Memories of alternate tomorrows

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.

Somewhere along the line, we decided that any repeated behavior, any source of pleasure, any coping mechanism, any habit that isn’t monk-like and productivity-optimized must be labeled an addiction. You like scrolling art before you create? Addiction. You watch comfort shows after work? Addiction. You check your phone in line at the grocery store? Addiction. You drink coffee with breakfast? Addiction. The word has been stretched so thin it barely means anything anymore, except “a behavior I personally disapprove of.”

Addiction is not “I enjoy stimulation.” It is not “I have habits.” It is not “I seek input before I produce output.” Addiction is a specific, devastating pattern of compulsion, harm, loss of control, and often self-destruction. It dismantles relationships. It corrodes trust. It hijacks the reward system so thoroughly that survival itself becomes secondary. It is not equivalent to liking Pinterest boards or needing music to focus.

When everything becomes addiction, nothing is. The language gets diluted, and with it, the gravity of what actual addiction is. People who have clawed their way out of substance abuse know the difference between compulsion and preference, between destructive dependence and deliberate engagement. Collapsing those distinctions into a trendy moral panic about “dopamine” is not enlightened. It’s sloppy.

There’s also something deeply puritanical about it. The 2020s seem obsessed with pathologizing pleasure. If something feels good, it must be suspect. If it captures your attention, it must be hijacking your brain. If it isn’t explicitly productive, it must be rot. We’ve replaced older moral frameworks with neuroscience-flavored shame, but the tone is the same: you are wrong for enjoying things.

What bothers me most is how casually the word is thrown around in creative spaces. If you gather inspiration through music, images, movement, conversation, suddenly you’re “stimulus addicted.” If you can’t brute-force a novel in a silent white room with no input, you lack discipline. Never mind that many artists throughout history have relied on immersion, community, environment, and cross-media inspiration. Now it’s framed as weakness, as though the only legitimate art is produced under self-imposed sensory austerity.

This framing flattens nuance. There is a difference between avoidance and incubation. There is a difference between doomscrolling to numb out and deliberately engaging with material that fuels your imagination. There is a difference between compulsively chasing a hit and consciously choosing input that enriches your work. But nuance doesn’t trend. Alarmism does.

There’s also a strange individualizing move happening here. Instead of asking why people are exhausted, overstimulated, underpaid, isolated, or burnt out, we zoom in on their coping mechanisms and label them addictions. Instead of examining structural monotony, economic precarity, and social fragmentation, we scold individuals for having “bad dopamine habits.” It’s easier to diagnose people’s scrolling than to confront the conditions that make endless scrolling appealing.

Calling everything an addiction also erases agency. It suggests that people are perpetually hijacked by their brains, incapable of intentional choice unless they purge all sources of easy stimulation. That’s not empowering. It’s infantilizing. Adults are capable of enjoying things without being enslaved by them. Adults can have rituals, comforts, and creative processes without it being pathology.

When I hear the word “addiction” tossed around to describe normal human behavior, it doesn’t sound like insight. It sounds like moral grandstanding dressed up in pop psychology. And for those of us who have actually lived through the wreckage of substance abuse and fought to reclaim control, it feels like watching something serious get turned into a meme.

Had his ass kicked by a big dog

Lost the one time he did hand to hand combat though he did take some people with him

Literally drowned himself, though his spirit survived it

Ganondorf's job is to be the final boss in a Zelda game. And he's tough minded enough Sauron can't play mind games with him.

And you know Sauron didn't do enough quests to be ready for this.

Gannon /still possesses/ the Triforce of Power. Sauron had to corrupt and breed his orcs over centuries.

Gannon can just /will his troops into existence/.

Gannon's main opponent has literal timetravel as part of his skill set, an equivalent Triforce of his own, a evil banishing holy sword, and their confrontations still come down to the wire every time.

When Sauron gets killed he remains as nothing but a disembodied will clinging to the control he has over his servants. He notably never recovers from this state.

When Gannon gets killed he takes a lifetime or two to self resurrect, he's done this /multiple times/ and he gets better at it each time it happens.

Just canceled my account (not that I used it that much). But I won’t permit this. Via @unaminh.bsky.social:

IMPORTANT: For any artists/writers/etc etc, using Linktree to point people to their work, from 5 July, they'll be feeding all imagery you use on your landing page into DALL-E by OpenAI.

Also also. Do you think you know where you are going, being led by AI?