Sarah, 28, Belgium. Solidarity and intersectionality.
Passionate about human rights.
Fascinated by stories.
Black Sails, Discworld, TAZ Balance and Pride (2014) helped form my soul. Currently wildly obsessed with ALOTO (2022), mostly Jess and Lupe.
Also very into assorted unhinged queer sff books. Gay for my friends, the gayest for my wife.
Chapter 1: I’m not going to pretend (that I’m the kind of girl you’d call more than a friend) (5106 words)
Jess and Lupe know too well how the world looks at people like them. But then they meet, and they see each other.
This is an exploration of Jess’ and Lupe’s relationship throughout Season 1, as they become friends, get wildly horny for each other, fall in love, and finally do something about it. This fic is as canon compliant as humanly possible, and is built out of a mix of scenes from the show told from their perspectives, expanded upon background moments, and plenty of missing scenes.
(This fic is already fully written. It consists of 11 chapters, totalling up to about 60k words. I will be posting one chapter a day.)
this fic is officially complete as of yesterday! Please go read it and leave a comment if you enjoyed it, you’d make my day!
Spotify Premium ad: “Imagine playing music without interruptions! Infinite skipping! Replay the song you want! And even do it offline? No ads! Whatever songs you want! For a small monthly payme-” Me: *nods, turns off Spotify and turns on my MP3 player and does all the things they offer, but for free and with songs they don’t even have*
For those of you who might not know how to do any of this:
To convert CD audio into mp3s, you just follow the steps here
To play mp3 files, you download an mp3 player like Winamp here and away you go
On mobile? There are plenty of free mp3 players for your phone available, too, so check them out
You don’t need to be tethered to an online streaming service for your music. Be free.
You can also rip audio files from youtube and find files all over the internet. It is far easier to come across great and lesser known music if you dont limit yourself to spotify.
Here’s a tutorial on how to get the music and playlists you like with unlimited listening/downloads.
This is a free way to do it that I believe is a balance between cost, time, and pros & cons:
If you have the CDs, it will be easier to rip them. Most music managers include this feature and you will have all the track information loaded into the file. There are also pirate websites where you can download entire albums with
their metadata attached, but there could be risks associated (I would worry more about viruses than lawsuits these days, though). Deciding a method for acquiring music is a balance of the required time, the alternative costs, and other pros/cons like supporting the artist or taking the risk of pirating sites.
1. Find the song on Youtube.
YT has pretty much every song at this point, usually in comparable quality to what you would get on a streaming
service.
This is great if you already listen to music on Youtube, but there might be a better
method for going direct from Spotify, though this will work either way. The main downside to this method is that official music (and even lyric) videos sometimes have non-music portions so you might have to listen to the whole thing to be sure. SponsorBlock will highlight non-music sections for most artists, so if you have it installed you can tell at a glance if this is the case.
2. Download the audio from YT. There are many ways to download YT videos completely for free.
It’s probably against the YT terms of service, but you’re not going to get sued.
I like y2mate for downloading YT videos (or their audio in mp3s) because it’s a simple, ad-free website. You just paste in the URL for the video you want to download. Sometimes it’s laggy and you have to come back later, but usually after a few moments the video loads, you select your download quality (the highest), and then save it. For easy file management, download everything in folders for the Artist, and then sub folders for the Album, and name the MP3 file the “song name”.mp3.
3. Upload to your music player/manager of choice. The file will currently be lacking metadata (Artist, Album,
track number, etc) and will be added to the library as a song with its title set as the file name minus its .mp3 extension. Various music players/managers have different ways to add metadata (usually accessed by right-clicking the song) with varying ease.
iTunes is free and and logical if you have an iPhone, but limited in its capabilities. I do all my management/listening in MusicBee (free for Windows) because of its playlist and management
features, as well as having a very customizable interface. You can set it to scan the folders you download music to so it will automatically load things into your library, or do so manually. Once loaded into MusicBee, you can batch edit an entire album’s metadata at once easily with Auto-Tagging. Auto-Tag can fetch the details from the internet and fill in artist, tracks, album artwork, etc and save that information to the mp3 file. You can edit this manually if needed too. Drag and drop the edited songs to any other player you may want to add them to so it can find the files.
