Ever feel like you're not enough? Like you have to be perfect to be loved and accepted? In Beautify Imperfection, we throw those ideas out the window! This book is a warm invitation to embrace your true, perfectly imperfect self. Inside, we'll explore the masks we wear to hide our true selves and the fear that keeps us from being authentic. We'll dive deep into the power of vulnerability and how our so-called "flaws" are actually unique gifts that make us stronger and more resilient. Think of it as a guide to uncovering the beauty hidden within each of us, the beauty that shines through when we dare to be ourselves. Through insightful stories, practical exercises, and a sprinkle of ancient wisdom (like the Japanese art of Kintsugi!), you'll learn to: Silence your inner critic and cultivate self-compassion. Transform your relationship with vulnerability. Find strength and resilience in your life experiences. Unleash your creativity by embracing limitations. Discover the true meaning of self-love and acceptance. This isn't just another self-help book that gathers dust on your shelf. Beautify Imperfection is a heartfelt conversation, a journey of self-discovery that will empower you to shed the weight of perfectionism and embrace the beautiful, messy, perfectly imperfect you. It's about finding freedom in authenticity and realizing that true beauty lies not in flawlessness, but in wholeness.

When witnesses to a mass murder start dying, breast cancer survivor Teddy Federline must push aside her anger and trust an ex-boyfriend to ensure she lives long enough to testify against the killer.Detective Sloan Michaels still has deep feelings for Teddy but realizes that after the way he left her years ago, he has a lot of making up to do. Now, he must keep his focus on the case and off the woman he loves. If Sloan doesn't keep Teddy safe, he'll never get a second chance.

In praise of imperfection: how life on our planet is a catalog of imperfections, errors, alternatives, and anomalies. In the beginning, there was imperfection, which became the source of all things. Anomalies and asymmetries caused planets to take shape from the bubbling void and sent light into darkness. Life on earth is a catalog of accidents, alternatives, and errors that turned out to work quite well. In this book, Telmo Pievani shows that life on our planet has flourished and survived not because of its perfection but despite (and perhaps because of) its imperfection. He begins his story with the disruption-filled birth of the universe and proceeds through the random DNA copying errors that fuel evolution, the transformations of advantages into handicaps by natural selection, the anatomical and functional jumble that is the human brain, and our many bodily mismatches. Along the way, Pievani tells readers about the Irish elk (incidentally, neither Irish nor elk), whose enormous antlers serve to illustrate the first two laws of imperfection; the widespread dissemination of costly or useless traits; and the neuroimperfection of the human brain—“a frozen accident of evolution that was not designed from scratch,” as Pievani calls it. He sizes up the alleged perfection of the human body, asking, for example, if everything in our bodies serves a purpose, why do we have appendixes? Why bipedalism, with the inevitable back pain that results? In this fascinating account, Pievani offers the first comprehensive explanatory theory for the ubiquity of imperfection.

Her husband died in a plane crash on Mount Blanc. It was a tragic accident. These are the simple facts. Except someone’s not telling the truth . . . After nine months of sorrow and grief, Junie Lagarde – a brilliant forensic accountant and passionate guitarist – is gradually accepting life without her beloved husband Olivier, a French safety consultant and climate-change expert, whom she lost in a tragic plane accident over Mont Blanc. If only she could have found her loyal hearing-dog Leo, who ran off in the terrifying aftermath of the crash, before she had to return home to America. But then Junie receives an unexpected call from France . . . Capitaine Philippe Brevard, the man in charge of investigating Olivier’s death, has seen recent CCTV footage which shows Leo being held by a man who closely resembles Olivier . . . right down to his distinctive jacket. It’s not Olivier. It can’t be . . . can it? But who is the man – and what else is Capitaine Brevard hiding from her? Junie knows she must go to Chamonix, rescue her dog, and uncover the truth . . . but there are those who mean her harm, and soon Junie’s learning dangerous secrets. Secrets that will shake her faith in her closest friends and put more than just her own life in the gravest of danger. The Beautiful Risk is an intelligent, thought-provoking standalone thriller from internationally bestselling author Lynn Hightower. It’s a story of grief, of a dangerous mountain with a dark history, of corruption and greed, of ecoterrorism . . . and of a vulnerable woman with hearing loss, an injured dog and a broken heart, who’ll stop at nothing to uncover the truth.

