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!

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.