I’m seeing a bunch of posts that make me think most USAmericans don’t know about The No Surprises Act.

It was passed in 2021 (thank you Biden) and essentially states that if you don’t have insurance or your insurance doesn’t cover a service you need (or want) you are entitled to a Good Faith Estimate of the cost of care. (If your insurance does cover the service, you should be able to estimate the cost of care based on your deductible and co-pay.)

As a healthcare provider who does not accept any insurance, I am very careful to not violate The No Surprises Act. Why? Because for every penny more than $400 that the Good Faith Estimate was “off” (or if it wasn’t provided), you are entitled to a refund for that amount.

Y’all. Ask for a Good Faith Estimate. Get it in writing. Compare it to what you are paying. If you are not provided an estimate or if it’s wrong by more than $400, demand a refund.

I’m reforging this for the second time in five minutes because I needed to add that part of this is also about what your health insurance provider is required to do. They’re required to tell you what your out of pocket cost will be. If you contact them and they say actually they don’t know but your copay is X%, you can ask them to call the provider and get the codes they plan to use to bill for your services. If the provider is in network they’ll have negotiated rates in place so the insurer will know exactly how much you can be charged for that service and then they have to tell you. No surprise huge medical bills even if you are insured.

People in the notes providing a perfect example of divide and conquer by nitpicking the wording and order of the dominos.

YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO NITPICK THE METAPHOR, YOU DUMBASSES!

The People who wanna knock down the dominoes are more then willing to reorder the dominoes to make them easier to knock down.

well i guess that's fine

There is no queer art you can create that will ever be acceptable enough for the Christian far right, so why bother trying? Make art they'd hate.

Relevant here, I think. Please go weird and go hard!!

A sitting Congresswoman got a gay man arrested for shaking her hand. If you’re wondering what the state of the Republican Party is right now.

And yes it’s important that the man was gay because he was advocating for trans foster children in part because he was a gay foster child at the height of Gay Conversion pseudoscience and he recognizes that it’s in many ways the same struggle trans kids are facing now.

“People who saw the interaction said it was only a handshake.”

What took place Tuesday night is not entirely clear, and video recordings have yet to surface.

Following the encounter between Mace and McIntrye, as a reporter looked on, several officers arrested McIntyre on a misty Tuesday evening outside the Rayburn House Office Building. At the scene, other youth advocates shouted out concern and dismay. 

Shortly before 8 p.m., Rep. Mace — who was the first female cadet to graduate from the Citadel military college, and has achieved recent attention for pushing to bar a fellow lawmaker who is trans from using the women’s bathroom — began posting a series of messages on the social media platform X. She cited a supportive phone call with president-elect Donald Trump, and described herself as being “physically accosted” by a “pro-tr*ns man.”

But three eyewitnesses disputed her characterization, saying they saw nothing but a routine handshake, followed by a request by the foster youth advocate that the Representative support transgender youth in foster care.

The fact that's Mace is pushing for transphobia against colleagues seems like necessary context here - as are other parts of the article that highlight she "wore her right arm in a sling as she walked through the Capitol today", but that "after U.S. Capitol Police arrived, Mace refused paramedics’ assistance".

Another important point from the article:

At today’s court hearing, an Imprint reporter watched as McIntyre pleaded not guilty to a “simple assault” misdemeanor charge. He was released by Superior Court Judge Renee Raymond on his own recognizance, with no objections from prosecutors. The judge ordered McIntyre to remain 100 feet from the Congress member and — over the objections of his attorney — he must now stay away from the nation’s capital.

This wasn't just an extreme right-wing bigot's overreaction. It was a targeted political move that sets an unsettling precedent for the future of trans activism.

I'm just gonna say it: white women have a history of weaponizing their womanhood and victimizing themselves in order to harm others. Her target happened to be a gay man this time. But white women have gotten a lot of black men killed using this exact tactic. They absolutely will use it to harm trans people.

