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.

Is it just me or did our generation (those of is who are currently 20-30 ish) just not get the opportunity to be young in the 'standard' sense?

Don't get me wrong, we had fun. But all of that, threats of not graduating, threats of failing classes over a single test, over some mini golf and ice cream?

Throughout high school and early in college, my friend group got kicked out of malls, stores, and even a parking lot just for being there wrong. Not being loud of disruptive. Not causing problems. Just being there too long, or without buying anything.

My mom graduated high school, after repeating her senior year, without a single grade above a D, and was offered a full ride scholarship to a state university to play on their women's football team. I had a 3.8 GPA, multiple extracurriculars, a summer job, and over 100 hours of volunteer work, and barely got into that same university, and then couldn't afford to go there anyway.

We've made getting into college so important and yet so difficult that kids are sacrificing their childhoods for it.

Then they become adults and it doesn't go away. Your employer/ potential employers are searching your social media and internet presence so you'd better hope no one has ever posted a picture of you at a party, or with alcohol, or wearing revealing clothes, or whatever else they've deemed unprofessional. And if you want to go out it's a 10 dollar cover and drinks are at least 8 dollars, and you need to tip if there's any kind of live entertainment, who can afford to do all that regularly?

My physical therapist, when I was 18, told me about his 21st birthday, how the last thing he remembers is people taking body shots off him. I spent my 21st birthday alone, was in bed by 10pm because I had to be at work the next morning. My boss had already told me that they knew it was my 21st, and if I called out, she'd write me up for improper use of sick leave because you're not allowed to use sick leave for a hangover. I don't know anyone whose 21st birthday was a big deal. No one went out and partied for it.

Original report (waybacked PDF) is from 2007. That's Gen Z kids.

When I, Gen-Xer, was about 12 - in my rural home, I had about a three-mile range. (Could've pushed it to more, but didn't want to walk that far.) In the city, it was about a mile. Not that anyone was checking; again, that was about the distance I wanted to walk, and besides, that covered all of "downtown."

My kids? Closer to that 300 yards limit at the same age. Not because I wanted to restrict them, but we live next to a freeway on-ramp and between two sets of train tracks... and there is absolutely nothing kid-friendly within a half-mile for them to visit.

I spent my 21st birthday bar-hopping. My kids spent their 21st birthdays at home with a nice meal. I don't think either of them wanted to go bar-hopping - but yeah, as a society, we've removed a LOT of teen-friendly options.

See also: End of Third Places, switch from video game arcades to home consoles (hey, then every kid has to buy their own copy--great for game-makers!), shutdown of malls or restrictions on youth at them, closure of public parks, reduced/removed after-school programs, etc. Plus the places that think it's illegal for a 12-year-old to walk to the corner store unsupervised.

I am, however, DELIGHTED to hear that the booze & other vices industries are panicking over Gen Z not going out to party. Like, you spent 30-odd years removing all the places and ways people can hang out together and have fun outside of someone's personal house, and... guess what, when people hit milestone events (graduation, milestone birthdays, job promotion, whatever), they don't immediately flock to the Party Zone that they have never been welcome at. How shocking.

and nowadays?? we've made the bar so fucking high for these kids. i participated in this mock interview program as an interviewer guest from the library, where seniors would get a chance to pretend interview for a job with me to get some experience before they entered the workforce.

and my god. the resumes on these kids. they're pumped full of sports, arts, extracurriculars, awards, volunteer work, like 60% of them had already had at least one job, and at least 2 of them had already started their own fucking businesses.

like. i'm impressed of course, overall this isn't a terrible thing. but when do these kids get to take a break? when do ANY of us get to take a break?? we have made society so back-breaking that 15 year olds are starting businesses while they run the student council, attend five clubs, volunteer on the weekends, and do ever increasing mountains of homework to maintain a 4.0 GPA.

