inTechnicolor @sychaeus - Tumblr Blog

Guys, it's time to drop Google.

Google isn't the only search engine in the whole internet, there are others! And we need to diversify our search engine usage or we're gonna end up where we were a decade and change ago with the Internet Explorer issue. We can't let a single brand monopolize everything! This is why Google Search can afford to suck so hard: because people use it regardless! And there are alternatives.

A little bit about search engines, there are 3 types: crawlers, which work by scraping the web and developing their own indexes; metas, which get their results from the crawler-type search engines and therefore depend entirely upon them; and mixed, those which have their own (small) index but also pull results from the crawlers.

Right now, there are a couple of independant crawlers apart from Google, Bing (from Mycrosoft) and Yandex (the Russian one): this are Mojeek and Wiby.

Supporting independant crawlers is the easiest way to fight the shittyfication of the internet.

Mojeek.com is an independant british search engine with its own growing index commited to fighting internet censorship. It's small, and therefore it's usability isn't as good as that of the Big Three, but it doesn't censor, it's fairly respectful of people's privacy, and it doesn't drown you in adds. For those old enough to remember, it's a lot like early 2000s Google: you can find what you need, but if you write "dig shelter" instead of "dog shelter", that's what it's gonna search for. That said, please try to use it and support it as much as you can before we end up entirely dependant on Google, Bing and big corps adds. [click here to go to Mojeek]

Wiby.me is a new indie project that is literally dedicated to bringing back the old-school web. It's goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. So, for those of you who can't find any answers to technical questions beyond highschool level because Google buries them under a gazillion commercial sites and other meaningless shit, keep an eye on this project! It has a lot of potential. And, if you know of any personal websites that have great stuff but have been murdered by Google, you can go over to Wiby and submit it to their index. [click here to go to Wiby]

Aside from those, there are also meta search engines you can use to ween yourself off Google and search for random, day to day stuff.

Qwant.com is my go-to here—it has its own index and pulls from Bing, has relatively little censorship, and is fairly private. This is the one I use on my phone for everyday stuff. [click here to go to Qwant].

Historically, DuckDuckGo has always been a go-to for those who want a search engine that respects your privacy and doesn't censor. Personally, I've never been a fan, and there have been a LOT of scandals in recent years. It supposedly has its own index and pulls from Bing, much like Qwant, but I don't know. I just don't like it. Still, I've added it here for completeness' sake.

If you have Firefox Mobile browser, you can set any of these search engines as your default search engine and you can also add the others as secondary search engines and switch quicky from the navigation bar. If you don't have firefox mobile though, what are you doing with your life??? Go get it!! It is So. Much. Better. You can have add blockers and watch YouTube add free, for free! You can have reader mode and dark mode add-ons! You can have the world oh my goshhhh, drop Chrome!!

4get.ca is my last recommendation: 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 reaserch, 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. It's also very privacy conscious, so that's an other plus, and it has that late 90s / early 2000s vibe that I totally dig. [click here to go to 4get]

If you wanna learn more about the topic, you can over to the Search Engine Map [click here] which shows you a bunch of Search Engines and how they relate to each other. Or you can also go over to this one dude's personal website whose done A Lot of reaserch into the topic (way more than me) and seems to be pretty legit, if a little extra. [click here to go to digdeeper.neocities.org] Hope this infodump is useful to someone =D

PS: here's to hoping all the links work!

EDIT: eliminated the "read more". Figured there are enough mega long posts in tumblr, one more won't make no difference lol (tho the version w the read more has been reblogged already, in case you'd rather)

onlyphriends

Beyond Evil episode four: Cried

#beyond evil #favourite

prokopetz

If you’re wondering what the whole drama regarding tieflings is in the Dungeons & Dragons fandom: basically, capitalism ruined tieflings, and for once that’s not even slightly a joke.

Tieflings were first introduced as a playable species in Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition, via the Planescape campaign in 1994. At the time, there were no particular rules regarding what a tiefling was supposed to look like. The text explicitly stated that their basic physiology could vary wildly depending on what their fiendish ancestor was, and one of the first major Planescape supplements even included a table for randomly generating your tiefling’s appearance, if you were into that sort of thing.

This continued to be the case up through the game’s Third Edition. However, when the Fourth Edition rolled around in 2008, the game’s text suddenly became very particular about insisting that all tieflings looked pretty much the same. Some campaign settings even provided iin-character explanations for why all tieflings now had a standardised appearance. Understandably, this made a lot of people very annoyed.

There was naturally a great deal of speculation concerning what had motivated this change. It was widely cited as “proof” that Dungeons & Dragons was trying to appeal to the World of Warcraft fanbase – which was nonsense, of course; nearly all of the Fourth Edition’s allegedly MMO-like features were things that popular MMOs had borrowed from Dungeons & Dragons in the first place, and to the extent that tieflings’ new look resembled a particular WoW race, it was in that they were both extraordinarily generic.

