Late-Night Rumination

Call me Sam // 27 // Misc blog, I'm just here to keep track of stuff I enjoy

[urfavhatesterfs]

YOU hates terfs

[switchingtogeico]

[captainhaterade]

[stankpasta]

rb if u hates terfs

[official-pussy-posts-2]

Official ‘terfs get out of my house’ Post

[bodhimcbodeface]

Do u ever read a friend’s fic and it’s like holy shit how do you consider me qualified to talk to you?

[wanderbythewayside]

No

Y’all need better self-esteem

[wanderbythewayside]

Alright I have been enabled so I’m gonna say somethings.

Fatalistic sarcasm is a thing, however, it usually hides deep feelings of insecurity, and whether you consciously recognize this or not, it validates them. Seriously, I used to constantly make jokes about how other people’s work was better than mine, and it did nothing for my self-esteem, it was a tool to deflect from my own feelings of inferiority and it actively worked against me thinking critically about my own and other people’s work. If it was a joke I could put myself down instead of analyzing why someone’s work was better and trying to incorporate that into my own

As someone who took creative writing courses I was constantly surrounded by other brilliant people, if I hung my head in shame every time I read something as good or better than mine I never would have lifted it. 

As someone who has watched a lot of writers with very good idea’s crash and burn I mean it when I say you either develop a healthy sense of respect for your own work or you stop writing. 

There’s three things I really wish more people consider

1. Do you think their work is better because it’s a different style, one that you like? There’s an element to ‘the grass is greener on the other side’, I have seen people work in some amazing styles that I wished to god I could replicate, some I managed, some I never did, but there’s nothing wrong with either. having a different style Is Not the same as having a bad style, each has their own strengths and you can admire one without putting yours down

2. Knowing someone who is a better writer is a blessing and if they knew you were using their work to bring yourself down they would not be happy, mooch off that friend, analyze their work, ask them to edit your shit, as long as you’re not annoying them be shameless about it. the best thing creative writing did for me was give me the confidence to ask people to critic my work and shamelessly better each other for that sharing 

3. People need to normalize being confident in their work, the quality of your work has literally nothing to do with your worth as a person, the quality of your work has nothing to do with your worth as a writer. You can write something really shitty and the only thing I’d say to you is that your trying and I respect you for that

[januariat]

this is true for art too btw

[finwe77]

I also don’t like comparing my work to others’ bc it starts to feel almost competitive in a way. It turns to asking “which of these is better?” instead of “what do I like about each of these?”

We’re not competing against each other to see who can bake the best cake, we’re all bringing dishes to a potluck. It’s the community and love for the craft that matter

[sandandglass]

Donald Trump gets attacked by an eagle.

This eagle truly represents America. What a majestic symbol.

[lukcskywalkcrs]

It’s only fitting that this gets reblogged today

[rinokami]

This is the only eagle that deserves reblogging on the 4th

[kawuli]

random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)

[yomikoreadsbooks]

Keeping a list of Google alternatives just in case…

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine

[justalurkr]

Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.

But... Stochastic Parrots.

Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.

Her name is Timnit Gebru.

She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.

The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.

The paper had not even been published yet.

Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.

The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.

This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.

The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.

The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.

Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.

Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.

The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.

In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.

The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.

In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.

The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.

Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.

This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.

The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.

The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.

Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.

She was making that argument from inside Google.

Then Google proved her right by removing her.

The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.

Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.

Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.

The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.

Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.

The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.

The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.

And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.

[irispurpurea]

This is the paper. It's excellent, highly recommend reading it.

I remember reading about Gebru's firing but I had no idea this was the paper she was fired over.

[stringcage]

Years of personal growth can be unraveled in 2 days at your parents house

[misscrazyfangirl321]

Hey someone suggested I use ChatGPT to figure out adulting today, and as I was going through the mental list of places I'd rather look, I realized "beloved strangers on Tumblr dot net" was on that list.

So if you have an aspect of adulting that you're really good at-taxes, budgeting, cooking, insurance, credit, time management, house upkeep, anything-please feel free to reblog with any tips.

[notcruvusmemes]

Not me, but @bitchesgetriches has a lot of great resources for many of these topics on their website.

