#Cure Memoir | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

solitus17utopia · 2 months

Text

" it’s too late, for this place has withered and died out already like an anökumene, "

Every life is unique to their own, however, all beings have something in common that cannot be altered: death. Each life must pass, and each contentment must melt to the hands of the reaper. It's only science, yet such a grim aspect of it.

pronouns — they/them.

genre — yapping to fluff to angst.

c.warning — aforementioned death, grieving, suggestive self-unaliving, not entirely proof-read.

✧ Dr. Ratio. — Unrequited lives.

For a man such of high prestige as Ratio, one could not think he was for love in the first place. Pursuing the curing of universal flaw— ignorance— he strives to achieve his appearing raison d'être regardless. Recording from as long as from high school, the doctor exceeded all low bars that society expected averages of, staggering results imprinted on every letter and grade file.

The concept of him picking out a mere breathing soul to place his affection on is a foreign concept to all those that know of him. More so, is publicly supporting their partner's catering necessary needs and in moments which they needed him; with the humorous-intended excuse that by helping them, Ratio has rid a scintilla more of ignorance.

With time coming, he too understood human psychology and its involuntary reactions by the help of his partner. Like two pieces in a perfect puzzle, leaving no room for other exceptions. However, despite the thick chilling borders that lined his passionate heart, he never caved in deeper, afraid of the consequences.

But, he subconsciously did.

Hand-holding, cherished moments together, learning and exploring. Memoirs accompanied their partner's room, with softer and unfitting items for a man such as him in his own. No matter how contradictive they were to himself, he saw himself walking back to those same arms, wishing to see that same smile and hoping to educate them further than just innovation, problem-solving, critical thinking and philosophies.

After the passing of his dear partner, Veritas could not help but be reduced back to his self, bitter no less but more. The day he found the news of them found lifeless on a sterile bed, with doctors apologising for their "failure" at saving them, he had to restrain the uncharacteristic gloom that filled his veins. Something he had not felt after that one letter from the Interastral Peace Corporation.

Nowadays, he finds himself to be less passionate than what he once was before, projects and researches and points, all reminding him of the person he halved his life and mind to. The hands of time waited for no one, that was the rule of the universe. Simple as that. But, why does someone like him jolt his grievance into late nights? Why does his heart feel like the weight of their entire form, crushed into a messy, paper ball? He could not pinpoint the answer, there was no logical statement. Or perhaps that's what he forced himself to think.

Only if they were here, they could provide the solution to his problem.

— alex's comments on this matter : was supposed to be an angsty one, but it ended up more of a Veritas blabber than that... this is my first test for him, so I don't think it's that great. I wish to write better works for him later in the future

59 notes · View notes

gatheringbones · 1 year

Text

best books of 2022 rec list:

fiction:

chouette by claire oshetsky

forty thousand in gehenna by cj cherryh

fierce femmes and notorious liars by kai cheng thom

sula by toni morrison

everyone in this room will someday be dead by emily r. austin

jane eyre by charlotte bronte

villette by charlotte bronte

non-fiction:

gay spirit by mark thompson

we too: stories on sex work and survival by natalie west

transgender history by susan stryker

blood marriage wine & glitter by s bear bergman

love and rage: the path to liberation through anger by lama rod owens

gay soul by mark thompson

between certain death and a possible future: queer writing on growing up in the AIDS crisis by mattilda bernstein sycamore

the man they wanted me to be: toxic masculinity and a crisis of our own making by jared yates sexton

nobody passes: rejecting the rules of gender and conformity by mattilda bernstein sycamore

cruising: an intimate history of a radical pastime by alex espinoza

gay body by mark thompson

what my bones know: a memoir of healing from complex trauma by stephanie foo

the child catchers: rescue, trafficking, and the new gospel of adoption by kathryn joyce

the opium wars: the addiction of one empire and the corruption of another by w. travis hanes III

a queer history of the united states by michael bronski

the trouble with white women by kyla schuller

what we don't talk about when we talk about fat by aubrey gordon

the feminist porn book by tristan taormino

administrations of lunacy: a story of racism and psychiatry at the midgeville asylum by mab segrest

