donutsweeper

I've spent the last three or so weeks going through and updating the resources links posts and I'm not done, it's still an ongoing progress. I had over 150 links to add and I also like to go through and check for dead/changed links every 1-2 years (which I last did spring 2024 and now takes *forever* since 2k+ links). I'll also (probably) be splitting the randomness post into two posts and moving some things from the Hollywood/history post over to one of those posts but that's all still in the planning stages while I still slowly make my way through the other posts.

It always amazes me how many links die every time I do this. Sometimes it's just a web address switch and I'm able to find the new one and I do try to back stuff up at the wayback machine when I add links to my resource posts but they're not always things or sites that can be backed up so finding dead links there is a crapshoot. (It's still a wonderful resource though, more than 160 links *had* been backed up and are now accessible via it). That old adage about 'once something is on the internet it's there forever' is just not true. Some stuff will be there forever, but others? *poof*

As always, if anyone uses the resource posts and finds the layout confusing, has suggestions to make it better, has links (or even general topics) they should be added, etc etc just give me a shout, either here or on the specific post or any of my posts in general honestly. I'd like them to be as useful and informative as they can be.

It's almost Yuletide time! The schedule has been posted and for the first time in a few years there's been some changes (mostly a 12 hour shift backwards with assignment deadline not being 9pm UTC on Wednesday 17 December instead of 9am on the 18th and reveals being 9pm UTC on Wednesday 24 December instead of 9am on the 25th.) They've changed before and will change again, they mods need to do what work best for them and they've given us plenty of time to adjust to the change.

Another interesting change is as an experiment for this year only we'll be given 5 nomination slots instead of 4 (although with still only 4 slots per fandom) and the ability to have up to 8 requests rather than the previous max of 6. I usually only request 3 or 4 so that doesn't really affect me but more nom slots is definitely nice. :)

And, whoops. here's a month or so of recthething recs (tons of tumblr art recs and some MDZS/Untamed fic/podfic recs):

Tumblr art:
Batman/DCU:
- The whole world at her fingertips. (love this take on Barbara as Oracle)
- AU: what if Dick became the vessel for Nightwing of Krypton? (wow, incredible idea and art)

DMBJ/The Lost Tomb:
- Heihua (Xiazi 'helping' Xiao Hua with his opera makeup, excellent)
- the apple trend ft. heihua... (delightfully sensuous)

Doctor Who:
- Sandwich break (Jamie and Two!!! Lovely)

The Losers
- How to Properly Care For Your Domesticated Housecat Cougar (this is just so soft and gorgeous)

MDZS/The Untamed:
- we will always get through the bad times (gorgeous mirror set of paintings)

Merlin
- I just needed to draw them again (gorgeous Merthur wih magic art)
- devotion (this is *incredible*)
- dressing up your boyfriend as a silly lil jester (absolutely nailed their expressions in this one)
- Being rough with Merlin is Arthur’s love language guys trust me (love their expressions!)

The Princess Bride
- This is true love. You think this happens every day? (gorgeous, almost movie poster style look at most of the cast)

Star Trek
- I finished the quilt I’m gifting to my daughter (Absolutely amazing TOS Enterprise in space quilt)

Supernatural:
- as a spn fan i’m legally obliged to draw this (Dean at his snarky, beaten-up best)
- I love old men retired yaoi (a wonderful look of what the future might have been for dean and cas)
- diner (Sam and Dean in a diner, spot on)


MDZS/Untamed fic/podfic:
Target Acquired (A Family) by relenafanel (11.7k, locked to archive)
Summary: Wei Wuxian has been on his own for months. It’s easier to pull off surprise assassinations against the sect that destroyed the Jiangs if most people think he’s dead. He doesn’t expect Lan Wangji to join with his own vendetta against the Wen. And he certainly doesn’t expect to acquire A-Yuan in the middle of a job. (assassin AU that's also sort of fluffy and adorable)

fic and its podfic
the guqin player next door by marquisguyun (1k)
Summary: Lan Qiren meets someone who is far older than he looks. (mortal/reincarnated LQR and immortal LWJ); podfic (by sisi_rambles, length - 6:33)

The former "Utterly and Completely Random Remaining Links" post has been expanded and split into two parts for easier searching since it got so big. Generally speaking, the division is as follows:

The first part (found at the original link here) now has all the links about the world itself and things to do in it, broken down into the following groupings: survival, moving about (maps, travel and vehicles), information on the sun/moon/stars, various calendars and conversions between them, communicating with others (accents, pronunciation and languages), plants and animals and various databases about them, and various places on the web to find things to read and listen to.

The second part (this one) contains all the search sites (scientific and general non-google places); places to find articles, books, and more; library, museum and cultural collections; recipe, food and drink sites; random place related sites; building and homes info and terms; people and their shapes and sizes; things to consider regarding sex and writing sex scenes; "writers' guides to..." type links; lots of artists resources; and, last but not least, uncategorized random links.

Places to Search for Info Other Than Google (with a scientific(ish)/scholarly focus)
WolframAlpha- the site's goal is "Making the world’s knowledge computable" and there is tons of stuff there to poke about and find on all sorts of subjects. (Like the random city generator below, WolframAlpha can be used to generate numerous things like random occupations for a character or historical eras to set a story, etc)
Sci-Hub - a website with over 67 million academic papers and articles available for direct download, bypassing publisher paywalls by allowing access through educational institution proxies. (It's sometimes forced to change domains so if link doesn't work google "sci hub" for a working link, also due to a lawsuit it has stopped uploading new articles, Anna’s Archive now offers a search of SCIdb with access to 95+ million scientific papers, see below for link)
Cornell University's arXiv.org - open access to 1.5 million Physics, Mathematics, CompSci, Econ, Stats and more papers
Open Access Publications from the University of California - hundreds of thousands of ebooks and scholarly articles free to peruse
Yale Law School's Avalon Project - Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy (documenting from BCE-21st Century, wayback machine link)
refseek - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
worldcat - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
bioline.br - a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
BioOne Digital Library "Explore more than 580 journals and eBooks in the biological, ecological, and environmental sciences."
repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
science.gov - an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
base-search.net - one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.
JSTOR a digital library with more 12 million journal articles, books, images, and primary sources in 75 disciplines, currently allows access to 100 articles a month with free registration. Post with info on the best way to search jstor, including some videos demonstrating it
Higher Intellect / preterhuman.net - a server hosting a searchable database of over 750,000 text files on a variety of subjects
Our World in Data "To make progress against the pressing problems the world faces, we need to be informed by the best research and data. Our World in Data makes this knowledge accessible and understandable, to empower those working to build a better world." (thousands of charts on hundreds of topics)

