yes

Like I said, the museum was a pretty snotty institution. It’s got a LOT of objects it’s way famous for possessing, but nobody knew about the absolutely massive collection of Moche erotic pottery it had because the curators were totally embarrassed by this stuff.

Some examples:

Pretty hot shit, right? They never, ever put any of this stuff on public view or published it in any catalogues but - we legit had like several hundred pieces of Moche ceramics in the “dirty pots” category. Anyway, I was left alone to just do my job with regard to the database for several years, ok? And I figured, well, these’re accessioned objects in the museum’s collection - better get down to bidness. 

I catalogued every goddamn bestiality, necrophiliac, cocksucking, buttfucking, detached penis, and giant vulva drinking cup in that collection. I’d be like, 

A drinking vessel in form of a standing man wearing a tunic and cap. He holds an oversized erection in his hands and stares into the distance (note I did not say “like he’s hella-constipated”). The vessel has a hole at both the tip of the penis as well as around the rim of the figure’s head, thus forcing the drinker to drink only from the penis or risk spilling wine all over themselves from the top of the vessel. Red and orange slip covers the surface of the piece.

Pretty straightforward, right? Apparently the deep seated fear of these objects that the curators exhibited was meant to spread to me as well, but - no one ever gave me that memo, because I guess Midwesterners reproduce asexually. When the curators understood that I had catalogued all of these objects in addition to the other, non-sexy pieces in the collection, they were apparently livid, but knew they had no legs to stand on in terms of getting pissed at me for it. 

I visited the museum’s online public access database a few years back and - every single description I wrote of these pieces has been totally neutered to say something like Male figural vase. 

Today, many scientists acknowledge the troubling attitudes that have long plagued research projects in Indigenous communities [...] But some Indigenous groups feel that despite such well-intentioned initiatives, their inclusion in research is only a token gesture to satisfy a funding agency.

Has everyone just believed this whole time that I bring it up for optics?

Everyone nods, "of course he mentions Indigenous people," because they believe it would simply look bad for me if I didn't.

In fact Indigenous knowledge is a constant topic of conversation and point of reference when I discuss my work as a scientist who uses Western science because my work is useless without it.

I work with endangered species which are endangered solely due to continual colonial violence against people and the land. I can follow the Western scientific method all I want and publish 100 papers on how to fix salmon populations—and get nowhere without Indigenous knowledge and sovereignty.

Indigenous knowledge is not an afterthought to reference as back up to Western science. Believe it or not, we can and should lead any number of scientific projects with Indigenous knowledge.

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.

1: the most famous one is the first one we found and it was by a person named Nanni. I just think we should remember the person who wrote it

2: we wound up finding like, a whole closet full of complaints about Ea-Nasir

3: I read translations of several of them as well as suplemental information on Ea-Nasir by the professionals that studied him, and it's been a while, but i will now tell you a summary of his life story to the best of my ability as i remember it

He started off early in his career becoming one of the main copper dealers working directly for the palace, where he built up a good reputation for himself.

Then he moved into being more of a middleman, buying the copper from the outlying city states and then selling it to his old contacts at the palace. And also on the open market. Soon he was dealing in both the wholesale ingots (which is what most of the complaints are about) and finished copper products direct to both smaller merchants and the general public - things like decorated copper pots etc.

At some point he wound up in one of the city states buying copper and stayed there.

It was the island city state of Dilmun, in the Persian Gulf, downstream from his hometown of Ur.

There is absolutely no evidence to say i am right about this next point, but i know how people work, and given what follows, i strongly suspect he got in with the wrong crowd and developed either a gambling problem or a drug problem (or it could have just been women and beach parties, but i do suspect drugs or gambling more)

Anyway, what we do know is that he sort of stopped coming back to his old city, and started running a sort of scam. I really think it was basically like the bernie madoff thing, he would say "if you give me the money, i can buy you the best copper at a good price" and someone would give him the money, and then he would spend that money, and then he would get really really hard to track down, and then when the person finally did track him down he'd be like "fine!"

So he'd get someone else to give him money for top shelf copper, then he'd spend like half that money on bottom grade copper and send the shitty copper to the person who was hounding him to complete his contract. That person would write an angry letter, often threatening legal action, and Ea-Nasir would basically be like "listen, you gave me money for 100 ingots of copper, i sent you 100 ingots of copper; if you don't want them now, that's on you"

He did this a lot. Two of the guys in charge of buying copper for the palace itself (his old job) had to buy good copper with money out of their own pocket after he took the palace money they gave him and sent shitty copper to the palace. And remember, he KNEW what the palace standards were.

At some point in all this he got himself a business partner, and one of the tablets is from this business partner, and it basically says "i'm sending you a good customer with good money who is exactly what this business needs. Please, please do not be the asshole you usually are."

Another complaint tablet i liked is like the third one this author is sending him and among other things it says "do you not know how tired of you i am?"

Anyway, as you can imagine, he burned all his bridges, ruined his reputation, and drove himself out of business. At which point he had to move back home. My guess is he left some angry loan sharks in Dilmun holding a large IOU when he bailed.

Then he tried to start a lot of other businesses. I think he opened a restaurant briefly? He even did some speculative real estate.

Somewhere in here, he had to sell some of his house to his neighbors. All the houses were touching, like, they all had shared walls like an apartment complex, so he basically plastered over the doors to, idk, half his house, and they knocked a door in one of the shared walls to access it, and just like that half his property became part of his neighbors' home. He must have been very broke.

In the end, he wound up running a second hand clothing store out of what was left of his home.

So that's the tale of Ea-Nasir, people really have been living the same stories since always, haven't we.

here it is today

STOP IT’S BEEN MONTHS. MONTHS!

I mean, we all have mandibles, though definitely not like bugs do. Just sometimes archaeologists have extras to clean, because we dug them up.