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[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!

[ceanothusspinosus]

And if audio is more your thing, check out LibriVox! All free and public domain, volunteers welcome if you want to contribute as well.

https://librivox.org/

LibriVox | free public domain audiobooks

[cygnahime]

https://www.fadedpage.com/ for things that are public domain in Canada but not in the USA due to the House of Mouse’s pernicious influence! Emphasis on CA authors but far from only those.

[charminglyantiquated]

hey guys can you help me find that old portrait of a girl holding a little painting of a naked dude and cracking up about it?? I want to say it’s by Rembrandt but that’s probably not right

[runwildwithme]

It’s “Smiling Girl, a Courtesan, Holding an Obscene Image” by Gerard van Honthorst!!

[charminglyantiquated]

It’s the best painting that exists

[earhartsease]

I don’t know about you, but I really want to know what’s written on there - wait, I found a higher res image, can anyone translate this?

also it’s kind of an amazing little vignette

[kipplekipple]

Hahahaa

Okay it says “who knows my arse from behind” and I will never recover from this

[twunkish-cleric]

I love how everyone collectively makes fun of the Victorians and the past in general when we literally haven't changed at all. We still have weird fashion statements and beauty standards. You think corsets were oppressive? Women nowadays literally get permanent irreversible surgery just to be prettier for an arbitrary beauty standard that changes every 5 years. At least the Victorians could put on their ideal body in the morning and take it off at night. Disabled people are still treated like garbage, arguably just as badly as back then, people now just go "Ohh nooooo" and then don't do anything about it. We still die of treatable illnesses because of negligent doctors. Crazy shit happens now that will make historians 100 years from now call us barbaric idiots and declare this was an absolutely insane and cruel era

The past was full of people and people are always fallible. They were just like us. Stop shitting on history when we repeat it every goddamn day

[t-poserat]

If you can, please donate to the Internet archive, links in the description. The loss of the archive would be devastating for dozens of reasons.

[definitelynotcecelia]

I know the Library of Alexandria comment sounds like an exaggeration. It absolutely is not. As of May 7, 2022, the Internet Archive holds over 35 million books and texts, 7.9 million movies, videos and TV shows, 842 thousand software programs, 14 million audio files, 4 million images, 2.4 million TV clips, 237 thousand concerts, and over 682 billion web pages in the Wayback Machine. It’s been operating since 1996, the loss of knowledge would be impossible to ever completely come back from.

The lawsuit from Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, John Wiley Sons, and Penguin Random House alleges there have been significant revenue losses because of their controlled digital lending program. For context, most libraries in the US also use CDL to distribute books to their patrons wherever they are but those programs are run through for profit companies and the libraries are often paying a very high fee to so their patrons can have access to digital books. The Internet Archive’s program is completely free but they have a policy of not digitizing and lending anything less than 5 years old.

The lawsuit goes on to note that authors often own larger shares of their revenue of digital vs. print copies of their books. So the publishing companies, seeing that they’re underpaying their authors, are essentially blaming a library for being free instead of bumping up what authors earn on print copies. The Internet Archive’s 5 year policy is designed to protect authors anyway as that’s when books typically make the most money.

[definitelynotcecelia]

Hey by the way The Internet Archive is also one of the most cited places on Wikipedia. If it goes down a good chunk of Wikipedia will go back to “citation needed” or citations will lead to dead links.

[headspace-hotel]

I have a hot take about "guerrilla gardening"

[headspace-hotel]

So i've been pulling/digging up and growing random seedlings I find along roadsides for a month or two now. Many of them are dug out of gravel or pulled out of literal pavement.

This started out as an experiment and has now grown into a pretty large project, as I've found out that most of these plants actually survive and thrive. I have at least 120 plants in pots that are thriving now (after culling the non-natives) and I've planted still more in the back yard.

Anyway, throwing native wildflower seeds onto a golf course does literally jack shit. It's already covered in native wildflower seeds.

[headspace-hotel]

To restore biodiversity and habitats, we have to change the way land is managed. Mowing and spraying are an endless war on nature's efforts to re-wild our entire world, and our upper hand against her is incredibly fragile. Nature is tough as nails and she doesn't stop.

Now I can identify so many native plants, especially trees, as seedlings, and...they're everywhere. There are dozens and dozens of plant species in a lawn that isn't constantly laced with herbicide, and many of them are beautiful flowering plants that just never get a chance to bloom because people keep mowing them down.

Furthermore, common "weedy" species proliferate largely because of constant, destructive human management. Most "weeds" are just plants that take over destroyed areas and get them habitable for other species. "Weed" isn't a real category of Evil Plant, but it isn't an arbitrary descriptor either—"weed" is a job.

When a swath of forest burns or is felled by a tornado or something, somebody has to stop erosion from stealing all the topsoil, give the creatures a place to hide, attract birds and mammals that will spread new seeds, and keep the ground shady and moist. And that somebody has to be a quick, aggressive grower. That's where "weeds" come in.

So by intensively and indiscriminately weeding and mowing, humans keep their yards and gardens in a constant state of "oh shit, emergency," and the weeds try to take over because....that's what they're supposed to do.

