Category: Books

The Human Domestication Guide: Abscission

Abscission is a book-length story based in The Human Domestication Guide setting. I read this on the recommendation of a friend to see what the interest was because… Well, Abscission is basically a fan-fiction featuring dominate/subordinate and sadistic fetishes.

For someone with no interest in these fetishes, what is the draw? Abscission features a cast of characters with a variety of identities and disabilities. The transgender protagonist Autumn suffers from some sort of schizophrenia, severe anxiety, or paranoid delusions. Her lesbian girlfriend Dawn suffers from neurological disorders that impair her motor functions, memory, and consciousness. Autumn’s would-be murderer turned friend Qiru has autistic symptoms and identifies as a genderless robot rat. These characters have basically been adopted as pets by all-powerful plant aliens called the Affini, who have agreed to love them and take care of all their needs. The Affini have a directive to reduce suffering in the universe, and for humans that have proven to be a threat to themselves or others, adopting them as pets is required. The Affini use a lot of drugs to sooth their pets’ various fears and traumas but also genuinely love them. With their highly advanced technology, the Affini have produced an era of post-scarcity, meaning they and their pets often don’t need to worry about much but spending time with one another.

In other words, Abscission offers an escape for those who suffer from disabilities, mental disorders, or persecution for their identities. It contains a message that the reader doesn’t need to be more than themselves to be loved. The reader doesn’t need to fight through discomfort or disability to impress or prove their worth to anyone. The reader can dream of what it’s like to live in a world of post-scarcity and post-capitalism. Abscission also celebrates drugs not as tools to be used only as needed but as a method to become one’s true self and escape needless or unrealistic worries and despair. And there’s also a lot of dominate/subordinate fetishism for those who are into that sort of thing.

That said, Abscission is also an underdeveloped, minimally edited, and incomplete novel. Abscission is far from the worst such novel that I’ve read. Some manuscripts intended to become legitimate, published novels that I’ve beta read have bored or frustrated me into a rage, but Abscission held my interest by being equal parts entertaining, confusing, disgusting, and boring.

It does suffer from many common problems though. Plot holes are common. For having a directive to reduce suffering, the Affini do a lot of suffering on their own. Autumn’s Affini Solanum claims to have an important job but spends most of the book not doing it, leaving one to wonder who does any of the work around here, what compels them to do it, and how society doesn’t fall apart. Characters are inconsistent. Autumn is afraid of drugs and then wants all the drugs with little transition. Autumn is bored without Solanum to entertain her until she decides she has a history of studying alien languages. There is little conflict or problems for the characters to solve together. Most of the time, Autumn and her fellow pet friends have no life outside their Affini. Most of the book is indulgence in fetishes, drugs, alcohol, and trivial social gatherings. The writer often makes their own fantasies obvious with such nonsense as characters wearing a collar and cuffs by mandate; being casually tied up; experiencing sexual arousal through petting or submission to someone else’s will; or willingly undergoing surgery while awake. On one hand, Abscission tells the reader that they don’t need to be more than who they are to be loved, but on the other hand, it tells the reader to give up and let themselves be defined entirely by their illness, drug use, or niche identity.

Then again, Abscission perhaps couldn’t be the escape that it is if it didn’t contain some of these problems. A book lacking conflict isn’t commonly considered “good fiction.” A world of post-scarcity where everyone is accepted for who they are, problems can be efficiently solved, and people need not worry about who will care for them today or tomorrow, however, is the world that fans of Abscission, and The Human Domestication Guide in general, dream of.

There’s no excuse for the ending though (aside from it being self-indulgent fan fiction). The third to last chapter is mindless torture porn, which, really, the entire 155,000-word book had been building toward. The final two chapters, however, have nothing to do with each other nor anything to do with the rest of the book. In reaction to these final three chapters, I said out loud as I finished reading, “What? That’s insane!” Which might as well have been my reaction to the entire book. XD

Her Last Christmas

Similar to my thoughts on Silent Hill f–and really any story that features the protagonist’s loveless relationship with their significant other–Her Last Christmas by Claire McGowan made me wonder, “What is this lady even doing with this guy?” The protagonist Emma joins her boyfriend Michael and his fellow wealthy friends for Friendsmas in the Alps. Emma doesn’t know how to ski; Michael’s friends are unwelcoming, drunk, and high; and Michael, seeming to prefer his friends’ company, does little to nothing to help Emma feel comfortable.

