OMG THIS WAS A HELL TO ANIMATE, BUT IT IS EASILY THE BEST COMMISSION I'VE EVER BEEN ASKED FOR, I LOVE THEM 😭💕💕💕

you’re hearing it more and more

Spotify Premium ad: “Imagine playing music without interruptions! Infinite skipping! Replay the song you want! And even do it offline? No ads! Whatever songs you want! For a small monthly payme-” Me: *nods, turns off Spotify and turns on my MP3 player and does all the things they offer, but for free and with songs they don’t even have*

For those of you who might not know how to do any of this:

You don’t need to be tethered to an online streaming service for your music. Be free.

You can also rip audio files from youtube and find files all over the internet. It is far easier to come across great and lesser known music if you dont limit yourself to spotify.

Here’s a tutorial on how to get the music and playlists you like with unlimited listening/downloads. This is a free way to do it that I believe is a balance between cost, time, and pros & cons:

1. Find the song on Youtube. YT has pretty much every song at this point, usually in comparable quality to what you would get on a streaming service.

2. Download the audio from YT. There are many ways to download YT videos completely for free. It’s probably against the YT terms of service, but you’re not going to get sued.

3. Upload to your music player/manager of choice. The file will currently be lacking metadata (Artist, Album, track number, etc) and will be added to the library as a song with its title set as the file name minus its .mp3 extension. Various music players/managers have different ways to add metadata (usually accessed by right-clicking the song) with varying ease.

4. Now you can use the player of your choice to listen endlessly, form playlists, etc. Some free music managers also have music discovery/recommendation features for expanding your collection.

There are many music managers/players, including cross-platform ones with streaming, though they usually have fees for that feature. Because you aren’t streaming the music and rather storing it, you’ll need space on each device you want to play the music on, but memory is cheap these days.

I do encourage people to pay for art, especially from small, independent artists. You have to pay for art if you want to keep it alive, but there is debate over if streaming services are really “paying the artist”. Alternatives include buying and ripping CDs, purchasing merch or tour tickets (where artists make a lot of their money), etc to support them with something other than streaming views.

ID. a tweet from Don Hughes @/getfiscal dated Feb 18 21. it reads, “Started imagining paying for Spotify for the next thirty or so years and got a bit dizzy, cancelled a bunch of subscriptions, installed Linux on my computer and then pulled out my old CDs to rip. Going caveman.” End ID.

Seconding MusicBee! Also, you can use a library subscription to access Freegal, which allows (depending on your library system) up to five free downloads a week. Completely free, actually legal, yours to keep, no DRM or any crap like that.

For indie producers, always check if they have something like Bandcamp! Bandcamp lets you download as well, and has significantly higher royalties going to the actual artists (Spotify pays them… very little).

Jsyk, winamp rips cds natively.  You can set whatever bitrate you like.  Been doing *that* since last century. 

It’s that time again:

Every time I try to purchase music legitimately, I run into an infinite scrolling wall of streaming options which will suck money out of my pocket for all eternity in return of mediocre garbage service, and not a single goddamn option to simply receive audio files I can play on my fucking devices.

And legitimate purchase options might be gated even further behind region-locking and all kinds of DRM bullshit.

If I can find a Bandcamp, I always buy from that, because they offer proper audio quality and multiple formats (and I like my FLACs). If I can’t, I’ll buy the music on iTunes, and go looking for whatever way is available to obtain files in a better format than Apple’s m4v bullshit.

I want to buy music from musicians legitimately, I really really fucking want to, and I don’t want to feed the fucking ghoulish parasite middle-man assholes at Spotify while I’m doing it.

So uh….some dude apparently recreated Adobe Photoshop feature-for-feature, for FREE, and it runs in your browser.

Anyway, fuck Adobe, and enjoy!

