here's a list of programs/sites/whatever that were helpful to me when i was moving away from using spotify & back to downloading music:
soulseek - peer to peer downloading program, has most music you'd want. there's "rules" to it though and the UI is a little confusing, but you can figure it out. there's tutorials. i believe in you
cobalt.tools, ytiz.xyz, yt-dlp - mp3 downloaders, for the songs that you can't find on soulseek
musicbee - music player, extremely customiseable. reminds me of when i used itunes back in the day. has a lot of good features, including syncing music over to your phone
lastfm & listenbrainz - sites that keep track of your listening stats. i'd recommend this even if you still choose to use a music streaming service
syncedlyrics - cmd thing that gets you timed song lyrics, like the ones spotify has. there's no UI but it's easy enough to use. just grab the lyrics and timestamps it spits out and paste it into musicbee
music presence - program that shows what song you're listening to in your discord status, in case you use discord and enjoy the thought of other people seeing what you're listening to, which i do for some reason
i'm not going to lie to you and say that switching away from spotify/streaming services is an effortless task, it took me half a whole day of nonstop Work to get all my music downloaded and sorted out, but i will say that it was worth it!! and you should do it š if you want to
Spotifymate - not 100% reliable, but very helpful in downloading songs from your spotify lists to your mp3 folder.
MusicBrainz Picard - named after Starfleet's esteemed bald man, a program for all your tagging and renaming needs.
Mp3Tag - fewer features than Picard, but a bit easier to use. I like it especially for mass renaming of the tracks. Offers 3 days free without registration, and it counts only the days when you use it. Usually, one afternoon of using it gets you sorted out.
As a much-superior alternative to Spotifymate, take a look at casualOnTheSpot. It will grab entire public playlists, albums, or artists. It does have some bugs, but persistently retrying when it starts having issues, or re-running your query will almost always work.
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Iāve never in my life seen or been taught sentence structure like this. It seems incredibly interesting, though. Do any of my followers know anything about this or were taught this?
(Source: satrayreads on threads)
You know what I realizedā¦ schools are not teaching students how to diagram sentences anymore and it SHOWS. This used to be the bane of my ex
First, I do genuinely think it's a useful skill, for English language learning specifically (can't speak to other languages), given our rules are kinda...wibbly? A lot of my students, both native speakers and ESL kids, make the same common mistakes (like mistaking a verb in a clause for the main predicate, or the direct object for the subject, or writing a phrase as a complete sentence) and having them slow down and diagram stuff like this really helps. This is super useful when they move into more complex sentence structures and unorthodox ordering. "Will looked at the snow over the balcony." and "Over the balcony, Will looked at the snow." share an identical diagram. Where is Will looking? Over the balcony. Just because 'the balcony' is the first noun in the sentence does not make it the subject. You'd be surprised how much of a shocker this is to some kids.
Second, sorry if defining all the terms seems a bit pedantic, I figured if you're anything like me you dumbed this knowledge straight out of highschool, if you had it at all.
ok so, the most basic english sentence diagram is literally just this:
We call this a Sentence Skeleton and it is the minimum requirement for a complete sentence. ...Ok technically what you actually need is the Subject (main noun) and the Predicate (main verb phrase), there are often more non-subject nouns and non-subject predicate verbs, but it's just simpler to start this way. All complete sentences have complete sentence skeletons, no matter how complicated or simple, but if one of these two is missing, something's gone wrong. "Sue left." is a complete sentence, and the correct skeleton for this example. "Left school" is not a complete sentence either (the noun there is not the subject noun, 'school left' is not the sentence we're writing). "Sue had forgotten (her latin book)" is ALSO not the correct skeleton, despite having both a subject noun and a verb phrase, because 'had forgotten' is not the subject predicate.
what about all the other stuff??
right ok. the easiest way to tell where everything else goes in a diagram is just to ask how those words relate to the sentence skeleton. Lets take our full example:
Sue left school early because she felt sick, but her mother brought her back because she had forgotten her latin book.
Yikes ok! Here's a chart, and I'll explain why things go where.
