Otter's Rock

I'd argue that the answer to these is the same: Justice of Albis, the narrator, IS showing its interiority, but only by proxy: through the interiority and development of the novel's main characters, Jonr, Shtel, and Keemat. What could be more fitting for a Rachaai ship, after all, but to tell its story through ancillary experiences?

The kid was picked up by an ambulance 30 minutes later.

Now as an adult working in security I get SO MANY folks- upper-middle aged mostly- coming to me to 'rat out' people they think are faking it.

I was once sent into a bathroom because a client demanded that the "fucker won't get out, so go drag them out"- I was NEVER going to do that, so I did a wellness check instead. You know who it was? A person recently released from the hospital after a car accident. They had a hole in their skull and major hearing loss. They couldn't answer the owner because they couldn't HEAR the owner.

Another time about a homeless man who got around town by kicking the ground from his wheelchair. "You know he doesn't actually need that thing, his legs work fine, it's just for pity points"- Oh, so he's not paralyzed, his wheelchair is performative? Funny story Dale, I actually know that guy, he was backed over by a truck and has chronic pain from his shattered pelvis. But sure, let's make him stand up and walk everywhere so nobody feels too bad for him and tries to help him or something.

"She doesn't need that scooter, I've seen her get out of it."

"Look how fat he is, because he just rides around and refuses to get up."

"She doesn't really need that cane- she comes here without it all the time"

Did anyone in Project Hail Mary ever stop to ask "hey what do we do if Grace's glasses break"?

Because I know a lot of people don't think of poor eyesight as a disability, but it's a pretty significant one. I can't drive without my glasses. My roommate can't even walk to the mailbox. I had to get replacements after my frames snapped so I was wearing my three-years-ago glasses for a week this spring, and I had splitting headaches the entire time.

But all things considered, what I'm gathering is that Hollywood went "lol we can't have him be attractive, put him in glasses." So it is ableism, just from a different vector.

That being said, I didn’t even think about that the first time I watched it because I know so many people who don’t wear their glasses because it’s too annoying.

I am in the camp of needing my glasses to safely walk across a room I’m not familiar with. I cannot function without my glasses.

It is so far away from anything I can relate to as a glasses wearer.

whereas anyone with only 1 pair of glasses NEEDS those glasses and they have those glasses and their backup old glasses for Emergency Broken Glasses situations and that's IT and someone else will have to go get the Emergency glasses if they are needed because this individual cannot make it to the bedroom where the glasses are.

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.

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.

- Due to storms, they had to evacuate the National Mall grounds. But the MAGA crowd didn't want to leave. They just stood around chanting "USA! USA!" They were convinced liberals were messing with the weather. Reportedly, one of the security guards got so fed up that he threw a chair at them.

- Fox News didn't have anything to share while they were waiting for Trump's delayed speech, so they just showed a feed of him staring at the TV. And he was watching Fox News.

- A bunch of the crowd that was evacuated wasn't even let back in, and they were raging about it on social media. Some of them waited 10 to 12 hours in record-setting heat (102°F) and never got to see anything. All special passes were canceled. So much for money privilege.

- Because the program was running so far behind, several performers were cancelled.

- Trump's speech began at 11:15 p.m., after a sizeable amount of his followers had abandoned the event. It was unremarkable in just like all of his other ones- a bunch of "America is the greatest nation," blaming Democrats for everything bad, and general gibberish.

- The fireworks didn't begin until almost midnight, so they ended on July 5th.

- They wanted to have more fireworks than ever before, but they set off so many that the sky was covered in light, and it just looked like everything was on fire. The finale was not visible due to the smoke.

- Trump appeared to fall asleep during the show.

- The immense amount of pyrotechnics fucked up the air in DC

First let me start with a disclaimer that I am speaking generally here. Of course both the U.S. and Europe are both massive and diverse places containing hundreds of millions of people, and a lot of regional differences. Neither the U.S. or Europe are a monolith (although a lot of people on the internet speak of both places as a monolith, which I wish people would stop doing, since neither are).

I could be wrong about this, since I don't live in the U.S., and haven't visited everywhere in Europe. But between where I have visited in the U.S., and where I have visited / lived in Europe, and from what I know from my friends in the U.S. and friends in other European countries, I get the feeling that overall the U.S. has stricter disability access laws than a lot of places in Europe do, especially in regard to building codes.

Of course there are exceptions, I know New York city is abhorrently hostile in its design towards anyone elderly and/or disabled. Although when I visited New York city it really just felt on par with a lot of major European cities with how abhorrently inaccessible it was.

One example of this is that recently I saw a Reddit discussion where a USAmerican vacationing in France was surprised at how many staircases didn't have handrails, because according to this man handrails are required by law in the U.S.

