[viciousvales]

this site definitely doesn't allow you to paste the link to any article blocked by a paywall (say, a NYT article) so that you can read it free of charge! that would be illegal and would benefit broke college students too much. it definitely does not do that. promise.

[taigacryptid]

decentralize and clean up your life!!!

use overdrive, libby, hoopla, cloudlibrary, and kanopy instead of amazon and audible.

use firefox instead of chrome or opera (both are made with chromium, which blocks functionality for ad-blockers. firefox isn't based on chromium).

use mega or proton drive instead of google drive.

get rid of bloatware

use libreoffice instead of microsoft office suite

use vetted sites on r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH for free movies, books, games, etc.

use trakt or letterboxd instead of imdb.

use storygraph instead of goodreads.

use darkpatterns to find mobile game with no ads or microtransactions

use ground news to read unbiased news and find blind spots in news stories.

use mediahuman or cobalt to download music, or support your favorite artists directly through bandcamp

make youtube bearable by using mtube, newpipe, or the unhook extension on chrome, firefox, or microsoft edge

use search for a cause or ecosia to support the environment instead of google

use thriftbooks to buy new or used books (they also have manga, textbooks, home goods, CDs, DVDs, and blurays)

use flashpoint to play archived online flash games

find books, movies, games, etc. on the internet archive! for starters, here's a bunch of David Attenborough documentaries and all of the Animorphs books

burn your music onto cds

use pdf24 (available online or as a desktop app) instead of adobe

use unroll.me to clean your email inboxes

use thunderbird, mailfence, countermail, edison mail, tuta, or proton mail instead of gmail

remove bloatware on windows PC, macOS, and iOS X

remove bloatware on samsung X

use pixelfed instead of instagram or meta

use NCH suite for free software like a file converter, image editor, video editors, pdf editor, etc.

feel free to add more alternatives, resources or advice in the reblogs or replies, and i'll add them to the main post <3

last updated: march 18th 2025

[rebellesims420]

❥ Braids , Locs , Twists And More. Maxis Match Edition ❥

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Part 2 3 4 5

Huge thank you to the CC creators ! ➳♥ @dogsill @aler-ii @kamiiri @daylifesims @oakiyo @qicc @sheabuttyr @gigglecoffin @joshseoh @candysims4 @arethabee @sleepingsims

[byjove]

Since you guys like my male name list, here are some vintage girl’s names from old historic documents, recently updated:

(Sorry I listed the name origin/individual’s place of birth on some and not others.)

[linguisticparadox]

Spoke to a gen z person the other night and apparently the young folks don't know about the very legal sites from which you can access public domain media (including Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other Victorian gothic horror stories)?

Like this young person didn't even know about goddamn Gutenberg which is a SHAME. I linked to it and they went "aw yiss time to do a theft" and I was like "I mean yo ho ho and all that, sure, but. you know gutenberg is entirely legal, right?"

Anyway I'm gonna put this in a few Choice Tags (sorry dracula fans I DID mention it though so it's fair game) and then put some Cool Links in a reblog so this post will still show UP in said tags lmao.

[ri-writing]

Spreading the news to my followers - if you weren’t aware of this before, here’s the link to Project Gutenberg - https://www.gutenberg.org/

Project Gutenberg is a gigantic collection of books that are in the public domain.  You can read the books through the site or you can download them in various formats so you can get the format you prefer for your eReader of choice.

It is free. 

It is legal.

I was reviewing the list of the top 100 books downloaded yesterday and I saw a fair few that I had to read for college classes - so if you’re a college student and your professor assigns you to read Plato or any number of older works, check here before you buy a copy.

I reread the Anne series several years back - they were free through this.  I need to reread Pride and Prejudice at least once a year, and my e-book version is from this.  Someone recommended Jekyll and Hyde to me a few weeks back and I got a free copy from this.  When I went to Haworth on my last holiday before the plague times, I brought books by the Bronte sisters with me to read or reread that I downloaded from here.  It’s a great resource.

[linguisticparadox]

Yes yes yes! I was honestly so flabbergasted that this young person hadn't heard of the gutenberg project! It's been around for AGES, maybe longer than the kindle has? And it's such a huge project and wonderful resource! It used to be a household name (or maybe that's just my family, thanks to my dad being a cheapskate nerd [affectionate]). I was so glad to be able to share this resource and others with them though, and I wanted to make sure no one else was missing out!

If you look at the first reblog from me I also recommended a few other resources, most of which were from www.archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine! They run openlibrary.org, where you can check out ebooks of some public domain titles! They even have the Bone series by Jeff Smith!

And archive.org itself has all kinds of public domain media including music and movies! For Dracula fans, here's a radio show adaptation of the book, starring Orson Welles! And here's a 1920 movie adaptation of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring John Barrymore, the grandfather of Drew Barrymore!

I'm so excited to see people falling in love with classic media through Dracula Daily! Let's keep that fire blazing!

