snowynight

Planning Your Travel

Make My Drive Fun:Enter a starting point and a destination. The site will show you interesting places to stop along the way.
Denmark Art Explorer: Explore Denmark via art objects from the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK)

Travelling without Leaving Home

Persepolis Reimagined Take a tour in a Persian city 2500 years ago
Virtual Visit Tours: Fully interactive 360 degree virtual tours across Ireland
Virtual tour of Chauvet Cave: contains some of the best-preserved cave paintings in the world, dating back as far as 36,500 years ago.
4k WALK: Youtube channel about walking tours of city streets and natural scenery in different countries
Apollo in Real Time: A real-time journey through the Apollo missions

Maps across the history

OpenHistoricalMap: a crowdsourced project designed to store and display map data throughout the history of the world
USGS Historical Topographic Map Explorer: Explore Maps of the United States from 1884 to 2006. You can see how a place changes through the overlay of maps over the current location.
Topotijdreis: It functions like the USGS Historical Topographic Map Explorer, but it's for Netherlands (In Dutch)
David Rumsey Map Collection: virtual library of more than 150,000 maps of North and South America, as well as maps of the World, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania from 16th through 21st century
Library of Congress Maps Collections

DIY Projects

30 Awesome DIY Projects that You’ve Never Heard of

11 DIY Electronics Project Ideas for Engineering Students


Washi Tapes

40 Creative Bullet Journal Washi Tape Ideas

How-to Paint with Washi Tapes

What is Washi Tape and Why Do You Need it? 15 Cute and Easy Projects Made with Japan Souvenirs

Sand Animation

Home is where the heart is" - אילנה יהב A Sand Art by Ilana Yahav. (video)

20 Award winning Sand Art works and Sand Animation examples

Ceramics

HOW I MAKE CERAMICS AT HOME (the entire pottery process) | lolita olympia (video)

Intro to Ceramics

Adult Colouring Books

107 Adult Coloring Books Everyone Should Own

13 best adult colouring books for unleashing your creativity

Adult Coloring Books Online: 17 Free Websites

AI Art Generator

Nightcafe (Web): Nightcafe uses AI to turn any simple English sentence into a painting. When creating an art, you can choose from various artistic styles like cubist, oil painting, matte, surreal, steampunk, etc.

Dall-E Mini (Web): Simplest text-to-image AI generator and offers unlimited tries for free.

Dream by Wombo (Web, Android, iOS): Simple, Free, Unlimited AI Text to Image Art Generator that you can choose styles from Ghibli, Dali, Love, Robots, Psychic, Synthwave, Baroque, and Dark Fantasy. Mobile version has more function but compulsory video ad.

Pixray (Web): Pixray is a text-to-art generator that you can run in a browser, on your computer, or with an API, all for free.

Twitter fiction bots

Magic Realism Bot: "I generate a magical story every 4 hours. "

a strange voyage: a bot forever voyaging. endless nautical story generator

Mythology Bot: mashes up motifs from fairy tales and mythology to create a scholarly index of an alternate-universe folklore.

PremiseBot: creates premises for stories that range from the realist to genre

Noir Fiction bot: Randomly generated hard-boiled detective stories


Twitter literary bots

the Vita & Virginia Bot: an epistolary bot that tweets excerpts from the letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, who were in love and did their best to close the distance between them with letters

Sappho Bot: Bot that posts fragments by Sappho. With translations from Anne Carson's 'If Not, Winter,' and more.

Emily Bot: I'm a Dickinson mash-up algorithm! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?

Mythic Maps: Maps from fantasy and science fiction novels

Ulysses Reader: Reads Ulysses by James Joyce. In 280 characters or less

Sylvia Plath Bot: Tweets random bits of Sylvia Plath's poetry every hour

Nights bot: fragments from the 1001 Nights

gothic fiction bot: quotes from gothic fiction every hour

Dracula Daily: the classic novel reimagined as entries released day by day

The First Troll: The wicked vendettas of Thomas De Quincey, the author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

11 Lesser-Known Fairy Tales: Quite a number of stories are bloody and sad.

Detective novels

Ten golden age detective novelists who deserve to be better known

A Recipe For Hardboiled Fiction

The 10 Weirdest Crime Novels You Probably Haven't Read: Pushing the Boundaries on Strange and Twisted Crime Hybrids.

Memory

A Well-Aged Mind: Maintaining Your Cognitive Health

Building a memory palace in minutes: Equivalent memory performance using detevirtual versus conventional environments with the Method of Loci

Transient Global Amnesia Is an Experience You'll Never Forget

NIH scientists try to crack the brain’s memory codes

Links:

Musee des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden: a poem and a painting about suffering in plain sight

The Productivity Blocker: An extension that blocks productive websites (like Slack, Duolingo and Linkedin) so you can relax.

Endurance: Shackleton's lost ship is found in Antarctic: Scientists have found and filmed one of the greatest ever undiscovered shipwrecks 107 years after it sank.

For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of World War II

Essays

Diagnose Your Current Relationship Problems With These Key

How Did This Many Deaths Become Normal? - The U.S. is nearing 1 million recorded COVID-19 deaths without the social reckoning that such a tragedy should provoke. Why?: It sadly resonated with the mindset of people in my home city too.

I am reading Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks, and find it very insightful about embracing our limits and cracking the myth that we can do everything we want/need to do. I find his other essays helpful and practical too.

Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket: To be honest, at this point my to read pile looks more like a sink than bucket.

How to make writing less hard

What if you never sort your life out? The reality is that it's a "when", not an "if"

Science

Happy Lunar New Year! 

Happy Year of the Tiger by wenjunlin: The art is very adorable. 

A guide to Chinese New Year flowers and fruits

Art: 

A lesson in History: lover's eye jewelry

Art on Brazilian rocks tell history of mankind

Collection of paintings in public domain

MET Museum collection 

Science: 

 The Neuroscience of Thirst: How your brain tells you to look for water: How our bodies use complicated mechanisms to make sure we drink the right amount

Tunicates—Not So Spineless Invertebrates: Our closest invertebrate relatives

I like playing Twine games and choice of games, and daydream about writing a simple one some day. Here are some links about writing interactive fiction. It's interesting to compare the similarities and differences from writing stories.

General 

General Writing FAQs and Resources: a very massive list of writing resources including plot, characterization, structure and game design specific resources. Useful to general writers too. 

Standard Patterns in choice based games

NPC Characterization by Emily Short

Make Good Choices: A Guide to Decisions in Videogames

Scoping for Game Jams: How to finish a game within 48 hours


Twine

A Total Beginner’s Guide to Twine 2.1

Top Twine Games Make the Most of Interactive Fiction

I really like the games choices. Queers in Love at the End of the World, The Uncle Who Works For Nintendo, and With Those We Love Alive are all great games that make good use of Twine. They are all distinctive in different ways. 

Choice of Script related

Small Plotting Trick for Choice-of Work: How to make character arc distinctive

End Game and Victory Design

How We Plan a ChoiceScript Game

 Recently finished: 

I have finished the transcript of Silt Verses. It's set in a dark brutal world that new  gods are made by corporate and governments and regulated. People deemed useless were used as sacrifice. Old forgotten gods roamed the countryside. No one got what they at first wanted. I really like the mythology, the dramatic irony and the psychological horror. There are a lot of body horror, but I guess reading text lessens the effect on me. I will be interested if there is a new season. 

Currently reading: "It can't happen here". I haven't read much yet, but people never changed through the decades. 

Link: an 10000 year old ancient amber bear