You did what you did and what you did is what you did

the first ever pride flag (1978) versus the TMP movie poster (1979)

via @ninjahijabimuse​

their (live!) young gestate for. wait for it. eight to eighteen (??) YEARS. can have up to 10 at a time. good grief.

longest lifespan of any vertebrate, up to five hundred years

toxic flesh

has giant eyes but is usually blind because of a weird little crustacean that's evolved to live on and eat their eyes. this doesn't seem to bother them much.

lives in deep cold water and has the lowest swim speed and tail-beat frequency for its size across all fish species. just generally lives life in extreme slow motion

largest genome of any shark

eats everything including moose and polar bears

After 2 years of this I asked myself "How could I have let this happen? How did I not see the red flags? How did it get this far?" And it hit me. He treated exactly the same way my adults treated me when I was a child. I didn't see any red flags because I'd never been treated any differently. I'd be screamed at for being lazy, if I wanted anything then I was selfish. I was physically intimidated to make me behave. My emotions were "dramatic", and if I complained at all I heard the "everything I do for you" speech. He treated me exactly the way id always been treated and I didn't even recognize it as abuse until I wanted to kill myself about it.

That realization changed my life. Its a big part of why I work with children now. Parents sometimes hate when I say this but you need to treat your children how you would want their future partners to treat them. They are going to use their relationship with you as the blueprint for every other relationship in their life.

And it keeps them safe *now* as well. People who groom children are able to do so easily because many children havent experienced an adult be kind to them before. All the predators need to do is treat them like a person for a bit and of course they seem safe and friendly. If you treat your children with respect and kindness then their uncle or babysitter or whoever is gonna have a harder time gaining their trust and getting close to them because their tactics don't work if the child already expects to be treated like a person. Plus if your child feels safe and respected most of the time the moment someone makes them feel unsafe they can immediately know this isnt right and they will trust you to fix it.

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.

(Fair disclaimer: I lost close relatives to lung cancer and pneumonia worsened by long term smoking damage, so I was never going to like it. But I'm just talking about the aesthetic.)

The yellow cigarette butts everywhere, killing wildlife and making everything messy and ugly--it was the most common litter. The way nicotine coats furniture and windows in a sickly film. The stench of it, the way if you went to a nightclub Saturday night you would wash your hair three times Sunday morning and it would still stink from absorbed smoke. The way food tastes different/worse when the smell of people smoking fills the room. What it tastes like to kiss someone who has been smoking. Ash trays full of ash and butts. The way a smoker's perspiration smells funky, and then being on a bus or train on a hot day surrounded by people smelling like that.

It was all just really grim, and every now and then I am struck with how much cleaner and more pleasant it is to be in an outdoor mall or university campus or pub, places that used to be crammed with people smoking. God, even the relative lack of cigarette butts alone is miraculous.

When one or the other of these thought patterns makes it hard to throw things away, we can’t see what we really need now, at this moment. We aren’t sure what would satisfy us or what we are looking for. As a result, we increase the number of unnecessary possessions, burying ourselves both physically and mentally in superfluous things. 

The best way to find out what we really need is to get rid of what we don’t. Quests to faraway places or shopping sprees are no longer necessary. All you have to do is eliminate what you don’t need by confronting each of your possessions properly. The process of facing and selecting our possessions can be quite painful. It forces us to confront our imperfections and inadequacies and the foolish choices we made in the past.

 Many times when confronting my past during the tidying process I have been so ashamed. My collection of scented erasers from primary school, the animation-related goods that I collected in junior high school, clothes I bought in high school when I was trying to act grown up but which didn’t suit me at all, handbags I bought even though I didn’t need them just because I liked the look of them in the shop. 

The things we own are real. They exist here and now as a result of choices made in the past by no one other than ourselves. It is wrong to ignore them or to discard them indiscriminately as if denying the choices we made. This is why I am against both letting things pile up and dumping things without proper consideration. It is only when we face the things we own one by one and experience the emotions they evoke that we can truly appreciate our relationship with them. 

There are three approaches we can take towards our possessions. Face them now, face them sometime, or avoid them until the day we die. The choice is ours. But I personally believe it is far better to face them now. If we acknowledge our attachment to the past and our fears for the future by honestly looking at our possessions, we will be able to see what is really important to us.