Futuristic Words

I already knew that our old lead instructors were the stuff of legends. Before I returned to Love Systems, I had shared many fond adventures with the rapscallions who were lead instructors when I was with the company before. Since I started working bootcamps again, I have been consistently impressed by the incredible people who [...]

I highly recommend going to the Playboy Mansion. It was a lot of fun. They have excellent crabcakes.

I have returned to Los Angeles. En route to my hotel, I was struck by how much I didn’t remember from when I lived here in 2006. The city sprawls, and every neighborhood takes on a new theme of people and landscape. I don’t see how I could not remember the deserted-looking oil derricks, but [...]

As I mentioned briefly yesterday, I swelled with geeky gamer pride when I saw an e-mail I sent to Tycho on the posted on their Penny Arcade front page. Sure, Gabe put the kibosh on any impression that they were defending or endorsing Love Systems, but I was really glad to have our voice heard as part of the debate. Non-gamers,  Penny Arcade is a comic strip that runs every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. For the most part the content is gaming-related, which means non-gamers tend to have a lot of trouble punching through the archive. For those who know, Penny Arcade obviously needs no introduction.  I’ve copied the body of the e-mail I sent Tycho because sometimes cool stuff from the blog/newspost section of their site disappears into the archive:

“When you call Mike this or that caustic name, you do it because you know you can and because you’re friends. Our students– and probably most men– have elaborate belief systems made around how women are and how men and women interact. A lot of these systems are either misguided or blatantly false (to wit: women don’t want to be picked up when they go out to a bar). The neg gets attention because it SEEMS like an insult, but it’s more a gesture of comfort, a sign that you, the suitor, aren’t going to bend your natural conversational style for the sake of trying to impress a woman. The main reason why assholes get girls is not because girls are just dying to be abused and ignored– although some are for whatever fault of upbringing or genetics– but because women, especially beautiful women, hate the weakness implied when a man bends over backward to impress her. A reactive sign of this is to, um, not bend over to impress her. A proactive sign, a way to signal this in the first few minutes of conversation, is to tease her.

And the neg is just a tiny sliver of what we teach.

More than anything our material is about understanding what makes women attracted to men beyond the obvious answers of looks and money and power, beyond the simple snipe of “confidence”. We then help our students implement that understanding through practical application, i.e. actually trying to pick up the girls you are attracted to.

Mike noted that if it’s guys “hunting women from the back of a jeep” he’s not behind that. What does he (or you) think guys are doing every single time they go out to a bar or club? As my mother has noted during the times I wore a hair shirt about my job, Love Systems didn’t invent the act of guys going out and trying to find girls to have sex with. We just gave guys the tools to do it effectively without boring girls. Our course lets guys make their own calls. For my part, I try to explain the ethical ramifications of hollow sexual interactions, and I try to emphasize the role that developing personal standards for the people with whom you surround yourself has in developing standards for yourself… But if a guy takes away scummy lessons, I am not there to change him. At my last bootcamp, though, there was a gentleman who had an MFA and poetry and ran a non-profit. I just don’t see him as the sleazy guy at the bar with his chest hair poking out, you know? But he had just left a divorce, has two daughters he loves very much, and he wants to know how to interface with the modern world of dating. Mike happened to meet Kara in line at Star Wars. Romances spark at events like PAX and Comic Con. And some people– most people– are content to live day to day and luck into chemistry and attraction. But every guy has seen a girl who has taken his breath away, or been on a date that didn’t end with a comic strip proposing marriage to her through his alter ego, a date where the girl decided, inexplicably, that she just wanted to be friends.

But I am a nerd. I can run D&D 1st, 2nd, or 3rd from memory with very little help, and I have a Planescape: Torment tattoo proudly on my right arm. Just TALKING about Shadowrun gets my excited. I have an encyclopedic knowledge of Marvel and DC comics, and I have strong feelings about what Batman would or would NOT do in any given situation. I built my computer, and I’m going to build my next one, to say nothing of the hundreds of servers I built in the Marines.

And beautiful women, the women I would want from afar, used to scare the shit out of me.

Our kind, the nerds, are the worst of the lot, man! How many girls did YOU have at your gaming table? They are thin on the ground in my weekly d20 modern group and in my XBox Live Friends list, and I don’t think I’m overreaching with my anecdotal evidence when I say my experience is not abnormal. I’m sure we both have compelling reasons for WHY girls might steer clear of our favorite hobby, but the simple reality is that gaming, even when there are comparitively a LOT of girls, is still going to see WAY more men than women. It doesn’t exactly give guys the same male/female socialization tools that say, sports does.”

