What I've Read in The Second Half of 2024

 Inner Gold - Robert Johnson

Inner Gold is an  exploration of the concept of psychological projection; where individuals attribute their own thoughts, feelings, and traits to others. Rather than use projection in a negative way, as it usually is in today’s discourse, Johnson talks about how we will project positive aspects of ourselves onto others that we ourselves are unable to handle. Johnson uses Jungian psychology to explain how recognizing and reclaiming these projected elements can lead to personal growth and deeper self-awareness. The book is pretty brief but deeply insightful; it makes complex psychological concepts accessible and practical for readers seeking self-improvement and a better understanding of their inner selves. I highly recommend this book out of everything I read over the past six months.

Earth To Moon - Moon Zappa

Moon’s memoir paints a whole new side of Frank Zappa that is missing from public perception and will change what his legacy is. Moon discusses growing up and how her father was largely absent between his touring and obsession with writing music, and her mother who was a full blown narcissist.

I grew up in a household EXACTLY like what is described in that book; one narcissist parent and one checked out parent while being the oldest child of three. I was told life's not fair when my parents were cruel, I was responsible for raising my siblings, taking care of my parents emotionally, and was shamed for not prioritizing anyone in the family before myself. It's uncanny how similar my experience is to what I read in this book. The twist is that I read Frank Zappa's autobiography multiple times as a teenager. I loved the chapter about him being a parent because he sounded so reasonable and down to earth. I wished that I lived in the household he described in that book. I guess Moon does too...

Something that stood out to me before reading this book is that Moon did an interview on Mark Maron’s podcast. Around the 1:01:13 timestamp Moon talks about this dipshit LA yoga anatomy class where they get cadavers donated to science so that they can pick up and handle the organs, and then immediately talk about going to Burning Man. After hearing about this yoga class I got unenrolled from being an organ donor in California.

Batman: White Knight - Sean Murphy

I made a mistake by reading this graphic novel / comic, the mistake being not to take reading recommendations from Reddit. Users there said that this series put the Batman / Joker dynamic on its head by making Batman the bad guy and the Joker the good guy. This really isn't the case and there wasn’t much in this series for me: the story is geared towards adolescents. I liked some of the art but a lot of the plot points felt like they were taken out of a scenario a  group of kids came up with while playing in their backyard. A major plot point is that there are giant transportation tunnels under Gotham City that no one know about even though an army of workers was brought in to make these giant tunnels. Bruce Wayne’s father is shown to have done business with the Nazis but Bruce is not aware of this probably because of how Batman could be portrayed. Black Lives Matters is portrayed as a media manipulation rather than a grassroots movement.

I would instead recommend The Dark Knight Returns, animated by Frank Miller which depicts a Bruce Wayne who is aging out of the Batman role or The Killing Joke.

Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser

I first read this book in high school, I borrowed it from a friend’s house after I saw it sitting on a bookcase in their basement, and I forgot how much of an impact this book had on me. The investigation around Colorado Springs helped me understand that while growing up in Springfield Massachusetts did kinda suck, there were plenty of other places in America that were a ‘whole lot worse; that the stroads with Mcdonalds, Wendy’s, and Taco Bell were strategically planned.

Fast Food Nation is still a really good book. While it tries to end on a high note, it hurts to think how much worse off the US is when it comes to health, labor, and the wealth of its working class people. While I came back to this book to remind myself why I need to curb some unhealthy eating habits that I picked up during lockdown, I was surprised at how much of a contemporary realistic American slice-of-life book this is. In terms of eating, I remember my takeaways from this book being that pink ground beef is such much more worse for you because almost all of the bacteria in the meat is introduced during the processing process and that one fast food hamburger can include the meat from a dozen to hundreds of different cows. It’s a beef slurry patty.

The finer details is that ecoli is caused by feces. When you get bad food poisoning because of eating undercooked beef, it’s because there is either shit in your meat, or the cows themselves were living in shit before they were slaughtered. When you get food poisoning from veggies, it's because the vegetables grew downstream from a meat processing plant, and absorbed ecoli from runoff water from the plant. The symptoms of poisoning from ecoli in adults can include shitting and pissing blood, and it’s even more dangerous for children. There is a sentence in the book that says “the spillage rate at the gut table can be twenty percent”. Meaning that when they remove the intestines from the cows in the slaughterhouse, the insides of the intestines spills out onto the carcasses of 1 out of 5 of the other cows.

Because of this book I tend to eat a lot more poultry and fish though I know that industrial farming for birds and fish are not great either. I try to buy all my beef farm-direct. I love hamburgers, but it’s hard to get someone to sometimes understand why I won’t eat it if it’s pink inside. In high school, after reading this book, I ate a hamburger from Texas Roadhouse and even though I ordered it medium, it was all pink inside and delicious. I figured that 1) Texas Roadhouse was probably quality and 2) I was too chickenshit to send it back and that first bite was so good. I got more sick than I’ve ever been from food again. I didn’t shit or piss blood but for years the thought of the smell of Texas roadhouse turned my stomach upside down, our family went back some time after and I just ate the rolls and peanuts. Years later I’m standing at Benders in San Francisco ordering food. I order a medium burger (the sign said local grass-fed beef, who knows for sure though) and the guy in an English accent says “why do you do that to yourself? We grind the meat ourselves”. I guess he knew what I was talking about, but I couldn’t roll the dice anymore than I already was by ordering ground beef.

