In 2026, the chicest thing a gay actor can do is never explicitly come out as gay but also make it abundantly clear that he is. Coming out is too modern. Staying closeted is too old fashioned. But this method merges contemporary freedom with Old Hollywood glamour and allure, and it weeds out the dumbest people who truly don’t get it. I call it the Pascal Method.
You clearly don't go here or to queer history and signaling, or both, enough to have this conversation and I'm not going to explain it to you. You could have asked questions, you could have done even a modicum of research. You didn't and you made yourself look ignorant. Goodbye.
#I'm fucking crying#this is an instant classic#this is the next meme#i can't believe I'm here to see a baby copypasta nary two hours old#I can't#lol#i laughed way too hard#iconic
#While this is a joke#For the etymologists out there#Tumblr did not “goncharov” poob#translation: Tumblr is not making a fictitious thing called poob that we insist is real#Poob is glup shittoing (streaming services)#Translation: Poob is now a generic name for whatever streaming platform is out there when you don't feel like naming something specifically
My Complete Guide for getting off of streaming and onto digital files for music:
From someone who has successfully done so in a relatively short amount of time. This is meant to be extremely general and beginner-friendly. RB or comment if you see mistakes or have recommendations for updates since idk what my blindspots are.
Prerequisites
It helps if you have the following, from most to least important:
A desktop or laptop computer running Windows or Linux (Mac and ChromeOS are also fine, but both are more restrictive. If you're on ChromeOS, use the Linux VM)
A thumb drive with an appreciable amount of storage (mine is 500gb but I only use about 50gb for music)
Experience using this computer and desktops/laptops in general, especially file handling and command-line experience
An external CD R/W drive if you plan on ripping from or burning to CDs (Speed will vary a lot depending on the drive, so find a fast one if that matters to you)
A Bandcamp account, since a lot of artists host purchasable digital/physical copies on here.
And some things to note before you start:
You will lose out on the convenience of traditional streaming, but it's worth it for a myriad of reasons since streaming is hell and every company sucks.
Your catalog will be very restricted if you want to avoid piracy for some reason. It's actually for real impossible to get some music without illegally downloading, so I don't care.
This will take time---a lot more than just opening Spotify and hitting play---and you will have to learn things, unfortunately. Every album or song will require an investment of your precious time, plus cost money if you plan to compensate the artist.
Do not worry even a little bit about the argument of "the artist isn't making as much if you don't stream!!". Buying a single CD, vinyl, cassette, or digital album from an artist gives them many times more money than streaming their music.
Software
OK, first steps: You'll need a few pieces of software that will massively help you.
VLC Media Player: This is an open-source media player that has so many features and extensions/add-ons and is incredibly useful. Also available on basically every device for free without any ads or any of that. There are many other pieces of software that have a more streaming-service-like UI, but I've never gotten into them. VLC rocks.
yt-dlp: This open-source software, available on Linux, Windows, and Mac, allows you to easily download the video/audio from basically any website using the command line. I mainly use it on YouTube but the supported sites list is ridiculously long.
Some kind of music tagger: These allow you to edit the metadata (metadata are a bunch of pieces of information connected to a file that help to categorize and organize it. music files usually have metadata fields for title, artist, genre, track #, etc.) of files, create/edit playlists, tons of useful stuff. There are so many free options for these. I use Mp3tag on Windows and MusicBrainz Picard on Linux (also available for Mac and Windows), but you can find a good one for any platform and they all do basically the same thing.
Organization
You're going to want a system for organizing all of the things you download. You really don't want a bunch of cluttered, loose files in a single folder without any metadata attached to them.
Create a folder specifically for your music and plan out how you're going to store different files. I personally split it into four categories: I have a folder for albums (and a folder inside there for each album), a folder for specific artist playlists, a folder for general playlists, and a folder for singles/loose songs not on any album.
To do this, you can use the default file handler for your device (File Explorer for Windows, Files for Linux), or a third-party file handler, or the command line if you're cool like that.
When you do have albums downloaded, it's common practice to store them in their own folder with the track number first in the filename. This is so that they generally display in order, and for organization purposes. Below is an example:
It's up to user preference what the filenames are. Generally the bare minimum, as shown, is just the track number + title.
File Formats and Compression
This section is just an overview of different file formats and what they mean for music. You can skip over it if you already know about this.
When you store audio data in a file, there are three different ways you can do this: uncompressed, using lossless compression, or using lossy compression. Each has their own file formats, upsides, and downsides.
