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booksandwords · 6 months

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Realigned by Becca Seymour

Series: Coming Home #1 Read time: 1 Day Rating: 4/5 Stars

The Quote: Heat spread over every inch of my skin. Wicked tongue. My brain had short-circuited at some point in the last thirty minutes or so. I didn’t know if it had started when he admitted his feelings for me or at the mention of seduction. I knew one thing for sure, though: my addled brain could not shake the thought of his tongue. — Shaun O'Ryan

Warnings: None. Just a rock-loving scientist and his selfless idiot.

Realigned is Shaun's story. Shaun O'Ryan is an Australian country boy, a geologist employed by NASA. He's been living in America for 8 years not coming home in all that time, talking to his family by phone and occasional visits by them. Now he's in Australia for a two-week stay. The first event in the book is Shaun getting pulled over for speeding... a joke by his lifelong friend Sergeant Mitch Harris. It is kinda funny and is a perfect example of their relationship dynamic.

The novellas epigraph is Take risks.. This sets the tone for the whole story. Shaun is being headhunted by a big company, his family (especially his mum) wants him to stay in Australia for good, taking the offer and coming home. They decide to use Mitch as a weapon knowing full well that Shaun and Mitch have had a thing for each other for a decade. Honestly, it's simple enough. It is Shaun saying I can't have sex involved if I'm going to make a logical decision here. It's a premise a liked and I appreciated that Becca choose to use a single narrator to tell her story. Sometimes having both spoils the surprise for some events.

Have some of the long quotes I liked.

Since it was midweek, there were only a handful of patrons propping up the bar. I greeted every one of them with a handshake when they declared the astronaut had returned. I simply smiled and indicated to Mitch to hurry the hell up with our drinks. There was no point even attempting to explain I wasn’t an astronaut. Yeah, I was lucky enough to work for NASA, but I was all about geology and research. It didn’t matter in a small town like this though. Six hours from civilisation in the arse of the outback, most of the residents heard NASA and decided for themselves I would be travelling the solar system at some point in the future. Who was I to spoil their fun? — I have nothing to add to this really. It just feels like he is the ultimate hometown boy made good. This quote almost said more about him than anything else we got early on. (Shaun)

Apparently everyone knew whatever it was Mum was failing to act coy about. Even my brothers-in-law looked prepped for a reveal. I took a few moments to try to figure out what was going on before returning my attention to Mum. This time her expression was more relaxed, just too much so considering everyone else’s reaction. — Oh the pure joy of this level of this family dynamic. I love it so much. Meddling mothers are the best. (Shaun)

“Not quite sure yet.” I indicated Mitch with a chin lift. “That’s a question for Sarge.” I looked over at him and threw him a wink. “God help us all.” Lorna chuckled, and I glanced back to see her watching the two of us, an amused smile on her lips and a gentleness in her eyes. “You boys back together again.” She shook her head. “Not sure if it’s a good or bad thing Mitch here is now the sarge. Does that mean you’ll get away with even more, rather than not getting up to any crazy stunts?” With her brows raised high, she studied Mitch then clucked. I had no idea what she’d read on his face, but by the time I looked at him, his face was a picture of innocence. I rolled my eyes, not at all convinced. — There are several reasons I like small-town romance, particularly back home after a long-time romance, moments like this are one of them. The people who knew them as kids, the trouble making them, get the whole oh help us all vibe. It's fun and funny. (Shaun and Lorna)

"I’m happy with weird if it means you keep looking at me the way you do.” “What way is that?” I squeaked. “Like you want me to be yours and you don’t want me to ever let you go.” I was done. It was time to stick a damn fork in me. — I just love that last line. I know this is a fairly common quote but somehow it feels like home to me. I can't explain it. I also like the set-up here. (Mitch and Shaun)

I like Becca Seymour for her Australian romance. They have some angst, a whole lot of sweetness and Australian linguistics. Realigned is no exception to this. Better yet it is free on both amazon and Prolific Works (likely other platforms as well), giving this broad access option if a reader wants to try her writing for the first time. I'm giving this 4 rather than 3⭐ because it is free, yes it is short. But it is a HFN, not a HEA and I'm more than okay with that. This does have a follow-up Amalgamated, I will be reading that as well I think. It follows the same sort of ideas.