A noun being acted upon by a verb is called a Direct Object. They go on the same straight line as the main sentence skeleton, and are placed after the verb. Where did Sue leave? Sue left School. (Indirect objects gooooo Elsewhere! Under the verb! we don't have one here)
Is 'school' early? No, she left early. Early, an Adverb is describing the verb (as adverbs do) so it goes on a diagonal line below the verb it is associated with. Adjectives, the ones that describe nouns, are diagrammed in the exact same way, just under their appropriate noun word instead. Articles like 'the' are diagrammed basically identical to adjectives.
Because! Oh joy, a clause. Now we can really get into it. So, this is now what we call a Complex Sentence because we have both a main, Independent Clause (sue left (early) school) and what we call a Subordinate Clause. Subordinate Clauses can not act as full sentences on their own. "She felt sick"? Full sentence, independent clause. "Because she felt sick"? NOT a full sentence. If it has one of them clause words in front of it, it's a Subordinate Clause, so it gets stuck under the main sentence line. Now, "Because" is a little funky, it's what we call a Subordinate Conjunction, meaning it's a lil like a conjunction where we're connecting two complete independent clauses, but instead of making them equal, it makes the connected sentence a subordinate clause. This is a little different from the more common under-the-sentence phrase work I'd usually start students with which involves the more flexible prepositions, which connect phrases which do NOT have to be full Independent Clauses. (in the sentence "Sue, who ate lunch, left school." "ate lunch" is not an Independent Clause because, would you look at that, we can't complete a sentence skeleton! It only has a verb and the Direct Object. "Who" is a preposition attached to 'Sue,' so it would go under her on a solid line. ok. ANYWAY) Subordinate Conjunctions = dotted diagonal line. Prepositions = solid diagonal line (because they are not full skeletons on their own). And then those lines go right down to whatever phrase they've got which is diagrammed accordingly. They've done a disservice by connecting these dotted lines to the middle of the phrases all sloppy like but here's a cleaner version
Subordinate Clauses and Phrases are connected to the main sentence structure under whatever word they're attached to just like our adjectives/adverbs. (In fact, if you noticed Prepositional phrases are diagrammed similar to adjectives/adverbs, you're correct! they're both expanding on a word or phrase in the main clause, just, one is a full phrase and the other is a word. 'John, who is green, writes books.' and 'Green John writes books' tells us the same extra thing about John (he's green), so that information is diagrammed in the same place (under John with a solid line). one just has some extra steps if that makes sense. And it's worth pointing out that if "Green John" was a proper noun both words would go up in the Subject spot. In this case it's being used as an adjective tho. I'm digressing again.)
ok alright. Because she felt si- what is THAT.
alright don't freak out. Sometimes the noun connected to the skeleton after the verb is NOT a Direct Object. What??? Yeah I know. Backslashes are for Predicate Adjectives which is panic inducing till you realize they're literally what they say on the tin: an adjective. In the Predicate. Wow. A Direct Object is something that is being acted upon by a transitive verb, a verb that is doing something. Sue left (transitive), so the place she left, 'school,' is a noun that is not describing Sue or her leaving (crucial). Certain verbs, called Linking Verbs, do not have Direct Objects and instead link (aha) the adjective, as a part of the Predicate clause, back to the subject. We use a backslash to indicate that, instead of having a DO and being a Separate Thing, our Predicate Adjective is reaching over the verb and back towards the subject.
BUT!!! A proper Conjunction??? From the Junction??? Wow a celebrity! Ok, did a little research and apparently the under-the-first-clause diagramming is an accepted strategy nowadays, but when I was a tyke, the idea was a conjunction combines two complete, equal sentences. This makes the sentence a Compound Sentence (there's two (or more) of them!) and they were diagrammed as such.