General Search Engines Besides Google:
duckduckgo "search without being tracked" (now has AI which can be turned off in settings or just use No Ai Duckduckgo to avoid it completely)
Startpage "The world's most private search engine."
MillionShort a search engine that removes the most popular sites from its results (now appears to require a paid account to use)
search.marginalia a "search engine calculates a score that aggressively favors text-heavy websites, and punishes those that have too many modern web design features." (updated version, or use old site)
I search from simulate using Google Search from a different location or device (choose from a list of countries, languages and devices)
Mojeek.com "Mojeek’s web search results are 100% independent. They come from our crawler (MojeekBot) and index of the web, and are ordered using our own ranking algorithms."
Wiby "The Wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet" (its focus is personal webpages rather than commercial ones so its results aren't very robust. It goes have a 'surprise me' button though to take you to a random webpage)
Qwant "The search engine that doesn't know anything about you"
&udm=14 - AI-free Google search aka the"disenshittification Konami code" for Google (an article about it)

TinEye Reverse image search alternative

Places to Find Articles, Books and More: (general sites, see the randomness part 1 post for links to numerous-particularly vintage-specific newspaper, magazine, radio, short story compilations, etc collections)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Art Books and other publications, 1k+ available as free PDFs and 700+ available to read online
Cornell University's entire library is open access and available over on archive.org
Sidestone Press "Open Science is central to our publishing philosophy: we believe that scientific information should be freely available to all. Through our own digital e-book library we guarantee that scientific information published through Sidestone Press is immediately freely available around the world." (a Dutch academic publisher)
OpenAccessButton - If a scholarly paper is paywalled, this website/browser extension can search for an open access version. If there isn't an open access version already available online, Open Access Button will request the article from the article's authors. (now retired, see blog entry for alternatives)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories) is "the world’s largest collection of full text open access research papers."
Unpaywall - an extension which automatically detects when you’re looking at a paywalled journal article and will connect you to a legally available open access version if one is available.
Paywalled sites can sometimes be accessed by entering the url at archive.ph or archive.is or try Remove Paywall.

CC Search - Search over 300 million images and other openly licensed and public domain works (eventually will have 1.4 billion CC licensed and public domain works in all media types including open texts and audio, sources are museums, APIs, science organizations and more)

r/freeEBOOKS/'s wiki Resources and links for free audiobooks and ebooks (both fiction and nonfiction)
WeLib - the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. "Explore the profound depths of 43 million books and 98 million articles."
Anna’s Archive "The largest truly open library in human history. We mirror Sci-Hub and LibGen. We scrape and open-source Z-Lib, OpenLib, and more." (sometimes forced to change domains so if link doesn't work check Shadow Libraries (see below) for the current one)
Library Genesis (sometimes forced to change domains so if link doesn't work check wikipedia or Shadow Libraries (see below) for current ones)
Shadow Libraries "Shadow libraries, sometimes called pirate libraries, consist of texts aggregated outside the legal framework of copyright" (collection of links to various sites)
r/Piracy's megathread wiki
r/FreeMediaHeckYeah's megathread wiki (all information also available off reddit at FreeMediaHeckYeah (FMHY): The Largest Collection of Free Stuff on the Internet, see the beginners guide/FAQ for more information)

Libraries, Museums, Cultural Institutions with Online Collections/Online Museums:
The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Museum Resources, E-Learning, and Online Collections - a huge, huge list of links to dozens of museums offering virtual guides, portals to their collections, online exhibits as well as various e-learning options (some general, some gears towards kids) and digital libraries, archives and online collections. (compiled in 2020)
Arte.tv documentaries, films, shows and more; offerings available in 6 different languages but varies depending on location
Open Culture - "The best free cultural and educational media around the web" (thousands of free courses, audio books, ebooks, movies, language lessons and more)
Open access image libraries – a handy list - "a list of museums and other archives that provide unrestricted downloads of high-resolution images."
The Smithsonian Institution's open access online platform (data and material from all 19 Smithsonian museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives and the National Zoo, etc to peruse and DL as desired)
Google Art and Culture's database of museum collections (searchable numerous ways, including via map)
DigitaltMuseum The objective of DigitaltMuseum is that museums’ collections should be made available to anybody who is interested, regardless of time or place.
Europeana "Discover Europe’s digital cultural heritage. Search, save and share art, books, films and music from thousands of cultural institutions.
The Digital Library of the Middle East "a vital resource for scholars, students, and the general public interested in the rich history and culture of the Middle East and North Africa"

Vintage Calculators Web Museum
The Living Image Vintage Camera Museum (including examples what cameras were available by decade and more)
The Early Television Foundation and Museum "The Early Television Foundation is dedicated to the preservation of the technology from the early days of television. Our mission is to preserve and make available to the public the history of early television, from the mechanical systems of the 1920s through the introduction of color television in the 1950s"
The Rewind Museum "Museum of early consumer electronics and 1st achievements"

Cooking, Recipes, Food and Drink Sites:
Recipes by Ingredients - "Enter Ingredients, Get Recipe. Find recipes based on ingredients that you have on hand."
My Fridge Food (check off which ingredients you have, it will find recipes for you. Also has general tips. Available as an app as well)
Big Oven "BigOven wants to help you waste less, and eat more. Choose up to 3 ingredients and our library of 1,000,000+ recipes will tell you what you can make."
Chef D's The College Student Cookbook "Chef D is an acronym for Cheap, Healthy, Easy,Fast, and Delicious. The recipes in this book were chosen because they meet most of these criteria" (40+ page PDF cookbook, wayback machine link)
'Good and Cheap: Eating Well on $4 a Day' Leanne Brown's award winning cookbook for people with very tight budgets, particularly those on SNAP/Food Stamps benefits. In English or Spanish, available with website signup or as a wayback machine pdf.
From Scratch (wayback machine pdf)
Cooking on a Bootstrap budget recipe site, searchable in numerous different ways
Budget Bytes "Good food doesn't have to be complicated or expensive"(budget friendly recipe site)
The Sad Bastard Cookbook "A completely free cookbook for the zero spoons crowd."

