Another journal

I’m rather behind, in many things I suppose right now, which is fine! It’s fine. I’ve had full (and lovely) weekends recently and was hoping I could have something nice and restful and fruitful this long weekend but that’s not how it’s going to shake out which! is! fine!! So let’s just have a tab cleanout for the blog post this week.

human.json, as it is described on GIT “A lightweight protocol for humans to assert authorship of their website content and vouch for the humanity of others.” It’s very interesting and seems straightforward and easy to implement.
status: moved to REF: Web & Computer

Corridor Crew’s video on Disney’s sodium vapour effect process, which was represented in my phone by a tab that was a search on DDG for “mary poppins special effect background.” I can’t even remember why I was looking for it, it certainly wasn’t to watch a video essay? I wanted to know what it was called, I think? In finishing the search sat undone until now I also found a post saying they did not find the prism, or otherwise disputing the stories around the prism.
status: whatever caused me to care has passed, but I did find what it was called hooray

Schrodinger’s Cat Burglar, from Abandoned Sheep, over on Steam. My sibling has been streaming this and it feels like Portal 2 with cats from the trailer.
status: added to my Steam wishlist

Harvard Sentences, which are “sample phrases used for standardised testing of Voice over IP, cellular, and other telephone systems.” I suppose the “quick fox jumps over the lazy dog” of sounds, then. Fascinated by this, not sure I want to test my voice against them, but I love their existence.
status: moved to Sounds

Game accessibility guidelines, with why/how, three levels of guidelines, an Excel checklist download. And, of course, the guides. Important stuff to know and have!!
status: moved to WIP/REF: Gamewriting

Webcomic Studio, a hub for reading and publishing indie webcomics.
status: moved to LINKS: Websites (Retro/Coding)

taylor titmouse’s guide for improving your itchio store page, this is a great guide and although I’m doing some of it on some things on my Itch, I’m not doing all.
status: moved tab from mobile to main computer, in my “to-do” window

The following I am just adding into a new bookmark folder I am calling “puzzles” so I can just open it and stop leaving tabs open:

• 2025 (make 45 groups of 45)
• Tiled Word (crosswords but you build the words)
• Reunion (letter tile world building, there are two small animals, I’m bad at it)
• Uncrossy (crosswords but you take apart the words)
• Trizzle (like a match three but with specific level ups of pieces)
• Blossom (make words from a selection of letters)

Okay and that’s the lot! Blog streak not broken and tabs cleaned!!

This week started off with a water leak and dealing with the mess of that, so of course the whole schedule was thrown off. Then, I had dentist on Friday, which also begun my annual chunk of time off that I take each spring, so I quite nearly missed blogging this week. HOWEVER I want to keep the weekly thing going so here we are. A post.

And yes I know technically I’ve posted this week as another flash fiction from last year is let loose into the world, but it’s not a *post,* you know?

I would do a link roundup but currently my second monitor is at the doctor’s (Chase is fixing how it is mounted), and I’m incapable of doing that sort of thing quickly with just one little laptop screen. Wait, maybe I am strong enough.

FEMICOM Museum, a very cool archive of girly games, toys and consoles. I love small archives and websites are such a nice way to handle that. I’ve not heard of most of these toys, but that’s less about me not being into girly games and more about me being of an age and temperament where most of the games I knew about as a kid were either Sega MasterSystem (then Genesis) or handheld poker games.
status: moved to *absolutely random shit (because I haven’t got a folder for these kinds of sites yet, the asterisk indicates a folder to be sorted)

DriftBook by Lur Noise over on Itch. A game about walking and drawing and exploring. I had heard of it then forgotten and was reminded again, thank goodness.
status: keeping the dang tab open because I mean to do it this week

Tiled Words. Hey do you like crosswords but want them to be more annoying (positive), but haven’t the mind for the kind with no clues or no numbers or whatever? Tiled Words is a great variant where you build the words that answer the clues. It’s fun and there’s a depth of puzzles at this point (they’re daily!) to support a big zoned out crossword dive if you are so inclined.
status: keeping tab open on tablet because that’s where my streak is

Coffee with a Codex, over at UPenn. As they describe, it’s a weekly “informal lunch or coffee time to meet virtually with Kislak curators and talk about one of the manuscripts from Penn’s collections.” It’s nice to sign up for the email reminders to see what is upcoming, but I never end up watching them live, which is fine as they’re archived over on YouTube.
status: already signed up for emails, shared here to round the list out

Okay there. A Post ™. My pomodero just blipped and some laundry is coming out of the dryer so onto the next thing.

