Dienw Neb

@bareroot.bsky.social

15228 Followers 5254 Following

Writer of odd books https://noshelterbooks.com/ Reposting & posting unpolished thoughts as I work on my current project.

Image shows a square-cropped cover of the book, null Pro Edition.
The cover of spirals?, some gold spirals on a black background with the subheading "Collected short writings of Dienw Neb". The title "spirals" is stylised with a question mark, as though the word itself is question.
An edited Tom Gauld cartoon where one man demonstrates to another where the joke went.
It's a photo of hotpot.
A book cover. In the top left, the uncapitalised heading is 'spirals', with a question mark. A subheading in the bottom right says, 'Collected short writings of Dienw Neb'. The visuals of the cover are a black background superimposed with a number of gold circles, regularly offset to give an illusion of spirals.
Sales figures breaking down how many copies of which edition and format have been sold. They're not interesting to you.
Black and white still of Nastassja Kinski in Cat People
A close-up of wet tarmac, the tar visibly worn away by impact of water.
A screenshot of "Customers who bought this item also bought..." featuring John Scalzo and qntm.
A thick stack of printed paper stapled together in bunches. The text on the pages is sporadically marked with notes in red pen.
A pair of guillemots (birds).
A thick stack of printer paper stapled together in smaller chunks.
Zia Yusuf tweets: Today we announce a new policy: ︀︀ ︀︀In order to deport all illegal migrants in Britain, Reform will need to detain tens of thousands at a time. ︀︀ ︀︀Migrants will not be able to leave these detention centres, and each will be held there a couple of weeks before being deported. ︀︀ ︀︀So here’s our promise: ︀︀ ︀︀A Reform government will not put any migrant detention facilities in any constituency with a Reform MP. ︀︀ ︀︀Nor will we put them where Reform controls the council. ︀︀ ︀︀And of the remaining areas, we will prioritise Green controlled parliamentary constituencies and Green controlled councils to locate the detention centres. ︀︀ ︀︀Put simply, if you vote in a Reform council or Reform MP, we guarantee you won’t have a detention centre near you. ︀︀ ︀︀If you vote Green, there’s a good chance you will. ︀︀ ︀︀This is an important exercise in democratic consent, not just for our mass deportation policy,…
A cat sitting in the sun right in the middle of my goddamn work desk.
Five text file icons. Totally pointless image.
A partially-inked stippling image of many small mammal skulls.
Google map showing the environs of Girvan Cove. Areas marked are 'Sawney Beane's cave' and 'Snib's Cave (Not Sawney Beans)'
A seedling tray of 15 sprouting acorns is striated by beams of light from the window.
Photo of a mechanical pencil resting on sketchbook with some vague doodles and an ink drawing of a vole holding a safety lamp.
A POV photo of a text document open on a distant laptop balanced on knees. The keyboard is inaccessible due to a large sleeping ginger cat in the foreground.
Photo of a printed page from a book, it reads "null_ No. I don’t think Jane was an alien. Well, maybe. That’s not what I’m trying to say. I can’t claim her not to be intelligent on the basis of failing a Turing Test any more than someone unfamiliar with computers can reasonably claim any sort of recognisable language output as being a sign of intelligence. It might print out “Hello world!” but that isn’t proof of conscious intelligence. They just don’t know any better. Jane isn’t a robot, she’s just foreign. She’d say the same about me. Although she’d probably phrase it quite differently."
A photo of live sea urchins - they are covered in outward pointing spines
A scribbled illustration of what is likely Steerpike, a character from Titus Groan. The same face is shown in profile and at an angle, sallow, thin and inexpressive.
Image shows a selection of poorly-drawn field voles wearing long peasant dresses.
I'm sure you can extrapolate from context what this image shows. The 'Local authors' shelves of a bookshop. null is facing out, which is nice to see.
Spider Jerusalem, journalist antihero of the Transmetropolitan graphic novel series, looks at his laptop.
Pencil sketch of The Grabbler
Lost in a square of white space, a simple drawing of an anthropomorphic vole wearing something like a medieval peasant's dress runs from left to right.
An image of the Remembrance Day poppy overlaid onto the classic "Antifascist Action" circle logo.
A useless degree-of-relation chart
A screenshot of a four paragraph, three star review. Text content follows: Principals follows Agati and Jun-Fi, best friends who find themselves plucked from their home in a war torn, post-apocalyptic city full of poverty and tossed into the world of training to become idols. Sounds glamorous, right? I mean just days of Singing, dancing, obeying orders, starving and receiving beatings whenever they are not perfect. Not so glamorous. Outside their walls, a revolution is stirring. What could go wrong? The secondary plot line in this story is Johan, an incredibly self-centered song writer who has been very privileged and as such could not imagine the government or the police treating anyone unfairly, let alone him. He is a law-abiding citizen, after all. He is summoned to another city to receive an award and in spite of warnings from his daughter and ex wife, he decides to go anyway. His plans aren’t the only thing that starts to unravel as his beliefs and his very life are threatened again and again. I think this is a debut novel for this author or perhaps one of only a couple and overall, it was well done. I enjoyed the writing and the concepts. The story felt very real too given the state of the world at the moment. She kind of lost me in the last third of the story a bit though. It started to feel disjointed as the story ramped up and maybe that was the author’s intent but it was frustrating to me as a reader. I felt the ending was too abrupt and left many questions unanswered. Things also didn’t really tie together like I had hoped they would. I think standard chapter breaks would have helped me out immensely too. The best parts in my opinion were the short bursts of perspective from operatives in the resistance, I would have liked more of those to give the reader a bigger picture perspective on this world throughout. Overall a very creative idea that just needed a bit more finessing in the last 75 pages for me to feel like it worked well.
