A Thing That Annoys Me A Lot Nowadays Is The Way The Average Person Unceasingly Consumes Art In The Vast

Pixel art of my dnd party I made in may 2021.

Shozenji, A Japanese LGBTQ Safe Temple Run By A Transgender Nun

Matcha reports on Soshuku Shibatani, the transgender head nun of the Shozenji Temple in Moriguchi City, Osaka. It  is Japan’s first temple built as a refuge for the LGBTQ community.

Soshuku Shibatani, a 65-year-old openly transgender Buddhist nun, was assigned male at birth: 

She began to identify as a female in elementary school but never dared to express her gender identity at the time. As a university student, she met people similar to her and briefly lived at ease among like-minded peers. However, upon entering the workforce, she had to hide her true self once more…

According to Ms. Shibatani, “Buddha saw beyond the differences of gender.”

There is no need to hide your true self. Ms. Shibatani gradually became interested in Buddhist teachings and enrolled in community courses at the Graduate School of Koyasan University. She later resigned from her company, joined the priesthood, and went on to study Esoteric Buddhism.

Ms. Shibatani stated, “Shozenji is not exclusively for the LGBTQ community, but rather a temple for everyone.”

“The Kannon Bodhisattva has no gender identity,” Soshuku Shibatani says. A statue of Kannon, the Buddhist deity of mercy, is enshrined in the temple. Others see Kannon or Guan Yin  as a female incarnation of the Buddha.

(source)

You’re yourself forever - idea by and commission for @kingiovi  🖤

thoughts are not inherently bad or good and they mean nothing.  if you have a scary/gross/mean thought and you’re like “hm, that’s scary/gross/mean”, congratulations, normal.  you don’t have to berate yourself over it.  the stuff that you think about/that your brain coughs up does not indicate your morality.  that is some magical thinking bullshit.

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

My changeling detective from a Curse of Saltmarsh campaign - March 2023