So people see a "weedy" lawn with two months' overgrowth and think, "this is terrible, we can't have this, look at all this thick grass and weeds, it is full of ticks" and decide that the Only way is to keep mowing the whole stretch of land constantly, forever, instead of recognizing that the weedy overgrown lawn is 1) an early developmental stage of something else and 2) 40% invasive species that you put there

I don't know where I'm going with this. I'm just generally frustrated that it's not common knowledge how nature reclaims land.

Most online quips about "guerrilla gardening" show a fundamental lack of understanding about this natural process. If you try to plant something else on a golf course, it will get killed with herbicides and/or mowed down. Those are the ONLY things stopping the golf course from becoming a prairie or forest or whatever it was before.

I think people really want edgy illegal action to be the answer but the answer is actually "talk to people, educate them, and give them the resources to do better." I'm realizing also that the average person knows nothing, nothing, about plants or native species or ecosystems, and people appear to not care because they don't know.

"Water usage! Conservation! Biodiversity!" all that stuff is meaningless squawks to people that can't put it in context. People will generally pretend to know the importance of words like this even if they don't. It's a social thing.

But when you explain to them what bees do for plants, or how many kinds of grass there are, or what plants provide food for birds, it immediately becomes apparent that they actually don't know anything about the natural processes around them, and most people at this point are trying to keep up a dim facade of being sort-of-conscious of environmental concerns, but don't actually have an accessible point of entry to Actually learn about their world

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

it is both normal and healthy to have protective maternal feelings towards tiny bottles of condiments

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

i just want my children to be safe and happy in life

[quiteliterallyhotsauce]

You’re going to receive GOOD NEWS this week.

[witchfromthemidwest]

I CLAIM THAT SHIT

[mjsheartisstillbeating]

@thatpettyblackgirl

[quiteliterallyhotsauce]

[haroldhatter-deactivated2019081]

I don’t think I’ve reblogged this yet this week, but I did see it earlier today, and I got a new job! 

And I went in assuming that it would just be a volunteer job, but I’m getting paid $15 an hour! 

[team-flashh]

HOLY FUCK! I GOT A RAISE!!!

I came into work and bumped into my boss and she said that she was looking for me because she wanted to let me know about my raise. This shit worked in an hour omg

[raspberri-iced-tea]

i fuckin need some good news right about now so pile it on

[callmebliss]

I reblogged this on my lunch break and two hours later got a message from SALM that his abusive boss is leaving

GOOD NEWS

GET YOUR GOOD NEWS HERE

[notebookgirl30]

man I want some good news

[itsastrabitches]

I NEED THIS

[fullmetalfisting]

My boyfriend has to go to the ren fair for work but i can come and he wanted to do a matching costume. He was like “I want to be Frodo” and I was like “oh cool I can be Shelob” which was, apparently, not the couples costume he was thinking of

[fullmetalfisting]

I was like “babe she has the most screen time of any woman in Return of the King” and my boyfriend was like “that cannot be true,” looked it up, and said “i can’t believe that’s true”

[moreglitter]

finally a strong female character who doesn't shave her legs

[bringbackthegoldenage-deactivat]

How r u out here being homophobic and still writing mpreg 😭

Those are two entirely separate things. But I guess I couldn’t expect someone like you to understand that.

[catboyinchief]

[i-need-an-egress]

This is talking about Paul McCartney by the way.

[percethecurse]

It’s what

[caecilius-est-pater]

OK here’s the context:

This person writes fanfic about real life musicians from the 60s, including mpreg. They’re also openly homophobic. Someone made a post joking about Davy Jones from the band The Monkees being gay and OP went off on them about how disrespectful it is to headcanon real life people who are still alive as being gay. OP’s inbox got flooded by people pointing out that they themselves write fic about actual real life people who are still alive being mpreg’d but they insist it’s totally different you guys I swear and had a meltdown.

Also, the fic isn’t actually about Paul McCartney, it’s about Paul Simon from Simon & Garfunkel being impregnated by Lily Tomlin.

[ok-boomer]

y’all i kinda just assumed this was an old 2014ish post circulating, but the original post was made yesterday. as in like, on May 19th 2022

[twiggytoast]

[fellshish]

You know those 30k note posts and if you click on the original it’s just a picture of cas and you know the op changed it. Well i want to get a pic of cas legimitately to 30k he deserves it

[fellshish]

I choose this one reblog to reblog etc

[hs-gmac]

[rosemary-pie]

Girl help! I'm watching Merlin in 2022

[emeraldcas]

new year's eve? more like new years STEVE!

he super believes in you and he told me to tell you that next year is going to be so much better!! ✨💞

[emeraldcas]

new years day? more like cas is GAY!

he says be kind to yourself this year! & he'll make you soup whenever you need it!!!!! 💕

[autisticbeecas-deactivated20220]

What’s the meaning of your name and how does that connect to your identity or life now?

[rosemary-pie]

How are you supposed to know time has passed when you can't track migrating sunshine puddles???

[bastardbvby]

what movie do y’all know front to back like it doesn’t even have to necessarily be Good,, it’s just something you’ve seen so many times that the dialogue is printed into the very core of your being

[hearteyes-wheeler]