aesthetic mish mash

12ft – Hate paywalls? Try this site out.

My Fridge Food – No idea what to make? Tell this site what ingredients you have on hand and it will give you recipes to cook.

Project Gutenberg – Always ends up on these type of lists and for very good reason. All works that are copyright free in one place.

Ninite – New PC? Install all of your programs in one go with no bloat or unnecessary crap.

Unchecky – Tired of software trying to install additional unwanted programs? This will stop it completely by unchecking the necessary boxes when you install.

Sci-Hub – Research papers galore! Check here before shelling out money. And if it’s not here, try the next link in our list.

LibGen – Lots of free PDFs relate primarily to the sciences.

Zotero – A free and easy to use program to collect, organize, cite and share research.

Car Complaints – Buying a used car? Check out what other owners of the same model have to say about it first.

CamelCamelCamel – Check the historical prices of items on Amazon and set alerts for when prices drop.

Have I Been Pawned – Still the king when it comes to checking if your online accounts have been released in a data breach. Also able to sign up for email alerts if you’ve ever a victim of a breach.

Radio Garden – Think Google Earth but wherever you zoom, you get the radio station of that place.

Just The Recipe – Paste in the url and get just the recipe as a result. No life story or adverts.

Tineye – An Amazing reverse image search tool.

My 90s TV – Simulates 90’s TV using YouTube videos. Also has My80sTV, My70sTV, My60sTV and for the younger ones out there, My00sTV. Lose yourself in nostalgia.

Foto Forensics – Free image analysis tools.

Old Games Download – A repository of games from the 90’s and early 2000’s. Get your fix of nostalgia here.

Online OCR – Convert pictures of text into actual text and output it in the format you need.

Remove Background – An amazingly quick and accurate way to remove backgrounds from your pictures.

Twoseven – Allows you to sync videos from providers such as Netflix, Youtube, Disney+ etc and watch them with your friends. Ad free and also has the ability to do real time video and text chat.

Terms of Service, Didn’t Read – Get a quick summary of Terms of service plus a privacy rating.

Coolors – Struggling to get a good combination of colors? This site will generate color palettes for you.

This To That – Need to glue two things together? This’ll help.

Photopea – A free online alternative to Adobe Photoshop. Does everything in your browser.

BitWarden – Free open source password manager.

Atlas Obscura – Travelling to a new place? Find out the hidden treasures you should go to with Atlas Obscura.

ID Ransomware – Ever get ransomware on your computer? Use this to see if the virus infecting your pc has been cracked yet or not. Potentially saving you money. You can also sign up for email notifications if your particular problem hasn’t been cracked yet.

Way Back Machine – The Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites and loads more.

Rome2Rio – Directions from anywhere to anywhere by bus, train, plane, car and ferry.

Splitter – Seperate different audio tracks audio. Allowing you to split out music from the words for example.

myNoise – Gives you beautiful noises to match your mood. Increase your productivity, calm down and need help sleeping? All here for you.

DeepL – Best language translation tool on the web.

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

senshistock sketch tool

senshistock’s deviantart (queen of queens tbqh)

fatphotoref (password protected, you can dm the creator for the password or ask me but i will only answer if i can see by your blog that you are an artist)

figurosity (free, kinda wild)

jookpub stock

photoref.org (paid packs, run by jenn ravenna tran, so you’d be supporting a woc artist/filmmaker!)

scott eaton’s bodies in motion (paid subscription and kind of pricy but good if you want to spend some time Really Focusing on Anatomy)

posespace (big library, also paid)

drawthis channel on yt

anatomy for artists course on proko (pricey but good)

always gotta mention schoolism

books:

force: drawing human anatomy

morpho books

figure drawing for artists: making every stroke count

andrew loomis books (ALL FREE!!!)

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

When cassettes ruled the world….

The search engine calculates a score that aggressively favors text-heavy websites, and punishes those that have too many modern web design features.

If you are looking for fact, this is almost certainly the wrong tool. If you are looking for serendipity, you’re on the right track. When was the last time you just stumbled onto something interesting, by the way?

CLR James

José Carlos Mariátegui

George Padmore

Huey Newton

Che Guevara

Angela Davis

Ho Chi Minh

Alexandra Kollontai

Rosa Luxemburg

Mao Tse-tung

Walter Rodney

Julius Nyerere

Safiya Bukhari

Bell Hooks

AbdulRahman Mohammed Babu

Sanyika Shakur

Dhoruba Bin Wahad

Mumia Abu Jamal

Paulo Friere

Amié Césaire

Robin D.G. Kelley

You can back up your work at any time. If Neocities goes down, you can take your blog or wiki or what have you and move to a new provider (or even host it yourself).

Free accounts have 1gb of space. You probably won’t hit that unless you’re hosting a lot of images. I’m at 0.5% of that limit, almost all of which is images. Plain-text just doesn’t scale that quickly. (If you can donate, I encourage you to even if you haven’t hit the limit. It’s a great website.)

