[cutecipher]

fuuuuck i forgot to give a shit about stupid bullshit that doesnt matter 🤦‍♀️

[creatingblackcharacters]

I can't remember where I read it last week, but the person discussed how when we think of chattel slavery in the US, we tend to think of massive plantations of cotton or tobacco, with one very rich white master or mistress with lots of land and lots of enslaved people. But we very rarely think of the many families that had just one or two slaves, in smaller homes.

Because it's not like you had to pay them, so once your family owned someone, they owned them and their descendants indefinitely. Could you pay and eventually free em- sure! You could also send them anywhere you want for any labor you want, could have an enslaved woman bred for more children, or maybe save up and buy new slaves and sell the old. Like cattle (thus, chattel slavery).

So it's interesting that many people go "oh well it's not like my family owned slaves!" Because like, one, how do you know that? Have you ever actually asked your grandmas about their grandmas? How many of your family members grew up with mammies? Have you ever asked? I wonder how many people have actually done the digging for the truth (or was it easier to just benefit). Because I've talked to my grandma, who picked cotton in the sea islands. She had to have been doing that for someone in the 1930s and 40s!

And two, it's easy to think that because your family (or someone else's) didn't own sprawling stolen land and generational blood money like a plantation owner, that it wasn't as important. But... It was. That was still someone's entire life. That was a person, whose labor benefitted and saved a family money that could be used in other ventures. How often do we think of them?

[thecryptkeeper]

[parakeet]

just saw a 'comments' tab on someones blog you know where the following and likes tabs would be if enabled and it was just showing all the replies theyve made on peoples posts. this is fascinating when did this feature come out

[parakeet]

EMERGENCY - ITS AUTO ENABLED!

if you've made replies on posts there is now a tab on your blog showing every post youve replied to and your reply.

if this is not what you want, either go to your blog and click comments and disable it from there or just go to your individual blogs setting pages. just change it from blue to grey if you dont want everyone to see your replies AND the post you're replying to

PLEASE BE ADVISED that it is set to disabled for blogs that have not made any replies but it will turn ON if you reply with that blog in the future.! i just tested it with my main, which was greyed out but it turned on the moment i left a test reply

figured i'd get the word out bc i have not seen a single mention of this and i'm sure there are plenty of people who maybe comment on things they don't want on display for everyone to see on their blog lol. you can still look at your replies with it toggled off just no one else can, like locking the following and likes list

[parakeet]

so for some reason this feature was actually announced on the tumblr engineering blog. interesting choice not to reblog it to the staff or tumblr blog, esp considering they asked for user input on how to implement it, but i suppose considering the response to the last update maybe the replies would be too overwhelming...

so couple of clarifications. comments are disabled as default for primary blogs that have their likes disabled. they are seemingly enabled for all other blogs that have replied to posts

posts you comment on may show on your followers 'for you' page if you leave your replies publically available. they may, in the future, show in on your followers dashboard if your follower goes to their dash settings and enables this. apparently, if your likes are enabled, your followers can already see those on the dash if they've gone into preferences and selected to do so, which I was unaware of, and that seems to be disabled at default, but it's possible i disabled it previously and forgot about it ig

[makingqueerhistory]

We could really use some patrons/one-time-donations right now!

[kropotkindersurprise]

An Irish far-right streamer attempts to interview an antifascist. Sound on. [video]

[kropotkindersurprise]

Update from the Twitter account of the hero in that video:

[eroscestlavie]

when you’re a gay lion and you accidentally tried to introduce your lesbian lioness friend to one of her own exes at a gay bar and she goes into the bathroom and bitches you out for not being able to tell her endlessly rotating cast of girlfriends apart which isn’t really fair because first of all they all keep dyeing their hair different colors and second of all she keeps getting back together with different ones at different times and meanwhile you’ve been “single” for like 8 months but are spending a lot of time with one specific guy who works at your old co-op and were going to excitedly tell her about it tonight but now you’ve ruined the whole subject of dating by trying to introduce her to her own ex at a gay bar (which is a watering hole. because you’re lions.) 

