???

First thing the sales guy did after I laid down the rules was turn to Sean and go, "What's your number?" And Sean said. "Oh, no, you negotiate with Gayle."

So, strike one for the sales guy. Could not divide and conquer us by implying THE MAN would not surprised at what I laid down.

Sales guy then had to confer with his manager and left us at his desk for several minutes. I have a vague recollection (this was 16 years ago) of Sean and I amusing ourselves doing bits about the other people there to look at cars. I am sure we did not give off the stressed or nervous energy they were hoping for.

Guy comes back. His first offer is fifty dollars a month more than I told him we could pay. I looked at him and said "I gave you our upper limit."

"Well, but what's another 50 bucks a month?"

"Something I can't afford."

He didn't know what to do with my open and unashamed admittal that I had a budget because my money was finite.

He went back to talk to the manager again.

It took two more rounds of "I told you what I can afford" before he finally came back 20 bucks under what I'd stated as my max.

Anyway, while it is not wrong to say that all of the law is just some stuff we made up and enforce. Trademark/patent law is some of the most made up bullshit in the world. The idea of ownership of an idea, a word, or its equivalent, and beyond that the idea of corporate ownership of just about anything, but especially a non-person entity owning an idea, is such incredible levels of "we have to control the words people say about us or we lose the fake money we have in the system that makes the lines go up on Wallstreet" that it loops back around to hilarious absurdity

Beyond that. It kills people. This isnt even up for debate, the most trademarked and patented things in existence are medical advances and technology. They make up 90% of patent law and it was recommended in law school that you should have an undergraduate degree in biology or chemistry at least if you wanted to go into the field. And these patents gatekeep and make medical tech wildly more expensive than they need to be for the cost of production.

So yes. I also think Patagonia are full of shit for this and I hope they lose this suit if they dont drop it like they should.

“There is insufficient evidence to suggest a social media ban for under‑16s would help keep children safer online, Scotland's children's commissioner has said.”

“Nicola Killean warned a ban could drive children to less regulated or riskier parts of the internet, and said the focus should instead be on holding social media companies to account.

She was responding to the UK government's consultation on whether to introduce a minimum age for accessing online platforms, including social media.

"A ban does little to address underlying issues such as exploitative algorithms, and business models that drive harmful content and engagement," she said.”

“Ahead of submitting her response, the commissioner's office carried out a children's rights impact assessment examining how the proposals could affect children and young people, both positively and negatively.”

“Her team also worked with a group of young advisers aged between 12 and 17 from across Scotland.”

She said that are dangers like cyber bullying, harmful content, and exploitation”

But she also pointed out the benefits of social media and the way it impacts these teens lives, saying

"by supporting communication, self-expression, access to information, participation, play, and connection with communities and support networks".

She added "The evidence so far on bans is limited, mixed, and still emerging. "Blanket restrictions can risk shifting responsibility away from platforms and onto children."

“Killean also warned a ban could impact on some youngsters more than others.

The commissioner said it could more negatively impact those in rural and remote areas, those with family overseas, disabled children and those who rely on online communities for support with their identity.”

“In her recommendations, Killean called for greater focus on platform design and accountability, and a crack-down on harmful features.

She also said rules should reflect children's age and maturity, and that young people should be directly involved in shaping future policy.

🚨 PSA: Only 5 DAYS LEFT to back to the Game Changer: Home Edition on Kickstarter — get yours before June 5th!

➡️ Go to Kickstarter to pledge now for the Game Changer: Home Edition

Brennan did NOT expect the prompt after... 😭

➡️ Go to Dropout.tv to watch the season four finale of Make Some Noise now

Hey guys, wanted to give peeps the headsup that Phlurrii's account was outright terminated randomly today.

Please be aware that she did NOT delete her account or block anyone.

“Hi guys, I’m not really sure how to even type this out, but tumblr just terminated my entire account, side blogs and all. I’m not sure what happened beyond that long time follower messaged me and I went to reply; then boom. Deleted off the face of the planet. Losing everything I worked on for 4 years, all the art, asks, theories, comics, and community is kinda insane? I’ve reached out to tumblr, but there no guarantee. So um… I don’t know, honestly I don’t know.” - Phlurri

She has already gone to Tumblr Support and we are hoping she gets her account back.

And sometimes, you have a string of fandoms that are Actually Pretty Good. And the danger of this—the very great danger—is that when you have a string of Actually Pretty Good and even Actually Amazing obsessions, you start to believe that maybe you have taste. Perhaps you are now immune to the indignities of losing it over something mostly bad.

And frankly, it’s starting to really get on my nerves when people read “I think this thing is good. I wouldn’t change a thing about it and frankly I don’t even think there should be more canon added to it, but I am still going to write thousands of words of fic, make a cosplay, and draw fanart” and then completely misunderstand and respond with “yes I agree—I like things that are good too. But I never feel the transformative/creative fandom instinct for them because they are too good.”

compelling worldbuilding (invites interaction with the setting)

interesting gimmick (see: daemons, drift compatibility. subcategory of compelling worldbuilding)

shipping bait (duh)

original character bait (in-universe categories/factions and design elements that make it fun for people to create their own characters)

compelling narrative (invites interaction and tweaks to the storyline: AUs and fixits and so on)

basically anything that invites interaction and recombination. but fandom also has a sort of multiplying effect: the larger the interactive audience of fandom is, the more likely it is to generate ideas and works that draw in more participants. so:

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.

and if you click it...

the site lectures you for sinning against god.

also

Enjoying bad art is neither virtuous nor unvirtuous because enjoyment is passive. It is barely a choice. I do, however, think that incuriosity is shameful. Taste, as in the ability to understand, diagnose, and articulate, the artistic choices that make up a work, is the vehicle for understanding and producing art. Taste can only be cultivated by reflecting upon a broad field of art, peak to dogshit. Because of this, the cultivation of Taste is one of my favorite parts of being alive.

If you've only ever watched marvel movies, of course they are your favorite movies. Your love of marvel movies means little. However, if you have sampled everything the world of cinema has to offer, have watched every single movie dogshit to peak, and marvel movies are still your favorite, that is meaningful. You probably have some very interesting things to say about movies. Even though I will probably disagree with them.