I have spent most of this week doing fiddly things that are very boring and haven’t gathered a moment to blogpost this week so! Tab cleanout it is also because god I need to just do that as well.

xkcd 2501 generator, what it says on the tin. Make your own of the oft-memed panel about experts over estimating how much the general public knows about a specific topic.
status: shared, shared on family discord

Discord Chat Exporter on GitHub by Tyrrrz, because I do like the concept of archiving. However, this is one of those things that looks jussssst complex enough I feel defeated before even trying. I think GitHub in general makes me feel that way. Nonetheless!
status: moved to REF: Web & Computer

Tegerio on Patreon. I had encountered a comic panel I liked by JW Kennedy over on Bluesky and looked them up to find more. I found the Patreon and on my phone the whole thing (which is 18+) was blurred so the tab had been living open until I remembered to look at it on the computer where I’m signed in. From there I found a Tumblr archive of a webcomic, which I’m now following and fingers crossed I remember to start reading the backlog of it.
status: followed links, followed Tumblr

A Little Nightcap, at Cooper Hewitt. A friend had sent me a post about this embroidered cap and I poked around in the notes to learn more about it and would like to maybe replicate it some day? Love this comment on it regarding the “caterpillars” that accompany the rainbows and clouds the cap is covered with:

Those are not caterpillars. Why must we always assume the most pleasant option and have a narrative; especially when it is abundantly clear they are house centipedes. We live with them now, and folks certainly lived with them then, and oftentimes things are ornamental without a reason, other than familiarity. Caterpillars, do not hve antennae, nor junctured legs. It is a lovely and interesting piece. Thank you for sharing it.

status: moved to REF: Fibre & Sewing

50 Ways to Meet Your Neighbor, a zine I encountered on Bluesky and immediately lost the source of. Wait! Because the tab had just been open forever I was able to browse back and it’s from Million Experiments. It’s one of those lists of things that vary in seriousness and usefulness but does get the brain moving. MOSTLY though what I keep thinking of is that Mister Rogers Neighborhood is available on Hoopla on Binge Pass, which means you can log on with your library card and check watch for a week. I am enjoying it, it’s nice and calming and familiar and also hopeful, which is vital I think nowadays.
status: saved zine to archive

How To Stop Jumping Ship, one of multiple posts about fixing the Internet Problem I’ve seen lately. This one feels less um, “I know how to fix it let’s start by building things anew” than others I’ve seen (and could be just being a bitch about, I haven’t brought myself to read more than the pull quotes yet but I’m a bit :grimace: about it, maybe because that particular post is on Substack which is ah, hm. Anyway, I am here with my blog, which is mirrored on Dreamwidth (hello, if you are reading this there), I have a newsletter, I dunno. I know this isn’t a cute/cool retro style blog, but it’s mine. Did you know my oldest real post is from 2008 I guess. I think I imported my LJ over here, once upon a time, but damned if I know what posts are what.
status: added the blogring to my Links page, moved a link from post about IRC to REF: Web & Computer

Please wish strength at me as if I keep my shit on track I can finish this boring task this weekend.

Been a bit since I did one of these! That’s mostly because I’ve been up on my browsing, good job me. And anyway, mostly these kinds of posts are good for me ensuring I keep my weekly blogging habit and I’ve been managing that okay. This week though, not so much, lol. Find all these link dumps on the tag “tab cleanout.”