So the rest of this is pretty self explanatory. This is a Compound Complex Sentence, with two complete sentences and one 'because' subclause each. Note the 'had forgotten' is the full predicate of that last phrase, helper verbs get to sit pretty with their main partners, so they're in the same spot. Also note, despite being connected in front of the first 'because' phrase, I know the original sentence was 'Sue left school early because she felt sick, but her mother brought her back because she had forgotten her Latin book" and not, perhaps "Sue left school early, but her mother brought her back because she had forgotten her Latin book because she felt sick." because... 1 girl ur successive becauses. obviously. and more importantly 2!! that first because clause is attached to the First Sentence, not the second one. Attaching it to the second full sentence changes the meaning (she forgot her book because she was sick, now. that was not implied before even if it's a reasonable assumption!) and it would, obviously, be diagrammed differently. (this kind of split between the two complete sentences would be easier to see if the 'but' and second sentence was diagrammed out straight to the right, the way I was taught, but oh well.)
ok one more thing. I do want to say this diagram misses my absolute favorite bit of diagramming which is conjunctions between subjects or predicates.
So sometimes we combine two sentences and we notice we can be more efficient about it. Lets say. Sam hunted. and Dean hunted. It is grammatically correct to say "Sam hunted and Dean hunted." (two independent clauses combined by a conjunction) buuuut that's a little clunky. They're both hunting! So we say ok fine. We can say "Sam and Dean hunted." wooooah! neat! But how does that work on the diagram? do we have to separate it out again? NO. We get a āØSPACESHIPāØ
^ thing that actually made me do my english exercises when i was 10 (explosions and astronaut doodles not included)
And you can have as many lines in the space ship, or as many space ships, as you need. "Sam, Dean, and Cas hunted." (spaceship gets three lines) "Sam, Dean, and Cas hunted and ate pie." (spaceship has three lines and connects to ANOTHER SPACESHIP which has two predicates) so on and so forth. Any phrases connected to particular subject would be diagrammed under the subject. "Sam and his older brother Dean hunted." 'his older brother' would all be diagrammed as appropriate under Dean's line specifically, they are not describing Sam!
Listen all I'm saying is, all those posts about English grammar being bs? Wouldn't you like a map?
I thought this was an absolute waste of my time when I was learning it in 3rd-5th grade but I am eating my words now
Because internalizing this stuff (not learning it in a testable way but knowing it at a depth in which I can apply the knowledge) has made me a substantially better writer than I would have been otherwise
I miss sentence diagrams. In high school the English teacher was late to class and for funsies I diagrammed the Preamble to the US Constitution on the blackboard. That's how much I love sentence diagrams. They're so helpful for working out what is really being said.
i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.
there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.
anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.
A Better World - create an alternate history timeline
Alter Ego - abandonware birth-to-death life simulator game
Seedship - text-based game about colonizing a new planet
Sandboxels or ThisIsSand - free-falling sand physics games
Little Alchemy 2 - combine various elements to make new ones
Infinite Craft - kind of the same as Little Alchemy
Written Realms - more text adventure games with a user interface
The Cafe & Diner - mystery game
The New Campaign Trail - US presidential campaign game
Money Simulator - simulate financial decisions
Genesis - text-based adventure/fantasy game
Level 13 - text-based science fiction adventure game
Miniconomy - player driven economy game
Checkbox Olympics - games involving clicking checkboxes
BrantSteele.net - game show and Hunger Games simulators
Murder Games - fight to the death simulator by Orteil
Cookie Clicker - different but felt weird not including it. by Orteil.
if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.
I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard
Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.
Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.
Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.
Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.
SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.
SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.
Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.
Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.
Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.
Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.
Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here's a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.
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I study graphic design and my tutor recommended and used this in his classes at art college last year, itās so good it has SO many features for free, I really recommend it, even if youāre just trying to learn the basics of PS, such a wonderful thing <3
A skeleton crew doesn't mean a site is going away (though it likely won't get updates and bugs/outages will take longer to fix), but just in case anyone is concerned, here's a link to instructions to download your entire blog
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Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo weāve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and itās revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.
