As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse. It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms
As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable. As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.
Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.
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Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.
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.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.
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
My fellow americans, I have decided to drop out of the democratic race. I haven’t shared this beyond my close family — Treasured Jill and Lovely Hunter — but I also wanted to take this moment to announce that my pronouns are he/they/she. I am still a catholic. I am also a democrat. I am also dying, and as I felt my soul pulling from my body and towards the Infinite and Heavenly Pools Of Tranquil Waterfalls And Citrus Compassion (my new property on the amalfi coast where I will be retiring) my mind coruscated into a kaleidoscopic fractal, my ego frayed apart like a well-wrought rope tied around the twinkling stars I will soon be consumed by, and I came to know the glittering multitudes dormant, and rustling, within me. It has been the greatest honor serving as your president and to share this final chapter of my self with you, along with this first chapter of my becoming. Im sorry that the Nasty Courts stripped you of the student loan forgiveness you deserved… We all deserve forgiveness one day. And Im sorry about the economy, but it’s not my fault. I have started seeing a therapist to work through the toxic shame I carry on behalf of this nation and its relationship to my avoidant-fearful attachment style. As for the election, although such matters seem small and insignificant now that I have glimpsed the vast and sparkling universe that presses against the silk stitches of my cursed soul, I must attend to these matters while my days on this sick and gorgeous earth persist, even as they come to an end… I will be nominating Beautiful Kamala to take my place in the race. Vote blue… And vote for her💙
With love and grace, joe biden 💖🍋🪽
K so not to be dramatic or anything, but there's a free vintage French pattern book available on antiquepatternlibrary so if you like to crochet/weave/make pixel art/tie epic friendship bracelets don't walk- RUN.
It has scenes from aesop's fables! Cherubs doing things! Beheadings! Greek muses! Little farm people! Intricate floral pattern! Goth stained-glass window like patterns! Fun little corner pieces! Eeeeeeeeeeeeee
https://www.antiquepatternlibrary.org/html/warm/C-TT008-180.htm
this was too good to not post here
i loved one direction with an all-consuming force when i was younger. it hurts deeply to mourn someone you were a massive fan of as teenager, and became a peer of as an adult.
i know people change and grief is unsure or complicated when it’s attached to a fond memory or the feeling a person gave you and not tangibly the person themself. i can see many of you on here are struggling with that right now and i understand.
a few years ago i purchased a home that Liam previously owned. there were rumors the house was haunted. He assured me it was not, and i believed him. because i know the ghosts that haunt us aren’t tethered to buildings. They live in parts of us that are harder to reach and they go wherever we do.
as a parent, a fellow artist, and a fan, i simply cannot fathom this untimely loss. my heart goes out to his family, friends, and the fans. 💔
A gothic horror story where a gentleman from a good family gets haunted by something monstrous, which follows him around and keeps killing people around him at utter random, in cruel and horrifying ways. Specifically within circumstances where the protagonist has no alibi, and everything indicates that he committed the murders.
But the real horror is not that he would find himself accused of the murders, but that the people around him naturally assume that he did do it, but genuinely do not care, because the victims are never people that the society around him considers "important". The scullery maid of his household is found brutalised beyond recognition in a room where even the ceiling has been splattered with blood, and a constable of the local police brushes it off as a case of household discipline gone wrong, being horrifyingly casual with the assumption that the protagonist severely beat a girl in his service to death, and will dismiss it as an accident. The street urchin that the protagonist was seen talking with - wanting to help this poor little orphan - is found decapitated, severed head in the protagonist's fireplace. This, too, is calmly swept under the rug.
After every horrifying murder, the protagonist tries to seek help, to present the crime to authorities in hopes of getting some semblance of help, or at least clearing his own name of this, but every time it's brushed off. "These things do happen", he is reassured, like it's perfectly normal that a mansion of that size has a secret garden of unmarked graves in one shady corner.
The real horror is the ever-encompassing implication that this is perfectly normal.
feel so gross and doughy
Thinking of becoming a guy that thinks wolves are the most badass and aspirational animal, but about ants. Like wearing t-shirts about being loyal to my Queen and training to bench 5x my bodyweight. Studying ant warfare. Posting shit like this
just feel so fucking stupid all the time
I talk frequently about how ignorant most Global North citizens are about the immigration policies of their own and other countries. When my husband and I (Global North citizens of different countries) got married, we had conversation after conversation with people who assumed that by producing our marriage certificate we could simply become residents of each other’s countries— and that we could not be refused residence in each other’s countries, as separating a husband and wife could surely not be allowed.
More interestingly, a lot of people seem to refuse knowledge about immigration, perhaps because it can’t be integrated into some deep and important picture of the world that they have. My parents can’t make themselves believe that my British husband would get in trouble if he overstayed his visa “just a couple of days” in the US, or that I (an American) would ever get deported from the UK, no matter what the circumstances. This is not only because they believe that British and American citizens, as Global North citizens, are specially exempt from the systems that are “meant” to regulate other kinds of people, but also because fundamentally they believe that government and its processes are rational and just. They must believe that government and its processes are rational and just, because otherwise their whole picture of the world— the means by which they understand it— would collapse.
This is all fairly simple and obvious. What is not so simple and obvious is the way that their privileged ignorance, the hothouse resilience of their fantasy world, is part of a mechanism through which the “work of knowing” in our society is outsourced to the underprivileged. (The privileged do not have to know in a way that disrupts their fantasy, because not-knowing has no consequences for them.) This is an interesting dynamic, because many postcolonial theorists (Sara Ahmed, Dipesh Chakrabarty, etc) have explored how the Global South is typically portrayed as that-which-is-known-by-the-Global-North, and therefore as not capable of knowing. So what does it mean that the tools of regulation remain in the hands of the Global North, but that the knowledge of regulation is a burden borne by the Global South? There is an element here of knowing as knowing-your-place, for sure— learning to be interpellated as the illegal and the undesirable. The knowing that is happening also constitutes the production of the illusive “just and rational” world that sustains the Global North. I’m interested in the way that the dehumanization of the Global South therefore serves to sustain the rational and just Human and humaneness of the Global North. There’s an abjectification that is necessary for this— as anyone who has experienced universal healthcare knows, more just and equitable care/distribution of resources often means that more privileged people get less-nice things than they have been led to expect, so if they want to continue to enjoy the same standard of living allowed them by unjust and non-equitable care, they must rationalize this somehow. And how does one rationalize having been, by chance, born in the right geographic area? One can’t. One must, instead, believe that this is not how privilege is allotted, which required not-knowing that this is how privilege is allotted.