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.

⁂

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

right now it’s almost halfway through 2023, and 2024 is an election year in the US. I have started to see a growing proliferation of posts suggesting that there is no difference between the republican and democratic parties–the exact same kind of posts I saw an awful lot of before the last major election here. I am unfollowing folks who post or reblog these sort of posts, as I consider these posts to be fascist propaganda framed as leftist discourse, designed to suppress anti-fascist votes and voters. 

Prepare yourself to vote for Biden now, because the only other option is someone who will make 2016-2020 look like a picnic.

You work with what you’ve got, not what you wish you had.

I detest Biden more with every passing day (and he was not in my top 10 candidates in 2020). 2024 will be an election between:

No Labels is an op. It’s being funded by unknown parties to defeat Biden and the Democrats. Their election scenarios are fantasy football for political junkies.

No Third Party has a road anywhere outside statewide offices (Bernie is the exception that proves the rule, and he’s a Democrat for all intents and purposes).

Arguably the rosiest scenario is that TFG breaks with the Republicans to form his own party and tanks any chance the Republicans have, but that’s not looking as likely as it did two years ago.

If you’re pissed, get involved in your local elections. Ensure that no position is running unopposed (and that includes if you’ve got a conserva-Dem somewhere now–primary them).

Get the House back in the Democratic hands (unless you’re up for two more years of this only with MTG as Speaker this time). Increase the margin in the Senate (and send Selema to her post-senate career). Make sure your school board isn’t full of flat-earthers. Wake sure your county counsel isn’t going to shut down your libraries if they have a book someone doesn’t like.

As Stonekettle says, if you want a better country, but a better citizen.

There’s a reason we call it a civic DUTY, not a civic privilege.

Starting mid-April I’ll be posting to-do lists and action items for people who’ve never gotten involved before. One party wants you dead. FIGHT.

Speaking as a Michigan resident:  Look at the laws being passed in Michigan.  Now look at the laws being passed in Florida.  Spot the difference?  That’s because Michigan is being governed by the Democratic Party, and Florida is being governed by the Republican Party.  That’s the difference.  They’re different parties.  It is not the same.

You want what we’ve got?  Vote for it.

(And you want Michigan to stay the way it is and not slide backwards into the shit we had to deal with with Rick Snyder, or even just the way it was when the House and Senate were Republican-controlled?  Keep fucking voting.)

D are not our friends or even allies but R is a staunch enemy

look the main thing is that our first-past-the-poll voting style automatically and always devolves into a two party system where the majority of people dislike both parties. This is now a known phenomenon, a feature of our voting method as inevitable as water running downhill. 

But that isn’t going to change until we get some sweeping voting reform that revises our voting system into some kind of ranked or run-off voting

Meanwhile one of our destined-to-be-disliked parties is actually trying to do things we want (health care, living wages, social services, public transportation, civil rights, education, support for gay and trans people, religious tolerance, etc) and one of our parties is banning books and undoing women’s rights and supporting corrupt racist police and endangering gay and trans lives while paying people to make posts about how both parties are equally bad so that people don’t vote democrat.

Like, we are going to not like a lot of how the Democrats operate, that is a feature of the current design, but they are trying to protect women’s rights, they are trying to help the homeless, they are trying to raise minimum wage they have agendas that include important things. And republicans? are at this point a literal cult that want to create a religious fascist state.

Even my father, now 80 years old, a man whose politics i have often despised, a man who voted for Reagan for fucks sake! even he (unhappily) votes Democrat now, because he’s not an insane person, and the republican party has become SO BLATANTLY EVIL AND STUPID that he can’t ignore it.

Democrats pass legislation we want that republicans then find ways to block. Democrats have passed bills that:

close gender pay gaps raise federal minimum wage make becoming a US citizen easier for immigrants protect civil/public water sources from pollution cut greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change increase gun regulation lower and control prescription drug prices improve healthcare access for those with pre-existing conditions protect net neutrality protect gay marriage rights

these are all the subjects of specific real bills that democrats have either passed into law or tried hard to pass in the last few years. Meanwhile republicans act to block these bills while championing book bans and attacking trans folk and giving more power to corporations to ruin our planet and taking away women’s rights. 

when you see posts attacking Democrats from the left or whatever, the talking points and quotes can often be traced back to right wing sources

So all posts trying to keep non-republicans arguing amongst ourselves and calling for us to not vote democrat (or not vote at all) ? I will be assuming they are bad-faith posts and i won’t be spreading them or engaging with them or anything.

Honest critique of the party is necessary, but like it or not our system currently is a two party system, and i’ll be voting for the better of the two until we can change our voting style to make additional political parties viable.

I live in Pennsylvania.

Neither of my children is cisgender.

The last gubernatorial election was, literally, do we elect this guy who is overly fond of cops but is generally a normal human being, or do we elect this other guy who believes frightening conspiracy theories and wants my children removed from my care and forcibly detransitioned and honestly would prefer them to be dead?

That’s it. That’s the kind of choice we get in first-past-the-post voting. If that second guy won, we needed to move. There was no safe way to stay here. The votes of my fellow citizens were all that was standing between my kids and serious fucking danger.

