I’m sorry friends, but “just google it” is no longer viable advice. What are we even telling people to do anymore, go try to google useful info and the first three pages are just ads for products that might be the exact opposite of what the person is trying to find but The Algorithm thinks the words are related enough? And if it’s not ads it’s just sponsored websites filled with listicles, just pages and pages of “TOP FIFTEEN [thing you googled] IMAGINED AS DISNEY PRINCESSES” like… what are we even doing anymore, google? I can no longer use you as shorthand for people doing real and actual helpful research on their own.
– https://search.marginalia.nu/ Search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and promotes websites that aren’t usually at the top of the list.
– https://www.worldcat.org/ Search engine for items in libraries (books, but also maps, articles, sound recordings, theses, etc.)
– https://scholar.google.com/ Search engine for scientific papers, reviews, etc. It’s still google, but a lot better than the normal search engine counterpart.
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines A list of search engines sorted by subject, area, and more. If you’re searching on a specific area, it might be worth checking if there is one focused on that area.
Also, P.S.: Please stop using Google, and start using more privacy focused search engines, like DuckDuckGo or SearchX (opensource; personally haven’t used it yet, but it looks promising for privacy-focused users)
That Google and Meta can get away with this during an era of intense misinformation and disinformation signals that we cannot rely on large tech companies to provide reliable access to information and news:
Honestly, in my work as a therapist, I’m seeing this A Lot, and tbh I still don’t have a satisfactory approach to it. A heavy dose of Existentialist “create your own Purpose” tempered with “when the plane’s going down, put your own oxygen mask on first”, but… yeah, there is no ethical way to work on individual emotional distress without acknowledging the systemic socioeconomic, geopolitical fuckery going on at the moment, and the sheer grief that comes with it.
I’m a guidance counselor/psychologist for teenagers and it’s getting really hard to motivate young people to work for a future they don’t believe in.
They look at ther future and see global warming, wwIII, unemployement, political unstability, poison in everything they eat, the earth and animals dying all around them.
I saw this video where someone was asking french teens in the 50s how they imagine the future would be. The war hadn’t been over for long and yet it was all positive with like peace and flying cars and such. Then they went and ask the same questions to nowadays teens and hell that was depressing. Some still had hope, but it was just that “well I hope I’ll have a nice house and maybe some kid” but there was such a hesitancy to it, like they didn’t dare to hope too much.
People mock Greta Thunberg but what they don’t get is that when she said “you stole my dreams”, it was the truth.
Young people don’t get to dream like they used to. They don’t dream anymore, they grief all that won’t be anymore and that’s just so fucking sad.
The fact that both the tweet and these reblogs are pre-pandemic makes this post even worse
Whenever a celebrity turns out to be transphobic they get a million hours of media coverage and spotlight. It’s easy to feel like every famous person hates trans people, and that’s just not true! We have tons of high profile allies!
Here is a quick list of some (but definitely not all) supportive celebrities! Please feel free to add to this list.
Okay look, I’m a millennial on tumblr. I grew up watching David Tennant as the doctor, and seeing him support his non-binary child actually did so much for my mental health. I really can’t emphasize enough how important that is to me
Trans Missourians on HRT, call your doctor as soon as possible and get a 90-day supply or as much as they’ll give you.
Lots of us are going to have to relocate or go through costly and/or illegal channels to acquire HRT now.
I invite trans people in MO to add their payment links this post. We desperately need support. We need people to give a shit right now. This is life-or-death for many of us.
Here is a link to the diy hrt wiki. It has a lot of information for getting hormones without a prescription. There isn’t as much stuff for getting testosterone but it has a lot of information for estrogen and it’s a good place to start.
had a minor crisis when 12ft.io went down yesterday and thankfully it’s back now but this seems like a good opportunity to compile a list of similar paywall-evading tools in case 12ft ever gets canned for real:
12ft.io: the legend himself. definitely my favorite of the bunch by virtue of being the easiest to use (and the easiest url to remember), but it’s configured to disable paywall evasion for a handful of popular sites like the new york times, so you’ll have to go elsewhere for those.
printfriendly: works great; never had any issues with removing paywalls, even on domains that don’t work with 12ft.io. since this site is literally designed to make sites print-friendly, it might simplify the overall formatting of the page you’re trying to access, which can be a good or bad thing. my only real issue is that the “element zapper” (which lets you remove content blocks from the print-friendly preview) is a little sensitive if you’re browsing on a touchscreen device, which means you might accidentally delete a paragraph when you’re just trying to scroll. but if that happens you can reload the page and it’ll revert everything back to its original state.
fifteen feet: basically a 12ft clone, minus 12ft’s restrictions. haven’t used it much since I only discovered it yesterday in the wake of 12ft’s 451 error but it seems to do the trick.
archive.today: an archival tool very similar to the wayback machine, but it also works as a de facto paywall removal tool. (the wayback machine seems to remove paywalls as well, but archive.today has better UX imo and is way faster to use.)
and an honorable mention for sci-hub: only works for scientific/academic journals, not random news articles, but the other sites listed above only work for random news articles and not academic publications so you gotta have this one in your toolbelt for full coverage. pubmed is your oyster.
Can you believe it’s been a whole year since the demo was first released?
Even if development has slowed down a little bit, I’m really happy people like the project so far, and hope you’ll stick around as time goes on and see where things go.
To celebrate, a bunch of people in the discord server joined together to make a little collab pic of the main cast!
my toxic xennial trait is that i believe something should either be software (in which case after i download it i shouldn’t need to be connected to use it) or a web page (which shouldn’t require me to download anything to use it, however badly, in a browser). fuck your mandatory single function constant connection apps
You’re so right. Say more
Yes. YES. Why the fuck do I need a goddamn SUBSCRIPTION to use MS Word or Excel. It’s total bullshit.
On that note, does anyone have any recommendations for Word Processors that you buy once (or are free!) and then just live on your computer forever? I know assume they must (still) exist, I just haven’t looked into it yet.
Libre office is free and more than that its code is open source which basically means it belongs to all of us. Anyone can contribute to its improvement and anyone can use it.
It’s been around for a long time and is arguably less powerful than word office (it could have been different because of past politics but it may well be in the future) but still more than enough for any individual or professional.
Leave Microsoft behind and don’t look back !
LibreOffice Fucking Rules and is a full office suite, which includes a program similar to Excel, a program similar to Powerpoint, as well as a math program and Libre Office Draw, which isn’t great for doing actual drawings but IS great for making flowcharts. It’s not just a word processor, it’s all of this:
LibreOffice.Org has a wonderful support forum that is full of questions people have had over the years, so if you’re having a problem with any of the programs you can search “how to do X in libre office” and you will very likely find an answer.
Draw can also open, read, and edit PDFs. I had a customer who called me yesterday and was looking for an Adobe Acrobat Pro license and the one functionality she needed was document signing and my friends you do not need to pay fucking adobe $300 a year to sign PDFs.
I used Libre Office Writer to create my Fuck Google pamphlet and save it as a PDF; it is just a fully functional word processor. You can also use it to save in .Docx and .RTF and .PDF if you have to save documents in a specific format for any reason.
For 99.999% of people using office suites, Libre Office will provide all the same functionality of Microsoft Office with none of the subscriptions and all of the control you could want. There is a *slight* learning curve to some things, and the interface might look a bit old-fashioned to some people, but it is well worth it to download if for no other reason that having a non-subscription, non-internet-based (Word doesn’t actually store its dictionary locally anymore! Not for like six years! You may need to have internet to get fucking spell check to work!) word processor that will never redirect you to the fucking microsoft store.