Oh, one hundred percent. And let's not forget that not only was she responding to people and forgetting to switch to her sockpuppet account (lol) but that on her "official" X account, she posted a video where she literally addresses "trannies" while carrying a bullhorn around looking for protesters to scream at.

She is fully weaponizing White Woman Fragility while also trying to play herself off as So Tough. It's gross.

should be able to leave kudos on scientific studies. i liked your paper dude keep at it

sorry, Dr. Dude

Dude et. al.

need y'all to know that most academics have publicly searchable email addresses and this not only makes their day but they can put nice emails in their giant packets for applying for jobs or tenure. "hi i read your paper for a class and it was very helpful, im at xyz college and the class is blah with professor blah" is sufficient and ENORMOUSLY helpful

So today I want to talk about puberty blockers for transgender kids, because despite being cisgender, this is a subject I’m actually well-versed in. Specifically, I want to talk about how far backwards things have gone.

This story starts almost 20 years ago, and it’s kind of long, but I think it’s important to give you the full history. At the time, I was working as an administrative assistant for a pediatric endocrinologist in a red state. Not a deep deep red state like Alabama, we had a little bit of a purple trend, but still very much red. (I don’t want to say the state at the risk of doxxing myself.) And I took a phone call from a woman who said, “My son is transgender. Does your doctor do hormone therapy?”

I said, “Good question! Let me find out.”

I went into the back and found the doctor playing Solitaire on his computer and said, “Do you do hormone therapy for transgender kids?” It had literally never come up before. He had opened his practice there in the early 2000s. This was roughly 2006, and the first time someone asked. Without looking up from his game of Solitaire, the doctor said, “I’ve never done it before, but I know how it works, so sure.”

I got back on the phone and told the mom, who was overjoyed, and scheduled an appointment for her son. He was the first transgender child we treated with puberty blockers. But not, by far, the first child we treated with puberty blockers, period. Because puberty blockers are used very commonly for children with precocious puberty (early-onset puberty). I would say about twenty percent of the kids our doctor treated were for precocious puberty and were on puberty blockers. They have been well studied and are widely used, safe, and effective.

Well. It turned out, the doctor I worked for was the only doctor in the state who was willing to do this. And word spread pretty fast in the tight-knit community of ‘parents of transgender children in a red state’. We started seeing more kids. A better drug came out. We saw some kids who were at the age where they were past puberty, and prescribed them estrogen or testosterone. Our doctor became, I’m fairly sure, a small folk hero to this community. 

Insurance coverage was a struggle. I remember copying articles and pages out of the Endocrine Society Manual to submit with prior authorization requests for the medications. Insurance coverage was a struggle for a lot of what we did, though. Growth hormone for kids with severe idiopathic short stature. Insulin pumps, which weren’t as common at the time, and then continuous glucose monitoring, when that came out. Insurance struggles were just part and parcel of the job.

I remember vividly when CVS Caremark, a pharmaceutical management company, changed their criteria and included gender dysphoria as a covered diagnosis for puberty blockers. I thought they had put the option on the questionnaire to trigger an automatic denial. But no - it triggered an approval. Medicaid started to cover it. I got so good at getting approvals with my by then tidy packet of articles and documentation that I actually had people in other states calling me to see what I was submitting (the pharmaceutical rep gave them my number because they wanted more people on their drug, which, shady, but sure. He did ask me if it was okay first).

And here’s the key point of this story:

At no point, during any of this, did it ever even occur to any of us that we might have to worry about whether or not what we were doing was legal.

It just never even came up. It was the medically recommended treatment so we did it. And seeing what’s happening in the UK and certain states in America is both terrifying and genuinely shocking to me, as someone who did this for almost fifteen years, without ever even wondering about the legality of it.

The doctor retired some years ago, at which point there were two other doctors in the state who were willing to prescribe the medications for transgender kids. I truly think that he would still be working if nobody else had been willing to take those kids on as patients. He was, by the way, a white cisgender heterosexual Boomer. I remember when he was introduced to the concept of ‘genderfluid’ because one of our patients on HRT wanted to go off. He said ‘that’s so interesting!’ and immediately went to Google to learn more about it. 

