Unidentified artist. Female nude (Oil on wood), 1953.
People are walking biomes if u think about it
To invading germs, you are a jungle full of hungry tigers. To your gut bacteria, you are a warm orchard of perpetual bounty. To your eyelash mites, you are a walking fortress and a mountaintop pasture. How many generations have you hosted? What do they name the wilderness of you?
— "Host" by @cryptonature, in his book Field Guide to the Haunted Forest
Parasites and other symbiotes (*symbiosis is actually an umbrella term that includes parasites, before anyone asks) outnumber free living organisms in both species and individual numbers, meaning that the *norm* for life on earth is to live your whole life in or on another creature. Us larger independent beasts are technically special in having adapted to survive the harsh non-living world; to gut bacteria and mites and parasitic worms we're like planets keeping them safe from an immense deadly void.
SISTER (Stroud in Internationalist Solidarity Together for Earth Repairs) have reclaimed the space as the ‘SISTER Summer School’ and declared their intention to squat the empty Old County Library in Stroud Town Centre. SISTER states that empty buildings are unjustifiable during these cost-of-living, housing and rental, energy, climate, and ecological crises. UK public services have been and continue to be systematically underfunded, dismantled, and privatised whilst CEOs hand out record profits to stakeholders, while the education system is failing to equip young people and communities with practical tools to solve our problems...
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:
- To convert CD audio into mp3s, you just follow the steps here
- To play mp3 files, you download an mp3 player like Winamp here and away you go
- On mobile? There are plenty of free mp3 players for your phone available, too, so check them out
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:
If you have the CDs, it will be easier to rip them. Most music managers include this feature and you will have all the track information loaded into the file. There are also pirate websites where you can download entire albums with their metadata attached, but there could be risks associated (I would worry more about viruses than lawsuits these days, though). Deciding a method for acquiring music is a balance of the required time, the alternative costs, and other pros/cons like supporting the artist or taking the risk of pirating sites.
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.
This is great if you already listen to music on Youtube, but there might be a better method for going direct from Spotify, though this will work either way. The main downside to this method is that official music (and even lyric) videos sometimes have non-music portions so you might have to listen to the whole thing to be sure. SponsorBlock will highlight non-music sections for most artists, so if you have it installed you can tell at a glance if this is the case.
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.
I like y2mate for downloading YT videos (or their audio in mp3s) because it’s a simple, ad-free website. You just paste in the URL for the video you want to download. Sometimes it’s laggy and you have to come back later, but usually after a few moments the video loads, you select your download quality (the highest), and then save it. For easy file management, download everything in folders for the Artist, and then sub folders for the Album, and name the MP3 file the “song name”.mp3.
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.
iTunes is free and and logical if you have an iPhone, but limited in its capabilities. I do all my management/listening in MusicBee (free for Windows) because of its playlist and management features, as well as having a very customizable interface. You can set it to scan the folders you download music to so it will automatically load things into your library, or do so manually. Once loaded into MusicBee, you can batch edit an entire album’s metadata at once easily with Auto-Tagging. Auto-Tag can fetch the details from the internet and fill in artist, tracks, album artwork, etc and save that information to the mp3 file. You can edit this manually if needed too. Drag and drop the edited songs to any other player you may want to add them to so it can find the files.
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.
MusicBee allows you to create playlists with folders, subfolders, and dynamic features. You can export these playlists for cross-platform play on other computers with MusicBee installed. I think the playlist features on MusicBee are better than what is on streaming services. You can create an auto-playlist of your recently-added music so you can easily find the ones that are new and might need need editing, adding to other playlists, etc. I have custom tags for music by LGBT artists, sapphic love songs, and more. I also drag-and-drop these playlists directly into iTunes so I have them on my phone too (you can do this to make a new playlist or just edit/add songs to a current one).
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.
You can buy a 2TB external harddrive for less than Spotify or Youtube Premium costs for six months, so having to store the songs isn’t much of a downside. Plus, the song will never “leave the service”, you can listen to it offline, etc.
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.
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.
Also, borrow the CD from the library to rip. You get your music and the library gets usage stats
Understand that there is a beast within you
that can drink till it is
sick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied. Understand
that it will use the conventions of the visible world
to turn your tongue to stone. It alone
knows you. It does
not wish you well.
—Frank Bidart, excerpt of "The Third Hour of the Night", in Half Light
Nils Udo (German, b. 1938, Lauf an der Pegnitz, Germany) - Installations and Photography. See each photo for information.
Source: nils-udo.com
This is a very cool station if you are interested in truly eclectic music. All songs pulled from YouTube have under 100k views and they must be from before the year 1996.
brian kershiznik / franz stuck / lane demoll / words of lane demoll in the description of their painting “circle dance (six witches)”
Cave Painting, Dance Scene
Nymphs dancing to Pan`s flute
Joseph Tomanek (American, 1889–1974)
Circle Dance, Tom Friedman (2010)
They just PUT A STICKER ON THE CLEARLY LABELLED USB PORT I'm dying
Bad time for me to have switched to entirely printable shipping labels 😞
Hiroki Takahashi "Mt. Fuji and the Moon in Blue" 2018 Mineral pigments on Japanese paper.
Black sun, mixed technique on canvas 2011, paris www.danovski.pl