#finding stuff

For years I've been compiling a list of useful tools for writing (fiction and non-fiction) and I thought it might be fun to share it.

What am I missing? What do you use and love? I'd love to keep building this list!

Historical Research

General plug: Librarians!!! They want to help you.

Search for words/signs in Brooklyn

Encyclopedia of Hair

Underwear, a history

Newspapers.com

Historical (and modern) meeting minutes

Find a grave

Political TV Ad archive

Oral Histories

Columbia

National Archives

MoMA

Archives of American Art

The Oral History Review

Words

Wordnik

Dictionary of American Regional English

Scrivener built in name generator

Lose the very

Scene Setting / Images

Animals & Plants by geolocation (also good for general scene setting)

Flickr world map

Past weather by zip code

Google Maps streetview / Google Earth

General Inspiration

Oblique Strategies

Worldbuilding

Tarot decks (my personal favorite is this one)

The Thing from the Future

The Picture Game

Misc

This is what I gifted my parents for the holidays, and it’s straight-up, old-school radio frequency tech, no apps, nothing is going across the internet.  They are spending an increasing amount of time looking for stuff my mom was just touching and put down.  Her specific active memory loss is short term, so think of it as, her biggest challenge is remembering whatever it was she was doing right before whatever she is doing now or whatever she was doing before something broke her train of thought.  Actually when my dad gets stressed, he exhibits this type of memory challenge too, something common to most older folks, and I even have a touch of this as someone with ADHD.

To start, I tagged her purse and her keys, and then I took both items and hid them in the house, and made my parents use the remote to make the tags beep, and find the items.  Having a couple test scenarios was really good for them, and I used the second practice run to make my dad put his hearing aids in, and coached them more to act like a team, not like one finder and one critical observer.  If this helps, we’ll add tags to other things that need frequent locating.  

tips: study tips, getting-your-life-together tips, a strange number of job and resume tips, productivity/motivation tips

reminder!!: reminders to all of us

useful: useful links/resources

opinions: my opinions on things that y’all didn’t ask for but i’m delivering anyway

good vibes: hella! good! vibes!

about me: mostly tag games, “tag yourself” posts

Google the fck out of what you remember 🤣

For a song: I found a song by using the dun dun music sounds someone one Reddit is probably looking for it and already found it.

Actually for everything I would use Reddit sometimes quora has stuff but it’s annoying to navigate