Trying for a change

This user is trying their best to stay positive and get better

[dancinginthesliverglow]

Is it not enough to intensely daydream a fanfic in painful, emotional and visual detail constantly for over a week? Must I also convert it to doc/word format as well?

[mochacoffee]

not to be emotional on main but fanfiction is a gift and it’s so fundamentally human to tell each other stories and i am deeply grateful to have that in my life. thank you all for adding so much emotion and meaning to the world with your words

[crowiin]

Pushing the short wukong agenda again

[louisegluckpdf]

“well. plays the cards i’m given” has profoundly changed something in me. litany against wallowing in an unsatisfactory situation

[louisegluckpdf]

jpgs that radically altered my worldview

[lifehacksthatwork]

Just a bunch of Useful websites - Updated for 2023

Removed/checked all links to make sure everything is working (03/03/23). Hope they help!

Sejda - Free online PDF editor.

Supercook - Have ingredients but no idea what to make? Put them in here and it’ll give you recipe ideas.

Still Tasty - Trying the above but unsure about whether that sauce in the fridge is still edible? Check here first.

Archive.ph - Paywall bypass. Like 12ft below but appears to work far better and across more sites in my testing. I’d recommend trying this one first as I had more success with it.

12ft – Hate paywalls? Try this site out.

Where Is This - Want to know where a picture was taken, this site can help.

TOS/DR - Terms of service, didn’t read. Gives you a summary of terms of service plus gives each site a privacy rating.

OneLook - Reverse dictionary for when you know the description of the word but can’t for the life of you remember the actual word.

My Abandonware - Brilliant site for free, legal games. Has games from 1978 up to present day across pc and console. You’ll be surprised by some of the games on there, some absolute gems.

Project Gutenberg – Always ends up on these type of lists and for very good reason. All works that are copyright free in one place.

Ninite – New PC? Install all of your programs in one go with no bloat or unnecessary crap.

PatchMyPC - Alternative to ninite with over 300 app options to keep upto date. Free for home users.

Unchecky – Tired of software trying to install additional unwanted programs? This will stop it completely by unchecking the necessary boxes when you install.

Sci-Hub – Research papers galore! Check here before shelling out money. And if it’s not here, try the next link in our list.

LibGen – Lots of free PDFs relate primarily to the sciences.

Zotero – A free and easy to use program to collect, organize, cite and share research.

Car Complaints – Buying a used car? Check out what other owners of the same model have to say about it first.

CamelCamelCamel – Check the historical prices of items on Amazon and set alerts for when prices drop.

Have I Been Pawned – Still the king when it comes to checking if your online accounts have been released in a data breach. Also able to sign up for email alerts if you’ve ever a victim of a breach.

I Have No TV - A collection of documentaries for you to while away the time. Completely free.

Radio Garden – Think Google Earth but wherever you zoom, you get the radio station of that place.

Just The Recipe – Paste in the url and get just the recipe as a result. No life story or adverts.

Tineye – An Amazing reverse image search tool.

My 90s TV – Simulates 90’s TV using YouTube videos. Also has My80sTV, My70sTV, My60sTV and for the younger ones out there, My00sTV. Lose yourself in nostalgia.

Foto Forensics – Free image analysis tools.

Old Games Download – A repository of games from the 90’s and early 2000’s. Get your fix of nostalgia here.

Online OCR – Convert pictures of text into actual text and output it in the format you need.

Remove Background – An amazingly quick and accurate way to remove backgrounds from your pictures.

Twoseven – Allows you to sync videos from providers such as Netflix, Youtube, Disney+ etc and watch them with your friends. Ad free and also has the ability to do real time video and text chat.

Terms of Service, Didn’t Read – Get a quick summary of Terms of service plus a privacy rating.

Coolors – Struggling to get a good combination of colors? This site will generate color palettes for you.

This To That – Need to glue two things together? This’ll help.

Photopea – A free online alternative to Adobe Photoshop. Does everything in your browser.

BitWarden – Free open source password manager.