Cocktail Flow - The Definitive Cocktail Encyclopaedia

JustTheRecipe site that will take the URL of any recipe blog or website and remove all the clutter and unnecessary information, showing only the relevant ingredients and instructions.
Cooking Recipes Units Conversion (converts with specific ingredient in mind)

Random Money Related Sites:
Historical Currency Conversions (US and British currencies, past and present)
Convert Currency Rates Easily daily updating world currency converter
Counterfeit money detection: know how - Provides the latest information about the major world currencies and methods for detection of counterfeits

Random Place Related Things:
Need a random destination to send characters to? Click here
Need it to be a city people will have actually heard of? Try here instead
Random Place Generator Generate random (real) places from around the world (can limit by country or continent if desired)
Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names® Online searchable by place type as well so can look to find abandoned airfields, duchy, ferry terminals, natural pillars, ruins and so much more
WindowSwap - look out a random window somewhere in the world

OpenStreetMap.org open source map data about roads, trails, cafés, railway stations, and much more, all over the world.
City-Data (US and Canadian cities' population, photos, median income, schools, crime rates, weather, etc)
Dollar Street "Imagine the world as a street ordered by income. Everyone lives somewhere on the street. The poorest lives to the left and the richest to the right. Everybody else live somewhere in between. Welcome to visit all homes on Dollar Street!" (photos of over 264 homes in 50 countries with information given as to their income and purchasing power parity (PPP) and converted the value into US dollars)

Ghost Town Gallery a "collection of more than 2000 pictures from 180 Ghost Towns, mining camps and historic places in the United States."
AbandonedPorn subreddit
abandonedography tumblr
Midwest Gothic tumblr
FYeahGhostTowns tumblr (no longer updated)
evilbuildingsblog (sinisterish rather than abandoned places/ghost towns, no longer updated)

Buildings and Homes, Information, Terms, and More
InspectAPedia - "Encyclopedia of Building & Environmental Construction, Diagnosis, Maintenance & Repair"
Common House Terms - terms for describing houses, porches, roof types etc
Words that describe buildings or rooms and parts of buildings (wayback machine link)
Glossary of House Building Terms
House Parts You Didn’t Know Had a Name
Getty Research Institute's Art & Architecture Thesaurus® Online

People, and all their shapes and sizes:
Free stock photos sites (general focus): pixabay or unsplash or pexels or morguefile or StockSnap or Burst.Shopify.
Free sock photos site (specific focus): Nappy whose mission is "to provide beautiful, high-res photos of black and brown people to startups, brands, agencies, and everyone else."

Height Comparison Images (provide the height and sex for two figures to see how they compare or use this one to compare up to six figures)
hikaku sitatter - height comparison chart "compare the height difference of people and things when drawin
Photographic Height and Weight Chart (created via user provided photos)
3D Body Visualizer "Welcome to the website of 3D Body Visualizer, an online tool that allows you to see the shape of your body in 3D."
Your Personal Body Visualizer "Visualize your body shape with our male or female body visualizer based on height, weight, and other parameters.
Body Visualizer - create a visualization (male or female, 3d and can be moved for viewing from different angles) of a body based off measurements etc

My Body Gallery "What real women look like: Changing the way women see themselves one photograph at a time." (user submitted photos, searchable by height, weight, age, etc)

Names and Surnames searchable by popularity, timeframe, race and more (data provided by the US Census Bureau)
Time Magazine's tool "Find Out What Your Name Would Be if You Were Born Today" - uses data provided by the US Social Security Administration to chart the popularity of first names from the 1890s to today. Very useful for trying to find popular or unusual names in different times. Or go to the US SSA itself and check out popular names by birth year or how the popularity of a name has changed over time.

(see also numerous name lists from various eras posted in the generators and lists post)

Information and things to consider regarding sex and writing sex scenes (NSFW):
Gay Sex is All Wrong in Fanfic (what it says on the tin, wayback machine link) and a tumblr post's commentary on it.
Minotaur's Sex Tips for Slash Writers An internet classic since 1999
ficsex - run by a certified sex educator, has expanded to contain much more than just sex in fanfiction but there is a fic sex tag for easy searching (as well as a lube and many more, no longer updating)
Leviathan: The Bare Bones of Smut and how to write it (tumblr post)
Prompts & Pointers: Smut Guide (wayback machine link)
Smut Writing Resources (tumblr post collection)
Lascivity's Kink Guides (dozens of different ones including ones with resources)
MaxPrivate.net Sex Engineering website's articles (articles on training, enemas, anal, and more)
Writing lesbian sex in fanfic (wayback machine link)
How to Write a Sex Scene (also on AO3 here, locked to archive) by Resonant. Four tips for creating better sex scenes in erotic romance.
Gay Sex Positions Guide - "Learn gay sex positions through photographs, a visual Kama Sutra. Cum and enjoy! (NSFW 18+)" (categories include anal, oral, and group sex positions and sexual behaviors)
Brazen 2.0 - "sexual health and safer sex information for trans women and their partners" (PDF)
Primed - "A Sex Guide for Trans Men Into Men" (PDF)
Wheelchair Sex After Spinal Cord Injury
The Best Sexual Positions for People with Limited Mobility (wayback machine link)
12 Best Sex Positions for People Who Have Limited Mobility
A Guide to Returning to Sexual Activity Following Hip or Knee Replacement Surgery PDF, with diagram of positions surgeons recommend and don’t recommend following hip surgery
Sex After Joint Replacement UMass Memorial Health article
(see also links posted in Action/Sex scene descriptive words section of the words post)

Things a writers might need to know about/ "a writer's guide" type links:
Writer's Guide: Writing about Alcoholic Drinks and Cocktails Terminology, equipment, common drinks and more.

10 Things Writers Don’t Know About The Woods a lot of good things to consider if writing a scene that takes place in the woods.
Your Fictional Farm is Wrong - Or, How To Write Life on a Farm. part 2.
A writer's guide to hurricanes

Writing a Blind or Visually Impaired Character - "A Multi-Step Guide Written by a Visually Impaired Writer and Blogger" with numerous links for more information
"A Guide to Canes, Dogs, O&A" (O&A=Orientation and Mobility, written by a visually impaired writer/blogger)
Resources For Writing Deaf, Mute, or Blind Characters (huge resource post)
A general cane guide for writers and artists (from a cane user, writer, and artist!)

Fantasy Guide: Horses, Steeds and Mounts - terminology, colors, food, tack, etc (and some corrections to the original guide)
Your Noble Steed - horses, what you need to know (wayback machine link)
For Writers and Worldbuilders: On Horses
Saddles and Saddlebags
On Warhorses
Arpy's guide to horses "a little guide to help people out with some of the more technical stuff" (wayback machine link)
Horse Body Language for Writers
Horse Misconceptions in Fantasy Writing
Horse Terminology: Gaits and Anatomy
Horse Terminology: Tack and Riding
Matching Horses to Use, Climate, and Characters in Fiction

Archery Information for Writers (wayback machine link)
Archery information for writers that no one asked for but probably some of you need and I like talking about archery, so here it is.
Child Development - a guide to writing realistic small people
A Guide to Manual Transmission Cars for People Who Have Never Driven One
ghostflowerdreams has numerous advice, research and reference posts (check out their writing reference tag, advice tag, and writing research tag or their collection of writing advice posts) subjects range from historical eras, survival guides, weapons information, writing tips and much, much more although be aware many contain outdated or dead links.

