Wild And Precious Life

kell has a complex relationship with his birthday. he doesn't know the exact date bc his memories had been wiped when he was bought into the maresh family. rhy decided they would celebrate it the day they officially became brothers

he also doesn't enjoy attention but rhy never forgot to bring him a pastry or a small cake in his favorite flavor so they could eat it together. rhy would obviously try to make kell laugh while doing this and once kell was about to choke with cake. he would also give kell gifts he picked for him

after kell goes on the grey barron with lila, she makes him work even harder on that day, since he made a point that it is a day just like any other. if they are docked somewhere, she takes him out to drink. one time, she secretly docked in red london to surprise him so he could see rhy and meet ren for the first time

needless to say, lila tries to keep her birthday a secret. even alucard had to pry it from her hands, and her crew casually discovered it and prepared a big dinner for her aboard. she never truly celebrated it nor thinks is important, although she is grateful to be alive and to be on that ship with kell and everyone, who are now her family. kell made a point to tell her happy bday first thing in the morning and let her choose one thing she wants to do with him that day (it's often training of some kind, which often ends with kissing)

rhy loooooves his birthday and celebrates it twice. the first party is official, and all royalty is invited. he hates most of them, but he wants to make his enemies annoyed: he wants them to see he's thriving and wearing the best outfit and smile

the second party is private and held in his private chambers. there's his favorite people (kell and lila can't come every year, unfortunately, but they once celebrated via the basin) and they play games. to him, the best gift is that people he loves are present

holland never celebrated his birthday and discovered birthdays by travelling to the other londons. he finds the concept a bit silly. not that one can't celebrate how many years they've been alive, but growing in white london, the most important thing was staying alive and seeing another day. there wasn't time to celebrate life, when you had to survive.

if holland lived, maybe kell would've brought him a cupcake to celebrate every year. and if holland in tftop is real, kosika would organize a party to celebrate him

alucard used to spend his birthday with his sister anisa, who never forgot to make a handmade gift for him. after becoming captain, he celebrated on his ship and give the day off to his crew. the night ended with everyone or almost, very drunk and flirty

#hello again martin and bosco!! sending you boys round for another go :)

are disabled

are chronically ill

can't celebrate for health reasons

disability gets in the way of their gender representation

disability got in the way of a relationship

don't have anyone to celebrate with

have homophobic caretakers

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.

Updated September 22, 2023

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to expanding other people’s knowledge on this topic.  Information literacy is a huge topic in high schools and universities, and one of the things teachers and librarians are struggling to help students understand is the fact that their search engine is not free of bias and may prioritize ads (or what it thinks you want to see based on your shopping experience) rather than actual information.  It’s made more difficult by the fact that the technology in use is constantly evolving.

Also, big thanks to the folks who reminded me to fix the ref links in the original post.  Not sure what I was thinking when I copied it over from FB, but it’s now fixed (can’t vouch for reblogs, this is Tumblr afterall).

Someone accurately noted that the bulk of the above links are databases, not search engines. The initial post called them research sites not search engines.  If you want something better than Google, I would usually suggest using Duck Duck Go.  Someone in the comments said it skews right, but I have not seen research or evidence to back that up, so proceed as you wish.  I would recommend Firefox as a browser, and you could consider one of these search engines.

https://www.qwant.com/ - Search engine with no tracking or advertising

https://www.ecosia.org/ - Search engine that plants trees – has ads and that ad revenue runs the engine while funding tree planting

Additional Sites Recommended in the Comments

Here are some of the top sites recommended in the comments.

Academic/Reseach

Academia - platform that shares academic research

arXiv - (pronounced archive, apparently) is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for 2,328,899 scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. It is housed by Cornell University

Astrophysics Data System - The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is a digital library portal for researchers in astronomy and physics, operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) under a NASA grant. The ADS maintains three bibliographic collections containing more than 15 million records covering publications in astronomy and astrophysics, physics, and general science.

Bielefeld Academic Search Engine - BASE is a search engine specifically for academic studies texts, and contains more than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.

Bioline - This is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

Education Resources Information Center - ERIC is a comprehensive, easy-to-use, searchable, internet-based bibliographic and full-text database of education research and information.

JSTOR - academic digital library providing access to more than 12 million journal articles, books, images and primary sources in 75 disciplines.

PubMed - the National Institute for Health’s National Library of Medicine, comprises more than 35 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.

Research Gate - founded to address the problems in the way science is created and shared. Connects the world of science and makes research open to all.

Research Papers in Economics - Volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science for RePEc.

Sci-Hub - research publication library – technically pirated content, but please note that the researchers do not get paid for publication, and will often send you a PDF of their research for free if you ask, it’s the publications that want to restrict access to paying readers

US Government Science Portal - Science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

World Cat - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where the rare book you need is.

Libraries

Boston Library History & Political Science - The Boston Library has a ton of history and poli sci resources. Big libraries often have things available digitally for free, even if you aren’t in the area.

Hathi Trust Digital Library – This library provides free digitized books from all over the world.

Internet Archive - This non-profit library houses millions of free digital books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.

PDF Drive - This is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format, claiming over 225 million names. Caution advised as some users report malware may be hidden in with the valid content.

Project Gutenberg - This site provides free downloads of digital books, focusing on works with expired US copyright. Note, if you look for out-of-print books on Google, it will try to sell you books that you can actually download free from Gutenberg (I’ve tested this multiple times).

