tumblr kinda lives in a weird paradox where lemon demon is cringe drivel but neil cicierega is cool and respected
Jules of Nature

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Show & Tell
Sweet Seals For You, Always
YOU ARE THE REASON
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
occasionally subtle
trying on a metaphor

Andulka

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣

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todays bird
NASA
Stranger Things
Cosimo Galluzzi

if i look back, i am lost
AnasAbdin
styofa doing anything
Keni

seen from United States

seen from United States
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seen from Malaysia

seen from United States

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seen from Switzerland

seen from T1

seen from Malaysia
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@gooseteaparty
tumblr kinda lives in a weird paradox where lemon demon is cringe drivel but neil cicierega is cool and respected
EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE (2022)
forget your zodiac tell me what you order at a bar and at a coffee shop
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
Headspace, okay to recommend Authors Against Book Bans, an organization that is campaigning against this?
Sure thing
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.
KIDS CAN'T BE EXPOSED TO GAY FISH
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.
Lil teatime today, drinking an older fukamushicha that is still surprisingly good.
Happy Pride!
Every pride, you must reblog this. No exceptions
I don’t know if anyone will read this… or if my voice will disappear like everything else we lost.
My name is Suhaila, a mother of five children.
My daughter Mira is in a very critical condition, and every passing moment brings us closer to losing her if help does not arrive in time.
I hold her small hand, watch her struggle to breathe, and pray for one more chance for her life.
Please… act now. Silence is taking her away from me. Every moment without help brings us closer to losing her. I beg you from my heart, don’t scroll past—help us before it’s too late.
Every second matters. Any small donation can help save her life. Please don’t ignore us. Share this message, donate if you can. Your kindness could give my daughter a chance to live and see tomorrow
Every second now is precious, and every act of kindness could be the reason she survives.
I am not asking for anything impossible—just a chance for my daughter to live, to stay with her siblings, and to have a tomorrow.
Please do not ignore this message.
If you cannot donate, please share it.
Your compassion might be the reason Mira lives.
I beg you with all my heart, stop here – donate, share, choose compassion before this silence becomes my daughter’s end.
Thank you for listeningMy daughter is on the edge of death. Every passing second could cost her life.
Share, donate now, and don’t let silence steal her minutes. Your kindness can save her today.
Donation link below 👇
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💬 69 🔁 7018 ❤️ 1447 · My name is Suheila from Gaza 🇵🇸, a mother of 5 children, living with my family in a tent after the war destroyed ou
My children are searching for their clothes under the rubble. This is my destroyed home Please help my orphaned children in Palestine. Help them
Help us. Save us. We are slowly dying. 😭💔🙏
I am a mother of five children, and today we are living through one of the most terrifying moments of our lives.
The army has ordered the evacuation of the areas around us. People are running in fear, carrying their children and whatever little they have left. I recorded a video so the world can see the suffering we are going through and the fear surrounding us every second.
We have no money to leave, no safe place to go, and nowhere to protect my children. Every moment feels like danger is getting closer to us. My children are terrified, and I do not know how to keep them safe anymore.
Please, I beg you, help us before it is too late. Help us before we are bombed and disappear like so many others. Any support, donation, or share could save the lives of my children.
Please do not ignore our cries for help.
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Donation link
Hi my name is Mickey and I'm raising funds for: Suheila, who is a m… Mickey Dee needs your support for Support Suhaila's family in
must we live in squalor
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:
replica by alessio carnevali // st. mary magdalene from the santa lucia triptych, painted c1470 by carlo crivelli
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
hello imptortant message from deer youyr doing it agen. i cant eet the vegbals you are growing for me like this
this is for a part-time job as a barista
on an application to work the front desk of a hotel
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?
you learn something new everyday. unless you're a historian. then you learn something old
vintage lamp with a porcelain elephant
(via purple-irises, floralandlace)
WHIMSICAL MUGS ♡