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unsettlement.bsky.social
Jason
@unsettlement.bsky.social
200 followers 180 following 150 posts
Recovering Academic.
Looking for virtuous signal in a world of vicious noise.
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unsettlement.bsky.social
NB: currently free if one is an Audible+ subscriber.

[I keep considering switching wholly or partly to Libro.fm, but these free-to-subscribers offers do keep holding me…]
March 12, 2025 at 5:48 AM
unsettlement.bsky.social
I’m the kind of coffee purist who doesn’t normally take sugar; but stopping to enjoy surprise nectar keeps me umbel.
Closeup of a hand with finger brushing the overhanging umbel (flower cluster) of a potted hoya. The flowers are pink-white, with dark crimson centres holding globules of dark crimson nectar, a few drops of which dot the finger. Hoya flowers strapped to security bars on a kitchen window (in a part of the world where the bars are normal) are saluted in the foreground by a flat white with a dusting of cinnamon like a negative print of the Milky Way across the sky. The pink leaves of a pink princess aglaonema are visible to the left of the background, the bright background sunlight shining through them.
March 9, 2025 at 6:23 AM
unsettlement.bsky.social
Little triptych of how South African pols have responded to Trump’s pining for the Volk.
President notes that no land has been expropriated (technically correct); guy who no longer has a shot even at being the official opposition insists he’ll expropriate even harder now; white farmer mouthpiece…
Headline from “The Citizen” reads “Ramaphosa Responds to Trump, says SA has ‘not confiscated any land’.” Accompanied by picture of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in front of South African flag. Headline from The Citizen reads “‘We will expropriate land and Trump’s threats won’t stop us’ - Malema,” accompanied by a pic of Julius Malema, leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters, in red beret in front of red background. [Absent: the rest of the EFF leadership, who defected from the Sankarist/Leftist party to join the authoritarian-anti-constitutionalist MK party.] Headline from The Citizen, reads “Trump must punish Senior ANC leaders, not ordinary citizens, says…” The text fades to ellipses before we can learn who said it. It is unclear whether the picture of a frustrated man begging to be understood in context is related to the headline, or some unrelated advertisement for marital counselling.
February 3, 2025 at 4:11 PM
unsettlement.bsky.social
“it’s knocking over fences, crossing property lines, four winds levelling the pines.”

But then I get to enjoy my effort, and end on Hundreds of Ways.
Because “there are hundreds of ways to get through the day. You just find one.”
In the foreground, a pair of flat white coffee in cappuccino cups and saucers on a wooden counter, with a French press of recently frothed milk behind them.
January 22, 2025 at 4:58 AM
unsettlement.bsky.social
Storm knocked out the power overnight, but I’m South African, so my morning coffee making has built in contingencies…

The rainy morning Connor Oberst playlist in my head starts with Landlocked Blues, because “The future hangs over our heads, and it moves with each current event. Till it falls all…
In low light, a Bialetti moka pot and milk frothing pitcher sit side by side on top of a metal camp cooking plate on a butane cannister gas stove. A thermometer in the milk pitcher is about 5 degrees short of a printed green zone marking 60-70 degrees C.
January 22, 2025 at 4:58 AM
unsettlement.bsky.social
From love-as-vulnerability, to experiencing being a car as body euphoria, to the risk of hope under autocracy, it was heartbreakingly beautiful.

