nnwest

Happy Pride 2025. This post is 5 years old, and I’m in equal parts proud of it, and annoyed by how chaotic and tacky it is. So I’ve decided to make a new version: one where all the additions are in a single reblog, and with integrated image descriptions (thank you @oddler14 for providing most of these back then!). I would love it if people reblogged this version instead, even if I understand the previous version is much more widespread on Tumblr.

I am one of the people who, for a long time, didn’t feel queer enough. Specifically, as a nonbinary person, I struggled for a long time to believe I was trans enough to even deserve to label myself as trans. This post was the start of my journey unlearning that shame and guilt, which was caused in part by the gatekeepy rhetoric that was predominant in many online spaces. Today, I am confident and joyous in my trans, nonbinary, queer body and mind.

To my 20-year-old self, and to anyone else who might need to hear this: you are queer enough. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. And always, always remember:

I use Pinterest mainly as a personal archive of my artwork. Over the years, I’ve organized my paintings into collections by year, and sometimes, while browsing through old folders or recommendations, I come across photographs that make me see familiar things from a completely new perspective.That’s exactly how this painting began.I found a photograph of a swan diving underwater. The original image looked nothing like this painting—there were no underwater plants, no glowing light, no imagined world beneath the surface. But I was fascinated by the unusual point of view. I realized that I had never really seen a swan from that angle before.Unfortunately, I don’t know who took the photograph. It had been shared and saved on Pinterest without any credit to the photographer, so I can’t thank them personally.But that single image became the starting point for this painting. The underwater garden, the reflections, the colors, the atmosphere, and the story all came later as the work evolved. The swan was simply the spark that inspired the journey.So today I’d like to thank all photographers. You show us moments that most of us would never have the chance to witness ourselves. Sometimes one extraordinary image is enough to inspire an entirely new story on canvasAnd yes, I truly hope that swan was real and not AI-generated. The real world is already full of wonders if we take the time to look closely. 🤍

#AnastasiaTrusova #AcrylicPainting #ContemporaryArt #SwanArt #PinterestInspiration

Ok someone has to take this away from me before I drive myself insane attmepting to idk art better 🙈

Or did one of its humans see this in a store and go OMG I know who needs this? I can picture Ratthi showing up with a gift bag and a grin and the idea that he should pretend everyone's favorite rogue SecUnit has a birthday, just so he can get the others to give it presents too.

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.