So yeah...

use overdrive, libby, hoopla, cloudlibrary, and kanopy instead of amazon and audible.

use firefox instead of chrome or opera (both are made with chromium, which blocks functionality for ad-blockers. firefox isn't based on chromium).

use mega or proton drive instead of google drive.

get rid of bloatware

use libreoffice instead of microsoft office suite

use vetted sites on r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH for free movies, books, games, etc.

use trakt or letterboxd instead of imdb.

use storygraph instead of goodreads.

use darkpatterns to find mobile game with no ads or microtransactions

use ground news to read unbiased news and find blind spots in news stories.

use mediahuman or cobalt to download music, or support your favorite artists directly through bandcamp

make youtube bearable by using mtube, newpipe, or the unhook extension on chrome, firefox, or microsoft edge

use search for a cause or ecosia to support the environment instead of google

use thriftbooks to buy new or used books (they also have manga, textbooks, home goods, CDs, DVDs, and blurays)

use flashpoint to play archived online flash games

find books, movies, games, etc. on the internet archive! for starters, here's a bunch of David Attenborough documentaries and all of the Animorphs books

burn your music onto cds

use pdf24 (available online or as a desktop app) instead of adobe

use unroll.me to clean your email inboxes

use thunderbird, mailfence, countermail, edison mail, tuta, or proton mail instead of gmail

remove bloatware on windows PC, macOS, and iOS X

remove bloatware on samsung X

use pixelfed instead of instagram or meta

use NCH suite for free software like a file converter, image editor, video editors, pdf editor, etc.

feel free to add more alternatives, resources or advice in the reblogs or replies, and i'll add them to the main post <3

Let's say you read '4% of Americans are currently behind on their mortgages'... What exactly does that mean? What can you infer about the state of loans in general?

One might ask themselves: Is that of all Americans or mortgage holders? What about couples that have both their names on it? What's the typical delinquency rate? High or lower than 4%? Has this rate changed rapidly? Are foreclosures included? Foreclosures within the past how many months?

on the way home, I encounter someone eating raspberries. I ask and they tell me that they grow their own, they got some seeds from the shop back in The Raspberry Days and kept them. They take me to a field of many beautiful raspberry plants and invite me to pick my own, they're free for all the town to pick whenever they'd like.

Private Equity: Pestilence (they are parasites that voraciously strip the value out of a healthy business until it withers and dies)

Workforce Optimization: Famine (cutting hours and employees until the business is starved of staff, barely functioning)

And it's not about apps or digital being faster, I'm all up for physical media, but commercially produced CDs from the 90s and early 2000s are reaching the end of their functional lifespan*, and are starting to fail.

If you have a lot of CDs, it would be a good idea to rip them into high fidelity digital audio, to preserve them.

*CD/DVD lifespans are tricky. Some estimates in peak, perfect conditions and maintenance go for almost 200 years. Others calculate between 20 to 30 years in "normal" use, though no one can agree what normal is.

I recommend buying a cheap DVD reader/writer unit -I bought mine for less than 20 USD - and then batch ripping stuff. Surprisingly Windows Media Player works out of the box, just make sure to save things in the correct format (mp3 or MP4) so you're not limited in playback.

You can of course find more robust options online, including VLC, to rip your files. Ripping a CD will not damage it or prevent it from working, it'll just make sure you have the option to burn a new one if your original happens to fail. This is 100% legal and ethical (and would be ethical still even if illegal, because piracy is always ethical in late stage capitalism and corporations are not your friends.)

I recommend redundancy for your backups (remember that time Apple fucked up with people's files by replacing them with itunes shit? Yeah) and if you're really techy, set up a NAS by your router, with your backups.

If your rips are high quality you can feed it to your computer/tablet/phone/any device in your network and always have access to CD quality audio no matter where you are.

Sources!

if you are saving digital audio for long term use make sure to use a lossless file type like .WAV

yes it’s a lot larger of a file but it won’t degrade over time

Until, of course, they showed it to a traditional leatherworker and she took one look at it and said “Oh yeah sure that’s a leather burnisher, you use it to close the pores of leather and work oil into the hide to make it waterproof. Mine looks just the same.” 

“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”

“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”

It’s just. 

So ancient Roman statues have some really weird hairstyles. Archaeologists just couldn’t figure them out. They didn’t have hairspray or modern hair bands, or elastic at all, but some of these things defied gravity better than Marge Simpson’s beehive.

Eventually they decided, wigs. Must be wigs. Or maybe hats. Definitely not real hair.

A hairdresser comes a long, looks at a few and is like, “Yeah, they’re sewn.”

“Don’t be silly!” the archaeologists cry. “How foolish, sewn hair indeed! LOL!”

So she went away and recreated them on real people using a needle and thread and the mystery of Roman hairstyles was solved.

“A hairdresser comes a long, looks at a few and is like, “Yeah, they’re sewn.”

“Don’t be silly!” the archaeologists cry. “How foolish, sewn hair indeed! LOL!”

So she went away and recreated them on real people using a needle and thread and the mystery of Roman hairstyles was solved.”

Did they? Did they really? The archeologists all laughed at the plucky hairdresser and then she proved her theory by simply recreating the styles?