Like again. I was a fucking square in school. I had all A's in everything and i did extracurriculars, i even did some volunteer work here and there. but mostly i went home, i read books for fun, i went rambling in the woods near my house for no particular reason. i chilled out with my friends and doodled pictures and wrote piles of fanfiction. i spent so much time in high school just...relaxing and playing.

when are these kids getting time to do that, between all the stuff we expect of them? where are these kids getting the space to do that as we continue to push them out of every single physical space, because teens hanging out in a gaggle of friends is somehow threatening?

why are we expecting this much out of kids, out of young adults, while we refuse to offer even a fraction of what our parents and grandparents were given for a fraction of the work we're putting in?

her name was Sonya Massey. she was a human being who deserved to live. say her fucking name. Sonya Massey.

top 10 anime betrayals

The closest word we have in English for ‘wet but with air’ would be ‘aerated’, which is the past principle of the verb ‘aerate’. As a multi syllable Latin derived word, aerated wouldn’t feel equivalent to wet even if you just used it as an adjective in a sentence- so to have something that feels like ‘wet’ I looked for a monosyllabic air-related word with a German root.

What

he's not just a wheelchair user but also an amputee. an above knee amputee. wheelchair users are already next to nonexistant in video games but amputees exist in this really...disheartening? spot where they're pretty much just reduced to "person with a cybernetic limb" - it's always just somewhere from "just a cool visual design" to flat out "superpower". I can't think of a video game amputee that is actually disabled by their limb differences - I'm all for futuristic worlds where prosthetics and other disability aids are far advanced from what they are now, but that's not really what's implied by these designs. They're just... Cool designs that in no way reflect on the real-world experience of being an amputee.

Look at Hephaestus, though. Look at that prosthetic. Whilst stylised it very much looks like it functions like common mechanical knees - knee bends when thigh is lifted, knee straightens when thigh is lowered. He's a wheelchair user as well as a prosthetic user - every prosthetic user I know is also a wheelchair user as a prosthetic is not usable in every occasion and also cause exhaustion and pain if used constantly.

Whilst we can't see much of his wheelchair the position he's sat in and the wheels very much evoke active wheelchair to me - this carries on to very specifically the thickness of his arms. Whilst a lot of Hades designs are muscular Hephaestus has very noticeably thick arms - which makes sense, as active wheelchairs require a lot of arm strength.

First, hhhhhhh women…

Second, I don’t know if this is intentional but I’m going to assume it is, I love how Supergiant has dug into less well known parts of Greek mythology. Zagreus and Melinoë, for instance, are attested to by a single source each that give next to no information other than their parentage. And they did it again with Aphrodite!

Like all Greek gods, Aphrodite was referred to by different epithets depending on what aspect of her was being referenced. One of her less famous epithets was Aphrodite Areia (“The Warlike Aphrodite”), which places her role as a goddess of war as well as love. Worship of Aphrodite Areia was mostly limited to Sparta, Taras, and Kythera.

Aphrodite was originally introduced to Greece as the Phoenician goddess Ashtarte, a goddess of war, love, fertility, lions, and Venus, who herself was borrowed from the Mesopotamian Ishtar/Inanna, a goddess of war, love, fertility, Venus, and rulership. She was spread to Greece by traders during the Greek Dark Ages, first coming to shore in Cyprus and Kythera, both of which are often cited as her birthplace.

Aphrodite Areia was probably more faithful to her original interpretation, but most of Greece ended up sanitizing the war associations out of her. The Iliad, written while that was happening, goes out of its way to portray her as incompetent in battle, she gets stabbed in the wrist by Diomedes and told by Zeus that she doesn’t belong on the battlefield. It’s conspicuous enough to sound like a pointed statement from the author. I do find it very funny that despite trying to remove her associations with war, the Epic Cycle also makes her directly responsible for starting the most biggest war in Greek mythohistory.

I love that her design is shedding light on this lesser known aspect of her, her pose even seems reminiscent of the surviving statues of Aphrodite Areia.

Another little detail is her new face paint, which is identical to Ares’ in Hades! Aphrodite Areia is associated with Ares even more than usual (Ares and Areia are cognate words, both from ‘are’ for war or ruin). Of course, Aphrodite is often depicted as Ares’ lover so this choice just works in general.