A hand to hold

A mountain is unmoved by a single drop. But canyons form as each drop of water wears a small groove. The drop doesn't know, doesn't care, it simply falls. And wears away the stone. The next drop is also unaware, and if the drops could talk they might share how alone and small and insignificant their impact felt against that stone. "What is the point?" They might ask. "I gave everything and nothing changed!" And other drops might agree, because they could see the stone, but the drop was invisible against it.

Every drop of water counts.

The canyon forms beneath the miniscule drop because it is relentless. Eventually a small groove forms and more drops follow that path. "But that was already there! I changed nothing! I'm just taking the easy path!" The drop might think as it followed the groove other drops had carved away, not realizing that it also made the groove that tiny bit deeper wider bigger.

Every drop of water counts.

Each of us feels alone and small and insignificant and we are. But each of us is also a drop that wears away the stone, though we cannot see our impact. Sometimes we follow the easy path and think we did nothing. But our existence is felt in ways we cannot fathom, because we are drops that fall upon the world.

●○  A Lesson for Cassian (and Anyone Else Who Needs It) ✦

✦ ᚺ ᚢ ᚲ ᚺ ✦

I was having coffee. Reading the news on my computer. Nothing important. Old headlines. The world is still stupid.

Then I heard Cassian.

Practicing a script in front of the mirror. With a voice that wasn’t his. A constructed voice. Too aware of itself. That calculated whisper. That rhythm that tries to sound hypnotic… but is only theatrical.

Not to move a mind. To sound interesting.

I set my coffee down.

—Cassian.

He turned. The mirror betrayed him before his face did.

—Do you really think a silky tone is enough to convince anyone?

I opened my mouth to continue. But something in his expression — wounded pride, genuine confusion — made me pause.

It’s not his fault. He’s repeating what he sees. What everyone sees.

People who confuse voice kink with technique. Who think that if they sound good, nothing else matters. Raised on audios where a pretty voice whispers empty words and the audience applauds: “it hypnotized me.”

No. It didn’t hypnotize you. You liked how it sounded.

That’s not the same thing.

But Cassian is my apprentice. So — in a rare moment of generosity — I’ll explain why he’s wrong. And to anyone else listening.

First. A simple question.

Does my voice change much when I do inductions?

No.

Because hypnosis is not a performance. I’m not here for you to enjoy the timbre. I’m here to build something inside your mind.

The voice is the vehicle. It is not the journey.

If your only tool is a pleasant voice, you are not a hypnotist. You are a narrator… with ambitions.

Second. The mistake of confusing the sensory with the structural.

You can have a perfect voice. The exact tone. A rhythm that makes people close their eyes and sigh.

And still… not know how to hypnotize.

Because if you don’t understand how a suggestion is built, if you don’t know where to place a pause, if you don’t know when to speak… and when not to—

then all you are producing is a pleasant sensory response.

That is not hypnosis.

Third. The fragility of the wrapper.

Tell me, Cassian.

What happens if the subject doesn’t like your voice?

What if they prefer a different tone? A different accent? What if your “seduction” feels ridiculous to them?

If you depend on that, you are fragile.

A real hypnotist does not need to be liked. They need their language to enter.

The voice is the wrapper. The structure is the content.

And it is the content that moves the mind.

Fourth. Pleasure is not trance.

Do your inductions only produce pleasure?

Then you are not hypnotizing.

You are creating something comfortable. Relaxing. Pleasant.

And that’s fine.

But don’t confuse it with trance.

Trance is not just feeling good. It is responding to suggestion in ways that are not entirely voluntary.

Pleasure can be part of it. It is not the mechanism.

Fifth. The uncomfortable truth.

Much of what is sold as “hypnosis” —audios, videos, attractive voices promising trance—

is nothing more than absent technique… with good production.

Marketing.

Because it’s easier to sell “listen to me, I sound good”

than to sell “study structure, learn language, understand the mind.”

And it’s more profitable.

People pay to feel good. Not as much to change.

But you, Cassian, are not here to sell smoke.

You are here to learn how to move minds.

The decision.

So decide.

If you want to hypnotize, learn structure. Learn to speak to anyone, not just those who already enjoy your voice.

Understand this: trance does not enter through the ear.

It enters through meaning.

If you want to sell smoke with a pleasant voice… at least invest in a good microphone.

And don’t waste my time.

Cassian looked at me. Opened his mouth. Closed it.

He nodded.

I returned to my coffee.

The world was still stupid. But at least one apprentice had understood something.

Or so I hope.

Because if I hear him practicing that “cheap audiobook villain” tone again tomorrow…

I’ll make sure he understands.

Please don’t put me in situations where I have to tell you no. I don’t want to tell you no. I want to tell you yes. We can talk about limits and must haves and wants and needs and likes and dislikes. And, I do want you to push me. Challenge me. But stay inside the limits, so I don’t have to say no. Please.

If I let you in, all the way… I’ll be vulnerable. Completely. If you push, I’ll cave. If you push, I’ll give in. And the potential for damage exists. It takes a lot for me to let anyone in at a depth where they could actually hurt me. If you ever really get inside my mind, my heart, my soul…

Please use that power to bring us closer.

Please don’t make me say no. Don’t make me protect myself from you. Don’t make me reassert my agency. Let me live blissfully under your authority. Please.

Because I don’t want to say no. I want to be submissive. I want to be a good girl. I want to feel fully owned, and fully loved and protected.

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.

“The notion that people panic and run screaming for the exits is a Hollywood fiction,” said Prof Stephen Reicher, an expert in group behaviour at the University of St Andrews.

“Characteristically, people stay and help each other,” he said. “We found this during the 7/7 attacks on the underground and the 1999 attack on the Admiral Duncan pub in London, where people looked after each other even though they feared other bombs.

“In our own research on the Leytonstone tube attack in 2015, there was an amazing level of spontaneous coordination by bystanders: some directed others away from danger. Some distracted the attacker. Some confronted the attacker. Each was able to act because of the others. Heroism was a feature of the group, not just the individual,” he added.

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.