Hey, call me Fae or Sprite. I love art and I reblog and post what I like. I’m 20+ and do not have time for nonsense, minors WILL be blocked. PSA: If an account with no reblogs follows me, I assume it’s a bot and block it.
(i'd never heard of this site before but from what i've found it's fully legal. It has a subscription model, but you can also buy comics individually and there's a bunch of free stuff too, mostly from small creators)
"I can't believe humans would hunt the thylacine to extinction, humans are fundamentally evil" Hey, did you know that extinction was long thought to be impossible, and within 50 years of humans realizing that extinction via overhunting was a possibility it practically stopped happening? Did you know that humans are so desperate to prevent more losses that they're funneling millions of collective hours and billions of euros into helping other species? Hours and euros that could be spent on humans, and species on whom humanity's own survival does not depend? Did you know that due to an accidental introduction of rats, the Lord Howe Island stick insect population was brought down to 24 individuals and now there are tens of thousands of them?
This bug. This bug that, to most humans, is utterly useless, relatively gross, and completely foreign. Humans saved it because humans do not want to cause another extinction ever again if they can avoid it.
as someone in the field of ecological conservation, I can promise without a shadow of a doubt that people DO care. SO MANY people care.
I have to race to sign up to volunteer trips because even with dozens of spots available, people rush to devote their unpaid free time to helping the environment. these trips often fill up within hours. people care.
you will see a lot of bad news because that is the kind of news that people pay the most attention to. I know this more than you'd think from my optimism- not only do I live somewhere facing some of the most extreme ecological issues on the planet, I also spend my time studying the Bad Stuff every single day.
to see all of this firsthand and stay hopeful is proof enough that there IS hope. I promise there is good news, brilliant news, all the time. it's just less visible. but it's no less important or impactful.
.mp3 is very small, but uses lossy compression which means it's lower quality
.flac is smaller than .wav, but uses lossless compression so it's high quality
.m4a is an audio file format that apple uses. that's all i really know
downloading the music
doubledouble.top is a life saver. you can download from a variety of services including but not limited to apple music, spotify, soundcloud, tidal, deezer, etc.
i'd recommend ripping your music from tidal or apple music since they're the best quality (i think apple music gives you lossless audio anyway. .m4a can be both lossy and lossless, but from the text on doubledouble i assume they're ripping HQ files off apple music)
i also love love love cobalt.tools for ripping audio/video from youtube (they support a lot of other platforms too!)
of course, many artists have their music on bandcamp — purchase or download directly from them if you can. bandcamp offers a variety of file formats for download
file conversion
if you're downloading from apple music with doubledouble, it spits out an .m4a file.
.m4a is ok for some people but if you prefer .flac, you may wanna convert it. ffmpeg is a CLI (terminal) tool to help with media conversion
if you're on linux or macOS, you can use parameter expansion to batch convert all files in a folder. put the files in one place first, then with your terminal, cd into the directory and run:
for i in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i "$i" "${i%.*}.flac"; done
this converts from .m4a to .flac — change the file extensions if needed.
soulseek
another way to get music is through soulseek. soulseek is a peer-to-peer file sharing network which is mainly used for music. nicotine+ is a pretty intuitive (and open-source) client if you don't like the official one.
you can probably find a better tutorial on soulseek somewhere else. just wanted to make this option known
it's bad etiquette to download from people without sharing files of your own, so make sure you've got something shared. also try to avoid queuing up more than 1-2 albums from one person in a row
tagging & organizing your music
tagging: adding metadata to a music file (eg. song name, artist name, album) that music players can recognize and display
if you've ripped music from a streaming platform, chances are it's already tagged. i've gotten files with slightly incorrect tags from doubledouble though, so if you care about that then you might wanna look into it
i use musicbrainz picard for my tagging. they've got pretty extensive documentation, which will probably be more useful than me
basically, you can look up album data from an online database into the program, and then match each track with its file. the program will tag each file correctly for you (there's also options for renaming the file according to a certain structure if you're into that!)
there's also beets, which is a CLI tool for... a lot of music collection management stuff. i haven't really used it myself, but if you feel up to it then they've got extensive documentation too. for most people, though, it's not really a necessity
how you wanna organize your music is completely up to you. my preferred filestructure is:
artist > album > track # track
using a music player
the options for this are pretty expansive. commonly used players i see include VLC, foobar2000, clementine (or a fork of it called strawberry), and cmus (for the terminal)
you can also totally use iTunes or something. i don't know what audio players other systems come with
i personally use dopamine. it's a little bit slow, but it's got a nice UI and is themeable plus has last.fm support (!!!)