What about the one with the princess locked in a tower learning to become a wizard? Thatās lived in my mind for years and I havenāt seen it in a long time
Oh, love that story, adding it to the list:
20. Princess Talia
and adding a few more contenders
21. Thyme
22. The Monster under the Bed
23. A Meaningful Death
24. Humans are unstoppableā¦until they arenāt
25. The Monster under the Fridge
26. Antler Guy
27. Cleric slamming healing spells
Adding a few more I remembered:Ā
28. The Frog and the Scorpion
29. HSTHETE
30. The First Witch in the World
31. Imagine that Oceans were replaced by ForestsĀ
32. A Faerie taking a NameĀ
33. The Dragon on the FarmĀ
34. Synovus & MenaceĀ
35. Raising the Anti-ChristĀ
36. Aliens vs. Flora & Fauna of EarthĀ (pretty sure there are even more additions to the original post but I had this one saved)Ā
37. Doctors without Bordersā¦in Space!Ā
38. The Villain-WranglerĀ
39. The Last ContactĀ
40. The 100 Parent-Point ChildrenĀ
41. And the Heavens WeptĀ
42. The Night GentlemanĀ
43. The Serpent God and their PriestessĀ
Pinning this since I genuinely think Piracy is a great skill to have and I want to share it with anyone who'd like to see it
Okay so! You need to download something!
Be it a movie, a game, a software, a book. Where do you even start? You know people catch viruses or fines pirating, so how to do it, and do it safely? This is going to be a bit verbose, so coloured text has the most important info. THIS WILL BE LONG but you can just skim it! (P.S. there are some goodies for artists in the end so do take a peek there if you do art and would like courses or procreate brushes) By the end of this you should be able to download or stream almost anything.
(Disclaimer: I'm not super knowledgeable on the technical side of things, just a moderately seasoned pirate. Will explain stuff to the best of my abilities, but there will be wild semplifications. If there's any issue, or precisations you'd like to make, or just need a hand with something, feel free to reach out to me directly on here!)
Putting a cut here so I don't spam your dashes <3 - now, here we go:
First off: ADBLOCKERS. It's dangerous to go alone. Take this: a little browser add-on that will prevent you from seeing ads and popups ever again. Yeah, no more ads on Youtube either btw. Most malware you risk getting while pirating is the result of ads and pop-ups!
Important: Chromium based browsers will start dropping support for adblockers starting 2023. These include: Chrome, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave. (Brave has its built-in adblocker, but it's very controversial, has a huge focus on crypto, and tries to push its own crypto trading ads on you, among other things.)
This is simply happening because Google (who mantains Chromium) is in big parts an Ad Company, aka makes money from selling ads to you.
Mozilla Firefox is not affiliated or mantained in any way by Google, and will support Adblocking indefinitely. Just so you know.
The BEST Ad Blocker around is uBlock Origin, by Raymond Hill (gorhill). It's recommended that you use it at all times, as it will not slow down your browser but will improve your user experience drastically! Official add-on installs: Firefox, Chrome (until 2023)
How does it work?
There are two kinds of downloads: Direct Downloads and Torrents.
Direct Download Link (DDL): you click on the thing, the browser downloads it. Simple! It's an 1 on 1 communication between you and their servers. Pros: no hassle, super easy, nothing else to do, pretty safe. Cons: downloading big files is sloooow, and if your connection falters just a few seconds, you gotta start from the top again.
Torrenting: the good stuff. It's "Peer to Peer", or P2P. The way I understand it: you're put in a room (a "swarm") with a bunch of people. Some want the file (Peers and Leechers), some already have it and are giving it around (Seeders). You all share small pieces of the file around, and eventually everyone will get a complete file.
Seeders are the most important part: a torrent with zero seeders will not start (no one is giving out the file). A torrent with 200 seeders will be immensely faster than one with 3 seeders.
It's good etiquette to seed back what you download, in a 1:1.10 ratio: you upload what you downloaded (1:1) and then a little more. Sharing is caring!
Pros: fast, you can stop and resume whenever you want, you can find torrents of mostly anything, easy to download big files.
Cons: unsafe without a VPN (might get fined), a bit harder to understand, might take an hour or two to set everything up.
