Ya Boi, BlueJay

I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard

Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.

Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.

Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.

Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.

SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.

SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.

Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.

Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.

Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.

Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.

Friends in Distant Places, chalk pastel on paper

Happy birthday #Usher!

Within a year, the statue had sustained so much damage that it was unrecognizable and the lettering unreadable, so eventually the council came and took it down. Also apparently, the person in the Hi-Vis vest didn't even work for the council. They were supposedly just some 'good samaritan' who cleaned it, often before the council even discovered it needed cleaning, so they just let them do it and ignored the problem. They didn't bother putting the statue up again.

I’m going to go into more detail about my workplace eventually but for now it’s important to make public that ethanol holdings in the Florida State Collection of Arthropods (FSCA, Gainesville) are completely neglected and actively rotting. Holotypes (the original specimen of a plant or animal used to define a species, completely priceless and the pride and joy of any good collection) are already ruined. Don’t ever donate your stuff there, it will go to waste.

Everything that is not personally interesting to the administrators has clearly been totally ignored for decades and priceless scientific information has been lost as a result. It is the worst I have ever seen, having worked in three other collections previously. I was lucky I had not formally donated most of my own collection material there because I guarantee they would have barred me from ever accessing the specimens again and then neglected them all to destruction anyway. Other people have not been so lucky and multiple scientists have their life’s work trapped in there and deteriorating. Admin is not above blocking former employees or whistle blowers from using the collection, even if it is your own material.

Here is how FSCA was keeping the holotype of the rare cave millipede Scoterpes rudis. The ethanol should be clear, but I had to fish the actual specimen out of the opaque yellow slime with forceps. Many others were just like this when I found them, and I did my best to care for them all but there was clearly already permanent damage years before I was even hired. I’m really sorry for the poor solifugid biologist who has to try to get useful information out of the holotype that is just a small wad of legs and glue now.

Many of the specimens, including some holotypes, are like this centipede, with the rubber stopper having degraded into a glue-like material and dripped onto the specimen. Reaching this state requires years of total neglect because you can see the rubber start to wilt long before it drips. All it takes to fix this is replacing the stopper more than once in a century, but apparently that was too much to expect of the “world class” FSCA.

FSCA higher-ups recently presented a big cheesy video at the Entomology Society of America meeting in Nov 2022 in Vancouver, patting themselves on the back for the size of the collection and soliciting new collaborators and donations. They are constantly seeking to acquire more material even though they are running out of space and totally incapable of maintaining what they have already. The other staff are completely aware, but apparently only concerned with their own personal research material and individual favorite bugs.

I would appreciate if you all could share this with anyone you know interested in entomology, natural history collections, or biology in general. I suspect my former position will open for new applicants almost immediately because of how many different aspects of the operation I supported out of a genuine love for entomology and curation. Now that I am gone, the ethanol collection is likely completely abandoned. Please do not give this pathetic institution and its staff more things to ruin.

Dude taught himself to compose and calls it fake

“Just string it together in any order, the more random it is the more complex it’ll sound" improvising music on the fly was one of Mozart’s party tricks

Let’s talk about perspective and how to put characters into perspective.

There was an older gentleman sitting across from me on the M train.  It was about 6:30am, so I didn’t think much of it when he started leaning over.  It was when he kept going when most people would jerk awake that about 5 of us took action.  We asked if anyone knew CPR in our car, and when we pulled into the next station, we held the doors open and shouted for a doctor (there was a firefighter on the train with us who knew CPR, because that’s how things are in NYC).  No response during CPR.  The older gentleman’s lips were turning blue. 

When the ambulance arrived, the paramedics took over and after 2 minutes of no reaction, I watched something that will always haunt my soul existentially, the way this pic does:  The paramedic yelled at this man that he had to get up because he’d be late for work.  And he got a response.  I don’t know if the older man made it, but he had a pulse when they took up the stairs to the ambulance.

“Stopped.

- Last word of the british surgeon and anatomist Joseph Henry Green (1791-1863) while feeling his own pulse.”