the women's house of detention by hugh ryan

angela davis: an autobiography by angela davis

ten steps to nanette by hannah gadsby

neuroqueer heresies by nick walker

the remedy: queer and trans voices on health and healthcare by zena sharman

brilliant imperfection by eli clare

the dawn of everything: a new history of humanity by david graeber and david wengrow

tomorrow sex will be good again by katherine angel

all our trials: prisons, policing, and the feminist fight to end violence by emily l. thuma

if this is a man by primo levi

bi any other name: bisexual people speak out by lorraine hutchins

white rage: the unspoken truth of our racial divide by carol anderson

public sex: the culture of radical sex by pat califa

I'm glad my mom died by jenette mccurdy

care of: letters, connections and cures by ivan coyote

the gentrification of the mind: witness to a lost imagination by sarah schulman

skid road: on the frontier of health and homelessness in an american city, by josephine ensign

the origins of totalitarianism by hannah arendt

nice racism: how progressive white people perpetuate racial harm by robin diangelo

corrections in ink by keri blakinger

sexed up: how society sexualizes us and how we can fight back by julia serano

smash the church, smash the state! the early years of gay liberation by tommi avicolli mecca

no more police: a case for abolition by mariame kaba

until we reckon: violence, mass incarceration, and a road to repair by danielle sered

the care we dream of: liberatory & transformative justice approaches to LGBTQ+ health by zena sharman

reclaiming two-spirits: sexuality, spiritual renewal and sovereignty in native america by gregory d. smithers

the sentences that create us: crafting a writer's life in prison by Caits Messner

#book recs tag #83 in total the same as last year

578 notes · View notes

flowerbloom-arts · 5 months

Text

When Moomin's tail was balding and doctors couldn't be of any help, Moominmamma goes out of her way to cure her son herself. His tail successfully grows back - but now the tuft is gold! Because of this, Moomin becomes a sensation across the world, but is fame always a blessing?

Honestly, I think a movie based on Moomin and the Golden Tail would be a very interesting thing to make, especially as a response to the declining capitalist economy and the flanderization of the Moomins' image. All the Janssons who've had their hand in the brand have admitted to Moomin being a sort of curse - the stress of managing such a large brand and also creating content out of it... It's known how rough it was for each of them. And Tove projected that stress onto her Moomintroll in Moomin and the Golden Tail.

3 of the major changes I would make would probably be

1. Moominpappa's arc is expanded upon beyond his troubles with Wimsy and the gentrification of his house - he'd try to ride the coattails of his son's fame and finally sell his Memoirs to a large audience, only to get... Not negative responses but responses that bruise him right in the ego.

2. Sniff would be a Lars stand-in rather than a greedy company stand-in. Stinky is already there to fill that role, and Sniff was very much flanderized in later Tove comics much to my chagrin, so I would like to have his role as an adoptive brother be expanded upon as he tries to help Moomintroll in his tail ownership/maintenance/business.

3. The golden tail gets passed onto Sniff. The comic ends with a classic "the crowd moves onto The Next Big Thing immediately after the main character quits" trope and while it's fine for a semi-episodic comic strip, for a movie that would lean into more of Tove's struggles with the franchise I think it would be more hard-hitting and truthful to subvert that trope and be honest about the franchise's ongoing relevance and how the comic ended up in Lars' hands after Tove happily quit and left the comic strip to him.

#moomins #moominvalley #art #moomintroll #moomin snorkmaiden #the snorkmaiden #snorkmaiden #moomins snufkin #snufkin moomin #snufkin #sniff moomin #moomin sniff #stinky moomin #moomin stinky #moominpappa #moominmamma #moomin and the golden tail #moomin comics

123 notes · View notes

plaguedocboi · 4 months

Note

Tell us more about Moby Dick!! :D

Ishmael is a fascinating little specimen let me tell you. He has a reputation for being a “boring narrator” but that’s complete bullshit. Right out the gate he’s like “hello this is my (fake) name, I’m poor, I’m depressed, but luckily when I can tell I’m about to kill myself I hop my ass on a boat because the water can cure whatever’s wrong with you, also we are all being controlled by the puppet strings of the divine and free will is an illusion. It is now Page Three.”

