Dartingmind

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> right so you can just get top surgery, it doesn't have to mean anything

> you want clothes to fit differently! you want to walk around shirtless! you are tired of boob sweat! who fucking cares!

> you know who cares a lot? literally nazis and your creepiest uncle

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the second image is a picture of a book which reads:

[transcription:

That is a right of each woman, each intersexed person, each transsexual man or woman — each human being. [highlighted] I believe that people who don't identify as transsexual also have a right to hormones and surgery. [/end highlight] There are many of us who have wanted to shape our bodies without changing our sex. Since sex-reassignment programs won't prescribe hormones or arrenge surgery for a person who does not identify as a transsexual, we have to lie, buy hormones on the street, or go to quacks who sell prescriptions for a hefty fee.

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Google isn't the only search engine in the whole internet, there are others! And we need to diversify our search engine usage or we're gonna end up where we were a decade and change ago with the Internet Explorer issue. We can't let a single brand monopolize everything! This is why Google Search can afford to suck so hard: because people use it regardless! And there are alternatives.

A little bit about search engines, there are 3 types: crawlers, which work by scraping the web and developing their own indexes; metas, which get their results from the crawler-type search engines and therefore depend entirely upon them; and mixed, those which have their own (small) index but also pull results from the crawlers.

Right now, there are a couple of independant crawlers apart from Google, Bing (from Mycrosoft) and Yandex (the Russian one): this are Mojeek and Wiby.

Supporting independant crawlers is the easiest way to fight the shittyfication of the internet.

Mojeek.com is an independant british search engine with its own growing index commited to fighting internet censorship. It's small, and therefore it's usability isn't as good as that of the Big Three, but it doesn't censor, it's fairly respectful of people's privacy, and it doesn't drown you in adds. For those old enough to remember, it's a lot like early 2000s Google: you can find what you need, but if you write "dig shelter" instead of "dog shelter", that's what it's gonna search for. That said, please try to use it and support it as much as you can before we end up entirely dependant on Google, Bing and big corps adds. [click here to go to Mojeek]

Wiby.me is a new indie project that is literally dedicated to bringing back the old-school web. It's goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. So, for those of you who can't find any answers to technical questions beyond highschool level because Google buries them under a gazillion commercial sites and other meaningless shit, keep an eye on this project! It has a lot of potential. And, if you know of any personal websites that have great stuff but have been murdered by Google, you can go over to Wiby and submit it to their index. [click here to go to Wiby]

Aside from those, there are also meta search engines you can use to ween yourself off Google and search for random, day to day stuff.

Qwant.com is my go-to here—it has its own index and pulls from Bing, has relatively little censorship, and is fairly private. This is the one I use on my phone for everyday stuff. [click here to go to Qwant].

Historically, DuckDuckGo has always been a go-to for those who want a search engine that respects your privacy and doesn't censor. Personally, I've never been a fan, and there have been a LOT of scandals in recent years. It supposedly has its own index and pulls from Bing, much like Qwant, but I don't know. I just don't like it. Still, I've added it here for completeness' sake.

If you have Firefox Mobile browser, you can set any of these search engines as your default search engine and you can also add the others as secondary search engines and switch quicky from the navigation bar. If you don't have firefox mobile though, what are you doing with your life??? Go get it!! It is So. Much. Better. You can have add blockers and watch YouTube add free, for free! You can have reader mode and dark mode add-ons! You can have the world oh my goshhhh, drop Chrome!!

4get.ca is my last recommendation: 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 reaserch, 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. It's also very privacy conscious, so that's an other plus, and it has that late 90s / early 2000s vibe that I totally dig. [click here to go to 4get]

If you wanna learn more about the topic, you can over to the Search Engine Map [click here] which shows you a bunch of Search Engines and how they relate to each other. Or you can also go over to this one dude's personal website whose done A Lot of reaserch into the topic (way more than me) and seems to be pretty legit, if a little extra. [click here to go to digdeeper.neocities.org] Hope this infodump is useful to someone =D

PS: here's to hoping all the links work!

“Do you want to try this off of my plate?”

“It’s made of [ingredients], I think you’d like [x part]”

“If you want to see if you like [x food], this is pretty good representation of it”

“You won’t like this, it tastes like [description]. Do you want to try it for fun?”

