you can hear me screaming, faintly

Sansa and Cersei from A Clash of Kings ('A Song Of Ice And Fire')

5.5 x 8.5" (14 x 21.6 cm)

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

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Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

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.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

“You have a place in my heart no one could ever have.”

Lord Victyr Dormaire and Lady Sansa Stark

this is ridiculous I didn’t even draw the cake half as tall as it should be

As a ceasefire is declared in Palestine, families need your support more than ever to rebuild and heal. We are now accepting commissions for 30 Euros each to a Palestinian cause of your choosing.

One important takeaway here, though, is the way that he (and his wife, she's not innocent in this) used their fandoms to identify and groom victims. The quote from the article that struck me most was the following:

People who flock to fantasy conventions and signings make up an “inherently vulnerable community,” one of Gaiman’s former friends, a fantasy writer, tells me. They “wrap themselves around a beloved text so it becomes their self-identity,” she says. They want to share their souls with the creators of these works. “And if you have morality around it, you say ‘no.’”

This is why parasocial relationships and hero worship are dangerous. There is an inherent power differential between fans and creators, especially when a work attracts a young and marginalized fanbase.

Responsible creators will take steps to enforce a bit of distance between themselves and their fans because they don't want to take advantage of people who look up to them. Creeps and predators will act like consuming their work creates a special and intimate connection between you, like doing unpaid labor for them is an act of charity.

If you really admire someone, if their work means a lot to you, it's easy to let down your guard and to say "yes" to requests that you'd say "no" to if anyone else asked them of you.

Fan worship, stan culture, and parasocial relationships place a huge burden on creators, but it can also transform fans into a ready-made army of potential victims.