Dear Digital Journal

Dolly Parton's Imagination Library They send an age appropriate book once a month if you have a child younger than 5.

Project Gutenberg Lots of free classic books.

Library Genesis A great place to look for and download college/university textbooks for free, as well as other books.

Scihub Endless Free college books. (and peer-reviewed scientific publications that are otherwise hidden behind a paywall)

Khan Academy Free knowledge that you can use to clep out of university courses, or to simply invest your time in a worthwhile topic.

Openlearn UK’s Open University - free courses for all levels of study, samples of university materials, study skills and tie-ins to BBC documentaries. Everything under Creative Commons licence so you can use it as you see fit.

Duolingo The Green Owl of Languages. There are a few hundred that it teaches and the mobile app makes it easy to do anywhere while waiting (!warning! only good for Spanish, German, French, Dutch, Esperanto, and English. with anything else it gets very low-quality and short.).

Codecademy An awesome site to learn how to use some programming languages. Doesn't get into the really advanced stuff, but it's good for a start.

Photopea Completely free Photoshop clone that has all the basic features of Photoshop, using basically the same interface.

Gimp Another free version of Photoshop.

Unsplash Stock of free photos of just about anything, provided by the photographers themselves, to do with what you like.

Futureme You can write letters to yourself (or other people) in the future! You can also make notifications and reminders of a +doctors appointments or anything else important.

Heavens Above You can look up all the satellites flying over your house tonight, including the ISS, Hubble Space Telescope, those pesky Starlink satellites, and whatever else your heart desires, complete with star maps and precise timing. And there is an Android app, but unfortunately no iOS one last I checked. (For iOS you can use “Sputnik!” which is free and tells, when ISS and Hubble passes overhead.)

Night Sky Other astronomy app for iOS. If you hold your phone to the sky the app tells you what you're looking at (or point it at the ground for a view from the other side of the planet). Zoom in with two fingers and tons of deep space stuff is revealed.

Freecycle its literally people giving away stuff they don't need/want any more that they can't/don't care enough to sell.

Nexus Mods Has thousands of video game mods (for 1,509 PC games), made by independent content creators, available to download at no cost.

Archive The Archive aka Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and so much more... For example a lot of DOS games (classics like Prince of Persia, Oregon Trail, DOOM, Monkey island, Rayman, Turtles), directly playable through the browser.

My earlier list

a black girl character growing her hair out long breaks more stereotypes than a black girl character having short hair

a black girl character getting to be soft and fragile breaks more stereotypes than a black girl character being strong all the time

a black girl character being protected and comforted by others breaks more stereotypes than a black girl character having no one to look out for her but herself

a black girl character being considered pretty or cute by other characters breaks more stereotypes than a black girl character being considered unattractive

not everything that is empowering for white girls is empowering for black girls

I made a little tutorial for you, many asked me for the wind effect, so there you go! I hope it will help many of you considering those effects can be tricky. Details also on Patreon too, you can support me there!  

The great thing about art is it’s one of the few careers that you can break into that don’t require a degree or schooling of any kind. You can be entirely self-taught, but if your portfolio is rocking, then you’ll get hired.

If you’re starting at ground zero, I’d say start with the cheapest — but still the most impressive — art technology. A pencil. If you hone your skills and your craft so well even just with a pencil & paper, You can build a following, get noticed, and start earning money to save up for adobe programs and online classes in digital art.

A few ideas:

—Make great drawings and take pics of them and start an instagram or tumblr and start gaining followers and offer online commissions. 

—The best way to get into comics is to MAKE YOUR OWN COMIC. Scan it and put it on the web. So many comics artists launch their careers with their personal work as webcomics and cheap xerox printed comics. (Nimona being a great example. Noelle Stevenson launched her entire career by just posting a comic page once a week.)

—Go to the park on your off days, start sketching people for $20 and sell it to them.

—Put some work up in the restaurant for sale. Maybe they’d even let you sit in the corner and sketch customers, then sell them to the diners.

—If you get really good and really fast, you can get jobs doing storyboards for advertising agencies, or even concept art jobs freelance.

There are art jobs in every city in the world. There are plenty of startups and creative agencies and small game companies in Portland for sure. If you’re nowhere near a medium-to-big-size city then get creative. Look around your town. People need art for all kinds of things. Start drawing out in public. Start putting your work around bulletin boards in town. You’ll start getting hired for all kinds of little jobs that you can save up to get started digitally. Remember, you don’t HAVE TO start with Adobe programs. There are free clones of photoshop and illustrator online, just google them. Lynda.com is a great cheap resource to learn any computer program, and it’s only $25/month. There’s also a ton of free videos there. And literally anything you want to learn has a video on youtube.

Get creative. Use what you have, then upgrade as you go. If you really want this to work, then put the time in and people will notice.

—Agent KillFee

Strawberry Shortcake - 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom

This house was built specially for the founder of my Perfect Genetics Challenge; in the upper story there are 2 bedrooms (the master bedroom and another with a bunk bed), and both are connected to the only bathroom. There’s also a tv with a console in the hallway. On the first story there’s a large living room with a piano and a fireplace, a kitchen with a table for 4 sims, and a laundry. And in the yard there’s a space for dining with a barbeque, a gardening space with few plants (not cheaty!), a easel and a telescope just for the fun of the owner :)

Requires Ambitions, Late Night, Generations, Supernatural and Master Suite Stuff.

Contains few CC, linked at the download page (since I usually clean my DCBackup folder, then the CC wasn’t included in the .sims3pack file)

Built with patch 1.57.