Z Library – This digital library provides ebooks for free. Currently considered a security risk by Firefox, so maybe avoid.

_

“In Lieu Of Keen Virtue” (2017) by British-Ghanaian artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

Anyway, I went looking for the full profile, which is a glorious piece of art in its own right--link to a nonpaywalled version--. Here are some of my favorite excerpts, for anyone as enthralled by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye as I was:

(ID: Pic 1: "You died screaming, yet the monster who took your place was silent. -- you are a weapon, and weapons do not weep."

Pic 2: A photosurrealist oil painting of a man clawing at his obscured face. The fingers sink into his skin, raising it up like messy clay.

Pic 3: An eye filled with inky blackness, no iris or white visible. End ID.)

Pic 2: Cascade by Henrik Aarrestad Uldalen

Pic 3: Pinterest

Shades of Magic: Holland

1. As Enose vs. As Tascen

In the first book, Kell uses the blood command As Enose (to find), in order to travel to the location of a specific person. This spell is never used again after ADSOM. Instead, they start using As Tascen (to transfer) for the same purpose for the remainder of the series.

2. Onase Aven vs. Aven Essen

Tieren introduces himself to Lila as the onase aven (the head priest) during ADSOM. This title/term is literally never seen or used again. Friendship ended with the onase aven 😤 the aven essen is my new best friend ig

(I wrote about this on the adsom tv tropes page btw under early installment weirdness, if the words seems familiar. dw they are mine haha, i wrote basically half the entries for adsom on that site lmao, you should check it out if you’ve never read it!)

In Chapter I of "Fire and Festival" Kell notes "there were stories, of non-Antari who tried to open doors and got stuck"

It is true he also says travel by token won't work if she's been trapped between the worlds.

But! We see at several earlier points Kell's actually a very excellent spell inventor—the healing salve, the guards' swords, spelled for short-term severance of targets' magic. He also sees magic closer to friend than thing to dominate, as typified by his and Holland's dispute later. Earlier, when he can't travel courtesy of encountering the wrong side of said bespelled swords, he coaxes, and magic complies.

cw: vague discussion of non-con sex acts

So while it isn’t stated in canon, it isn’t hard to surmise that the Danes would sexually abuse Holland. They have complete power over him, don’t regard him as a real person (not that they treat average people well either), and are both sadistic in general, especially Athos.

My current thought is what that extends to (for fic purposes) while feeling in character.

Oooo thank you for the three A.M. excuse to compare bleak smut headcanons on main! Putting the rest of this beneath a readmore, for anyone who'd rather skip my fucked-up noncon musings.

37 comes from a random tumblr post schwab made years ago, but it’s never said anywhere in-text—you can’t even extrapolate his age from flashbacks! read my way-too detailed explanation below at your own peril !!

Vor was actively sending assassins after Holland around the time of Talya's death, enough so that Holland knew his name.

At an unstated point in time, Queen Stol killed the other White London Antari in an attempt to gain his power. Vortalis was present in an unclear role, avoiding answering when Holland asks.

In their Silver Wood encounter (x) years later, Holland doesn't know who he is (and doesn't immediately assume he's an assassin) until Vortalis introduces himself.

Vor states he only sent 'enemies' after Holland, not allies or friends.

The wiggling:

Considering Vor's statement about his choice of assassins, we can safely assume that Talya wasn't his doing, even if the tragic irony is juicy. Holland had a lot of people looking to kill him.

Then there's the Unnamed White London Antari (heretofore called UWLA) and his ambiguous place in the narrative. We have no idea when he died/when Stol reigned. He briefly appears on the last page of the last issue of the Steel Prince comics looking vaguely middle-aged or older, though I can't really tell with the comics style; this is set at a time when Holland is a child (or not even born if we go by the younger timeline) and Vor is presumably a young adult if close in age to Maxim. While my previous assumption was that UWLA was executed when Holland was young (or else you'd have two active adult Antari who didn't cross paths), it is possible it happened later.

It is also notable that Holland doesn't recognize Vor when they first meet, only knowing him by name and reputation. This suggests that Vortalis wasn't sending assassins after him once a month or more, because then Holland would be more than valid in hunting him down to threaten him into backing off (while open hostility isn't Hol's style, I feel like that kind of prolonged stress would push him to that point); I feel like if it was me, I would at least want to know what my harasser looked like to know to avoid him if we happened to cross paths. So while it started as active murder attempts, it could have evolved to occasionally tossing problem-causers at Holland to see what he would do and keep an eye on him.

For clarity, my previous idea regarding UWLA, Stol, and Vor: he supports Stol in some way, helps her kill UWLA (presumably known for violence, if they didn't attempt and fail to recruit him), doesn't fix anything, he leaves to the Shal when her reign starts to fall apart, Vor assumes Holland is going to be the same kind of problem as UWLA (this is also assuming he started when Holland was 18, he knew Vor was after him but I'm not sure if it states how recent), spends the next 10ish years sending assassins on and off, because Holland clearly isn't pro-killing even in self-defense Vor realizes he might be more useful on his side than dead.

37 comes from a random tumblr post schwab made years ago, but it’s never said anywhere in-text—you can’t even extrapolate his age from flashbacks! read my way-too detailed explanation below at your own peril !!