[kropotkindersurprise]

June 2 2020 - Antifascists marched against the fascist president Bolsonaro in Curitiba, Brazil, burned a Brazilian flag, and chanted antifascist slogans including in solidarity with Black Lives Matter protests in the US. [video]/[video]

[headspace-hotel]

while trying to decompress yesterday i ended up looking up a shit ton of stuff about book banning in the USA and wound up falling down this labyrinth of spreadsheets and aggregations that the people behind all this book banning stuff are using to find and challenge books

first of all theres ratedbooks.org which has a lot of different "ratings" of books but also advertises, for a fee of 100 dollars, a "Library transparency package" where you send in a spreadsheet of the inventory of a library and it is automatically cross-referenced against the site's list of no-no books.

There's also "national book rating index" which seems to be like...the same organization, sort of? Like a lot of the stuff on the site is the same.

on this page on "ratedbooks" there is a Google Docs template that i screenshotted

first page is a template for requesting that a parent be notified if a child checks out a book that is listed on the no-no list. From what it sounds like,books can be auto-flagged if they were banned in another school district.

the letter suggests that the parent will "review" the book by looking at its rating on the NRBI. Not by actually Reading The Fucking Book. Please note the additional boxes for "CRT" (Racially Divisive) and "LGBTQ"

The second page is (part of--the list continues) a list of books that the organization apparently recommends parents request that the library buy, which includes, among the stuff I haven't heard of, PragerU materials, "Irreversible Damage" by Abigail Shrier, something called "Transing Our Children," and the Tuttle Twins books.

very, very, very focused on recommending a few highly conservative publishers and specifically anti-trans stuff.

if you go to NRBI's "ratings" tab you find a link to the "standardization table" which explains that the ratings are compiled from multiple reviews from different sites.

Among these, "ratedbooks" is considered to be a source. So I'm confused about the relationship of these two sites.

So is. "Christian Parent Reviews." I looked at their "movie reviews" tab where they also recommend "Plugged In" and clarify that it is created by Focus On the Family. Their top recommended movie resource is something called "Christian Spotlight," which when I click on it actually leads to a site called "Christian Answers" which is. weird.

At this point I have detoured from the book banning quest and am searching in fascination at these people's approach to experiencing storytelling.

They have an "actors" tab where you can search actors and see whether they are Christian and what their "worldview" is. Every gay actor appears to have the worldview "Homosexualism."

I looked at Sebastian Stan for funsies.

Yeah. They have a list of all current and former partners and whether or not said actor reproduced. WHY

Looking at the actual movie ratings, I decided to search for Annihilation (2018). The "moral rating" given to Annihilation is "Extremely Offensive."

In spite of that the reviewer seems to think that the movie was actually very good, though violent. They fixate more than anything on the fact that the movie assumes evolution is real. It's just...strange.

Scrolling down the letter A I find The Avengers (2012). The website thinks this one is "better than average."

The morality rating is fully unrelated to how good the movie is. I have to think on that for a while.

Christian Parent Reviews doesn't really have a whole lot of books rated, though. I visited another website that was used to aggregate the NRBI ratings, "The Good and the Beautiful." Recommendations seem to be locked to members of the site, but I can at least access the site's FAQ where they state their ethos:

Okay this is the most sinister one yet.

ratedreads.com is not explicitly christian nor does it have a focus on "racially divisive" or "lgbtq" content. In fact, it seems excessively focused on swearing.

The link to Compass Book Rating appears to be broken.

So I go back to Rated Books. The rating scale, which you can read here, goes from 0 "all ages" to 5 "deviant." I find "deviant" to be a troubling word to use here.

This is where we enter a confusing network of Google Sheets documents. The first one is the "master list" linked on this page. It contains a bajillion links to Google docs that painstakingly outline every instance of "offensive" content in the book. I found several Google Sheets documents like this somewhere in this maze of links and they don't all have the same content.

I decide to see what Rated Books thinks is "deviant" content. "Bride" by Ali Hazelwood is listed here. I click on the page and click the image slideshow. It contains. Get this. A screenshot of content warnings from the author's website, and then a bunch of fucking Google AI overviews about kinks the book has in it.

Anyways this didn't help me decompress and I don't know why i did this

[jayalaw]

Headspace, okay to recommend Authors Against Book Bans, an organization that is campaigning against this?

[headspace-hotel]

Sure thing

[headspace-hotel]

Oh my god. I can't believe I missed this. One of the lists used to create the NRBI's list is the Marshall Project's database of books banned in prisons, in other words an anti-censorship resource is being used as a tool to promote censorship

[headspace-hotel]

These folks have a youtube channel. The videos have almost no views. I only found it by googling this cryptic company name found on the NRBI website, which has basically no other results come up for it.

