I cannot put into words how much I Fucking Loathe the fact that when you search something on youtube now it will randomly intersperse blocks of “people also watched” and “for you” into the results. That’s not what I searched for, youtube. I typed in a search query because I wanted to see search results, not random unrelated garbage you have placed in my way apparently to either inconvenience me or force me to scroll further for actual results. I despise your wretched little games and every time I see it I can only instantly close the tab as I am overcome with the urge to burn something down.
“I despise your wretched little games” perfectly conveys how I feel about the entire algorithm/attention economy
They also refuse to actually show the parameters you searched for. If you sort by “upload date,” the first few videos might be more recent ones by upload date, but anything past that you’ll find a video that was uploaded five years ago, then five months ago, then three years ago, etc, which—NO! That’s NOT WHAT I ASKED FOR!! PUT THEM IN ORDER!!!
Also sometimes the “people also watched” bullcrap will not only be entirely unrelated, it will also be videos with violent, sometimes outright triggering thumbnails. I’ve gotten some AWFUL unrelated video thumbnails just when searching for video game music videos.
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.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free
“your rent should be a third of your income” well wouldn’t that be nice. wouldn’t it. lower the rent pussy
Casual observation from someone old enough to remember: in the year 2000 financial advice was that rent should be no more than ¼ of your income.
Until the mid 80s, the advice was that if you must rent instead of owning, then that 20% of your monthly income (oh yes, only 20%) should include all your utilities too.
After all, rent costs more than a mortgage, so it should offer more too.
Last Sunday was hella fun…both of us, wearing nothing but opera masks, ran the B2B together. Yay! (Although it’s hard for me to keep up with my darling wife at her usual pace—Madison easily runs faster than I do by like a minute per mile.)
But the article is wrong about one thing: there were def more than six women who ran it naked. I saw at least 20 others along the route, plus plenty of naked spectators of various body configurations.
This is your daily reminder to not be ashamed of making your life easy for yourself.
Cut your food into small pieces, make the font size 30 on your e book, use straws to drink, get a pen that’s comfortable to hold, take more naps, walk slowly, eat another cookie, buy velcro shoes, re-watch the part you couldn’t understand the first time, write things on your hands so you don’t forget it… whatever you want and/or need
Don’t let anyone tell you how you should be doing things. We don’t need to prove each other anything
The police covered up killing this man for as long as they could. If the shooter doesn’t kill you, the police will.
This also outright disproves the “good guy with a gun” bullshit conservatives like to espouse. Because if a good guy with a gun takes out a shooter, the police kill them.
First, it narrows our understanding of safety. Police get us to focus on crimes committed by the poorest, most vulnerable people in our society and not on bigger threats to our safety caused by people with wealth and power.
For example, wage theft by employers dwarfs all other property crime combined — from burglaries, to retail theft, to robberies — costing some $50 billion every year. Tax evasion steals about $1 trillion each year. There are hundreds of thousands of Clean Water Act violations each year, causing cancer, kidney failure, rotting teeth, and damage to the nervous system. Over 100,000 people in the United States die every year from air pollution, five times the number of all homicides.
But through the stories cops feed reporters, the public is encouraged to measure a city’s safety by whether it saw an annual increase or decrease of three homicides or fourteen robberies — rather than by
how many people died from lack of access to health care, how many
children suffered lead poisoning, how many families were rendered
homeless by illegal eviction or foreclosure, or how many thousands of illegal assaults police committed.
The second function of copaganda is to manufacture crises or “crime surges.” For example, if you watch the news, you’ve probably been bombarded with stories about the rise of retail theft. Yet the actual data shows there has been no significant increase. Instead, corporate retailers, police, and PR firms fabricated talking points and fed them to the media. The same is true of what the FBI categorizes as “violent crime.” All told, major “index crimes” tracked by the FBI are at nearly forty-year lows.
The third and most pernicious function of copaganda is to manipulate our understanding of what solutions actually work to make us safer. A primary goal of copaganda is to convince the public to spend even more money on police and prisons. If safety is defined by street crime, and street crime is dangerously high, then funding the carceral state leaps out to many people as a natural solution.
Bugs Bunny could have simply walked into Mordor. He would have shown up at the gates of Mordor in a disguise and been like “Evil volcano inspection unit” and flashed a fake ID badge to the confused orc.