In the end, I determined their relationship makes sense in a similar way that Hinako and Shu’s relationship makes sense in Silent Hill f. Her Last Christmas is told from Emma’s distorted, first-person perspective. She claims she doesn’t partake in excessive alcohol or drugs, she paints herself as a victim, and speaks somewhat demeaningly about the other characters’ relationships and careers. That is, she makes herself sound good to the reader, perhaps better than she is in reality. There must be a reason she attracted people like this, including Michael, into her life though. Indeed, the end of the book reveals that Emma is as willing to set her morals aside to protect her career as the other characters are to protect theirs. Emma choosing Michael, a popular politician, was likely motivated by her desire for status, wealth, and career advancement. While she decides to part ways with him, she still participates in covering up a murder.

A couple funny thoughts I had while reading…

Toward the end of the book, Emma runs into a snow storm without proper clothes in a fit of hysteria. She tells the reader repeatedly she knows this is a bad idea but doesn’t know what else to do. I thought to myself of the author, “I can hear you telling your beta readers that you know your protagonist is being an idiot.”

Emma: “[Michael’s] wife had accused him of domestic abuse, and women didn’t lie about that sort of thing.”
Me: Why did you give Ms. Heard muffins!?

Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

First of all, buying this book as an audiobook was a mistake. It’s a textbook with diagrams to look at, best absorbed through reading. Also, I work as a software engineering team lead. Spending my free time reading books about what I do for work everyday is a quick way to burn out.

That said, the information is interesting. It explains different patterns of structuring teams within an organization based on the organization of the code for the software the business supports and how these patterns ease development of the software. For example, a system for sending and receiving packages might be organized into two teams: one that handles everything about sending packages and one that handles everything about receiving packages. This allows developers to specialize in one area and communicate often with other specialists on their team rather than requiring all developers to know a lot about both areas. This reduction in cognitive load increases the speed and quality of development, reduces mistakes, and improves developer experience. The company I work for has been practicing these principles for the past year and a half. It works well, much better than the team structure we had before.

The book also made me feel like an imposter. It states that toxic team members need to be identified and removed for the health of the team. Individuals must put the team before themselves by, for example, being on time to meetings and helping team members to complete current work before starting new work. Me, I’m chronically late to meetings, I’m a rule bender and breaker, and I split my time between current and future work. I reason that I’m late to meetings when I don’t see the point of them, especially at 7:30am. Developers may have work now, but they won’t have enough or any if no one is figuring out what happens next. I’m a free-minded introvert operating the best I can in an extroverted world. And it’s been working pretty well. My team and I get a lot of work done.

Still, I’m a team lead. I’m supposed to be showing my developers how to behave professionally, even when I think nobody gives a crap about me or needs an announcement that I’m going to be at an appointment for the next hour. It’s very possible that I’m a toxic team member that makes team topologies fall apart.

The Nuremberg Trial

For being a 25-hour-long audiobook about post-World War II, The Nuremberg Trial by Ann Tusa and John Tusa was surprisingly interesting. My favorite section of the book, about the first third, was dedicated to explaining the many complications of executing a fair trial against 22 German military and political leaders. The first decision was who would judge the Germans. The Polish were ultimately excluded, leaving the trial to be overseen by French, English, American, and Russian judges. This required enough collaboration between the four nations, Germany, and their slightly differing views of fair judgement. The Russian view was the most troubling as it came with a preconception that the purpose of the trial was to exact punishment, not determine guilt. That Germans had knowledge that they were committing crimes against humanity throughout the war also had to be established for there to be grounds to even hold a trial. A location needed to be found for the trial to take place, somewhere with prison facilities to keep the defendants secure and comfortable accommodations for lawyers, judges, attendants, and viewers of the court proceedings. Germany was the most appropriate place, but much of it was war torn and destitute. After much reasoning with the Russians, who insisted the trial take place in Berlin, Nuremberg was chosen for its historical significance and for being fairly intact. Lawyers willing to defend the defendants needed to be provided. Food for everyone needed to be provided, of which American provisions were the best. Someone needed to pay for all this. The judges even had to decide such trivialities as what to wear. Wigs and dresses? Military uniforms? Black gowns? After all the previous decisions and coordination, it’s not surprising that they settled on wearing whatever they wanted.