The entire first part of the book is his story of meeting, falling in love with, and marrying a hot tattooed Polynesian man in what may be the first recorded case of the “there was only one bed” trope and it only gets wilder from there. This really caught be off guard tbh, I had no idea that there was so much gay stuff in this book.

I honestly cannot even pick my favorite Ishmael moment. Could it be him being adamantly on the wrong side of the “are whales fish or mammals” debate? That he suggests narwhal’s horns would be good for turning the pages of small books? When he hides behind the mast and eats some spermaceti because he just has to know what it tastes like? When he tattooed himself with measurements of a beached whale but rounded all the numbers because he also needed room for the poem he was writing on his arm? The gay sperm squeezing chapter? When he made his drunk listeners fetch him a priest and a Bible so he could swear he was telling the truth? And then lied????

Ishmael’s musings range from beautiful, lyrical prose that makes you stop and reread the section because damn, and chapters about How Rope Works and encyclopedic writing about the whaling industry. There are lofty theological debates and accusations about the reader being a fish. You spend much of this book wildly seasick because Ishmael’s voice is manic, hilarious, and disorienting. Once you’ve finished this story, you, too, will feel like you’ve spent three years aboard a whaling ship.

Although the unhinged tangents are often amusing, many people complain because they probably account for 90% of the book with only the remaining 10% devoted to the plot. Surely if we just got rid of Ishmael’s Nonsense it would be better, correct? No. This is Ishmael’s memoir. He knows how it ends. These plot-delaying anecdotes are purposeful; he does not want to reach the end because it is The End. The death of his friends and his husband. The inevitable, unforgiving blade of fate that slices the lives of of the Pequod’s crew short and leaves him alone and adrift at sea. Enjoy his journey, because it may seem long now but it ends all too soon.

#whale weekly spoilers

57 notes · View notes

burningvelvet · 6 months

Text

Let me tell you about John “Foul-Weather Jack” Byron, Captain James Cook, a doctor named James Lind, and also a different doctor named James Lind, and how they all knew each other, helped to cure scurvy, and inadvertently helped to inspire Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) -- a long-winded history ramble

John Byron next to a first edition copy of Frankenstein.

John joined the Royal Navy at 14 and by the ripe old age of 17 had proved himself by surviving a deadly shipwreck off the coast of Chile. The voyage was part of George Anson's famous circumnavigation of the globe done to seize Spanish ships. Only 188 men of the original 1,854 crew members survived; several, including Byron, were taken as prisoners by the Spanish. Recollections of the voyage were sensationalized and it was depicted in stories like William Cowper’s poem The Castaway. John Byron published his own successful memoir, The Narrative of the Honourable John Byron (1768).

The novel's full title deserves attention for it's 18th century pre-Byronic melodrama: "The Narrative of the Honourable John Byron (Commodore in a Late Expedition Around the World) Containing an Account of the Great Distresses suffered by Himself and his Companions on the Coast of Patagonia from the Year 1740, till their Arrival in England, 1746. With a Description of St. Jago de Chili, and the Manners and Customs of the Inhabitants. Also a Relation of the Loss of the Wager Man of War, one of Admiral Anson's Squadron." I can only imagine that had his grandson Lord Byron's memoirs been published instead of burned, their title would have borrowed from his grandfather's by including something similar to "Containing an Account of the Great Distresses suffered by Himself . . ." but I digress.

I do not digress. The beginning of his preface opens with this gem (I've swapped the 18th-century "long s" for a regular one):

"But here I must say, I have been dubious of the partiality of my friends; and, as I think, justly fearful lest the world in general, who may perhaps find compassion and indulgence for a protracted tale of distress, may not give the same allowance to a luxurious imagination triumphing in a change of fortune, and sudden transition from the most dismal to the gayest scenes in the universe, and thereby indulging an egotism equally offensive to the envious and censorious."

Which brings to mind Francis Cohen's criticism of Lord Byron's Don Juan: “Lord B. should have been grave & gay by turns; grave in one page & gay in the next; grave in one line, & gay in the next. And not grave & gay in the same page, or in the same stanza, or in the same line… we are never drenched & scorched at the same instant whilst standing in one spot" (letter to John Murray, 16 July, 1819). And (not the most entertaining part, but to keep things brief) part of Byron's retort: "I will answer [Cohen] who objects to the quick succession of fun and gravity — as if in that case the gravity did not (in intention at least) heighten the fun. His metaphor is that ‘we are never scorched and drenched at the same time!' Blessings on his experience!" (letter to John Murray, 12 August, 1819).