Uncompressed: This is the raw, unmodified audio data. Nothing has been done to it to save on space or efficiency. This is usually only used by actual music producers and archives. File formats that are uncompressed include .aiff and .wav.
Lossless compression: These formats use some tricks to reduce the file size and make storing the audio more efficient, but don't lose out on any of the actual audio quality. It'll sound the same* as uncompressed but take up less space. I recommend this if you're looking to have the highest quality possible and don't have concerns about storage space. FLAC is by far the most popular lossless file format.
Lossy compression: These formats compromise on some audio quality for the purpose of using less storage space. In most cases, the reduction in file size is significant and the loss in quality is not. Sometimes, lossy compression formats only get rid of details you can't even hear, so in some cases it sounds nearly identical to lossless. I'd recommend if you have storage concerns or don't care a lot about extremely high quality. You'll almost always see these as .mp3 files, but you'll also come across .ogg, .aac, and .opus files sometimes.
I personally use .flac files when I can, but it is completely up to user preference and there's no wrong choice. MP3 files with sufficiently high bitrate (bitrate is the amount of information per second that is stored inside the file. It's basically a proxy for audio quality.) will sound nearly identical to lossless. Any sampling rate (sampling rate is the amount of times per second the audio signal is measured) above about 48 kHz is actually useless and you as a human cannot hear the difference.
Downloading
Good. Now you've got your computer with all the right software and a nice organization system and thumb drive (hopefully). You know the basics of file formats and compression for music. You're ready to start downloading your favorite albums and songs.
There are a few places you can reliably find the music you want. If you don't want to deal with a peer-to-peer service (A peer-to-peer or p2p file sharing software is an application that allows thousands of users to download files directly from each other instead of through a central service) like Soulseek (I highly recommend Soulseek if you have the technical experience), I have found that Internet Archive and YouTube are your best bets.
Internet Archive:
The Internet Archive is a database of many, many files that have been stored for archival and preservation purposes. A lot of the time, you can find full albums on here by searching for the artists or the albums. There aren't a whole lot though, and sometimes you'll get censored or compressed files. When you find an album you want,
find where it has the audio files. It will usually read "VBR MP3" or "FLAC". Click on this and find the button to download the files as a .zip.
Click this button and save it to wherever you keep albums. Unzip it into its own folder (zipped files are a collection of files that take up less space but can't be used until they're unzipped, which is just converting the files from the space-efficient format to the usable format). On most devices, unzipping is as easy as right clicking the .zip file and selecting something like "Extract to [filename]\".
Congratulations! You have downloaded an album from Internet Archive. It's really easy and convenient and they usually have very good download speeds.
YouTube:
This is where yt-dlp comes into play. You can download full albums extremely easily from YouTube just using the yt-dlp command line tool.
Find an album you want on YouTube and go specifically to the playlist page for it.
Open your command prompt (On Windows: hit the Windows key, type "cmd", then hit enter. On Linux: right click on the desktop and hit "Terminal"), and navigate to the folder where you're going to store the album. On Windows, do this by typing the drive letter of the drive you store the music on (or not if it's on the C:\ drive), then use the "cd" command to navigate to the correct directory. If you need to, use the "mkdir" command to create a folder for the album.
Note: YouTube stores audio in a lossy format using .opus. Converting to another format will never increase the quality, even if it's an uncompressed or lossless format. I do convert to lossless sometimes for strictly organizational purposes.
The basic command format for yt-dlp is:
yt-dlp [OPTIONS] [URL]
Where you replace [OPTIONS] with the specifics of what you want to do and [URL] with the link to the album. I would recommend always extracting the metadata and using a custom output format, but other options are optional, as the name suggests. Linked here is a cheat sheet for all of the yt-dlp options. Here are some templates for specific use cases. Replace [URL] with the link to the album.
Download the album in FLAC format with all of the metadata included and the video thumbnail using the filename format "[Track Number] - [Title]": yt-dlp -x --audio-format flac --embed-metadata --embed-thumbnail -o "%(playlist_index)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s" [URL]
Download the album in MP3 format at the highest quality with all of the metadata included and the video thumbnail using the filename format "[Artist Name] - [Title]": yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 0 --embed-metadata --embed-thumbnail -o "%(uploader)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s" [URL]
Download the album using the default audio format and default naming convention without any metadata: yt-dlp -x [URL]
You can also use all of this information to download specific songs, or if you want the video too, remove the -x and just do yt-dlp [URL]. The same commands also work for any other site on yt-dlp's supported sites list.
