Ok but like. What the fuck is there to do on the internet anymore?

Idk when I was younger, you could just go and go and find exciting new websites full of whatever cool things you wanted to explore. An overabundance of ways to occupy your time online.

Now, it’s just… Social media. That’s it. Social media and news sites. And I’m tired of social media and I’m tired of the news.

Am I just like completely inept at finding new things or has the internet just fallen apart that much with the problems of SEO and web 3.0 turning everything into a same-site prison?

Long collection of resources under the cut.

Keep reading

ALSO you should consider browsing Virtual Pet List and seeing if there are any pet sites you might be interested in playing. There is a whole genre of browser games right under your nose

Another one that I just found recently is this, which is a whole collection of blogs, organized by topic!

Look guys the real internet IS STILL THERE I’m going to cry

Getting off of twitter and onto neocities has really healed me and I am so glad to see it is healing other people too ;u; let’s retreat into the self-made digital woods and away from corporate bs pls, I am so tired

The internet is still there, it’s just been cordoned off by The Internet™️ in hopes that we forget about it and keep feeding data to the Machine.

tweet

Something like this would be so colossally helpful. I'm sick and tired of trying to research specific clothing from any given culture and being met with either racist stereotypical costumes worn by yt people or ai generated garbage nonsense, and trying to be hyper specific with searches yields fuck all. Like I generally just cannot trust the legitimacy of most search results at this point. It's extremely frustrating. If there are good resources for this then they're buried deep under all the other bullshit, and idk where to start looking.

>:)c

May I present to you, nationalclothing.org?

It doesn't have everything, but it's still my first source when researching traditional clothing from other cultures.

There's also this resource on historical fashion: Claire’s Historical Fashion Reference & Resources

another addition as far as physical media goes there is the encyclopedia of national dress (that i still need to buy myself bc this kind of thing is super important to my sort of fantasy designing) but yes i do agree i wish there was EVEN MORE documentation on this

here are some resources for Indian clothing archives:

The Sari Series: a digital anthology documenting India's regional saree drapes though short films

Purushu Arie's blog; started when he was studying at NIFT, the blogger has gone on to become a leader in the neo-traditional fashion scene in India.

if anyone knows more please add links !

the father the son and the holy spirit

I saw this post and it was literally them

I was exploring an area and found a sign that read ‘Under surveillance by guard’ and said, “Oh boy, I hope it isn’t a man with incredibly suspicious eyebrows.” And then saw the guard and his eyebrows looked like this and I laughed so hard I woke up.

a group of the two of us

hi, here’s my frame for the #EveryFrameMatters project! please look at the finished project here!

For all the people who said that the eye reflections in nimona represented a characters alliagence how does it feel to be right?

From art of nimona

refseek.com

www.worldcat.org/

link.springer.com

http://bioline.org.br/

repec.org

science.gov

pdfdrive.com

PDFDrive stopped working a couple months ago, but you can try oceanofpdf.com instead.

a guy walks in with two puncture wounds on his neck like “u should see the other guy” and then a vampire walks in covered in those cartoony lipstick kiss marks

i’m really glad this post was a hit with the gays

I had to draw this 

If you like cheese and boobs and live in or near Michigan, you should definitely come to the StripCheese burlesque show on Oct 1. This is a one night only event!

Tickets and more details here.

This will be my last burlesque show ever. I'm retiring from this art form so I can focus on other types of performance (more on that in another post), but I wanna go out with a big bang, and what better to sum up my decade+ career than a celebration of cheesy comedy, stripping, and too many props! This lineup is amazing, this theatre is amazing, and you can eat cheese while you watch. I'm really proud of what we've put together.

If you've ever wanted to see me perform burlesque, this is literally your last chance, so come on out next week. It's gonna be a "grate" time!

In case you didn't know, I've been performing burlesque as Florence of a'Labia for the past decade. This cheese themed show will be my final performance. I've worked really hard on this, so please come/spread the word.

behold all my stick figures

Til it costs $32,093 to have a normal vaginal birth in the United States, and $50,000 for a cesarian. Not to mention $40 to hold your newborn after birth, $10 a day to use the telephone, $25 for an extra pillow. 🥺

via reddit.com

I’m due in June

These costs all vary by hospital, and they’re all massively inflated. They’re part of complex negotiations between the hospital and the insurance company, and they’re a scam.