This is weird. It's generic and vague, almost like placeholder text.

You can watch this 4 minute long video here. I'm concerned about the AI usage.

The lady says it has nothing to do with sexual orientation or race ("only whether it breaks the law") she claims. By the law she means a 2024 law passed in Utah that creates statewide bans for books in school libraries that are banned in 3 or more school districts.

But it's a lie because the resources they are using to create these "ratings" and the resources they promote clearly track and are biased against "racially divisive" and "alternate gender/sexuality" content.

Hell, ratedbooks.com links to "more rating sites" on this page and one of the linked sites is "we the people 2" which has (besides the horrifying AI animations of the founding fathers) under the "protect our children" tab the following:

Their position is apparently that a child cannot be legitimately removed from a household because children are property. Lovely. Also gotta love the demon hand makeup for the abortion picture.

Library Exposed tracks books apparently associated with removals and bans in Missouri school districts. Graceling, Looking for Alaska, the Handmaid's Tale, and Milk and Honey are listed on here. I'm linking the page for Rupi Kaur's Milk and Honey because these are among the poems sampled as evidence that the book is sexually explicit and therefore inappropriate

This is not "sexually explicit." Are you shitting me. Saying the words "sex without consent isn't sex, it's rape" is not explicit and inappropriate for children it's literally fundamental basic knowledge about being a person.

"The rape will tear you in half, but it will not end you." Do you think children shouldn't even know the word "rape?" Is that what you think? God this pisses me off so much

And this pisses me off even more

This is a poem about a child's experience!!!!! What the fuck do you think you're protecting children from??? Children really experience the things that are written about in these poems!

Censoring these poems so a child won't see them doesn't stop them from being abused. But it might stop them from realizing what happened to them is wrong.

Only a few of the poems are even talking about sex rather than abuse and they are vague and metaphorical. This actually pisses me off so much.

TakeBacktheClassroom.com is based in Oklahoma and has a bunch of articles like "THERES PORN IN YOUR KIDS SCHOOL" and actually claims this

The books they mean are like. Sex education books.

then there's screenitfirst.com which is a site where parents screen/review books and it's fucking NUTS

like, this statue in a picture book got an entire book flagged for "explicit content." there are a bunch of books flagged because a random background character appears to have two moms. or other random stuff that seems kind of gay.

KIDS CAN'T BE EXPOSED TO GAY FISH

[headspace-hotel]

there's also "pavement education project" which is a similar censorship database for North Carolina except it actually tracks every copy of no-no books in every school district.

[notlikingbestgirl]

Out of Touch

[hustlerose]

Out of Touch Thursday

[arbyscurlyfries666-deactivated2]

OUT OF TOUCH THURSDAY

[snuv]

but im out of my head when you’re not around…

[rockmilkshake]

happy birthday.

[saltwatersweets]

this is the only out of touch thursday you can reblog this

[reejindeed]

"It is onto the rampart that he used always to go; and he chanced upon a stone beneath his feet and trod upon it. The stone cried out beneath his feet, so that it was heard throughout all Tara, and throughout Brega. Then Conn asked his druids why the stone had cried out, what was its name, whence it had come and whither it would go, and why it had come to Tara. The druid said to Conn that he would not name it to him until fifty-three days had passed." -Baile in Scáil

[hippiedippieblondie]

Male loneliness this, male loneliness that. Have they tried lobotomies? Tranquilizers? Being fingered by medical professionals? Tearing the yellow wallpaper off the walls of the attic room where your husband keeps you locked up?

[parkchanwoohoo]

Found abusive family

[parkchanwoohoo]

Sometimes a group of queer, traumatized people come together and beat the shit out of each other and do DARVO tactics to recreate what their parents did to them. And that's beautiful.

[heretical-angel]

[hymnism]

can we remove "biblically accurate" from the general lexicon

[fashion-runways]

fashionrunways's Commissions

Commissions Open! Click to see fashionrunways's commission menu.

:)

[fwugradiation]

[beatcroc]

the best part of this post is undeniably that it was made by toby fox

[iliothermia]

behold, he is woven (soon he will be a circular pillow)