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Street art in Melbourne, Australia.

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?

Sure thing

bitesexual btw

íaspis pearl.jw

Nichelle Nichols (December 28, 1932 - )

rhyfeddu-partyofone-deactivated

“Uhura never had another name during the series. One of the fan writers wrote “Upenda” - which means “peace” in Swahili, I understand — not officially, but in some of their fan writings. And it sort of took hold. But when they were going to do the official history of Star Trek in a published book, the writer called Gene and asked him was “Uhura” her first name or her last name? Gene said, “Well, Nichelle and I never decided.” We always leaned towards it being her last name because it’s taken from the Swahili “uhuru” which means freedom. So it would sort of be like the same as “Freeman.” So he said, “You can make it her last name.” The writer said, “What about her first name? I’ve come up with one in Swahili. It’s Nyota.” Gene said, “I can’t give you that permission because Nichelle and I named her together, and she has rights to that, so you’ll have to call her and get her permission.” So he gave him my number, and he called me and I laughed and was delighted. He said, “I have a name and it’s Nyota.” I said, “That’s quite beautiful. What does it mean?” He said, “It means ‘star’.” I said, “You can have my permission!” So I have since said that her name is Nyota Upenda Uhura, which would mean a free-floating star: “star of freedom and peace”. I like that.” — NICHELLE NICHOLS

ethubbie

there's something so good about a character who hasn't had enough comfort and warmth in their life and now has weird complicated kinda sexual feelings about being treated with actual basic respect and dignity and they feel like an awful gross pervert for it. i like those wires getting crossed

wordfather

what in the world could i have pinned for this to happen

wordfather

its ok

pmamtraveller

love never dies

emiliosandozsequence

nothing will get you to hate the cops and the government faster than dealing with cps and having them not believe you, but believe your abusive parents and lying about what happens in abusive situations`

emiliosandozsequence

nothing will get you to hate doctors faster than being chronically ill/disabled with a rare disease/disability that primarily effects women and/or people of color and get treated like you're exaggerating and lying and pill seeking even if you are diagnosed while also not being listened to about your own disease/disability EVER because they always think they know more than you ever could because they had one (1) unit on it in college fifteen years ago

forestgreenandgray

Hey do you know what rumination is?

Rumination is probably the most common type of OCD compulsion, but I rarely see anyone talking about it. I've talked to multiple people diagnosed with OCD who didn't even recognize it as a compulsion.

Basically, if you have OCD you have terrible intrusive thoughts. They can be about anything, but common themes are fear of being a bad person, fear of hurting someone, fear of contamination. etc.

Rumination is when you get stuck in a spiral. Rumination is when you spend hours catastrophizing, overthinking, analyzing, telling yourself it's going to be okay.

I'll say it again:

Rumination is a compulsion.

Rumination is a compulsion, and that means you have to stop doing it.

I did ERP (exposure response prevention) for my OCD with a therapist! For 9 months! And it did help, but the idea didn't really click until I found this website a couple years later.

And Oh My God. It made things make so much more sense, and I was able to pull myself out of an episode even though I wasn't in therapy or on meds at the time.

Genuinely if you have OCD, or even if you suspect you have OCD, I'm begging you to read some of these articles.

Like this was genuinely life changing for me.

Here are some of the ones that were most helpful to me:

Defining Rumination

How to Stop Ruminating

ERP Exercises for Compulsive Rumination

What to Do When You're Triggered

francoisarnaudarchive

François Arnaud as Rene in X Company 2x02 "Night Will End"

loveridden1999

anyways remember when toni morrison said "sometimes you don't survive whole, you just survive in part. but the grandeur of life is that attempt. it's not about that solution. it is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances."

loveridden1999

everyone say thank you toni morrison

surii

BRENDAN FRASER as RICK O’CONNELL ODED FEHR as ARDETH BAY THE MUMMY (1999) dir. Stephen Sommers

my-dailydreams

sleepyspoonie

when you see a tumblr poll with this picture attached and you know it's time to lock the fuck in lest you get a bad grade in an impromptu absurdist pop quiz you didn't know you were about to take

charl0ttan

best multiple of nine

Voting ended onMay 28

stjohnstarling

The reason most indie novels are written like the author is terrified of doing something wrong is because the overwhelming majority of indie novelists get their start by networking in the violent panopticon of the social media indie publishing community, which favours the people who are able to win at the social policing game.

3s-are-green

Okay so this comment got me googling because I hadn't heard of Isabel Fall

And if you also hadn't heard of her go read this because uhh... Holy Shit

headspace-hotel

I had heard of the whole messed up situation with this story, but I hadn't ever read the synopsis of the story before, and WOW

This story sounds like it could have been a brilliant exploration of gender and warfare and violence but instead it was attacked by people who didn't know how to confront a story that made them uncomfortable, and the author faced horrible consequences.

It's so important to be able to deal with stories that give you uncomfortable feelings in other ways than just attacking it. Being shown new perspectives sometimes has feelings of discomfort because it's an unfamiliar way of seeing the world.