#this occasionally comes up in bookfunnel and prolific works promotions #keep an eye out and you may be able to get it either free or cheap #becca seymour #coming home #realigned #read australian #book review #ktreviews #read 2022 #novella #booklr

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appri-dot · 3 months

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Nutcracker oc

#lethal company #his reprogramming was moreso him realizing employees were humans #he was able to identify one and realign himself n just..followed them to the ship #violently protects his crewmembers and tends to overwork himself #his pink cheeks lost its paint sorry #lethal company nutcracker

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firstfullmoon · 2 years

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deborah levy (quoting marguerite duras) / charles m. schulz / susan sontag

#music realigns bones like nothing else on earth #w #comparatives #deborah levy #susan sontag #peanuts #perhaps that’s the way with music what’s the point if it doesn’t hurt

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mostlysignssomeportents · 8 months

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Naomi Klein's "Doppelganger"

Tomorrow (September 6) at 7pm, I'll be hosting Naomi Klein at the LA Public Library for the launch of Doppelganger.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

If the Naomi be Klein you’re doing just fine If the Naomi be Wolf Oh, buddy. Ooooof.

I learned this rhyme in Doppelganger, Naomi Klein's indescribable semi-memoir that is (more or less) about the way that people confuse her with Naomi Wolf, and how that fact has taken on a new urgency as Wolf descended into conspiratorial politics, becoming a far-right darling and frequent Steve Bannon guest:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374610326/doppelganger

This is a very odd book. It is also a very, very good book. The premise – exploring the two Naomis' divergence – is a surprisingly sturdy scaffold for an ambitious, wide-ranging exploration of this very frightening moment of polycrisis and systemic failure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCjcwVhFhTA

Wolf once had a cluster of superficial political and personal similarities to Klein: a feminist author of real literary ability, a Jewish woman, and, of course, a Naomi. Klein grew accustomed to being mistaken for Wolf, but never fully comfortable. Wolf's politics were always more Sheryl Sandberg than bell hooks (or Emma Goldman). While Klein talked about capitalism and class and solidarity, Wolf wanted to "empower" individual women to thrive in a market system that would always produce millions of losers for every winner.

Fundamentally: Klein is a leftist, Wolf was a liberal. The classic leftist distinction goes: leftists want to abolish a system where 150 white men run the world; liberals want to replace half of those 150 with women, queers and people of color.

The past forty years have seen the rise and rise of a right wing politics that started out extreme (think of Reagan and Thatcher's support for Pinochet's death-squads) and only got worse. Liberals and leftists forged an uneasy alliance, with liberals in the lead (literally, in Canada, where today, Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party governs in partnership with the nominally left NDP).

But whenever real leftist transformation was possible, liberals threw in with conservatives: think of the smearing and defenestration of Corbyn by Labour's right, or of the LibDems coalition with David Cameron's Tories, or of the Democrats' dirty tricks to keep Bernie from appearing on the national ballot.

Lacking any kind of transformational agenda, the liberal answer to capitalism's problems always comes down to minor tweaks ("making sure half of our rulers are women, queers and people of color") rather than meaningful, structural shifts. This leaves liberals in the increasingly absurd position of defending the indefensible: insisting that the FDA shouldn't be questioned despite its ghastly failures during the opioid epidemic; claiming that the voting machine companies whose defective products have been the source of increasingly urgent technical criticism are without flaw; embracing the "intelligence community" as the guardians of the best version of America; cheerleading for deindustrialization while telling the workers it harmed with "learn to code"; demanding more intervention in speech by our monopolistic tech companies; and so on.

It's not like leftists ever stopped talking about the importance of transformation and not just reform. But as the junior partners in the progressive coalition, leftists have been drowned out by liberal reformers. In most of the world, if you are worried about falling wages, corporate capture of government, and scientific failures due to weak regulators, the "progressive" answer was to tell you it was all in your head, that you were an unhinged conspiratorialist:

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point-3434d7cbfae2

For Klein, it's this failure that the faux-populist right has exploited, redirecting legitimate anger and fear into racist, xenophobic, homophobic, sexist and transphobic rage. The deep-pocketed backers of the conservative movement didn't just find a method to get turkeys to vote for Christmas – progressives created the conditions that made that method possible.