4. Now you can use the player of your choice to listen endlessly, form playlists, etc. Some free music managers also have music discovery/recommendation features for expanding your collection.
MusicBee allows you to create playlists with folders, subfolders, and
dynamic features.
You can export these playlists for cross-platform play on
other computers with MusicBee installed. I think the playlist features on MusicBee are better than what is on streaming services.
You can create an auto-playlist of your recently-added music so you can easily find the ones that are new and might need need editing, adding to other playlists, etc. I have custom tags for music by LGBT artists, sapphic love songs, and more. I also drag-and-drop these playlists directly into iTunes so I have them on my phone too (you can do this to make a new playlist or just edit/add songs to a current one).
There are many music managers/players, including cross-platform ones with streaming,
though they usually have fees for that feature.
Because you aren’t streaming the music and rather storing it, you’ll need space on each device you want to play the music on, but memory is cheap these days.
You can buy a 2TB external harddrive for less than Spotify or Youtube Premium costs for six months, so having to store the songs isn’t much of a downside. Plus, the song will never “leave the service”, you can listen to it offline, etc.
I do encourage people to pay for art, especially from small, independent artists. You have to pay for art if you want to keep it alive, but there is debate over if streaming services are really “paying the artist”. Alternatives include buying and ripping CDs, purchasing merch or tour tickets (where artists make a lot of their money), etc to support them with something other than streaming views.
ID. a tweet from Don Hughes @/getfiscal dated Feb 18 21. it reads, “Started imagining paying for Spotify for the next thirty or so years and got a bit dizzy, cancelled a bunch of subscriptions, installed Linux on my computer and then pulled out my old CDs to rip. Going caveman.” End ID.
Seconding MusicBee! Also, you can use a library subscription to access Freegal, which allows (depending on your library system) up to five free downloads a week. Completely free, actually legal, yours to keep, no DRM or any crap like that.
For indie producers, always check if they have something like Bandcamp! Bandcamp lets you download as well, and has significantly higher royalties going to the actual artists (Spotify pays them… very little).
Jsyk, winamp rips cds natively. You can set whatever bitrate you like. Been doing *that* since last century.
Every time I try to purchase music legitimately, I run into an infinite scrolling wall of streaming options which will suck money out of my pocket for all eternity in return of mediocre garbage service, and not a single goddamn option to simply receive audio files I can play on my fucking devices.
And legitimate purchase options might be gated even further behind region-locking and all kinds of DRM bullshit.
If I can find a Bandcamp, I always buy from that, because they offer proper audio quality and multiple formats (and I like my FLACs). If I can’t, I’ll buy the music on iTunes, and go looking for whatever way is available to obtain files in a better format than Apple’s m4v bullshit.
I want to buy music from musicians legitimately, I really really fucking want to, and I don’t want to feed the fucking ghoulish parasite middle-man assholes at Spotify while I’m doing it.
seeing the terms “bad rep” and “good rep” applied to media that was created by and for an in-group makes me want to eat glass
“not sure if this is a good representation of the trans community :/“ right well a trans person made it, and they made it for other trans people, so. perhaps that logic is not applicable here. must we live our entire creative lives under the watchful eye of Cisgender Scrutiny? how can you compare self-expression to willful misrepresentation lmao
no one is ever allowed to be feminine ever again and in fact the goal of feminism is to make everyone ever a hairy butch lesbian. sorry, but this is what must happen in order to achieve true equality.
Do you think Harrow did the search-and-replace thing with Gideon’s last name too? Did she hear the Erebos’s crew talk about how they were trying to nigenadigate to their destination but there were unigenadoidable obstacles in the way?
ALT
