There is something else in the series of love tokens that sailors like to give to their loved ones before they set sail. Unlike the more popular coins, these are rolling pins made of glass. They began their triumphant advance in the 18th century port towns, like sunderland and london as plain white milk examples, others, especially those from Bristol, shone in blue and the Nailsea examples were particularly colourful. Earlier examples were richly hand painted (often by the Sailor himself) and often contained sayings such as - don’t forget me - stay true to me - remember me - but also anti-slavery smessages were to be found on them.
An amethyst glass rolling pin printed with a three-masted ship - Love and be Happy, 19th century - A Bristol blue hand painted with a clipper The great Australia Clipper- ship ; Success to the fisherman and True love from Hull, early 19th century (x)
However, these pieces were not for everyday use. They were special pieces that hung on parlour walls and were considered to bring good luck. They were often used to make the couple’s wedding cake when they returned home, and it was considered especially lucky for the guests when they ate it.
A handpainted milk glass pin, Be true to me, 19th century (x) - A Bristol blue Anti Slavery pin , c 1830 (x) [… ] Honour to the brave, Success to the love, Freedom to the slave
All these pins had one special feature: they were hollow inside. They were used to store spices, rum, salt, tea, cacao and other valuables that he brought back from his travels.
Six Rolling pins, the swirled and colour full ones are so called Nailsea Pins, the other one is a printed one, 19th century (x)
The Victorians then discovered them as a collector’s item and so the pins also spread inland and were sold in port towns as souvenirs with sweets as contents. The significance as a love token was increasingly lost.
Ceramic rolling pin, 1870- printed and hand coloured (x)
At this time, the technology also changed, the motifs were no longer elaborately hand-painted, they were printed, and not only on glass, but also on cheaper ceramics, and the plain ones had become closed ends and were then just a simple household item.
one of my favorite bits in lord of the rings is something the movies didn't really try to do because it's entirely internal, but sam's carrying the ring and it starts trying to do its work on him, so he's having these intrusive visions of himself marching at the head of a vast and terrible army, and he just starts laughing because, me? samwise gamgee? sam gamgee the general sam gamgee the dark lord are you for real? man i just want to go home and do some gardening. and the ring gets frustrated and it starts trying to figure out other stuff that would actually tempt sam and it's finally like, okay, but hear me out: imagine if you could have...A REALLY REALLY BIG GARDEN
listening to CDs in the kitchen i always brace myself for the ad between songs but then it just keeps rolling. skipping around how i like without interruption feels heavenly. we're in such a commercial angst prison that books and CDs are luxury now 😭
protect, pass on, thrift, gift, and store physical media, it's worth it
Ok, I NEED you to understand just how insane even ATTEMPTING this was for them.
1. Playing an instrument is difficult. Doing so in sync with others even more so. Don’t think I’m stepping on any toes saying that.
2. Dancing is difficult. Doing so in sync with others even more so. Still not controversial.
3. YOU AVOID, AT ALL COSTS, MOVING YOUR BODY WHILE PLAYING A WIND INSTRUMENT. To make the correct, pleasant sounds, you need to be in the correct form. And that form involves your ENTIRE body, even your legs when sitting down.
4. “oh, but I’ve seen marching bands before and-” MARCHING BANDS HAVE ENTIRE SCIENTIFIC FIELDS DEDICATED TO FIGURING OUT HOW TO MARCH WITH MINIMUM BREAKING OF PROPER FORM. A marching band tries to be as smooth as possible while moving, so as not to jar their instrument, mouth, neck, arms, torso, or anything else.These ladies and gentlemen are BOUNCING and still playing properly, what the FU-!
5. AND ANOTHER THING! Wind instruments and dancing BOTH make demands on your breathing, so the fact that they are dancing (making you breath faster for extra oxygen) AND playing wind instruments (making you effectively hold your breath) AT THE SAME TIME is HUGE. Their lungs must be MASSIVE.
All of that also; the song is Sing, sing, sing (with a swing). If you wanna listen to some of THE SPICIEST big band ever recorded. Its a big hard song and this band does it expertly.
- every woodwind player in that band ABSOLUTELY jammed their reed into their soft palate at least once during rehearsals, and
- the hardest thing to maintain when playing an instrument when your breath control starts to slip is volume. And they have MULTIPLE major volume changes/crescendos
China has apparently removed thousands of arts and humanities degrees from its universities and people want us to be optimistic about the AI advent. The creative fields like visual media are going to be unwatchable in the future.
