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:

Don’t forget that you can borrow CD’s from your local library! Borrow, rip, repeat ad infinitum!

for playing mp3s on android - musicolet, very customizable, bajillions of options, and you can edit the metadata in-app including album art and lyric files

on firefox - there’s a youtube video downloader add-on that lets you do it from page, though only as video - but most video players have an export-as-audio option

If you have installation privileges, I would strongly suggest Mediahuman’s audio downloader which, in addition to scraping youtube audio can also capture from a variety of other sites, is highly configurable, does not rely on a website provider choosing not to become malware, AND downloads/converts the audio in around the amount of time it would take that video to load?

couldn’t stop thinking about this post

gotta lie down every time I remember this recording and the post about it

babe are you okay i saw you were reblogging “No Children (live at the bottom of the hill)” again?

All shall be well someday

bastille has done more for the queer community by just making all of their love songs about "you" instead of specifying a gender than taylor swift has in all of her discography. thanks for coming to my ted talk.

this post is VERY funny bc it has a fuck ton of likes and like. two reblogs. the fear of the wrath of the swifties is VISCERAL.

Beyond lockpicking: learn about the class-breaks for doors, locks, hinges and other physical security measures

Deviant Ollam is runs a physical security penetration testing company called The Core Group; in a flat-out amazing, riveting presentation from the 2017 Wild West Hackin’ Fest, Ollam – a master lockpicker – describes how lockpicking is a last resort for the desperate, while the wily and knowledgeable gain access by attacking doors and locks with tools that quickly and undetectably open them.

Ollam’s techniques are just laugh-out-loud fantastic to watch: from removing the pins in hinges and lifting doors away from their high-security locks to sliding cheap tools between doors or under them to turn thumb-levers, bypass latches, and turn handles. My favorite were the easy-exit sensors that can be tricked into opening a pair of doors by blowing vape smoke (or squirting water, or releasing a balloon) through the crack down their middle.

But more than anything, Ollam’s lecture reminds me of the ground truth that anyone who learns lockpicking comes to: physical security is a predatory scam in which shoddy products are passed off onto naive consumers who have no idea how unfit for purpose they are.

When locksport began, locksmiths were outraged that their long-held “secret” ways of bypassing, tricking and confounding locks had entered the public domain – they accused the information security community of putting the public at risk by publishing the weaknesses in their products (infosec geeks also get accused of this every time they point out the weaknesses in digital products, of course).

But the reality is that “bad guys” know about (and exploit) these vulnerabilities already. The only people in the dark about them are the suckers who buy them and rely on them.

So when Ollam reveals that thousands of American cop cars, fleet cars, and taxis can all be unlocked and started using a shared key that you can literally buy for a few bucks at Home Depot, or that most elevators can be bypassed with a similarly widely available key, or that most file cabinets and other small locks can be opened with a third key, or that most digital entry systems can be bypassed in seconds with a paperclip (or another common physical key), he’s doing important (and hilarious!) work.

He’s such an engaging speaker and the subject matter is nothing short of fantastic. There are a hundred heist novels in this talk alone. It’s definitely my must-watch for the week.

https://boingboing.net/2019/06/14/fools-paradise-lost.html

Here are some of his recent talks on youtube to watch or put on in the background:

Through the eyes of a thief (2023)

Elevator Hacking - From the Pit to the Penthouse (2022)

I'm begging you to turn the sound on

Spring.

Spring.

Spring.

Spring.

Spring.

Everytime this crosses my dash my eyes light up because I know my favourite part is coming. Spring. Spring. Spring. Spring. Spring.

Knowing that trans women of color started the movement in the united states and were literally immediately erased and excluded from what they started is the most deeply jading knowledge.

It is the original sin of the so-called queer community and it damns it from the cradle.

no white gay boy will ever reblog this, watch:

no white gay will reblog this

no white lgb person will reblog this

Without Stonewall, without the efforts of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, the LGBTQ Community wouldn’t be where it is today. Don’t forget the roots, don’t forget the catalyst.

and then TERFs wanna be like, “hmm well the LGBT community existed before Stonewall!”

but like…Becky, of course LGBTQ+ people existed before Stonewall. We’ve all existed since the beginning of time. But the movement got a shock to its senses, a jump-start, a rocket-into-space when that glass shattered via Marsha P. Johnson, and when Sylvia Rivera was up on-stage protesting guess who was on the sidelines heckling her?

