Another journal

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.