Are there blacksmiths in your story? I'm a hobbyist blacksmith and I'm here to help! (tumblr post with advice on writing blacksmiths, wayback machine link)
Tanner’s Guide to Writing Tanning
A guide to writing fics set in museums / with a museum worker character "insight and tips to writing museum-related fics"
A Guide to Working in a Flower Shop for People Who Want to Write Flower Shop AUs
Fic Set In LA: A DIY Guide "A resource created by two fans who live in the Los Angeles area, as a reference for fic writers. We cover a wide range of topics--climate, culture, DRIVING, etc. Feel free to ask questions in the comments!" (AO3 work)

Artist resources:
"good places to find art reference that are not full of AI trash" a dreamwidth post of resources curated by doodlemancy
Numerous reference posing posts for artists or for looking at to describe poses (SenshiStock recently changed their name to Adorkastock but most links appear to be the same)
AdorkaStock gallery for all Adorkastock's poses and photos
jademacalla Another person providing poses, these are mostly action/with weapons
jookpubstock which offers poses, some action, some not, with and without weapons and other props. They also have a tumblr
Freephotomuscle (google translate version of a Japanese stock photo pose site with lots of buff guys)
theposearchives "We are Hamish and Izzy, and we are The Pose Archives! We create awesome pose reference for artists!"
Posemaniacs - 3d poses for artists
Hero Forge (technically a platform that lets you design and order custom tabletop miniatures and statuettes but excellent for poses in general with or without armor and weapons and other typical tabletop miniature accessories)
Bodies in Motion "Bodies in Motion exists to inspire artists with beautifully crafted images of the human body in motion. Created by artist and educator Scott Eaton, it has grown into a library of 150,000+ images used by illustrators, graphic novelists, sculptors, painters, storyboard and character artists through to teams at Netflix Animation, Disney, and Industrial Light & Magic." (videos of people moving for action posing, 3D scans, expressions and more. Some free, some requires registration)
Reference Angle use "this tool to practice drawing heads at different angles" (see photos of head shots based on emotion, sex, age range, and a few other choosable attributes)

Creating Animated Cartoons with Character A Guide to Developing and Producing Your Own Series for TV, Web or Film (epub offered for free by author, Joe Murray)

So you want to learn pixel art? "Part 1 of ??? - The Basics!" (tumblr post, lots of resources for how to learn pixel art and what programs to use, also available as a google doc)
Common Workflows for Digital Painting one of many tutorials offered by the free sketching and painting program, Krita (others include pixel art, understanding layers, inking and more)
guide to art & art tutorials - Huge resource list and guide compiled for learning about art including suggestions on apps, tools, tutorials and more. (google doc)
A master post of Thomas Romain’s art tutorials (designing interiors digitally, techniques for drawing detailed buildings and streets and more)
Line of Action posing refs, community discussions from other artists, figure study, anatomy, and more.
Sketch Daily "Welcome to the SketchDaily reference doohickey." (search by pose, clothing options, body type, perspective, etc.)

sketchfab - a 3D viewer where you can rotate pre-made models to see them from any angle
Creazilla open-source graphic design resources for artists and designers (vectors, silhouettes, clipart and 3D models)
Figure Drawing Practice Tool - provides models (choice of clothed/nude, male/female, and different ages) for specific time intervals for practice sketching purposes
Setpose.com "Create free 3D reference models. Pick a preset pose, combine them with different props, or create your own"
Human Anatomy for Artist Unofficial Search Helper

Drawing East Asian Faces a guide
How to Draw Hands tutorial
Hands Tutorials For Those Who Hate Drawing Hands
Things to think about when drawing necks
Things to consider when drawing shoulders
Human Anatomy Fundamentals: Basic Body Proportions
Cartoon Fundamentals: How to Draw the Female Form
The NSFW Illustrator's Guide Volume I (of 6, follow links for more)
'pointers on drawing dingle dongles' (male anatomy)
Three tutorials on how to draw women's body parts: lady butts, boobs and waists
Wheelchair Drawing Tutorial by Goldfvsh (wayback machine link)
Manual Wheelchair Tutorial by fancyfade
Ezra and Levi's Guide to Drawing Manual Wheelchairs (tumblr post)
A general cane guide for writers and artists (from a cane user, writer, and artist!)

Blumineck's reference photos and gif of holding a bow at the ready while pirouetting (his tumblr and youtube channel are filled with various archery feats and demonstrations)

So you want to draw some archery- an archery guide in art
How to draw tack on horses - a guide
Wolves vs Dogs A tutorial for beginners
How to Draw Animals: Dogs and Wolves, and Their Anatomy
How to Draw a Wolf Step by Step
How to Draw Animals: Cats and Their Anatomy
Pouncing, a tutorial
Learn to Draw Birds with David Sibley (includes video tutorials)
Shrub Sparrow's Bird Tutorial

How to Draw a Stick Figure: a Complex Guide
How to draw water surfaces (tumblr post, excerpt from Jack Hamm’s Drawing Scenery)

My Color Space "Never waste hours finding the perfect color palate again!" (generates color palates based off your original color choice)

Where Do I Host My Webcomic? - part one: A webcomic website hosting masterpost and part two: A webcomic platform hosting masterpost

Uncategorized and Utterly Random Links:

How to tell if someone might be lying to you
Havocscope- A database of information for criminal underworld/blackmarket stuff taken from newspapers and police reports. (site went down August 2025, this wayback machine link has much of it backed up)

Dimensions- a "reference database of dimensioned drawings documenting the standard measurements and sizes of the everyday objects and spaces that make up our world."

Conversion Tables and Instant Measurement Conversion (modern and historical conversions for everything from distance to weight to shoe sizes to more)

The Quote Investigator "Exploring the Origins of Quotations" - great for checking to see if someone really said the thing or not.

Occupational Folklife Project at the US Library of Congress a collection of more than 1800 audio and audiovisual oral history interviews with workers in scores of trades, industries, crafts, and professions (huge range of professions from bookbinders to circus workers to park rangers to professional wrestlers)

Mirror The Video - fips YouTube videos horizontally (just replace "youtube.com" with "mirrorthevideo.com" in the URL, everything is flipped, including the video's progress bar)

Creepy Link - The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible.