John went on to be considered one of the greatest naval commanders of his era, commanding several ships as captain during the Seven Years’ War and beating the French as leader in the Battle of Restigouche. He later set the record for fastest global circumnavigation at the time while commodore, became a notable explorer, became a commander at multiple Royal Navy stations, and was appointed Governor of Newfoundland in Canada for three years. According to Wikipedia, “his actions nearly caused a war between Great Britain and Spain.”

It seems like he basically just did whatever the hell he wanted. We can see that the apple really doesn't fall too far from the tree. Everyone in the Byron family was kind of crazy. See: psychologist Kay Jamison's Touched By Fire, a novel on the mental illness of famous writers, half of which is focused on Lord Byron (as it should be) and includes an extensive psychological analysis of his whole family tree, which in a short summary brings me back to my previous point: everyone in the Byron family was kind of crazy.

John's health declined after sustaining storm-induced injuries and an unsuccessful attack against the French at the Battle of Grenada. He died at 62 with six living children. His grandson, the poet Lord Byron, borrowed inspiration from John's life and the shipwreck descriptions in his memoir while he was writing the shipwreck sequence in his magnum opus Don Juan.

In an epistle to his half-sister (Epistle to Augusta) Byron mentions their grandfather thus:

"A strange doom is thy father's son's, and past / Recalling, as it lies beyond redress; / Revers'd for him our grandsire's fate of yore— / He had no rest at sea, nor I on shore. / If my inheritance of storms hath been / In other elements, and on the rocks / Of perils, overlook'd or unforeseen, / I have sustain'd my share of worldly shocks, / The fault was mine; nor do I seek to screen / My errors with defensive paradox; / I have been cunning in mine overthrow, / The careful pilot of my proper woe."

On to the Scottish doctor James Lind! He's important because he developed the theory that citrus fruits treated scurvy, and in attempting to prove so he conducted the world's first ever official clinical trial. In his tests, he used the survivors from this famous shipwreck. This likely included Byron himself, being one of the few survivors and having reported the healing effects of citrus in restoring men who were on the verge of death. Needless to say, the discoveries and implications of Lind's clinical trial had an unprecedented impact on the fields of nutrition and medicine, and all of history, particularly in the Caribbean. In 1753 he published his Treatise on Scurvy.

Lind's theories on scurvy influenced the famous Captain James Cook, who implemented these ideas and proved their efficiency by how few men he lost to scurvy compared with every other Captain at the time. When Cook circumnavigated the world on his first voyage, no one died of scurvy. This didn't help with malaria and dysentery, which nearly wiped out his whole crew at one point on a journey to Indonesia. Aside from Anson's shipwreck, Cook's voyages were the other major instance of what I would call "social experiments at sea, or, fuck around and find out: scurvy edition" which led to the development of scurvy research.

As an aside, there is a famous town in Australia named Byron Bay. That town was named by Captain Cook in 1770 as a tribute to John Byron. Cook was sailing around on the HMS Endeavour doing even crazier colonial shit, and he likewise died as the result of his sea travels. He was killed in a scuffle on Hawaiʻi Island which transpired after he had casually tried to kidnap King Kalaniʻōpuʻu-a-Kaiamamao in broad daylight, planning to ransom him out of revenge for the theft of one of his boats, although Cook himself had stolen their sacred wood first after they had been so nice to him. This is what I've gathered from reading a bit about the confusing affair, but the main point is that Cook got what was coming to him. The Journals of Captain Cook were published to major success, contributing to the history of English travel narratives. But Cook is a pretty well-known historical figure so I can't go into his chaotic life any more than this, lest I be writing forever.

Lord Byron in an Albanian oufit he bought while traveling for 2 years, & Captain Cook thinking about navigation. The backgrounds make them look part of the same painting, no?

