Here’s an easy resolution: This stuff is all free as long as you have access to a computer, and the skills you learn will be invaluable in your career, and/or life in general.
Chandoo is one of many gracious Excel experts who wants to share their knowledge with the world. Excel excellence is one of those skills that will improve your chances of getting a good job instantly, and it will continue to prove invaluable over the course of your career. What are you waiting for?
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Perhaps no other skill you can learn for free online has as much potential to lead to a lucrative career. Want to build a site for your startup? Want to build the next big app? Want to get hired at a place like BuzzFeed? You should learn to code. There are a lot of places that offer free or cheap online coding tutorials, but I recommend Code Academy for their breadth and innovative program. If you want to try a more traditional route, Harvard offers its excellent Introduction to Computer Science course online for free.
You could use a pre-existing template or blogging service, or you could learn Ruby on Rails and probably change your life forever. Here’s an extremely helpful long list of free Ruby learning tools that includes everything from Rails for Zombies to Learn Ruby The Hard Way. Go! Ruby! Some basic programming experience, like one of the courses above, might be helpful (but not necessarily required if you’re patient with yourself).
If you’re not interested in coding anything other than fun game apps, you could trythis course from the University of Reading. It promises to teach you how to build a game in Java, even if you don’t have programming experience! If you want to make a truly great game, you might want to read/listen up on Game Theory first.
Spreeder is a free online program that will improve your reading skill and comprehension no matter how old you are. With enough practice, you could learn to double, triple, or even quadruple the speed at which you read passages currently, which is basically like adding years to your life.
With Duolingo, you can learn Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, or English (from any of the above or more). There’s a mobile app and a website, and the extensive courses are completely free.
Full disclosure: BuzzFeed and other websites are in a partnership with DuoLingo, but they did not pay or ask for this placement.
Tired of your farmer’s market haul going bad before you use it all? Or do you just love tangy pickled veggies? You too can pickle like a pro thanks to SkillShare and Travis Grillo.
You can take the University of Washington’s Intro to Public Speaking for free online. Once you learn a few tricks of the trade, you’ll be able to go into situations like being asked to present at a company meeting or giving a presentation in class without nearly as much fear and loathing.
UC Berkeley put a stats intro class on iTunes. Once you know how to understand the numbers yourself, you’ll never read a biased “news” article the same way again — 100% of authors of this post agree!
Knowing the basics of psych will bring context to your understanding of yourself, the dynamics of your family and friendships, what’s really going on with your coworkers, and the woes and wonders of society in general. Yale University has its Intro to Psychology lectures online for free.
Step one: Learn how to play guitar: Justin Guitar is a fine and free place to start learning chords and the basic skills you’ll need to be able to play guitar — from there, it’s up to you, but once you know the basics, just looking up tabs for your favorite songs and learning them on your own is how many young guitar players get their start (plus it’s an excellent party trick).
Step two: A delightful free voice lesson from Berklee College Of Music.
Step three: Have you always thought you had an inner TSwift? Berklee College of Music offers an Introduction to Songwriting course completely for free online. The course is six weeks long, and by the end of the lesson you’ll have at least one completed song.
Step four: Lifehacker’s basics of music production will help you put it all together once you have the skills down! You’ll be recording your own music, ready to share with your valentine or the entire world, in no time!
Let Stanford’s Stan Christensen explain how to negotiate in business and your personal life, managing relationships for your personal gain and not letting yourself be steamrolled. There are a lot of football metaphors and it’s great.
If you struggled with math throughout school and now have trouble applying it in real-world situations when it crops up, try Saylor.org’s Real World Math course. It will reteach you basic math skills as they apply IRL. Very helpful!
All kids draw — so why do we become so afraid of it as adults? Everyone should feel comfortable with a sketchbook and pencil, and sketching is a wonderful way to express your creativity. DrawSpace is a great place to start. (I also highly recommend the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain if you can drop a few dollars for a used copy.)
BuzzFeed’s own Katie Notopoulos has a great, simple guide to making an animated GIF without Photoshop. This is all you need to be the king or queen of Tumblr or your favorite email chains.
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Have you never really “gotten” jazz? If you want to be able to participate in conversations at fancy parties and/or just add some context to your appreciation of all music, try this free online course from UT Austin.
Macalester College’s lecture series is excellent. If you’re more interested in journalism, try Wikiversity’s course selection.
Another invaluable skill that will get you places in your career, learning Photoshop can be as fun as watching the hilarious videos on You Suck At Photoshop or as serious as this extensive Udemy training course (focused on photo retouching).
Lifehacker’s basics of photography might be a good place to start. Learn how your camera works, the basic of composition, and editing images in post-production. If you finish that and you’re not sure what to do next, here’s a short course on displaying and sharing your digital photographs.