We will get more into Torrenting right now, as it will be the main way to pirate things.
How to Torrent files?
You will need: a Torrent Client, a VPN (optional, recommended), and either a .torrent file or a magnet link. Don't panic, this is easy!
Torrent Client: a little software that will actually manage the downloading. There is no reason to use anything else than qBittorrent: it's free, open source, frequently updated, has no ads, and has a neat little feature that we will see later. Download and install it and you're all set!
VPN: ok, so. You *can* download things without a VPN. I've done it a bunch. Please know, it's unsafe. VPNs are, like, the condoms of piracy. Depending on how strict your Internet Service Providers are about piracy, without them you might get a hefty fine, or simply a warning, or nothing at all. With torrenting, sadly, ISPs can kind of exactly see what you're downloading. VPNs fool your ISP. I'm not a fan of how much VPN services are fooling us in thinking we need them - but sadly us pirates DO need them.
I would personally not recommend free VPNs, they aren't too reliable in my experience. I also advice to use a VPN that allows "port forwarding" as that will make the downloads faster.
The most loved VPN service in the pirating community is Mullvad. It's VERY secure, actually cares about your privacy (unlike Nord, or even Proton sadly), has no yearly plans to rope you into nasty subscription models. It's so privacy oriented that you don't even need an email, they will simply give you an account number and you will use that. They do NOT want your data. Super neat!
Their service is 5ā¬ a month, and I suggest paying only one month, downloading a shitton of stuff, and then just leaving it be until you need another month of downloading bonanza.
You will see they accept and encourage crypto payments. Please don't judge them too harshly for this. I hate crypto as much as the next tumblr user - but this is not for crypto bros, this is because they really would like to not have your data if possible. There's people who want to avoid leaving behind any sort of trail showing that they, personally, purchased a VPN, and this option serves them.
Torrent files, magnet links: a torrent file is an actual file you download and open in your client. You download "bee_move.torrent", open it in qBittorrent, and it will start downloading! A magnet link simply bypasses having an actual file. it's a link that you will directly open in your client and will tell it what it needs to know, and acts in place of a .torrent file. They're virtually the same. There are dedicated torrent sites that let you search for the torrent you want, and offer either a torrent file or magnet download. Let's see how to find them!
Where to find stuff?
r/piracy Megathread - there are links to pirate anything that could be pirated. Navigate to the section you need and follow the instructions! There are usually both Torrent sites and direct download links. The masterpost isn't being mantained anymore - as of 31/10/2022, I'm still having luck with it and finding it a great resource. There are other masterposts though. For example, the Awesome Piracy megathread and the r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH wiki. As of April 2023, itās being rewritten!! Hell yeah!! Go check it out!
But some of the torrent sites listed on the masterposts are broken! :(
I hear ya, I hear ya! It's perfectly normal. For technical / legal reasons that I cannot comprehend, torrent sites need to change URLs often. This is where unblockit comes in. I'm not sure how it works, so I'm just going to say that it's magic. It gives you working links to all the best torrenting, streaming, DDL sites. From books to music to, uh, adult material. I usually refer to the masterpost to know which sites are the most trustworthy, and then use unblockit to access them. Generally, for example, you will want to avoid ThePirateBay, and prefer 1337x instead.
ALMOST DONE!!! There's one last important thing to set. This is a safety measure, for those who use a VPN service and want to make the most of it.
At times, the VPN connection you are using might falter for some seconds. These few seconds that it's not working, your torrent might still be downloading, exposing your IP address briefly and letting your ISP catch you. There is an easy and quick way to prevent this from happening. It's called binding the VPN network interface to your torrent client - it's a big name, but it means you tell your client (qBittorrent) to ONLY connect to the internet via the VPN. No VPN? No connection. No IP leakage. Linked guide above will take you a couple minutes at most.
This is the basic stuff! :D You should be able to download pretty much all you need just from this!
However, since I'm a nerd, here's some other useful things, or more niche sites.