The World of Playing Cards, a very cool and in-depth resource that “documents playing cards across cultures and centuries, from early handmade cards to industrial production, and from games of chance and skill to education, advertising, political satire, magic and fortune-telling.” I stumbled across it while looking up something about court cards and was delighted.

status: moved to REF: Assorted

The George Quaintance Blog, curated by Ken Furtado and John Waybright. I always love single-subject blogs, and I found this one while looking up more on Quaintence and the physique paintings he was known for after he was mentioned in a book I was reading. There’s a book as well, which I dropped in it’s own bookmark folder.

status: shared

Of Yuppies and Yippies and Hippies, over at the English Language & Usage stack exchange. Chase and I were trying to pin down in our memories what exactly a “yippie” was, and encountered this pretty in-depth history of the word and how it grew from hippies and morphed into yuppies. And also if it’s a portmanteau or not. Then, because it’s a stack exchange, there’s even more detail about related words.

In addition to the historical threads that ScotM identifies in his excellent answer, several other -pies formations that were current in the 1960s and 1970s may have contributed to the adoption of yuppies as shorthand for members of the sociological category “young urban professionals.” To wit: preppies, bippies, blippies, dippies, and trippies

status: moved to *absolutely random shit

Understanding AI: Facts, Myths & Protecting Your Work, over at TrueReft, stuck in an open tab so I could check some of the settings it mentions. It’s a nice little rundown of the basics, if you want some good bullet points for explaining why GenAI gives you the ick.

status: read and closed

“Don’t Just Do Nothing: 20 Things You Can Do to Counter Fascism — Yes, You! Yes, Now,” an imposed (ready-to-print) zine from It’s Going Down (who have a post with a lot of other new media projects covering current social movements and news here). These quotes from the intro sum it up:

We offer up this sampler of ideas, encouraging you to think and act for yourselves, with each other, as precisely the only winning strategy. If each idea here seems not enough on its own — well, it isn’t.

Here are twenty things you can do to counter fascism—yes, you! yes, now! Dream up and put into motion many, many more things too. This is only a beginning.

status: saved to my zine distribution folders

Okey dokey, that’s the lot, my tabs are tidied, and I’ve blogged for another week.

Okay listen, I have way to many links open on my devices, and not because I am not dealing with and bookmarking and reading them but because I was like, “Ooooh, I want to share this.” So, let’s get going. Find all these link dumps on the tag “tab cleanout.”

Who drew the comics on the back of Topps baseball cards? from The Fan Files. It’s what it says it is, THAT link though is just a summary and links to the four posts of the actual guy (a Dr. Eric White) who is doing the research, which I repeat here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.
status: shared

Founder of Dwarf Fortress and Caves of Qud publisher Kitfox Games says its procgen sims for sickos are ‘giving storytelling tools back to the people when games and passive media took them away’ over at PC Gamer. This is some interesting talk about procedurally generated story and what it can give us as players, this is the meat of it for me:

“These games force you to have to sit with what you’re seeing. Whether it’s because the graphics are lo-fi or Dwarf Fortress’ feed being very non-descriptive, it allows you to fill in those gaps in an interesting way,” Orlando said. “The heart and soul of it is sitting with your dwarves and figuring out how you see their personalities interact with each other and different situations. That’s where the player stories come from.”

status: moved to WIP/REF: Gamewriting

The Bearded Vulture as an accumulator of historical remains: Insights for future ecological and biocultural studies at ESA. The sum of it is: some bearded vulture nests are mega old and when scientists started poking into what they were made of, or what litter from previous meals of generations was there, they found amazing stuff. Like, the expected bone remains and hooves and whatnot (which is a cool way to see the history of other animals in the space) but items made by people from the local esparto grass, cloth, a crossbow bold, a shoe. It’s like a core sample of the history of people and creatures and the world that the nest has existed alongside for hundreds of years. From the study:

More interestingly, the abundant and well-preserved anthropogenic elements brought to the nests, such as the extraordinary historical manufactured items made of esparto grass: such as alpargatas (esparto sandals), ropes, basketry, horse tacks, and slingshots, have an ethnographic interest. These artifacts can gain significance when considered alongside nest altitude, which influences the availability of remains and the type of ecological zone represented.

status: shared

The Spooky House by SPOOKYSOFT on Itch. A very delightfully chunky-pixel looking game that links to a fun soundtrack to listen to while you try to escape said spooky house.
status: saved in Itch.io to my to play list

Word building over at Words and Things. A really easy to understand breakdown of how you can build words that feel right, even if you’re not building a whole fake language for your pretend world. It’s a short piece but one that gets the brain going on why some words in a genre piece work and why they don’t (and why some names scan and others feel like Scrabble tiles spilled out).
status: shared

