Free Online Entertainment for Difficult Economic Times

Crayon Physics: Image via Wikipedia

The difficult economic times that we’re going through has seemingly affected everyone. Someone in your family may have lost their job. Or perhaps you have taken a cut in pay, or had to minimize family spending. It is widely reported that libraries are being frequented much more than was usual just a year or two ago.

In addition to borrowing books, audiobooks, movies and sometimes software from the library, the internet is another great place to turn for free entertainment. There is a vast amount of information you can use to learn new things such as languages, history, science, philosophy and how-to just about anything. However, if you are looking for less autodidactic activity, Aric Annear at Amazon.com’s End User blog gives us a list of five places to get free movies, television shows, music, games and yes, even more education.

1. Television and movies from Hulu.com. Since the content is sponsored, there are commercials, but it is legal. Only available in the U.S.

2. Flash games from UGOPlayer.com. If you can’t afford the latest video game, this is a great place to stop for some free ones.

3. Music from Archive.org’s Live Music Archive (downloading free and legal live music) and Mixtape.me (streaming music). I also want to add Songza to this category, where you can create your own playlists and choose what specific songs you want to hear.

4. Education about a wide variety of topics in a very inspiring way from TED Talks.  Each one of the videos on this site is fairly long, so I’ve only seen a handful of them. But ever single one I have seen has inspired me like little else.

5. Free downloadable games from Freewaregames.net. They have a large number of games to choose from. Crayon Physics looks particularly interesting.

Beware, though.  Most of these sites will help you use up quite a bit of time. So if you really need to be doing something more productive, visit the sites at your own risk!

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