A huge blocklist of manually curated sites that contain AI generated imagery for uBlock Origin & uBlacklist. - laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-A
Install this blocklist using the instructions on the GitHub page. For Firefox, you will need to install uBlockOrigin for this. Google Chrome no longer allows the uBlockOrigin extension, so I'm assuming you're at least primarily a Firefox user - or about to be (see browser alternatives below).
For Google Chrome or mobile browsers, this will work with uBlacklist. See the GitHub page for full details on compatibility.
Remove AI Widgets:
If you go to your uBlockOrigin Filter lists page, you can select to filter out AI Widgets - this should completely remove the 'AI Mode' widget/button from your Google search page, in addition to the work done by the Huge AI Blocklist.
Using the uBlockOrigin Huge AI Blocklist filter has made my Google searches look like they used to, and gives me genuine search results.
Look at this. It's beautiful. It's informative. It's not a heap of burning trash bloated with fake information made up by a hallucinating chat bot.
We can go even further: return to the old school search results.
Now, the above results are great and should be free of generative AI junk, but some people would rather not see any of the summary widgets or 'people also ask' box at all. Fear not! You can remove all that by using the 'Web' mode in the Google search bar. Click the 'More' drop down menu and select 'Web'.
Huzzah! Incredible. It's like a functional search engine again.
You can make this the default Google search mode in Google Chrome using Method 1 from this page (https://allthings.how/how-to-turn-off-ai-mode-in-google-chrome/). Unfortunately, I don't know if there's a way to do this in Firefox too. This is why for the most part I still use DuckDuckGo (see below) as my default search engine, and only use Google to supplement my searches on the rare occasion I'm just missing something.
Remember, if you clear your cookies, your search engine preferences will reset, including any settings you enabled/disabled to avoid AI. This applies to DuckDuckGo as well; check your settings every time you clear your browser!
Extra filters (optional):
I've also added four filters (their order doesn't matter) to the My Filters page. Full disclosure: I'm not sure they still work, or may only work on Chrome, but I'm keeping them anyway, just in case.
From https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1i7kg83/comment/m8lllwr/: see which solution in the list works for you, it seems to be different for everybody.
From https://allthings.how/how-to-turn-off-ai-mode-in-google-chrome/:
www.google.com##.Beswgc
www.google.com##.olrp5b
www.google.com##.hdzaWe
Make sure you hit the apply changes button when you add filters.
Browser alternatives: escaping Google Chrome.
If you haven't jumped ship from Chrome yet, I'd recommend doing so. Sometimes Chrome outperforms Firefox for niche purposes or because a website doesn't bother to fully support non-Chrome browsers, but the days of Chrome being the superior browser are long gone — by about 10 years. If you're trying to escape Chromium browsers, beware that a lot of the popular Chrome alternatives are just Chrome in a different hat.
Firefox has been the most popular non-Chromium browser for years, and for good reason. However, the company running Mozilla Firefox has annoyed their users, me included, by refusing to take an anti- generative-ai stance, and even included AI features in the Mozilla Firefox browser. Most Firefox users specifically use it because they hate Google's enshittification and want a privacy-focused, clean browser that doesn't hog their RAM and CPU for no reason. So, you can imagine that Mozilla's attitude has pissed us all off recently. You can turn off the AI features in Firefox with the built-in settings, but the company has recently steered straight into the burning garbage heap by saying they want to make the browser based on AI.
Waterfox and LibreWolf:
There are really good alternatives based on Firefox (open-source) which are not affiliated with Mozilla (the company), if you don't like how it operates. Waterfox and LibreWolf are even more trimmed down and privacy-focused than Mozilla's Firefox, and don't use AI. Anti-ai statements: Waterfox and LibreWolf.
From this page: https://programming.dev/post/42546774
In short: LibreWolf is for those who want a “locked-down” fortress out of the box, while Waterfox is for those who want a privacy-conscious browser that still feels like a normal, convenient daily driver.
Choose LibreWolf if: You want the highest level of privacy without having to manually edit config files, and you don’t mind occasionally “fixing” a broken website or re-logging into accounts.
Choose Waterfox if: You want a privacy-respecting browser that supports Firefox Sync, has an Android counterpart, and handles streaming sites/logins without any extra friction (it supports WideWine out of the box, which lets you stream DRM protected content (netflix, hulu, disney, etc).
— [email protected]
I've heard good things about both of these browsers and will investigate them further to decide whether to personally switch from Mozilla Firefox.
DuckDuckGo:
I would also recommend installing the DuckDuckGo extension to your browsers and setting it to be your default search engine.