[wanderingchaos]

Also, if you can't handle reading things, check out libirvox.org! it's a free audio book project taking public domain works and people doing free audiobooks! there's a lot of great stuff on there, but it takes things in the public domain and makes audio books out of them!

it's a super nice project, and you can find some really nice readers there!

[athenadark]

Also don't think a book is old because it's in the public domain

lots of writers and publishers are prepared to waive future profits for entirely petty reasons

because of this the entire works of Philip K Dick [petty writer who found himself with lots of hangers on during his life] and HP Lovecraft [his publisher - who was his wife and hated him] became public domain on their death

Sherlock Holmes entered public domain this year, it's always worth checking because you can save a fortune

and the more popular the classic - the more likely someone has uploaded it

[the-haiku-bot]

Also don’t think a

book is old because it’s in

the public domain

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[elfwreck]

Want audiobooks instead?

LibriVox has free public domain audiobooks.

Public domain works in the US are:

Anything published (in the US) from 1927 or earlier (this number goes up every year for quite a while), and

Anything published between 1928 and 1963 that wasn't renewed, and

Anything published before 1989 without a proper copyright notice.

(Don't go looking for things in that third category unless you've studied a LOT about copyright law. Mostly that covers things like "weird little newsletters" and "self-published booklets" and sometimes fanzines. But most publications have a copyright notice in them.)

There's also some oddball exemptions here and there; copyright law is a tentacled mess. But those are the basic guidelines. (Except for audio. Audio has its own set of rules. It's weird.) (I mentioned tentacles, did I not? Double the amount of them you were thinking of.)

There are a lot of works from the 50s and early 60s that were not renewed, especially short stories published in magazines.

Project Gutenberg began in 1971; the first text was the US Declaration of Independence, shared through the university computer system. That was the start of "hey computers + public domain text = FREE BOOKS FOR EVERYONE."

[noswordinourlake]

Adding on that Project Gutenberg is not just Eng language texts either! I know specifically about the French texts because I did independent study French lit in high school and all my sources were Project Gutenberg acquired (Candide my beloathed) but there's many open source texts available in a number of languages.

[tyanis]

Kinda feel like there's some untapped meme/reaction image potential from old horror movie trailers...

[thematicparallel]

ZLIBRARY IS BACK

[canadianwheatpirates]

Here's an article talking about their new setup, tl;dr when you make an account you get two personally-assigned secret domains to help prevent it getting taken down by domain seizure. Don't share them with anyone!

[kosmogrl]

zlibrary gone... FUCK TIKTOK FUCK BOOKTOK I hope that app burns in hell

[dreamingofseastars]

library genesis is still up (very similar site) and r/freemediaheckyeah and r/piracy have lots of other alternatives. zlib was the GOAT though. fuck tiktok

(originally commented. putting as a reblog as its important)

[kosmogrl]

for anyone that wants to know about other sites, I also didn't know so this is a big help!!! thank you!

[ichornyra]

some sites i use to read online: - https://libgen.li/ - https://www.pdfdrive.com/ - https://libretexts.org/ - https://openlibrary.org/ - https://novel80.com/ - https://www.allfreenovel.com/ - https://bookreadfree.com/ - https://allbookshub.com/ - http://thefreeonlinenovel.com/ - https://www.epub.pub/ - https://www.readingsanctuary.com/ - https://yes-pdf.com/ - https://www.booksfree.org/ if none of the links work if you just search up "(book title) read online free" there's almost always gonna be a pdf link and those are always good to read from too

[bourtange]

ever since sites like the new york times caught on to the private browsing trick to get around their bullshit paywall, i’ve been using the google translate trick instead. google translate isn’t restricted to text you paste; you can also paste in a url and it will generate a link to a translated version of the webpage you wanted. it’s this service you’ll be using

go to google translate and paste the url of the paywalled article you’re trying to read on the lefthand side (where you’d normally paste foreign text). set the “from” language (the one on the left side) to russian, arabic, japanese, etc. – any language that doesn’t use the latin alphabet. set the “to” language (the one on the right side) to english. it will generate a url on the right, and you can click it and enjoy

(the reason you want to pick a language that doesn’t use the latin alphabet is that false cognates are inevitable. if you don’t want to read an article that’s mostly intelligible but every instance of the word “after” is changed to “anus”, for example, you don’t want to go with german)

this DOES NOT work with every paywall! i just tested it on a number of sites, and it doesn’t work on wall street journal. but it does work on the new york times, the la times, the washington post, and the san diego union-tribune. i make no guarantees!

hope people find this helpful!

[3liza]

many/most paywalls can be foiled by putting the url into Archive.is as well. this has the secondary benefit of creating an archived snapshot of that particular article on that day, which is invaluable to historians and researchers

[themauvesoul]

Hate diet culture so much bitches will b like “don’t eat processed carbs they’re so bad for you” like and??? So what?? God did not give us grain and stone to grind it with for no reason. Bread is inevitable. Bread is food for the heart and the soul. U think I’m gonna give that up in pursuit of instagram fitness?? U think I’m gonna deny myself the simple pleasure of toast with jam so I can endlessly chase an ever-shifting standard of beauty that ultimately means nothing? In 20 years I will no longer be beautiful and in 60 my body will be vacant food for other, smaller creatures. But the taste of fresh bread? Of homemade donuts and still-warm pie? I will carry the taste on my tongue into whatever follows this life. So like. Stop telling me I should diet lmao. I’m not abt to martyr myself just to get a man to look at me.