Research and Resource Collected Links Masterpost


Last updated: all links checked 31 March 2026 and new ones added 1 April 2026

I threw together some Battleship recs for the last two weeks' recthething community rec posts (mostly art but a little fic) and just remembered I should share it here too (creators will still be anon until Wednesday):

Art recs:
Carmilla
- Art: Your Sleep Demon (delightfully creepy)

DCU
- Art: Just a little more, Superman... A young Jason helps Clark to safety.(gorgeous, particularly the lighting)

Dracula
- Art: Midnight The scene after Dracula leaves Jonathan and Mina's room. (the emotions in this!)

Dredge (Video Game)
- [Art] Sunset Scene Summary: A small atmospheric piece.(absolutely beautiful, no canon knowledge needed digital art piece)

Moby Dick - Herman Melville
- [Art] The Ghost Hunter AU Summary: No-dialogue comic imagining if the events of the book were loosely adapted into a found footage horror piece centered on Ahab's quest to prove the existence of the spirit Moby-Dick. (so many details in this comic and so well done!)

Original Works
- [Art] She was a fairy This art was inspired by samiabenchaou_ on Instagram. She’s a hijabi fashion influencer. (beautiful)
- A Regency grape angel enjoying some tea with her pets (so sweet)
- Art: Madame Poire A woman wearing a pear-themed historical dress. (wonderfully detailed)
- The Fruit Heist Glorbo, Barry, and Pearry stealing fruits. (All of the teams' mascots and friends, so cute!)
- [art] Glorby Be (Manuscript art! Amazing)
- Battleship 2025: Paper Dolls (A series of paper dolls of Glorbo and others that can be cut out with clothing and whatnot to add, so neat!)
- [Art] The Tower Sumary: A mermaid is... happy to see the lighthouse keeper she's been watching. (beautiful, if slightly creepy charcoal/chalk/pastels on paper piece)
- [Art] Monster in 8B Summary: The shadows aren't cruel. (amazingly creepy)

fic recs:
Eureka/Stargate SG1 crossover
- Bugs in the System Summary: SG-1's visit to Eureka has some unexpected results. (Jack Carter and Sam Carter are cousins and amazing in this)

Leverage/DCU crossover
- They Meet Again Summary: At a charity gala, Bruce Wayne meets a beautiful woman he's run into many, many times before. (great Bruce voice and so many neat little details)

Star Trek Lower Decks
- Battlesheep Potemkin Summary: First officer's log, stardate, uh, computer, add the stardate in. The Cerritos is responding to a distress call from the USS Potemkin, an Excelsior-class starship that was exploring the Gra'pe-2025 system. Upon arrival, we found Potemkin adrift in orbit of the third planet, which is currently surrounded by an ion storm. There is no sign of the crew. However, the ship is filled with hundreds of strange mammalian life-forms. (hilarious)

The last team, Lemon, cleared their final board today and those works will go live tomorrow. I will be very interested in hearing from their team (and everyone else) when the feedback post is put up. I don't usually comment on those posts but I might this year, depending on what the mods say in the first place about how the game might change for next year (there was already mention in the discord that the tag count will drop back down to 400 from the 574 of this year which is such a relief). Without some mod changes (or at least issue acknowledgements) I'll have to think very hard about signing up again next year, which is a shame since I'm one of the very few who've done it every year but the things I love about it are starting to be outweighed but what I find stressful or outright dislike. Sigh.

Now that battleship's winding down hopefully I'll have time to tackle a few things on my to-watch and to-read lists. I would really like to get through the official Guardian translation before the Guardian-read-along finishes up but I am just not sure I'll manage it. (And then there's my poor MDL to-watch list. So long despite efforts earlier this year to work my way through it. Somehow, I keep adding to it. Too many good shows/movies out there I guess.) I also have to start thinking about Yuletide and what I'll want to nominate for it.

Crafting-wise I've been working on a blanket my daughter 'commissioned' from me (aka she bought the yarn). I'm about 3 skeins into the 7 I think it'll need for the length she wants. It's turning out nice, but will still take a while to finish. After that (or maybe during a break from that) I need to do another bread/bagel bag rug because my stack of bags is starting to get unwieldly. Not sure what I'll do with it/where I'll put it once I make it, but that's a future me problem. I also have a string bag I was designing that I ran out of crochet thread for that I need to get back to now that I've bought more. (Here's hoping my notes still make sense)

Anyway, hope all of you are doing well and August is being nice to you! :)

Whoops, I completely forgot to mention in my last post that there was a Friday the 13th tattoo related flash and I wrote an Iron Triangle triple drabble for it: As Evening Slowly Slides Into Night. Summary: An evening, like many others, for the Iron Triangle. (And their shared big bed.)

The Hurt/Comfort exchange has (finally) opened! Lots of fandoms to peruse here. Authors will be revealed on the 11th. I got great Guardian art and a fic for The First Shot and, as always, there's just a ton of amazing things in the collection.

Battleship hit its signup cap within 36 hours of opening so now it's just a random prompt period for a few more days until teams are assigned and then it actually starts on the 12th I think. If you want the chance of getting stuff created (fic, art or podfic) for you, prompting is open to anyone. As prompting is a bit complicated, a few different people have written up guides on how to do it: guide #1, guide #2, and guide #3. All are tumblr posts but I checked them in a private tab and they all work when not signed into tumblr. You might not get anything, but, then again, you might so feel free to peruse the tagset (also linked in all the tumblr posts) and see if there's some fandoms and a few freeform additional tags (500+ ranging from the most E rated things to very, very G) that catch your eye and consider throwing in a prompt or two (or 50, the max).

I've only done 11 prompts so far and haven't decided if I want to do more or not. I tend to keep mine pretty simple as I find my eyes glaze over at huge walls of tags so I pick 10-20 and leave it at that with a few comments in the prompt box along with my DNWs but everyone does it differently. If you want to prompt and have any questions, I'd be happy to help.

Well into the ramp up of this year's Battleship it randomly changed its rules to no longer accept crochet art. I'd already started planning a project to fulfill the 'battlesheep' additional tag and decided to finish it anyway. Behold the 'fearsome' (major use of airquotes there) Battlesheep!! (And I now make up 12.7% of AO3's entire crochet tag between my main and birthday bash account.)

I still haven't gotten any of the links from Pocket posted to any of my research link posts, I really need to start working on that. Ugh. So much to do, so little time.

