I am a serious data hoarder. I have multiple dedicated hard drives just for shit I've scraped off the internet. Not all of it is munchie content and most of it is not even interesting, but I'm a historian living in a world of very cheap storage and limitless primary source documents about ordinary people so my brain screams "ARCHIVE IT ANYWAY YOU MIGHT NEED IT." So step one, before I've even bothered to see if they're worth a post or not, is scrape the account. I almost always start with Instagram because it's my preferred platform so start at the beginning, tab through posts taking screenshots of everything. Not reading, not really processing what I'm seeing, just making a copy of the account as fast as possible. I know a few people I talk to use
Instaloader or the tiktok equivalent to automate the archiving but I've never tried that.
Here's timestamps of one I was working on earlier. You can see sometimes it's multiple screenshots per second (the 1 after the time stamp). I give it just enough time to load the image before I grab it and move on.
Tiktok is the most annoying to archive and takes for fucking ever. I use Snaptik.app to download the videos I want to save but I do not archive the whole account usually because it's too much work and so much of tiktok content is completely inane and useless. When archiving Tiktok I actually take my time to see what I should bother saving and what I can ignore rather than just pillaging everything and seeing what I have later. Youtube, the transcript button is your friend. No one has time to watch these chicks prattle on about nothing so I open the transcript and can it for relevancy then use
this to grab the ones I want. Helps to also screenshot when archiving video so you have the date/timestamps/descriptions/comments in case you need to reference them.
(I also enjoy muting dance tiktoks and playing my own music over it. Sometimes the movements line up so perfectly to another song that I have to record it for posterity. It's the little things.)
Now that I've archived no matter what happens between then and when I have time to look into them, I have a copy saved and they can't take that from me. Sometimes I don't get around to posting what I've archived for a while and in the meantime they've wiped a ton of incriminating shit off their accounts like
Mel Lucas,
Shelby Lynn Logsdon, and
MC Preuninger, but it doesn't matter because I already saved it all.
When I'm ready to write I usually open something like 100 images at a time in Preview (on Mac, I've been told the Windows equivalent is Photos or Paint but I haven't used a PC since Windows ME) and just start reading. Open a blank word processor and just start writing. I like to go into it with the mindset that they may be telling the truth about any individual thing rather than go into it thinking that they're lying about everything. Just personal preference. I believe them until there's a big inconsistency or some big proof that can't be chalked up to my own ignorance, like Tricia taking handfuls of pills while saying her intestine had failed so badly she couldn't even drink a sip of water unless she drained it out of her stomach. Other than that I just kind of let them tell me the story as they want it told. "Here's when she gets her service dog. Two months later she's talking about needing salt water for her POTS. After her first salt water infusion she's already talking about how she needs a port."
If there's a lot of loose threads that need tying I'll keep a second document where I'll do strict chronology as things are revealed. Like I said my current girl has had a long history of deleting everything and starting over so I'm trying to figure out what happened before her current profiles were live, and she is a hardcore retconner who constantly changes her own version of her past. So I've made a chronological timeline that just has dates, notes, and some links in it. Like
2010 October: first surgery on her wrist
2010 November: starts using crutches at school
2011 January: asking about wheelchairs on local forum
2011 March: friend defends her on Facebook
>>>>>> wins writing award
Etc etc. Those are made up but you get the point. To keep the timeline organized I had to make an actual
timeline of shit she did and whatever else I could find.
If you don't know, then admit you don't know. I have a very limited background in science and it's way easier to just say "I don't really know if this is a lie but it sounds like one to me" than to try to prove it's definitely one when I can't. I can find journal articles that sound like they agree with me but oh boy
howdy do I feel like the world's biggest idiot trying to read those things and understand them. It's not worth embarrassing myself over a minor detail I'm not sure on when there's big screaming lies I could be focusing on instead.
On the other hand, when it comes to non-medical shit, it is really, really,
really fucking fun to call them on some inconsequential lie or chronology mishap. Like it
delighted me to point out that Natalia Rijo's "CPS evidence" photo was bullshit. Beyond the obvious (why do you have evidence photos that were taken by CPS posted on instagram?) she claimed she was held by CPS in Texas but the photo was from a year later in Florida.
Usually takes a pretty long while to write the whole thing but since I've archived everything and they're no longer a flight risk, I can work on it as I go along. I had the first two parts of Tricia's post written by like the 10th of March but I didn't start on the last one until maybe the 25th. I just work on them when I'm bored and walk away when it starts feeling too much like work.
And you can always DM me if you have a specific question or want to like, bounce shit off of me. I might not get to it right away but I do eventually read and respond.