[mockiatoh]

Op genuinely thank you for this

[vstheworld]

“bread is inevitable” is our household motto now

[gogh-save-the-bees]

Yellow it stands for the sun | Vincent Van Gogh Paintings

[aura-eden]

Vincent Van Gogh, View of Arles with Irises, 1889

[virgomoon-deactivated20240514]

hey, take some more video essays. (part one)

how tiktok makes you feel ugly

a relaxing critique of animal crossing new horizons

the 27 club: mental illness and art

talent belongs to the beautiful - how media manipulates your tastes

lindsay lohan: the rise of a starlet ( part one, part two )

the unrealistic beauty standard is deadly

how beauty brands failed women of color

the devil wears prada style analysis

the beauty standard between men and women

what happened to all of the black children sitcoms?

a deep dive into ‘aesthetic’ youtube

dan schneider’s wife aka hungery girl exposed

why black people hate justin timberlake

janet jackson: the underrated legend

erotica: madonna’s career ending album

the cracked reality of the ACE famly

the lovely bones is scarier than we remember

lady gaga is performance art

why rappers are the new rockstars

colorism and violence: what really happened to 3lw

the real ellen - the bitter truth behind the daytime icon

pretty privilege: beauty standards, bimbo effect and free scones

from fame to shame: shane dawson’s story ( tw for racism & pedophilia )

you’re not relatable anymore

the beauty community: racism & toxicity

a goofy movie and the power of nostalgia

music that defined the 2010s

heathers, jawbreaker, & the timelessness of killer cliques

deep cuts: society & queer horror

pinterest aesthetics, fatphobia & whitewashing

tiktok vs black creators: if you hate us just say dat

the “blaccent”; nonblack creators key to fame

ghost singing: who was really singing on michael jackson’s posthumous album

judy garland: the end of the rainbow

marilyn monroe: living blonde

the downfall of the singer cassie

this teen idol manipulated everyone

how frenemies reveals a mental health misconception perpetuated by the internet

legacy, chronical, & every other reimagining of the craft

it’s not a coincidence, it’s colorism

evil queens: a gay look at disney history

the authenticity of lana del rey

[regardslionett]

i, a lesbian, took this uquiz about men and literally had to take a minute when i saw the result. like full on exhale sit-back hands-clasped-over-face a minute

take it and you might see why

[bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190]

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again but it is absolutely an example of civilizational inadequacy that only deaf people know ASL

“oh we shouldn’t teach children this language, it will only come in handy if they [checks notes] ever have to talk in a situation where it’s noisy or they need to be quiet”

[raginrayguns]

My mom learned it because she figured she’ll go deaf when she gets old

[manyblinkinglights]

My family went holiday SCUBA diving once, and a couple of Deaf guys were in the group. I was really little and I spent most of the briefing overcome with the realization that while the rest of us were going to have regulators in our mouths and be underwater fairly soon, they were going to be able to do all the same stuff and keep talking.

[tell-the-stars-hello]

The only reason some form of sign language is not a standard skill is ableism, as far as I can tell.

[emoracreations]

For anyone interested in learning, Bill Vicars has full lessons of ASL on youtube that were used in my college level classes. 

https://www.youtube.com/user/billvicars

and here’s the link to the website he puts in his videos:

https://www.lifeprint.com/

[acti-veg]

https://bookshop.org/

[caniscaballus]

They are making audio and digital books available now too!!

[cardenvondraken]

I found a hardback printing of the Voynich Manuscript on here. This place fucking rocks.

[tengubride-deactivated20241201]

Hey I’m so excited to see this on my dash! I work at an independent bookstore in NY and we were hit insanely hard by the pandemic, like so many other indie bookstores across the country. Bookshop has literally been helping us to keep the lights on. You using stores’ affiliate links to bookshop (you can support my store here) or just browsing it on your own directly impacts our ability to remain in business. Overall Bookshop has raised over 10 million dollars for independent bookstores across America. This site really works!

If you want to buy books from the comfort of your own home without supporting Amazon, please please consider using Bookshop! We are all so thankful for your support!

[millenniallust4death]

Just Scream Hotline

You can phone [phone], wait for the beep, scream, and then hang up. 

Just Scream “is a participatory sound art project created by Chris Gollmar”, an elementary school teacher. Your scream will be recorded and saved to a playlist depending on scream criteria such as featuring laughter, animal sounds, etc. The project will be archived on 21 January 2021 so it’s best to call today. 

I thought this project was perfect for my mutuals who regularly scream into the void here on Tumblr dot com.