storage

saved posts, refs, recipes, things to read, etc / icon by @anonymous-leemur

[mossyshadows]

yes pleassseeee do your lesbian scifi fantasy short stories list

here are some recs not in any particular order! general heads up as per prev post that i do read a lot of (body) horror & toxic dynamics so please be mindful of checking cw !

immigrant girl from the end of the world - hannah yang

bride / butcher / doe - lowry poletti

archaeological evidence for the time traveler - tia tashiro

the name ziya - wen-yi lee

think of me before i disappear - raahem alvi

hungry daughters of starving mothers - alyssa wong

dead air - nino cipri

xianrenzhang - jiaqi kang

scream queen - julia armfield

horror story - carmen maria machado

bonus (comic) on a sunbeam - tillie walden

[systlin]

"Sys how is your decent into fiber arts hell going"

Glad you asked. I have arrived at 'modern flax is Bullshit compared to what we had in historical textiles, the flax widely available for handspinning is basically the tow that would be discarded from textile creation and used with tar to caulk ships back in the day'

This naturally led me down a hole of 'why is the staple length of this stuff a bullshit 6 inches' and the answer is 'we have bred modern flax more for the oil than the fiber because cotton usurped the place of everyday textile thanks to slavery and the cotton gin'

Anyway, THIS led me to a rabbit hole that culminated in me finding flax seed bred for proper 30 inch tall plants for fiber, sold by some fellow minded nerds on a website that has not been updated since 1998 and you have to email them to buy anything.

Anyway how are all of you doing.

[systlin]

I FAILED YOU ALL here is the site. You can also buy flax fiber from them. The PROPER shit, not the hot garbage ass tow fiber sold as flax top for handspinners.

[kradeelav]

i know things are hella grim in the nsfw/kink art circles especially in the last year --

but I'm hearing there's a NSFW-friendly ko-fi alternative built on atproto that's actively in the works, and being vetted by lawyers right now. as torrent-princess (OP) says, you should be able to swap out payment processors while keeping your account intact. this matters since even if stripe removes support, you'll still have a shop and all of your links intact. (ATproto is an infrastructure that bsky is built on, but is far bigger than bsky with far more opportunities.)

additionally, the Free Speech Coalition is working on a credit union specifically for adult work (including kink art) - here's the link so you can add your interest & support. Since this will be built by sex workers, there'll be far less risk of being debanked for spurious and puritanical reasons.

on a domain TLD level, there's an initiative here for a .furry domain built from the ground up by seasoned furries; it's unclear whether they'll support NSFW, but it's yet another promising turn of events for a group that's been similarly affected by censorship.

there are friends and allies out there helping to build a working parallel infrastructure. keep being vocal, keep supporting these initiatives when it's possible, and keep supporting your nsfw/kink artists. ♥

[shutyourmoustache]

Making exercises more accessible to the disabled? Fuck yeah!

[closet-keys]

wanted to share a paper I recently read on this (the widespread framing of minority representation in western academia as "justice") which names it as a form of counterinsurgency.

Just Words: How Western Academics Disguise Their Bourgeois Aspirations as “Justice” to Present Capitalist and Colonial Violence as Progressive by lawrence maminta

Although the Student Intifada has unmasked the University as a genocidal landlord that moonlights as a police state under the guise of a credential factory, the call to cite more non-white academics in the name of “justice” ignores the University’s normalized, structural violence against non-white workers. Universities have deployed Zionist vigilantes and state and federal law enforcement agencies against students who have been vocal in their objections to their schools’ investment in U.S. imperialism and complicity in genocide. The University’s recent deployments of extralegal and state violence against its workers echoes Kent State’s and Jackson State’s responses to students who protested the U.S. government’s mass murder of Vietnamese citizens in the 1960s and 1970s. Citational justice whitewashes this historic pattern of state and institutional violence by claiming that the University can be just and equitable if individuals cite more non-white scholars so that these non-white scholars’ class positions improve. It is this legitimizing of the University, a colonial institution rooted in the occupation of indigenous land, which makes citational justice (and other similar initiatives) inadequate, regressive and dangerous.

(considered adding this as a comment on the original post, but the article is definitely written for an audience of people in the imperial core, and I don't want to derail a post about us centrism with us centrism, so I'm making my own post. but I have the original post linked in the image so you can reblog that too.)

[doodlemancy]

hello fellow artists. google has fallen. pinterest/duckduckgo AI filters don't work. do not despair; here is a list i made of places to find reference images without having to sift through piles of worthless garbage. (for future editing convenience i am just linking my blog post on dreamwidth.)

