Censorship in the 21st Century

Long time no post, but the summer's properly demented, and some of us have Internet woes (and Usagi's still in Kyoto). Basically, reduced team is no fun...

We've made a choice about Racine's Phedre et Hyppolyte: we'll have the original spelling and typography, and a modern version (just the old one could be fun, but it'd be really tough without a more modern one on the right page).

We're still working on Wilde's Salomé, but we're taking our time to make sure that we'll give you a nice translation - and a bilingual introduction.

When I have some free time, I work on the fourth novel in my Sci-Fi universe (the current news are feeding the plot bunny in a rather dark way).

Then... bank news to be able to launch our website.

So... we've found a bank, but because of an annoying technicality, we can only open the account in September (sometime in September).

But what's utterly frustrating is that Cousin Chris had managed to open an account for us at her main bank. She'd had to go through artificial hoops to please the arrogant plonkers, but we had an account... until we asked for the reference that would allow us to buy an e-commerce plugin so that we could safely link our website to our account.

The female that called my cousin at my aunt's (even though my cousin never gives any phone number because she does business at 2 am by e-mail - because she gets some written proof) was a proper nightmare. 

First, she claimed that she didn't have access to our file (then, how did she get my aunt's phone number, um?), and she demanded to be given the names, addresses, and e-mails of the website provider and webmaster; to quote my cousin: 'No way in friggin' Hell!!!!!'.

My cousin's plan was to get the reference, give it to the plugin company, buy the plugin, install it, buy the website, migrate our site that's on Xampp, test everything, and launch the ship.

That wasn't possible, as the phoning biped demanded to be allowed to see our website first because she wanted... to censor it!

She literally said that she had to "check our website for references to religion, sex, and drug".

Well, 95% of our books are LGBTQ-friendly (though there's nothing graphic, but with "Miss Censorship-Sunshine", we'd have ended up with an empty catalogue). And Shakespeare's potentially controversial. And Wilde's play was already censored on religious grounds - from the late 19th century, up to the 1930s!

What we miss is stuff about drugs (thanks for the plot bunny, arrogant bank biped!).

So the account was closed, because none of us (not even our accountant, who growled with us, editors and authors) were ready to accept censorship in the 21st century.

Do you know what the other bank only asked us? That the website had an SSL certificate, which we will have. Internet security is their only concern.

Right now, we're plotting all together to report the censoring biped to someone much higher than her in the food chain.

I'll have some painting to show you soon, maybe a video, and we're planning to take pictures of our paper babies to add them to the website (we'll share some with you then).

See you soon (hopefully)!