Back to the Linds: interestingly enough, the scurvy-studying physician James Lind had a younger cousin who was also a physician named James Lind, as well as a scientist/philosopher/teacher. While teaching at Eton, this Lind became a tutor and mentor of a young Percy Bysshe Shelley, and had such an impact on him that Shelley refers to Lind in several of his works. Shelley especially enjoyed Lind’s experiments regarding galvanism - the study of bringing things to life with electricity. It is widely believed by scholars that Shelley’s conversations and rememberances about Lind at Lord Byron's Villa Diodati were some of the primary inspiration for Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818).

For further reading on Shelley's Lind: The real Doctor Frankenstein? by Christopher Goulding via Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. Lind's Wikipedia page has a section devoted to Frankenstein.

Percy Shelley described his Lind:

". . . exactly what an old man ought to be. Free, calm-spirited, full of benevolence, and even of youthful ardor: his eye seemed to burn with supernatural spirit beneath his brow, shaded by his venerable white locks, he was tall, vigorous, and healthy in his body; tempered, as it had ever been, by his amiable mind. I owe to that man far, ah! far more than I owe to my father: he loved me, and I shall never forget our long talks, where he breathed the spirit of the kindest tolerance and the purest wisdom . . ."

A tie-in to vampire literature: Lind is also thought to be an influence on Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), which was influenced by (Lord Byron’s doctor) John Polidori’s novel The Vampyre, the first ever vampire novel, which was inspired by Lord Byron’s short vampire story Augustus Darvell, which was written at the same time as Frankenstein during their infamous ghost story competition at Villa Diodati. Augustus Darvell was inspired by Byron's travels through Eastern Europe, and was likely in part inspired by (another famous Romantic poet) Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s gothic poem Christabel, which Byron terrified Percy Shelley with after reading it aloud at the Villa Diodati, and which Byron loved so much that he helped Coleridge publish it through his own publisher. Christabel began in 1797 but wasn't published until 1816 for this reason.

To continue on vampires: Byron's enemy, the famous poet Robert Southey (who Byron roasted in Don Juan, among other works, and basically cancelled him as a result) also wrote a poem called Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) which is sometimes considered to be the first true depiction of a vampire in English literature. He also wrote it while traveling. Shelley (and Keats) both loved this poem, and so it also *could have* inspired some of the conversation at the Villa Diodati if Shelley had related the vampire theme to Christabel or Darvell. Southey is also the first English writer to write on Haitian zombi folklore, which would later become the zombie of modern horror. Southey was also reportedly in love with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the mother of Mary Shelley and philosopher who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), one of the most influential proto-feminist texts.

I relate these connections to demonstrate how small the literary world was at the time; so small that all the writers pretty much knew each other. In 1801, the English population was about 11 million, and in 1899 had grown to around 37 million due to industrialization (source: Black, Joseph, et al. "British Literature: A Historical Overview." The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Broadview Press, vol. B, 2010, p. 70).

That's nearly the current population of London alone, but around 75% of that 11 million English population in 1801 was rural, whereas at the end of the century the national population was about 75% urban (source: same as prior), again due to industrialization. London in the early 19c was much less populated than today, and the amount of people who were educated or even merely literate was also much smaller than today. So really, it makes sense that all of the artists/writers/scientists/aristocrats knew each other. But it's still insane to see examples of how small the world really is and always has been.

The front-facing portrait is of Scurvy Lind, the shadow portrait is of Galvanism Lind.

The Shelleys: the King and Queen of Romanticism.

Southey, Coleridge, Polidori, Stoker: some early Kings of Vampirism (as represented in popular British literature).

71 notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 5 months

Text

All the books I reviewed in 2023 (Graphic Novels)

Next Tuesday (December 5), I'm at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, NC, with my new solarpunk novel The Lost Cause, which 350.org's Bill McKibben called "The first great YIMBY novel: perceptive, scientifically sound, and extraordinarily hopeful."

It's that time of year again, when I round up all the books I reviewed for my newsletter in the previous year. I posted 21 reviews last year, covering 31 books (there are two series in there!). I also published three books of my own last year (two novels and one nonfiction). A busy year in books!

