candybarrnerd

Okay so this is something new I'm trying. This log is based off the scrapbook premise by @callunavulgari - with thanks to her for allowing me to crib from it.

This is my first go at it, so I will see how I go. This might change as I go through the year. I might add commentary, I might not. I'm trying to keep this loose, fun and easy.

BOOKS

From Below - Darcy Coates

Eggshell Skull - Bri Lee

Year of the Rat - Harry Shukman

Out There Screaming - anthology, edited by Jordan Peele

Everything is Tuberculosis - John Green

Firelight - John Morrissey

Family Meal - Bryan Washington

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter - Stephen Graham Jones

Axiom's End - Lindsay Ellis

Not Too Late - Anthology

How to Stand Up to a Dictator - Maria Ressa

How Fascism Works - Jason Stanley

Pedro the Vast - Simon Lopez Trujillo

The Mountain in the Sea - Ray Nayler

A Clergyman's Daughter - George Orwell

MOVIES

Dangerous Animals

The Monkey

Good Boy

The Conjuring

Pontypool

The Damned (2024)

TV SHOWS

none (yet)

COMPUTER GAMES

Tiny Bookshop

CRAFT

Summer Lee's Flea Stitch Socks

(Water)Melon Socks

Lino printed a Djitti Djitti (bird)

MUSIC RECOMMENDATIONS

Sofi Tukker - saw live, loved!

PODCAST RECOMMENDATIONS

Citations Needed - always a fave

Lamestream podcast - analysis of the australian media, if you're from aus this is a great one to be listening to

May included the last weeks of my placement and it really slayed all of my motivation to do anything, including reading. I was just so tired. I'm still recovering to be honest! So no books this month, but a few other things:

Craft: did some lino printing! Fun and cool

Computer game: Tiny Bookshop. Absolutely love, absolutely recommend

"No, I mean-"

Oh, maybe the woman who had to pee in a public park that only had pay toilets, so she tried to hide behind the bushes but got caught? Public urination is a sex crime.

"What? No, I mean-"

Oh, maybe you mean the homeless guy who had to strip down to get his clothes in the laundromat to clean them for the first time in weeks? He tried being subtle, but someone called the cops on him, and now he's on the sex offender registry for public nudity.

"Rapists and pedophiles! Kill rapists and pedophiles!"

Oh, like the trans woman who got called a pedophile groomer for helping a trans kid escape her abusive parents?

Or maybe the black man who got labeled a rapist because he came on to another man's wife, and he decided to get back at him by charging him with rape?

How about the 17 year olds who were fooling around, fully consensually, in one of their bedrooms? That's still technically underage sex and thus rape of a minor.

Oh, or maybe you're talking about the doctor who performed genital reconstructive surgery in a state that just voted to get that classified as rape?

People will do everything they can to get you convinced rape and pedophilia are the worst crimes possible, then accuse whoever they like the least of being either a rapist, a pedophile, or both, counting on you turning on them just for being accused of the crime.

"Oh, so you're saying you don't want to kill a serial rapist?"

That's exactly what I'm goddamn saying.

Once we decide a group is okay to kill, the government will do everything they can to convince you that their political enemies are either part of that group, or just as bad as that group, to get you to kill their enemies for them.

yeah!

you're allowed to FEEL like you want to kill rapists (esp your own if such a misfortune has befallen you). you're even allowed to WANT and WISH for their deaths. that's all normal natural and dare i say... healthy???

it's perfectly sensible to feel all that rage and bloodlust as we grieve the loss of our autonomy, even if it was brief, or if we grieve the fact that this happens to others, or the prevalence of this crime, etc. whatever the reason you want that person dead, you're certainly entitled to that mental state

all of those feelings are yours, and you are allowed to feel them as long as it takes you to feel them

i've talked a lot on other posts about how i didn't tell anyone that i was being sexually abused for 14 years, because it was my father, and i loved him, and i didn't want to never see him again because he was in jail or worse for what he did to me. before he was an abuser, he was a victim; CSA was a generational trauma, much like the poverty he grew up in, and he never got the help he needed. this is tragic. i lost my dad far before he died. he developed schizophrenia, as many victims do; this, too, is a generational trauma throughout my family.