Last but not least, a single recthething fic rec (MDZS/Untamed):

Burn with the sun, die with the sun (series). Summary: A collection of works in which Wen Xu picks Wei Wuxian off Yiling's streets and makes him an integral part of the Wen Sect. (An interesting AU series where shortly after getting his sword WWX is sort of thrown out of the Jiang/Madam Yu sends him to Yiling and tells him he can't return until he's tamed the Burial Mounds but after saving Wen Xu's life there he is taken in by the Wen, currently 3 works, 21k total)

I have managed to go through all of the links I'd saved to Pocket. It was honestly interesting to work my way backwards through fannish interests (the big ones like Sherlock, MCU, SPN, Merlin, NCIS, SGA, Mag7, and DW/TW but also random ones I dipped into like Sleepy Hollow, SouthLAnd, Haven and so many more) via fics and anon meme comments saved, different research rabbit holes, and general hobby interests. Out of the 1.5-2k links I've kept a little over 300 or so (many articles/fics were read but didn't need to be kept and probably at least half the links were dead). About half those kept were genealogy links-I used to be massively interested in that but mostly researched backwards as much as possible (quite far for a few ancestors including some of hub's to late 1600s/early 1700s Sweden on his dad's side and his mom's to 1500/1600 France->Quebec; many of mine I can't trace before they arrive in the US 1900ish but there's a few I've traced back to late 1700s/early 1800s in the Pale of Jewish Settlement) - generally I've lost the shine of the whole search process but I kept the links just in case. The other half is pretty random, but includes a good dozen or two things I'll be adding to various of my useful links posts so keep an eye out for that.

The Hurt/Comfort Exchange announced due to unclaimed pinch hits (there were still two unclaimed last time I checked) that there will be a delay in opening so instead of going live tomorrow, it'll be July 4th. Kind of bummed about that.

I've made two more rugs out of prepped strips I'd made a few weeks back:

a big, give or take 37" by 27" rusty batik(ish) one and

a smaller, 27.5" by 17" ish blue/green plaid and grey one, out of the rest of the strips left over from the rug I posted about 2 weeks ago and a pair of old grey flannel sleep pants

I'm pretty much out of places I can put rugs here, but I still have lots of prepped strips and whatnot. Not sure what I'll do about that.

Here's two week's worth of tumblr art recs at recthething (due South, DMBJ, Doctor Who, Guardian, MDZD/Untamed and Merlin):

due South
- Let’s pretend the Rays are in the basement of an all girls school again okay (hilarious would-be reaction of the Rays responding to Fraser, and his action, in the ep he was posing as Ms Fraser)

DMBJ
- The coolest guy ever (absolutely incredible art of Reboot's version of Hei Xiazi)
- Zhang Qiling doodle (amazing take on UN's Xiao Yulang's Xiaoge photoshoot)

Doctor Who
- Two (absolutely darling)

Guardian
- Something dramatic for Weilan (this is incredible and so tender)

MDZS/The Untamed
- Modern mdzs series: 1) Wei Ying, 2) Lan Zhan, 3) Wen Ning, 4) Wen Qing, and 5) Jiang Cheng. (Love the whole series, especially Lan Zhan and Wen Ning's looks)
- sometimes I think about older Mianmian meeting Jin Ling and I just. have to take a moment (a comic/bit of animation with a little meta/thoughts about Mianmian and Jin Ling, hits you in the feels)

Merlin
- Treating myself with some soft Merthur (tender, beautiful kisses)
- my first offering to the merlin fandom, good god i'm so obsessed. look at what i've done to my boy. (amazing use of color and lighting in this)
- (tw suggestive) Lap dance (yes, good, thank you)

Daughter's favorite animal is the pangolin and she moved last week so I hunted down a pattern and made her one for a housewarming present


It's based off the lemon-pangolin pattern here but I made a bunch of changes (and actually took notes!) so if anyone wants to try their hand at it, let me know, I can write up my version.

Weather here has been nuts, it went from a highs of 94 to 48 in only a few days. I loathed the heat and high humidity but that kind of temperature change is nuts and hard on the body as well. Santini isn't thrilled with the weather change either but that's because he's of the belief windows should always be open just in case he wants to properly stalk the bunnies or squirrels (does he ever get off his pile of blankets on the couch to do so? No, of course not. Does that matter? No, of course not. He is cat. His opinion is all that should matter)

Moths got into the chest we were keeping some random linens and clothes in so had to toss the chest and then decide what to do with all the now not wearable/donatable sheets and shirts and whatnot so, of course, it's all going to be rugs. I spent most of the week prepping about half of it -cutting in strips and then rolling the strips into balls/disks depending for easier use later (after washing, of course)- but then decided to start a blanket instead of a rug. Maybe I'll switch off between a skein of blanket, do a rug, another skein, more rug, etc.

And, last but not least, two weeks of recthething tumblr recs (DCU, MDZS/The Untamed, Sherlock Holmes-ACD, ST:DS9, Star Wars, SPN, X-Files)

DCU
- Every tender shrimp needs a soft space to recuperate, amiright? (very tender Bruce/Clark moment)

MDZS/The Untamed
- mdzs fandom, long time no see! it’s been almost five years since i last drew wei wuxian, so please accept my offering now (wonderfully eerie Yiling Patriarch era WWX)
- Nie Mingjue and Baxi-huahua The Unrelenting (absolutely love this idea of how Baxia would be in a swords->dogs modern AU)
- Wangxian lightbox (very neat)

Sherlock Holmes - ACD
- Holmes and Watson overlooking the moors (lovely yet eerie Hound of Baskervilles moment)

ST:DS9
- Quark Study (Quark and tribbles, love it!)

Star Wars
- happy star wars day!!! may the 4th be with you!!! (adorable grogu doodle)
- Skywalker Twins comic (hilarious Leia being better with the force than Luke comic)

Supernatural
- Destiel (I think I like the alt background under the cut better but this is a wonderful scene from a hunt either way)

X-Files
- Mulder and Scully in the rain (lovely painting of these two)

(I'm honestly surprised I managed to find stuff to rec these past two weeks. I keep thinking that I'm going to break my approximately 4yr long weekly reccing streak but have managed to squeak in a few. I doubt I'll keep it up, but oh well, it was a fun challenge while I managed it)

As a head's up there's a new round of bots hitting AO3 and posting comments claiming works failed some kind of AI test. The one I got read "Claude showed 69% on analysis. Already posted it to the Discord blacklist. There’s a massive difference between using AI for brainstorming and straight-up uploading what the bot spits out. Readers deserve better." They're usually left by guests so if you get one just hit the 'report spam' button and ignore/delete it. (Hilariously, the comment was left on a work written for an children's lit exchange in 2013 so very very much not able to have been made by AI and it's the only work in its fandom so I've no idea how they even found it to bother with their spam).

In more *ugh* news last year Duolingo fired a lot of its translators to pivot to AI and now Duolingo's CEO has announced Duolingo will be replacing ALL contract workers with AI and elsewhere announced a whole slew of new languages the app will be offering that have all been created (solely or mostly) via AI. None are English->other language so I haven't checked any out but there's been numerous posts/comments/reports of how... not great they are to put it politely. Ever since Duo got rid of the tree I've been collecting tumblr and reddit posts with suggestions for other apps/sites, I'm really busy right now but hope to throw together a post compiling the info within a few weeks.

