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
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
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.
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.
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OK I guess I'm doing a little write-up about my monpe pants!
So many people want my pants, and trust me: you can have them!!
Caveat: this is a traditional Japanese garment with a long history and made to be worn with kimono. I'm not Japanese and know nothing about the history of monpe or the crafting techniques involved, I literally just looked at the diagram @/prince-rosalium posted, looked at some monpe other people have made, thought well that's not hugely different from the European medieval clothing I know how to make, and went from there. I have altered - westernized! - my monpe to be worn without kimono, so they do look different from true monpe, but still have all monpe advantages, which are splendid and manifold.
I’m splitting this post into two shorter ones, to preserve my sanity.
Part 1: Pattern and sewing
Part 2: Adjustments and finishing
Ok, here we go. Monpe write-up part 1 after the readmore:
Monpe pants part 1: pattern and sewing
Here's how monpe work: You cut four mostly identical rectangles, fold over the upper outside corners, join the rectangles in the middle front and middle back, add a square gusset to add to the crotch depth, close down the legs, and add ties. Optionally, the legs can be tapered to be narrower. The front piece is tied in the back, the back piece tied in the front, and the waist is adjusted to your true waist circumference with pleats, darts, or elastic. Theoretically, you don't even have to make any other cuts beyond those four rectangles / gusset / ties, which makes this a fantastically low waste pattern.
I made my specific monpe from midweight wool fabric and lightweight linen, added tailored pleats, and hid the slits in the side seams with further lining, so they're a bit more engineered beyond "stick rectangles together". This is fairly heavy fabric, so I wanted to reduce bulk around my waist as much as possible and wanted the wool to drape nicely. I could have added pockets, but... forgot!
People have asked about fabric recommendations, and as far as I know, you can use basically anything. Linen. Quilting cotton. Wool. Denim. Handspun handwoven hand-dyed fabric, obviously, and I'm totally not glancing at several of my mutuals here. Each fabric will behave a bit differently - with thick wool, you might want to cut off the triangles at the top and not just fold it under to reduce bulk; with linen, that would be unneccessary. I lined my wool monpe with linen because the pure wool would have been a bit too scratchy otherwise.
These can be sewn completely by hand, if you prefer - it's exclusively straight seams. It's very easy. All fabric edgs in this can be finished however you want - I serged all my edges on both top fabric and lining, because both are rather fragile and I wanted less bulk. You can also make french seams, or felled seams, or just zizag the edges if you've got stable enough fabric.
Here's the basic pattern diagram for monpe.
And here's how I have adjusted it according to my own measurements:
I really do advise making a mock-up version from cheap fabric first, because you will likely have to fudge around with the gusset a fair bit to find what works for you.
You need these measurements:
waist (the narrowest part of your body)
hip (widest part of your body)
waist to ankle (leg length)
crotch depth (length from front waistband, between your legs, to the back waistband)
Check if 1/2 of your hip width (= one trouser leg width) actually fits well around the middle of your thigh! If not, add a few more cm, so your trouser legs sit comfy around your thighs. You can also add a cm or two to your basic rectangle width, for more roomy pants. If you're fat this is a neutral term, measure your waist and hip width while sitting down - more soft tissue to move around means your tissue will behave differently between standing / sitting.
The rectangles are cut like this:
2 x front: 1/4 of your hip width x leg length
2 x back: 1/4 of your hip width x (leg length plus ca. 2 cm)
The back pieces are a little bit longer than the front pieces to add more room for your butt. :) You can also ignore that, like I did, and make four fully identical rectangle pattern pieces.
Remember to always add seam allowances.
Optional: Mark the following points on your fabric, to make variations to the mock-up easier: edges of the folded-under corners; start of the square gussets on all legs; start and end of the leg taper.
Ok, once you have your fabric cut, we can start:
Fold over one upper outside corner of each leg rectangle - my folded triangles are about 25 cm by 5 cm. (If you use really heavy fabric, you can also cut them off and finish the raw edges.)
Close the middle seam in front and back, in a straight line from waist to wherever your gusset should start. Where is that? About half of your crotch depth minus a few cm. Don't worry, we'll adjust this later.
Ok, add the square gusset:
Gusset size: around 20x20 cm
I cut my gusset 21x21 cm and placed it 31 cm away from the top edge.
Adding square gussets is a bit complicated, but here's an excellent video by Morgan Donner on how it works: Watch it. Trust me, watch it, then it will make sense.
Close the inside leg seams:
Here, you need to decide if you want to taper your legs, and how narrow you want them to be. I started the taper at around my knees, tapering down to a 43 cm hem circumference. If you're making a mock-up, you can simply make one leg tapered and one leg straight, and compare the difference directly.
Close up the outside leg seams, from where the folded corners start, to the hem. Add the optional taper at the same place you started it on the inside (that's why marking it ahead of time is a good idea).
Congratulations, you have the rough approximation of trousers! Go take a break and drink some water.
what a beautiful time of year everyone is growing veegtables for me spacifically, one problem though you need to make fences shorter im sure its a mistake but i cant reach some of them
If minimum wage you'd like to make,
This ancient quiz you'll have to take.
Step right up, but be prepared.
Those who fail are poverty-snared.
Question One!
If your labor proves most fruitful,
Raking quarters by the bootful,
Who should excess profits reap,
Me the wolf or you the sheep?
Question Two!
If, by merit, you're made pope,
What will be your fervent hope?
Law and order justly paired?
Or mercy and the guilty spared?
Question Three!
If a train should leave Topeka
Driven by a solar squeaker,
How then should the cat behave?
Give it milk or give it grave?
Question Four!
Do you have a criminal record?
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