So You Want to Write Iambic Pentameter at Azhdarchid. What it says on the tin. This is neat and I’m still trying to wrap my brain around it but I LOVE system-based approaches to writing and crafting so I am going to keep picking at it.
status: moved to WIP/REF: Ref & Writing

And now here are three stories that are perfectly suited to the season, and none of them are in your standard story format:

• A Wayback Machine link to “Crampton”, a spec script for an episode of The X Files by Thomas Ligotti and Brandon Trenz from 1998. It’s good stuff.
• ‘Scrow by Michael Lutz, a forum-formatted creepy story about scarecrow hobbyists.
• Unwindr, also by Michael Lutz, a sequel of sorts. This story is done as reviews for a corn maze.

Whew, okay, my poor old phone can breathe again.

I continue to have eyes bigger than my stomach when it comes to things to read and engage with so another tab cleanout it is.

Make Up A Guy, by Nora Reed. Also there’s a make up a fantasy guy. Literally just a fun silly little character generator.
status: moved to Absolutely random shit because I can’t find if I have a folder for fun generators

Sounds of North American Frogs, from Smithsonian Folk Ways Recordings. It’s what is says on the tin! I found the link via something nice that went into detail about it but I’m just charmed it exists. From the Bandcamp page: “This classic of both biological fieldwork and natural sound recordings, originally released by Folkways in 1958, presents 57 species of frogs and toads on 92 tracks, digitally remastered from the original master tapes. Compiled and narrated by renowned herpetologist Charles M. Bogert, these sounds were recorded in swamps, lakes, woods, creeks, and road-side ditches all over North America.”
status: added to wishlist on Bandcamp

Profanity Adventures at Monkeon. It’s an archive of what happens when you swear in various text adventures on the Spectrum 48k. A fun range of responses from restarting the game to gentle chiding.
status: added to upcoming newsletter links section

Bird divination text found at Hittite settlement over at The History Blog. Just a little info about a cuneiform tablet about interpreting the flights of birds. What is interesting is that it was maybe worn or hung as display and I like thinking about someone who carried a bird flight path cheat sheet around with them.
status: moved to Absolutely random shit

A look at how fan fiction is changing publishing and reading from NPR. A friend sent me this and the transcript wasn’t showing at the time so I set it aside to listen to later, then when I did look at it like two weeks later the transcript was there so I read it, hooray! I like this quote particularly: “What I would say to you, Scott, is, like, allow whimsy into your life, you know? Allow the idea of connecting with people over something niche and exciting.”
status: read

The Manuscript Cookbooks Survey. It’s a database of pre-1865handwritten cookbooks! How cool!!
status: moved to REF: Food & Cooking

And the following links are just a path I followed from a Bluesky post: “In 1994, Italian artist Marco Patrito released a 3D scifi visual novel called Sinkha on Windows 3.1.” There’s some mention of the “gameplay” (just pressing ‘next’ mostly) and some images. A threaded reply also links to the game’s own worldbuilding website. Poking around about it I learned Sinkha was reprinted in Heavy Metal Magazine (see the issue cover here). I’ve always been interested in Heavy Metal’s habit of reprints, even though Sinkha as a whole seemed cool but just too dense for me to care much about beyond skimming information. Luckily, jumping from that, I found some very thorough analysis and read-throughs of Episode 0 and Episode 1 over at Post Rendered. Neat stuff!

Yeah that’s right another bunch of cool links I’ve come across and need to file or finish reading! I guess these will be living under the so-original tag “tab cleanout.”

