fyi I'm not off tumblr for good but I'm trying very hard to stay off of here atm because I've got a repetitive stress injury and scrolling hurts my hands, hit me up on discord if you want
So you can sort your likes by oldest first now which is kinda cool but the thing is, I made my blog in spring 2016 and didn't at the time like that many posts and it's not fun looking at the posts I liked in November 2016
Like, this attitude towards PRC as less friendly to LGBT+ people comes from the way that people only narrowly measure LGBT+ rights as that of marriage equality, and, not, like, how far the state will go to protect its LGBT+ people. A country where a president signed "Marginalize All Transgender Women" order will turn around and act like a country where there's over-the-counter estradiol and an anti-homophobia cybersquad is the country where LGBT+ people need to worry about their safety. As someone whose professional area is in sexual minorities (and folk religion but that's not relevant here), it's very odd to see. It's not just me, though. LGBT+ rights activists with a backbone in the USA has talked about the fact that marriage equality is nowhere near enough in the early years of the 2010s.
PRC's judicial system has, as of this week, passed a memorandum/guideline that banned discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression in judgments, including the written terms in legal protections against discrimination. This means that PRC, as a nation of 1.4 billion people, are offering the same level of legal protection towards LGBT+ people as the most progressive prefectures and citites in Japan, places that I'd have said is the easiest to live as LGBT+ in Northeast Asia until this week. The ruling acknowledges that insults and humiliation for these reasons can lead to punishment and compensation, that companies cannot discriminate in hiring, firing, or work environment, and that schools can be punished for bullying LGBTQIA+ students. This is not to say that equal rights for marriage should never be granted, but the progress being made here is not only steady and positive, but honestly leaps and bounds compared to how slow it's been for Japan, previously the most friendly country in the region for LGBT+ rights, at least in terms of social attitude.
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)
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
I’ve switched to duckduckgo as my primary search engine a while ago, but I find myself falling back to google for some tricky queries, so I'm doing a little comparison test on a single query below the cut (this is of course not comprehensive or covering all types of searches but it's a demo with a real song lyric I was trying to remember this evening so it's at least a use case I actually have)
tldr: startpage is the only free option that was as good as Google for my test (kagi also got it but it’s paid)
Query is "lyric a dream where you're next to me no one has to leave you just keep me company the beths" (I did not remember this song lyric right, for the record, and literally nothing found it before I remembered the band name)
Found my lyric
startpage: linked to genius for 2 am
kagi (I had to make an account, smallweb didn't have it, but I'd been wanting to try it anyways): linked to spotify for 2 am
For completion, google (like normal google, also didn't give me an ai overview for this one for whatever reason)
Didn't find my lyric
DuckDuckGo: gave me links to song lyric finders. Note: the previous commenter was a little unfair here, lots of search engines use the bing index plus their own whatever, and what microsoft gets from ddg (and has promised not to do anything with, which may or may not be trustworthy)
Qwant: also just links to lyric finders. Notably slow (not like, minutes, but definitely 4+ seconds which is where I start noticing)
SearX: it did some weird redirects, but once it redirected, also links to a-z lyrics and then a few results down some lyric finders
Gibiru: didn't find my lyric and linked to a lot of music related but not related to my lyric reddit/insta posts. So maybe a good choice if you're looking for more responses from people vs websites, but for this lyric question it's doing worse. Also concerningly, labeling itself as copyright 2021
Swisscows: links to a bunch of individual songs (genius pages etc) that are not right and a beths redit ama
Gigablast: I just did the 100 search engines option (which is also what you get if you hit enter) and it's kind of impressive that it's worse imo than the individual search engines it's querying, which is to say also a bunch of links to song pages that are not the song I'm looking for
oscobo: more links to specific wrong pages including the reddit ama and some yt/insta links
4get.ca: linked to lyric finders
searchxng: I picked the top proxy, it linked to lyric finders
etools.ch: linked to lyric finders, very retro ui (kinda fun for me tbh)
yep.com: links to some info about beths concerts and some unrelated song lyrics? I sort of think this is worse than the other lyric ones but they're all pretty bad so you'd have to do an easier query to do a real comparison
dogpile.com: bunch of fb links and the reddit ama
luxxle: this has an ai mode and links to a chat on its homepage so I don't think it's going to be a big fave around here, also linked to a bunch of wrong song lyrics
presearch.com: linked to song lyric finders, notably slow but it has a cute loading graphic!
out of a sense of fairness, I did try the top listed lyric finder (chosic, pretty consistently) and it did not find my lyric (so as much as I say just give me the links and let me click through more that's not the solution here)
Not a general purpose search engine
WolframAlpha is extremely cool and I hope people aren't put off by their ai description (it's been around for ages and is relatively limited purpose) However I wouldn't consider it a general purpose search engine: it's really best for math/science problems. It doesn't even parse my song lyric question right, but that's a misuse of the search engine anyways. It will tell me how many ping pong balls could fit in the sears tower though!