Give credit to the 30-year-old who worked on this for free and offers this service for free!

googling ‘jobs for autistic people’ and realising that everyone still thinks autistic people are either sheldon cooper or really tall toddlers

NVM ONE SUGGESTED NIGHT GUARD OUTTA MY WAY GAYBOY IM GONNA FUCK FREDDY FAZBEAR

🚨🚨🚨EARN IT ABOUT TO BE PASSED🚨🚨🚨

PLEASE SOMEONE ANYONE HELP US

WE WILL BE SPIED ON DUE TO NO ENCRYPTION

LGBTQ+ CONTENT WILL BE WIPED FROM THE INTERNET

SEX WORKERS WILL BE CRIMINALIZED

THIS BILL WILL KILL THE INTERNET AS WE KNOW IT

what to do?

CALL YOUR STATE REPS

SIGN PETITIONS

DONATE

JOIN DISCORD SERVER

I AM BEGGING YOU PLEASE DO SOMETHING!

🚨🚨🚨🚨 URGENT 🚨🚨🚨🚨

This was Ordered Reported on May 4th to the floor of the Senate, meaning it cleared committee.

It is unconscionable that at a time when women, girls, trans folks, and other marginalized communities are being persecuted in GOP-led states for exercising bodily autonomy and their right to seek information and travel for Congress to enact a law that threatens the right to privacy and which weakens people's ability to use encryption to protect that privacy.

Far from protecting vulnerable children, this law will make it easier for unscrupulous police departments to implement dragnet searches to punish women who seek information on contraception, and will make it much harder for teens especially to access reproductive care without fear of retaliation, and will further have a chilling effect that will cause more suffering and death of the kind we are already seeing in the post-Roe environment.

It will also make it easier for the GOP to continue their anti-trans witch hunt, as basic sexual education material is already being characterized as a criminal act in states like Florida and Tennessee, and the loss of privacy protections will make it easier to prosecute people for these things.

As annoying and banal as interacting with your reps' staff can be (and make no mistake, is often is both), it CAN make a difference if enough people call in about the same issue. They do track that sort of thing, if only for their re-election campaigns, and on a bill like this which is primarily being pushed for the optics of DOING SOMETHING TO PROTECT THE CHILDREN, making enough noise can scare some of the more skittish congresscritters away from voting yes on this.

This will be the only non-poll related post on this account, as this is a pressing global issue, and I have much more reach on this account than my main. Please, if you are in a position to help oppose this, do as much as you can.

If you cannot do anything directly, I ask that you spread this as far as you can, especially to those in the USA.

You did a great job today👍

You deserve a Tiny mini Wally🫵

if there is a 7-11 around you, you can print it by using the ibon machine, if not here's the whole set up! the size is 10.5 × 14.8 cm!

but please remember, do not steal my art to make merch or something, I just want everyone to have fun with little Wally!

The silly puppet man lives in my head rent free

RF!Wally belongs to Dodozoi17 on TikTok!

Oh, btw this was the image the last drawing was based on!

so embarrassing when i forget im checking someone's blog and i start scrolling through and liking and reblogging shit as if it's just my dash. it feels like wandering into someone else's apartment and not noticing and making myself lunch

reblog if i can wander into your apartment (blog) and make myself lunch (like and reblog as if it's my dash)

Glaze is out!

Tired of having your artwork used for AI training but find watermarks dismaying and ineffective?

Well check this out! Software that makes your Art look messed up to training AIs and unusable in a data set but nearly unchanged to human eyes.

I just learned about this. It's in Beta. Please read all the information before using.

Art thieves already hate it:

Dude, if you're stealing, you deserve to have the data poisoned. Because you could have asked and you didn't.

The link is only in the original post inside an image, not as text, so here it is as plain text: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/ and the paper about how it works: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04222

As links (because some of us are on mobile and can't easily copy and paste to our browser), those are:

https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu

&

A bit of a TLDR for some questions I saw in the notes:

The team that created Glaze is from the University of Chicago. Their names are each listed in full on the Glaze download website. (This group of students/professors did this for their SPRING BREAK 😱 so go give them some love lol)

It is free to download. No, they won’t ask for or raise money from/for this project.(stated by one of the lead professors of the project).

