Hansen's reframing of the Silk Road as connected local markets is the most useful methodological point made about the topic in decades. The caravan-crossing-the-desert image is romantic but mostly wrong.

My experience with AI-generated reference images: useful for abstract lighting scenarios; less useful for anything with consistent objects.

Ancient Arabic poetry — the qasida form with its long polythematic structure — is one of the oldest and most sophisticated poetic traditions in the world and one of the least known outside of Arabic scholarship.

My Krita brush organization: I have about fifteen brushes in my daily palette. The rest are archived. More brushes don't make better paintings.

The Loomis books are genuinely good for self-taught anatomy. Not exhaustive but enough to get started correctly.