The End Times by Benjamin Percy. Man, I missed out on the physical subscription to this, but the digital is still open. I LOVE-love serialised stories and I’m super into what I’ve read about the whys and wherefores of this project (see this interview at Counter Craft). Short novel about a post apocalypse, delivered in a newspaper format monthly? Yes please.
status: subscribed

Curate your own newspaper with RSS from Molly White at Citation Needed. This is just a nice run-down of how to set up RSS feeds for yourself, to make the focus of where you’re getting info somewhere that isn’t centralised social media. I’m currently using Inoreader as my RSS base, which is especially nice as more of my pals get blogs.
status: dropped as a maybe link in September’s newsletter

Company Logo Gallery from VGDensetsu. This is such a rad thing, all sorts of company logos, and crediting the folks who actually designed them! Roger Dean is in there a lot.
status: moved to REF: Assorted

Older LGBT Science Fiction Database, built on Notion by Remnantglow. This is a pretty dope filterable database of “Generally, any novel published before the 21st century that can be called 1. sci-fi, and 2. a queer book in some sense is included.” Very much something I’ll probably pull into a spreadsheet and start marking off what I read at some point.
status: moved to REF/TOOLS: Book Organisation

Linkfest #37 from Clive Thompson. Basically someone doing blogging of links better than me, in newsletter form, though I will admit these posts are partly just for me/soft sharing. I just don’t have it in me to blog to that level! Grateful for others who do it.
status: subscribed to newsletter

A VPS Tutorial For Those Who Want Control from x. This is a pretty rad and comprehensive guide on starting your own server! Probably too complicated for me at the moment, but going into my files for later. I am happy with paying for hosting and servers the same way I (would) pay for an electrician to do some fixes (if I were not a renter).
status: moved to REF: Web & Computer

Peacock feathers can be lasers from Rachel Berkowitz over at Science. It’s what it says on the tin!! Peacock feathers use structural colour (reflecting light to create colour, basically??!!) and apparently that can be laser-fied? It’s neat and it’s neat to think of non-traditional ways to focus lasers.
status: dropped as a maybe link in September’s newsletter

Also now just some links I read and kept open so I could dump ’em here:

“The First Homosexuals” Is a Dazzlingly Overwhelming Chronicle of Queerness in Art at Observer. An article about a show at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago, a very nice rundown of the content and intent of the curation.

The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog (1905) A Silent FIlm Review from Movies Silently. A very thorough review of both the silent film in question and the picture postcard world around it. Love it!

A plaintext subject line is all email has ever needed from Buttondown’s Blog. They always have something fun about email history. The whys and wherefores of the email header.

This time the tabs weren’t open necessarily so I could organise them into other, better, folders. They were just open because I wasn’t getting around to reading them. But there was some good stuff here, so sharing again!

la la la more link cleaning

On not being a naturalist – but being one anyway over at Scientist Sees Squirrel, a lovely look at what being a naturalist means and how it is more about interest in the natural world than knowing a lot of IDs.
status: finally read

Preserving the USC Optical Sound Effects Library from The Freesound Blog, a very cool dive into vintage optical sound effects and how they worked and were created. Gosh I love archives and people who archive, and the way we learn when we archive.
status: moved to TO-DO: Sounds

The Animal Photo Reference Repository, a very cool site of loads of reference photos, strong anti-generative AI stance. There’s also a gallery of work created from these reference photos! I collect photo reference libraries then never use them, that’s fine.
status: moved to REF: Draing & Pose Reference

Art of The Great Mouse Detective from Art of Animation. This one has been making the rounds but it’s very fun and cool stuff!
status: looked at and admired

The Terror of Blue John Gap from the ACD Society. I’m no Arthur Conan Doyle-head, I think I got to this via reading about some interesting minerals (oh! it was link jumping from something in a recent newsletter from Failbetter Games), but it’s an interesting site layout and an interesting project, plus scans of Doyle’s manuscript!
status: moved to *absolutely random shit

The archive saving home sewing history from the trash over at The Verge, which talks about sewing pattern archives–notably the Commercial Pattern Archive. I found this via a post somewhere about the big four sewing pattern brands getting sold to a liquidator (more info here), which puts everybody in a pickle, because physical patterns are vital not just to sewists but to smaller pattern makers who use the same large-scale tissue paper printing machines.
status: moved to REF: Fibre & Sewing

E-COM: The $40 million USPS project to send email on paper over at the Buttondown blog is a delicious little slice of history that I feel will be haunting my back-brain for a bit for several reasons.
status: moved to *absolutely random shit

New Game Series – Art & System: Games for Expanded Play is some very cool archiving happening by Central Michigan University Press with crowdfunding upcoming.
status: signed up to be notified when they launch

