What would you do making first contact?

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.

if you use Spotify then spotdl is pretty nice for downloading playlists and gets lyrics and metadata too

Also you can check out actual CDs from a library to rip them (which supports your library by showing them that people still like CDs and are using the library services), and you can also find CDs at thrift stores…

forget about touching grass, i need to touch THE SEA I NEED TO GO INTO THE WATER I NEED TO DIVE INTO THE SEA!!!!!!!!!!!!

good lord

YEAH I GOT NOTHING

i don’t understand a single sentence in this and i’m ok with that

I haven’t stopped saying “it’s called quantum jumping, babe”

I would genuinely like to know who to blame for making these children so disconnected from the concept of imagination that they think the simpler explanation for what they’re doing is that they’re projecting their consciousness into one of infinite realities where fictional characters are real.

topical :/

WHY IS IT TOPICAL

Me shouting at my rash ointment

great post everyone

This had me laughing harder than it should have.

From the article:

“Oh my god! This is like in the 1500s with the Indigenous people and smallpox,” she says. “They had no defences against it!”

Wait – what did she just say?

I pause and look to my friend. Did the Barbie film just compare women and patriarchy to Indigenous people and disease? Was that really necessary?

Other people obviously felt as taken off guard by the comment as I did, judging by the response on social media: “this line was unnecessary and not needed for the plot,” one person wrote. Another remarked that it “reeked of white feminism,” while another called it “a sloppy attempt at intersectionality.”

The thoughtless line about Indigenous people and smallpox ironically comes right before an insightful and impassioned monologue by Ferrera’s character on how complicated it is to be a modern-day woman.

—

I would have loved to have grown up speaking nêhinawêwin (Swampy Cree). My father understands it, and my grandparents spoke it fluently. My grandfather even had a radio station in Manitoba where he exclusively spoke nêhinawêwin. This loss began with the same history that dates back to Pocahontas’s “story” — dispossession, expulsion from our lands, forced assimilation, and discriminatory laws that disbanded many from speaking it for a time. Because of this, I didn’t get that opportunity. In the same way so many others didn’t.

Speaking of my grandfather, Murray McKenzie, he was a photojournalist. He received his first camera while recovering from tuberculosis at the Clearwater Lake Sanatorium. We know now that my grandfather was given a blanket carrying the disease. Murray was one of the few little boys who survived his ward at the sanatorium.

So imagine my surprise when a movie about another fantasized character, Barbie, goes on to include a reference to a disease that wiped out so many Indigenous peoples on the continent. For example, my colleague recently wrote a piece on the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Nation’s 100-year amalgamation anniversary, where it was shared that 100 years ago, the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (the Squamish people) at one point went from a population of 30,000 to 400 because of disease.

—

I’ll end by saying this:

It is literally impossible to be an Indigenous woman.

We have to be beautiful but not too beautiful, or we might go missing.

We have to leave our homelands to become ‘educated,’ and to enter the ‘workforce.’

But we can’t forget who we are and where we come from.

We want to be good and loving mothers and protect our children,

But we can’t make a single mistake, or our children will be taken into the child welfare system.

We want to preserve the natural world for the next generation,

But colonial law will remove us with an injunction and put us in prison.

We want to honour our dead, but governments tell us that it “isn’t feasible.”

We want to speak our languages,

But so many of our language keepers have been lost to colonial violence.

Aren’t we tired of watching every single Indigenous woman kill herself to simply exist?

SHRAMP

yeah people who deny the way little girls are indoctrinated into seeing weight gain as the worst thing on the planet are on some shit

just remembered the time my cousin realised i have a chronic illness that can cause weight gain and was so overwhelmingly sad about this but when i explained that was the least of my concerns given the amount of times ive passed out alone in public and possibly dangerous places or the chronic pain that makes it hard to walk some days or you know my heart working the way it does (read: badly) she couldn’t get her head round it how could any of that compare to being fat?

yeah no thats not normal and it shouldnt be normal youre not born hating fatness to the point that being miserable and in pain but thin is more desirable than being fat

no more "in my humble opinion", from now on it's "from my grandiose and objectively correct deductions".

does anyone know if i can like block sites from appearing in my google images searches??? i keep getting those awful ai generated things with a hand coming out of a man's neck and just straight up not what i was looking for, because this was in a search for "curly hair in medieval paintings". it happens every time i search for anything vaguely art-reference-like and it's so fucking annoying and it clutters my search results so much. i don't wanna add specific commands to the query every time too, what i need is like a browser extension or something

okay i found one! it works! everyone come get your blacklist 👍👍👍

I made a list of as many ai sites i could find to block with ublacklist, just copy and paste them in ublacklist's options menu

Concept: A witch cat that’s too fat to fly

This is legit great because it shows that it’s not the cat that’s the problem, it’s the broom. The cat just needed someone to make an accommodation so they could fly too.

