breathing deeply, walking backwards

MARK: The day that I moved to San Diego, I got up in the morning, loaded up my shitty Nissan Stanza, drove from my small town down to San Diego. Halfway there, I was like, what am I going to do in this big city? Like I don't know anybody, I don't really want to get a job, I don't want to do anything. I like playing music. So we got to my mom's house, unloaded my car, turned to my sister and I go, well, what do I do now? Like, I want to play music, and what do I do? I put an ad in a paper? Do I put like, you know, fucking bassist wants mediocre bandmates? And my sister was like, my boyfriend has a friend who plays guitar, loves punk rock, loves skateboarding, you should meet him. So we got in the car that night, drove over to this guy's house, and it was Tom.

DANIELLE: Wow, you were like set up on a friend date.

MARK: Yeah. Blind friend date. But it went great. Like, I went into his garage where he had his bedroom because his parents were going through a bad divorce, and we started playing music and laughing and hanging out. And that night we wrote a song that we still play today, it's called Carousel.

DANIELLE: I wonder if that's the only story of meeting a guy who has a bedroom in his garage and going into it on your first blind meeting. If that's the only story that's worked out well.

MARK: Totally. Yeah. Absolutely. It's a blind date :)

DANIELLE: I don't recommend that for most blind dates, but it did pay off in this situation. Okay, so how quickly do the two of you form blink-182?

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