JeddakofThark

I don't know anything about modern cons, but old school confidence games had names like you're thinking. You might enjoy The Big Con, by David Maurer. Written in 1940, it's kind of a linguistic dip into big store cons. And absolutely fascinating.

Just flipping through it you've got the Gold Brick, Dollar Store, Fight Store, the Rag, the Wire, the Pay-Off, Hype, Smack, Tap, the Huge Duke, Last Turn... It goes on and on.

And the names of the con men are even more fun. From the second chapter alone: the Narrow Gage Kid, Pretty Billy, Larry the Lug, Limehouse Chappy, Yellow Kid Weil, Crawfish Bob, and the Postal Kid.

I highly recommend the book.

I want to know more about them each proposing to each other!

Reading about the specifics of the cons reminded me of watching automation in How It's Made. So complicated that no single person could design the stuff in one go.

It had to be an iterative process figured out by many, many people over years and decades.

That sounds really cool.

The first game I recall really getting into that was live action/cg was Rebel Assault II. Realistically not a great game, but I remember thinking that this was obviously the future of gaming.

Every done a sinus rinse before? It's not that bad generally, but it isn't fun to learn immediately after sinus surgery.