Little-alienated - Local Cryptid

Skip Google for Research

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

Saw this somewhere else and felt the need to post it cause no one else ever really tells you this stuff

In 1980 the bones of a bird with a wingspan of twenty-five feet were found in Central Argentina. It has been named the “Magnificent Argentine Bird” (Argentavis Magnificens). It is estimated to be about eight million years old. This species is the largest flying bird ever discovered. 

Kenneth E. Campbell, (one of the discoverers), stands in front of a silhouette of the “Magnificent Argentine Bird.” And yes, this is to scale. It is on display at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles.

Shozenji, A Japanese LGBTQ Safe Temple Run By A Transgender Nun

Matcha reports on Soshuku Shibatani, the transgender head nun of the Shozenji Temple in Moriguchi City, Osaka. It  is Japan’s first temple built as a refuge for the LGBTQ community.

Soshuku Shibatani, a 65-year-old openly transgender Buddhist nun, was assigned male at birth: 

She began to identify as a female in elementary school but never dared to express her gender identity at the time. As a university student, she met people similar to her and briefly lived at ease among like-minded peers. However, upon entering the workforce, she had to hide her true self once more…

According to Ms. Shibatani, “Buddha saw beyond the differences of gender.”

There is no need to hide your true self. Ms. Shibatani gradually became interested in Buddhist teachings and enrolled in community courses at the Graduate School of Koyasan University. She later resigned from her company, joined the priesthood, and went on to study Esoteric Buddhism.

Ms. Shibatani stated, “Shozenji is not exclusively for the LGBTQ community, but rather a temple for everyone.”

“The Kannon Bodhisattva has no gender identity,” Soshuku Shibatani says. A statue of Kannon, the Buddhist deity of mercy, is enshrined in the temple. Others see Kannon or Guan Yin  as a female incarnation of the Buddha.

a thing that annoys me a lot nowadays is the way the average person unceasingly consumes art in the vast ocean of information that is internet - especially young people.

most treat art as it is some kind of disposable and throwaway thing that serves ephemeral delights and put no effort into understanding it; it’s all about aesthetics and catchy visuals with no real depth or actual meaning.most of us nowadays don’t care who put effort into art - we don’t care who’s the person that manages to evoke and transmit all these feelings. it’s just an endless need to be aesthetic, beautiful and in-tune with modern standards consuming pictures like we consume our food and all the materials that we need to make ourselves “happy” but in the internet it comes for free; we don’t even have to try. 

makes me think the way we praise and give so much credit to older artists like picaso, warhol or dali after so many years but give no respect or visibility to modern artists that struggle to be relevant and the least succesful, in an institution that has done almost everything and drained itself out of ideas and original concepts. “there is a deeply ethical appeal in the desire for a more inclusive representational landscape and certainly under-represented communities can be empowered by an enhanced visibility, the terms of this visibility can often enervate the putative power of these identities." 

- peggy phelan (1996)

D&D Party Portrait March 2022

From our Tomb of annihilation campaign. The game fell apart from various reasons but I still play with most of the group.