Glaze is designed to protect artists’ STYLE--which a bunch of ai people have been deliberately fine-tuning their models to mimic (and specifically of current living artists--small or big).

It currently does not protect against composition/trace-like theft (as seen when run through img-to-img) but that would be protected by copyright anyway while STYLE is not.

The University Team has stated that they are dedicated to continuing to improve the tool, like fixing bugs (like overheating older computers by taking up lots of energy when Glazing--it currently runs on CPU so they’re trying to change that to GPU, I believe) and expanding the type of protection given to artists (like working against img-to-img theft).

It currently only works directly on your computer (phones not advised due to current overheating issue, no tablets, or iPads, and no website runthrough since that would be insecure to breaches/scraping/hacks)

It currently works best on painterly artwork, but can still be used on other forms (team is working on improving this)

IT WORKS BY calculating the changes each image needs for the best protection against style theft by AI, and adds tiny changes throughout the piece, so that your style will, for example, confuse the ai into seeing van gogh. But the ai thieves will see a regular image in your style, feeding it into their model labeled as your work (thus starting the “data poisoning”).

Do not post the original unGlazed piece of your artwork after posting your Glazed version (obviously)

The Team worked directly with over 1,000 artists that were being impacted by the ai theft. Because the team listened to those artists, Glaze accounts for regular art thieves too (i.e. Glaze can’t be removed/cropped etc. like signatures or watermarks when reposted. It’s just part of the image, so even if it ends up on another site and scraped, the Glazing is still in effect)

When you run your artwork through Glaze, no information is sent back to the Team. (Aka, no scraping on their part. The app receives information from the Team (like updates) but no information from you is given to them through the app. Basically Team servers ---> You and NOT Team servers <--->You) One-way data street.

Brief misunderstanding happened over an open-source license for the front-end part of the app. (Used open-source coding for front-end, not knowing that code’s use-license states it is only for other open-source uses, not closed-source (the back-end code of the app is private to prevent counter-counter measure developments)). The Team took down the app until they replaced the front-end code with code written from scratch by the team. They are now not in violation of that open-source license since they are no longer using it. (you have 30 days to remedy a license breach once informed; they did so in 2)

The Team is currently in touch with Japanese artists to better expand the tool for use to protect their art styles

From what I understand of it, Glaze is an AI tool designed to be anti-AI (Think Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: one Terminator robot vs. all the other Terminators 😂)

You can download it from their website and also contact them through email there with any questions, problems, or bugs. The website: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/

reblogging this every fucking time it comes across my dash

AMAZING

my text post collection vol. 1

Had a dream I was gaming so hard during a run of Deltarune that I somehow unlocked all the unreleased chapters even the ones that haven't been made yet and I pulverized through every single enemy just by running into them really fast, making them violently explode into scattered pixels with my sheer force. I was having fun until suddenly the screen went white and a very visibly upset Mario appeared (because I was playing on the switch) and he was sitting on a folding chair with his hands clasped together and he asked me “what the fuck is a-wrong with you”. immediately woke up

dam…….. that website “you feel like shit” (it’s like a questionnaire / troubleshooting guide for when you feel like shit) really works………………….. im not even all the way thru it and i even half-assed a lot of the suggestions and i already feel loads better

for some reason, with this website, i was able to complete small tasks ive been fruitlessly bugging myself to do for weeks??

anyway, i feel almost good now :^)

im glad this got some notes!!!! i hope it helps y’all find some measure of peace or comfort <3

I am a(n):

⚪ Male

⚪ Female

🔘 Writer

Looking for

⚪ Boyfriend

⚪ Girlfriend

🔘 An incredibly specific word that I can’t remember

*wakes up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat*

WAIT IT’S CALLED A THROW PILLOW

here is a super helpful website for this kinda thing!

the first result isn’t always the one you’re looking for but when you press enter it’ll give you a ton of words related to your query that’ll probably have what you’re wanting, or something better

here’s some examples:

Reblog to save a writer’s sanity (the last bit that’s left)

OneLook thesaurus is a lifesaver!

@candy-cryptid