Charlie : ) @souplatypus - Tumblr Blog

Green Wheat Field (detail), Vincent Van Gogh, 1890

shit man this got me emotional

left: the Nebra sky disc, circa 1600 BCE, showing the Moon, Sun, and stars in gold on copper - the oldest depiction of the cosmos in the world

right: the Webb Space Telescope, July 2022, revealing thousands of baby galaxies forming in the early days of the universe - humankind’s deepest look into the sky

thirdtimecharmed

tiktoksijustthinkareneat

alexaloraetheris

The aliens are gonna be so confused when humans first board their ships and start doing this, and by GOD I hope at least one of them is going to have a camera when it happens.

dzamie

IS THAT FUCKING RUSH E?!?!?!?!?!

sosuperawesome

Teapot and Cups // Teraphim Ceramics

design-is-fine

Minton & Co, plate with frog scene, 1878. Feldspathic stoneware. Stoke-on-Trent, England. Via Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest

simena

Julie Collino

amygdalae

Everybody give it up for columnar jointing

amygdalae

Woo! Yeah! Woohoo! Yippee! Hell yeah! Woo!

amygdalae

the-lights-are-loud

Every time I see stuff like this, I have to restrain myself from shouting "BASALT"

megapope-deactivated20220531

self driving cars aren’t even hard to make lol just program it not to hit stuff

ronpaulhdwallpapers

if(goingToHitStuff) {

dont();

}

petersolarz

Painting by Peter Solarz

canthaveshitingotham-crucified

we dont talk enough about how awesome folders on the computer are

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!

wanderingchaos

Also, if you can't handle reading things, check out libirvox.org! it's a free audio book project taking public domain works and people doing free audiobooks! there's a lot of great stuff on there, but it takes things in the public domain and makes audio books out of them!

it's a super nice project, and you can find some really nice readers there!

athenadark

Also don't think a book is old because it's in the public domain

lots of writers and publishers are prepared to waive future profits for entirely petty reasons

because of this the entire works of Philip K Dick [petty writer who found himself with lots of hangers on during his life] and HP Lovecraft [his publisher - who was his wife and hated him] became public domain on their death

Sherlock Holmes entered public domain this year, it's always worth checking because you can save a fortune

and the more popular the classic - the more likely someone has uploaded it

the-haiku-bot

Also don’t think a

book is old because it’s in

the public domain

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

elfwreck

Want audiobooks instead?

LibriVox has free public domain audiobooks.

Public domain works in the US are:

Anything published (in the US) from 1927 or earlier (this number goes up every year for quite a while), and

Anything published between 1928 and 1963 that wasn't renewed, and

Anything published before 1989 without a proper copyright notice.

(Don't go looking for things in that third category unless you've studied a LOT about copyright law. Mostly that covers things like "weird little newsletters" and "self-published booklets" and sometimes fanzines. But most publications have a copyright notice in them.)

There's also some oddball exemptions here and there; copyright law is a tentacled mess. But those are the basic guidelines. (Except for audio. Audio has its own set of rules. It's weird.) (I mentioned tentacles, did I not? Double the amount of them you were thinking of.)

There are a lot of works from the 50s and early 60s that were not renewed, especially short stories published in magazines.

Project Gutenberg began in 1971; the first text was the US Declaration of Independence, shared through the university computer system. That was the start of "hey computers + public domain text = FREE BOOKS FOR EVERYONE."

noswordinourlake

Adding on that Project Gutenberg is not just Eng language texts either! I know specifically about the French texts because I did independent study French lit in high school and all my sources were Project Gutenberg acquired (Candide my beloathed) but there's many open source texts available in a number of languages.

specialagentartemis

And if you want public domain ebooks formatted all nice and pretty, with equally nice public domain art covers, Standard Ebooks takes Project Gutenberg texts and formats them into nice ebooks in epub, kindle, and kobo!

marta-bee

It's amazing to see Gutenberg going so strong after all these years, and the formatting has gotten so much better! I don't think there were ebooks the last time I used it, and the HTML was some clunky font that irritated my eyes after too long, Courier I think. But the content has always been so lovely, and now the actual etexts are much easier to read for a neurodivergent like myself.

Personally I've always preferred Wikisource (sister project to Wikipedia), because the spacing between paragraphs just makes for easier reading for me personally. Also the links to Wikipedia articles they include can be helpful, and they include a lot of historical illustrations. Kindle can also be useful if you like to read from a tablet rather than a phone or computer: it won't be free, but you can usually buy a whole author's public-domain library for 99 cents and have it automatically imported to your e-reader, which may be worth the small price for ease of access.

But this is really less about where you access these, and the simple fact that old books are almost always freely available online. It's your right to gobble up as much of those goodies as you can.

this-lady-of-the-flowers

also go to the internet archive site. Lots of public domain books scanned in and if you create a free account you can "borrow" books not in the public domain. And a lotttt of the books you can borrow are taught in lit classes (eg James Baldwin, etc)

christianfrederiksen

Duck Taking Flight, 2023 Chalk pastel on illustration board. 8 x 6 in. For sale! (DM me for pricing). Testing out some energetic pastel hatching on this photo of a duck I took in Confederation Park a while ago.

toadschooled

An American toad rainbow, featuring different phases from different regions. They’re a pretty diverse bunch!

[x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x]

starkju0

Riz new design is super dope! 🔫💼💚

why are there fake transparent pngs. what kind of sick prank is this. some kind of looney tunes ass bullshit. i run at the gray and white checkered background and hit it like a wall.