Boardreader is specific to message boards and doesn't have anything relevant to beths lyrics I guess. I tried searching "wind and rain lyric versions" as something that felt related but fair (I know there are forums for trad songs! If I was just looking for that on ddg I might specify mudcat for example) and it didn't get anything, so I'd say you may have to start with whatever kind of forums it does index, which they haven't listed anywhere, so this is borderline unusable for me
Disconnect appears to be a wrapper for other search engines so it's not relevant to the quality question (or rather its quality is equal to these other ones)
https://search.marginalia.nu/ I haven't played with this but wouldn't expect it to work on this kind of general purpose search
Paid only - skipping these but that's not inherently an issue
Metager
kagi, kind of, but I've heard enough about it that I did sign up for a trial anyways
Not useable
Infinity Search: well this literally would not load for me with the provided link and then when I ddg'ed infinity search I got something with a login so not for me. Looks like they have a github up and you can self host but I cannot live like this.
Search encrypt: I think they may be dead? The link here linked to some kind of garbagey website where the search bar searched in that page and couldn't answer simple queries, and the first result from ddg was last updated in 2020 and doesn't load results (or possibly loads results that are 100% blocked by ublock?)
mojeek and wilby.me both failed to get me useful results for a simple query ("love the magician chords" because I'm on a theme here). I like the idea of focusing on personal websites (I was going to list this under not general purpose) but you have to be able to find things and it's not like I gave a conversational query, neither site gave a page that had that string in it and there are definitely sites that do, including at least one small personal site that ddg gave me a year ago and unfortunately won't give me today
This stunning gypsum selenite baclava/lasagna belongs to Phillip Rendina, it was shared on Facebook, and boy aren't we jealous! We thought you needed to see it too.
@acommonrose tagged me in a book ask game so here we go
1. The last book I read:
Last book I finished is Maus (for book club)
2. A book I'd recommend:
I like doing book recs based on a person/context generally speaking (my asks are always open!) but to arbitrarily choose one for people who see this post at large, I really enjoyed Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman, which is a cute book about a trans vampire who's an archivist. (Storygraph describes it as a romance novel, which I didn't think it was but it does have a major romance arc, though I would say it's more vibes/concept based than plot based. Also wow this book is way more divisive per reviewer comments than I would have guessed from reading it)
3. A book I couldn't put down:
This applies to lots of romance novels (I recently read Star Shipped more or less all in one sitting) but that somehow feels like cheating to me, so I'm going to go with The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett, which I did read in a single day because the library wanted it back but also I was very into it - fun mystery and extremely cool fantasy worldbuilding. I love it when there's messed up biological stuff!
4. A book I've read twice or more:
I've read Sunshine by Robin McKinley many many times, it's a real comfort read for me. (I read lots of things twice or more though)
5. A book on my TBR:
My tbr is over 400 books long so it's more of a list of potential options than things I am imminently planning to read, but to arbitrarily choose something: I need to read more Octavia Butler! (I think Xenogensis and Parable of the Sower are the specific ones that are actually on my tbr)
6. A book I've put down:
I really wanted to like Time and Time Again by Chatham Greenfield - it's a time loop romance with Jewish f/f that was specifically recced to me by a friend! - but unfortunately I both found the writing didactic in annoying ways (please don't put a whole lecture in your character's mouth about how to treat disabled people, that's bad to read) and didn't mesh well with the way they wrote about judaism (which I think is likely that this author was just raised differently than I was but in a way where it felt very off to me)
7. A book on my wishlist:
I don't think I have a wishlist? I have been at a lot of bookstores this spring and also live in a house with a lot of books. I am very excited about Daggerbound finally coming out in a few months?
8. A favorite book from childhood:
I was very into the Oz books as a kid (and did a big reread in 2020 and, well, some of it really holds up as an adult! some of it's either problematic or annoying as an adult though)
9. A book I'd give a friend:
I feel like this super depends on what friend and context, but I did give @acommonrose my copy of Rules for Ghosting (I do want it back eventually but like, I would hypothetically give that book to someone if I had multiple copies)
10. A book of poetry or lyrics I own:
Hm I basically don't own any poetry books. I've got a book of poems in Russian that I can only kind of read that someone was giving away at some point when I could kind of read them a little more? But lyrics-wise, I do own a copy of Rise Again, the updated edition of the Rise Up Singing group songbook which includes Boulevard of Broken Dreams and Birdhouse in Your Soul as well as some sea shanties and such.
11. A nonfiction book I own:
The Food of a Younger Land is a nonfiction book about food (which I own several of) but this one is specifically a modern collection of a bunch of different WPA authors writing about food in their state/local area. I've more flipped around than read the whole thing but I thought it was really cool to see what people were saying about food a hundred years ago.