“Do you remember trying/have you ever tried [x food]? This is like that, but [differences]”

“I think you’d like the taste of this, but the texture is iffy. It’s [description]”

Make sure there’s other food they can eat if they don’t like the new one

And most importantly, build trust with that person by listening to them, showing that you take their concerns into account, and being cool if the answer is no. No is always an option. This isn’t something you do once, it’s a pattern you have to stick to if you want to establish that you are a safe person when it comes to food stuff

It’s recommended your rent only be 30% of your total budget, so with an average monthly rent of $1,827 that would mean your average renter’s monthly income should ideally be $6,090

That would be roughly $35.13 hourly or $73,080 annually

However, the average renter’s household income is only $42,500 annually or $20.43 hourly (as of 2019 according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey)

This means either rent prices are too unsustainably high and price gouging or wages are too unsustainably low and predatory

Fun fact: after the American Physical Society held their 1986 annual meeting at the MGM Grand, the entire city of Las Vegas politely asked APS to never, ever come back.

Relatedly, one time when I was a kid, a large chunk of my extended family went on a cruise to see an eclipse. Everyone on the cruise was scientists or science hobbyists. The crew didn’t know what to do with us! Everyone wanted the 6 pm dinner, no one wanted the 10 pm dinner that you had to dress up for. The casino was empty for the entire week. A group of passengers demanded that all the lights on the deck be turned off at night, even the pretty decorative ones, for at least an hour and preferably more, every single night. One night at dinner, my grandmother saw dolphins out the window, and as word spread the entire dining room emptied, even though it was still the middle of dinner. And that’s not even getting into how my grandfather started talking to the cleaning staff (who were not supposed to talk back) and found out they wouldn’t be let off work to see the eclipse, and within hours had formed an entire committee to go with him to demand to speak to the captain about this mistreatment of the staff.

Ask yourself this: is what I tell people about my gender actually how I feel or am I just people pleasing out of fear of being judged?

I've been avoiding certain coming out conversations, which feels safe in the short term. It's a knee-jerk reaction.

we have to fight against them together or die there's no choice at this point.

they don't mean, like. future gender-affirming care.

The law redefines the illegal-in-public "adult cabaret performance" to include "male or female impersonators who provide entertainment that appeals to a prurient interest (...) regardless of whether or not performed for consideration." "Public" is defined as anywhere one "could be viewed by a person who is not an adult."

Families aren’t being told that they “can’t have conservative values in public,” trans individuals are being told that they can’t exist in safety.

That they’ll be fined, arrested for wearing what a random citizen deems as drag and reports as such. That if they’re a minor, they’ve got 18 months to, as the news by me phrased it “wean themselves off of” the gender affirming medical care they’ve been receiving. That they are a problem to be dealt with, a crime just for existing.

Making people out to be crimes is a dangerous precedent to set, one that history has shown time and again to be a stumble down an already slippery slope towards discrimination, violence, and persecution.

I just got done with my kid’s annual homeschool evaluation, which means it’s the anniversary of when I pulled them from school. 

This right here is from the last meeting I had with the school. Spoiler alert: their plan did, in fact, not work, and they suspended my kid within the week for behavior that was a direct result of said plan being completely inappropriate for the situation.

The real problem was that they were being bullied, constantly. The real problem was sensory issues that no one wanted to accommodate. The real problem was that my kid was PDA in one of the demandiest places on earth, school.

The real problem was that the school saw my kid’s completely understandable reactions to their completely distressing and unsupportive environment as “the real problem.”

And this is the problem with behaviorist approaches. More often than not they assume the problem is in the kid, not their environment. (This is especially true in schools where lack of resources leads them to do everything they can to avoid accommodations by putting the onus on the child to “adapt.”) More often than not they don’t even attempt to ask the kid what’s up. More often than not the “function” they assign is bullsh!t, and so is their attempt at a solution.

So yeah, happy homeschooling anniversary to us. I only wish I had put a stop to the trauma sooner.

We've been homeschooling for 5 years because my kid was being bullied–by the adults–for her inability to meet their expectations of behavior in the classroom.

Non-speaking does not equal non-thinking.