The same fuckers who won’t ever reblog or acknowledge this

My apologies to the original poster as I photo captured this post to add to the thread-I reposted this last year for pride and expect to repost it every year I have left-it’s our history people.

Marsha P. Johnson allegedly died of suicide in 1992, and her death was never investigated. Even I, a mere prole, could catch the “she was murdered” vibes from the circumstances surrounding the discovery of her body.

Without a trans black woman, LGBT+ rights would not exist. Never forget. Never “pay it no mind”.

R E M E M B E R

And whatever you do, don’t watch that awful movie Stonewall.  Go watch a documentary on Marsha P. Johnson instead.

there’s a wonderful documentary on netflix called the death and life of marsha p. johnson! very powerful watch.

every white person ever should reblog this

Official graveyard post. +Bonus

Love how much is illuminated by landlords making a meme which equates the idea of tenants rights w like being murdered by the fuckin red guards

I like "fix my ac" being included here right next to parasite when that is literally their job to keep their property in good repair. Maybe if they don't like being called a parasite they shouldn't act like doing the bare minimum of work required is an unconscionable imposition.

Love how much is illuminated by landlords making a meme which equates the idea of tenants rights w like being murdered by the fuckin red guards

I like "fix my ac" being included here right next to parasite when that is literally their job to keep their property in good repair. Maybe if they don't like being called a parasite they shouldn't act like doing the bare minimum of work required is an unconscionable imposition.

Love how much is illuminated by landlords making a meme which equates the idea of tenants rights w like being murdered by the fuckin red guards

I like "fix my ac" being included here right next to parasite when that is literally their job to keep their property in good repair. Maybe if they don't like being called a parasite they shouldn't act like doing the bare minimum of work required is an unconscionable imposition.

i can't possibly justify the $249 right now but this is cool as hell and if i didn't already have a portable audio player i'd be on this so fast

how can i say “transmisogyny is the basis of patriarchy” when all good materialist feminists know the goal of patriarchy is the exploitation of women-classed people for reproductive labor, specifically dependent on biological reproduction? well, let’s dive a little more into what i mean by “basis” in this context.

when we talk about the basis we could talk about a lot of things. the historical basis? we don’t know, although gerda lerner has a book i have not read that i hear has some good theorizing about it. the material basis? mentioned above. but when we dive into the reproductive process we see something else: the psychological basis of patriarchy, and the behavioral modification conducted primarily around coercive birth assignment.

for cafab people, the intention is to create the class “woman”, which is basically a trauma and labor dump for everything man decides he doesn’t want to be (and wants to exploit sexually, in the model version where gay people don’t exist).

for camab people, the intention is to create a “man” which basically means abusing someone into a series of ways of shutting down their internal processes until they conform to various cultural archetypal stereotypes of dominance. the whole way you create a “boy” is by using patriarchal ideology and practices to train a type of dominance around perception of sex-class into the mind of a camab child. this *relies* on the idea that boys are *essentially* this way–or to put it another way, that camab children are essentially this construct called “boys”, a construct doomed to become “men”.

the only way to achieve this is by culturally outlawing any alternative paths for camab children. with cafab children, the structure tries to abuse them into the subservient position. with camab children, the structure tries to brainwash them into the dominant system, and therefore they are allowed more leeway: essentially “boys will be boys” which is to say “boys can do whatever the fuck they want”. there’s a risk therefore of slippage, because if boys can be like girls, and people who are like girls are being abused into the subservient position, then boys could become girls. and if that could happen like that, the structure would be destabilized. men would feel emasculated every time they were dominated. WHICH IS WHAT REALLY HAPPENS, because in reality camab kids can become girls, men constantly emasculate each other, etc.