In Inspired Imperfection, Gregory A. Boyd adds another counterintuitive and provocative thesis to his corpus. While conservative scholars and pastors have struggled for years to show that the Bible is without errors, Boyd considers this a fool's errand. Instead, he says, we should embrace the mistakes and contradictions in Scripture, for they show that God chose to use fallible humans to communicate timeless truths. Just as God ultimately came to save humanity in the form of a human, God chose to impart truth through the imperfect medium of human writing. Instead of the Bible's imperfections being a reason to attack its veracity, these "problems" actually support the trustworthiness of Christian Scripture. Inspired Imperfection is required reading for anyone who's questioned the Bible because of its contradictions.

A breathtaking, exquisitely crafted memoir about a trans person’s singular journey through breaching the boundaries of gender—across generations, cultures and borders—to become his truest, most authentic self. Nearing the age of forty, with an entire life already lived as a woman—half in Colombia, half in the US—Miles Borrero comes face to face with his father’s impending death. Suddenly realizing that he has been stalling his transition for fear of losing his family’s love, this moment catalyzes Miles’s determination to be fully known as his father’s son before it is too late. In Beautiful Monster, Miles chronicles his unusual childhood, by turns riveting and hilarious, in ’80s and ’90s Colombia during the Pablo Escobar years, as well as his move to Salt Lake City to pursue acting and the winding trajectory that eventually lands him in the New York City yoga scene. Within these very different cultures, the realities of being queer and trans echo poignantly through the triumphs, heartbreaks, family dynamics, spiritual pursuits, and relationships that propel Miles along his path. Sublimely nuanced and written in ravishing prose that is as unique and irresistible as its subject, Beautiful Monster is one person’s story of navigating the pressures to perform femininity while becoming a gender outlaw. Brimming with wonder, humor, and mythos, entertaining and enlightening in equal measure, this book offers a compelling case for embracing one’s true nature.

What happens when communication breaks down? Is it the condition for mistakes and errors that is characteristic of digital culture? And if mistakes and errors have a certain power, what stands behind it? To address these questions, this collection assembles a range of cutting-edge philosophical, socio-political, art historical and media theoretical inquiries that address contemporary culture as a terrain of miscommunication. If the period since the industrial revolution can be thought of as marked by the realisation of the possibilities for global communication, in terms of the telephone, telegraph, television, and finally the internet, Miscommunications shows that to think about the contemporary historical moment, a new history and theory of these devices needs to be written, one which illustrates the emergence of the current cultures of miscommunication and the powers of the false. The essays in the book chart the new conditions for discourse in the 21st century and collectively show how studies of communication can be refigured when we focus on the capacity for errors, accidents, mistakes, malfunctions and both intentional and non-intentional miscommunications.

By the time she was eleven and living in the Soviet Union, Lee Kofman had undergone several major operations on both a defective heart and injuries sustained in a bus accident. Her body harbours a constellation of disfiguring scars that have shaped her sense of self and her view of the world. But it wasn't until she moved to Israel and later to Australia that she came to think these markings weren't badges of honour to flaunt but were, in fact, imperfections that needed to be hidden away. In a captivating mix of memoir and cultural critique, Kofman casts a questioning eye on the myths surrounding our conception of physical perfection and what it's like to live in a body that deviates from the norm. She reveals the subtle ways we are all influenced by the bodies we inhabit, whether our differences are pronounced or noticeable only to ourselves. She talks to people of all shapes, sizes and configurations and takes a hard look at the way media and culture tell us how bodies should and shouldn't be. Illuminating, confronting and deeply personal, Imperfect challenges us all to consider how we exist in the world and how our bodies shape the people we become.

Distortion in Music Production offers a range of valuable perspectives on how engineers and producers use distortion and colouration as production tools. Readers are provided with detailed and informed considerations on the use of non-linear signal processing, by authors working in a wide array of academic, creative, and professional contexts. Including comprehensive coverage of the process, as well as historical perspectives and future innovations, this book features interviews and contributions from academics and industry practitioners. Distortion in Music Production also explores ways in which music producers can implement the process in their work and how the effect can be used and abused through examination from technical, practical, and musicological perspectives. This text is one of the first to offer an extensive investigation of distortion in music production and constitutes essential reading for students and practitioners working in music production.