RatCreature's Journal

Looking at the Worst Room Tumblr just now (a blog that posts photos of horrible rooms and small "apartments" for rent in NYC at outrageous prices) makes me feel so much better about my place.

Also, of course I knew that fictional depictions of supposedly crappy NYC apartments in tv series and such always make them vastly larger than they would be in reality (perhaps because you couldn't actually fit a professional camera larger than an iPhone, the person operating it, and a person being filmed into an actual crappy NYC apartment from the looks of these photos so you'd probably have to stage them and leave one wall out that you don't see or something), but these are just astoundingly awful. Like, many seem to be either windowless closets rented as bedroom for several hundred dollars or some sort of crawlspaces repurposed for sleeping in, that are too low to stand or even sit.

I know they have server trouble, but this is annoying. I'm in the middle of reading a multichapter story there, but it takes always five attempts or so to get the thing to respond, and just now it doesn't at all for me. *grumble*

In other news, AO3 has a post asking what features you would like to see in your ideal fanart archive, as they plan to expand from just fiction eventually. There are many ideas already in comments, but if you are a fanartist or like looking at fanart, you should chime in too.

This goes to show that rabbits can be vicious, dangerous animals: Video of a rabbit attacking a snake and chasing it up a tree

This probably is already obvious to anyone not me, but: I was browsing the internet archive for books, and found that they archived some vintage mail order catalogs, which have lots of pictures and illustrations and thus are great for easy to find period references for anything from clothes to carriages, farm equipment and kitchen stuff. Not to mention that it is just kind of cool to look at mail order catalogs from 1900, 1907 or 1920. I had no idea that you could find old catalogs online, but there's all kinds of interesting scanned things with pictures available there, like I found some sort of British government guideline for protective clothing worn by female factory workers in 1917, with photos of what they were wearing.

I also found old course books on fashion drawing and costume design, which look kind of helpful for clueless and fashion-challenged people like me to figure out how clothing more complicated than t-shirts actually fits together, because when I look at pictures of older clothes I often can't figure out the pieces, and old photographs aren't the clearest either. I mean, even drawing contemporary clothing is hard.

I also found this old book on pen drawing with lots of examples for different crosshatching and other b/w inking techniques for illustrations, which I have only skimmed so far, but it looks interesting.

It's the cover of the current issue of the Italian politics magazine Internazionale covering the US election. Though I guess Obama/McCain slashers (and if there are any? kind of disturbing btw) would get a kick out of this. I don't actually speak Italian, so I have no idea why they have a cover illustration with an Obama/McCain kiss, I just saw this on an image blog.

First, some art comm linkage (even though I suspect most interested people will already know of these):

yuletart, a multi-fandom art exchange, has started with the nomination process for this year's fandoms. For the next couple of days only the participants from last year can suggest fandoms for this year, but soon it'll open up to new participants. Since I suggested fandoms I guess that'll mean I'm going to do a holiday exchange again this year. Meep.

Also, paintedspires recently got an overhaul and reopened as an SGA flash art community. The first challenge has been posted, and you should all join or at least watch.

In less happy news ( rat health update )

I don't often link to random stuff I've come across, but this dragon sand sculpture is very impressive. Here's a photo from another angle where you can see the baby dragon the big one is cradling.

This simple online game is really quite addictive. Also I never manage to clear the board of blocks past level five. I have no idea how people are getting high scores like that.