I watched these kids transform. I saw them come into the office the first time, sometimes anxious and uncertain, sometimes sullen and angry. I saw them come in the subsequent times, once they were on hormone therapy, how they gradually became happy and confident in themselves. I saw the smiles on their faces when I gave them a gender marker letter for the DMV. I heard them cheer when I called to tell them I’d gotten HRT approved by insurance and we were calling in a prescription. It was honestly amazing and I will always consider the work I did in that red state with those kids to be something I am incredibly proud of. I was honored to be a part of it.

When I see all this transgender backlash, it’s horrifying, because it was well on the way to become standard and accepted treatment. Insurances started to cover it. Other doctors were learning to prescribe it. And now … it’s fucking illegal? Like what the actual fuck. We have gone so far backwards that it makes me want to cry. I don’t know how to stop this slide. But I wrote this so people would understand exactly how steep the slide is.

Pete Buttigieg is just a faggot.

It's very important to me that younger queers understand this: to the people who you're trying to be more respectable for when you say things like neopronouns set the trans movement back or you're why the cishets don't accept us or including [aces/bi people with the 'wrong kind' of partners/non-binary people/kinksters/non-passing trans ppl/furries/polyam people] just hurts us, can't you wait until we get all our rights before we talk about some of yours? -- to those people? Pete Buttigieg is just a fag.

On Sunday at Pride Northwest, some kids -- late teens, early 20s -- asked what our button I survived Reagan for this? meant. All of the queer adults at the tables making up our ad hoc counter looked at each other and sighed a little. Emet and another adult started to explain the way that the Reagan Administration handled -- or didn't handle -- the beginning of the AIDS crisis. How many people died. How much we were ignored. The Ashes Action. The Time Magazine article which explicitly blamed bisexual men for passing the pandemic to the cishet community, playing on all the worst stereotypical bullshit. The way that even when the CDC started paying attention, they were so focused on gay men that they ignored AIDS in the lesbian community, leading to the "women don't get AIDS, they just die from it" poster. And so on.

I finished counting out change and passed the last Bear Pride raised fist pin over to a bear a little older than me, then turned my head and interjected, "they didn't care until it started infecting more than just the fags." I turned my head back and handed him his change. He laughed bitterly and said, "remember when they called it 'gay cancer?'"

That what I need you to understand. The people for whom you are folding yourself into smaller and smaller boxes will never see you as anything but a freak. A queer. A dyke. A tranny. A fag.

Never.

These are people who will stand by and let you wither away and die alone, gasping for breath in a cinderblock room, and not even claim your ashes, and they will say you deserve it, because of your lifestyle. If they speak of you at all it will be by the wrong name, with the pictures you hate the most. They will curse at your lover, throw him out of the home you shared, and steal the gift you gave last Christmas to throw it in the trash just so he can't have it and they'll say Jesus loves you! while they do it. They'll feel good and righteous and blessed and holy and pure for doing it.

And for them, you spit in the eye of your sister. For them, you disavow your sibling. For their sake, you trim away bits of your heart and lace yourself up tight. Never too loud. Never too queer. Never inconvenient or embarrassing, never asking for too much.

Pete Buttigieg is what happens when your Boomer dad turns out gay. Middle America. Parents still married. Suburban-sprouted. Valedictorian. Harvard-educated. Rhodes Scholarship. Military service. More power to him: I hope he and Chasten are very happy together. Genuinely, I do.

You couldn't create a more respectable gay if you grew one in a lab run by concerned voter focus groups.

But Pete Buttigieg? Is just a fag.

That's the part you don't seem to get: when they abandoned us, they abandoned all of us. Rock Hudson was a beloved movie star and even personally friendly with that horrid pair of ambitious jackals. Nancy Reagan refused to help him get into the only place in the world that could treat him at the time, and he died.

