Fun Friday Resources
/And here we are in a “new year,” whatever that means to the cosmos.
For your TASK AVOIDANCE needs, I present a handful of online resources that can suck up your free time in a more productive and more relaxing way than doomscrolling. Use them wisely.
First up, the Internet Archive. You will be overwhelmed. You should be overwhelmed. There’s so much stuff there: books, music, art, images, and more. I’m currently listening to an old LP of the Magical World of Melody, a huge collection of those hummable pieces from the past 150 years or so.
If you click through that link to the album, make sure you click on the picture of the album: It flips over to provide you with all the liner notes of this literal album of LPs. If you are very much younger than I am, you may not have ever encountered the wealth of information that records and CDs used to provide. A great deal of my knowledge of musical history came from those notes.
(I’m in the Archive at least twice that I know of.)
Next up is Project Gutenberg, an enormous library of free e-books. I’ve used this site more than few times for resources. For example, when I directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Southern Arc Dance Company, I downloaded the text from Project Gutenberg and edited it down to the length we had agreed on and laid it out in Affinity for printing. Much cheaper and more efficient than ordering hard copies and then having to wrangle everyone’s copy into agreement.
It’s a great website if you’ve decided you need to catch up on your classic novels.
If audiobooks is more your style, check out LibriVox, which provides free recordings of books in the public domain. The selection is of course more limited, since all recordings are done by volunteers, and the selected books must be in the public domain in the U.S.
And speaking of the public domain, remember that you now have a whole new tranche of free-to-use works to STEAL FROM THE BEST.