Every year, these roundups remind me that I did actually manager to get a lot of reading done, even if the list of extremely good books that I didn't read is much longer than the list of books I did read. I read many of these books while doing physiotherapy for my chronic pain, specifically as audiobooks I listened to on my underwater MP3 player while doing my daily laps at the public pool across the street from my house.

After many years of using generic Chinese waterproof MP3s players – whose quality steadily declined over a decade – I gave up and bought a brand-name player, a Shokz Openswim. So far, I have no complaints. Thanks to reader Abbas Halai for recommending this!

https://shokz.com/products/openswim

I load up this gadget with audiobook MP3s bought from Libro.fm, a fantastic, DRM-free alternative to Audible, which is both a monopolist and a prolific wage-thief with a documented history of stealing from writers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

All right, enough with the process notes, on to the reviews!

GRAPHIC NOVELS

I. Shubiek Lubiek by Deena Mohamed

An intricate alternate history in which wishes are real, and must be refined from a kind of raw wish-stuff that has to be dug out of the earth. Naturally, this has been an important element of geopolitics and colonization, especially since the wish-stuff is concentrated in the global south, particularly Egypt, the setting for our tale. The framing device for the trilogy is the tale of three "first class" wishes: these are the most powerful wishes that civilians are allowed to use, the kind of thing you might use to cure cancer or reverse a crop-failure.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/11/your-wish/#is-my-command

II. Ducks by Kate Beaton

In 2005, Beaton was a newly minted art-school grad facing a crushing load of student debt, a debt she would never be able to manage in the crumbling, post-boom economy of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Like so many Maritimers, she left the home that meant everything for her to travel to Alberta, where the tar sands oil boom promised unmatched riches for anyone willing to take them. Beaton's memoir describes the following four years, as she works her way into a series of oil industry jobs in isolated company towns where men outnumber women 50:1 and where whole communities marinate in a literally toxic brew of carcinogens, misogyny, economic desperation and environmental degradation. The story that follows is – naturally – wrenching, but it is also subtle and ambivalent. Beaton finds camaraderie with – and empathy for – the people she works alongside, even amidst unimaginable, grinding workplace harassment that manifests in both obvious and glancing ways.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/14/hark-an-oilpatch/#kate-beaton

III. Justice Warriors by Matt Bors

Justice Warriors is what you'd get if you put Judge Dredd in a blender with Transmetropolitan and set it to chunky. The setup: the elites of a wasted, tormented world have retreated into Bubble City, beneath a hermetically sealed zone. Within Bubble City, everything is run according to the priorities of the descendants of the most internet-poisoned freaks of the modern internet, click- and clout-chasing mushminds full of corporate-washed platitudes about self-care, diversity and equity, wrapped around come-ons for sugary drinks and dubious dropshipper crapola. It's a cop buddy-story dreamed up by Very Online, very angry creators who live in a present-day world where reality is consistently stupider than satire.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/22/libras-assemble/#the-uz

IV. Roaming by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki

The story of three young Canadian women meeting up for a getaway to New York City. Zoe and Dani are high-school best friends who haven't seen each other since they graduated and decamped for universities in different cities. Fiona is Dani's art-school classmate, a glamorous and cantankerous artist with an affected air of sophistication. It's a dizzying, beautifully wrought three-body problem as the three protagonists struggle with resentments and love, sex and insecurity. The relationships between Zoe, Dani and Fiona careen wildly from scene to scene and even panel to panel, propelled by sly graphic cues and fantastically understated dialog.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/11/as-canadian-as/#possible-under-the-circumstances

Like I said, this has been a good year in books for me, and it included three books of my own:

I. Red Team Blues (novel, Tor Books US, Head of Zeus UK)

Martin Hench is 67 years old, single, and successful in a career stretching back to the beginnings of Silicon Valley. He lives and roams California in a very comfortable fully-furnished touring bus, The Unsalted Hash, that he bought years ago from a fading rock star. He knows his way around good food and fine drink. He likes intelligent women, and they like him back often enough. Martin is a—contain your excitement—self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. He knows computer hardware and software alike, including the ins and outs of high-end databases and the kinds of spreadsheets that are designed to conceal rather than reveal. He’s as comfortable with social media as people a quarter his age, and he’s a world-level expert on the kind of international money-laundering and shell-company chicanery used by Fortune 500 companies, mid-divorce billionaires, and international drug gangs alike. He also knows the Valley like the back of his hand, all the secret histories of charismatic company founders and Sand Hill Road VCs. Because he was there at all the beginnings. Now he’s been roped into a job that’s more dangerous than anything he’s ever agreed to before—and it will take every ounce of his skill to get out alive.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

