ive never seen a saw movie but i like how people talk about them on here. i like how saw starts off every trap with a greeting and a description of what is going on like a subsitute teacher reading the lesson plan out loud. it’s nice. i feel at home
fucked up how you can be ashamed to be yourself for fear of turning people off, but that it literally is also the point. youre supposed to filter people out to find the ones that enjoy you for you
I’m not a prayin’ man, but the night I found out my at-the-time-fiancé had been sending sex horny nasty horny sex asks to my friend on THIS VERY WEBSITE, I sat in the car in the parking lot of an abandoned church and watched a family of deer play in the snow, and it didn’t quite feel like a sign because that part of Pennsylvania was mostly deer and abandoned buildings and snow, but it felt nice, and once the tears stopped, I looked down at my phone and my other friend had sent me a text that said, “HE’S TRYING TO CHEAT ON YOU ON THE ONE DIRECTION IMAGINES WEBSITE?” and I realized that life is all about your curated experience. A real choose-your-own-adventure deal. I have never seen someone post about One Direction on here in my life.
This April [2021], the Iowa Department of Corrections issued a ban on charities, family members, and other outside parties donating books to prisoners. Under the state’s new guidelines, incarcerated people can get books only from a handful of “approved vendors.” Used books are prohibited altogether […].
In 2018, the Michigan prison system introduced an almost identical set of rules, and Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington have all made attempts to block book donations, which were only rolled back after public outcry. Across the United States, the agencies responsible for mass imprisonment are trying to severely limit incarcerated people’s access to the written word […].
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The official narrative is that donated books could contain “contraband […]“ – the language used in Michigan […]. This is a flimsy justification that begins to fall apart under even the lightest scrutiny. […] [Contraband] […] [is] not originating from nonprofit groups like the Appalachian Prison Book Project or Philadelphia’s Books Through Bars. [….] The old cartoon scenario of a hollow book with a saw or a gun inside just isn’t realistic, and its invocation is a sign that something else is going on.
That “something else,” predictably enough, is profit. With free books banned, prisoners are forced to rely on the small list of “approved vendors” chosen for them by the prison administration. These retailers directly benefit when states introduce restrictions. In Iowa, the approved sources include [B&N] and [B-a-M], some of America’s largest retail chains – and, notably, ones which charge the full MSRP value for each book, quickly draining prisoners’ accounts. An incarcerated person with, say, $20 to spend can now only get one book, as opposed to three or four used ones; in states where prisoners make as little as 25 cents an hour for their labor, many can’t afford even that.
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With e-books, the situation is even worse, as companies like [GTL] supply supposedly “free” tablets which actually charge their users by the minute to read.
Even public-domain classics, available on Project Gutenberg, are only available at a price under these systems – and prisons, in turn, receive a 5% commission on every charge. All of this amounts to rampant price-gouging and profiteering on an industrial scale.
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The rise of these private vendors has also been mirrored by the systematic dismantling of the prison library system. In the last ten years, budgets for literacy and educational resources have seen dramatic cuts, reducing funding to almost nothing […]. In Illinois, for instance, the Department of Corrections spent just $276 on books across the entire state in 2017, down from an already meager $605 the previous year. (This means, incidentally, that each of the state’s roughly 39,000 prisoners was allotted seven-tenths of a cent.)
Oklahoma, meanwhile, has no dedicated budget for books at all, requiring prison librarians to purchase them out-of-pocket. […]
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These practices become all the more abhorrent when you consider the impact books can have behind bars. By now, the social science on their benefits is well-established […]. [O]ther inmates have reported that reading meant “the difference between just giving up mentally and emotionally and making it through another day, week, or year,” countering the dehumanizing effects of their imprisonment. A book can offer a brief, irreplaceable moment of calm in hellish circumstances. […]
[There is] a shameful pattern in American society, where many people simply don’t think about the incarcerated on a day-to-day basis, let alone sympathize with their worsening conditions. […] One of the most common arguments for the American carceral system, and its continued existence, is that of rehabilitation. According to its defenders, a prison is not simply a place of suffering, where unwanted populations are sent to disappear. Nor is it a callous money-making machine, intended to squeeze free labor from them in a regime of functional slavery. Instead, prison rehabilitates – so the story goes. […] In these terms, the basic legitimacy of mass imprisonment, and its allegedly positive social role, is taken for granted. […] But the practice of book banning exposes the lie. Not only do American prisons have little interest in education, healing, and growth, but they will actively prevent them the moment there is a dollar to be made or an ounce of power to be secured.
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Text by: Alex Skopic. "The American Prison System’s War on Reading”. Protean (Protean magazine online). 29 November 2021. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]
one thing I really appreciate about rtd era doctor who is just how NORMAL the sets often look:
there have been at least three separate people I’ve known whose bedrooms had this vibe: the incredible clashing between different shades of pink, the dark carpet, the messiness, the poor lighting filtering through that dark curtain—I know how it feels beingin this room.
I painted my room this exact color in 2008/2009. martha’s organized, but she’s a student and it’s a cramped space—she arranges her shelves the best she can, but her stuff is just stuff and doesn’t perfectly match.when I’m at school I have to dry my laundry in the middle of my room exactly the same way!
yup, that’s what every break room I’ve ever had at work looks like, with the mismatched tupperware and posters and questionably-clean microwave.
sylvia’s house is obviously intended to be coordinated, but with a nonprofessional’s taste. you can see the little pumpkins in the background from halloween, there’s a printed tablecloth at the table, the counters are that realistic mix of cluttered and clean.
even in a fancy office, we’ve got the ugly fluorescent lighting that’s not really doing anyone favors, the crooked potted plants, the sporadic beige and white walls, the random workplace posters above the printer and trash cans.
people sitting in weird places because there aren’t enough seats around the tv! the cat tower with kitty litter shoved in the corner! the overstuffed table! the slightly-crooked picture frames! this IS the vibe of being stuffed into a too-small room with company over.
I don’t know, I just love how they unapologetically show the messiness of normal life on camera?? I feel like the unglamorous-ness of it grounds the show so much?! it’s just so much fun watching a bunch of fantastical sci-fi things play out against mundane settings I see every day.
The computer is a machine built for looking at pictures of fish you wouldn’t otherwise see. Anything else you can do with a computer was an accident and unintended