The TB12 Method - Tom Brady

After having spent the last few years focusing on weight lifting instead of cardio, I was finding that despite going to yoga classes and stretching regularly before and after exercise, I was more stiff that usual. Reading this book helped me understand that by making my muscles more dense and big I had optimized my muscles in a way that really didn’t accomplish what I wanted to do when distance running. I can now see how Brady’s concept of pliability plays into orchestrating your body’s physical health and it’s something that I am still working into my daily workout routines.

This is a really great book for anyone who invests in their health and body. Granted some of the habits and advice given is likely more suited for an adolescent than an adult. Some suggestions were interesting: Brady advocates for a plant based fiber rich diet and that Brady recommends sleeping in “bio-ceramic” sleepwear (also called recovery wear) and says that he is trying to figure out how to wear it all the time.

There are some great recipes in this book as well as suggested resistance training exercises that you can do yourself. It’s mostly basic exercises with resistance bands. Practicing pliability fully requires working often with a trainer who is trained in it, which I think is out of reach for most people in terms of both cost and logistics.

Cult of The Dead Cow - Joseph Mann

Cult of The Dead Cow is a written history of the eponymous hacking group. I voraciously read a lot of the text files they had posted when I was a teenager and the book describing the CDC as a labyrinth is right on the nose. This book revealed that Beto O’rouke was a member of CDC, though he was more of a creative writer than a hacker. It also revealed that the federal government used the CDC remote access tool BackOriface in international operations.

Just like how the book It Came From Something Awful draws a straight line from Rich Kyanka creating Something Awful to Donald Trump getting elected president, this book draws a straight line from the Grateful Dead to the existence of this hacking group - whose members would go on to proliferate in just about every major tech company. The member Mudge is now the CIO of DARPA. One member contributed heavily to Windows XP Service Pack 2 (maybe in 2024 that doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it was at the time. Windows XP was an awful product before SP2). The group's name may sound funny, but their existence has more than one fingerprint on the lives of anyone who has ever accessed the Internet. Funnily enough, you could consider this book a prequel to both It Came From Something Awful and Mindfuck.

WizzyWig - Ed Piskor

The titular character, as well as the story in general, is a composite of hackers throughout computer history. I would recommend reading Accidental Empires, or The Art of Deception instead of this. I had read the first volume of this comic when Boing Boing posted about it sometime in the early 2010s. I was looking forward to reading the remaining volumes of this comic when they came out, but I never got around to them when they eventually came out as life caught up with me.

With the recent news of Ed Piskor killing himself after being accused of sexual misconduct, I figured I might as well put a pin in this series as I was interested to see the direction the story went. The story in the book exaggerates injustices against real life hacker Kevin Mitnick that don’t need to be embellished. The only humor in the book is really just being crude for the sake of being crude. I don’t really find floppy dicks compelling, especially if they don’t have any relation to the story. If you’re interested in learning about hackers I would recommend just sticking to primary sources, there’s plenty of talks that Mitnick himself gave and plenty of recordings of the Off The Wall radio program out there. There’s nothing new or interesting in this book unfortunately.

Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson

As a cyberpunk book, Snow Crash does what Neuromancer did when it came to predicting the direction of computer technology is/was heading, but in a more contemporary way than Neuromancer. The book at times is a little too edgy, the way that Stephenson writes a teenage female protagonist in the face of the threat of sexual assault is cringe. However, I genuinely think that Snow Crash is a seminal work that defines and influenced the way we think about the internet and virtual reality today. The way that Stephenson weaves Sumerian history and lore into the story offers insight into bronze age influence on language, philosophy, and our myths that exist today without the usual interference of Abrahamic religions.

The Parable of The Sower - Olivia Butler

I read this book after Snow Crash, I had mentioned to a coworker that I was so surprised at how well Neuromancer and Snow Crash predicted the current state and direction of computer technology; I wanted to find an even more recent cyberpunk book that would continue to do the same thing. He recommended this book… The Parable of The Sower is not that book. After the first 100 pages, I was of the mind that The Parable of The Sower is post apocalyptic young adult fiction for the children of people who donate to NPR. I was getting the impression that the book was very derivative; it wasn’t until I looked at the publishing page of this book and saw that it was written in 1993. The reality of the situation is that this book was ahead of its time and all post-apocalyptic fiction after it has borrowed from it either directly or indirectly. As a result I would put this book at the top of my post-apocalyptic fiction recommendations, over Alas Babylon and The Road.