It was 1985, 4 years after the CDC first released papers on what would eventually become known as HIV/AIDS and 7 years after the first known death from an infection from HIV-2. Reagan hadn't even said the word AIDS by the time Hudson died.

Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, and so am I. Unless I'm a dyke, which seems to depend on who's yelling what from which window and what day it is.

Yes, there will be people who genuinely love and accept you. Those people are worth all the frustration of the rest, thankfully, and they're the ones who love you in a pup mask or a leather harness and a neon jock like the ones sold by the men up the row from us last weekend. They're the ones who laugh out loud when you tell them you hid the word "dyke" in your company name, the ones who love you in all your messiness and uncertainty and the way you don't fit into neat boxes all scrubbed up and clean.

Most cishets, though... well, they don't actively mean you specifically any harm, at least not when they have to look at you. Not when you're right there in front of them. Maybe they'll be okay with you, personally, especially if you're the kind of gay who makes a good rhetorical device, and as long as you remain a good rhetorical device.

They need people to know that they don't have a problem with the gays, after all, and there you are, being all convenient. You make a nice token, and as long as you do, well. You're useful.

But they call you by your deadname when you're not around, and they put the wrong pronouns in your medical record even though they met you years after you came out, and they won't put themselves out to save you. Not one little bit.

I didn't want to be here again. The year I graduated from high school was the worst year of the AIDS crisis. The world into which I became an adult was a world in which an advisor and friend to Reagan, William F. Buckley, openly advocated for forcibly tattooing the HIV status of HIV+ gay men on their buttocks (and IV drug users on their forearms), and in which my father not only told me that when I was 14 or so, but when was told me that he'd advocated for that tattoo being "over their assholes."

(Buckley wrote that in '86, but he doubled down on it in 2005.

Fucker.)

But yeah. I didn't want to be here again. I wanted my daughter to inherit a better world. I wanted Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas and Hope & Change to really mean something. I work for it, today and all days. I haven't given up.

I need you to know that, too. This isn't a white flag. I'm not surrendering. This isn't over. To misquote Henry Rollins, this is what Marsha and Sylvia and Stormé and Leslie and Brenda and Auntie Sugar trained us for. This is punk rock time.

But I need you to understand that if Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, if that human embodiment of a Wonder Bread, mayo and Oscar Meyer bologna sandwich is not respectable enough for them -- and he's not -- then the rest of us have absolutely no hope of measuring up. Not even if we trim away every colorful, beautiful piece of our community, not even if the Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence vanish into the ether, not even if we sacrifice the five elements of vogue on the altar of white supremacist cishet middle-class conformity: we can't trim ourselves down to something they'll accept.

The only other option is radical acceptance of our queer selves. The only other option is solidarity. The only other option is for fats and femme queens and drags and kinksters and queers and zine writers and sex workers and furries and addicts and kids and the ones who can look us in the eye and see all of us to say we're here, we're queer, get used to it just the way we did 30 years ago. It's revolutionary, complete and total acceptance of our entire community, not just the ones the cishets can pretend to be comfortable with as long as we don't challenge them too much, or it's conceding the shoreline inch by inch to the rising waters of fascism until we've got nowhere left to stand and some of us start drowning.

That's it. Either it's all of us or it's none of us, because if we leave the answer up to the Reagans of the world and all the people who enabled him in the name of lower taxes and Democrats who wring their hands, weeping oh I don't agree with it but we'll lose the election if we fight it right now, the answer is none of us.

The brunch gays can come, too, I guess.

"The meaning of TAROT is any of a set of usually 78 playing cards including 22 pictorial cards used for fortune-telling."

**Update: Wrong form was linked! Correct form is now attached.

Our Tarot Deck project is coming along wonderfully! Please enjoy this sneak peak of some of our earliest cards.

What is this project?

Over the course of a year, we will create a deck of 78s Yu Yu Hakusho themed tarot cards. Each artist chooses as many cards as they'd like to create. At the end, if the project succeeds, we will look to print the cards and make them into an actual deck you can purchase!

