Feb 29, 2024
We're off on a journey into what the author, L. Frank Baum, calls a modern fairytale, to see another one of the real hits of the public domain, this time digging into the antics of not just Dorothy, but all her delightful friends, besides! Well, really, we meet her major enemy as well, and what most people would call (and I'm putting this charitably here) a charlatan! A con man, even! Well, I mean, how else would you ask me to interpret those required green sunglasses, huh? Confused as to what I'm on about? You've got to listen to the episode, then! It's different from the movie, you know! Not a huge volume, different, mind you, but different nonetheless! Keep a close ear on things, and maybe you'll catch just what's up there, I found it quite a fun game when I was listening to edit the episode down.
Want to read along with us? Find the book here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/55
Have opinions you want to share, or want to suggest books? (Like, say, the many sequels to this book?) Discord's great for that!
https://www.discord.gg/PBZNsjn/
Want to listen live? Drop by Fridays, over on twitch!
https://www.twitch.tv/glacier_nester/
Disclaimer time!
TL;DR up front: Paper Cuts is almost all public domain stuff, and some of it hasn't aged well. I'll be doing my best to warn you, but I'm not changing any of it, I don't believe censorship is the path forward here.
Paper Cuts, by necessity, has to be a majority books that are in the US public domain. That means it's almost exclusively going to be content produced in the 1920s, or earlier. These works may have aspects that have not aged well to a modern viewer/listener. Now, I'm never one for censorship, but IÂ do believe we are entitled to being able to filter the leisure content we don't want to see. So, this results in the following policy:
I'll do my level best to warn you, the viewer, at the beginning
of the episode, what's likely to come up.
A great example is something like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,
which had some passages describing natives of various places in a
fashion I'd charitably describe as unkindly.
In cases where something sneaks up on me unwarned, I will be
reading the content unedited, with my sincerest apologies for the
lack of active warning.
All that said, I'm gonna cover my bases with some common warnings that have come up often in books I've read before:
Descriptions of "savage natives"
Various racial slurs, unkind terms, and/or Descriptions of groups
that have taken on a worse connotation
General mistreatment and misrepresentation of cultures
Generally speaking, if something I'm reading is on the page? Don't expect me to have opinions aligning with it. We're here to have fun, not disparage people!