Warning to anyone using Linktree.

From the 5th July, they'll be feeding all imagery you use on your landing page into DALL-E by OpenAI.

Carrd.co. Free alt with paid features.

Bento.app Currently free, integrated with bluesky

Everlink.tools Closest to Linktree, has some paid features.

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.

You see this?

That's not a river. That's the South Canal in Mesa, Arizona (Phoenix metro area).

This is a view of the East and South canals. At least half of all the Phoenix metro canals were originally built by the Hohokam (from roughly 200-1400 CE), and are still in use (restored) today.

Phoenix, Arizona actually has more miles (kilometers) of Canals total than both Venice and Amsterdam. No, really. Phoenix has about 180 miles of canals, many of which are built on ancient canal foundations.

below is an aerial view photo taken in the late 1930's of one branch of Phoenix's canal systems:

Also have the "Montezuma Castle," if you need a castle:

(funny enough, a lot of people have been saying it's youtube forcing ads, but that's not the issue, nor is this intentional)

“your YouTube tab just consumed 7GB of RAM and froze your entire browser.

That’s not user error or aging hardware—it’s YouTube’s latest interface bug turning routine video watching into system roulette.

Reports flooded Reddit and browser forums late last week as users watched their browsers transform into digital quicksand, with tabs becoming unresponsive and entire systems grinding to a halt.”

The main issue is the Like, Dislike, and Share buttons

“Developers tracking the issue through Mozilla’s Bugzilla pinpointed the problem to YouTube’s flexible menu container below each video.

The interface enters an endless identity crisis: it checks whether all buttons fit horizontally, hides the overflow, recalculates the available space, then shows them again—repeating this cycle thousands of times per second.

Think of it like someone obsessively rearranging furniture in a room that keeps changing size.”

All browsers are experiencing the same thing

Google has said nothing

Reports have said that a temporary fix is to use ublock origin and Add this filter: www(.)youtube(.)com###menu