The comments were all Europeans having an absolute field day with this. Pretty much all of the comments were some variation of "I can't believe Americans are too stupid and lazy to use the stairs without a handrail 🤣🤣🤣 what's wrong with you fat lazy stupid Americans that you can't even use stairs without a handrail 🤣🤣🤣 thank GOD I was born in Europe where I was just taught how to walk up and down the stairs on my own and don't need a handrail like a lazy fat stupid American 🤣🤣🤣"

A few people tried to gently point out that this was about accessibility for elderly and disabled people, and it's not cool to laugh at building codes that are about accessibility, but those commenters were usually shut down with some variation of "yeah well in MY European country if someone is disabled or becomes elderly we either move to a more accessible building or we modify our home to be more accessible, we don't sit around whining like a bunch of Americans that our building isn't already accessible 🙄"

Which is, such a cruel way to talk about accessibility. Why wouldn't disabled and elderly people deserve the same access to a building as anyone else? Are elderly and disabled people not allowed to visit friends and family? Anyone could get hit by a car today, and after that struggle with going up and down stairs without the use of a handrail for the next several months, years, possibly the rest of your life. It's so easy to feel smug when you can easily trot up and down the stairs without a handrail, but so cruel to be unwilling to consider anyone who struggles with stairs should maybe be allowed access to the same places as you.

Honestly when I go on vacation abroad with my elderly + disabled mother, it's often easier to go to the U.S. with her than other places in Europe, because the U.S. does tend to be more accessible (in my experience, and except for New York city ofc) making going around to different public places with my mom generally a lot easier than somewhere like France or the Netherlands.

The USA has something called the Americans With Disabilites Act (ADA), and apparently it works fairly well. An American in my WhatsApp group went to a figure skating championship in Toronto a while back and was stunned that the arena didn’t have wheelchair access for spectators. Because an American arena would have.

Not everything about the USA is awful. Not everything about Canada and Europe is great.

Also, I live in Vancouver. We didn’t have a subway system until 1986, that’s when the Skytrain was finally built. Several of the Skytrain stations were originally built with no elevators. People with wheelchairs were expected to enter or exit the system at a different station that did have wheelchair access. In 1986.

The system wasn’t built in 1896 or 1926, when wheelchairs were a newfangled idea. It was built in 1986. British Columbian Rick Hansen’s Man In Motion world wheelchair tour started in 1985 (in Vancouver).

Or well, the Skytrain was opened in 1986. Let’s say the plans for it were finalized by 1983, since it would’ve taken a few years to build. In 1983, there was already a substantial disability rights movement in Canada, but several Skytrain stations didn’t have elevators anyway, presumably because it was cheaper.

Naturally, it eventually became politically unacceptable to make wheelchair users (and people with strollers, and people with canes or walkers, and people with suitcases) skip a station because they hadn’t bothered to put an elevator in that station.

So those stations had to be retrofitted at vast expense to make them wheelchair-accessible. It probably would’ve been cheaper to just build them accessible from the start, in retrospect. But we didn’t have a Made In Canada version of the ADA, so it didn’t happen.

Also, wheelchair accessibility does not only help wheelchair users. It also helps people with babies or toddlers in strollers, people using walkers, crutches, or canes, travellers with heavy suitcases, elderly people, etc, etc. I take the Skytrain several days a week, and I see all those people taking the elevator instead of the stairs or escalators.

The fight for the ADA was long, and bitter, and every single line of it is thanks to decades tireless activism work. Evangelical religious groups widely opposed the ADA because they believed that disability (and especially particularly disabling conditions, such as being HIV+) was God’s will, and wanted disabled people to be reliant on (religious) charity. Most large corporations and business interest groups opposed the ADA, because complying with accessibility requirements might hurt their bottom line. The US Chamber of Commerce came out swinging against it. The National Federation of Independent Business called it "a disaster for small business" and fear-mongered about it shutting down mom & pop shops and throwing hard-working American out of work. Greyhound Bus Lines literally testified before Congress that they were ~so concerned~ about the costs of requiring disability accommodations that they believed that passing the ADA would be tantamount to denying all rural people access to any buses, because apparently having to install a few fold-out ramps and fold-up seats would instantly bankrupt every extant bus company.

The bill was trapped in limbo for months. It looked hopeless. A lot of people thought it couldn’t happen – that the lobbies against disability rights and the disabled were simply too strong.

And in response, hundreds of disabled protesters showed up in Washington, DC and crawled up the steps of the Capitol.

But whether or not that is true depends on whether the federal government is willing to actually enforce it, and they weren't.

And so a group of disability advocates led by Judy Heumann and others occupied a government building in San Francisco for 26 days, and managed to put enough pressure on the Federal government to get Section 504 officially in place. (They were assisted by the Black Panther Party and others.)