There was recently a flash exchange focused on lemmings and other small rodents and I went a little nuts crocheting for it. I wound up making 4 creatures- 2 generic animals (mouse and capybara), Shanklin the Stab Possum from Gravity Falls (along with a crocheted knife for it), and The Death of Rats from Discworld (the scythe was so annoying to try to do OMG) and posting 9 works (reusing the mouse and capybara and a previously made guinea pig along with some little items I freehand crocheted for the prompts like a tiny mug of coffee, a shrink ray, a pair of wings, two flower crowns, etc. (Many, many other things were tried but failed. So many.) Everything's on donutsweeper (rather than my EAD birthday bash sock that most of the crochet is on) but here's a few of them:

(I really need to get better at taking pictures of my crochet. So much detail gets lost and sometimes the angle is just weird no matter what I try. SIGH)

And, last but not least, recthething recs! (One MDZS/Untamed Pacific Rim fusion fic and tumblr art for that plus Dracula, Looney Tunes, Merlin, Sherlock Holmes and SPN)

by the grace of the fire and the flames by ShippersList (56k, locked to archive)
Summary: Three years after the Sunshot Campaign (and two years after Wei Ying shut himself and the Wen remnants into the Burial Mounds), something rips open in the bottom of the sea and unimaginable horrors crawl out. The cultivation world unites once more in the face of a common enemy. Lan Wangji knows from the start that without Wei Ying, there is no hope of survival. (neat Pacific Rim AU)

Dracula
- I miss Dracula so heres a silly drawing of it as a muppet movie XD (absolutely delightful)

Looney Tunes
- If the Bugs Bunny show ever gets another revival, I advocate for Yosemite Sam to heckle at the hosts periodically (hilarious comic)

MDZS/The Untamed
- Lan Wangji, do you want revenge? (amazing Yiling Laozu LWJ)
- Ahh... the Burial Mounds (hilarious multi-panel comic)

Merlin
- First date ideas (these are so sweet)

Sherlock Holmes
- Lesson (love the way the pipe smoke blends into the background in this Granada!Holmes sketch)

Supernatural
- Carry On (gorgeous Dean fanart)</details)

Having an exchange assignment to stress over and avoid meant I got a lot of crocheting done these past two weeks! I finished the big blanket I started January 1st:



It's huge, 82"x44" or so and used about 4k yards of yarn, as planned (all but one skein I purposely bought for it this past Black Friday sale as well as the majority of the yarn left over from the dragon scales blanket I did a year and a half ago)

Attempt four of the oven mitt finally worked (and it was only after I finished it that I realized despite this being my fifth mitt, I've been doing the thumb wrong this entire time but oh well). The multicolored yarn I bought for it didn't turn out how I'd hoped but oh well, still, oven mitt!



While crocheting I watched The Imperial Coroner, a Tang Dynasty(ish) set drama about a woman who wants to be coroner for the investigative branch of the government (led by a prince who was the most well written awkward bean of character I've seen in a while) and how they end up unraveling both current and decades old mysteries together. I tried it because it starred Wang Ziqi and it was very good and nice change from all the modern crime c-dramas I've been watching because despite engaging mysteries that sometimes involved murder or death or whatever, it showed basically *nothing* - no drugs, no rapes, no real violence... even the autopsies were done by her explaining what she'd done while cartoonish sketches show what she'd discovered during her VO. All the main characters (those two, the deputy of the investigative branch, the prince's (female) best friend and his elder brother) were all great and could have made a wonderful polycube but the actual canon pairings are nice too. It available on youtube and viki.

Egg prices have finally started to come down here but are still about 3x more than they were even 2 years ago. However, they'd reached $9.49 a dozen at the regular supermarket and $11 at the fancy one so I will take the current $7.99. (Actually, I won't because the fancyschmancy eggs that I normally wouldn't consider because usually they ran about 2x the price of normal eggs due to being cage-free/whatever are, while more than they used to be, still only $6.50. Which says something about capitalism and corporate greed to me. SIGH)

I haven't started using an egg substitutes for cookie baking but I have begun using a flax seed meal replacement for muffins and quick bread (2 eggs = 2 tbsp flax seed meal + 5 tbsp water - mix and let sit a few minutes for it to thicken; I've never had a problem with it affecting the baked goods rising, but supposedly using a slightly heaping spoons of baking soda or powder or whatever leavening agent the recipe calls for will help with that if it's needed.) Another option is 3 tbsp of unsweetened applesauce per egg, but I've found that can alter the taste a bit more, although it can be barely noticeable in most muffins/breads. There's a few other substitutions, especially ones more for cookies rather than breads, that I might try if egg prices rise again but hopefully they won't.

recthething recs! Tumblr art recs for 911, Merlin, Sherlock Holmes and X-Files and an Untamed/MDZS fic rec:

911
- BuckTommy (set of showering doodles, amazing)
Merlin
- Good luck kiss <3 (oh this is nice)
- in my mind, whatever it is they have going on right now, they're probably going to kiss about it later (excellent use of lighting in this and yes, they absolutely will)
Sherlock Holmes
- their asses are NOT making their valentine’s day dinner reservation (tender and sweet Watson and Holmes)
- recent painting practices (a whole bunch of gorgeous Holmes & Watson, and Holmes/Watson, art pieces)
X-Files
- dana scully may be the girl of all time (wonderful Scully doodles)

Weary Wanderer Come Rest Your Bones by NonsensicalRambling (25k, locked to archive)
Summary: The gorgeous young man who flung open the door and gave him a look of surprise that was possibly mixed with interest, before giving him a blinding grin and a cheerful "Hi!" a moment later, is not what Lan Zhan expected. "Are you the owner?"
"That's me! Are you looking for a room?" The man didn't step back from the doorway, but his smile didn’t dim.
"I am from the Lan sect. We were contacted to come take care of a haunting."
The young owner blinked, and his smile dimmed. "No. I didn't contact you. We don't have any problems that require cultivators. Someone is probably trying to pull a prank."
Lan Zhan’s brow furrowed. "We have already been paid. I can -"
"Congrats on the free money! Go away."
The door slammed in Lan Zhan's face. (interesting modern-with-cultivation AU where WWX runs a B&B for resentful/supernatural creatures that someone keeps reporting to the Lan Sect)

Signups for the Hurt/Comfort exchange have opened!! I have been perusing the tagset for days and am still deciding on what I want to request and offer. So many things, so hard to choose.

Attempt #2 at the oven mitt was somehow even more of a failure than attempt #1. No idea how or why. Tension issues, I guess. Luckily (luckily?) I noticed at the 1/3rd-ish mark this time instead of 3/4. Still annoying though.

