Open Thread

Open Thread #142

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44 thoughts on “Open Thread #142

  1. In a long overdue decision, Canada has turned “Pride month” into “Pride season”, spanning the four months from July to September. I am currently conflicted on the issue whether we should permanently rename summer to “Pride” — it rolls off the tongue nicely: Spring, Pride, Autumn, Winter — or whether it may make more sense to equalize all seasons and refer to the entire year as “Pride”:
    https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/campaigns/pride-season.html

    1. The opportunities of this are endless. We will simply tell kids that if they enjoy summer, because the weather is warmer, it is actually because of the awakening of their true inner sexuality. Thus, we will go from “enjoys warm climate” (but not in the way of climate change) to “embrace that you were assigned the wrong gender at birth” to “get your dick cut off or your clit remodelled”. It’s so fab!

    2. Ah, Canada.

      They also self-identified as having committed genocide re: its indigenous people

      https://www.aptnnews.ca/national-news/mmiwg-inquiry-concludes-violence-against-women-and-girls-is-genocide/

      Recently, there have been “mass graves” at former residential schools uncovered leading to people to want to cancel “Canada Day” (July 1st).

      Meanwhile, the Canadian senate voted that China has NOT committed genocide

      (link: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/china-reacts-canada-senate-motion-genocide-1.6086018)

      <> for the win!

  2. AlekNovy once mentioned that he personally knew people who he once perceived as “ugly” but came to learn later on that said ugly men turns out to actually be attractive to women because of compact midface,etc.

    I’d like to request some sample photos of such men(doesn’t have to be the people he knows personally,maybe there’s a celebrity out there who fits the profile…),if anyone here can contact him for me. I’m kinda curious about it..

    1. I think FaceandLMS has a few videos with examples. He extensively discusses features that make male faces attractive.

    2. Look up the wheat waffles channel. He has a 4-part series on 65 attributes that make a male face more attractive.

      Super detailed, thorough examples. Really well done.

      You will be surprised. But it’s kind of the matrix. Once you learn this stuff, you’ll look at men differently and everything you thought about male looks might change.

    3. About your specific question, I don’t know if I used the word “ugly” (I might have), but I don’t mean ugly as in disfigured.

      I mean that I saw these guys as the opposite of pretty. And they are.

      But that’s the thing. Male attractiveness isn’t primarily about being pretty, it’s mostly about being masculine.

      A hyper masculine and cavemannish looking guy is more attractive than a pretty boy.

      Male supermodels do have both. They have the traits that make a face look prettier AND they have the traits that make a face more masculine. That’s a male 10.

      Thing is you can be an 8 with pure masculinity and no prettiness.

    4. Aaron,
      I’ve often seen guys who have average facial features, however, there’s one noticeable thing about them. And that is that they have a jawline. How do these guys fit? They don’t quite look like Chads but have a nice jawline.

    5. I think what causes the confusion is that women look for COMPLETELY different things on a man than what we look for in women. For example, nice skin and nice hair are very important for female attractiveness. A dude can have a receding hairline and imperfect skin and still maintain his attractiveness. He looks “distinguished.” Sometimes even more masculine. This relates to the thread about older men considered attractive by younger women.

    6. I’ve often seen guys who have average facial features, however, there’s one noticeable thing about them. And that is that they have a jawline.

      That’s a great example. Jaw is HUGE. Facial characteristics aren’t equal in importance. A guy with an otherwise average face (but good jaw) can be a chad, and then guys are like “what the fuck do chicks see in him?”.

    7. I think I have a good way to clarify, rather than “not pretty”. To describe the guys I thought are “ugly and getting hot chicks” until I learned what makes for hot male faces.

      Their faces are not aesthetically pleasing to look at. That’s what I mean. But that’s a male criteria. We prioritize things that make a face aesthetically pleasing.

      Male models are aesthetically pleasing. But masculinity > aesthetics when it comes to how much a chick wants to bang you.

      So these guys I saw as unattractive, I was thinking like a guy looks at female faces. I don’t find it pleasing to look at his face for more than 1 second. All the while missing he had hunter eyes and a jawline.