[bitchesgetriches]

That's us! Professional internet adults, specializing in financial stuff! We recommend starting with our Grand List of All Articles, or one of our Masterposts:

MASTERPOST: Everything You Need To Know About Taxes

MASTERPOST: Everything You Need to Know about How to Increase Your Income

MASTERPOST: Everything You Need to Know about Retirement and How to Retire

MASTERPOST: Everything You Need to Know about Credit and Credit Cards

MASTERPOST: Everything You Need to Know about Investing for Beginners

MASTERPOST: Everything You Need to Know about How to Pay off Debt

MASTERPOST: Everything You Need To Know About Living Independently for the First Time

MASTERPOST: Everything You Need to Know about Repairing Our Busted-Ass World

MASTERPOST: Everything You Need to Know about Self-Care

MASTERPOST: Everything You Need to Know about Getting a Job, Raise, or Promotion

MASTERPOST: Everything You Need to Know about Saving Money and Being Frugal

[veronicamarsconfessions]

🪷

[dduane]

Always RB: because there is never enough love. And fanfic love is some of the purest.

[caimofnoceur]

47 more free and helpful things, that everyone can take advantage of

Music

Gnoosic is your place go for new music recommendations. It asks for three of your favourite bands, and based on them, spits out an artist that you might like. You can also “like”, “dislike”, or mark it as something you aren’t familiar with – which further refines the results.

NoCopyrightSounds is a copyright free / stream safe record label, providing free to use music to the content creator community. NCS Music is free to use for independent Creators and their UGC (User Generated Content) on YouTube & Twitch - always remember to credit the Artist, track and NCS and link back to our original NCS upload.

Radio Garden take a trip 'round the world's airwaves! Just pick a city — literally any city — and Radio Garden will play you whatever its local radio station is broadcasting.

Radiooooo Radio Garden walked so Radiooooo could run. This site adds a timeline function so you can listen to radio from not just anywhere, but anywhen. Get down to those 1910s Germany bops!

Art

Krita free and open-source raster graphics editor designed primarily for digital painting and 2D animation.It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and Chrome OS

29a.ch interactive site that lets you color what looks to be a map of the cosmos, but I'm honestly not sure. Whatever it is, it's mesmerizing.

Games

Patatap is an interactive website that responds to the keys on your keyboard with a sound and a brief animation. Now imagine hammering in entire sentences – and you got an explosion of sounds, colors, and movement! Once you start typing in random paragraphs, it becomes almost hypnotic, in a way.

Drench a very simple browser game, Drench gives you a board with different colored tiles, and you use the buttons to flip the colors around. Do this until your board is full of tiles of a single color only.

River Styx an interactive point-and-click game that takes you through the river Styx and the Underworld. You will meet many Greek Gods and Goddesses here, and you will also be learning a lot about their myths and legends.

2048 this website lets you play a game called 2048, which is kinda like Tetris but with addition. Use your arrow keys to try to combine numbers until you reach 2048, or go ~beyond~ and try to reach 4096.

Little Alchemy 2 fun little time killer. As its name suggests, the website deals with the process of transformation you achieve when you start mixing different things. You start with Earth, Fire, Water, and Air. The goal is to create as many different materials or objects as possible. For example, earth and air will form dust. There are no rules just mix and match your creations to create new ones. You will not even know where your time went.

Akinator website is magic or rather feels like one. You can think of any character in this entire world and through a series of question, it will deduce the name. Don’t believe me, go try for yourself.

Find the Invisible Cow You’re going to want to make sure your sound is on in this fun finding game! Find the invisible cow in this laugh out loud version of hot and cold.

CookieClicker How fast can you click for cookies? Level up and become a cookie pro with this fun time-wasting website!

Knowledge

Zooniverse A really neat website that brings people together to create one of the largest platforms for people-powered research. Volunteers come together to assist professional researchers. There is no need for a specialised background or training; all you have to do is to answer simple questions.

Cool Hunting is a really cool publication platform that uncovers the latest in design, technology, style, travel, art and culture. If you are into art, architecture, and culture, then this website is perfect for you.

OCEARCH Shark Tracker This one looks right on the money for the folks who can’t get enough of sharks! With OCEARCH Shark Tracker, you can keep a track of tagged sharks as they are busy swimming around the deep ocean. Moreover, the website also lets you zoom in on a particular location to check where sharks have been swimming for the past year.

Ad Astra-app An essential tool for every astronomer. The star atlas and skyguide that makes it really easy to pick the best objects, make your own observation list and use it when you are outside

100,000 Stars is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen on the web. It shows a representation of galaxy with stars inside it. You can take a tour which starts from the Sun and takes you to the outer edges of the galaxy while teaching you valuable insights in between.

wikiHow is an online wiki-style publication featuring how-to articles on a variety of topics. For example: How to make ginger ale, How change a lock or How to survive an encounter with an ostrich.

