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a small-sized mystery by Jane Hirshfield

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The BBC is releasing over 16,000 sound effects for free download

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I think it should be noted that The Claims Adjuster indirectly saved hundreds, if not thousands, of lives. His actions intimidated Blue Cross Blue Shield into reversing it's new anesthesia policy, which would've led to rushed surgeries, people being unable to afford the surgeries in the first place, and people becoming impoverished in the wake of extremely high medical bills.

The life of a mass murderer, in exchange for the lives of hundreds of people (and that's if we're going with a low estimate).

Maybe he didn't intend to get that specific policy reversed, but he definitely intended to send a message to big healthcare companies and draw attention to all the lives lost due to their greed, and it worked. Possibly better than he'd imagined.

Just some food for thought.

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message to all bitches

please survive

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take my hand for a moment

your objective from this point on is to survive

the election results are going to take a few days. The world is going to be very tense. I want you to take all the things you like to do to distract yourself and splurge on them. I want you to go eat your favroite foods and spend time with friends. I want you to do what you gotta do to make sure you can make it through the week.

There are people out there who want you to survive. There are people out there who are just as scared as you are.

We'll get through this. We will find a way

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Because I remember disinformation being spread around the last few elections and I’m sure assholes will bring it back:

YOU CAN’T VOTE ONLINE.

YOU CAN’T VOTE FROM YOUR PHONE.

IN MANY STATES THERE ARE LEGAL CONSEQUENCES FOR PHOTOGRAPHING YOUR BALLOT.

DO NOT WEAR CAMPAIGN GEAR TO THE POLLS.

DO NOT TRY TO PERSUADE PEOPLE TO VOTE FOR A CANDIDATE AT THE POLLS.

DO NOT ENGAGE IN ANY KIND OF POLITICAL DISCOURSE AT THE POLLS.

NO ELECTION IS EVER A SURE THING, EVEN IF YOU’RE IN THE BLUEST OR REDDEST OF STATES.  IF SOMEONE TRIES TO TELL YOU THAT YOU CAN SIT THIS ONE OUT, THEY ARE EITHER IGNORANT OR MALICIOUS.

VOTE.

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

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Not my meme but figured I'd share for those about to ride out the storm

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Crossposted from BlueSky!

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Wha... we have counties? LOTS of counties? Country, state, county? On quite a few domestic forms, we have to specify county on a drop-down form that is unique to each state? Just by a quick Google search, it seems there are 109 counties in the whole of the UK. The US has 3,143 (including equivalents such as Lousianan parishes, Alaskan boroughs, and the 38 independent cities of my state Virginia (that are alongside 95 counties)).

(I agree that we U.S. Americans need to delearn our centrism btw)

one thing I’ve noticed while running an online shop is that Americans never include their country when writing their address.

I don’t mean when filling in online forms, bc that’s obviously a required element. but when emailing me for address changes for orders, they never include a country in the updated address. but I always know the country is the United States of America because literally nobody else around the world would do that.

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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

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Don't know if this is making the rounds here bc it's quite recent but TunnelBear VPN is now free for people connecting from Venezuela to use to elude censorship!

You can get it here!! Stay strong and safe!!

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HE'S BACK

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People are always saying ‘but [person] has a biological advantage so they shouldn’t be allowed in the olympics/sporting thing’ despite the fact that ALMOST EVERYONE IN THE OLYMPICS HAS A GENETIC ADVANTAGE COMPARED TO REGULAR PEOPLE. Why do you think more tall people play basketball?

Why do you think there aren’t that many short runners?

So why should someone biologically having more testosterone be an issue??

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