The project is still ongoing and sign ups are still open to those who would like to participate! Details are in the sign up form and any questions can be directed to this blog's ask box.

Credits:

• maiji :  https://pixiv.me/maiji
• krimsonkitsu: @yyh-behind-the-scenes
• LokiNeko: @lokineko
• Vayheer: @vayheer
• charbunni: https://charbunniart.carrd.co/
• lionalice: @lionalicelives
• katchevio: https://twitter.com/katchevio?lang=en

AN EXTREMELY NICHE VERSION OF RUNNING OUT INTO THE STREET AND GRABBING PEOPLE BY THEIR COLLAR AND YELLING

ADOBE GOT RID OF BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY IN INDESIGN 20.0

IDMLS ARE NO LONGER BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE

DON'T DO IT

DON'T UPDATE

Was talking to a 70 year old security guard at my university yesterday and I liked what he had to say to me and a couple of the younger freshmen chatting him up. I think you should hear it. I’ll paraphrase him (cutting out my half of the conversation);

“For people like us [POC] it’s always been a fight against the latest dude. Reagan and bush and Obama and trump. You know what they did when we started scaring them? They bombed American soil because they were about to piss themselves at black power. You know I can’t say out loud I was a part of that but that’s what you kids gotta do. Stay calm and build that black power, that neighbor power, that low class power against the latest dude, and when they bomb this neighborhood again that’s when you can panic, but you’ve gotta fight til then. The president was never on our side. Neither one.”

context for the unaware:

I feel like it's important to know that the University of Pennsylvania had parts of the bones of one of the MOVE bombing victims without the consent of the (living) family, and they had them for like... nearly 40 years. Then fucking lost them. The ME gave Penn the bones, and they used them for teaching classes.

It's become a huge issue bc a local reporter broke the story - Billy Penn is a Very Local Paper - and the public outcry has led to a cascade change of the way a lot of Philly institutions handle human remains, which to me says two things: they won't even respect your corpse if you don't make them, and local reporters are fucking important. It was Billy Penn that broke who the bones might be & went to interview their childhood friends. The potential people were Tree, 14, and Delisha, 12. (For context, I turned 8 a couple weeks after the bombing.)

All the content warnings, but like, I think knowing that the disrespect continues for a long time after is important to know, too. The work keeps on.

More remains were uncovered at the University of Pennsylvania two weeks ago:

SO HERE IS THE WHOLE STORY (SO FAR).

I am on my knees begging you to reblog this post and to stop reblogging the original ones I sent out yesterday. This is the complete account with all the most recent info; the other one is just sending people down senselessly panicked avenues that no longer lead anywhere.

IN SHORT

Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify and (aspiring?) voice actor, used AI to scrape thousands of popular, finished works off AO3 to list them on his own for-profit website and in his attached app. He did this without getting any kind of permission from the authors of said work or informing AO3. Obviously.

When fandom at large was made aware of his theft and started pushing back, Weitzman issued a non-apology on the original social media posts—using 

• his dyslexia; 
• his intent to implement a tip-system for the plagiarized authors; and 
• a sudden willingness to take down the work of every author who saw my original social media posts and emailed him individually with a ‘valid’ claim,

as reasons we should allow him to continue monetizing fanwork for his own financial gain.

When we less-than-kindly refused, he took down his ‘apologies’ as well as his website (allegedly—it’s possible that our complaints to his web host, the deluge of emails he received or the unanticipated traffic brought it down, since there wasn’t any sort of official statement made about it), and when it came back up several hours later, all of the work formerly listed in the fan fiction category was no longer there. 

THE TAKEAWAYS

1. Cliff Weitzman (aka Ofek Weitzman) is a scumbag with no qualms about taking fanwork without permission, feeding it to AI and monetizing it for his own financial gain; 

2. Fandom can really get things done when it wants to, and 

3. Our fanworks appear to be hidden, but they’re NOT DELETED from Weitzman’s servers, and independently published, original works are still listed without the authors' permission. We need to hold this man responsible for his theft, keep an eye on both his current and future endeavors, and take action immediately when he crosses the line again. 