Cooking

Cooking for Engineers is a godsend for those who love to cook. This website has it all, from recipes, to kitchen gear, to cooking tests, down to a handy dictionary. The best part about this website is its classic 90’s layout, which makes accessing the recipes and files intuitive and easier.

My Fridge Food at this point, your fridge probs has, like, three random items in it, and you're starting to panic about meal options. Enter My Fridge Food, which inputs everything you have in your kitchen and outputs a recipe. Bless.

Work, or relax

Da Font Tired of your basic Times New Roman? You can spend hours downloading new fonts from typography artists to spice up your new document!

A Soft Murmur If you’re looking to create your own ambient background music to listen to while you work or read, A Soft Murmur is the fun website for you! Create your own mix of white noise and other natural sounds to relax and waste some time.

Rainy Mood Get all the benefits of rain without getting caught in it with Rainy Mood! This is perfect for setting a relaxed and chilled out mood.

I Waste So Much Time The website is designed to literally allow you to waste your time. There are no long articles, just funny pictures with embedded texts. A very good time waster for short breaks.

This Is My Website Now The website truly kills your time. It is just a collection of small games which you can play on your browser. Effective for less than 10 minutes of usage, it’s good for a short break.

Instructables If you’ve always wanted to learn how to DIY but didn’t know where to start, try Instructables. They have community posts with step-by-step instructions to help you become a DIY master in no time.

OBS Open Broadcaster Software is free and open source software for video recording and live streaming. Stream to Twitch, YouTube and many other providers. only downside to it is that you have a power director watermark in the corner of your video, but its not very large.

Sleepytime is your sleeping schedule out of whack? This fun website calculates exactly when you need to go to sleep and wake up in order to get a good night’s sleep.

Boredom

MapCrunch Go on an adventure without leaving your home — because you can't! This site plops you down in a random location on the globe, and all that's left to do is explore.

List of Conspiracy Theories Get sucked down the dark rabbit hole of the internet that will have you denying history and wearing tinfoil hats. Wikipedia’s list of conspiracy theories will have you scrolling for ages!

This Person Does Not Exist If AI and deep-fakes fascinate you, this is a website that will either make you very excited, or give you nightmares about whether ‘The Matrix’ is real, and if you, at some point in your life, took the blue pill instead of the red one. Either way, the website generates fake people using GAN (or generative adversarial networks), and displays them to you. You can refresh the page to see a different face. Also, if this interests you, you might also like:

This Cat Does Not Exist. You know, because why stare at human faces when you can look at cats instead.

The Useless Web Want to see what the Internet truly has to offer? Take a peek at The Useless Web to see what truly is out there.

Not Always Right Had a bad day at work? Did that one annoying, pesky customer or client who just wouldn’t shut up tried to give you a hard time, and succeeded? Then this website is just perfect for you! It’s a collection of stories about customers who just don’t know when to shut up.

Zoom Quilt If you're looking to be hypnotized, then check out this site, which is basically a picture that infinitely zooms in to reveal new pictures.

Just for fun

Tickld is your go-to spot for anything humorous and funny, for anything that’s really cool and interesting, or stuff that’s just plain WTF.

Paper Toilet Just because stores are sold out of toilet paper doesn't mean you have to live without. This site features some interactive TP that you can roll up or down.

The Passive-Aggressive Password Machine Type a password (real or fake) into this site and it'll shade you for how much it sucks.

CoolThings is a collection of cool things. From entertainment, to gadgets, to even toys and inventions, there is bound to be something here that will interest you.

This Is Why I Am Broke This is a great website for discovering new gift ideas which are distinct. The products range from a few dollars to a few thousand. There’s something for everyone here.

PostSecret is a very interesting website. Visitors are encouraged to send in anonymous postcards on which they write their secrets. There are all sorts of secrets on all kinds of postcards, and the variations make this a really interesting project. However, be warned – these secrets are very real… and very heavy.

NOIYS – Post, read, forget is a place to post an anonymous note to be viewed by many people, only to be deleted within 24 hours. It’s the perfect website for venting anonymously and not worry about the consequences, as it will be deleted within a day. The best part (or maybe worst) is that strangers can reply to your note, too. That way, you can have a running conversation with a complete stranger.

Scream Into the Void Take your outrage about our current situation (or any problem in your life) and throw it into the void. Just type out your feels and then click the "Scream" button, which does exactly what you think it does.