In reality, it was a change that had been lurking for some time. Though Dungeons & Dragons is directly published by Wizards of the Coast, Wizards of the Coast is in turn owned by Hasbro, and Hasbro has long regarded the D&D core rulebooks as a vehicle for promoting D&D-branded merch – in particular, licensed miniature figures.

This was a bugbear that had reared its head before. When the Third Edition received major revisions in 2003, Hasbro corporate had ordered the game’s editors to completely remove any discussion of how to improvise minifigs for large battles, and replace it with an advertisement for the then-current Dungeons & Dragons Heroes product line. Implying that purchasing licensed minis wasn’t 100% mandatory simply would not do.

If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve probably already guessed where this is going: tieflings having no standard appearance made it difficult to sell tiefling minifigs, as any given minifig design would only be suitable for a small subset of tiefling characters. In the brutally reductive logic of the corporate mind, Hasbro reasoned: well, if we tell tiefling players that all of their characters now look the same, we can sell them all the same minifigs. So that’s what the game did, going so far as to write justifications into several published settings for magically transforming all existing tiefling characters to fit the new mould!

This worked about as well as anyone who isn’t a corporate drone would naturally anticipate – and that’s the story of how capitalism ruined tieflings.

tomatomarrow

Here’s that table, btw. I really dig the art in the old Planescape books.

ifightformyfriends

I already made a post talking about how varied Pathfinder allows/encourages Tieflings to be, but this seemed like a good excuse to just post a bunch of the official Tiefling art that really shows it off

There’s so much variety and flavor :D

#reference

the-loveliest-lies

aheathenconceivably

please please please share your low effort lazy ass meals please!!!! i'm trying to compile a bunch of super simple recipes to gift to a friend that's moving out soon. feel more than free to reblog, i will definitely take suggestions from strangers!!!!! thank u very much mwah

#curry: put chopped veggies like potato and carrot in a rice cooker sautee a bit add rice and water and cook normally #put frozen chicken in oven and bake i use veganfriedchickn.com #add japanese curry cubes to water on stove and heat #when everythings cooked add it to a bowl and eat it #make it fancier with some slice spring onions or some salad on the side #risotto: sautee chopped veggies in rice cooker with oil or buter #add risotto/arborio rice and stir until it looks a bit translucent #optional: add white wine and stir until it looks gluggy and not watery #add stock close rice cooker lid cook on normal setting #stir through parmesan cheese when it's done if you want #CAVEAT: my rice cookers normal setting doesn't cook risotto rice/sushi rice properly it always makes it not sticky enough #so for both of the above i check on the rice about 25mins into the 45 min cooking time and then every 5 mins or so #and end up turning it off early #for the risotto use the same amounts of rice/wine/stock as recommended in any standard risotto recipe #to make life even easier if more expensive buy pre-cubed soup veggies from the supermarket for both of the above

lustyargonianmaid

edit of all time

#yooooooooooo

thenightgaunt

Fuck this one hits home.

#look its the last 12 months of my brain in 15 tweets #between tweets 13 and 14 teenage me just went well #i guess theres no fixing this then #our only option is to stop trying at anything we're not immediately good at and tell people our failure is on purpose #and let me tell you that is proving hard to unlearn and makes putting effort in wildly emotional #crying and trying

rongzhi

English added by me :)

wojit

rongzhi

English added by me :)

vampire-eros

ur so right though

i-am-dulaman

"You still haven't gotten rid of your bad habit of breathing" is my new fave insult

asliceofoceanmist

Vegas in a nutshell

titkoks

this was a RIDE and the end was a huge slap in the face

#lol

digitised-celluloid

spellofwinter-deactivated202605

Visit Original Link

Ha Guen Young, Ye Sol Kim – Who Is the Monster

ms-demeanor

this is such a dumb thing but could you please tag math problems? i have dyscalculia and i like following you but seeing them makes me really dizzy

As someone else with dyscalculia I feel you, because looking at these is making me feel physically sick to my stomach. I will try to remember but I am pretty bad at remembering that sort of stuff. Tagging it "math problems" now.

skarmazenuk

wait...dyscalculia is a thing? I’m pretty sure I might have this...

...and yet I am a Jedi Grandmaster of spreadsheeting formulae...

ms-demeanor

how well do you read time on an analogue clock? Were you able to reliably read time on an analogue clock before you were 10?

That's one of the better off-the-top-of-my-head ways to begin figuring out if you might have discalculia.

ms-demeanor

For the record: There were tons of analogue clocks around in the 80s and 90s when I was a little kid and I basically still can't read time. I know how it *works* it's just going to take me a minute to figure it out and I'm going to have to go "five, ten, fifteen, twenty...." until I get close to correct and it'll still probably be wrong the first time around.

#oh my gosh this is changing my life