If progressives answer pregnant peoples' concerns about vaccine risks – concerns rooted in the absolute failure of prenatal care – with dismissals, while conservatives accept those concerns and funnel them into conspiratorialism, then progressives' message becomes, "We are the movement of keeping things as they are," while conservatives become the movement of "things have to change." Think here of the 2016 liberal slogan, "America was already great," as an answer to the faux-populist rallying cry, "Make America great again."

When liberals get to define what it means to be "progressive," the fundamental, systemic critique is swept away. Conservatives – conservatives! – get to claim the revolutionary mantle, to insist that they alone are interested in root-and-branch transformation of society.

Like the two Naomis, conservatives and progressives become warped mirrors of one another. The progressive campaign for bodily autonomy is co-opted to be the foundation of the anti-vax movement. This is the mirror world, where concerns about real children – in border detention, or living in poverty in America – are reflected back as warped fever-swamp hallucinations about kids in imaginary pizza restaurant basements and Hollywood blood sacrifice rituals. The mirror world replaces RBG with Amy Coney-Barrett and calls it a victory for women. The mirror world defends workers by stoking xenophobic fears about immigrants.

But progressives let it happen. Progressives cede anti-surveillance to conservatives, defending reverse warrants when they're used to enumerate Jan 6 insurrectionists (nevermind that these warrants are mostly used to round up BLM demonstrators). Progressives cede suspicion of large corporations to conservatives, defending giant, exploitative, monopolistic corporations so long as they arouse conservative ire with some performative DEI key-jingling. Progressives defend the CIA and FBI when they're wrongfooting Trump, and voting machine vendors when they're turned into props for the Big Lie.

These issues are transformed in the mirror world: from grave concerns about real things, into unhinged conspiracies about imaginary things. Urgent environmental concerns are turned into a pretense to ban offshore wind turbines ("to protect the birds"). Worry about gender equality is transformed into seminars about women's representation in US drone-killing squads.

For Klein, the transformation of Wolf from liberal icon – Democratic Party consultant and Lean-In-type feminist icon – to rifle-toting Trumpling with a regular spot on the Steve Bannon Power Hour is an entrypoint to understanding the mirror world. How did so many hippie-granola yoga types turn into vicious eugenicists whose answer to "wear a mask to protect the immunocompromised" is "they should die"?

The PastelQ phenomenon – the holistic medicine and "clean eating" to QAnon pipeline – recalls the Nazi obsession with physical fitness, outdoor activities and "natural" living. The neoliberal transformation of health from a collective endeavor – dependent on environmental regulation, sanitation, and public medicine – into a private one, built entirely on "personal choices," leads inexorably to eugenics.

Once you start looking for the mirror world, you see it everywhere. AI chatbots are mirrors of experts, only instead of giving you informed opinions, they plagiarize sentence-fragments into statistically plausible paragraphs. Brands are the mirror-world version of quality, a symbol that isn't a mark of reliability, but a mark of a mark, a sign pointing at nothing. Your own brand – something we're increasingly expected to have – is the mirror world image of you.

The mirror world's overwhelming motif is "I know you are, but what am I?" As in, "Oh, you're a socialist? Well, you know that 'Nazi' stands for 'National Socialist, right?" (and inevitably, this comes from someone who obsesses over the 'Great Replacement' and considers themself a 'race realist').

This isn't serious politics, but it is seriously important. "Antisemitism is the socialism of fools," its obsession with "international bankers" the mirror-world version of the real and present danger from big finance and private equity wreckers. And, as Klein discusses with great nuance and power, the antisemitism discussion is eroded from both sides: both by antisemites, and by doctrinaire Zionists who insist that any criticism of Israel is always and ever antisemetic.

As a Jew in solidarity with Palestinians, I found this section of the book especially good – thoughtful and vigorous, pulling no punches and still capturing the discomfort aroused by this deliberately poisoned debate.

This thoughtful, vigorous prose and argumentation deserves its own special callout here: Klein has produced a first-rate literary work just as much as this is a superb philosophical and political tome. In this moment where the mirror world is exploding and the real world is contracting, this is an essential read.