Neocities has its own tutorial built-in, but I’d recommend checking out other resources as well! Most of what I’ve learned is from googling about specific problems and then moving on from there. I’d also recommend looking around your library or used item stores! I have a HTML/CSS guide I got for 6$, and it helped me fill a lot of gaps in my google education.

For anyone interested in blogging on neocities, I’d recommend checking out zonelets.net. It’s free, and has in-depth video tutorials explaining how to use it. It makes blogging a lot easier, though the way it relies on javascript can make parts of your site inaccessible to those who don’t/can’t use it. If you’re looking to solve that problem and are used to using html, I’d recommend looking at static site generators like Jekyllrb.com (this is the one I use, which is why I’m linking it. I’ve heard good things about gohugo.io too.).

I’d also like to take a moment to shill for forums.sufficientvelocity.com. It’s a writing/worldbuilding/collaborative fiction forum. I really, really recommend that people check it out. There’s a lot more interaction between writers and readers, and the moderators are both elected and incredibly progressive.

Discord and its knock-offs are not easily archived. You can’t find it when using a search engine. You can’t have people read what happened before in the discussion. If you get banned, you can’t reread conversations unless you screenshotted them. I think many communities have been harmed by this lack of history trail. It’s a problem with Twitter and Tumblr too, but I think it’s more apparent on Discord because Discord is impossible to effectively archive. If we want knowledge to survive more than a few months, we need to store it places where people can get to it. 4chan, the website where it literally deletes stuff on purpose, is easier to find old stuff on than Discord is. I’m not eloquent enough to explain, but I have to stress that archiving stuff is very important. Pick apps and websites that let you do it. (Hell, at least Skype lets you download every groupchat you’ve ever been in, pictures included. I had to set up a custom bot to do that for my personal Discord.)

Just give the thing two layers of explanation. One to explain the specific problem, and another one explaining the explanation. Have an example:

Plot hole 1: If the vampires can't stand daylight, why couldn't they just move around underground?

Solution 1: They can't go underground, the sewer system of the city is full of giant alligators who would eat them.

Well, that's a very quick and simple explanation, which sure opens up additional questions.

Plot hole 2: How and why the fuck are there alligators in the sewers? How do they survive, what do they eat down there when there's no vampires?

Solution 2: The nuns of the Underground Monastery feed and take care of them as a part of their sacred duties.

It takes exactly two layers to create an illusion that every question has an answer - that it's just turtles all the way down. And if you're lucky, you might even find that the second question's answer loops right back into the first one, filling up the plot hole entirely:

Plot hole 3: Who the fuck are the sewer nuns and what's their point and purpose?

Solution 3: The sewer nuns live underground in order to feed the alligators, in order to make sure that the vampires don't try to move around via the sewer system.

This website is full of free sewing patterns that will automatically alter to ur measurements

- Although there are a few direct download sites I put here, I deal mostly with Torrenting, in which you WILL have to download a client in order to get your stuff;

- uTorrent/Bittorrent has not been deemed trustworthy since a few years ago for discreetly putting a Bitcoin miner in their software. Use clients such as qBittorrent for desktop and LibreTorrent or Flud for mobile (Android).

- Avoid The Pirate Bay, period. Not even recommended uploaders are safe anymore, and just because you got one or two safe downloads from there doesn't mean the next one won't be fucked up.

- Links with * on them mean that the site is direct download (DDL), meaning you don't need a torrent client.

- I live in a country which generally doesn't need VPNs for pirated downloads/streams, however I know Canada, the US and some parts of EU have very strict regulations and can get you a notice from your ISP before legal action is taken. Research reputable VPNs, it's worth getting one.

- Whatever you do, use uBlock.

The following list will be divided between editing software, editing assets, where to get TV shows/movies, etcetera, under the cut.

“For most dialogue, use a comma after the sentence and don’t capitalize the next word after the quotation mark,” she said.

“But what if you’re using a question mark rather than a period?” they asked.

“When using a dialogue tag, you never capitalize the word after the quotation mark unless it’s a proper noun!” she snapped.

“When breaking up a single sentence with a dialogue tag,” she said, “use commas.”

“This is a single sentence,” she said. “Now, this is a second stand-alone sentence, so there’s no comma after ‘she said.’”

“Of course you already know to use a paragraph break between speakers,” they said.

“Yes,” she agreed. “Depending on style, you can either indent or line break, as long as you keep it consistent.” “Exactly! But did you know that if your single speaker goes on and on and gets a little rambly, and you find yourself needing to put in a paragraph break but not switch speakers, you should do the exact same thing?   “Only, in this case, don’t close off the quotation marks until that speaker is completely done talking. See how after the question mark above there isn’t anything? Indent or line break for your next paragraph – however you’re indicating – and use a beginning quotation to mark the dialogue, but leave the initial paragraph open, so that the reader can tell it’s not a different person now speaking,” they finished.