Congratulations! You now have downloaded an album from YouTube. It's worth going over each file to make sure the title and metadata and stuff are correct, since I've found this to be spotty in my experience.
Playing Your Music
So now you have the music downloaded and on your device. Great! Now how do you listen to it?
You'll recall that you downloaded VLC Media Player earlier or some other software to play local music files. To listen to an album, open VLC (or the player of your choice), go to "Media" or "File" or something like that in the top-left, go to "Open Directory", find the album, and select it. It's that easy. You can also drag-and-drop an album into VLC, but it depends on the specific software what you're able to do. VLC is also able to play .m3u playlist files, which we go over in the next section. You can shuffle or loop whatever you're playing as well, and you can change the order by dragging the songs around just like any streaming service.
Creating playlists
Playlists are one of the main appeals of streaming over physical music. Luckily, we can easily create playlists with local files as well. The .m3u file format exists specifically for this purpose, and basically stores an ordered list of the locations of files in a playlist with some extra metadata. I use Mp3tag to create playlists, but there are many softwares that allow you to do this.
On Mp3tag, begin your playlist by selecting one or two songs, going to "File", and then clicking "Playlist (selected files)". Save the file to somewhere, open it using Mp3tag, and voila! You can now edit and add to this playlist. Add songs by dragging the files from File Explorer and holding ctrl when you drop them. Save your changes by going to "File" then "Playlist (all files)" and saving it in the same location with the same name.
You can play m3u files using VLC (because of course), and many other softwares support importing/playing playlists in the m3u format. Some music players also have in-built support for making playlists, which is likely easier than using Mp3tag or a similar software.
Doing All This On Mobile
Things get more complicated on the phone, but not significantly so. Phones generally have less storage space and less software support, so many of the things mentioned here wouldn't work. I wouldn't even try doing file management stuff on mobile unless you have an Android and experience. The solution I've found is best is to convert the music you want to .mp3 or some other smaller format, organize it on your computer, zip it, move the zipped file to your phone, and unzip that file to have the whole organized directory of compressed music on your phone. From here you can play it using a lot of different softwares. I'm on Android and the one I use is Musicolet (highly recommend). VLC is also on mobile but it kinda sucks on Android and has not nearly as many features as the desktop version.
I would love if people could drop tips or recommendations for playing local files on mobile.
Summary
Like, RB, or leave a comment if you actually read all of this. My prediction is zero people get to here.
TLDR: Streaming is evil and sucks. It's relatively easy to download the music you want if you have the right tools, and also quite easy to organize and play it. Support artists directly instead of allowing a middle man to profit off of your attention and data while giving musicians next to nothing.
[Image ID: Two screenshots of tumblr tags, the first read:
aside from antisemitism the other core tenet of Nazi ideology is murder. the Nazis believed all problems could be solved by killing the people responsible. they thought certain people were inameleorable drains on society and everything would be fine if they were just dead. which is something i've definitely never heard before or recently.
the second tags are by @lem0nademouth and read:
this is what i mean when i say 'violence is okay if the victim is someone i have decided is Unacceptable' is nazi ideology. because it quite literally is nazi ideology.
[Image ID: Tags which read: '#idr think this applies to billionaires by the way. if you can actually place where the hurt and oppression is coming from with accuracy and #not prediction and hatred then i think you do actually have a moral imperitive to get these people out of society'. /End ID]
no offense, but this is exactly what this post is about. there is NO group of people you are allowed to kill. the nazis also were convinced that Jews were 'where the hurt and oppression us coming from'. killing people is not the solution. killing people is never 'moral imperative'. we can acknowledge that billionaires have too much power, that they further oppression and bigotry, but playing the nazi's game is never the solution.
also it's genuinely kind of frightening how many people jump straight to "if we kill all members of [group], it will fix everything!"
first off, killing billionaires wouldn't fix anything. their wealth won't magically redistribute itself, it'll go to their heirs (or just disappear because most of it is tied up in shit that is not actually tangible money in any way, shape, or form).
secondly, why the fuck is your first instinct "we should kill them"?why do you want to kill people? ever? there's definitely people i think we, as a global society, would be better off without - but fuck, i don't wanna kill them. i'm sure there are situations in which i would take a human life, and i'm equally sure it would haunt me til the end of my days. are you really considering what that would be like? or do you just wanna make someone else do it, so you have an easy, violent solution and you can offload the consequences onto some other sucker's conscience?
i think the casual ease with which some people discuss murder is fucked up, actually.
