Some doodles from the Idaho Museum of Natural History. Oviraptorosaur foot study, wee orycto, and a species of fern actually found in the Wayan Formation.

 I drew this illustration to commemorate a new and updated edition of my unnecessarily long Neopets fanfic Worth Searching For! I had already uploaded the previous version here, but parts of it still weren't sitting quite right with me, and I finally decided to just give it a total overhaul.

The most crucial edits here were to erase all vestiges of Isengrim's narcissistic sociopath personality from the first version, and really help Terra come into her own as a strong heroine whose kindness, wisdom, and courage inspire others to change for the better. In addition, I added a somewhat significant conversation between Isengrim and Suhel to tie Suhel's character development together a bit better than in previous versions; when I originally wrote this fic, I didn't go into much detail with her because I simply wasn't planning on doing anything else with her, but since then she's actually become a main part of the cast, so I figured she needed her due in her introductory story. I also took the opportunity to tighten up the prose, since it had been a few years since I'd last visited this story and I've somehow improved a bit as a writer since then.

If you've never read the fic, there's no better time to do so (but for Sloth's sake don't read the version that got into the Neopian Times, thankfully it's very old and you'd have a difficult time finding it, so just spare me the embarrassment and don't go looking for it).

 More museum sketching! They have an adorable little mount of Citipati that was just begging for some attention. I love that the Idaho Museum of Natural History is all about celebrating oviraptorosaurs right now!

Scrambled Circuits

Here's some original fiction for once! Sometimes I write short fiction, and then forget about it, and then rediscover it several years later and discover it actually wasn't half bad. Maybe I should post more of it here.

This is one of those. I was just having fun writing from a space probe's point of view. You've got to wonder what a computer experiences during a software glitch--what if it's like digital schizophrenia?

What I'd like to see more of from Pokémon

With it now being more than a year since the release of The Indigo Disk, and still absolutely no new information on Pokémon Legends: Z-A since the very vague teaser trailer back in March, as well as my recent various rantings on what Scarlet and Violet could have done better, I figure now is an opportune time to reflect on what I like about Pokémon as a franchise and a game series, and what I hope to see from it moving forward. (Also, happy new year and such.) (This post is rife with spoilers. You have been warned.)

 A random tablet doodle that turned out surprisingly well for how tired I was last night. I was just experimenting with oviraptorosaurs having plumage more like an ostrich and being adorably fluffy.

One of my paleoart pet peeves is when artists under-feather dinosaurs, as if they're begrudgingly painting a token thin veneer of drab integument onto the scaly dino shapes they grew up with and can't seem to shake. I love seeing artists get more creative with dinosaur soft tissue, because the more we learn about these incredible creatures, the more we discover that they were just as variable and visually interesting as modern animals. Most vertebrates actually look quite different from what their skeleton alone suggests, so it's silly to suppose that dinosaurs were the exception. It's the 21st century; let's move on from shrink-wrapped skin and noncommittal feathers, and start depicting dinos as real, functional biological organisms.

/rant

 Couple of oviraptorosaur hand studies from the Idaho Museum of Natural History. Ovis are one of my favorite dinosaur groups (the other two are therizinosaurs and abelisaurs), so I'm super psyched that ovi eggs have been found in the Wayan Formation and their (for now rather conjectural) parent is the star of the museum's current dinosaur exhibit.

One thing I'm not sure many people realize or appreciate is that (most) theropods actually had an opposable first digit and could grasp things very similarly to humans. So dromaeosaurs were really even more capable of opening doors than Jurassic Park depicts*! :)

Ovis probably had quite a bit more feathering than this, including ample pennaceous feathering on the arm, but I omitted those feathers in the interest of modeling their very cool hands.

*The caveat here is that theropods could not rotate their hands at the wrist like we can, so they couldn't really grab a doorknob and twist at the hand; they would have to move their entire arm from the shoulder. Yes, I have overthought this and pretended to be a theropod to see how it would work.