And lastly...

Dildo Generator Welcome, good citizens of the web, to my favorite site of all time. It's right in the name: You can generate a custom dildo by length, width, base, contours, and so many more variables. Things get wild pretty fast.

Eyebleach Did you see something on the internet that was just too scary? Or just need to get it out of your head? Click on Eyebleach to be fed adorable pictures of puppies, kitties, or babies!

Earlier post

[headspace-hotel]

Adding Boil the Frog to the musics list

Radiogarden is Amaaaaazing

[purely-nicole]

Two more for the music list:

- Muspy: Track when your favorite artists have a new album coming out via RSS feed.

- Songkick: Scans your library and tells you when bands you like are in town.

[fluoresensitives]

Personally I hate AI because it uses slave labor, is killing the planet and is making people stupid, but that's just me. The soulless art aspect is just one little piece of my grander disdain.

[castrolle]

wait how does AI use slave labor? Do you mean the human works that are stolen and not credited or compensated? Because technically under capitalism everything is exploited but there are varying degrees

[postillfastill]

Aside from the scraping, AI tech companies, including openAI/chatGPT, have outsourced training their models to countries in the global south, specifically Kenya in openAI's case. These workers are working in sweatshop conditions for less than 2 bucks USD per hour. I'm on mobile, but if you search 'openAI Kenya slave labor' and related keywords, you can find multiple articles about it.

[almostdefinitelydying]

Kenyan workers with AI jobs thought they had tickets to the future until the grim reality set in

Training AI takes a heavy toll on Kenyan workers, who say they earned $2 an hour to label and sift through gruesome content for American com

[brightlotusmoon]

[theelectricdreamsofddx]

Hey, wanna make music? Yeah? Got a buncha money? No? Well that's perfectly fine, check this free stuff out:

Vital - A powerful wavetable synth, my personal favorite VST synth, very easy to figure out creating new synth sounds, with the help of the plenty of tutorials that are out there for the plug-in. (There are paid versions but they are completely unnecessary to get 99% of the features of the plug-in.)

Synth1 - A classic piece of synthesizer software.

Pendulate - An interesting, chaotic synth that you can make weird little sounds with.

Native Instruments' free plug-ins - Various cool VSTs, including the Komplete Start pack.

The Free Orchestra - A set of orchestral instruments for Kontakt Player (see previous link).

BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover - More orchestral stuff! This one has its own player so you don't have to download a separate VST to use it if you don't want to.

Magical 8bit Plug - A chiptune plug-in, intended for producing sounds like that of 8-bit systems like the NES and Master System.

Genny - A synth VST made to emulate the soundchip of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive.

MT Power Drum Kit - A nice rock n' roll style drum kit plug-in.

This guy's weird VST collection - 6.4 gigabytes of weird VSTs, including some you might know, like Delay Lama and MeowSynth!

sforzando - A free player for soundfont files.

Musical Artifacts - A resource I mainly use to find soundfonts, on which you can find other various things as well.

Kilohearts Essentials - 30 effect VSTs including reverb, delay, compression, pitch shifting, transient shaping, ring modulation, phase distortion, and more.

Xfer's freeware VSTs - Exactly what it says on the tin, including the one and only OTT compressor.

Illformed - The good ol' dblue Glitch 1.3, Crusher, Stretch, and TapeStop.

Hysteresis and Fracture - Two interesting glitch effects, one being a delay and the other being a buffer.

Codec - A cool digital audio degradation effect.

Le Phonk - A slick distortion plug-in.

MAIM - An effect that mimics the sound of MP3 compression.

Soundly Shape it and Place it - One is simply an equalizer VST, the other is an effect that emulates a speaker (ex: a radio) and a space (ex: a cave).

Fresh Air - An effect that adds high end information to your sounds, to provide brightness.

ValhallaSupermassive - A combo reverb and delay plug-in that sounds quite big.

UnplugRed - A collection of various interesting VSTs, most of which have free versions.

Chowdhury DSP - I can't personally speak for all of these but their tape model effect is great for some lo-fi style effects.

TAL-Chorus-LX - A thick sounding chorus, good for "retro" sounds too.

Polyverse Wider - A great effect for widening sounds up, really simple too with only two controls.

Freesound - A good audio file resource, mainly for foley recordings.

Cymbatics Dubstep Starter Pack - A little sample pack with some good drum and synth samples.

fishmonger drum kit - A pack of samples from the album 'fishmonger' by Underscores!

