Hilariously enough my city's "woke" government is actually in the process of banning little free libraries because "they are on public easements without a permit."
They are also building a permitting process, but only allowing non profits to apply for the permits.
American Governments are hilarious
What a great use of everyone's time
Distilled liberalism. "Aykshully you don't have a permit so it's bad by definition"
Odd. But not surprising.
My little village has a little free library on the lot with the city hall.
No matter how good at art I get, I will never be as good of a satirist as Kelly.
He may be a lib, but he's great for the pipeline.
Those are two different skills, so yeah that's probably true. Kelly comics have intentionally bad art but it's acrually generally a bit too good and shows he's faking the style of the real untalented hacks. His recurring characters are on model each time. I learned a lot of how to draw from copying and tracing cartoon and comic characters. Calvin and Hobbes specially. If you use thin loose leaf and a bright overhead light you can usually trace over darker lines from a page underneath and just feeling out how the lines work and stuff by doing so can help, then go for free hand copying. Do that over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over with gradually more and more realistic stuff while also learning formal techniques, anatomy and also fucking around and free drawing and doodling you will get there. Persistence gets your technique down and patience allows you to execute effective, you gotta tske your time and while I wouldn't say there are no shortcuts cause there are, you can only take rm once you know the hard way.
Lady Liberty burning books while crying tears of joy. This is
If the image is burning the works of JKKK Rowling, it gets my critical support
I walk by a handful of little free libraries on the way to work and I've never seen any books taken out. They honestly seem like slightly more elaborate "IN THIS HOUSE" lawn signs.
Theyre good places to leave propaganda, I heard.
They are basically not self-sustaining. People will use them as places to dump actual literal trash books out of some misplaced belief that destroying books is wrong so they're doing good by passing it along. Actual good books will be taken. So they deteriorate monotonically over time, therefore whenever you walk by one it's a near certainty that all the books are entirely garbage.
It's a given that if you operate one you will likely be on your own to provide books and stock it. Granted it depends where you live. I used to help facilitate one and it seemed to get a ton of traffic... Some visitors would take 5+ books and bring nothing in return. Sometimes somebody would donate dozens. Most people who commit to operating one of these know they will go into their own pocket to stock the thing. Thrift stores often have books for 50 cents. It's probably worth the investment in the community. For me its kinda the least I could do.
A neighbor of mine has one and it actually got used as intended when they first put it up, but I feel like once the novelty wears off they're just so limited in scope that they become a lawn decoration.
get me some of that public library filth
This might be my new favorite Kelly comic
Once found a BBQ cookbook with gay cowboys on the cover in one of these free libraries like 100yds from the US-Mexico border
One time i found a bunch of hardcore body modification/scarification zines in one of these
Based
Why Michael Crichton? Just because it's like... "pre-woke"?
His books definitely err towards a sort of fash-adjacent libertarian moral. Like I can probably sum up at least half of them with "the based chad maverick scientist comes in and saves the day from the ineptitude of weak soy government/corporate establishment scientists, with his rugged basic common sense and some catch that Crichton thought sounded clever."
It's funny that in his most famous book by far the libertarian capitalist completely screws the pooch by trying to save money, gets eaten alive by his own creation, and in the end the government has to save the day with napalm (though they don't get everything and the Amazon is undeniably screwed forever after the end of the book).
cuz he's a MANLY MAN writing about DINOSAURS and EPIC TIME TRAVEL
Honest question - Is any curation of these tantamount to censorship? Note that the free libraries are often geared toward kids.
If you operated a free library and someone put Mein Kampf in there, would you leave it or remove it?
How about the Anarchists Cookbook?
Old copies of Penthouse?
I'd remove it and whether it's censorship or not doesn't really apply because it's a free library and I can take whatever book I want from it and if I choose to burn it or shred it for use in a hamster cage than I can. I'll censor those who want to spread hateful or pornographic material in my neighborhood if it's left in a public book box like that. But personal censorship just means like, yknow doing that or tearing down flyers you don't want around etc. I guess if a government were to do it it would count as censorship but they'd probably just get rid of the whole free library box under some zoning law or whatever.
This is a really reddit question. Part of my free speech is being able to counter other people's speech and a way of doing that is physically removing it from public space.
If I had one I would definitely curate it to general audiences, which means none of the above. But I'm not against censorship on principal so
imo removing anything from the little library is censorship but anyone who has a problem with censoring nazi propaganda aimed at children is either actually a nazi sympathiser of some kind or so utterly abstracted from any real consequences of nazi ideology that they feel fine sitting in libertarian subreddits or whatever and complaining that Nazi's need to have their god given right to incite pogroms
Depends on how many stains are on the pages. And that goes for the cookbook and penthouse too