✨ good places to find art reference that are not full of AI trash 🌈

[zanthiakhalaplace]

THANK YOU SO MUCH! I have been despairing as it is so hard now to find references and photos of succulents and other things for my designs!! T_T

[estro-boi]

we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason

[estro-boi]

torrents work like this

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

please learn to torrent

[macleod]

How to Use Torrents (with Pictures) - wikiHow

An expert guide to get started using torrentsTorrents are one of the most popular forms of file sharing on the internet, accounting for over

always use qbittorrent, do not use bitorrent or utorrent.

[ohgodohfuckohgeez]

Welp. Google's AI horseshit has arrived. And I'm not complying. They can pry my ID out of my cold dead hands. I will simply go elsewhere. Remember folks, DO NOT GIVE THEM YOUR IDs. Do not comply. Resist, fight it, use other browsers or sources beyond youtube and google controlled services. Call them. Email them. Make noise. Fight back.

[mocrlbmutwwwptth]

I've been using Google as my main mail service since 2006, and every single account or service I've ever signed up for was made with that address. For a long time I thought it'd be impossible to divorce myself from Google.

It took less than 5 minutes to switch to a ProtonMail account, less than 2 hours to download and/or offload every byte of data from my Google account, and less than 3 days to change every single account or service I've ever signed up for to the new address.

As of today, the only single one I have that's still tied to it is YouTube. It's the only thing I'd lose access to if I deleted my Google acount entirely.

They really, really want you to believe that it's a hassle to switch to a different email system. But it's not. Most websites and/or services allow you to change the email address associated with it.

I've been using Google for almost 2 decades and it only took a few days to move everything. It's not a painful sacrifice; it's an easy change that, frankly, has absolutely been worth it.

[twilight-deviant]

Proton Shoutout

You can and should switch to a free, encrypted Proton email account. You also get all of the below perks. For free. There is no trick. It is paid for by the people with paying plans. I am one of them. The (completely functional) free tier is there to entice you into getting a paid account with even more perks. (It worked on me.) But there's no penalty or pressure for staying with the free account.

Also get your stuff off the google drive and put it on Proton's drive. It is encrypted. Only you with your password can access it. Not even Proton can see what you put in there.

[tzikeh]

Switch everything away from Google. It's easy and it's important. Read above, click the link for Proton, download your gmail and switch.

[nikoco11]

i'm sure you get this a lot but what brushes do you use? particularly interested in your lineart brushes meoww .. ,

hi!!! thank u for this it reminded me my current posts r out of date LOL here’s a big master list of what i’m using right now and a link to all the downloads ^^

hope this helps!! i’ll try to keep my current brushes under their own tag as well now :D

lmk if u need any more examples of anything in use or have questions 🕺

[melyzard]

As more and more people are being forced to switch to Windows 11, Microsoft's most AI-malware-ridden OS yet, I've been putting together articles and links for how to undo the damage and save your battery, your RAM, your disk space, your privacy, and your sanity from this bullshit.

FIRST:

The easiest way to get rid of the majority of the bullshit that Windows is forcing on us, as of October 2025, is this one-stop-one-click debloat solution from a modern day hero:

GitHub - Raphire/Win11Debloat: A simple, lightweight PowerShell script to remove pre-installed apps, disable telemetry, as well as perform v

A simple, lightweight PowerShell script to remove pre-installed apps, disable telemetry, as well as perform various other changes to customi

It's very easy, even if you're not tech savvy or get scared of pop up windows saying "ARE YOU SURE?" Yes, you are sure, I promise. This program takes maybe two minutes and will save you SO MUCH pain, time, and money (and exploitation).

Now that you've done that, here's the cleanup, to catch the little shit that the debloat might have missed (most of this will already be done by debloat, but hey, it's good to double check).

Sick of AI in your Windows 11 PC? Here's how to get rid of it

Microsoft wants to put AI everywhere on your PC, but you can take back control.

Even just reading about some of these features makes me angry. Fucking Copilot and "Discover" AI scrapers are in Notepad. NOTEPAD. And then there's this uncanny valley garbage:

No uncanny valley video calls for me, thanks! (Also, what else is it doing while it scans your face and listens to your calls? What else, microsoft? Because there was a lot of memory being assigned to this program for a simple "smooths your skin" add on).

Stop Windows 11's most intrusive ads with these 9 easy tweaks

Tired of Microsoft pushing ads throughout Windows 11? Here are the settings you can tweak to turn them off and reclaim some privacy.

The truly insane number of places they have stuck ads on your own home computer is sickening. Become Unmarketable.

