the sun still shines the brightest in the city

and no, this isn’t me saying “write that messed up, disgusting thing” because while, yes, write it if it’s what you want (I myself enjoy writing dark fics, something I believe would be considered “vile” to a lot of people), this is me saying in a world of censorship and capitalism, ao3 really is a treasure.

My stepmother did NOT like the way her Libertarian Viking Neighbor framed pregnancy as the fetus "attacking the woman". She incredulously told him this was extremely disrespectful to expectant mothers to portray pregnancy as so violent and negative.

Libertarian Viking Neighbor's response was that people consensually hurt each other all the time, and "there's like a whole community about that, with the acronym the one that starts with a B" And his reasoning was that if the mother was consenting to bring attacked by the baby, it in fact wasn't violent and negative because there was consent.

My guilty pleasure right now is watching luxury hotel reviews and I found this british guy who keeps accidentally clipping into the backrooms.

the empty shop? he just opened all the unlocked doors he could find and stepped through open door in his boat hotel.

the "yikes"? he got lost in his hotel, and it's the same where he had to ask three different people his way to his room.

the elevators and then the creaky door to the stairs? he stepped in the elevator and tried to get to the top floor and stepped out of the lift in there.

all those three were when he was in Dubai

he also did some "worst hotel" videos and it's BONKER too

I was initially disappointed when switching from Google to DuckDuckGo since it seemed the latter is just as filled with unavoidable AI slop, if not seemingly more so. (Since I previously had a Firefox extension to block all "AI overview" results from Google, which of course didn't work on DuckDuckGo, meaning I was now seeing even more stupid AI search results after the switch than before.)

Then I stumbled across this Bluesky post about DuckDuckGo's dedicated AI-free domain, noai.duckduckgo.com. I'd already switched my default search engine on Firefox to DuckDuckGo, but that post got me wondering if it was possible to replace my default search engine with THIS version of DuckDuckGo instead. Turns out, you can! On both desktop and mobile! So I wrote out a tutorial below if anyone wants to follow the same process.

Note: This no-AI domain might not catch everything, but it does eliminate a lot of the AI slop, which is a win in my book. According to the screenshot in the post: "The system relies on curated blocklists, including uBlockOrigin's Huge AI Blocklist, to detect and suppress Al-generated imagery." While this seems to indicate the site only blocks AI images, I haven't seen any "AI overview" text search results either since I started using it. Double win.

----------------------------

Desktop instructions

1. In Firefox, open a new tab and look on the left side of the search bar. Click on the dropdown menu with "This time search with..." at the top and all the alternate search engines in the list below. I've already added NoAI DuckDuckGo, so you won't see that option yet; instead, click Search Settings at the very bottom.

2. (Alternatively, go straight to Firefox Search Settings by entering this in your web address bar: about:preferences#search)

3. Again, you won't find NoAI DuckDuckGo in the "Default Search Engine" box at the top...yet. You will have to add it first. Scroll all the way to the bottom where you will find the "Search Shortcuts" menu, and click "Add".

4. This is what I typed to add NoAI DuckDuckGo to my search engine list, which is the prerequisite step to making it the default search engine.

(Typed out below if you want to just copy and paste)

Search engine name: NoAI DuckDuckGo

URL with %s in place of search term: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/search?q=%s

Keyword (optional): @ noaiddg [remove space]

5. Now scroll to the top of the Search Settings page, where you will now be able to select "NoAI DuckDuckGo" from the dropdown menu of default search engine options!

6. Open a new tab and type in a search term to test. I searched "drawing references." It's still using the default DuckDuckGo logo on the left, but as you can see, the search info appearing below the search term is already pointing to the custom NoAI search engine we set.

7. And voila, it did indeed pull from noai.duckduckgo.com as the default search engine, not regular DuckDuckGo.

(I believe the "AI images: hide" toggle is in the basic DuckDuckGo search engine as well, but in the NoAI version, it's toggled off by default.)

----------------------------

Mobile instructions

The process is even easier on mobile, especially if you copy and paste!

1. Go to the Firefox app, tap on the hamburger menu on the bottom right, and open "Settings"

2. Under "General," tap on "Search" (again, if you haven't manually added NoAI DuckDuckGo, you won't see that option yet)

3. Scroll down to "Alternative Search Engines" and tap "Add Search Engine"

4. Add the same info as you would for the desktop version, BUT look at the link carefully after you paste it, as on mine it added a random extra "25" at the end that I had to delete. Make sure the %s at the very end of the link stays intact, as it won't accept the search engine without it.

Again, here's the URL to copy and paste (make sure you get the whole link with %s at the end):

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/search?q=%s

5. Now scroll back up to "Default Search Engine," and you should see "NoAI DuckDuckGo" (or whatever you named yours when you added it) as an option you can select from the dropdown menu!

6. Again, you can test it in a new tab if you want, and it should pull your search results from the NoAI version of DuckDuckGo instead of the regular version.

----------------------------

This tutorial was just for Firefox and the screenshots are both from Apple devices, but I'm guessing it's also possible to set a custom default search engine on other devices and browsers using a similar process.

“Ghosts aren’t real” it’s very fair and rational that you believe that

“Ghosts aren’t real anymore” I’m about to hear a poem or very sad story