Keep Your Private Searches Private
My concern with online privacy deepens, with each news story and tech podcast I listen to. I’m unable to impress anyone else with the urgency of these developments, it seems, so in some ways I truly am a tiny, solo being tumbling down an extended rabbit hole.
My latest kick, based on Google’s two latest invasive policies—plans to phase out ad blocker extensions in Chrome, plus "IP protection" which will redirect and collect the user's online traffic—have motivated me to divest from Gmail and give alternative search engines a try. I’m cleaning out my old email addresses, and I have several, used for various purposes and websites, like one dedicated to free MMOs from SE Asia, as well as the Size Riot account I used to manage the writing contest. Like I don’t have enough on my plate… well, I just completed the semiannual Great Password Update, where I deleted 17 accounts and started shifting my subscriptions to Protonmail.
ICYMI: Protonmail, like Substack, has the reputation that if you’re using it, you’re probably a criminal. Protonmail is a highly secure and private communication service, like the text messaging app Signal. Substack catches the askew glance because absolutely any political position can start an account through it. Some people interpret this as Substack giving a mic to hate speech and bigots, but what I know is that far-left accounts are routinely deleted on social media like YouTube. It’s Going Down was an indie news outlet that was suspended from Patreon by CEO Jack Conte (half of Pomplamoose), for legitimate journalism that happened on Twitter, identifying a leader of the Proud Boys at a public event. The Proud Boys told Conte to delete their account on Patreon, and Conte obeyed without hesitation, despite crowing about defending freedom of expression (albeit on a right-wing YouTube show).
So, fine. If Substack has space for the extremes, then it has space for me. And Google, through Blogger, has already made one attempt to censor accounts like mine. That, plus Google plundering users’ Gmail and docs stored in Drive to train Bard, means that I want to get away from Google products. Which as you might guess, is no easy task.
(Update, Dec. 23, 2023: This is a position I would later recant, as the CEO of Substack stated he sees no reason to prohibit Nazis from his platform.)
Fortunately, I found a WIRED Security article about this very thing, and they listed some web search options. I won’t consider Brave, due to the CEO’s anti-gay leaning, its crypto-heavy affiliations, and a privacy breach in which Brave appended its affiliate link to the end of any URL you entered into it, thus earning Brave revenue for your online activity. But I am implementing four browsers, in the hopes of compensating for not using Google’s unrivaled search capability: Mojeek, Kagi, Startpage, and DuckDuckGo. The latter is probably the best known, though it’s not a fantastic option. That’s why I’m hoping using all four for serious queries will help me find what I need. Startpage actually uses Google’s engine, but it anonymizes your query, runs it through Google, and returns the results to you without giving Google any metrics or personal data. What I really like is Kagi, because of its nested layout for results. It has an option for subscription, which is a selling point to me because of the truism: “If the service is free, you’re the product.” Paying for a service gives you some legal leverage, whereas some of us in the Size community have seen the downside of relying on a free service: being blacklisted on Amazon, shadowbanned on Instagram, and suspended from DeviantArt and Xitter with no warning and no justification. I can afford to throw some money to a secure service.
And like with any time I try some new aspect of technology, I had to put it through the paces. I ran a search for myself and my podcast through all four engines, and in aggregate, the results were about on par with using Google. Further, I searched for “giantess macrophilia” to see what it could produce, and I found things I’ve never seen before.
Join me, won’t you?
Found a porn video website (do people just call that porno, as opposed to “porn” that you look at in print?) where a contributing user just fed some Size-related terms into ChatGPT and cut-n-pasted the results into the video description.
That whole last paragraph, “It's crucial to approach discussions around fetishes with sensitivity and respect,” is a stock ChatGPT phrase and emblematic of its programming. It’s programmed to never be offensive and to ensure everyone’s treating each other with respect and asking for consent in all things. It can get in the way of good storytelling.
And I don’t even know what the hell this site is, besides some janky data aggregator. The title of the “article” is one of my stories, the copy pulls from all sorts of sources (after being dragged bodily through a translator), and then it grabs an image of Toby Hart’s Land of the Giantess, Book 4, probably from Amazon. Don’t look for this site, it will try to install malware on your machine.