Bonus:

Some background programs you probably don't need that are taking up space and how to remove them (Microsoft forums, 2024)

Your Samsung Galaxy Phone comes with 22 apps you don't need (Android Police, 2025)

How to disable the AI in firefox (still the only browser that lets you do this permanently) (Windows Report, 2025)

[fatmasc]

Hey i’m a fashion design student so i have tons and tons of pdfs and docs with basic sewing techniques, pattern how-tos, and resources for fabric and trims. I’ve compiled it all into a shareable folder for anyone who wants to look into sewing and making their own clothing. I’ll be adding to this folder whenever i come across new resources

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/16uhmMb8kE4P_vOSycr6XSa9zpmDijZSd?usp=sharing

[fatmasc]

Updated just now with new hand sewing resources (mainly buttonholes) and textbook pdfs on fashion history, fashion illustration, and thinking through designs!

[kawuli]

random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)

[yomikoreadsbooks]

Keeping a list of Google alternatives just in case…

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ 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. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine

[penny-anna]

hokay so i was curious as a point of contrast to the Guardian list how well tumblr would do on a best 100 SFF novels list. so i went looking for one and google directed me to NPR's top 100 novels list and i'm like aight i'll just use that one keep it simple. but as i scrolled down the list i was like wait there's been no Octavia Butler at all?? which i honestly found quite offensive but i was deep into adding books to my list challenge by that point.

also the version of the list i was looking at only had 97 entries on it; i am unsure if that's a counting error bcos some of the entries are series or if it's just missing 3 items off the NPR list but i opted to rectify both issues by adding 3 Octavia Butler books on the end.

so here is my list challenge of the 97 book long NPR top 100 list but I added Octavia Butler:

Nprs Top 100 Fantasy/Sci-Fi to Read

NPR top 100 books except there were only 97 on the list so I added 3 Octavia Butler's on the end. why in the world the original list had...

How many of the NPR: Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books list have you read?

0-10

11-20

21-30

31-40

41-50

51-60

61-70

71-80

81-90

91-100

Voting ended onMay 23

where a series is listed you can count that as the first book or the whole series at your discretion.

[theelectricdreamsofddx]

Hey, wanna make music? Yeah? Got a buncha money? No? Well that's perfectly fine, check this free stuff out:

Vital - A powerful wavetable synth, my personal favorite VST synth, very easy to figure out creating new synth sounds, with the help of the plenty of tutorials that are out there for the plug-in. (There are paid versions but they are completely unnecessary to get 99% of the features of the plug-in.)

Synth1 - A classic piece of synthesizer software.

Pendulate - An interesting, chaotic synth that you can make weird little sounds with.

Native Instruments' free plug-ins - Various cool VSTs, including the Komplete Start pack.

The Free Orchestra - A set of orchestral instruments for Kontakt Player (see previous link).

BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover - More orchestral stuff! This one has its own player so you don't have to download a separate VST to use it if you don't want to.

Magical 8bit Plug - A chiptune plug-in, intended for producing sounds like that of 8-bit systems like the NES and Master System.

Genny - A synth VST made to emulate the soundchip of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive.

MT Power Drum Kit - A nice rock n' roll style drum kit plug-in.

This guy's weird VST collection - 6.4 gigabytes of weird VSTs, including some you might know, like Delay Lama and MeowSynth!

sforzando - A free player for soundfont files.

Musical Artifacts - A resource I mainly use to find soundfonts, on which you can find other various things as well.

Kilohearts Essentials - 30 effect VSTs including reverb, delay, compression, pitch shifting, transient shaping, ring modulation, phase distortion, and more.

Xfer's freeware VSTs - Exactly what it says on the tin, including the one and only OTT compressor.

Illformed - The good ol' dblue Glitch 1.3, Crusher, Stretch, and TapeStop.

Hysteresis and Fracture - Two interesting glitch effects, one being a delay and the other being a buffer.

Codec - A cool digital audio degradation effect.

Le Phonk - A slick distortion plug-in.

MAIM - An effect that mimics the sound of MP3 compression.

Soundly Shape it and Place it - One is simply an equalizer VST, the other is an effect that emulates a speaker (ex: a radio) and a space (ex: a cave).

Fresh Air - An effect that adds high end information to your sounds, to provide brightness.

ValhallaSupermassive - A combo reverb and delay plug-in that sounds quite big.

UnplugRed - A collection of various interesting VSTs, most of which have free versions.

Chowdhury DSP - I can't personally speak for all of these but their tape model effect is great for some lo-fi style effects.

TAL-Chorus-LX - A thick sounding chorus, good for "retro" sounds too.

Polyverse Wider - A great effect for widening sounds up, really simple too with only two controls.

Freesound - A good audio file resource, mainly for foley recordings.

Cymbatics Dubstep Starter Pack - A little sample pack with some good drum and synth samples.

fishmonger drum kit - A pack of samples from the album 'fishmonger' by Underscores!

