Sometimes I’m looking for something online - often “how to” articles - and I want to filter for - like - a website that was clearly built in 2010 at the latest, which may or may not have been updated since then, but contains a vast wealth of information on one topic, painstakingly organized by an unknown legend in the field with decades’ worth of experience.
I don’t want a listicle with a nice stolen picture in a slideshow format written by a content aggregator that God forgot. I want hand-drawn diagrams by some genius professor who doesn’t understand SEO at all, but understands making stir-fries or raising stick insects better than anyone else on this earth. I don’t know what search settings to put into Google to get this.
thank you for articulating this cri de coeur for me
ngl these days i’m just happy when it’s not a video
The search engine calculates a score that aggressively favors text-heavy websites, and punishes those that have too many modern web design features.
This is in a sense the opposite of what most major search engines do, they favor modern websites over old-looking ones. Most links you find here will be nearly impossible to find on a regular search engine, as they aren’t sufficiently search engine optimized.
“It is a search engine, designed to help you find what you didn’t even know you were looking for. If you search for “Plato”, you might for example end up at the Canterbury Tales. Go looking for the Canterbury Tales, and you may stumble upon Neil Gaiman’s blog.
If you are looking for fact, this is almost certainly the wrong tool. If you are looking for serendipity, you’re on the right track. When was the last time you just stumbled onto something interesting, by the way?
I don’t expect this will be the next “big” search engine. This is and will remain a niche tool for a niche audience.“
i clicked around for a few minutes searching various things and I now have two fourteenth century pie crust recipes and an apple filling recipe i want to try, so thanks!
it has been twenty minutes and I am deeply in love with this search engine.
INCREDIBLE. I *do* want to know how to test Windows 95 for Y2K Compliance and I am glad that someone is still hosting step by step instructions for that.
tl;dr: search.marginalia.nu for the old or old looking and just plain serendipitous stuff that google or Duck duck go are gonna not find/bury on the 20th page. For perfectly good reasons, but …
My absolute favorite part of having made this post - other than causing people to be introduced to this site - are the people in the tags/comments talking about their interests and stuff they found about their hobbies.
[image id: excerpt from the {article} “is it really "carceral logic”?“ by lee shevek that reads:
”one problem with this formulation is that it shows a deep misunderstanding of both the breadth, depth, and purpose of the carceral system. prisons are not systems of punishment. punishment certainly plays a star role, and it remains beneficial to examine the ways many often conflate justice with punishment, but ultimately the carceral system is about control. the carceral system does not simply dole out punishment: it takes away the agency of the people it targets. it rips them from their context and totally closes off any possibility for the expression of personal agency and accountability. it is a system of total surveillance, of excess and constant brutality, and the populations most targeted by it are also (not at all coincidentally) disproportionately the people the state most wants to exert control over. to reduce it to simply a mechanism of punishment is to concede to the state that the reason they lock people up is as they say it is: only for as a punishment of crime, rather than as a mechanism of social control and the continuation of white supremacy. additionally, to be so crudely reductive, to draw equivalencies between survivors asking for accountability to harm done to them and a torturous carceral system, is to do a great disservice to survivors and the incarcerated people who have suffered or are still suffering the consequences of true carceral logic.“
“And I’d lay up in my bed, at night, and be staring at the ceiling, and I’d feel like if something didn’t happen, if something didn’t happen soon, it felt like I was just gonna… like some day, like I was just gonna…”
[image id: partial {lyrics} to the song “i’m on fire” by bruce springsteen that read:
“[verse 3]
sometimes it’s like someone took a knife, baby, edgy and dull
and cut a six-inch valley through the middle of my skull
at night, i wake up with the sheets soakin’ wet
and a freight train runnin’ through the middle of my head
[image id: two excerpts from the {essay} “whatever we want” by jp brammer. the first excerpt reads:
“i’m in love with you. i’m in love with you and i don’t even like you all that much. i’m probably not going to love someone like this again, and that’s fine by me because i’m not having a good time. i keep imagining all the things i’d give up just to make this work; fictional deals with a devil that hasn’t approached me. i’d shave years off my life. i’d give a limb. i do a lot of bartering while you’re staring slack-jawed at the open road. mouthbreather.”
the second excerpt reads:
“you climb back into the driver’s seat and run your hand through my hair and scratch the back of my neck. touch won’t feel like this again, so loaded with affections and mysteries and appetites i feel utterly invested in. love ought to be an involuntary thing. i see it that way because that’s how i’m feeling it. i didn’t choose to love you. i would have probably chosen anybody else. but here we are, so this must be how it goes.”
Hey guys, I made a carrd website and linked my other accounts! Make sure to give them a follow and spread the word (pretty please, I will give you wholesome content for it).