THE TIMELINE, THE DETAILS, THE SCREENSHOTS (behind the cut)

Keep reading

Hey folks, I doubt many people will see this message or the comment I left about it down below, but if you’re reblogging this post with death threats or calls for physical violence against this man, I am blocking you. I want this post to reach as many people as possible, and if you carry on like that you’re not just incriminating yourself, you’re giving tumblr reasons to nuke this entire recap. Thank you.

For the people coming in after Weitzman made the fanwork hidden to people who hadn’t signed up for an account beforehand, there does appear to be a way to see if your fic was lifted: searching for the fic title (+ your username maybe, if your title is a song lyric or something else used frequently) + wordstream will still bring up your fic if it was included in the theft:

Again, sharing this info is appreciated, because (understandably) I’m getting a lot of questions about this, and I will not be answering all of them individually. Share (and check back for) all additional info in the comments either here on on the latest Reddit thread if you can, because even useful additions in reblogs are difficult to keep up with. Thank you!

I sent messages to him every single day multiple times a day until I got this reply

Cliff Weitzman says it will take a week from takedown for our work to be given back to us completely—minus that pesky little part where he fed it all to AI, of course! I guess we will all find out if he’s been telling the truth about removing the work by December 31st 2024 (seven days after the fanworks disappeared from view).

Speechify CEO Weitzman has yet to communicate ANYTHING about his website & app word-stream taking fanworks and then quickly hiding them when we found out—nor this announcement in the screenshot above—ANYWHERE PUBLIC, so let’s help him get the word out!

Weitzman’s ‘X’ account

Weitzman’s Instagram account

Weitzman’s LinkedIn account

Weitzman’s YouTube account

Note that he will likely block you (like he did me) if you tag his username directly, so make sure to hashtag #cliffweitzman, #speechify and #wordstream as well when commenting or making your own posts about the issue!

Also, I know nothing about TikTok and don’t follow fandom on YouTube, but if anyone knows anyone who might be interested in covering this issue there too, I’d be extremely grateful for you bringing this post to their attention.

-

ADDITION DECEMBER 29th: Works that were accessed previously by people who signed up to gather more info before Cliff Weitzman made all fanworks disappear from view are still accessible on his servers today. Also check the comments for more info as it comes in!

Update December 30th: all the works I personally saw were up on word-stream before they were hidden from view still come up in search results today and are still accessible as AI-generated audiobooks through his app to people who signed up for his app before Weitzman hid the works from view.

Also, this was an interesting find, when googling Cliff Weitzman + fanfiction:

You may remember that one of Cliff Weitzman’s arguments that his theft was somehow defensible was the idea that word-stream was ‘only in beta’. (See above for the screenshot of his message stating this). Really, Cliff? Then why were you already advertising the operation on your main platform two days before we discovered it? Why was its payment system fully functional?

Friends, if you really want to help, please, if you can, don’t stop at merely reblogging this post. The previous reblog above lists some things you can do to help this issue break containment and make Weitzman take accountability for what he did. As things stand, we’re allowing him to make this entire thing quietly go away. And as someone in the comments said, wouldn’t it be awesome if we could broadcast this issue broadly enough that whenever someone does an online search for this man, or his company Speechify, his theft is one of the first results to come up?

Weitzman is either willfully or carelessly risking bringing about the end of freely available fanmade media by attempting to monetize it. If he receives zero consequences for this, it’s going to happen over & over & over again, and eventually the IP holders of the source material are going to go ahead and stop tolerating widely accessible fanwork entirely. Can we try to help not make that happen? Please?

Amazing: thanks to youtackything on Bluesky, we have the screenshots of Weitzman’s advertisement for word-stream!

Again, this was posted to Speechify’s website (at what is now a dead link) on December 20th, a full three days before Weitzman tried to make the argument that he couldn’t be held accountable for his theft because we weren’t supposed to find out about it yet.

