This week is Banned Book Week, where we look at how books across the country are challenged. However, this banned book week, we’re seeing a disturbing trend that cannot be ignored. Art is being censored, and it’s not just books. Anime and video games are taken away. It’s becoming illegal to own Dragon Ball manga.
Book bans are on the rise. We are censoring everything nowadays. And it won’t end with just books.
►AI Slop channels like EmmaWoods8190 are taking over YouTube. Sora 2 and other ai video generators are able to pump out videos effortlessly, which is discouraging real content creators from making real videos. YouTube’s algorithm is promoting AI slop content.
Tolkien called the Scouring of the Shire essential…so why? Today, we’re diving deep on what the scouring of the shire can teach us about how to read stories.
“Butty“ was Julius‘ and Moritz‘ graduation film for the “Berliner Hochschule für Technik“. Developing and writing started in September 2022, and the final deadline for the film was in September 2023.
Due to time management issues, only the first half of the script was produced. There are some obvious mistakes throughout the film that we didn‘t have time to fix until our initial deadline.
This is a renewed version of the original film we uploaded to youtube in 2023. It now contains music and some of the most glaring mistakes were fixed.
After uploading the film to youtube back in 2023, we got a lot of positive feedback, and three weeks later decided to take the film offline again to submit it to film festivals. After we got disqualified from the “In The Palace” Festival in Bulgaria because our film was “already online”, we found several websites that reuploaded our film without our permission and quickly got them taken down. Just to be safe we didn’t miss any, Moritz used a still of Butty and put it into Google Lens. What we found was shocking. Someone by the name of Samuel Felinton published Butty as his own under the title “T-130”, won festivals, and visited talk shows explaining how he made the film. In June 2024, we get in contact with several lawyers but have to accept pretty early on that taking Samuel to court would be very expensive and a matter of years. We decide to take fate into our own hands, fly to the USA, and confront Samuel about his theft.
In October 2024, nearly half of Trump’s campaign ad spending went to anti-trans messaging. Not inflation, not healthcare, not immigration. Trans people. A community that makes up less than 1% of the U.S. population. Think about that. With the economy in crisis, housing costs skyrocketing, and healthcare still broken, Republicans decided the biggest threat to America was a teenager getting puberty blockers. Trump even ran ads claiming Kamala Harris wanted “taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens,” ending with the line: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” Polls showed transgender rights ranked dead last on voters’ list of priorities. The public wasn’t asking for this fight. So why did Republicans make it the centerpiece of their campaign? That’s what we’re unpacking today — why the right is so obsessed with trans people, and what that obsession really tells us.