Love the implication here that the one ring would have little to no effect on Bugs
To be fair, it’s canonically established in Lord of the Rings that Tom Bombadil, an inexplicable magical trickster, is unaffected by the ring, and the only reason they don’t give the job to him is because Tom Bombadil is a silly little man who’s easily distracted and just wants to spend time with his hot wife.
Bugs Bunny, on the other hand, loves nothing more than fucking over self-important dickheads, and is also an inexplicable magical trickster, so he would in fact be perfect for this mission.
The One Ring may not tempt Bugs, but he’d have other problems with the mission: he’d get lost halfway there (”I knew I should’ve made a left turn at Albuquerque”) and get distracted enough to hand the One RIng to Elmer Fudd or Yosemite Sam as a prank, only for it to be stolen by Daffy Duck, leading to an ever-increasing number of characters on an increasingly-destructive chase across Middle Earth as everyone keeps stealing it from each other, (Bugs would definitely pull the “evil volcano inspector” gag to get into Mordor, and he’d then immediately turn around and pose as a customs agent stopping whoever currently has the ring at the border and relieving them of it as “contraband”) culminating in an all-out brawl at Mount Doom. Bugs manages to reclaim the ring one last time as everyone else is busy fighting each other, only for Daffy to come out of nowhere and grab it out of his hands. Laughing maniacally, Daffy doesn’t realize that his victory dance has taken him right off the edge off a cliff - until Bugs points it out, at which point gravity reasserts itself, and Daffy and the ring both plunge to the fiery depths below
April Fools Day (April 1) is one week away. To that end, I just want it known now, well before the day, that this blog will NOT be posting any jump scares, fake announcements, freak-out posts, fake hackings, fake emergencies, fake news, and “gotcha!” stuff on April Fools Day. We’re staying safe and chill around here.
I’m honestly not into April Fools Day, really, unless the jokes are obvious and silly–like Rickrolls and Dad Jokes. Rickrolls and Dad Jokes are just traditional.
Ditto: no AF content here, I promise. We have an agreement at my work not to do it there either.
i’ve mentioned this here before, but it will remain one of the most ideologically influential experiences of my life: when i was in fifth grade i did a report on post traumatic stress as manifested in veterans of the vietnam war, and my father did me the huge favor of connecting me w/ a vietnam vet friend of his who was diagnosed with PTSD, assuring him that while i was only ten i was bright and curious and he should be as honest with me about his experience as possible.
i remember entering his office with my tape recorder, sitting in a chair that was too big, and asking him questions about war, and his life after war, while swinging my legs over the edge of the chair. i remember being very, very quiet as he spoke of pulling the car over on the highway for fear of crashing when his hands would shake uncontrollably in response to song on the radio or a smell that he couldn’t be sure was real or sense-memory. and of ruined relationships and anger and american hypocrisy.
and i also remember that was the day i learned what “valor” meant. he used “valor” in a sentence and i didn’t know that word, and when i asked him to explain “valor” he became very quiet. and i can’t remember precisely what he said, if he ever offered me the dictionary definition or not, but i do remember him looking very sad, and saying something about our country’s idea of “valor”, and also something about a broken promise. and there was an edge to his words that i couldn’t parse at the time that i would later come to understand was bitterness, that he sounded bitter.
to this day i can’t hear or read the word “valor” without seeing sunlight coming through his office window at a slant, close-to-sunset light, and feeling the kind of quiet, confused, completely internalized panic a child feels when they sense that a grown up is trying very hard not to weep in their presence.
news reporting on murders is always like ‘the victim was described by the people who knew them as polite and funny’ like yeah i fucking bet they did what else are they gonna say. breaking news local man stabbed 1000 times to death, grieving friends and family described the deceased to reporters as ‘a bit of a cunt’, ‘mean and bad’ and ‘just generally kind of annoying, you know?’
I remember seeing a documentary about this recently, called No One Saw A Thing. This schmuck def deserved his fate. Go read the whole Wikipedia page for the story…worth your time.
Ally, 37, San Francisco. I'm a feminist, an introvert, a creative. I'm bizarre in ways most mundanes never even consider. I consider stereotypes as a dare. You'd never recognize me IRL. Oh, yeah…I’m also very happily married to @not-the-mermaid.
This blog rated FR for openly addressing both fandom and real-life topics: gender equality, politics, and other stuff that goes on in the real world. You may encounter occasional nudity here, just like in real life. Under-18 welcome if accompanied by an open mind.
If that's not enough to assuage your curiosity, click here, here, here, or if you really want TMI, here, here, or here to delve into my innermost depths.
