Futuristic Words

In case I didn’t make the case in my last update, you should attend the Love Systems Super Conference this weekend in Las Vegas. All our instructors will be out there with a few additions, e.g. Brad P, and it’s going to be heaps upon layers crammed into tunnels made entirely of fun. And vagina.

Lose time:

- Tons of sampling from Half-Life 1 and Half-Life 2, clever implementation of a video game styled HUD, and the only good use of first person perspective I’ve seen so far in live action. One question remains unanswered, though: what’s in the box?

- I’m reading Niall Ferguson’s Ascent of Money. It’s a dramatic departure from the fantasy series I’ve been reading since July, George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire. Dr. Ferguson is smart and a very good writer, but reading Ascent of Money makes me feel like I tested well and should be in the slow class. That said, the farther in the book I read, the more prescient Dr. Ferguson appears. Perhaps he can get a fourth PhD in Cassandraism. After that will be, in this order, A Whole New Mind, Why Women Should Rule the World, Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets: The Truth About Why Women Lie, The Artist’s Way, and then back to fiction with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and House of Leaves. I’m sad because except for the first one, NONE of those books are available for my Kindle.

- Get a Kindle. Girls (and guys and homeless people) will start conversations with you to talk about it. As with any situational opener, it then falls on you the Romantic Philosopher (RS)* to continue the conversation. I could go on and on about this amazing device. If you’re scrunching your face and muttering something about how much you miss the feel of books, I would point to the weight of the device and its note-taking abilities and its nearly infinite battery life. And then I would kick you in the shins and call you a Luddite.

- This is a video of a goat that screams like a person. (Thanks, Shanna)

-  I read Gretchen Rubin’s blog every day, and I am never more than a few inches from her 12 commandments of happiness. They are the first thing I scrawl in any notebook. Her book is coming out soon, but the blog is filled with thoughtful ideas about individual, familial, and societal happiness.

- Tuesday, 6 October 2009. With the exception of an errant shot of tequila at the Atlanta boot camp, a shot of tequila shoved in my hand by an excited Marine last weekend, and a glass of red wine foisted on me by a girl this recent Sunday, this is day 39 of a Future without Alcohol.

*—On this new term. I hate the terminology of the SUISC, and I love how my company has strived to bridge the gap between the Mystery-led herd of blind children to the rest of the mortal population. I eschew terminology like “PUA” or “player” or “pimp” because they wreak of a disingenuousness based on the faux excellence they imply. When I first taught at a boot camp, a student asked me how long it took me to become a “PUA”, and although I probably should have restrained myself, I looked at him like he was crazy. I have had success with women, and I have had failure. I can repeat my successes consistently, and I can talk meaningfully about the times I achieved or fell short of my goals. Any wisdom regarding my relationships with women I have attained by grasping it from the crucible of failure/awkwardness/embarrassment with bare hands. When I fight approach anxiety or have to use my knowledge to explain away a rejection, I carry the same frame of mind I did when I first discovered the SUISC. In those moments, I am no guru, just another student of human nature with a lofty heart.

I am on my way out the door. Tonight I have three parties to attend and a liaison with one of my favorite people on the planet, fresh from Los Angeles. Today is Day 15 without alcohol, exception the tequila shots a student bought me in Atlanta, the net effect of which were not drunkenness but a frigging hangover the next morning that plagued me well past sundown.

One of the parties is a “white party”, the mentioning of which prompts all my friends and family to ask various race-related questions. I am assuming it’s not a Klan rally, but if it is you bet your ass I’ll write about it. Regardless, I had a minor laundry emergency today, and while dressing found myself utterly without the eponymous clothing requirement. I will descend on this partie blanche clad entirely dans le noir. Naturally, if my host or fellow debaucherites ask me to leave, I will accuse them of racism.

I am also tempted to bring my messenger bag and tool with my Kindle. A gorgeous girl opened me on the subway the other day to ask about my Kindle—usually it’s homeless people, oddly, who ask me about the device—and she wanted to know if The Time Traveler’s Wife, which she had in her hand, was available. Time Traveler’s Wife was a fucking terrific book (and a movie so crappy words fail me), so we ended up in an enthralling conversation. An odalisk I am seeing also approached me to ask why I was carrying a copy of David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion in a bar. I don’t recommend it for everyone, nor does every book work. Psycho-Cybernetics, although a fantastic book, was extremely counter-productive. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian was excellent, as long as I didn’t mention the part where the one character gets sodomized to death.

So the main question for the evening is whether or not Future can a.) have enough willpower to abstain from drinking and cetera for the duration of the evening and b.) whether tripling up on parties and then some will even be fun without the chemical boosting. I predict strongly wanting to play Fallout 3 or Batman: Arkham Asylum by 0330. Actually, as usual, I’ll be WANTING to play Dragon Age: Origins, but that won’t happen until Bioware does whatever they need to do. Atlanta was delightful, but I wish I could have made it out to PAX.

Okay. Skin and whispers, serchez la femme, etc.

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.