don't let the github page fool you, you don't have to build from source. you can find the releases here
click the "assets" dropdown on the most recent release, and download whichever one is compatible with your OS
syncing
if you're fine with your files just being on one device (perhaps your computer, but perhaps also an USB drive or an mp3 player), you don't have to do this
you can sync with something like google drive, but i hate google more than i hate spotify
you can get a free nextcloud account from one of their providers with 2GB of free storage. you can use webDAV to access your files from an app on your phone or other device (documents by readdle has webDAV support, which is what i use)
disroot and blahaj.land are a couple providers i know that offer other services as well as nextcloud (so you get more with your account), but accounts are manually approved. do give them a look though!!
if you're tech-savvy and have an unused machine lying around, look into self-hosting your own nextcloud, or better yet, your own media server. i've heard that navidrome is a pretty good audio server. i unfortunately don't have experience with self-hosting at the moment so i have like zero advice to give here. yunohost seems to be a really easy way to manage a server
afterword
i don't know if any of this is helpful, but i just wanted to consolidate my personal advice in one place. fuck big tech. own your media, they could take it away from you at any moment
I’ve always found the chestnut of “Avatar 2009 had no cultural impact! It only has 6,000 fics on AO3!” a little unfair.
Like - putting aside the question of whether the amount of fanfiction a piece of media receives is an accurate reflection its cultural impact (I abide by the fanfiction moss analogy, sometimes good media just does not beget transformative work), looking at AO3 for numbers just feels disingenuous. AO3 was operating in 2009 but in my memory it wasn’t really in vogue during the time that Avatar 2009 was in theatres. If you’re looking for fanfic based on media from the 2000s, I find that Fanfiction-dot-net is the better website to look at; Castle 2009 only has 4,808 fics on AO3 at the time of writing, but it has over 23,600 fics on Fanfiction-dot-net. It’s not that Castle 2009 had no cultural impact, it’s just that AO3 wasn’t the website being used when that show was in the zeitgeist to capture that cultural impact.
That all being said: Avatar 2009 only has 1,500 fics on Fanfiction-dot-net
Ooooh, we have a bunch of really fancy pedestrian traffic lights in Germany! I need to share:
Starting off with the difference between formerly Eastern German traffic lights (upper images) and formerly Western German traffic lights (lower images):
The city of Erfurt had some additions, like an umbrella or a heart:
Same sex love in Marburg (upper image) and Frankfurt (lower image):
Traffic light lady in Bremen:
Karl Marx light in Trier:
Face of Friedrich Engels in Wuppertal:
Elvis in Friedberg (Hessen):
A sparrow (for the Golden Sparrow film awards) in Gera:
Winemaker in Bad Dürkenheim:
Mainzelmännchen (mascot of the public broadcasting service ZDF) in Mainz:
when we started talking about getting a small-breed dog I was like, "I will NEVER turn into one of those people who treats their little dog like a doll or an accessory by forcing them to dress up in ridiculous outfits. Dogs HATE that. They should get to be DOGS, and that means not having to wear anything but a HARNESS and being FREE to ROLL in the MUD." and then I adopted a dog who throws a fit if you try to take him for a walk without letting him pick out a bow tie first. a dog who loves wearing pajamas so much that I'm about to spend a disgusting amount of money on several sets of linen ones for summer. a dog who watches me wave at him to follow me through a mud puddle and just stands there blinking up at me like, "are you fucking serious? and get my paws wet?"
me: I will raise him no differently than the two 80-lb labs I had growing up. absolutely no hoity-toity frou frou little yapyap dog stuff. he's gonna be a good ol' fashioned, rough-and-tumble, capital D-O-G—
to celebrate the popularity of this post, I ordered him another set of the linen jammies in yellow. now he looks like paddington bear
the etsy seller threw in a little miniature hermes silk scarf as a freebie and I dare you to tell me he doesn't know how handsome he looks in it. whenever we take it off of him he broods like he's a wealthy victorian orphan child in desperate need of a seaside holiday to restore his delicate aristocratic constitution
