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Hi there! My name is Cee, I'm 26 and I'm starting a digital garden here, or more, a place where I can be a little pretentious but also hopefully helpful compared to my main, which is mostly for shitposting and having a good old time. I think it is helpful to have a place where I can switch into a more focused mind rather than just scrolling aimlessly.

Censorship, which is either just plain decency, or nasty-nice prudery, according to your own particular viewpoint, is finally with us - whether or not to stay, no man may foretell.

Censorship, of course, has always been with us to an extent, but of late it has become almost omnipresent. As a result, there has been a complete revamping of work in many of the studios.

The bathing beauties, of most of the companies specializing in them, for instance, have become almost things of the past. Some of the fair young things who formerly didn't get much chance to do any acting because the directors kept them busy displaying more obvious charms, have graduated i n t o honest-to-goodness actorines. Some of 'em have taken small parts in m o r e serious productions; some have become leading ladies, and a few have become real stars.

A whole lot more have lost their jobs, and been forced out of the game altogether.

The bathing beauties aren't the only ones affected, though, by a long shot. Sex films, of which, a while back, we had almost a sickening superfluity, have either been toned down to Sunday school standards, or discontinued altogether. And pageant productions in wh'ch the main feature frequently consisted of scenes in which many flowing haired maidens disported clad in a smile, and a girdle - and perhaps a pair of sandals, have just about quit.

And so on, right down the line.

Looking at the censorship question without rancor, there's a whole lot to be said on both sides.

Those in favor of it declare film producers had reached a point where art was abandoned for smut. Mothers and fathers both declared picture plays were getting so erotic they didn't want their children to see them. In fact, they said, they didn't particularly care about seeing such films themselves. Their objections were sweeping, too. They objected first to the titles, 'as being too suggestive. Then they objected to the sub titles, for the same reason. And finally, they objected to the pictures themselves.

Children, they said, grew worldly wise, all too soon, at best, without having such knowledge forced before their very eyes, on the silver sheet.

All of which sounds logical enough.

But, let's hear the other side.

The first argument of the producer against the censor, is the old French adage "Honi Soit Qui Mali Pense" - which is to say, "Evil to him who evil thinks - or, more simply still, "to the pure, all things are pure."

Again, they argue, a film highly objectionable to a prude might, in reality, carry a powerful moral object lesson.

And finally they point to the fact that what some nasty-nice people object to as being sensual is, in reality, mere artistic realism.

Too much censorship, it is pointed out, leaves the film company no material to work with except such action as dramatizations of the Elsie Dinsmore book - which probably wouldn't draw very big crowds.

So there you are.

To censor or not to censor; which?

Candidly, we don't know.

1. The Safekeep - Yael van der Wouden (Winner) An exhilarating tale of twisted desire, histories and homes, and the unexpected shape of revenge - for readers of Patricia Highsmith, Sarah Waters and Ian McEwan's Atonement. It is fifteen years after the Second World War, and Isabel has built herself a solitary life of discipline and strict routine in her late mother's country home, with not a fork or a word out of place. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel's doorstep - as a gust, there to stay for the season... In the sweltering heat of summer, Isabel's desperate need for control reaches boiling point. What happens between the two women leads to a revelation which threatens to unravel all she has ever known.

2. Fundamentally - Nussaibah Younis Nadia is an academic who's been disowned by her puritanical mother and dumped by her lover, Rosy. She decides to make a getaway, accepting a UN job in Iraq. Tasked with rehabilitating ISIS women, Nadia becomes mired in the opaque world of international aid, surrounded by bumbling colleagues. Sara is a precocious and sweary East Londoner who joined ISIS at just fifteen. Nadia is struck by how similar they are: both feisty and opinionated, from a Muslin background, with a shared love of Dairy Milk and rude pick-up lines. A powerful friendship forms between the two women, until a secret confession from Sara threatens everything Nadia has been working for. A bitingly original, wildly funny and razor-sharp exploration of love, family, religion and the decisions we make in pursuit of belonging, Fundamentally upends and explores a defining controversy of our age with heart, complexity and humour.

3. Good Girl - Aria Aber In Berlin's underground, where techno rattles buildings still scarred with the violence of the last century, ninteen-year-old Nila finds her tribe. In their company she can escape the parallel city that made her, the public housing block packed with refugees and immigrants, where the bathrooms are infested with silverfish and the walls outside are graffitied with swastikas. Escaping into the clubs, Nila tries to outrun the shadow of her dead mother, once a feminist revolutionary; her catatonic, defeated father; and the cab-driver uncles who seem to idle on every corner. To anyone who asks, her family is Greek, not Afghani. And then Nila meets American writer Marlowe Woods, whose literary celebrity, though fading, opens her eyes to a world of patrons and festivals, one that imbues her dreams of life as an artist with new possibility. But as she finds herself drawn further into his orbit and ugly, barely submerged tensions begin to roil and claw beneath the city's cosmopolitan veneer, everything she hopes for, hates, and believes about herself will be challenged.

4. All Fours - Miranda July A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey. Miranda July's second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July's wry voice, perfect comedic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman's quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic and domestic life of a 45-year-old female artist. All Fours transcends expectations while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.

5. Tell Me Everything - Elizabeth Strout It's autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer, Lucy Barton, who lives nearby in a house next to the sea. Together, Lucy and Bob talk about their lives, their hopes and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, befriends one of Crosby’s longest inhabitants, Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive’s apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known – “unrecorded lives,” Olive calls them – reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning. Brimming with empathy and pathos, Tell Me Everything is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers, illuminating the ways in which our relationships keep us afloat. As Lucy says, “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love.”

This is the first in a series of posts dedicated to helping you free yourself from the ways corporations are using internet users for profit to the user's detriment. I want to encourage exploration and the joy of the internet of my youth - of exploring and finding new pathways. This list is not comprehensive and it may grow to be outdated. Regardless, this was pretty successful on bsky, so I'm porting it over here! 1. Qwant - A very good replacement for Google. It is the most similar search engine on this list to Google's heyday. I get precise results compared to similar searches made on Google.

2. Wiby - Discover smaller sites that are typically made by hobbists or academics. This search engine focuses on sites that are older or lightweight (as in, less bloated by scripts that many modern sites rely on). Good for falling down a rabbit hole and finding blogs or personal websites!

3. Newgle - Search engine for sites that don't use certain generic top-level domains (that is what is the .com in tumblr.com). The disincluded domains include .com, .net and .org. I don't use this very often, and right now it seems to have a problem where it is indexing bsky.social (which is maybe not the kinds of things that someone would want to find while searching it) but nice to keep in mind.

4. Marginalia - Really good search engine for deep-diving and discovery. It's focus is on independence and on traditional information retrieval, rather than the natural-language search that google has oriented itself towards. It is meant as a compliment to other search engines.

5. Search my Site - Independent user-submitted site, great for personal web sites, but does not crawl the internet itself, so it is limited to what is sent in.

These are the one's that I use most and discover much on, but its far from the /only/ search engines out there. Here is a more complete list of search engines for your own perusal.