Instructables has a great course by a woman who is herself an online-taught knitter. You’ll be making baby hats and cute scarves before this winter’s over!
If you are lucky enough to have a regular income, you should start learning about savings and investment now. Investopedia has a ton of online resources, including this free stocks basics course. Invest away!
Unf$#k Your Habitat has a great emergency cleaning guide for when your mother-in-law springs a surprise visit on you. While you’re over there, the entire blog is good for getting organized and clean in the long term, not just in “emergencies.” You’ll be happier for it.
Most cities have free community classes (try just searching Google or inquiring at your local yoga studio), or if you’re more comfortable trying yoga at home, YogaGlohas a great 15-day trial and Yome is a compendium of 100% free yoga videos. If you’re already familiar with basic yoga positions but you need an easy way to practice at home, I recommend YogaTailor’s free trial as well.
It’s simple and just imagine the minutes of your life you’ll save!
Apartment 502 is a 18+ slice-of-life romantic drama inspired by shows like New Girl and Friends.
Content warnings include: explicit language, sexual themes, substance use, violence.
Moving from your small home town to New York City was supposed to be a dream. You were supposed to start your new life with your long-distance partner and dive headfirst into full-on adulthood. Everything was supposed to be perfect. How can you not love being in your mid-twenties in the Big Apple?
That is until your put-together, white collar partner dumps you the same day you arrive.
Fun.
Essentially homeless and and determined to make the life you dreamed of, you take a last-minute offer to move into the spare bedroom in Apartment 502. Now, you're twenty-five and living with three other longtime best friends with their own drama and messy interpersonal relationships. Parties, late-night pizza runs, drama, fights, heartbreak, betrayals...maybe the life you want won't be as easy as you first thought.
Will you find romance in the city that never sleeps?
**Apartment 502 is a romance, angst, and drama-centered story **
design your mc from clothing style to appearance to pronouns, gender identity, name, looks, and more.
choose 1 of 5 jobs that grant you different scenes and different people: (artist/musician, news anchor, writer, teacher, bartender )
curate your MCs personality and how they react to all the hijinks Apt. 502 has to offer, especially the drama that ensues. Style your MC's room and their aesthetic style.
navigate angsty and dark dramas that weave your roommates in a a narrative that can either save their friendship, or break them apart.
engage in a romance with 1 of 6 characters: one of your roommates, your ex, your neighbor or work rival.
Ruin relationships or mend them. Center yourself around the roommates and become part of the core group.
Follow Apartment 502 throughtout MC's first year as a roommate: from holidays, to birthdays, to everything in-between.
Atlas/Athena [f/m] - 1 of 3 roommates. A is the elusive and isolated musician who makes a living writing songs for others and doing gigs down at the local bar. A is quiet, nonchalant, and prefers their isolation. After getting their heart broken by their high school sweetheart, A has swore off love and vowed to focus solely on their career. A has no room for love, and they make it clear.
Appearance: Olive, freckled skin. Atlas has shaggy brown hair that falls in front of their eyes in a wolf-cut with bleached white dyed pieces at the bottom. Athena's brown and white hair falls down her back with black, straight-cut blunt bangs. They usually wear all black and have a variety of piercings.
Cal/Calliope [f/m] - 1 of 3 roommates. Cal is the ultra nice, slightly uptight, easily flustered college professor who is currently dating their longtime partner...that everyone seems to hate. Cal seems very in love with them and is oblivious to their best friends' irritation, but is that all a ruse?
Appearance: Cal has golden blonde hair. Cal's hair is curly fluffy while Calliope's falls down in soft ringlets around her face. Pale skin and green eyes. C dresses down, wearing basic clothes like button-downs and plain dresses.
Levi/Lani [f/m] - 1 of 3 roommates. L is boisterous, arrogant, and the comedian of the group. L makes their money as an influencer and uses their abundance of free time to pick up all kinds of people. L doesn't believe anyone can get them to settle down, especially considering they've never been in love..nor believe it exists.
Note: you can only romance L by starting a purely physical relationship first.
Appearance: Russet brown skin and long black hair that falls down their back and tied in a messy bun. L usually wears a white, billowy button down tucked into black slacks with an abundance of rings.
Garrett/Gaia [f/m] - Your neighbor. G is friendly but distant, always looking down at their phone when they see you. They seem disinterested in the happenings of Apartment 502. You can't help but wonder more about them...and their young child.
Appearance: Brown skin and curly black hair. G usually has headphones on, and Garett's hair is cut into a curly undercut while Gaia's is primed in a slick bun. They're usually dressed in a pristine black turtle neck and matching black pants.
