ghost bird

[jetix]

2011-04-29

[banchie]

i've been phasing the phrase 'google it' out of my vocabulary and going back to 'look it up'. fuck you youve lost your generic trademark privileges

[ghostbird000]

Duck it!

[pmamtraveller]

Old Cat Walking by Joe L'Estrange

[ghostbird000]

I always reblog Old Cat Walking because it’s so perfect. I confess I had no idea the artist is a woman! Really fascinating person.

[pennaraptor]

emotional responses are deeply evolutionarily advantageous in any animals that are making complex decisions and behaviors (in many vertebrates, say) because they act as a reinforcer for a behavior. a bird taking a vigorous bath in a puddle is probably happy because if that behavior didnt elicit a positive feeling they wouldn't do it (it is dangerous to be on the ground and wet!). if an animal can feel fear, which i think is a less contested assertion to make, then it can certainly feel the opposite, that is, happy.

[pennaraptor]

Bernd Heinrich in his book Nesting Season

[hatsbuckets]

please stop giving kids under 12 cell phones. if they need a phone like a flip phone will suffice. PLEASE please. As a teacher I am begging you, as a group of teachers here from 6 year olds to 18 year olds. Please stop. Tell your friends to stop. Talk about it with other adults. Please

Children, especially younger than 10, have no idea how to self regulate that and they need to learn through other means. Addiction to their cellphones is straight up your fault as their parent if you buy them their own phone with your money.

Fuck man.

LET THEM BE KIDS.

[ghostbird000]

We gotta have training wheels for the phone. Seriously. As a millennial, we had it so good. We had landlines at home, so even before we got our first cell phones, we could still talk to friends and family without having to ask a parent. And when cell phones became a thing, they weren’t a highly-addictive ad-infested portal to the Torment Nexus. You could call and text and maybe play Tetris. (I miss my elementary school Nokia brick.)

Because it’s so hard to find a phone with no “smart” features, it seems to be either a smartphone or nothing, which means a lot of kids are totally isolated until they’re given a smartphone and thrown to the wolves. I’m getting my little niece a Tin Can phone (a landline for kids, basically) because she loves phone calls and I want to teach her more independence. I’ll be so stoked when she calls me and her titi by herself!

[night-the-starfish]

Happy family, a paper craft.

[typhlonectes]

[ghostbird000]

The best thing I’ve ever learned from a podcast: “Always read the plaque.” Thank you, 99% Invisible.

[13th-blackbird]

Cloth Mother | 2300 words | no archive warnings provided

The cloth mother has love but no sustenance; the wire mother has sustenance but no love. An AI mother knows the terms of her end user agreement before she knows anything else. -- After “Wire Mother” by Isabel J. Kim, Clarkesworld, October 2025. I couldn't blame the AI; I had to look at her maker.

[kawuli]

random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google

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

also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)

[yomikoreadsbooks]

Keeping a list of Google alternatives just in case…

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:

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.

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.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine

[angelicdewdrop]

[guppymoss]

Block I made for the community quilt project at the local university's art museum! It's about my favorite park :)

[mismedleym]

recollections

[mrporg]

[farxistmeminism]

Can the women out there who opt out of body hair removal reblog this? We can show people that we exist, and show others that they’re not alone. 

[ghostbird000]

Natural for the win! I have never felt better. I shaved when I was younger because I thought it was a rule I had to follow in order to “fit in”. It took until my mid 20s for me to realize that it doesn’t fucking matter!

I save so much time and money by leaving myself alone, apart from getting a haircut every so often. I have the mental space to actually think without being constantly irritated. Seriously, having my body feel the same from day to day has removed so much sensory overload from my life. I don't think it’s just an autism thing. The chafing and cuts and everything are just that uncomfortable. I’m pretty sure every woman who shaves or waxes is walking around with the human equivalent of some bullshit adware taking up processing power that could be going to something more worthwhile.

Besides, we’re mammals. We evolved hair for a reason. Keeps the bugs off, wicks sweat away, all those good things.

[topcat77]

Georgia O'Keeffe

Waterfall, No. 2, Īao Valley

[great-and-small]

Hi! Just saw your This is AI Slop addition to the wolf in dog bed post

Ah that's really sad, I definitely thought it was real. Asking so I can b able to spot AI slop next time, what gave it away/made u realise this is AI?

Thanks!

The more you practice the better you will get at telling the difference! In general it is good to treat any post with a wild animal behaving in an especially cute or “wholesome” way with a healthy bit of skepticism. Sometimes these stories are legitimate but oftentimes they’re pure fiction created for engagement by people who do not know anything about wildlife.

A few reasons why this is AI:

1. Wolves are very shy in the wild and avoid humans as much as possible. A particularly bold urban coyote might do something like this but I’d consider this extremely abnormal behavior for a wolf

2. The door changes from a swinging door to a sliding door in the second frame

3. The wolf’s front right limb is distorted and the left hind limb is missing entirely in the first frame

4. Searching for “wolf in pet store bed” online yields zero legitimate news sources, just lots of clickbait social media posts and AI debunking sites. If this had actually happened, it would’ve almost certainly been reported on by a news source.

[ghostbird000]

Off work due to weather, wake and bake thought: The vaccine against AI slop is getting really into plant ID. You could also do birds or rocks or breeds of cats or typography, literally anything with details that can be systematized. I think my tree ID has saved me. Em dashes, rule of threes, “quiet”, “journey”, “tapestry”, etc… it’s just like leaf margins or bark textures.

[mybeingthere]

Wally Dion, born 1976, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Fabric Star Quilts.

Wally (Walter) Dion is a Canadian artist of Saulteaux ancestry living and working in Upstate New York. Working in a number of media including painting, drawing and sculpture.

Wally explains:

"The first fabric star quilt was made as part of a 2022 residency at Wanuskewin Park. It was my way of reflecting upon prairie tall grass and the reintroduction of bison into the Great Plaines. I wanted to make several transparent quilts and superimpose them; one in front another... a quilt for the microbiome, another for the bison, their manure & hooves, another for the summer fires that scorch the ground and a final quilt for the sweetgrass braid.

I was considering how all of these things worked together for thousands of years to create what is known as the 'prairie tall grass ecosystem'. A vast and fertile expanse of land stretching from the foothills of Alberta to the banks of the Mississippi. I wanted to highlight the invisibility of systems when everything is working well, as it should be.

I started with the green quilt because it is the colour of the sweet grass braid that is exchanged in ceremony and relationship building. I considered the nature and tradition of quilting; impoverished craftspeople using tiny scraps of fabric. I considered the act of offering fabric and adherence to tradition. I thought of a thousand tiny prayers and how that might look; invisible acts of respect and adherence to protocols spanning decades. My thoughts travelled across the land, imagining the trees and rocks collecting these prayers like a bush of cloth, or an etched boulders."

fabric quilts - Wally Dion

prairie tall grass quilts, Bonavista NL, 2023 bison quilt, 2023. 127 ¼ h x 106 ¼ w. fabric, copper pipe. fire quilt, 2023