The most interesting complication, however, was solving the language barrier. The trial was conducted in four languages: English, Russian, French, and German. All documents associated with the trial had to be translated into all four languages, which was more difficult to accomplish for some languages than others. For live court proceedings, the trial used IBM’s universal simultaneous translation system. The first time I heard this term, I thought the narrator was going to tell me about some Star Trek-esque futuristic device. In reality, everyone in the court room was provided a set of wired headphones. The listeners could switch between four channels, each connected to the microphone of a human translator for that language. The translators were seated in isolated compartments within the courtroom where they could hear the court proceedings but minimize the noise of each other’s translations. Judges, lawyers, defendants, and other speakers in the court room also had visibility to two lights. Yellow was an indicator from the translators to slow down. Red indicated to stop speaking to allow the translators to catch up. I thought it was an impressive use of technology for the time period but also adorable for its primitiveness.

After all the introduction, preparation, resolution of conflicts, and coordination leading up to and continuing throughout the trial, it’s amazing that this trial happened, and as fairly as it was, at all.

Pride and Prejudice (Lulu Raczka Adaptation)

If Pride and Prejudice took place in the modern day, so much drama would happen through text messages instead of letters. The characters spend so much time writing and talking about letters.

Also, the protagonist’s love interest Mr. Darcy made me feel very old fashioned when he justified his behavior to Elizabeth by writing a long and thoughtful letter rather than sitting her down and having a conversation. I have done this multiple times through emails, long messages, and even physical letters to try to resolve a conflict, voice a complaint, or tell someone something important. I also appreciated that Elizabeth took the time to read it and understand him even though she was angry. It pisses me off when I write a long message to someone, and they don’t bother to understand it or they reject it.

Overall, Pride and Prejudice features my kind of communication! I’ve never read the book (although I would like to now), but this audiobook/radio play adaptation was much better than the 1984 adaptation at least.

1984 (Joe White Adaptation)

Big Brother would approve of this audiobook/radio play adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984. 75% of the words have been replaced with heavy breathing and lip smacking.

On the subject of what content is there though… In some ways, 1984‘s world still parallels common conservative criticisms of modern socialist and big governments. The fictitious totalitarian superstate Oceania restricting language and spreading propaganda as facts, for example, eerily parallels real governments’ tendencies to emphasize certain views and suppress others.

Some of George Orwell’s other predictions for the future, however, haven’t aged as well. For example, the citizens of Oceania are encouraged to have children for the good of the Party. Having sex out of love or for pleasure is forbidden. In today’s reality, conservatives are more likely to complain that sex for pleasure, devoid of its biological purpose of procreation, is celebrated and used by governments to distract the first-world population from their replacement by third-world immigrants.

Red Letter Media gave another example of 1984 showing its age in the course of a somewhat relevant discussion about AI and dystopian futures. George Orwell imagined that, in the future, the government would place cameras everywhere to watch everyone. As the future has actually unfolded, today, almost everyone has a camera almost at all times, built into their smart phones at their own request. Everyone is watching everyone else, ready to record inappropriate behavior and use those recordings incite public ridicule or other life-destroying consequences. We did it to ourselves! We are our own Big Brother!

The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology

In The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology, Mark Boyle relates how he created a lifestyle without electricity, plumbing, and other technological commodities. To demonstrate the practicality of living this way to the reader, he builds the cabin he and his wife live in, an outhouse area, a garden, and interestingly, a natural hot tub powered by firewood, presumably on a piece of land he owns and has enough money to pay taxes on for at least the one year he wanted to experiment with living this way. He makes allowances for some technology like pencils and paper for writing but rejects other tools that would make his work easier in favor of more primitive tools or doing the work by hand. I can’t remember specific examples from the book, but as a generic example, rather than using a wheelbarrow to move stones, he would carry stones by hand. Seeming to contradict his purpose, he indirectly makes use of cars to hitchhike to visit his parents, the local pub to visit with his neighbors, and the modern mail service to send and receive letters.

I don’t think the point of the book was to strictly live without technology though. The author’s purpose was rather to connect himself more to nature and people. His selective use of technology seemed to be for the purpose of forwarding those goals. I related to his rejection of the Internet and phones the most. In our ability to connect with people around the world, we’ve forgotten about the people immediately surrounding us. The convenience of speaking to loves ones over the phone means, conflictingly, visiting them in person less. Despite their appearance of creating connections, these things have separated us from people by being too convenient, too far from our immediate reality, and too difficult to resist.

Ironically, the author’s wife left him toward the end of the book. I can’t say I’d want to live like this either. I don’t like living in reality. 😛 Although, I suppose the author also doesn’t like living in reality, the one where humans are naturally inclined toward progress and efficiency. Still, Boyle has some interesting perspectives nurtured by his enjoyment and sense of purpose in living this lifestyle.

