#they have to ruin it for the rest of us

[archivlibrarianist]

What kind of people ban books in the United States?

"It didn’t take long for Debbie Coleman to convince the school librarian to destroy books she deemed offensive.

“[The school librarian] just tore them up, tore all the pages out of them and threw them in the garbage,” Coleman told a New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter shortly after her literary sabotage.

"...On that day in Chalmette [February 1976, where Coleman and a school librarian ripped up books they thought could "corrupt" high school students], by the time school officials discovered the wreckage and asked Coleman to leave, the trash can was lined with ripped and crumpled pages from works such as Ulysses by James Joyce, a target of censors in the United States since it was first serialized in an American journal in 1918, Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell, about white Georgia tenant farmers depicted as backward primitives, and Our Bodies, Ourselves, a collection of women’s writings about female health and sexuality.

"Coleman told the reporter that there were other books on her hit list: dictionaries.

"'Some have quite a few obscene words,' the young woman said."

[cosmichawk]

It's that time of year again so here are xmas harbingers edits by yours truly

bonus:

[onpie]

Noodles and Tea’s work inspired me fr

[sallytwo]

Jennifer nearly jumped into the water / and she was tired like no one's ever been tired

[feedingicetothedog]

also this was the first ep where i could feel the effects of them filming during the writer's strike bc it didn't feel as polished as the others and a lot of that comes from the writers being able to be on set and make changes in the moment or the actors and directors being allowed to play w the material but bc all of those things are against the rules of a writer's strike it felt less cohesive/finished

[so-sick-of-17]

Seriously?! There is a chat gbt Anderperry fic on ao3? Gag! Get that away from me. No one wants to see your disgusting chat gbt story. I can’t call it a work because no work was done and I can’t call it fanfic because how much of a fan could you possibly be if you don’t write it yourself!? “I wanted to see a happier ending to the movie.” There are hundreds of stories you could have picked from that a real person actually created because they care about the characters. They are all infinitely better than anything a computer could have produced because they actually have a human connection and people who actually are capable of liking the movie and the characters. That tag is my happy place and it is tainted by that monstrosity. Normally I would be incredibly annoyed no matter the fandom, but for Dead Poets Society?! Really?! The movie about how art is tied with humanity?! Did you watch the movie?! Every single character would be disgusted by the use of ai to produce art. Art doesn’t exist without humanity and some cheep to imitation is an insult to anyone that actually works to make art.

[some-teeth-in-a-trench-coat]

hey uh I've only used airbnb twice because I don't live in America but I'm seeing posts about how hotels are better in every way and while I can't speak to the accuracy of most arguments I'd like to point out the nuance that for people like me having access to a kitchen (something hotels basically never give) is absolutely a requirement if I'm staying more than like one night. The vast majority of food served in hotels and restaurants I can't eat and chances are I won't be able to check in advance if I'm going to run into enough exceptions to not make myself sick (twice I've gotten sick traveling because I wasn't able to find enough foods and spent a week eating like two ingredients, due to unforeseen complications). I need a kitchen or I can't risk going. Kitchenless hotel rooms are an accessibility issue.

[queen-scribbles]

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[b4kuch1n]

first batch of art fight!! all revenge babeyy

for @trucbiduleschouettes, @sallymiakki, and @paristandard respectively :]c

[skibasyndrome]

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[ikram1909]

De La Muerte speaking about Gavi at the conference today ☹️

[mrsimqle]

I’m begging y’all to drop these subscriptions to paywalled creators and ea creators for dhm

[dairyfreenugget]

I could count the amount of original stories of mine that don't have horror elements on one hand and idk what that says about me

[thenixkat]

Anyway, if you aren’t Black don’t use any variation of woke. I don’t care what conservatives are calling fuckers/using as the new sjw/political correctness/what have you.

If you know what fuckers mean use what they mean, and if you don’t why are you copying what people are saying?

Woke ain’t for you. If the discussion isn’t about Black people being aware of and/or educating other Black people about racism/antiblackness/structural inequality/all the other bullshit then it doesn’t need to be used in the discussion.

[maxwell-grant]

So yesterday was my birthday and I invited a friend over to watch some movies we’d been each putting off. He showed me They Live, which I’d somehow never seen, for the first time, and I repaid the favor by breaking his brain with Speed Racer and letting him see how everyone ever was 100% wrong about that movie at release and it is in fact the best thing ever, but in regards to They Live:

I expected a good time and had a really great one. I knew about it’s central alien allegory, and how it’s been co-opted by anti-semitic memes and right-wingers who think they’re being cute. I knew it inspired dialogue in Duke Nukem, I knew it was a John Carpenter film starring Roddy Piper with Keith David in it, and that was it. I was blissfully unaware of everything else, including the fact that it somehow winds up being a spiritual successor of “The Challenge of the Beyond”, the pulp writer round robin exercise nowadays most famous for it’s H.P Lovecraft - Robert E.Howard parts.

There’s a post on it that floats around regularly and I’ll link here for better explanation, but in short: Lovecraft’s section of this story had the protagonist George faint from terror constantly and go mad after turning into a giant alien centipede, which was followed by Robert E.Howard immediately retconning said madness in his opening line and having the character embrace his new life as a horrid centipede beast in a new planet and go on a conquering rampage of “titanic adventure” as George the Centipede Barbarian. I bring up George the Centipede Barbarian not because it’s funny, but because They Live intentionally pulled off a very similar kind of brutal tonal dissonance.

They Live is very comparable to The Thing in the sense that it is a 50s concept told through 80s filmmaking and distorted accordingly, to the extent that the black and white parts are not just colored differently, but shot differently from the rest of the film in a way that’s far more reminiscent of 50s horror films. Our protagonist is an 80s meathead cowboy who lives in a struggling urban landscape with mysteries and horrors he never quite understood but continue to plague him and those around him, and he has a moment of truth when he puts on magical sunglasses and finds out that he’s been living in a Twilight Zone episode the whole time, and so has everyone. The black and white allegorical terrors won and have been running everything all along, and that is the point the episode should end with our protagonist horrified and broken, “wouldn’t that be fucked up / doesn’t this remind you of something / these horrors are real” message conveyed, episode over.

Except our protagonist is an 80s meathead cowboy, so instead of surrendering to the horrors after finding out everything is a monstrous lie, he fights back with a shotgun and a bag of one-liners. Dude just immediately, like not even 10 minutes after he first puts on the glasses, starts blasting alien cops and bankers and spaceships. I really did not think that “bubblegum” one-liner happened that early in the movie. This dissonance would have been wonderful regardless but it helps that it’s done so intentionally.

I really didn’t expect that the movie was this 100% completely blatantly unsubtle about the true nature of the alien ghouls as bloodsucking capitalists. It’s not some veiled allegory that can be left to interpretation, the movie tells you repeteadly and explicitly what it is about. The film tells you that the aliens are weaponizing communist paranoia to gain control over cops, preceding a line “We'll do anything to be rich” and then a description of them as “They are free enterprisers. Earth is just another developing planet, their third world” is actual dialogue from the film and that’s just before we learn the aliens all wear expensive watches, that most of the cops going around brutally gunning down the resistance are humans who sold out, and get scenes of the aliens and humans standing around in suits congratulating each other on profit margins. I don’t meant this as an insult but it’s frankly cartoonish in how unsubtle it is, it’s insulting that John Carpenter even had to set the record straight with Yes This Was About Capitalism and Reagan and Yuppie Bloodsuckers You Stupid Fucks like the movie isn’t hammering the point constantly.

If you haven’t watched it, did anyone ever tell you that the inciting incident of the movie is the protagonist being radicalized by police brutality? Yeah, funny, nobody ever talks about what happens in the movie before George puts on the sunglasses. The first 20 or so minutes are about the protagonist, George Nada, arriving in the city and struggling to find a job or place to stay and being offered one by Keith David’s character Frank, who takes him to a homeless community. They have a handful of dialogues together where Frank repeteadly expresses a cynical viewpoint towards life under You-Know-What, over opportunities turning into traps and steel mills giving themselves raises by screwing workers over, and George brushes him off stating he still believes in America, he still believes in getting a fair shot.

George is quickly and immediately reduced to horrified bystander as the police storms his community and destroys their church and goes around beating up them up and evicting tents by bulldozer, while George runs around trying to help and save at least one of them. The next time we see him, he puts on the sunglasses and learns the awful truth and starts his rampage (framed in no uncertain terms as an act of revolution) by doing, what else, shooting cops. Or, well, aliens who approach him as cops and tell him that, now that he sees them, they can work out a deal to profit together if he just goes quietly. The movie makes it as obvious as it could possibly make it.

So yeah, watch They Live, it’s Duke Nukem vs The Twilight Zone’s Episode on Capitalism (with Extended “Guys Being Dudes” Action, I’m glad I didn’t know about that alleyway fight scene beforehand). Also watch Speed Racer, it’s glorious, and it has the exact same villains. Had a really great time yesterday with both.

[lupismaris]

Happy Baltimore Pride, the parade starts in 3 and a half hours and I'm already exhausted