A pile of A4 sheets of paper with the text mosaic-censored to be illegible.
A crudely drawn, 4-panel comic. We see an angry or determined bald, shirtless man using some sort of gym equipment that involves having your arms wide out then pulling forward to bring them together in front of you to exercise the arms and chest muscles. In the final panel the man has a thought bubble: "I'm gonna be so good at huggin'"
Principals is a striking dystopian novel set in Ibban, a Korea-like country where poverty is brutal and survival is precarious. The story follows Jűn-Fi and Agati, two girls pulled into a government-run idol school that promises glamour but quickly reveals itself as little more than exploitation. It’s a smart and original twist on the genre: using the entertainment industry—modeled after K-pop—as a tool of oppression, while also critiquing the very real conditions faced by idols today. The novel shines most once the girls arrive at the school. The tension is relentless, the world-building immersive, and the stakes heartbreakingly high. It’s grim but never gratuitous, and the characters are easy to root for. I did find a few elements less effective. The chapter introductions, while reminiscent of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, were overly long and slowed the pace. The subplot involving Johan, a European songwriter, felt distracting and underdeveloped compared to the compelling arc of the girls. Despite these drawbacks, Principals is a powerful, unsettling, and deeply engaging read. I’d recommend it to fans of dystopian fiction who appreciate social critique woven into an emotionally gripping story.
Detail of a painting showing two shadowy, clothed squirrels with beady eyes on a steep, mossy cliffside.
Zack Fox tweets: This is how the photos be lookin in headlines when a white man kills his entire family. There is a photo of a man and his family all wearing sunglasses, smiling and riding a jetski.
A photograph of a cactus that looks like Juniper.
The void left on the courthouse wall where Banksy's painting has been removed, partially obscured by a splash of orange paint.
The same scene from another angle showing two women holding glasses of pink goop, with four hands between them as might be expected of humans.
A roughly carved statue imitative of the Buddha or some other SEA figure of veneration stands, dappled and mossy, in a broadleaf woody glade.
Book cover of "The Secret" by Rhonda Byrne
The mouth of a shady, fern-lined lane. The entry is marked by a small (four foot, or so), moss-and-ivy-ensconsed standing stone marked with a plaque that reads "Please close the gate". Some distance away from the posts the gate is laid, attached to nothing and partially covered by foliage, on the verge.
A spam email from "Aurora Harrington" addressed to a C. Buck.
A screenshot of the "Litnuts" website advertising "Typerwriter in the Sky" by L. Ron Hubbard, and "L. Ron Hubbard presents: Writers of the Future vol 41" above two other books and Principals.
A static ad for the book Principals by Dienw Neb. It shows the front cover, headed with the text "1984 was a warning, not a manual... Principals is different" and underwritten with "I cannot describe just how much I loved it" (available at amazon.co.uk)
A stack of copies of Principals and null, alternating to show how the titles all line up neatly.
Photo showing the Foreward and Contents of Principals' 2nd Edition
Photograph of the front cover and spine of Principals 2nd Edition at a slant angle.
Cover of Principals, second edition. A masked military figure looms over two young Asian women wearing orange bandannas. Behind them is a cityscape aflame.
Cover of "The Monkey Wrench Gang" by Edward Abbey, unknown Edition showing an illustration of the "bones" of a bulldozer, as though it was a living thing, decomposing into dry red sand.
Cover of "The Monkey Wrench Gang" by Edward Abbey, 10th Anniversary Edition with illustrations by Robert Crumb.
Cover of "The Monkey Wrench Gang" by Edward Abbey, First (?) Edition
Image shows the front and rear cover of novel titled "null". In the corner of the cover is a red tag denoting that this is the "Pro Edition". There is also a yellow rubber duck with an Ancient Egyptian Monarch's head dress in the photo.
Front and rear cover of the book "null". It shows a light blue glowing clade diagram against a black background, with a red tab in the corner proclaiming it as the "Pro edition".
An image of Batboy, via Weekly World News. He is a terrible photomanipulation with his mouth wide open.
"I have a confession - " "This isn't working." "What?" "This isn't working. This is the third time we've tried to organise something in as many weeks and all we've done is argue about the process of organising it." "What, like you're doing right now?" "Yes. Instead of talking about process can't we just discuss what actions we should actually take?" Shishal looks indignant, muttering and aggressively twiddling his thumbs. "You all just shoot down my ideas." "Your ideas would get us killed. Or worse." "So you just dismiss me out of hand?" "This is exactly why we need to establish our rules of discussion first." "But that's all we ever do" "We'd be done by now if you didn't keep interrupting to complain about it." "We'd be done by now if we just got on with making plans instead of planning to plan." "So you agree with Shishal's plan? He's the only one who's suggested anything." Agati sighs. "I wanted to suggest - " "No, we obviously shouldn't do Shishal's plan - " "I agree but how is it fair if we don't establish a way to consider all the suggestions equally?" "At this point it's the only thing we have given thought to." "So stop stalling us." "Fine. What do you suggest we do?" "I'm facilitating the meeting. You're the ones who need to be suggesting things." "We're all supposed to be suggesting things." "So get on with it. Unless you want to leave?" "You can't kick me out, you're not the leader."
Review reads "5 stars. What cipher should you use to decode this? PKD-esque cyberpunk multistory interwoven like IRC chat. Is one embedded in the other in the next in the first? I don't know! But, I liked it!"