Obi-Wan Kenobi couldn’t give Leia a blaster even as a ten year old because the Empire would have been over in two months and we have to keep them around until the OT.
obi-wan: so, mercy,
leia, already standing over palpatine’s smoking corpse: what
it actually makes me really happy when you share a cultural food and someone else says oh, that’s almost the same as my cultural food!, and then they share it with you and they’re right, it is almost the same
it doesn’t really matter to me if it’s rooted in cultural exchange hundreds of years ago or if two groups of people made the same food independently in two different distant geographic areas, i love people and food and how food connects us in unexpected ways
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:
outsiders and boring normal people and fandom newbies always think that buckwild kinky porn fanfiction is the strangest fandom hobby but they are wrong.
the strangest fandom hobby is plotty fanfiction, the kind that requires research, because engaging in this hobby makes no goddamned sense.
it doesn’t even give anybody masturbation material, which is at least a logical and admirable goal that contributes to the betterment of society, or at least society’s solitary orgasms.
in other news i hope the cia spyware monitoring my internet usage understands that i’m googling information about smuggling drugs in thailand because i want the details to be right in a single paragraph in a 10,000 word story about a gay mafia guys.
this post has been making the rounds again and i just want to state for the record that it is a fucking delight to read in the tags all the random things people research for their fanfic and art. fandom, i love you. i love you with your flood maps and medical procedures and tentacle biology and historical fashion and traditional handcrafts and conlangs and urban geography and literally everything else. i am completely sincere about this. the enthusiasm with which people embrace detailed, deep, and often obscure research, just because they want to get it right, because they want to create something rich and interesting, it makes me feel better about the world. i adore it.