WangleLine's sample packs - Free samples put out by my awesome mutual WangleLine!

aaand I might as well include this set of drums I made awhile back :P

As for DAWs, it's been a long while since I've used anything other than FL Studio (not counting Audacity, which I still occasionally use for specific purposes), which, while being the only one I can directly recommend, is paid. However, I've heard good things about Reaper which has a "free trial" that you can technically use forever, akin to WinRAR. Additionally, I've also heard some good things about Waveform Free.

[theelectricdreamsofddx]

(tags from @secretroomba) Ok saving these tags for later for myself

[theelectricdreamsofddx]

MORE because there are some additional little things I forgot about:

Geonkick - A drum synthesis VST, especially simple to get kicks going, but capable of producing a multitude of sounds.

plugdata - A visual programming environment for plug-in projects, that people produce their own plug-ins for, such as infamous plug-in the gusher.

SoundThread (info in description) - A really cool node-based audio editing interface based on the Composers Desktop Project, great for sound design, although it currently only supports .wav files.

OpenUtau - An open source software for UTAU voicebanks like Kasane Teto, much easier to work with imo than the original UTAU software for a beginner to vocal synths like UTAU and Vocaloid.

Famitracker - More NES style chiptune stuff, this one's a classic standalone tracker program.

Furnace - Another tracker I've heard fantastic things about from chiptune artists, more fully featured and capable of producing a wider variety of sounds.

[thepromiscuousfinger]

[chaifootsteps]

#Please little bird

[meriwetherwrites]

I love that the modern-day tumblr post equivalent of chain emails only requires me to reblog a relatively pleasant image instead of forward an email to a bunch of my friends and family members to quell my raging anxiety.

[nightguardmod]

It’s a win win. I get a bit of hope, you get a cute birb photo

[flootzavut]

I also love that I rarely see one of these that threatens bad things if you don't. (And when I do, I refuse to reblog them, even though that gives me anxiety, because I refuse to pass the anxiety on.)

Fuck those horrible chain emails. The birb is a great improvement.

[kaijuno]

This is what it’s like living in Michigan

[the-new-mandalor]

It’s a Monty Python skit.

[flyingwerecats]

Guy: *Singing* I’m doing some fishing…

Officer: *Emerges from the water with a grunt* You there, Sir!! I certainly hope you’ve got a fishing license!

Guy: *Panicking* Wha, no, I don’t!

Officer: Oh no?

Guy: *Screaming*

Officer: I’ll have you beheaded!!

[hclark70]

As a Michigan native,  I confirm this is all true.

[gotshadowbanned-feralfungii]

[mortalityplays]

always complain about things. okay, you know how programmers explain their code to rubber ducks when it's not working? same principle. an appliance breaks down. I get pissed off, try everything, go through the various stages of despair etc. I complain about it to a friend and explain why it frustrates me so bad, and suddenly I'm thinking 'wait I should try unplugging it and then doing a factory reset and then—' and I go home and do that and it starts working again. I keep losing my earrings. I complain about it to a friend, about how I keep them all in a little dish but then the specific one I want always dematerialises the moment I want it. my friend says 'I just keep them on the little card backs they came with' and I think well shit, I always throw those out. but then I think aha I can make a bunch of pinholes in a decorative postcard. genius. I read a story. it's about something I'm usually into, but for some reason I don't like this story at all. I complain about it, I figure out what irritates me about it, I have a great idea for a way better story. I try a new recipe, it doesn't come together. I bitch about it like crazy, about what I thought I did right and how it failed, and before I know it I'm explaining out loud which parts I'm inexperienced at or didn't understand or adjusted wrong. I need a little table for drawing on. I complain about it in the group chat, two days later someone says 'hey I spotted the kind of table you're looking for on the side of the road, do you want to come pick it up'. I complain, endlessly. my life is enriched. the art of complaining.

[mortalityplays]

this has never been more true btw

[chongoblog]

ITS APRIL 13 YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS

FETCH ME NEIL

[chongoblog]

[chongoblog]

HAPPY BIG TWENTY NEIL

[helenvaughans]

[itsmistybitch-deactivated202605]

These posts are sisters

[lierdumoa]

[orteil42]

am i losing the drive to create things for an increasingly alien and hostile world whose mounting taste for fascism feels like a cold metal vise around my skull or am i just lazy and unmedicated and looking for excuses

[orteil42]

they're on the twitter stealing my shit‼️