Rainn [f/m] - your perfect, financially-stable lawyer ex. You thought what you and Rainn had was special, until they abruptly dump you the same day you were set to move in. The worst part? They live in the same building.
Oddly enough, Rainn doesn't seem to be acting like someone who should be completely moved on...
Appearance: Rain either has a severe black bob or black slicked back hair and usually seen in a pantsuit or business-casual clothes. They have tan skin and bright blue eyes.
Mason/Mona [f/m]- your old academic rival...who is now your co-worker. What are the chances you two ended up in the same place? M seems to have a lot of fun making things harder for you at your new job, especially considering you guys are competing for the affection of your boss. Tch.
Appearance: Long or short dyed dark white hair and tan skin with bright brown eyes. (M's outfit is dependent on job of choice.)
The Patreon demo has been updated with over 40k words.
In this new update, you can see what the ROs do in their free time. The said free time might include:
smutty poetry
prostitutes
plenty of cookies
Also, try to remain calm and stay alive.
Public update is coming on 19th of November. Thank you for your patience!
hey instead of bullying or scaring you into switching to firefox, let me tell you why i LOVE firefox and how my online life has improved significantly since installing it
- the setup process is easy, and even fun! if you’re using tumblr rn, you can handle it, and if you’re the kind of tumblr user who likes customizing your blog or tinkering with xkit, you can have a lot of fun personalizing really granular settings and picking themes and extensions and everything, it’s very customizable and i happily spent like 2 hours getting everything perfect.
- you can use a command line entry tool to change specific settings right from the search bar! i did this to make firefox stop auto filling my email information since i use a different password locker (which you should too! try bitwarden!), and it was easier than digging through a bunch of submenus for a setting i wasn’t sure existed. you can just turn shit off!
- there’s a preset theme called aurora that’s purple and VERY pretty
- once you get ublock origin and as many other blockers as you’d like set up, no ads, anywhere, ever! streaming sites, youtube, all the basics, totally no stress and no compatibility issues for me
- in browser screenshot and picture in picture functions!! holy shit i use these every day, the PiP is especially helpful, it replaced an extension i used to use on chrome and it’s leagues better and works on all video content pretty much
- overall better downloads management imo, it’s a lot easier to get to your downloads and find them later
- better bookmark system, with the ability to organize your bookmarks with searchable tags and assign them a shortcut you can type into the search bar to go to
- containers! you can have two accounts to the same website open in two different tabs and switch between them without having to switch accounts. also gives firefox the ability to contain facebook and their trackers, so you can click that party invite link without feeling like you just let mark zuckerberg into your house
these were just off the top of my head, i love firefox a lot and actively enjoy using it, which i never felt with chrome! please download firefox!! you will not regret it!!! where’s your fucking rage!!!!!! go!!!!!!!!!
By Tiina Menzel
Hi! Hi!
So, the update is out. Details are on the WIP post at the COG forum.
Thanks for the love and support!
The world went to shit long before you were born- what happened, nobody's sure. Whatever it was, it left a mess. The horrors of the blasted wasteland, the things that roam outside of city walls, the static that buzzes in your ear like an old TV... not to mention the violent fuckers out there who'd rather they have what you've got.
But a job with a caravan travelling across the wastes means you can finally start a new life in the neon-lit utopia of Signal Hill. That is, until you're ambushed outside the city, your cargo stolen and your guards dead. The bright lights and the ever-present hum of the radio are starting to feel like more of a nightmare than a dream...
Signal Hill is a post-apocalyptic narrative RPG/interactive fiction game set in the eponymous neon-lit utopia, Signal Hill. Players take on the role of a wanderer from the North, arriving in the city for the first time and become enthralled in its local intrigue. It also contains gratuitous violence and sexual themes, so the current demo is recommended for adults only.
Over 83,000 words of quests, conversations, and locations
A detailed text-based open world to explore
5 fully-realized authored quests to pursue
Choose your weapon, skills, and customize your character
140 clothing options, and dozens of other customization options
Fully customizable pronouns & gender (separate)
8 available identities to define who you are through your choices
Meet most of the main cast
As you probably know, Punish A Muslim day is coming up on the third of April. Any Muslim who lives in England is in danger so please stay home. Don’t send your children to school. DON’T GO OUT on the 3rd of April. My non Muslim friends, please reblog this, one of your followers could benefit from it.
// Currently completing my final biology course and feeling nostalgic. I’m gonna miss the teacher and her weird assignments.
Hello everyone! I've been made aware that the personality calc isn't currently working in the demo. I'll fix it when I can in the next day or so, but until then, I'll repost this disclaimer from the forum!