Also, to the surprise of absolutely no one, the listings of our works are still visible and fully accessible to word-stream members today.

Also: to the person who tried to add Cliff’s involvement with word-stream to Cliff’s Wikipedia page, I owe you one (really, dm me, I have an excellent recipe for banana bread) but sadly it looks like your changes were already reverted. Anyone out there with an older Wikipedia membership who wants to give it a try?

Guys, it's time to drop Google.

Google isn't the only search engine in the whole internet, there are others! And we need to diversify our search engine usage or we're gonna end up where we were a decade and change ago with the Internet Explorer issue. We can't let a single brand monopolize everything! This is why Google Search can afford to suck so hard: because people use it regardless! And there are alternatives.

A little bit about search engines, there are 3 types: crawlers, which work by scraping the web and developing their own indexes; metas, which get their results from the crawler-type search engines and therefore depend entirely upon them; and mixed, those which have their own (small) index but also pull results from the crawlers.

Right now, there are a couple of independant crawlers apart from Google, Bing (from Mycrosoft) and Yandex (the Russian one): this are Mojeek and Wiby.

Supporting independant crawlers is the easiest way to fight the shittyfication of the internet.

Mojeek.com is an independant british search engine with its own growing index commited to fighting internet censorship. It's small, and therefore it's usability isn't as good as that of the Big Three, but it doesn't censor, it's fairly respectful of people's privacy, and it doesn't drown you in adds. For those old enough to remember, it's a lot like early 2000s Google: you can find what you need, but if you write "dig shelter" instead of "dog shelter", that's what it's gonna search for. That said, please try to use it and support it as much as you can before we end up entirely dependant on Google, Bing and big corps adds. [click here to go to Mojeek]

Wiby.me is a new indie project that is literally dedicated to bringing back the old-school web. It's goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. So, for those of you who can't find any answers to technical questions beyond highschool level because Google buries them under a gazillion commercial sites and other meaningless shit, keep an eye on this project! It has a lot of potential. And, if you know of any personal websites that have great stuff but have been murdered by Google, you can go over to Wiby and submit it to their index. [click here to go to Wiby]

Aside from those, there are also meta search engines you can use to ween yourself off Google and search for random, day to day stuff.

Qwant.com is my go-to here—it has its own index and pulls from Bing, has relatively little censorship, and is fairly private. This is the one I use on my phone for everyday stuff. [click here to go to Qwant].

Historically, DuckDuckGo has always been a go-to for those who want a search engine that respects your privacy and doesn't censor. Personally, I've never been a fan, and there have been a LOT of scandals in recent years. It supposedly has its own index and pulls from Bing, much like Qwant, but I don't know. I just don't like it. Still, I've added it here for completeness' sake.

If you have Firefox Mobile browser, you can set any of these search engines as your default search engine and you can also add the others as secondary search engines and switch quicky from the navigation bar. If you don't have firefox mobile though, what are you doing with your life??? Go get it!! It is So. Much. Better. You can have add blockers and watch YouTube add free, for free! You can have reader mode and dark mode add-ons! You can have the world oh my goshhhh, drop Chrome!!

4get.ca is my last recommendation: it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn't have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it's the best for reaserch, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can. It's also very privacy conscious, so that's an other plus, and it has that late 90s / early 2000s vibe that I totally dig. [click here to go to 4get]

If you wanna learn more about the topic, you can over to the Search Engine Map [click here] which shows you a bunch of Search Engines and how they relate to each other. Or you can also go over to this one dude's personal website whose done A Lot of reaserch into the topic (way more than me) and seems to be pretty legit, if a little extra. [click here to go to digdeeper.neocities.org] Hope this infodump is useful to someone =D

PS: here's to hoping all the links work!

EDIT: eliminated the "read more". Figured there are enough mega long posts in tumblr, one more won't make no difference lol (tho the version w the read more has been reblogged already, in case you'd rather)