Just Beam It - Peer to peer file transfer. Drop the file in on one end, click create link and send to whoever. Leave your pc on that page while they download. Because of how it works there are no file limits. It’s genuinely amazing. Best file transfer system I have ever used.

Atlas Obscura – Travelling to a new place? Find out the hidden treasures you should go to with Atlas Obscura.

ID Ransomware – Ever get ransomware on your computer? Use this to see if the virus infecting your pc has been cracked yet or not. Potentially saving you money. You can also sign up for email notifications if your particular problem hasn’t been cracked yet.

Way Back Machine – The Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites and loads more.

Rome2Rio – Directions from anywhere to anywhere by bus, train, plane, car and ferry.

Splitter – Seperate different audio tracks audio. Allowing you to split out music from the words for example.

myNoise – Gives you beautiful noises to match your mood. Increase your productivity, calm down and need help sleeping? All here for you.

DeepL – Best language translation tool on the web.

Forvo – Alternatively, if you need to hear a local speaking a word, this is the site for you.

For even more useful sites, there is an expanded list that can be found here.

[caesarsaladinn]

you know those movies that follow an animal around through different human lives? Black Beauty, War Horse, that sort of thing? I would like to write one about a shipping pallet. they’re animals to me and you can only imagine the shit they see

[lilliantheseus]

Finally, someone who shares my bizarre/damn near psychosexual obsession with shipping

[caesarsaladinn]

what an underappreciated part of society! everyone talks about Bezos, but nobody thinks about the cardboard box that made his business possible; everyone knows what a sea captain does, but who writes stories about longshoremen?

I don’t think you can truly appreciate (or hate, or understand) something without understanding the materials that made and maintain it, and for modern society, that’s intermodal containers and pallet jacks.

[squareallworthy]

You know what I can't stand, though? Those skids made of pressed wood chips. If they get even slightly wet they just fall apart.

[femmenietzsche]

I Watched An 857-Hour Movie To Encounter Capitalism’s Extremes

Logistics tracks, in reverse chronological order, the journey of a pedometer from a shop in Sweden to a factory in China.

On the night of January 7, sitting alone in my room, I hit play on the world’s longest movie.

I found the film by accident. Around that time, I was searching for something that could count as the longest horror movie ever made. The most viable contender I found was Douglas Gordon’s 1993 film installation, 24 Hour Psycho, which plays Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho at roughly two frames per second, amounting to a 24-hour viewing experience. But another film that kept popping up on the lists I searched is ultimately what caught my interest: Logistics Art Project.

Complaining about the length of Marvel movies is standard fare in our world. The longest of the bunch is currently Avengers: Endgame, which clocks in at three hours and one minute. Logistics, meanwhile, has a running time of 857 hours, or roughly 285 viewings of the Avengers film. If you wanted to watch Logistics in one sitting, you’d need to stay awake for 35 days and 17 hours. I’m one of likely just a few people to have watched the entire thing.

In 2008, Swedish artists Erika Magnusson and Daniel Andersson came up with an idea. As they describe on the Logistics website, they got fascinated with “the fact that the sourcing of just about every object in our surroundings involves almost inconceivable global logistics,” and wondered what those journeys looked like. They determined that in order to truly satisfy their curiosity, they’d need to track, in reverse chronological order, the journey of the “sort of anonymous clutter that everyday life is full of.” 

Eventually, Magnusson and Andersson decided upon tracking the course of a pedometer they bought in Stockholm to the factory it was manufactured at in Shenzhen, China. They write that, “Four years later we found ourselves on the largest container ship in the world on our way from Sweden to China.” As per the trip: “We had started the journey by truck to Middle Sweden, then by freight train to the port of Gothenburg, and after four weeks at sea, we filmed from a truck again, this time from the port of Shenzhen to a factory in Bao’an.”

...

Each of these vehicles has a person at the helm, but they are just as invisible under capitalism as they are in Logistics. In 857 hours of total silence, I can recall each moment a person entered the frame. 