That was fast

Oho the reason WHY is that the city received complaints from residents living across the street and fined the building owner for the obnoxious blinking thing.

Maybe, maybe, how quick they have taken it down has to do with them realizing that the office of the fucking legal team of the city of San Francisco is ACROSS THE STREET from Twitter HQ

Seriously.

How.

Every.

Fucking.

Thing.

About.

Musk.

Can.

Be.

So.

Dumb.

Holy shit.

I would like to point out, someone had a serious seizure set off by that thing and was sent to hospital because of it. It wasn't just "obnoxious" it was downright deadly.

[Tweet from Ellie @ TheElfmyster dated 01 Aug 23:

Hello, this is Ellie's girlfriend. To be even be typing this upsets me. In the early hours this morning, Ellie's epilepsy was triggered by the new X advertising, which has left her fighting for her life. A brand isn't worth someone fighting for there life for. #DodgeTheEx ]

Confirmed: the stunt with the dangerously-bright X logo and its strobe effect predictably caused physical harm. This is exactly why strobe lights need to be removed completely from the public sphere, and why 100% informed consent should be the bare minimum requirement for the use of strobe lights.

Strobe lights have their time and place, and a public street is NEVER that time nor place.

We have a petition to remove strobe effects from advertising. Click here to sign and/or share it. Every little bit helps!

Guys, the liquid stuff you use when you make a pen mistake so you have to cover it over, what’s it called?

White out

Okay that’s what I thot too,

But apparently it’s “Wite out” 😳😳😳 hello??????

Mandela effect *X-file music plays*

Views from an alternate dimension

Wite-Out is a brand of white out/correction fluid/liquid paper. The colloquial ‘white-out’ probably derives from the Wite-Out brand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correction_fluid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Paper

More importantly:

New Zealand math classroom, circa 2019

this post just shot me in the face like ten times

not the coquettes literally reinventing nazi phrenology on tiktok

western cat twitters are like “HoOman” and japanese cat twitters are like “Today I will consider the state of things.”

you forgot russian cat tumblr

Russian cats are right in the middle of the two

actually japanese cat twitters sound verbose to us because the translation loses a detail: it’s all written in katakana, which is considered childish or illiterate!

so japanese cats are really saying “today i wiww conshidah the state of fings ^owo^”

Also the only reason the Russian sounds semi childish is because of the lack of definite or indefinite articles (the, a/an), which Russian just doesn’t have in its language anyway

The corrected translation with English grammar would be “I am a wave” which is neither childish or verbose its just factual and simple

that is the face of a man worried he will be next

Good news, he was not next! In fact, she accepted him as her mate, he learned the crane mating dance and now every year, he artificially inseminates her with crane semen to expand the very endangered crane population. True story.

Sorry, he WHAT? Imagine being this man's boss and having to sit him down like. Listen. Brian. We need you to fuck the bird. You have to act like you're excited about it.

crane husband.....

this is the diametric opposite of all those awful swan wife stories and i love it.

(WalWaPo makes you jump through like three separate hoops before you can read the article, so I will share some of the highlights:

Legit cannot pick the funniest part of this

she has not been PROVEN to have killed her exes, but there is a PERSISTENT RUMOR (really officers she's simply DEVASTATED, she sobs, wearing a new feather boa unfortunately resembling her most recent deceased husband)

His name is Chris CROWE. (Mrs. Walnut Crane-Crowe?)

the mental images of a whole human man learning and performing the crane mating dance, and "sitting" on artificial eggs so she thinks he's performing his duties as a husband and father (and apparently OBJECTS if he does not?)

"chris, buddy, you gotta marry the possibly-murderous crane lady for the GOOD OF THE SPECIES." (alternately: "chris, my man! good news! we found you a very interested lady! She's 36, she's very spirited and independent, she holds a very important and rare status in her society! ...Is there a downside? WELL...")

chris sits any potential human partners down, like "my love, you must understand before we wed,,, i am already... Attached" (camera drifts wistfully to the above photo) "Lady Walnut and I have an,, Understanding... the relationship is open, but very committed"

just had to explain this post to my father bc he thought my stifled laughter was a signal of illness.

well done, everyone, good game. hit the showers.

Not only is he 'married' to walnut, this has apparently happened SEVERAL times, so he has MULTIPLE crane wives, none of which know about any of his other crane wives. This man is, for some unknown reason, irresistible to cranes

the “this content has been removed for violating Tumblr’s Community Guidelines” notice really adds a lot of flavor to this post and somehow makes it MORE obscene than whatever that actually was

World Heritage Post

$0