Rex Est Mortuum

i went over and was about to put in “single” or “it’s complicated” and, well..

Asks- Messages sent to an inbox, anonymous or otherwise.

Tags- The hashtags at the bottom of the post. Used for trigger warnings (tw) content warnings (cw) community tags, Fandom tags, personal tags you can search later on your own blog, and minor commentary.

Comments- the speech bubble at the bottom of the post, for talking about things relating to the post or other comments without interacting with the post itself.

Reblogs- Sharing a post by clicking the little green arrows at the bottom of the post. This shares the post to your blog, so people who follow you can see it. There is no algorithm for seeing posts, so posts are only shared when people interact with them by reblogging the.m.

Likes- clicking the little heart at the bottom of a post. This adds it to your 'likes' list, but does not share it to your blog. (People may be able to see your likes unless you go into settings and make your likes private.)

No Algorithm- Because there's no system for auto-sharing posts "based on your likes", posts must be reblogged in order to gain notes (reblogs, comments, and likes) in order to be seen. As a consequence, you will often see posts that are over a decade old, that happened to get popular.

Notes and notifications- Your activity page will show you every time someone interacts with a post you interacted with first. "Flooding your notes" means a post or re-post of yours got popular and people are interacting with it so much that you have to dig through your notifications to find updates on anything else. You can mute a post, delete a post, or turn off comments or reblogs to make this stop, but keep in mind that people might screenshot the post itself to keep sharing it if you delete it or impair activity. (I am going to ruin your notes by reblogging this. I am sorry.)

Ads- The ads here are wildly unpredictable and often make no fucking sense. There was a common one for a long time with a creepy dude dressed as Pikachu that became a meme. I get a lot of religious Christian ads. Sometimes you get ads where it isn't clear what is being advertised, or why. Tumblr is a famously unprofitable website and most of us just seem to ignore them even when they are coherent.

Crabs- "Crab Rave" is a music video with dancing crabs that reached meme status here. Dancing crab gifs come up usually when someone famous and terrible experiences a deserved misfortune. There was a brief feature where you could send people little cartoon crabs. I don't understand this as well as I would like.

"Blaze"- You can pay money to make random people see a post. This is a combination of "pay to become popular" type thinking and an act of warfare amongst users.

Mutuals- Someone you follow who follows you back.

Followers- The people who follow your blog and see your posts and reblogs. This number is not public. Nobody cares

"Investing at X notes"- A common comment used to imply that someone's post, usually only having a handful of notes, is about to go wildly popular. This is usually regarded as a curse, because having a post blow up means getting your notes flooded and having to see a load of bad-faith messages from idiots.

Staff- Tumblr site staff have made a lot of dumb fucking choices since the dawn of the sisite'creation and people tend to @ staff, much in the way that a helpless peasant may shake their fist skywards to an uncaring god. Just roll with it.

Anons- You can turn anons off, meaning nobody can send you anonymous messages. Because some of these fuckers are hateful cowards, this will cut down on harassment, bigotry, and general stupid talk shoeing up in your inbox. Unfortunately, this will also limit messages from shy people who genuinely wanna be nice.

Bots- If you get a weirdly flirty message out of nowhere by someone who hasn't followed you long and has a weird username, it's it's bot. Flag and block. If you're scrolling through an unrelated tag and suddenly see a supermodel looking person with their tits out and a bunch of random tags, it's spam and it's a bot. Flag and block. It's been a problem for a while, like roaches.

Dipshits- If you see a blog with "rad", "radical", "fem", "female", "vulva", "uterus", "terf", "radfem", or "critical" in their username, check their blog to verify if they're a radfem or a terf. If you don't know what those terms mean, you can Google 'em, but they're weirdly aggressive offshoots of feminism that wrap back around to being mysoginistic, transphobic, and racist, and they aren't very popular here. The common move is to just block 'em and move on. We also have trolls and white supremacists but again, not very popular, pretty easy to block, report them if you can.

Other common etiquettes:

Always assume OP is reading your comments.

Reblog posts, don't just "like" them. Again, no algorithm- this site doesn't work without sharing.

Don't share personal information. Always assume you can be doxxed. Keep it vague.

Don't be a dick.

Fact check before sharing info if you can- theres a lot of misinformation and misinterpretation.

Always read twice- Reading comprehension has been so bad on so many posts here that it's become a meme too. If you don't understand, read it twice before commenting.

Have fun, and do it for yourself. This isnt isn't clout website.

Other longtime residents are welcome to add on if I've forgotten anything.

absolutely use the Filters feature in your settings to sort out ANY tags/words you don't want to see content of

you WILL be followed by pornbots now and then. block & report

block freely, btw. anyone you dislike for any reason, just block'em. it's safe and cozy that way

#personal usually means "please do not reblog"

reblog means "share" but repost means "previously posted content reuploaded in a new post." so anything tagged "do not repost" means "do not download/screenshot my stuff and share it on your own blog for clout"

OPT OUT of the AI feature (in settings). the company that owns tumblr will allow your blog to be scraped unless you opt out

STOP IT’S BEEN MONTHS. MONTHS!