The hospital puts all these little charges together to “justify” a giant bill. Then they “lower” those costs to what they’ve already agreed on with your insurance company. The insurance company then tells you “look how much we reduced your bill by our negotiating!” and then pays some portion of that bill and passes the rest on to you, depending on your deductibles and so on.

If you have no insurance, you don’t get the benefit of the “negotiated” price - they keep the price that high as part of a deal with insurance companies who are trying to justify why you should pay them so much in premiums every month. If out of pocket patients paid less, nobody would get insurance.

We need price transparency where hospitals have to publish these costs and make them available to everyone. We need to be able to call people out when they charge $20 for a tissue and $30 for a band-aid. We also need to be able to compare prices and choose hospitals that give us the best balance of cost and quality. 

We also need to stop acting like giving everyone health insurance is the solution to our broken healthcare system. The insurance companies are the ones who broke it. 

If you are facing a big bill after a hospital stay, whether for giving birth or for anything else, here are some ways to reduce that bill.

1. If you have insurance, call them and ask for an explanation of what they didn’t cover. The person will probably not have one for you. Say you are not willing to pay a bill if they can’t explain why you owe it. The insurance company will sometimes re-submit the claim and cover more of your cost. 

2. Call the hospital billing department and ask for an itemized bill. This alone may reduce the cost somewhat because they were overcharging you to begin with. 

3. When you get the itemized bill, go through it. Highlight any items that seem exceptionally overpriced or even that don’t apply to your visit (a medication you didn’t receive, a procedure that wasn’t done, etc.)

4. Call the hospital billing department back and go through the itemized bill, asking for clarification on all the items you flagged. They may remove items or reduce the cost.

5. Explain that you are unable to pay your bill in full and ask about a settlement or payment options. Sometimes the hospital will be willing to take a significantly lower amount if you can pay all at once, or you can get a payment plan with no interest that is feasible for you. 

This is based on how my husband has been fighting medical bills for the last couple of years. He has a chronic illness and has frequent appointments, procedures, tests, etc. He frequently gets large bills and then negotiates them down to much smaller ones, or in some cases has gotten bills dismissed completely. 

He says that calling the billing department and the insurance company and simply asking them to explain the charges makes a huge difference every time, because the person on the phone almost never has an explanation for why the bill is so high. 

You ARE being overcharged, and you don’t have to just deal with it. You can fight back!

this,,, thank you this is going to be so fucking helpful

I’m gonna give you something actionable.

If you are in trouble and need help navigating the confusing hellscape of medical billing, these people may be able to help you a lot.

From their site:

That’s immense for someone who has few emotional resources to deal with red tape. Like sick, disabled, or neurodivergent people, new parents, caretakers, etc.

If you are a social worker, add this resource to your resource list IMMEDIATELY. That little sheaf of endlessly copied phone numbers, mostly out of date, could use some updating, don’t you think?

This shit saves lives. Suicide rates are EIGHT TIMES HIGHER for people in debt. For God’s sake, raise a light to maybe help ease the burden.

Spread this with love.

had a minor crisis when 12ft.io went down yesterday and thankfully it's back now but this seems like a good opportunity to compile a list of similar paywall-evading tools in case 12ft ever gets canned for real:

Hey with all the piracy going on, be careful

you don’t know what could have a virus, don’t blindly trust random people on tumblr/twitter offering free cartoons!

I’ve been pirating stuff a couple years and I want to give some advice in case someone hasn’t done it before

-The piracy subreddit (reddit.com/r/piracy) is a great place to start, there’s a guide there that can give you links to everything you would want (streaming sites,torrenting sites,where to get roms,what torrenting programs to use ect.)

- if your streaming ALWAYS USE A AD BLOCKER (and cookie clearer if you want extra protection) piracy sites 99% of the time are full of ads and pop-ups. If you don’t want to a bunch of local milfs in your area ads covering your screen use a ad blocker. Any ad blocker will work but I’m currently using ublock origin + privacy badger

-if your torrenting ALWAYS USE A VPN,even if it’s a free shitty one. If you don’t use a VPN your isp could try to shut off your internet if you get caught pirating or you could be fined if you live in certain countries, also its generally safer. If you don’t have the money to pay for a VPN I would recommend proton vpn, it’s free and it doesn’t keep logs (which means you data isn’t being kept and sold like most free vpns)

- this is mentioned in the megathread on r/piracy but I’ll mention it here just to make sure. try to avoid using pirate bay,it’s full of malware and viruses. Also don’t use utorrent (when you install it it also installs a bitcoin miner), I would recommend using qbittorrent instead.