The Year of Magical Thinking

Near the beginning of The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion promises that you will experience what she did in your lifetime. Specifically, she was referring to the feeling of disbelief following the death of someone dear. For example, following the sudden death of her husband, she described feeling that as long as she thought certain ways or didn’t acknowledge certain things, her husband would come back. She knew he was dead today but wondered, “What about tomorrow?” She saved her husband’s shoes with the thought that he would need them when he came back.

I can believe her promise and relate to her sentiment. Even five years later, it doesn’t seem real that I’ll never see my mom again. My cat Jiji passed away in June this year. I held on to a box of food I bought for her for months. I still have a baggy of her medications in a closet. These things are “special” in some way, a part of her, and can’t merely be thrown away.

A rant about smut and experimental writing

A friend recently recommended that I read stories from the Human Domestication Guide (HDG). This collection of stories takes place in a universe where Earth has been taken over by technologically advanced invaders. These invaders, however, have an imperative to reduce suffering, even if that means imprisoning a miserable person in order to take care of all their physical and mental needs. The stories are technically smut but 90% of their content examines disability, mental health, and gender expression.

It interests me partly because I like researching topics in mental health and gender expression. Additionally, at least some stories are written from the perspective of characters who desire to give someone else total control of their life. This ideology is the exact opposite of my own: everyone should have as much freedom to act as individuals as possible. A government-less society is the ideal… which is about as realistic as the society of post-scarcity, boundless resources, and total control depicted in the HDG. It interests me because I want to understand a perspective so different from my own.

I’m no stranger to picking through smut for other aspects of a story that interest me, but I’ve gotten rather annoyed with having to do so as evidenced by the following rant I gave my friend:

In regard to the Human Domestication Guide, is my fascination with experimental writing showing when I say I’m more interested in the methods the creators use to attempt to maintain coherence across thousands of stories and dozens of writers than I am in the stories themselves? At first I thought the Wiki (which I found first) was the HDG, but then, I found the collection of stories that actually compose it. If it had been the Wiki, that would have blown my mind. Non-linear writing is neat.

I’ve been slowly writing/adding to this “non-linear saga outline,” “digital garden,” thing: https://the-net-digital-garden.vercel.app/. Eventually, it will basically be a collection of my notes, backstories, character profiles, and other things that are too detailed or too irrelevant to put into any book I plan to write. They’re things I needed to flesh out to make the stories and characters that these notes support appear coherent (hopefully) though. At first I thought HDG was something similar that already existed.

I’ve imagined that some writer out there could find my notes and be inspired to write their own story within my universe. I don’t plan to flesh out six planets worth of things after all, just the parts that I need. There’s plenty of room for someone else to write within it… And then I think, “Someone is just going to use all these ideas as a backdrop for smut, aren’t they? I’ve certainly given them enough fuel to do that. -_-”

Smut has it’s place I suppose if it’s allowed HDG to grow as large as it has. It’s just annoying. HDG’s ideas sound interesting enough on their own without pandering to the reptile brain. It’s a plague within experimental writing, too. Even House of Leaves, a book objectively unique and interesting to look at without even reading it, has straight up porn in the middle of it.

I reread Vurt by Jeff Noon a few years ago and realized that it represents everything I dislike reading and everything I dislike about experimental writing. It’s a book about drugs and incest (and robo-dog-cop-vurt-human-shadow hybrids) and written from the perspective of a guy writing a book (that’s a different rant). Yet, I still loved the basic story, the characters, and the subtle experimentation with perspectives, which is what I remember most and remember liking a lot back in high school. I realized I’ve kind of spent the past twenty years trying to recreate what I liked so much about Jeff Noon’s writing but without all the smut.

400 Things Cops Know

I’ve been reading cop-related books lately for some writing research. Here’s a few relevant things I learned while reading 400 Things Cops Know by Adam Plantinga:

To kick open a door, kick it immediately beneath the knob.

Mediation Clinics offer mediators, often law students, to help resolve disputes between family members, tenants and landlords, neighbors, and other people outside of court. I had created a concept like this in a book I’m writing and was surprised that such a thing actually exists!

Cops don’t advertise that they’re cops outside of work because it attracts the attention of people who don’t like cops. This potentially puts the cop and/or their family and friends in danger.

Police are required to read someone their Miranda rights only after they are in custody, and they have begun interrogating them. They don’t have to tell them their rights immediately, contrary to what commonly happens on TV. What suspects say prior to being read their rights and interrogated can still be used in court.

The best TV show about cops is The Wire created by David Simon.

The best book about cops is Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon.