Ape Choir

I'm not dating or married or related to anyone I live with, and our household of four adults can't get any kind of financial or food or housing aid because we count as three separate households despite our semi-blended finances and living together for a decade. There are laws that have been proposed (at least, I don't know if any passed) that limit housing to nuclear families.

I had to turn this off, but it's something that allows Windows and anyone using your device to generate text/images.

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

Three current and former detainees who spoke to the Guardian said that, between 2023 and 2025, they endured months of abuse from an assistant warden named Manuel Reyes and his associates. In their complaints to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the detainees also said that they faced retaliation for reporting the abuse to authorities, alleging that Reyes and other staff beat them and denied them medical treatment. “I was treated worse than an animal,” said Mario Garcia-Valenzuela, one of the detainees. “We don’t deserve to be treated like this.” Garcia-Valenzuela, a trans man detained at SLIPC, has alleged that, as part of the unsanctioned work program, Reyes forced him to move heavy cabinets and cinder blocks, and to clean using industrial-strength chemicals without gloves or protective gear. When Garcia-Valenzuela complained of injuries from the work program, he said, Reyes and his associates forcefully stripped him naked and mocked him. Kenia Campos-Flores, who is trans and non-binary, told the Guardian that they suffered from persistent migraines and chest pain after exposure to cleaning chemicals they were made to use during unofficial, overnight work shifts. Campos-Flores also alleged in a complaint they were persistently sexually harassed by Reyes, who entered their dorm and stole possessions including their boxers. Another trans detainee, Monica Renteria-Gonzalez, complained that a stripper chemical he was told to use to clean the facility floors seeped through his fabric shoes and burned the skin of his feet. On more than one occasion, while Renteria-Gonzalez was bent over cleaning, he said, Reyes came up from behind and inappropriately touched him. The assistant warden also told Renteria-Gonzalez he was watching the detainee through security cameras, including while he was showering. A fourth detainee, identified by the pseudonym Jane Doe, is a cisgender, queer woman who said that Reyes forced her to perform oral sex on him on a “near daily basis” between February and May 2024, threatening to kill her if she refused, according to her complaint. [...] “This was a sadistic late-night work program,” said Sarah Decker, a senior staff attorney with RFK Human Rights. “It was designed to target vulnerable trans men or masculine-presenting LGBTQ people, who [Reyes] coerced into participating.” [...] Garcia-Valenzuela had fled to the US in 2014 from Mexico, where he was tortured by members of a drug cartel. “I have no choice, that’s why I’m fighting,” he said. “Because I know that as soon as they deport me, I’m going to be handed over to the cartels and I’m going to be tortured and killed – ripped into pieces.” But in SLIPC he faced a new kind of horror. He alleged that on more than one occasion he was told to move heavy metal filing cabinets back and forth across a room. When he struggled to lift the furniture, Reyes would taunt him, he said, saying: “If you think you are a man, I’m going to treat you like a man.”

And no one in the community seems to be interested in bringing it the fuck up. Even a post which starts off by talking about forced detransitioning under ICE! You'd think this would be the perfect example of this kind of violence in action, but for some reason people don't seem to think these people make good enough victims for the cause. Why is that?

At a time where reproductive rights are also being drained away, where there is very clear targeting of people's ability to control if they are pregnant, is it really so much to ask that we don't start talking about trans men's ability to "financially and socially defend themselves" as if that means jack shit to the brown undocumented trans men being used as slaves and sexually assaulted by federal employees specifically because they are trans men.

"Focus their energies on protecting the most vulnerable" the majority of people I see who talk about reproductive justice forget trans men. The majority of people I see talk about 99% of social issues forget trans men, much less nonbinary people in general. When exactly are we allowed to focus our energies a population that has a 51% lifetime rate of sexual assault across races, and which goes up to 71% for Native trans men? A population that, no matter what study you look at, is paid less than cis women (also see here)?

"Relatively privileged"? Are you fucking kidding me? Do you have any idea how insanely hurtful and straight up misinformative that is to say, in these circumstances?

The callousness this shows towards trans men is just unconscionable, and is highly suggestive of a lack of knowledge about the violence trans men face as well as a lack of openness to questioning ingrained ideas about transmasculine people. I don't mean this as an attack but this is a very clear example of how people internalize transmasculine erasure and repeat it uncritically as fact. We cannot tolerate this rhetoric. I'd like to once again highlight this HRW report, specifically the section “"Butches Get Punched”: Violence Against Masculine-Presenting LBQ+ People” in “This Is Why We Become Activists”:

"Unless they present hyperfeminine, butches don’t have access to the job market. You will not be considered if you don’t wear nice women’s clothes. If you set up catering, you will get told, “I am disgusted; a woman who thinks she’s a man is cooking for me.” So butch lesbians normally have an assistant, or their femme partner if they have one, who is more feminine-looking to run the front so customers don’t know a masculine-presenting person is cooking behind the curtains. Many of us become sex workers [due to lack of job opportunities].… But then when police raid brothels and homes, the masculine lesbians get treated “like men.” This means more forceful handcuffing, kneeling, and stripping their shirts off." – Rosa, lesbian and sex worker rights defender El Salvador [...] While gender expression is thus less explicitly criminalized than sexual orientation—the same project reports 66 countries that criminalize same-sex relations between consenting adults —LBQ+ people interviewed for this report repeatedly named gendered discrimination against masculine gender expressions[238] in particular as the catalyst for a lifetime of economic marginalization, discrimination and harassment at work, psychological abuse, and physical and sexual violence. Their accounts point to the need for deeper research and analysis of how masculine gender expression by LBQ+ people increases their risk of exposure to various human rights violations and abuses. Some reports on violence against LBQ+ people (explored below) have treated gender expression as a signifier of sexual orientation or gender identity, limiting knowledge production on how presentations of masculinity are themselves policed and violated.

This kind of attitude gets trans men is exactly what is described by this report as "limiting knowledge production on how presentations of masculinity are themselves policed and violated." It's just not right and its not remotely accurate. It can and does get trans men detransitioned and killed, and then those victims ignored and forgotten by the very people who claim to be acting purely out of a desire to focus on the most affected. The insistence that trans men don't need specific, focused attention and concern is exactly what creates the circumstances for their vulnerability!

A few months before he passed away in 2003, a 74 year old children’s television host sat down in the same studio where he had filmed 895 episodes over 33 years and recorded one last message. It wasn’t for children. It was for the adults who had grown up watching him.

Fred Rogers hosted Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on American public television from 1968 to 2001. For over three decades he walked into the same set, changed into a cardigan and sneakers, looked directly into the camera, and spoke to children as if each one of them was the only person in the room. He never raised his voice, never talked down to his audience, and never rushed a single moment.

In that final recording, he looked into the camera one last time and said “I’m just so proud of all of you who have grown up with us. And I know how tough it is some days to look with hope and confidence on the months and years ahead. But I would like to tell you what I often told you when you were much younger. I like you just the way you are.”

Anyways! HERE'S YOUR HANDY GUIDE TO WHAT CAN COUNT AS EYESTRAIN! I'm pulling this straight from the Artfight rules page about what needs to be labeled and filtered as eyestrain because it's VERY helpful and VERY accurate! I also know not everybody has an AF account and might not always have access to this handy guide, and this is an important resource; That's why I'm sharing it here! (under the cut)

PLEASE TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY!!! THIS IS ABOUT THE HEALTH AND SAFETY OF OTHERS!!!

FEELS SO FILLING, TASTES SO NICE

VEG AND PROTEIN, RICE AND SAUCE