Art and Junk

Some poc parents showing their support because images like these are rarely shown and hard to find.

THIS IS IMPORTANT.

For this week's Off Topic Tuesday: my shameless plug for Tidal.

I've seen posts circulating Tumblr complaining that Spotify has too much of a monopoly on music streaming, and it does! Part of the reason I switched to Tidal was because I do like to avoid supporting businesses I think have too much of a monopoly in favor of supporting "underdogs".

Another reason I switched to Tidal was because Spotify was having too many scandals for my taste in the content they platform (like allowing Andrew Tate's podcasts on how to traffic women, or Joe Rogan's COVID misinformation podcasts).

And also, as the linked article points out, Tidal has higher quality audio, and also pays artists better than Spotify.

The drawback is that Tidal doesn't have quite as much content as Spotify, for example Tidal is mostly music focused and has very few podcasts or audio books. For me this hasn't been an issue though, I just switched to using Pocket Casts for podcasts, and I'm not much of an audio book person in the first place (but I also know there's better alternatives than Spotify for listening to audio books, some are even through your library and support your local library!).

Like Etsy used to be except artists keep their money and the site is run off of a yearly fee for hosting stuff and some non invasive ads. There's other stuff, but the point is that the artists don't have to share a percentage on what they sell with the site.

That means that all searches as of today (Tuesday, May 26, 2026) are being run through Gemini’s latest model on both the input and output sides, regardless of previous opt-in or -out preferences

Here’s what you’re going to do:

Download and Install Firefox Mobile

Open the 3-dot Menu

Tap on “Settings”

Go to “Search”

Under “Alternative Search Engines,” tap “Add Search Engine”

Name it however you’d like and enter this: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%s&noai

Tap “Save”

Back in the “Search” menu, go to “Default Search Engine”

Tap on the newly added DuckDuckGo

Back in the “Search” menu, you’ll see Google enabled in your “Alternative Search Engines” - disable the toggle to remove Google results

Happy searching!