See, what actually happened is that Janet Stephens (the hairdresser/hair archeologist in this post), who published an article about her theory in The Journal of Roman Archeology in 2008, spent about 6 years of research pursuing her idea that perhaps Roman hairstyles were sewn hair and not wigs. She did both hands-on experimentation sewing the actual hair, and more traditional research reading through a ton of sources. This is coming from an interview done with Stephens herself:

“Lots and lots of reading, poring over exhibition catalogs, back searching the footnotes to the reading and reading some more! It helped that I am fluent in Italian and, in 2006, I took a German for reading class. Working in my spare time, the research took 6 years.”

“I am an independent researcher, but my husband is a professor of Italian at the Johns Hopkins University, so I have library privileges there. We are friendly with colleagues in the Classics/Archaeology department and at the Walters Art Museum. They were kind enough to send me articles and clippings, read drafts and help with some picky Latin, though I try not to impose.”

(Source: http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/14729)

Wow, so people in the Classics/Archeology department and at the art museum sent her articles and clippings and HELPED her with her research as opposed to laughing at her in their gentleman’s club! It’s almost like people working the archeology/art history these days aren’t all stuffy old white guys from the 1950’s!

Stephens also presented her work at the Archeological Institute of America Conference, and according to the interview I cited above, it was apparently well received: “It seemed to create a a lot of buzz and people said they enjoyed it. It’s not every conference where you go to the poster session and see “heads on pikestaffs”!”

“The first three found were fragments less than a few centimeters long and might not have been recognized without experience working with later period bone tools. It is not something normally looked for in this time period.”

The archaeological team almost missed them because these bone fragments were both tiny and unexpected as “[the] technology [was] previously associated only with modern humans”. As in, Neanderthals had not been shown to have even been capable to make these artefacts before that point. I don’t think people quite understand how big of a deal this is - this is about the equivalent of finding pottery in a modern human group about 20 000 years ago (they haven’t but that’s the level of *that shouldn’t be there*)

This was identified *by the archaeologists working on the project* because they’d found them before. They fully knew what these artefacts were in the first place, they just didn’t expect to find them there.

Then to prove it, they replicated the use-wear by buying a modern tool off the Internet and doing microscopic analysis. There was not a single modern leather worker mentioned in either the article linked or the actual paper put out. That is absolutely something that would have been acknowledged in both of the papers.

This paper was revolutionary in our understanding of Neanderthal crafting capabilities, recognisied by brilliant and diligent archaeologists and this entire narrative of incapable stuck up archaeologists is an insult to their work.

The women who recognised that the blades were being stored out of reach of children were also archaeologists. Janet Stephens’ research is part of a legitimate branch of archaeological research called Experimental Archaeology. Experimental archaeology has been practiced academically/professionally since the 80s. I’m a hobbiest in a lot of historical crafts and have been the person that a colleague turned to when struggling to identify an artefact. We were able to figure out what it probably was because I knew what use-wear to look for and how to find parallels.

The narrative that archaeologists are opposed to interdisciplinary work is very frustrating

Important addition!

There’s a recent trend, especially online, to be anti academia or mistrust academia. Sure, there are probably plenty of instances where academics - who do know a shitton of stuff in their field! - are oblivious to something much more mundane that is obvious to another group of people, but as said above, usually they are open to consult others and learn, and include that in their findings.

This trend is often fueled by conspiracy theorists, or picked up by them to further their agendas and promote stupid, unscientific “theories” like ancient aliens, some obscure lost civilizations, or much worse things like flat earth and the anti-vax movement. And those then often go hand in hand with ideologies that mistrust “them” (meaning governments, scientists and any other public authorities) on any sector, and that dive into far-right conspiracy theories.

Any service you rely on for convenience can be weaponized against you the moment you begin to rely on it. Streaming used to be a cheap and convenient way to see movies at home. It is now exorbitantly expensive, you need multiple accounts just to get what you want, and any of those movies can be taken from you at any time. And unless you have gotten used to going through the “inconvenience” of owning physical media, you can do nothing about it. Same goes for buying things on Amazon. Same goes for any service like DoorDash etc. These companies WANT you to be reliant on them for convenience so they can do whatever they want to you because, well, what else are you gonna do?

Same thing goes for the uptick in AI. If you train yourself to become reliant on AI for doing basic things, you will be taken advantage of. It is only a matter of a couple years before there are no free AI services. Not only that, but in the usage of AI’s case, it is robbing you of valuable skills that you need to curate that you will be helpless without the moment the AI companies drive in the knife the way they have done with streaming. Delivery. Cable. Internet. Etc. It will happen to AI too. And if you are not practicing skills such as. Writing. You are not only going to be at the mercy of AI companies in the digital world, but you are going to be extremely easy to take advantage of in real life too.

I am begging you to let go of learned helplessness. I am begging you to stop letting these companies TEACH you helplessness. Do something like learn to pirate. It is way more inconvenient at the beginning, but once you know how, it is one less way companies can take advantage of you. Garden. Go to the thrift store (older clothes hold up better anyway). These things take more time and effort, yes, but using time and effort are muscles you need to stretch to keep yourself from being flattened under the weight of our capitalist hellscape.

B-17 bomber is riddled with German anti-aircraft fire but miraculously survives. Later they discover the explosive shells were all inert; sabotaged by Nazi slaves working in armament factories.

Do not post your crimes