lol I hadn't updated this in literal years.
ey/they, aro ace
HoH, ADHD and HSD cuz apparently I have to pay for being smart and creative somehow,
now have a MSc in electrical engineering,
still love space stuff, still love star trek and all my old ships, more d&d stuff now, still do cosplay, now obsessed with Dead Boy Detectives
have my own cats now (Alistair and Jalmari)
Hello dear ones! I am asking you to support my campaign to help me achieve my goal. I am in dire need of your support now to help me stay alive and safe and support me in getting a bone graft in my hand that was injured by an explosive bullet that prevented it from moving and building my home. Gaza is a very dangerous place both in terms of living and lives. The family consists of 13 members, most of them are young children and elderly people. I need your financial support to enable me to get the basic needs for my family until the Rafah crossing is reopened to transport my family to safety and peace. Please help a family survive through your small donations or through your contributions to others. Thank you very much for standing by those in need. Please see the pinned post and share my story if you can't donate. Thank you.My campaign has been verified 90-ghoset
Even if the ceasefire holds people still need donations to rebuild their lives after all the destruction.
Hello my friend, I ask you to donate, help and participate in evacuating the family to a new home instead of the destroyed one. Every donation has an impact in saving the family from the tragedy, even if it is simple. The campaign has been verified and participated in @90-ghost
I used to be *good* at search. It was a whole thing - I found peopleās ālost songsā or their unknown-source childhood stuffed toy or whatever from Google.
Now, you canāt search for the exact brand/design name of something and get accurate answers. It drives me spare on Amazon - if I search for XYZ and you donāt have any, or you only have 2, tell me that.
I wouldnāt mind if it said āHere are 2 XYZ. Shoppers also searched forā¦ā Instead itāll just throw a random, barely-linked pile of results and you have to wade through every single one to see if the thing you want exists.
THIS. For ages I used to say that I had āhigh Google-Fuā. I could find *anything* because I knew how to use strings to enhance searches. The string commands havenāt even worked for well over a year or more, far before they put in this infernal (and often wrong!) AI BS on top.
I used to be able to search for recipes and easily eliminate unwanted ingredients with a -. For example Iād look for low-carb desserts but without the zillions that use peanut butter simply by searching for something like:
low carb chocolate dessert recipe -peanut
And Iād get a slew of on-point suggestions. For some time now if you do -peanut Google ignores the - and assumes you want recipes stuffed with peanuts.
Where itās even worse now is now you get directed to sites full of bogus AI recipes that donāt even make sense. But they have peanuts in them.
I used to be able to use reverse image searches to find out who made that awesome art so I could give credit in my share. Theyāve removed that ability entirely and replaced it with Lens, which is AI BS just showing you more like what you looked for. (Rebecca Watson complained about this in her recent video about JD Vance jizz cup rumours and I apologise for that sentence butā¦yeah. Watson is great, go find her on Youtube and subscribe because she went into detail about how Google has become less and less useful for debunking.)
This isnāt just about Google inserting shopping ads instead of what you wanted to learn about. Thatās bad. But the results now are just *broken*. The tools we used to have to make searches better have been removed. Google no longer wants us to find the answers we seek, but the answers they want us to have, and thatās super creepy and dangerous.
And the alternatives are either using Google in the back end or have other significant barriers to use.
This sucks.
Duckduckgo and all the other alternatives work this way too, now.
Verbatim search, guys!! Go to āTools,ā and enable āVerbatim.ā
Itās a pain in the ass, but it still works!
1) yay, thank you
2) WHAT THE FUCK WHY DID THEY HIDE IT
For all you Firefox users, hereās an addon that forces verbatim mode to always be on:
This addon forces āVerbatimā search on Google - removing all bs personalization and localization and letting you find results for what you type, not what Google thinks is in your head.
It also forces āSort by Dateā on Google News search.
In the flood of bad search results, I had forgotten about Google News giving me 2012 articles related to high-profile drama instead of whatever happened last month that I was actually looking for.
Im not on tiktok and never have been, but I downloaded RedNote just to see what is up, and I am witnessing something truly amazing
The Chinese user community is giving the American tiktok refugees an overwhelmingly warm welcome, meanwhile the American users seem to have collectively agreed that not only will they not let the app be taken over with English and they will provide Mandarin subtitles for everything, they are LEARNING MANDARIN. Ive scrolled through so many videos of Americans offering greetings in Mandarin to try to acclimate to the new environment and be respectful, and speakers of both languages are posting lots of tutorials on language basics and internet slang in Mandarin
My God, there is an AMAZING outpouring of curiosity and delight among everyone to learn about each others cultures and daily lives. People are posting videos of landscapes, cities, towns, and natural areas in USA and China, posting recipes and traditional foods, vlogs of everyday life, and reaching out to find people with similar hobbies.
And it’s not just young people! There are loads of videos from middle-aged American guys who have come to post about fishing or motorcycles and are now happily chatting with Chinese users sharing the same interests using Google translate
One American guy who was like. in his 60’s had a comment on one of his videos that was like “Red Neck?” and he replied “Yes!” and I just about fucking lost it
Also the Chinese users love, and I mean LOVE, Luigi Mangione. He is apparently broadly adored in China. There is SO much fanart and SO many edits.
There are many threads initiating Chinese users to ask questions of American users about the USA, and vice versa, and everyone on both sides is clearing up a lot of misconceptions. Some of the questions I saw a lot from Chinese users were: “Is it true that American parents kick you out of the house as soon as you turn 18” (not often, but sometimes) “Do you all really wear shoes in bed” (NO!!! Apparently a lot of characters in American sitcoms are shown lying in bed with shoes on which I never noticed before!) and “are there really guns everywhere” (yes).
For the most part Chinese content creators seem just overwhelmed by the sudden influx of hundreds of followers that are super enthusiastic about what they’re doing. A lot of them have made posts about how initially they thought the uptick in follower count was some kind of error, or that there was some kind of joke or prank, but then they realized the interest and enthusiasm was genuine and now they’re welcoming all the newcomers.
I found several posts by Chinese users saying that this felt like a really profound historical moment, where these previously separated worlds are suddenly smashing together and suddenly there is freedom to learn about each other’s cultures and connect. One of them said something along the lines of “This is a 21st century Tower of Babel and even though I’m an atheist I hope God lets this tower stand.” OUGH MY HEART.
The app itself works a little bit like a video-based version of Pinterest. It’s not really my thing so I probably won’t be on there long term but it’s been amazing to see what’s happening.
literally every time Ame talks to anyone from the citadel I think of Brennan saying “you guys leave this incredibly charged bakery interaction!”
like every time she speaks to one of these people she’s taking a wrecking ball to all of their values and ideas about the world and then just leaving them to a crisis, and I feel like that first conversation with Mr. Callum was such a prescient (if comedic) glimpse into how Ame would interact with the institution of the citadel and the people it has produced