We’re Really Just Going Through With All This, Aren’t We by Luke Plunkett is really such a mood (negative). It’s about how game releases etc. are approached, but my job has me looking at TV and film release cycles and it’s just!! Ugh.
status: haunting me

Which is what makes it incredible to behold that this week we are just carrying on through it all, as though nothing has changed. We’ll all be subjected to too many trailers to remember even a fraction of them. We’ll all create and digest the same console launch coverage we always have, with midnight launches, photos of people rushing home with their Nintendo-branded shopping bags, first impressions, review scores of a machine breathing only its first breath. We’re cosplaying as the 2000s, when these things meant something and were built for the occasion, even though literally everything around us–the economy, the industry, the platforms and ways we learn about and experience games–has changed radically.

A Radioactive Pen in Your Pocket? Sure! over at IEEE Spectrum is a fun quick look at some concept pens from the late 1950s. Love a Concept Object (TM). A cool thing that then led me to Parkercollector.com, which is one of those unchanged gems of the internet.
status: moved to *absolutely random shit

Okay so I guess, I am not going to get better at tab and link usage so I am going to do these more often, hmmmmmm, will think of a naming process next time.

I do not keep one million tabs open on my browser. I keep simply several dozen across multiple devices. And, since I also do normal, long-ingrained maintenance things like turning off my computer once a week, I can’t just let them fester in there forever. So what I do is make horrible little bookmark folders. It’s a bad habit! This isn’t even looking at inactive tabs in my mobile browsers! So, as I clean my tabs, let’s look at some cool stuff.

Advanced Marionette Making Techniques over at Storm the Castle. It’s a seven string marionette walk through! Very cool stuff. I am still learning marionettes, I had a couple as I grew up but was not good at manipulating them. I’ve made a couple recently but they were more about aesthetics than function. Function next! Hence having this tab open.
status: moved to Ref: Craft (Paper/Costume/Miniatures)

NBOS Character Sheet Designer. A free and very cool way to design character sheets. I encountered this through a tumblr post that is now somewhere deep in my 400+ item queue about blorbos/OCs, and using a character sheet as a template for understanding your story’s main character is genius. NBOS in general slaps.
status: moved to Ref: Assorted, downloaded and installed

Do You Maze. This is a really cool site with printable mazes, but most importantly, guides on drawing mazes. I’ve been adding mazes to my zines as I lay them out, this is where I am learning!
status: moved to Ref: Art Collab & Drawing Tutorials

In that same vein, Super Teacher Worksheets and Discovery Education Puzzlemaker are both incredibly dope ways to make cryptic puzzles and stuff. Also using those in zines (and for fun).
status: in general TO DO folder for easy access

Basic Sprang Moves at Solrhizaarts. I do NOT need to learn or fall in love with new to me fibre arts but dang I am all :eyes: about sprang. I do not have space for this in my heart or day at this moment, I need to close this tab.
status: moved to Ref: Fibre and Sewing

Skink Zine from BlackMudpuppy. Skinks! Zine! Love pics of these little guys, this looks fun.
status: moved to Want: Books

Queer Palestine from Pinko. A zine curating a “small archive of queer Palestinian life”. Obviously relevant to me.
status: moved to Want: Books

Appalachian Transsexual by Kyrsten Nerys Hodge. I actually already bought this (physical copy) I just need to close the tab.

My Tuesday Author Interview over at Night Beats. This was rad! I love Night Beats and Zilla is a joy.
status: linked from TAG Serialised page

Both The Art of Future War and Pulled From the Deep are articles I have open so I can read/finish reading them. Both incredibly topics I am always curious about.

One link, for https://its-behind-you.com, is no longer working since I had it up. It was some really lovely personal site for a Panto actor who had recently passed. I’d set it aside to go through it more later, there were pictures from shows, and history and all the lovely stuff one finds on that sort of thing. I’m guessing the domain is no longer being paid for. A loss!
status: moved to ARCHIVE: Dead links I want back

Okay, I think that’s it. Whew, thank you for coming along as I cleaned things up. I need to do this (blogging and link cleaning) more often. Oh! Speaking of links, I have added a pal’s blog to the Links page! Go check out Groove Pit! You know you love spreadsheets and TTRPGs.