so if you’re designing or memetically evolving patriarchy, how the fuck do you keep the whole thing from coming about because men are constantly patriarchally dominating each other? you have to put in a failsafe: make the idea of a camab person becoming a woman (or really anything other than a man) so repulsive and abject and dehumanized and disgusting that no one would ever ever want to choose to be it, even on the deepest levels of traumatic internalization where gender identity sets in. something so impossible everyone would try to deny it’s existence, while making it the butt of violent jokes. something that, when it appeared, was to be killed or raped or controlled or locked in a fucking basement or tortured or, if it was truly a fucking impeccably good person, held up on a dehumanizing pedastal of idolization that made them seem literally otherworldly.

so, trans women exist as “trans women” (or “faggots” depending on context) because it’s a dump category: the joke, the target, the going-too-far, the impossible, the fetishized, the ostracized, etc. and the reason it is, is that it needs to be to hold patriarchy together. male bonding is based around the fact of male identity, which is equally to say the rejection of what it decides is the female category. (this is not to say that male identity cannot adapt the performative signifiers of non-male identities). transmisogyny, the oppression of trans women, is therefore the psychological linchpin holding the whole thing in place. it keeps cis women from confronting how gender is socially constructed, by naturalizing it (transphobia in general does this). it keeps the family producing boys and men. so, like the exploitation of women’s reproductive labor, the oppression and exploitation of trans women is Vital for the intergenerational transmission of patriarchy. this is why we are considered a threat as bad as nuclear warfare by no less a patriarch than The Fucking Pope. both the oppression and exploitation of cis women (and to some complex defree, cafab nonbinary people) and the oppression and exploitation of trans women form the absolute basis, but transmisogyny is the psychological linchpin that keeps patriarchy in play. you might say, it’s patriarchy’s psychosocial weak point.

So funny when super conventionally attractive people have weird ass tumblr personality disorder and chronic poster syndrome like I’ll scroll through your blog and see some of the weirdest shit anyone has ever said and then get jump scared by a picture of the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen which is then followed by some more of the weirdest shit anyone has ever said

a funny sound 🔧

U.S. people, if you bought cinnamon from Dollar Tree, Dollar General, or other discount stores, throw it out. It's got lead

it's not just cinnamon as it turns out

it rules to be a transgender writer because writing trans themes is easy as fuck. it's easy as fuck dude. trans themes basically write themselves. change is the fundamental motor of storytelling. guess what else is all about change bitch

I can't stress enough how much I miss StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon once sent me to a supercut of Lion King, Lion King 1 1/2, and Lion King II, the main edit being that the scenes of Lion King and Lion King 1 1/2 were interspersed so that they happened in the order they actually happened.

stumbleupon not existing anymore can be directly traced to a dramatic decline in my mental health, I could do a thesis on it.

bestie stumbleupon very much still exists its just called cloudhiker now. i use it all the time.

mini compilation of suggestions from the replies:

The Bored Button - "Press the Bored Button and be bored no more."

The Useless Web

Cloudhiker - "Discover the most interesting, weird and awesome websites of the Internet" (not really a rebrand, it's a different person running it but they have the same intention in mind)

Astronaut.io - "These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you)."

Marginalia - "This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed."

Discworld: Wyrd Sisters Director: Jean Flynn | Studio: Cosgrove Hall | UK, 1997

It genuinely upsets me that there are people who call this animation and voice acting bad, there’s so much heart and soul on display in just this clip alone

At first glance: ‘lol this is going to be one of those hilariously cheap animations’

30 seconds in: ‘…Oh my god this is fantastic’

“WHO DARES TO INVOKE WXRTHLTL-JWLPKLZ?” “Where were you when the vowels were bein’ handed out, behind the door??”

oh MAN the whole thing’s free on YT

I can vouch for this cause Shea's moisture used to be the go to brand for people going natural cause is accessible. But now it's SHIT.