Our container ship makes regular stops at ports to exchange cargo. Each time we stopped, I would scour the frame for any sight of a human behind the cranes, forklifts and trucks taking cargo to and fro. I spent hours waiting to see one particular crane operator only for them to stop their crane stare directly down the barrel of the camera lens. I nearly cried. 

The most beautiful moment in Logistics comes at one of the lowest points. Hundreds of hours of not seeing so much as a human-shaped silhouette, and then a deck hand stops dead centre in the frame and washes the windowpane that sits in front of the lens. Soap, bubbles and water wash down the frame. The world of containers and the open sea drift into a gentle, psychedelic haze. 

[antigonehappy]

character who is sun-coded but not in the traditional ray-of-sunshine way. character who is sun-coded in the sense that they burn hot and bright and powerful, that they're a raging fury of fire and passion, and that maybe, just maybe, they are destroying themselves as they do so.

[realpeoplefiction]

really jealous of people who can just... do things. like they dont go through the 39 stages of grief before and the 47 stages of grief after. they just do it like its some adidas commercial. like the spirit of shia laboeuf possessed them. still sounds fake to me but whatever. good for them ig

[spaceshipsandpurpledrank]

[txttletale]

i gotta say i agree that exposing children to algorithmic content feeds is going to make them grow up with one billion new kinds of mental illnesses and it's a serious societal problem that urgently needs addressing but it makes me v. v. v. uneasy when i see posts going around that identify this issue and come to the conclusion 'this is why it's important for parents to know what their kid is doing online' and uh girls there are a lot of kids out there who would be dead if their parents knew what they were doing online

[txttletale]

"yeah this aspect of capitalism is extremely alienating and traumatizing" and im nodding and smiling and then they add "which is why we must retreat to the safety of the family" and i start abruptly high-pitched screaming like a fire alarm

[llumetesdellums]

“Fears, tell me fears, don’t get me started, I might die.”  

Did someone say animation of that one comic? I did. 

(THE COMIC)<—

And the Youtube version: LINK

[skopostheorie]

This meme is inescapable on French insta so I'm posting it here for all to enjoy

[relmint]

I FINISHED THE VIDEO!!!

[dankmemeuniversity]

[thatsbelievable]

[freedominthedarkmp3]

One time this man approached me in a bar talking in Spanish. So I assumed he was Spanish and we started speaking, we had a whole ass conversation and at some point he was like. So what part of Spain are you from? And I said well I’m Italian actually. What part of Spain are you from? And he was like. I’m Greek.

[pastelpinkcheeks]

One time I was in Argentina and I was so tired of trying to speak Spanish because I’m not very good at it lmao so I broke into exasperated English and the retail seller girl quickly understood me and engaged me in conversation. We talked for a while, she introduced me to a makeup brand, and then I decided to buy it. While she was packaging the purchase, she asked me if I were from the US or perhaps the UK and I just said “oh no I’m Brazilian hahah” and she looked me straight in the eyes and said, in clear Portuguese, “I’m Brazilian too”

[ex-evil-genius-deactivated20220]

When my dad went to China on a work trip, his Mandarin speaking wasn’t great but his listening was fine (his first language is Cantonese) and he encountered a German guy who had moved to China to work. My dad knew how to speak German because he studied it in university (but wasn’t great when it came to listening to new vocab he hadn’t studied before), and the German guy knew Mandarin because he lived and worked in China, so they had a conversation where my dad spoke to the German guy in German and the guy responded in Mandarin. I’m sure it confused a lot of their coworkers who just saw the Asian guy speaking German and the white guy speaking Mandarin.

[theriversdaughter]

Some years ago, I worked for a manufacturing company that had a service depot in China.  One of the engineers from the main office here in the US spent most of his time at the depot.  The problem was that he didn’t speak *any* of the various Chinese languages, and no one at the depot spoke any English. They all, however, spoke Spanish.

[vampireapologist-archive-deacti]

college professor just said “you’re probably too young to even remember this” and brought up something that happened in 2011

[light-em-up-benzedrine]

Better than my professer that said we’d “probably recognize this from Saturday morning cartoons” then showed us a cartoon from 1935…

[aluminumapples]

New immortal vs. old immortal