#like to be clear i do not wanna draw away from the antisemitism aspect bc that is very central to the post #but just. idk. it's so UNSETTLING how many people jump to "kill all [x]!" as a solution to problems
- prev tags
yeah, what i wanted to make clear is the fact that those people ARE WILLING TO MURDER. they have an, as you said, unsettling readiness to resort to violence. and it is much easier to convince someone who is already willing to murder to murder, for example, Jews, than it is to convince someone who doesn't believe murdering anyone, no matter what they did, is right. with the right words people on the left who scream about punching Nazis all day long can get convinced to punch Jews. and some of them already do. it doesn't help if you know nazis = bad. that won't protect you against becoming one. you need to know *why* exactly Nazis were bad, and that's not just cause they killed Jews and Sinti and Roma and queer people (the latter being somehow the one that gets more and more focus these days despite their murder also being motivated by antisemitism) instead of, say, billionaires (and as already been said before, the belief that Jews have to much power and money is a common antisemitic conspiracy). the problem is also their WILLINGNESS TO KILL. THE BELIEF THAT KILLING ANYONE WILL MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE.
if you (general you, not you prev) really are anti-Nazi then you should learn from that and get rid of the notion that killing people is anything other than a last resort in moments of extreme crisis. the main focus should be on non-violent ways to archieve a goal. you want nazis out of society? then how about you try to find a way to educate young people that prevents them from falling into conspiracy theories? how about you start fighting antisemitism, especially your own? how about instead of belittling people and shoving them away if they say something you don't agree with, something that is antisemitic or racist or queerphobic or misogynistic, you try to educate them? if you're shoving them away you'll shove them right into the arms of people like Trump, if the only people willing to talk to them are right-wing extremists, they will also become a right-wing extremist.
You know what would have prevented the Holocaust? Not killing Hitler or any other of the high ranking Nazis, others would just have taken their spots. No, the best prevention of the Holocaust would have been to fight the prevailing antisemitism at that time. If the Germans hadn't been willing to murder the Jews, a whole people, because they believed all the antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jews, then Hitler wouldn't even have gotten that far. The best way to prevent something like that happening again is to correct biases, both other people's and your own. The nazis were people, just like you and me, they were my ancestors, and just like they could be convinced to murder Jews, we could. But we can make it a hell of a lot less likely for that to happen by examining our biases and fighting against them, informing ourselves, and getting rid of the notion that any group of people should be killed.
[Image ID: A comment by @thisaccountdestroysfascists saying: This is all true but at the same time the Allies defeated the Nazis by bombing the shit out of Germany so there's also that. /End ID]
answering this here cause i think my reply above already says something about this.
for me there is a difference between acting in self defense or defense of others and murdering people cause you think it's 'right' or 'justified' or 'the solution to all the problems'
there's a difference between realising it might be too late for a completely peaceful solution and basing your ideology on murdering people. yes, the allies killed a lot of people in world war ii and thus defeated the nazis. but that does not make the murder of civilians less of an atrocity. 'bombing the shit out of germany' wasn't good just cause it got rid of the nazis.
and it didn't solve everything. antisemitism is still there. Nazis are still there. we can't even say that there is less antisemitism now, or that the world has learned from the events leading up to world war ii.
and 6 million Jews still died.
in an ideal world the Nazis wouldn't even have gotten in a position of power, they wouldn't have found so much support in the society, they wouldn't have been ignored for so long by politicians from other countries. in an ideal world the people in germany wouldn't have been so ready to rob and torture and murder their Jewish neighbours.
what this post is about is that, in order for something like that not to happen again, we need to be clear that the willingness to murder people in the name of 'the right cause' is the problem. cause what we have to be clear about is: these people are willing to kill other humans. and with the right words you can convince them to kill just about anyone in the name of 'the right cause'. and it doesn't even work. if hitler had been killed someone else would have taken his place, if you had killed all the nazis in 1930 you would probably have radicalised a lot of people, and just given them more 'proof' of 'a great conspiracy to eliminate the aryan race'.
you cannot eliminate bigotry with murder. this is what this post is about.
Nazism was a movement based on hate, and the opposite of that is not hating a different group of people. It is embracing love. It is embracing truth. It is embracing compassion. It is embracing nuance and education and cooperation and moderation and empathy. It is about embracing building and learning and creating better systems not tearing down and destroying.