This Is why I now only use small black owned brands and am diligent about not using these large store brands

Can we start posting and sharing these small black-owned brands so that we can better support the good stuff we still make? @afronerdism

I stick with Melanin hair care for my entire product line. I only diverge when I’m using as I am which is still small but Indian owner and then I use one anti dandruff shampoo. But it’s melanin hair care for everyone else

OYIN is still Black-owned and made by hand in Baltimore. https://oyinhandmade.com/ and YES non-Black people should buy the products too if they work for you. It's all green and helps the business stay with Black owners.

Bought my uncle a burger and milkshake in exchange for letting me disrupt the holiest day of the week, NFL Sunday Football, so I could install a Pi-hole and free the household of ads...the thing abt the specific boomers I live with is they told me not to trust people on the Internet but they do not understand the algorithm or online advertising and think that Facebook has their best interests at heart. And every time I have tried to explain to them that no, blorbo from my dashboard is not selling my kidneys on the dark web but Google from your capitalism is definitely selling your web searches to every advertising company on the planet, they think I am paranoid. How could their personal friend Mark Zuckerberg want anything bad to happen to them etc. I am fighting battles I did not know existed!!!

Update I have had Pi-Hole successfully installed for two (2) hours and have since learned that 40% of the web traffic in this household went to advertisements. FORTY FUCKING PERCENT. We live in hell. This is the greatest gift I have ever given my family that they will not understand or acknowledge or feel any gratitude for.

Update #2: it was rising all night but the number it finally settled on was...60%. 60% of the web traffic in this household went to advertisements. I can't tell if this high number is bc I live in Silicon Valley and probably am subject to the Algorithmic Internet in ways people outside of Silicon Valley are not or it is normal to have 2/3rds of your web traffic be ads, but it did make me set up a recurring donation of the EFF lmfao.

Okay I have had multiple people ask, so here are the useful websites that me and Beryl used to muddle our way through:

Using Pi-hole and Raspberry Pi (on the Raspberry Pi website, really good overview of what Pi-hole does)

Tumblr-archived Twitter thread about one household's experience with Pi-hole (this is what sold me on it. Also the tweets were published in 2022 and Pi-hole is actively being developed, so I think some of the teething problems he mentioned might have cleared up or are at least being addressed.)

Pi-hole website (gives broad strokes of the software and imho is not actually that helpful, however this proves that I am not making shit up)

Pi-hole documentation (read prerequisites carefully, you do NOT need the newest model of Raspberry Pi to run this thing!! You don't even need a Raspberry Pi at all, you can run it on a bunch of Linux systems however I'm very stupid when it comes to Linux and when my options are install and learn a whole ass new OS or spend $$ on a Raspberry Pi and hook it up to my TV with a wired mouse and keyboard I will unfortunately be spending money)

Privacy International's guide to setting up Pi-hole on a Raspberry Pi (bro this one saved our asses)

You guys can ask me questions if you want but I guarantee I will not know the answers bc I don't know shit about fuck, I just followed the directions and reaped the rewards. It did take us 2 hours to set up bc I'm bad at following directions (and it's kind of complicated if you've been out of the software game for a while like I have), and you do have to be sososo brave about fucking around with your internet provider's configuration. So make sure you eat before you do it!! However it has been so worth it for me so far, given that now all my devices at home are running faster and I'm not seeing any ads while web browsing. We will see what complaints my family comes up with, but I love it so far.

Also!! if you've never heard of Raspberry Pi, which I realize are not all of my followers are lost in the Silicon Valley sauce so you might not have, here's is their website and their page for using Raspberry Pi at home.

(And here is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that fights for digital privacy, free speech, and innovation, if you, like me, were presented with cold hard data about your personal internet usage and suddenly realized that our internet is fully a dystopia. haha.)

After a few months with pi-hole, I recently switched to AdGuard Home. It was recommended/is co-promoted in a pi-hole discord server, and it seems to be blocking a bit more successfully/consistently for me than the pi-hole did.

I also use Blokada on my phone when I'm not home and have the Windscribe browser extension which includes 10GB of free VPN traffic and has uBlock integrated into it. (AdGuard does technically make things that do this but I like those better; ymmv).

It all takes some setup and tinkering, but I highly, highly recommend taking steps to clear out some of the internet garbage and protect your info.