II. The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (nonfiction, Verso)

We can – we must – dismantle the tech platforms. We must to seize the means of computation by forcing Silicon Valley to do the thing it fears most: interoperate. Interoperability will tear down the walls between technologies, allowing users to leave platforms, remix their media, and reconfigure their devices without corporate permission. Interoperability is the only route to the rapid and enduring annihilation of the platforms. The Internet Con is the disassembly manual we need to take back our internet.

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

III. The Lost Cause (novel, Tor Books US, Head of Zeus UK)

For young Americans a generation from now, climate change isn't controversial. It's just an overwhelming fact of life. And so are the great efforts to contain and mitigate it. Entire cities are being moved inland from the rising seas. Vast clean-energy projects are springing up everywhere. Disaster relief, the mitigation of floods and superstorms, has become a skill for which tens of millions of people are trained every year. The effort is global. It employs everyone who wants to work. Even when national politics oscillates back to right-wing leaders, the momentum is too great; these vast programs cannot be stopped in their tracks.

But there are still those Americans, mostly elderly, who cling to their red baseball caps, their grievances, their huge vehicles, their anger. To their "alternative" news sources that reassure them that their resentment is right and pure and that "climate change" is just a giant scam. And they're your grandfather, your uncle, your great-aunt. And they're not going anywhere. And they’re armed to the teeth. The Lost Cause asks: What do we do about people who cling to the belief that their own children are the enemy? When, in fact, they're often the elders that we love?

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

I wrote nine books during lockdown, and there's plenty more to come. The next one is The Bezzle, a followup to Red Team Blues, which comes out in February:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

While you're waiting for that one, I hope the reviews above will help you connect with some excellent books. If you want more of my reviews, here's my annual roundup from 2022:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/01/bookishness/#2022-in-review

Here's my book reviews from 2021:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/08/required-ish-reading/#bibliography

And here's my book reviews from 2020:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/08/required-reading/#recommended-reading

It's EFF's Power Up Your Donation Week: this week, donations to the Electronic Frontier Foundation are matched 1:1, meaning your money goes twice as far. I've worked with EFF for 22 years now and I have always been - and remain - a major donor, because I've seen firsthand how effective, responsible and brilliant this organization is. Please join me in helping EFF continue its work!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/01/bookmaker/#2023-in-review

#pluralistic #books #reviews #science fiction #gift guide #graphic novels #2023 in review #novels

58 notes · View notes

crystem · 2 months

Note

🎧 If they had to put on a type of ambient noise, what sounds would it consist of? (for cure memoir)

Cure Memoir used to live in Yokohama before moving to a much quieter town, so sometimes she misses the busier atmosphere!

The noises would consist of

People walking and talking on the street

Bicycles, prams, and other wheel-on-pavement sounds

Cars and trams passing

Bird calls, but sparser than in her new town

River water, she remembers enjoying the sound of the water near the Cosmo Clock 21

Occasional theme park sounds, also due to that - though these are rarer for her to listen to

Really, any sounds that make her feel like she's back in Yokohama, rather than in her new town. She enjoys her new town, but she does miss her old city quite a bit, too.

Thanks for the ask!

Ask Game Context

#oc ask games #oc ask memes #ask games #ask memes #Kaiko Sakizaki #Sakizaki Kaiko #Cure Memoir #Cute Collection Precure #Cute Collection Pretty Cure #blackheartbiohazards

1 note · View note

joachimnapoleon · 2 months

Text

Dusting off a couple older posts from Louise Murat’s memoirs, featuring some scenes of Murat and his children, to hopefully inspire @credo--ergo-sum :)

Excerpt:

Quite often my brothers, while playing with the swords, pulled them out of the scabbard, and simulated fights, engaged in battles. I was the youngest, the slightest bit timid, and in this duel capacity, the punching bag for my elders; I was frightened, they attacked me, naked sword in hand; I became upset, I cried and ran to take refuge in the arms of my Father who, with a word, halted the assailants and, while scolding me kindly, sought to console me and to cure me of my childish frights. Poor Father! These familial scenes where he showed himself so good, so tender to us, are the last memories I conserve of him! These arms are, more or less, the only objects belonging to him that we have been able to save!

