EXCELSIOR

Multi-fandom blog | 28 | Current Obsession: Bridgerton | she/they | side blog: @theclonesdeservebetter | formerly: blueberry-9-pancakes

[justcatposts]

Little girl teaching her cats how to draw a flower 

(via)

[hottiewitabloggie]

they’re? just? sitting there ???

[ladycavalier]

it makes it 100% better that i can’t understand her, i feel like i’m hearing what cats hear

[socialistexan]

[crtter]

Heh, she’s speaking Portuguese! Here’s what she’s saying:

*baby voice* “… and if you have any questions, just ask me! And now… yeah. And now you draw the roots. You draw them all twisted up! Got it? A flower? Now draw it. Did you get it, Luis Roberto? Did you get it, Jurandir? Look. Did you get it? That’s how you draw a flower.”

Luis Roberto and Jurandir are people names (Jurandir is especially a name associated with older men) so it’s extra funny that the cats are named that, heh.

[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

[johnny-depp-is-loved]

[wulfhalls]

forever grateful i was simply too lazy to let the makeup industrial complex get its hooks in me. I was just like im not doing all of that. in fact. im doing none of that

[cumaeansibyl]

yeah I have political reasons for it now but my original and still most powerful reason is "I am not getting out of this bed one single second before I have to"

[aromanticduck]

[cutecipher]

I hope the samsung workers striking get everything they want especially given they're key to the huge profits samsung is raking in for memory

[cutecipher]

Samsung holds desperate final talks with union over 18-day chip factory strike that could cost $20 billion — government-mediated summit seek

A deal could cut Samsung's annual operating profit by up to 12%.

[the-big-mood]

[rockytheeridian]

(insp.)

[rockytheeridian]

#as a teacher myself he makes me ill#educating students is a beautiful wonderful thing @carhmel

[caringintensely]

Experience: Learning the right way to connect the dots.

[telep0rt]

This is the best representation of something I have been trying to explain to people for years!!!! Saving this to my phone so I can routinely pull it out when I need. 

[kidobsolete]

[tikkunolamorgtfo]

So if you look in the lower right-hand corner of that last panel with the unicorn, you’ll see that it looks like something was erased or pasted over. Know why? Because this isn’t the original version of the cartoon.

This is:

Yeah, that’s right. This entire strip is a comment on antisemtism and y’all changed it to be more “fun” and deleted the artist’s signature in the process. So anyway, this isn’t just some helpful infographic or a silly meme, it’s a commentary on how Jews have been getting blamed for world’s ills for 2,000 years, and whoever erased that panel can fuck right off for eternity.

[drowsy-salamander]

So I’ve seen this post a lot and when I first saw that it had originally been about antisemitism and that had been erased, I was shocked and angry. But then I noticed just how off the artist’s signature seemed to the rest of the image. It’s in a completely different resolution, in fact you can see slight discoloration behind the logo. So that’s odd. What’s also odd, is how the first picture has an artist’s handle, @gapingvoid and this new handle was completely different. It’s… JNRAGY? I think? Very different from the first handle. 

So I reverse image searched both images, the one commenting on antisemiticism and the unicorn one and I could not find the source for either of them. All I could find were other people posting reuploads of the art, not the artist. So I looked back at the images and actually, it turns out neither are the original. Because the original said nothing about Conspiracy theories. As the previous person said, if you look at the unicorn you can see something partially photoshopped out. On the other hand the lines making up the star are more pixelated than the other parts of the art piece and the dots are slightly blurry. It’s a lower resolution than the rest of the picture. The earliest post I can find with the antisemitism commentary was August 5th of this year. The unicorn 

So I go back to the first artist’s handle, gapingvoid. And it’s a whole website selling prints of artworks with similar art styles. This looks promising. Looking up ‘Data Information Knowledge’ lead me to find this.

It was from 5 year ago. This was the original. The two conspiracy theory versions have started being shared a lot this year, in the past few months honestly.

I think it’s worth always remembering to double check the veracity of claims. However, I do think that the edit of the comic to critique antisemitism is very good and is a very worthwhile piece of art in its own right. Adapting other’s work is an important part of art but it was not the original artist’s intent.

[chenisthebestkitty]

This uniquely illustrates the point of the conspiracy theory panel. People just changed the information. And they did it twice so that the first layer of falsehood only revealed the second underneath.

[too-many-hyperfixations]

Want to know how to turn change into a movement?

We all know that data science is all the rage, here to stay. The next thing we need to do is establish sustainable principles for living wit

The earliest use of the original I can find is from 2019, indeed on the gapingvoid site

[assortedinsanities]

The original first image was also first published there

information vs knowledge

The concept is probably inspired by the Data Information Knowledge Wisdom Pyrimad

DIKW pyramid - Wikipedia

[johnturturro]

living in the us right now is just a constant stream of

[iheartvelma]

[the-prairies-calling-out]

"Why do you buy books when the library is right there?"

Because publishing houses will not continue printing paper books if libraries are their only customers.

Also, I like being able to read at my leisure and generally have books at hand.

[its-the-blob]

#public libraries are good because they let people access books they might never otherwise read#private book ownership is good because it's Yours#physical books are good because they last a long time and again it's Yours#ebooks are good because you can fit a whole library into the physical space of a single book and they're cheaper to produce#audiobooks are good because they're accessible to people with eyesight or visual reading issues and leave your hands free#in conclusion: all books are good and people should enjoy them however and whenever they can#(lest it be misunderstood I agree with you completely OP I just also really like books in general and it got away from me)

YES. all books. every kind

[cb-writes-stuff]

I just learned that in Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, the problems that Miis have that you have to solve (formerly called Problems) are now called Ponderings. So in light of that

[grilledquesobabe]

SOMEONE TALK TO ME ABOUT "THE BOOK WITCH" RIGHT NOW

[lessthcn3]

Dr. Ryland mf Grace at Erid, realizing he doesn’t have to pay taxes, or his student loans anymore

[adhdchaosbean]

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

fun things to slip into conversation include

“i’m kinda fucking w/ the fourth wall here but-”

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

“I’m only saying this for foreshadowing purposes”

[nienna14]

“this’ll make more sense when you meet your nemesis but-”

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

“shit that’s not in the script”

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

“i thought we cancelled this story arc”

[jelly-writings]

“Probably gonna rewrite this later so-”

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

“oof that’ll hit the ratings”

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

“that’s not gonna make it past the censors”

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

“i’m still amazed this project got greenlit”

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

“in this political climate???”

[hedgehogradio]

Crazy how 6 years later, the quirky inserts just became mainstream vernacular. Aint that right, chat?

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

reality jumped the shark so bad the whole writer’s room got fired and now we’re all meta-aware

[hochiminhts-deactivated20190916]

[futchcassidyandthecumdancekid]

​still genuinely might be the best own ive ever seen in my fucking life

[the-big-mood]

The sword catching scene in Pirates of the Caribbean took hours to film because the actors kept missing the catch, so their reactions in the final shot are genuine.