I have tons of respect for the guys at PA and said as much in my letters to Tycho. They really macheted through the age of new media in a bold way and plowed through their work every week while batting down any hint of going a traditional route. They are a shining example of how the internet CAN work. They generate great content and have earned a rabidly loyal readership. Now they capitalize on said readership, not because they’ve whored themselves but because readers like me BEGGED them to release merchandise. They have high click-through from their site because their readers trust their opinions. To that effect they bellweathers for the video game industry, “mavens” as Malcolm Gladwell might put it. Gabe and Tycho have risen to full “internet demagogue” status, a fact Tycho occasionally references in his news posts.

They are my people. Tycho’s not fucking around when he says I’m “one of [them]“. I KNOW nerds, what with my continued working knowledge of Magic: The Gathering, ongoing Street Fighter IV fueds, my six digit Slashdot ID, and of course the fact that I am tickled pink to be on the PA front page. My point is that we concoct a view of the world that best represents our understanding of it, and Gabe stated his position clearly:

One of the effects of my anxiety was that I couldn’t talk to girls. My wife Kara was the the first girl I ever went on a date with and the fact is I didn’t even ask her out myself. My friends at the time knew that I liked her but also knew that I would never be able to ask her on a date. I was in my early twenties and I had never really talked to a girl for longer than a couple of minutes. My friends knew this and so like some kind of crappy romantic comedy they cooked up a plan to get us together. They told me that she wanted to meet me at a movie theatre and they told Kara that I wanted to meet her there. We ended up together watching Vegas Vacation and when she reached over to hold my hand I was literally fucking terrified.

Gabe and Tycho have huge sway when it comes to my video game purchaes, and we share a lot common views, but the above passage dissolves my ability to lend credence to Gabe’s redaction:

While some of their advice is probably fine I think the majority of it is really sleazy. Again, I can’t blame guys for seeking out help. All joking aside though, I just want to make it clear that I don’t think the seduction community is the place to go. I understand how badly you want to believe that there is a system out there that if you can simply master will resolve your problems. Sadly I don’t think that’s the case and if there is such a system, it certainly isn’t this one.

It’s unrealistic for me to expect a different stance from Gabe. If it wasn’t difficult to beam this stuff into students’ heads, Love Systems couldn’t justify the cost of a program. When we stand up at our comprehensive bootcamps, we do not stare into the eyes of true believers but skeptics, men who are a little embarrassed they are in our class to begin with. Whatever moral foundations a given student has or lacks, our refund rate and reviews speak for themselves. The cognitive dissonance is grating: on one hand Gabe opposes dating science on moral grounds, saying it’s “sleazy”, but on the other he says “if there is such a system,** it certainly isn’t this one.” Even our offended detractors agree that what we teach will indeed get you the girl.

I agree with him on one point though: the seduction community is not the place to go. Most of Love Systems’s competition are second-rate or outright charlatans, and the wild, wild internet is often home to blind men leading each other around.

Love Systems on the Tyra Banks show

Love Systems on Dr. Phil

Cajun from Love Systems onKeys to the VIP

Asylum attends a Love Systems bootcamp (by Emily McCombs)

The Boston Globe attends a Love Systems bootcamp (by Meredith Goldstein)

Oh, well. If you’re here from Penny Arcade, welcome. If there’s a big enough traffic surge, you bet your ass I’ll use this as a platform to talk about games.

If you’re interested in taking a program with a guy who has maintained his hardcore nerd affinities and still dates beautiful women, here’s my upcoming schedule:

Playboy Mansion: 15-16 August (this weekend) with Savoy, Starlight, and dahunter

Atlanta: 4-6 September with Tenmagnet

Miami: 18-20 September

San Francisco: 26-28 October

Additionally, I will be at the Love Systems superconference in Las Vegas 8-13 October.

We have a few other hardcore gamers in Love Systems, but I won’t out them here. For those of you on the fence about this stuff, I’ll add one word of warning: I didn’t play video games for about two years while I was getting a handle on how to interact with girls I was attracted to. It was a hard thing to give up, but it sure beat porn claw palsey. Video games are a solitary hobby most of the time, even when you’re playing with you friends online. That means you’re not getting out and talking to the girls you’re interested in, which is always the first step. And no, you shouldn’t bring a PSP or DS to the bar. Moreover, ardent geek flag-waving is NOT for every girl. There’s are healthy, normal, sane reasons a lot of girls are repelled by the intense escapism most geeks partake in… and like Gabe said, those girls aren’t the girls for you. But there are plenty of girls who might otherwise ADORE your nerdy, geeky traits eventually, even if they would be repulsed if you brought up the Quake 3/Unreal Tournament fued of 1999/2000 ten minutes into the conversation.

*– Breakthrough Comfort 2, Breakthrough for Nerds: Getting Girls to Read Comic Books and Video Games

**– Never mind that we don’t solve ANY problems except WHETHER you can get the girls you desire. Gentlemen/potential students, girls and sex and relationships create just as many problems as they solve. There’s always a price.