12. What I'm currently reading:
I'm in the middle of a few different things:
The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook (dungeon crawler carl book 3: I don't particularly recommend these but they are kind of compelling)
Little Bosses Everywhere (thanks rose for the library book)
Project Hail Mary (which I have to finish in the next 36 hours because the library will be taking it back so I guess soon I can finally unblock the tag)
And arguably I'm also in the middle of two different comics compendiums (Nightwing: A Night in Bludhaven and Starman: Compendium 2) though the nice thing about a comics compendium is you can stop for a while in between issues and that's a good breaking point. Also like one or two chapters into Original Sins, which is definitely going back to the library before I finish it, and Enemy Feminisms, which I'm probably not reading all of at this time.
13. What I'm planning on reading next:
Primary plan is to finish some of the things I'm in the middle of and then we'll see depending on what order I finish things because I like having a nonfiction and a fiction book going at any given time. I am pretty behind on a reading challenge I'm doing so I might be trying to read a 2025 award winner next, probably either Rakesfall or Chain Gang All Stars?
Tagging @sinni-ok-sessi and @thelaithlyworm if you feel like answering questions but as ever with tag games I hope anyone reading this feels empowered but not obligated to answer (I always want to see what people have to say about books)
Every time Babs manipulates people instead of like, talking to them and having a real human connection I love her a little more. Queen of manipulation and also my heart
I've been reading this monograph called Chinese Dreams by Eric Hayot which is my favourite thing rn, and it talks a lot about different approaches of translating classical Chinese poetry and the philosophies behind them. In one chapter, the book gave three completely different translations of the same poem by three professional writers/translators. I want to share them here and I'm curious to hear which version people find to be the best/feels the most authentic:
1.
Green grows the grass upon the bank,
The willow-shoots are long and lank.
A lady in a glistening gown
Opens the casement and looks down.
The roses on her cheek blush bright,
Her rounded arm is dazzling white;
A singing girl in early life
And now a careless roué's wife …
Ah, if he does not mind his own,
He'll find someday the bird has flown!
2.
Blue, blue is the grass about the river
And the willows have overfilled the close garden.
And within, the mistress, in the midmost of her youth,
White, white of face, hesitates, passing the door.
Slender, she puts forth a slender hand
And she was a courtezan in the old days,
And she has married a sot,
Who now goes drunkenly out
And leaves her too much alone
3.
Green, green,
The grass by the river-bank.
Thick, thick,
The willow trees in the garden.
Sad, sad,
The lady in the tower.
White, white,
Sitting at the casement window.
Fair, fair,
Her red-powdered face.
Small, small,
She puts out her pale hand.
Once she was a dancing-house girl,
Now she is a wandering man's wife.
The wandering man went, but did not return.
It is hard alone to keep an empty bed.
I want you to T-pose. Turn your right thumb up and your left thumb doen and look at your right thumb. Move your arms up and down a bit until you feel a nerve running from your armpit to your palm. Now turn your right thumb down and your left thumb up, and look at your left thumb. Keep your chest facing forward and your shoulders back. Move your arms again until you feel that nerve again. Keep alternating between these two for a minute, or look at each thumb thirty times each.
Now sit down. Put your left hand firmly under your left buttock, palm down. Keep your shoulders back and put your right hand over the crown of your head, very gently pulling it to the right. Do this for thirty seconds, then do it again but with your right hand under your right buttock.
These are stretches for the nerves in your arms, and are very good for people who sit behind a computer a lot, or fibre artists, or you name it. Do them daily. They will hurt in the beginning, but keep doing them, even after the pain has gone, or it will return and you'll have to start all over.
I had to go to occupational therapy a while back due to pain in my ulnar nerve (same nerve that acts as your 'funny bone'). It was getting compressed from jamming my elbow against hard plastic armrests that were in a too-tall fixed position on my cheap old office chair. I was having burning and tingling pain and numbness radiating from my elbow into my ring and pinky fingers. It sucked. Honestly, I found it worse than carpal tunnel, because a rigid elbow brace makes life way harder than a rigid wrist brace.
Anyways, the main exercise that my occupational therapist had me do was called a nerve glide. The stretches OP describes help improve flexibility, but the nerve gliding exercise helps move the nerve out of the pinched spot so it can move more freely.
Here's the best diagram I can find of it:
It's a little confusing, so have some extra description on the weird parts:
Step 3: thumb side moves down and towards the front.
Step 4: hand rotates out and around, pinky side first.
Step 5: nothing fancy here, just straighten your elbow.
Step 6 (not on diagram, but recommended by therapist): with arm in the same position, tilt your head towards the opposite side for a few second (works as a stretch).
Ulnar nerve compression (aka cubital tunnel) is apparently super common, but I had never heard of it before I started having issues. If you lean forwards on your desk or armrests a lot, I'd suggest giving these a try. It feels kind of weird because you can feel the nerve, but it shouldn't hurt at all.
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