WangleLine's sample packs - Free samples put out by my awesome mutual WangleLine!

aaand I might as well include this set of drums I made a while back :P

As for DAWs, it's been a long while since I've used anything other than FL Studio (not counting Audacity, which I still occasionally use for specific purposes), which, while being the only one I can directly recommend, is paid. However, I've heard good things about Reaper which has a "free trial" that you can technically use forever, akin to WinRAR. Additionally, I've also heard some good things about Waveform Free.

[uboatheflesh]

Don't forget the GOAT for turning any sound into a beautiful drone paulXstretch

and I mean ANY sound

[iamoutofideas]

Digitally Preserving Classic Synthesizers through Emulation

these guys have been emulating just about every synth from the 90’s/2000’s for free. installation is a little bit finicky but not too hard to do.

[innerchildabortionclinic]

it is always odd to me that there is a sort of masculine strength associated with conservative politics (this is an actual phenomenon that has been studied) because to me it all comes as a confession of weakness and mediocracy--an inferiority complex disguised as a superiority complex. maybe the reason conservatives dislike other conservatives so much is they do have to admit they're engaging with a loser by their own standards.

[innerchildabortionclinic]

in the US this association of masculinity and conservatism is part of what drives anti-environmentalism

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629626001210#:~:text=Petro%2Dmasculinity%20is%20a%20concept,fossil%20fuels%20within%20authoritarian%20movements.

‘The smokin’ hot trophy wife of the oil and gas industry’: The role of petro-masculinity in geothermal rhetoric and policy

This study applies the concept of “petro-masculinities” to understand geothermal rhetoric and policy under the second Trump administration.

comically stupid but real

[knightwithahundredkings]

I really recommend the Táin Bó Cúailnge to anyone looking to get into medieval literature because it's a great story, brilliant poetry (I read the Carson translation, and the way he translates the roscada sections are beautiful) and the backbone of the Ulster Cycle, but it's also just really fucking funny. It has a very slapstick yet dry sense of humor that provides just enough comic relief to make the dramatic moments of the story even more impactful. Genuinely I laugh out loud every few pages. Go read it.

[knightwithahundredkings]

You can't make this shit up

[dreamsy990]

i saw someone say nobody needs to know what a .txt file is anymore. what the fuck is the world coming to

[dreamsy990]

unironically i think we need to bring back computer labs because APPARENTLY some people WERENT taught basic computer literacy and internet safety in school

[dreamsy990]

things about computers/the internet i think kids should be formally taught in schools because theyre important to know and the amount of soon to be grown adults i know who know NOTHING about any of these is quite frankly almost all of them (and resources to learn if you dont know these things, because its never to late to get better with computers)

how to troubleshoot by yourself when you have a technical problem

what common file types are

some very basics on how to use ""developer tools"" on your computer (because i cant think of a better way to refer to them) like task manager and command prompt (and their mac equivalents, terminal and activity monitor ofc)

how to read and understand a privacy policy and what your personal data is, as well as what it being collected actually means and steps you can take to keep it private

how to understand terms of service (hey. if you have trouble with reading legalese and worry about being able to understand these policies anyways, here's a site that gives basic summaries of privacy policies and ToS)

what a cookie actually is

internet privacy and your digital footprint!! seriously i dont know why we stopped teaching people that they shouldnt be putting their entire real identity online in a world where your online actions can ruin you irl

basic safety measures like antivirus software (and why you should use it or if the built in one on windows or mac is enough for you) and backing up your computer (also a mac guide)

common keyboard shortcuts (and on mac)

as an additional note: things i think everyone should know on computers and the internet but schools may bit hesitant to teach about for whatever moral/legal standards schools pretend to operate on

vpns and adblockers! (btw for most of these where you can pay for things im purposefully not recommending any specific software but seriously just use ublock origin for an adblocker)

how to not get a virus while pirating something

what a temporary email is and when to use one

red flags that you shouldn't trust a website (and how to quickly check the security of a site)

what javascript on a website does and how to disable it to get around paywalls

[dreamsy990]

ok one last addition! if you want to take it one level higher, i think learning the very basics of at least one programming language is good for people. it makes computers less scary and it makes you feel very cool, and a lot of people get discouraged about it because it seems overly complicated and hard to learn outside a formal classroom setting, so heres some resources for learning the very basics of python (because i consider it the easiest language to learn and knowing one language will make it easier to learn others)

an online compiler so you dont need to download anything or worry about running code directly on your computer if that makes you nervous

a basic video guide to introduce you to python and walk you through beginner steps

a guide to some syntax and commands you should know (this was literally my lifeline in my first CS class)

some performance tasks to give you things to code to practice and assess yourself

[scam-alerts]

Sharing this here as many of these are insanely useful. :)