This Sure As Hell Ain't Funny Anymore

Phineas and Ferb - Season Four - “My Sweet Ride”

who else is in the “didn’t realize sheep have long tails until i was like 20″ club

watch the whole thing, i’m begging you

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Back in early summer I stumbled upon this pile of wood while strolling in a pasture with Pan (to meet baby cows), and it looked quite dry and good quality and it’s never too early to worry about your winter’s supply of firewood, so I went in search of the farm and asked the owner about it. He said it was at least 3 years-old and after a lot of mandatory small talk and hints, he agreed to deliver it at my house “at some point” when he was done haying.

I think last year I would have been stressed by the total vagueness re: date of delivery and cost (if I’d asked how much he wanted for his wood I would have received at best a noncommittal shrug), but I’m starting to figure things out, so I made no mention of money, and just waited, and two months later he delivered my wood as promised, then took a look at the forest behind my house and said I had some nice ash trees. I ended up offering him an ash tree in exchange for his already-cured wood and he said yes, that’s fine. I warned him that I might only have it cut in a few months and that was fine too.

Transactions are a lot less stressful now that I have a better grasp of how things work around here—time and money are often irrelevant in a way that feels disconcerting to someone raised in cities where you get things with money and without delay. Last summer when my donkey was injured and I needed an enclosure for him, the mason came to build a corral and when I asked him how much it would cost, he said “don’t worry, we’ll figure it out.” A perplexing answer for me because what is there to figure out? You give me a price and I pay. I tried to remind him of the corral later on but he never seemed to want to be paid for his work. Months later, I was chatting with the postwoman (his wife) who said their daughter struggled with English at school, and I offered some tutoring, and she said oh that would be great, then later added “see! we figured it out for your corral.” And if she hadn’t said that I don’t think I would have linked the two, and realised we had made a trade.

It made me notice other little trades I made last year without really being aware of it, because they are so tacit and drawn-out in time—as I started paying attention I realised how many transactions happen in this way between people at the village, including professionals (at the hairdresser, the car repair shop, etc). This whole informal system of trade is so habitual and unthinking it ends up being almost invisible. And in fact using money seems to be perceived as rather embarrassing at times (the postwoman noticed my firewood and congratulated me on not having bought it like last year, when I did things the city way and went to the sawmill in town)—as it might suggest you failed at fostering enough trust and goodwill with your neighbours to exchange goods & services without relying on money as an immediate incentive and guarantee.

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top 5 tumblr raps of the decade

5. cowboy rap

4. underwater monk

3. slurp on my gurt

2. bone removal, without approval

1. my dick don't work

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

I wrote a comic about meeting Team Yell in Pokemon Sword & Shield!