There are tips to make torrenting with VPN faster - I gotta be honest man, I still don't understand *how* this "Port Forwarding" business works, and for some reason I cannot get it to work right now with Mullvad (previously I had North which doesn't support this feature at all). My internet is too slow for me to really mind, anyway. But you should look into it if you're using a VPN and getting slow download speeds on torrents with 20+ active seeders.
Now, this is for all the artists out there. Online-courses.club has, like, an INFINITY of art courses and tutorials, and even some software. It's INSANE, super helpful, some of these courses would otherwise cost SO much. I've been getting a lot of use out of it. They're mostly DDLs, too! I can't recommend it enough!!!
Now, time for brushes. I've had a lot of difficulty finding good brushes for Procreate that didn't cost too much. This telegram channel has a neverending quantity of Procreate brushes: t.me/free_brushes. Sometimes Photoshop brushes crop up too. For some popular brushes, they ask for "donations" to download them instead of giving the actual download, which is a big yikes honestly. Thankfully, it's rare. In there, if you scroll really far, there's also a link to another smaller group to download Max Ulichney's brushes. I have no way of directly linking it off-telegram (it never generated an username or link!), but if you can't find it shoot me a message on @plantcreature on TG and I'll link it to you directly there!
My favourite way to pirate and share music is Soulseek, a neat little software that work as a Peer To Peer service, but between you and a single other person at a time. You share all your music folder, and others can download from it when you're online. In return, you can download other people's music from their shared folders. It's lovely, the quality of the files is GREAT, the community is actually really chill and honest, since it's just a bunch of peeps sharing mp3s and flacs.
There's also a LOT of telegram bots to download music or videos from several platforms. @MusicDownloaderRobot downloads from Spotify, @joeymusicbot from Deezer, @mediadownbot rips videos and music from stuff like reddit, tiktok, facebook, twitter etc, and t.me/BotsArchive has a vast collection of bots just like these. They can come in handy!
Lastly, since I am Italian, here's some resources to find italian material.
Those around my age or older might remember TNT Village as the n.1 source of italian torrents. It's closed down, but the magnet links for archived stuff are still out there. Only way to access them that I found rn is this Telegram bot: @tntvsearchbot. Source code here for those who understand this stuff.
There's also programmiedovetrovarli, great resource for famous software (Adobe, Office, etc) with instructions in italian. Needs adblocker to be deactivated on their site, but has no popup ads, just standard banners.
Well, this was a lot! Thank you for reading, I hope I was able to help in some way!
Please remember: illegal does not automatically mean unethical, or immoral. Everyone is free to choose what to do and think about piracy. Don't ruin this for those who choose to engage with it, and don't push this on those who'd rather steer clear. I am personally sharing this with you, because my personal opinion is that pirating is often moral, and avoiding giving money to certain corporations (Adobe and Disney come to mind) is always preferred when you can't or don't want to outright avoid and boycott their products altogether.
If you can afford to, always support small creators and artists.
If you cannot afford to, then consider that pirating and enjoying their creations, then spreading the word and talking about it online, is still beneficial to them!
hey i just wanted to put a quick post up for people that may not know, cuz i certainly didnt until a couple years ago, but the whole prescription glasses industry is a massive racket, and i wanted to let people know about the more affordable options for buying or replacing glasses
when you go to an optometrist to get your eyes tested, they take a lot of measurements and will give you a prescription that lists things like how near or farsighted each eye is, spherical and cylindrical measurements for astigmatism, etc, but one measure they almost always leave out of the portion they give you is your interpupillary distance, that is, the distance between your pupils, measured in millimeters
the reason they leave that out is because if you have your full prescription, including the interpupillary distance, you can just go online and buy glasses from a place like zenni optical for less than $20 USD. and if you go and buy them online, thats ~$200 they dont get to bilk from you
so, you have two options, you can either request your interpupillary distance number when you get your eyes tested, which they cant legally withhold from you because its medical information
This Is Specifically Enforced By The Federal Trade Commission!
they dont get to withhold this! a lot of them will lie to you, or try to skirt around it, because they want your money. raise a fucking stink. this is an argument you can win.
the other option is to measure your interpupillary distance at home, using either a ruler and a mirror, or a phone app which is made for this purpose
once you have your full prescription information, you can buy glasses online, made to your specific prescription, for well under a TENTH the cost of ones you would buy at a brick and mortar store
here are some other options for cheaper glasses! DO NOT LET YOURSELF BE SCAMMED BY LUXOTTICA if you live in the US or canada!! places like bon look (canadian) and warby parker (american) will give you paperwork to get reimbursed by your insurance plan, as well.