I was driving through Vermont with a friend, and we pulled over at a tiny shop offering Maple Items. We were on the state highway, not the interstate, so "pulling over" meant "squeezing my tiny car into a parking bay the size of a broad highway shoulder."

As we got out of the car, an older woman emerged from behind the building where she had been pruning her roses. She introduced herself as Tammy.

Her shop offered the promised variety of Maple, but also a number of small antiques and a plethora of dog figurines, plaques, and clearly-hand-stitched garden flags.

A huge purple ribbon hung on the wall behind the register, along with many pictures of small dogs. This was no county fair ribbon. It was the size of my torso. The material had the soft sheen of actual silk.

As I placed my purchases on the counter, I asked, "Do you... Breed dogs?"

Yes. She does. She has bred Yorkies for the last 40 years. Her mother bred Yorkies before her. The purple ribbon was from her national championship winning Yorkie.

You may be expecting that the infodump was going to be about Yorkies.

It was not.

It was about 40 years of drama in the Yorkie breeding community. Where – you must understand – the judging at shows is often about who you're in with, not about the dogs. This is especially true when Tammy's opponents win anything.

And Tammy's mother! Well. Phyllis has been on the Yorkie scene since Yorkies were invented. Because of this, many women of equally venerable age hold deep grudges against Phyllis. The sort of grudges that result in episodes of Midsommar Murders.

This led to deep injustices against Phyllis on the part of judges and prevented her dogs from winning so often she retired from the scene. Judging is all about who you're friends with, after all.

After 20 years in hiding, Phyllis – the One True Queen of Yorkie Breeding – hatched a plot. She may have been out of the show circuit, but she was still breeding dogs. She entered an absolutely perfect bitch in the national competition, but sent her with a handler rather than go in person.

None of the usurpers knew who this dog belonged to, and in dog-breeding circles this Does Not Happen. This could have resulted in further injustices, but Phyllis was crafty. She knew this tournament was being judged by a man from the UK, who knew naught of the drama in the US Yorkie Empire.

With these advantages – and being the best dog there – Phyllis's bitch won the highest honor at the show.

Incensed by this insult to their ill-gotten supremacy, the other owners descended on the handler after the show, demanding to know for whom he was working.

"Phyllis," said he.

The name of the overthrown queen evoked horror in the usurpers.

"PHYLLIS!? She's still ALIVE!???"

Yes, Phyllis yet lived, and this bitch – the dog, not the woman – went on to mother Tammy's current dogs. One of whom, Lucy-Fur, is the reincarnation of Tammy's sister (also Lucy). This is certain for two reasons.

Firstly, Sister Lucy absolutely went straight to Hell upon her death, and Lucy-Fur the dog is positively as evil as Sister Lucy was.

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.

To recover, you literally need to manually learn skills that most people learn as a toddler

You need to learn what makes your body uncomfortable, and what to do to fix it

If you are high-masking, that usually means that you have learned to ignore every distress signal your body sends unless it is a distress signal that a neurotypical person would recognize. People have likely been unintentionally gaslighting you about your lived experience your entire life

If you feel bad or panicked for no reason, stop and try to pay attention to your body. Are you tense? You are likely feeling physical pain somewhere. If you've been gaslit about your pain your entire life, you might not be able to identify it.

Go through a sensory checklist.

SIGHT: Try closing and covering your eyes. If this gives you relief, the lights are probably too bright. You may also need differently-colored lights

SOUND: Cover your ears. Does this give you relief? If so, you may need earplugs or noise canceling headphones. You may also benefit from a neutral or pleasant background noise, like soft music or brown noise.

TOUCH: Are your clothes uncomfortable? Your chair? Your body? Do you feel greasy, like you need a shower? Do you need softer, sensory-friendly clothing?

TASTE: Do you need to brush your teeth or tongue? Would chewing on something help?

SMELL: Is there a strong or unpleasant smell in the room? Do you need to clean or empty a trash can? Would an air purifier help? Would a pleasant smell like a candle help?

INTEROCEPTION: Are you hungry? Thirsty? Tired? How is your posture? Are any of your muscles tight or sore? Scan your body slowly from head to feet, tensing and loosening each group of muscles. Going for a walk or doing a series of quick stretches may help a lot.

Learning how to do this stuff is not intuitive, if you've had an entire lifetime of gaslighting telling you that everything hurting you isn't a big deal and you're being dramatic over nothing.

This takes time, it takes work, it's not intuitive, and it's hard. Most people forget how hard it is, because they learned this as toddlers.

"The installation depicts a chain of people holding onto one another, symbolizing solidarity and mutual assistance. The hand of the final figure extends beyond the fence, allowing visitors to grasp it and symbolically take part in the rescue.