And my fellow citizens DID turn out. Lots of them came out and voted to reject the scary death cultist. I am grateful to all those who went, ugh, I don’t really like this guy, but the other guy is worse, and hauled themselves down to the polling place to get it done.

You, too, can vote to reject scary death cultists, in your hometown and your home state and in the country as a whole.

Getting rid of the scary death cultists is a prequisite for getting political representation you actually want.

50 WORDS TO USE INSTEAD OF “SAID”

Do you ever find yourself over-using the word “said” in your writing? Try using these words/phrases instead:

(NOTE: Keep in mind that all of these words have slightly different meanings and are associated with different emotions/scenarios.)

Also remember that “said” is invisible on the page, and that you aren’t ever overusing “said”, even if you’re scared you are.

You could write a novel using nothing but “said” to indicate that people are speaking and nobody will ever notice, complain, or think you’re a lazy writer.

My mood currently.

when you’re trying to write and your last two functioning brain cells start yelling at each other

Found some writing I did when I was 11 and oh boy

For reference, this is what she’s talking about :

In conclusion: Fanfic is important, there’s nothing wrong with writing or enjoying it and the cast and crew of Good Omens are a gift.

tv tropes doesn’t say or imply tropes are negative; it repeatedly specifies the opposite. cinemasins is bad because it actively frames the existence of tropes as a bad thing. 

TV tropes- this trope really explains this one part of the movie

Cinemasins- this movie has a beginning middle and end, setting, and characters so :/:/:/:/

a hard pill to swallow: if an audience can pick up on where the story is going, it’s a good story.

A kinda related note i hope you don’t mind me adding on: one of the most life-changing bits of story advice i ever received was actually in a class on “Revenge and Vengeance in the Ancient World,” if you can believe it. The professor was talking about how everyone in ancient Greece knew all the Greek myths back to front and told them over and over again - and someone asked why they would keep retelling the same stories if they already knew they ended.

She explained that basically it wasn’t the ending that was the most suspenseful or exciting part, but how you got there. This is why The Iliad spoils its own ending in the opening lines. This is why we have so many different retellings of Shakespeare, of Arthurian legends, of fairy tales. 

There are no truly original stories or truly unpredictable endings. So, IMO, it’s better to focus on how you as a writer/filmmaker/artist/whatever can bring something new to the body of the story rather than trying to shock and mislead your audience. 

Writing tip: the purpose of chapter breaks is to divide a work up according to breaks in narrative flow, not to slice a work into arbitrarily equally-sized chunks.

It’s okay to have a chapter that’s ten thousand words long followed by a chapter that’s five hundred words long.

It’s okay to have a chapter that’s one sentence long.

Heck, one of the most famous and well-regarded novels in the whole of the world’s literary canon has a chapter that contains no text at all.

The only reason you’d ever want to try to make chapters equally sized is a. you’re writing for serial publication in a printed magazine and have a fixed page count to work with, or b. your jerkass high school English teacher insisted upon it. In any other circumstance, go wild.

I have to remind myself of this continuously. I once butchered a perfectly good draft because I was worried about chapters being too long and too short, and I was trying to smush them all into 3,000 words. It totally ruined it and I’m glad I have an earlier draft from before I made those edits, because it actually completely fucked up the pacing and tone of the story. 

oh shit this just really helped with me being stuck in itht. I was really worried about how short the chapters are on average. Thank you op!!

This is also really good advice for breaking up paragraphs in a larger text (especially non-fiction). You want to start a new paragraph where there’s a new idea or a shift in the train of thought–not just because you’ve written five or ten sentences or whatever. Break your ideas down into pieces that are going to help a reader follow your logic. 

If you want a more modern example of good use of varying chapter length, check out “Salt to the Sea.” The author uses chapter length to control pacing FANTASTICALLY well. (Warning, though, it is a very heavy historical fiction book and involves a lot of death.)

writing advice: never italicize words to show emphasis! if you’re writing well then the reader will know and you don’t need them!

me: oh really??? listen up, pal, you can just try an pull italics from my cold, dead fingers

“I never said she stole my money.”

VS.

“I never said she stole my money.” 

“I never said she stole my money.” 

“I never said she stole my money.” 

“I never said she stole my money.”

“I never said she stole my money.” 

“I never said she stole my money.” 

“I never said she stole my money.”

It’s especially funny how every single one of those sentences has a completely different meaning. Besides, one shouldn’t make such generalized, idiotic statements as “never use italics,” especially not to writers. A unique style is one of the most crucial elements of writing, and use of italics is a good way to differentiate your writing from others’.

You cannot take my slanty letters away from me.

Touch my italics and I swear by my pretty floral bonnet I will end you

Ok just cause I’m still salty and this needs to be said: just because your story is a bit predictable doesn’t mean it’s bad. sometimes that just means that your story makes sense. if nothing in your story is predictable then you have crossed the line from “keeping viewers on their toes” to “nonsensical nightmare that doesn’t deliver on any front”

Lately a lot of stories that try to hard to be “subversive” and “unpredictable” have turned out shitty because they were more focused on not using certain tropes than telling a good story.