Taking a break from crochet I pulled out the last of the crappy junk sheets I had and boy were these crappy: a set of Peanuts twin sheets from the mid 70s that were so old the fitted sheet was see-through even after being folded in half. The nice thing about rug making is while I don't know 100% what I'm doing (I tend to misjudge how long to make the initial starting row) I do know enough to work them quickly so the whole process from ripping the strips to finishing the rug was only about 5 days. Rug!

It's not huge, 30"x24" or so, but I managed to get a lot more workable strips out of the sheets than I'd initially thought, so I'm pretty happy with it.

While making it I finished watching The Embers and wow, it was so good. The MDL summary for it is absolutely awful and it's very hard to talk about the show generally without spoiling or at least discussing many of its twists and turns but I made an attempt at writing one with no real spoilers past the opening episode that I've been sharing everywhere in hopes of having more people to scream about this fandom with:

The Embers is a story about Liao Siyuan who currently (in 2019, when the show is set) is 20 and finishing university when a fellow student is killed and he initially gets suspected since he might have been the last one to see her alive. He distrusts/hates the cop, Shu He, who is leading the case because back in 2009 that cop solved the arson/murder of Liao Siyuan's family by claiming Liao Siyuan's older brother did it. Said older brother, Liao Zhibai, was much older, 21 or so and a police cadet at the time and died in the fire. Liao Siyuan idolized his brother and knows his brother didn't do it. He also still sees and interacts with his brother everyday.
(Things get much, much more complicated as the original case and then new ones seem to all be linked to Siyuan and the fire from 2009 somehow and he, first alone with his 'brother' and then actually working with Shu He, tries to figure it all out)

The best recommendation I can give for it is that it's one of those shows that works on both levels - when watching initially without any knowledge or spoilers for events and will still work on a rewatch when you do, which is pretty rare. If I've piqued your interest it's slowly being released on youtube by tencent (with the unfortunately typical occasional missing sound scene) but is also *ahemable* here.

When poking about AO3 while planning nominations for the h/c exchange I discovered that a fandom I had requested for probably 5 yuletides in a row (Strange World, which I wrote up a promo for back then) now has an AO3 presence in the form of an amazing vid!! The vid, set to "Winter" by The Alpha Conspiracy can be found here.

I forgot to post the recs I made recthething for Candy Hearts here but here's the link to the comment I made in that week's weekly recpost back while the authors were still anon (art for Dracula, Guardian, Original Work, Sherlock Holmes and Word of Honor and fic for Addams Family, due South and Great Mouse Detective) along with last week's rec (an MDZS/Untamed fic)

River's Child by NonsensicalRambling (80k, locked to archive)
Summary Snippet: There is an array under the floor at Lotus Pier. Or rather, there used to be an array. For nearly the entirety of the Jiang sect's existence it was kept a secret, passed down only from sect leader to heir. When Jiang Fengmian died without taking his son through the ritual to maintain it, it shattered, and what it bound is now free for the first time in centuries. War is on the horizon, and blood is waking up.

The waters of Yunmeng hold many secrets, and even the most placid looking river can hide dangerous currents and depths. (really interesting canon-divergent, no golden core transfer, dragon AU)

Today the friending meme over at snowflake_challenge was posted and it made me realize I hadn't actually done any of the challenges this year. The past two years I'd bounced off of a few and skipped others since they weren't pertinent, but I was kind of surprised to realize the month had come and gone and there hadn't been a single challenge I really was interested in or hadn't done numerous times before. Sigh. Oh well.

I'm nearly halfway through the blanket I'm working on, unfortunately I hadn't noticed that taking a break from it to do the EAD and Threshold amigurumi resulted in me using a much tighter stitch for a bit but oh well, I noticed now and loosened up the stitch. There's a chunk of rows where it's a lot less wide and tighter but it's just a throw that's going to live on the back of the couch and not be a present or sold or anything so meh, oh well.

As an FYI, if you've been thinking maybe you've been getting less kudos lately than usual, it's not your work, it's AO3. Kudos emails for numerous accounts were simply not sent out several times this month (including today and yesterday, seven days in all, particularly if you usually get yours from 6-9am EST). Apparently they're looking into it, but it's not a quick fix.

I listen to/watch a lot of history, linguistic/language and various other learn-about-something type podcasts and youtube channels and I'm finding that more and more often the research they seem to be doing is more of the briefest glace-at-wikipedia-if-that type than any real work at finding any details out themselves. It's frustrating. (Most recently on my instant-drop list was an english language lovers focused one that had an entire episode about Shakespeare and how many words and phrases he invented. Which, no. First recorded use of? Meh, maybe even if most actually aren't (including one he gave that even the OED mentioned was from Old English), but invented? Definitely not. Not only has the idea he did been disproven over and over by now, it's also beyond illogical, his plays had to be understood by the people who watched them. SIGH)

There *are* still a bunch that provide sources and show and explain their research, thankfully, but it's just frustrating how rare it's becoming. Currently, my favorite (actually well researched) language-oriented one is the idioms podcast Bunny Trails (which is on most podcast platforms but also puts their podcasts up on youtube) and the history one is the welsh history youtube channel Cambrian Chronicles which, among other things, has done some really interesting dives into incorrect wikipedia articles, trying to figure out why wikipedia claims what it does.

Have two weeks of recthething recs (one Mdzs/Untamed fic and tumblr art for DMBJ, Guardian, MDZS/Untamed, Merlin, ST:Voy, and Under the Skin):

Junior Detectives! (The Case of Mo Xuanyu) by CheekyBrunette (64k)
Summary Snippet: The one where Wei Wuxian uses the pseudonym "Mo Xuanyu" for reasons yet to be revealed, and the junior detectives solve a case each chapter while investigating their chemistry teacher. (cute YA detective book vibes in this recently finished fic)

Tumblr art recs:
DMBJ/Lost Tomb:
- Happy new year from hei xiazi and his snake friend (wonderful snake, wonderful way to celebrate the Lunar New Year)
Guardian:
- Dark Guardian (dark yet beautiful art of Zhao Yunlan, Shen Wei as the Black Robed Envoy and Da Qing)
- who did this? | it’s not mine part one and part two (Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan through the years, wonderfully done)
MDZS/The Untamed:
- would you like a Wen Ning in these trying times? (ridiculously cute wen ning)
Merlin
- Merthur Modern AU (gorgeous)
Star Trek Voyager:
- Star Trek Threshold (adorable art done in Lower Decks Style for this silly holiday)
Under the Skin:
- let the light in (cute Shen Yi, Du Cheng and Xiaoxuan the cat art)