Bummer that the Audible edition doesn’t include the listed introduction by Jo Walton though.
Screenshot of opening chapters menu from the Audible edition of Cameron Reed’s “The Fortunate Fall.” It begins with “Opening Credits” and then lists the first six chapters under Section 1 “Virtual or Immediate Touch,” but does not list an introduction by Jo Walton to the 2024 edition.
January 7, 2025 at 8:10 PM
unsettlement.bsky.social
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you.
One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.
No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
Day 3
💙📚
#booksky
#books
Somewhat scuff-cornered cover of “I, Lucifer” by Glen Duncan. Against an all red background, the central image is the silhouette of a man walking away. Below him, as though reflected by mirrored surface or cast as a shadow, his inverted silhouette has horns, a barbed tail, and a shaggier outline. The author name and title “I, Lucifer” bisect the silhouettes in a font whose dotted I’s (even the uppercase is dotted) resemble morning stars. Along the top is a tagline: “Finally, the other side of the story.” Along the bottom, the blurb excerpt by Stella Duffy reads “Lucifer is charming and sexy and very very funny. Glen Duncan knows way too much and says it far too well. I fear for his soul.”
November 28, 2024 at 9:06 PM
unsettlement.bsky.social
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you.
One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.
No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
Day 2
💙📚
#booksky
#books
Square cover indicating an audiobook cover. Cover image is of a looks up through the stalks of a corn field to a sky distorted into pink, purple, and green waves. This blurring and distortion of the mage suggests the effect of stretched videotape. Title reads “Universal Harvester” “A Novel” by John Darnielle. Smaller type reads “Author of Wolf in White Van” and “Read by the Author.”
November 27, 2024 at 8:51 AM
unsettlement.bsky.social
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you.
One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.
No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
Day 1
💙📚
#booksky
#books
Photograph of the slightly worn cover of Ian McDonald’s “Desolation Road.” The cover art by Mark Harrison features a man in a white shirt leaning on a tree on a hill in an oasis, all offset to the left of the foreground to frame the view downhill. In the middle distance a mess with windows carved into it and various antennae attached overlooks green farmland and train tracks with passing train below, and beyond Martian dunes and mesas, and a pair of round moons in the pink daytime sky. The cover text also states that this is a Signature Special Edition with new foreword by the author, and that it is by the author of “King of Morning, Queen of Day.”
November 26, 2024 at 1:42 PM
unsettlement.bsky.social
Quick pet peeve.
I utterly hate when people use the term “intergalactic” interchangeably with “space stuff.”
It means *encompassing more than one galaxy* FFS.

I haven’t read “Orbital yet, but I gather it takes place on the ISS, orbiting [foreshadowing] the earth.

💙 📚
Text from article on Booker prize winners. Highlighted bit reads “The fact that Samantha Harvey’s Orbital is an intergalactic story set on a space station, for instance…”
November 21, 2024 at 9:15 AM
unsettlement.bsky.social
My mind is a screensaver logo bouncing between these right now.
Screenshot of 4 ebook covers in a 2x2 grid. Titles are: “Wrong: how media, politics, and identity drive our appetite for Misinformation” by Danagal Goldthwaite Young; “Fearing Together: Ethics for Insecurity” by Ami Harbin; “Grandstanding: the use and abuse of moral talk” by Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke; and “Fighting Misinformation: Digital Media Literacy [Great Courses Guidebook]” by Tara Susman-Peña, Mehri Druckman and Nina Oduro.
November 21, 2024 at 5:56 AM
unsettlement.bsky.social
See you and raise you.
(Other was, in fact, for my wife.)
November 20, 2024 at 7:44 AM
unsettlement.bsky.social
Just finished Helen Phillips’ “Hum.”

Great fiction companion to the non-fiction reading I’ve been doing to get a grip on [gestures vaguely] everything.

Excellent embodiment of the anxieties of surrendering (via blurry ToS) privacy and control to omnipresent technocracy.
Tentatively resilient.
💙 📚
List of Audible titles in personal library, column marked “Finished”, with covers and author names. From top to bottom, they are: “Hum” by Helen Phillips, “Wrong” by Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, and “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible” by Peter Pomerantsev.
November 20, 2024 at 7:29 AM
unsettlement.bsky.social
I refuse to join Bluesky - I don’t want to become part of some kind of ristretto chamber.
Three, increasingly shorter, ristretto espresso shots.
November 17, 2024 at 5:28 AM
unsettlement.bsky.social
How it started…
November 14, 2024 at 3:26 PM
unsettlement.bsky.social
I’ll be honest, the euphoric buzz of re-engaging with a platform of like-minded people started wearing thin this morning, as I faced a feed of people as morally shocked and worried as I am.

So this unremembered surprise I set for myself is a welcome source of cheer…
November 12, 2024 at 8:59 AM