Excerpt:

My Mother also loved us, but she wasn’t effusive… we would sometimes remain for entire days without seeing her! He was our friend, I would almost say our playmate. He didn’t have a set time for his visits; sometimes he went up to our place barely awake… sometimes after a Council of Ministers; he came to relax, to unwind by making us jump upon his knees, and if a quarter of an hour interval separated an audience from his habitual walk, he took advantage of it to come embrace us before leaving. So what a welcome we gave him! What a celebration when we saw him open the door of the little staircase! How we ran into his arms!

#Joachim Murat #Louise Murat #memoirs #translations

22 notes · View notes

astrronomemes · 6 months

Text

GIRL, INTERRUPTED (1999): STARTERS

a collection of quotes, phrases, and sayings from the 1999 film adaptation of the Susanna Kaysen memoir, Girl, Interrupted. change & alter as needed.

"Have you ever confused a dream with life?"

"Don't tell me what you think. Take it to the lab."

"Sometimes, it's hard for me to stay in one place."

"Time can move backwards and forwards, and now to then, and back again, and you can't control it."

"I think young women should make up their own mind, don't you?"

"You need to go somewhere where you can get a genuine rest."

"You're hurting everyone around you."

"I didn't try to kill myself."

"That's the kind of thing you talk about in therapy, honey. Not here."

"Look, I'm not gonna burn my bra, or drop acid, or go march on Washington. I just don't want to end up like my mother."

"I need you to stay close to me, because it's easy to get lost in here."

"I won't be here that long. I'm just here for a rest."

"You've been gone for two weeks. A lot of shit has gone down."

"I mean, everybody thinks about it at some point."

"I think you should lock the door."

"Fuck his brains out. Use a rubber."

"You've been feeling bad in general, right? You've been feeling depressed."

"I haven't exactly been a ball of joy, [name]."

"He didn't say. He thought it would 'affect my recovery'."

"I must have missed that in the brochure."

"I mean, what kind of sex isn't casual?"

"You know, I know all about you. And I hope they put you away forever."

"What if I had a punctured artery? You'd go on your rounds, ignoring my wounds?"

"I tried to kill myself, [name]."

"What do they know about being normal?"

"Look, I know that this sounds crazy, but I think I love you."

"I want to leave... but not with you. Not with you."

"I just like you, that's all. I wish you were getting better, though."

"If talking did shit, we'd be out of here by now."

"Another one of my theories is that you people don't know what you're doing."

"It means I don't care. That's what it means."

"I'm just gonna rest for a while. Just a little while."

"You know, I can take a lot of crazy shit from a lot of crazy people, but you? You are not crazy."

"What's wrong with me? What the fuck is going on inside my head?!"

"I'm sorry for being a bitch. I was a drag."

"They didn't release you because you're better. They just gave up."

"I know what it's like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in, but you can't. How you hurt yourself on the outside to try and kill the thing on the inside."

"How am I supposed to recover when I don't even understand my disease?"

"I think what you've got to do is put it down, put it away, put it in your notebook... but get it out of yourself."

"You want to be rested for tomorrow. The last night is a long one."

"So nice of you to pass judgment on us now that you're cured."

"I'm playing the villain, like you want. I give you everything you want."

"I played the fucking villain. Just like you wanted."

"No one cares if you die, [name]. Because you're dead already."

"Maybe everyone out there is a liar, and maybe the whole world is stupid and ignorant, but I'd rather be fucking in it than down here with you."

"Crazy isn't being broken, or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me... amplified."

"They were not perfect. But they were my friends."

#rp meme #roleplay meme #rp starters #roleplay starters #dialogue prompts #dialogue starters #dialogue memes #rp prompts #roleplay prompts #rp memes #roleplay memes #sentence memes #sentence prompts #sentence starters

36 notes · View notes