Shout-out to @ms-demeanor for putting these on my dash again, Iād like to add this exceptional interview question āanswer guideā that explains traps and āthe bestā way to answer over 64 common questions. I donāt know who to attribute it to, but here it is: PDF from tri valley one-stop career center.
SUPER vouching for alison green/ask a managerās job interview advice but wanted to flag something real quick about the PDF:
it is not - like Really not - a good and clever trick to say āyou know, i donāt really have a weakness vis a vis this position.ā that doesnāt get you anything but skepticism from an interview panel, nor should it.
why? because everybody has weaknesses, and a lot of those weaknesses tend to impact your performance in the workplace. and because your interviewers are also humans, they know this. so you saying āhmm no i fit this job perfectly actuallyā comes across as unwillingness to share what your challenges in the job might be or just an outright lack of introspection about what they even are. both of which are pretty negative!
personally, i have a problem with time management because itās difficult for me to track the passage of time due to my mental condition as well as an abuse response that manifests itself as an unwillingness to push back on new tasks when iām at capacity. i know this about myself and am open about it in interviews. i also work a white-collar job and have a really high interview-to-job offer conversion rate. how? because the sell is what is important!
for me that goes like this: āthe biggest challenge iāve had in the workplace is being able to flag for my management team when iām at capacity. i always want to help out, and iāve figured in the past that my manager is aware of my workload and scheduling - and that if theyāre asking anyway, i need to find a way to work it in. i know now thatās not always the case! this is something iāve been able to address with tracking tools that let me look at my current workload, as well as talking with my manager when assigned a new task about where this item should go in my priority list - and if iām at capacity, what items should be left undone.ā
you can obviously remix this however you want but the gist of this idea: yes, you have to answer the weaknesses question with a real weakness. what you should NOT do is talk about a weakness that you arenāt currently trying to solve for or mitigate. if you can clearly articulate both your problem and your solution you will probably have at least a passable answer to this question.
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(european, middle eastern, african, asian, oceanic, native american, etc. etc.)
3. Learn a Language
This site is full of lists of words, phrases, etc with meanings and pronunciation for a bunch of languages. I wish I had discovered it earlier, it is really helpful.
4. Lexicity
Filled with a lot of resources for ancient languages like Akkadian, Egyptian, Mayan, Old English, etc.For each language, it has dictionaries, grammars, texts and some other resources.
5. BBC language learning
This site is filled with courses and lectures etc. for about 40 languages! It also has handy lists like '12 essential phrases in so and so language'
6. Internet Polyglot
This site does not have a languages, but is really good for learning and understanding languages.
7. Ethnologue
this is not exactly a language learning site, but worth a mention. The site claims claims to have language information, language family maps, etc. for world's 7,139 known living languages. It also has your basic information relatied to languages, like the most and least spoken one, endangered ones, etc.
8. Native Language
quote from their site: Native Languages of the Americas:
Preserving and promoting American Indian languages
A very good Google document with language learning resources for more than 100 resources is this (credit to reddit user u/chlebka)
Another very good folder is this (credit to the tumblr user @salvadorbonaparte)
If there is some language you want to learn but it is not available on any of the above sites, feel free to send ask me to look for resources for that language. I'm more than happy to help. Or you could message me at @life-gave-me-oranges (my main).
please inform me if any of the above links are broken
this feels like a good reference (and if possible, from personal experience, iād recommend packing ahead of time if you canā¦your panicked brain is not as effective as you think it is)
Yo ho to the bottle I go @magicandawe - Tumblr Blog | Tumlook