i have a friend who was a victim of CSA. he is a pedophile which is a word that refers only to sexual attraction to children, NOT acting on it. acting on it would be child sexual abuse, and he is not an abuser. he is a victim who was scarred by his experience, like my father was. but he got therapy. he decided never to have children, and never to be alone with children, because he never wants to cause the harm that was done to him. he engages in consensual kink with adult partners, that includes roleplay, as a healthy outlet.

when people say they want to kill pedophiles, they are talking about people like him, and that makes me not trust them. someone who knows their urges would do irreparable harm and actively chooses to keep others safe from that harm is more trustworthy, in my book, than someone who would kill them for thought crimes.

when i was a teenager, i was raped by a peer. victims of CSA are unfortunately highly likely to experience this. i was 16. he was 14. during the investigation, it was found that his single mother was sexually abusing him, just as my father was doing to me. he was a rapist. he was also a child, and a victim. my heart hurt for him. he regretted what he did. i've made my peace with it. it got him help out of a situation he otherwise could not escape.

when people say they want to kill all rapists, they are talking about people like him, and that makes me not trust them. rehabilitation was the goal for a 14 year old rapist who was being sexually abused; why is it not the goal for all rapists? why are people obsessed with finding people "bad enough" to justify murdering them?

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.

LineageOS (I use this one)

Graphene OS

Functionally they are virtually identical to stock Android. Android began as an open-source project, and these versions are built off of that.

anyapk is a lightweight Android application installer that bypasses Google's developer verification requirements by using local ADB (Android Debug Bridge) connections. Smoothly install any APK file on your device without restrictions, gatekeepers, or corporate approval.

a tweet by @/Pirat_Nation:

From September 2026, all apps, including those outside the Play Store, must come from verified developers.

No more anonymous sideloads. No quick comebacks for malware gangs.

First: Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand.

"Sideloading" is the rentseeker word for "being able to run software of your choosing on a computing device you purchased". There is no reasonable case for an operating system developer having a say over what programs you run on your hardware.

What if I told you, in about an hour, you’ll leave here different?

Fat hasn't become a bad word because fatness is somehow inherently undesirable or bad--it has fallen out of public favor because of what we attach to it. We take fat to mean unlovable, unwanted, unattractive, unintelligent, unhealthy. But fatness itself is simply one aspect of our bodies--and a very small part of who each of us is. It deserves to be described as a simple and unimportant fact.

Okay so this is something new I'm trying. This log is based off the scrapbook premise by @callunavulgari - with thanks to her for allowing me to crib from it.

This is my first go at it, so I will see how I go. This might change as I go through the year. I might add commentary, I might not. I'm trying to keep this loose, fun and easy.

BOOKS

From Below - Darcy Coates

Eggshell Skull - Bri Lee

Year of the Rat - Harry Shukman

Out There Screaming - anthology, edited by Jordan Peele

Everything is Tuberculosis - John Green

Firelight - John Morrissey

Family Meal - Bryan Washington

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter - Stephen Graham Jones

Axiom's End - Lindsay Ellis

Not Too Late - Anthology

How to Stand Up to a Dictator - Maria Ressa

How Fascism Works - Jason Stanley

Pedro the Vast - Simon Lopez Trujillo

The Mountain in the Sea - Ray Nayler

A Clergyman's Daughter - George Orwell

MOVIES

Dangerous Animals

The Monkey

Good Boy

The Conjuring

Pontypool

The Damned (2024)

TV SHOWS

none (yet)

COMPUTER GAMES

none (yet)

CRAFT

Summer Lee's Flea Stitch Socks

(Water)Melon Socks

MUSIC RECOMMENDATIONS

Sofi Tukker - saw live, loved!

PODCAST RECOMMENDATIONS

Citations Needed - always a fave

The Mountain in the Sea - loved. absolutely recommend

The Clergyman's Daughter - didn't love, but interesting. I could see Orwell's experiences with homelessness and poverty coming out, and his beginnings of experimenting with class in some ways. I like to see how author's grow and this is interesting to see

Pontypool - fucking LOVED it