Not entirely thrilled to see my property come up in XXXComics. This site is a warehouse of graphic novels and comics, grouped by interests. Searching for my name, I found two hits: my “Today We Climb a Woman” comic, and Masked Collager’s homage to my story, “Too Shrunken, Too Furious.” It’s not exactly piracy, since I’m not charging anything for these … should I feel flattered someone lifted these and preserved them on their site? However, these jerks use Fileboom to enable downloads from their site, so while they’re offering my free comics for free, they’re coercing you to pay for a premium download account and forcing you to start an account with them, while these files are free on my blog.
Does XXXComics have any reputation for posting pirated work, for sale by my friends? Is everything I share going to end up here, profiting someone else?
Found something legitimate, games and stories by GBTiny (Patreon). I’ve never heard of this user before, so I’m grateful to Kagi for digging it up for me. Seems interesting, and someone’s who’s making any kind of Size game deserves to be remunerated for his work.
Of course, when I see work like this, I always have to ask: Are the women in his images cognizant of his usage and consenting to how they’re represented? As my good friend Olo has pointed out many times, the Size scene is rife with people using stock images for macrophilic work, which is a gray issue, or worse, appropriating models’ images (like from Instagram) and ’shopping them into giantess/shrunken man collages, without permission.
[heavy sigh] So much of Size is thousands of young, broke users looking for free porn, and then dozens of users appropriating private resources to make it. Not everybody, of course, but it does seem to be a rite of passage, like shoplifting for teenage girls.
And it looks like someone on The Insane App site has created a giantess AI image generator. Or maybe they didn’t: follow the link and you’re taken to neural.love, a well-known AI generator, and all the links below only go to one example of an image luckily produced on four other popular generators. You can’t use them without creating an account, which means you only get a limited number of free images. I call shenanigans.
Likely, you already knew about the giantess stories archive on Gromet’s Plaza. I didn’t. I look forward to becoming well-versed in another Size writer’s oeuvre.
Turned up a collection of “text adventure games” on Giantess - V5 Games. It’s a really shaky chatbot with themed “giantesses,” which looks like a gallery of male-gaze porn stereotpyes. Don’t get your hopes up about the functionality, though: my conversation went off the rails immediately. I noticed that the background was changing images after a few minutes, eventually turning up this malformed AI-generated image, seen below. Anyway, you only get a few lines of chat before it starts asking for some very proud prices for a subscription, though being able to select from a couple dozen digital voices to read the bot’s script aloud is a nice touch.
I have never seen the 1958 musical Tom Thumb, but scenes like this make me want to give it a shot. I’ll have to do something to ramp up my defenses against it being a musical, and I’m sure the script is desultory and erratic, but I’m interested in the special effects and seeing whether they accidentally created anything magical.
If you’re a Gen X’er like me, you probably know and maybe even like The The. Apparently they have a song called “Shrunken Man,” and while the lyrics are referring to someone’s character, I’m used to taking anything I can get. Hell, it could be the soundtrack to a microphilia movie, where the anti-hero’s reduced size is an analogy to his character. It could be called A Little on the Nose.
And I’ll apologize for the randomness of this issue’s selection with an update from my Google Alerts, which … dammit … is another thing I’m going to have to cut out, because it doesn’t work without a Gmail account. Or maybe I’ll just keep the Aborigen account as an archive of past conversations and important contacts. That would be a lot to lose.
Apparently there was an Australian dramatic production about a real-life giantess: Mariedl, Selfies with a Giantess. The actress stood on a platform hidden beneath her traditional Austrian dress and enacted Mariedl’s career, making the circuit as a very tall women that people could pay to see. The article is very interesting, though I would have like to seen the show as well.
As always, thank you for your patience. Hope you find something of value in the junk drawer of my weekly existence.
Please try to avoid Google products, and switch to Signal for your text messages. Online security and privacy involves all of us.
In Her Shadow,
Aborigen
©2024 Aborigen/Size Riot