I'll be Klein's interlocutor tomorrow night (Sept 6) at the LA launch for Doppelganger. We'll be appearing at 7PM at the @LAPublicLibrary:

https://lafl.org/ALOUD

Livestreaming at:

https://youtube.com/live/jIoAh-jxb2k

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/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

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arjunasearth · 2 months

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The older I get, the more I am learning from children.

I have been working with children as a caregiver for almost 14 years -practically for half of my life. They have always been a part of my life. They are the true healers because they continously teach me to reaccess my inner child energy. To be joyous towards life, no matter how hard it may get. To never stop playing or being foolish. To keep taking risks, being courageous and to go for adventures. To collect things in Nature and dance. To move, to shake my body out and to laugh, to cry,to feel my emotions on the full spectrum. To never lose hope and to keep my dreams big. To follow my intuition and to speak and act from the heartcenter. To cherish Nature and to dance to the rhythm of life. To get creative whenever I can and to never lose connection to my creative energy, which is the Source of my Being. They truly are healers. And I am so grateful for having them in my life, for their lessons , for their reminder to always realign with my inner child, to see her smile. To be there for her. To reparent myself. Cause I know that when she is smiling and truly happy, than I am , too.

~She is me and I am her.~

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darkxsoulzyx · 1 year

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GOD HOW DO YOU GUYS ANIMATE SO MUCH RAAAAAAAAAAH

Anyways have some cute lil gifs I spent so long making haha

#fnaf security breach #fnaf daycare attendant #fnaf sun #fnaf moon #fnaf fandom #GOD IVE BEEN SITTING HERE FOR LIKE AN HOUR #HOW YOU GUYS DOING FULL ANIMATICS #MY SPINE #I LITERALLY LAID DOWN AND IT REALIGNED #GUYS #THOSE OF YOU WHICH CAN ANIMATE. ORE THAN A FEW SECONDS #ARE GODS #GO SICKO OR SOEMRHING LMAOOOO #Anyways I wanna try making more animations in the future hehe

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noneedtofearorhope · 26 days

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ok, i just checked like, 40 or 60 years of records of full moon dates. we got a big one coming in 2026. it'll finally land on april first, april fools day. so it'll be a fool moon. get it?

#i wasnt even sure if it was possible #i know the leap year is meant to help realign the gregorian calendar #but i was too lazy to try and use reasoning to figure out if it was possible or to pick out the pattern #so instead i just brute forced it #was planning to check thru to 2060 lol

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sheltershock · 10 months

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I don’t know if anyone else has thought about it, but I think the first time Sasha and Milla met would have gone terribly. Because if you imagine what it’s like meeting them for the first then you think of both of their backgrounds? They would be afraid of each other.

A fire survivor paired up with someone who smells of (cigarette) smoke? With someone who smells like death?

Someone with complicated mother-related issues being paired with a cheerful, outwardly affectionate girl? With someone who’s calling everyone “dear, darling, sweetie, honey, baby”?

They could have that “love at first sight” trope where they meet for the first time and get butterflies in their stomach. But the butterflies are on fire, and screaming, and chewing through their skin because it’s trauma-induced anxiety.

And they smile through their teeth trying to get through the interaction. But then he gets her name wrong, and her heart skips a beat and she has to tuck a suddenly levitating piece of hair behind her ear and they find the other endearing to the point that they can’t bring each other to hold this pain against them. They both intimately understand it’s purely them, and not the other person’s fault.

And over time they spend more and more time together and those butterflies begin to still. Brutal, breath stealing smoke starts to feel more like a gentle hearth you’d crawl next to. Oppressive, maniacal smiles more closely resemble the small grin you’d have when you listen to a song for the first time you know you’ll play over and over again. And then one day neither one of them don’t feel any of that anxiety at all, and they start to realize after that feeling goes away that they might be in love with each other.

#psychonauts #psychonauts 2 #milla vodello #sasha nein #I guess it would be like emotional enemies to lovers?#I know the obvious of “Milla reminds Sasha of his mom”#but I don’t see much of “Milla would be able to immediately smell the cigarette smoke and instantly become uncomfortable or get triggered”#they’re honestly each other’s greatest fear personified #but I like the idea that they have an inverse of “love at first sight” and their love story would more closely be similar to-#-a “falling out of love” story where you lose your initial feelings #but their associations with their traumas get realigned with something positive(each other)#that personally feels really sweet to me #sashamilla #nearly forgot that tag

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