I've had DuckDuckGo installed on my browsers, Chrome or Firefox, for like 10 years now. It is a good search engine, it's unobtrusive, and blocks trackers, cookies, and does not save any data about you. I've also used it as my default mobile browser for years, along with Firefox mobile, which you can add the AI Blocklist to (see again the GitHub page). I haven't tried the DuckDuckGo desktop browser yet, but I imagine it works just fine like the mobile version. I think DuckDuckGo's browser is also Chromium-based, at least indirectly. I use Firefox with the DuckDuckGo extension so I can have a widely-supported, non-Chromium browser, but include all of DuckDuckGo's anti-tracking features.
Note: DuckDuckGo has included AI in its browser product, however you can opt-out of all AI features with the built-in settings and they will not push it on you like Google does. I hope they remove AI features entirely in the future, but for now I am comfortable with the barriers in place to keep AI out of my face. Firefox also has AI features like Chrome does, which you can turn off with the built-in settings.
There's also noai.duckduckgo search, an alternative version of its normal search engine which removes AI-generated images and turns off AI results/assists by default. Even though DuckDuckGo's inclusion of any AI features annoys me, its policy to make these features 100% optional builds trust with this browser/extension/search engine.
You can always use Google search if you need to, but with uBlockOrigin and the AI Blocklist filter added on, at least you shouldn't have AI-altered search results or the AI overview anymore.
Other browsers exist, probably:
There are certainly more non-Chromium alternatives out there, but Firefox, Waterfox, and LibreWolf are the top three recommended to me. That link to alternatives, plus this ComputerCity page are the best lists I could find in a brief search. If you google "non-Chromium browsers" you'll get a lot of mixed results which require a bit of digging to realise they're not really recommending you what you looked for at all.
I've heard about Ecosia over the years, and while I like the idea of a search engine that plants a tree for each query, I don't think that's actually what happens — at least, that's what they used to be reputed to do, but I believe that's an unsustainable business model which has likely changed. In 2026, Ecosia says it uses 100% of its profits for the planet and runs its search engine off clean energy. That's cool! It's still Chromium-based. And it also uses generative AI for chat bots, so I don't trust its principles on environmentalism. I need to do more reading on this to form a stronger opinion about it.
I hope this post has helped at least some of you have a better experience browsing the web and googling your questions.
The Huge AI Blocklist really has been an amazing tool to keep my internet life free and clear of a lot of generative AI rubbish. I'm not a tech expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm savvy enough to understand what genAI is and does, and that the more I learn about it, it's even worse than I thought. I truly hate it, and I hate the enshittification of all our experiences, even those as simple and innocent as googling "snow leopard" or "how to cook pasta" or "what is a phascogale" (go ahead and test your freshly-cleaned search engines out with that one hehe).
I just realised Class S is the type of Yuri I'm exposed the most without even knowing what genre is that LOL Its very fiiting because I tend to like compelling relationships that's not only romantic. Though, of course, I welcome romantic too. Its definitely not for people who want a straight up romance with labels but I like mine subtext, undefined and ambiguous because I like figuring things up on my own. Also, I don't believe romantic is the only relationship where it can be deep and special anyway so I appreciate the queerplatonic aspect of it.
Mouryou no Hako (Goblin's Box) - Adapted from mystery solving Kyogokudo/Hyakki Yakou book series written by Natshiko Kyougoku with CLAMP character designs. The somewhat MC is used to be a religion researcher and use this knowledge to solve cases. Of course, all girls catholic school sometimes became part of some cases. Mouryou no Hako and Jorougumo no Kotowari in particular. Don't watch it if you don't want to be infodump about different religion, divination vs fortune telling or religion vs cult but i find it quite educational so I still enjoy it lol
Maria-Sama ga Miteru (Maria Watches Over Us) - Focuses in "Sisterhood" system. Surprisingly, very healthy and chill anime about school girls living their daily life. When you thought it will become toxic, it will not. I think you might enjoy it if you know some historical facts that sisterhood pledge is way for lesbians to get married.
TRUE OF VAMP "Lilium" musical stageplay - Didn't happened in catholic school but in all girls sanatorium with "Vampire" cast of characters. It has two versions and its very fun to watch if you don't mind tragedy stageplays. Vampire girl Lily is looking for Sylvatica but none of the girls are familiar with the missing person. Is Sylvatica real or just a figment of her imagination?
Watashi wo Tabetai, Hitodenashi (This Monster Wants to Eat Me) - A terrifying mermaid who eat human flesh and can give humans immortality became attracted with human who wish to end her own life. It sounds toxic but its actually bittersweet to watch someone who try to save her important person who refused to be saved. Definitely one of the best recent anime Yuri. They need more seasons like Marimite.
annaxmalina
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