  3. Considering moving to Colombia as they don’t require a negative PCR test. God only knows how much longer this lockdown in Vietnam is gonna last.

    1. You may want to rethink that. The security situation in Colombia is bad, and deteriorating.

      In addition to their endemic violence, high homicide rates and drug trafficking, as of recently you have leftist protesters wreaking havoc everywhere.

    2. @Yarara, I appreciate the advice. I had to take a PCR test a few weeks ago and found it very unpleasant. Also learned that the membrane lining the back of your nasal passages is very delicate. Would rather avoid taking these things.

      Fuck man. Part of me wants to go back to Texas, but I’m worried they’ll go back to a lockdown at some point. I’ll constantly have anxiety about lockdowns now.

    3. Well, jumping from a frying pan into the fire is hardly a solution. It varies from country to country, but Latin America has suffered economic stagnation in the lest few years, as the high prices cycle of commodities wound down, since China slowed down its demand. Criminality is high as ever, you can avoid most of it if you move around in the right places, but that requires that you have some familiarity with the country and language. I guess you dont speak spanish?

      In Latin America we have had notoriously harsh lockdowns, matched only by their ineffectiveness. The economic impact of the lockdowns has been severe, and will be felt for a generation. Most countries have opened up somewhat, AFAIK, if only because people avoid compliance with restrictions as much as they can.

      If you really want to avoid lockdowns without living in some shithole in Latin America or Africa, I would look elsewhere. Korea or Japan maybe? Or go to the USA and settle in some deep red state.

  4. Here’s a good article on the rather similar playbooks used for both AIDS and Covid:
    https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/why-covid-aids
    AIDS used to be referred to as “GRIDS”, i.e. “Gay-Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome” as you only observed it in homosexuals. Yet, after a lot of kvetching about the supposed marginalization of this group, the acronym was changed and the system pushed the “everybody is at risk” message, quite like what happens with Covid. However, in the case of the latter, only a fraction of the frail and old is at risk.

  5. I know know of a second-degree connection (friend of an acquaintance) who “died of Covid”. The guy was in his early 20s. Obviously, he did not die of Covid but as a consequence of the vaxx. However, we cannot wave in our optimism in the face of such events. Let us all get vaxxed in perpetuity. We’ll die one day anyway, so what’s the big deal, bigot?

    1. None, as far as I was told. I did not want to ask too many questions as it seemed inappropriate. It was a “sudden and surprising death”, so my hunch is that it was one of those cases of a blot clot in the brain.

    2. Do you know for sure if he was vaxxed?

      I personally know dozens of people who got Pfizer and I didn’t hear anyone getting anything more than one or two day fever. On the other hand I do know two people in their early twenties who had to be hospitalized shortly after contracting COVID. One developed pneumonia and the other multi level inflammatory syndrome. This was before vaccines came out.

    3. I think it is more plausible than not that this guy got vaxxed. Of how many young, healthy men have you heard who got killed by Covid?

  6. Aaron,
    This reminds me of two well known hackers….Hector Monsegur and Kevin Mitnick. Have you heard of these guys?

    1. I knew of the latter, and the former only indirectly, as I’ve just learned. LulzSec is, of course, a known entity.

  7. Do you guys have ant suggestions for how to find interesting websites these days? “Back in the day”, you used to be able to find interesting forums and people (like aaron) even from a google search or on youtube. Fitness, philosophy, specific hobbies, etc. Now, everything returns as 1. Corporate/shill websites filled with ads, or 2. SubReddit for every hobby/topic, and we all know how that sites culture is. You can get lucky with existing word of mouth, but I cant imagine how I would be able to stumble across Aaron’s blog if I was just starting today.

    Any suggestions, or is the era of independent creation dead?

    1. I think it is the latter. Google also did their part in burying blogs by penalizing non-corporate sites in search results. Your best bet are probably Telegram groups, but you won’t get the same depth of conversation smaller forums provided back in the day or focused blog still do, like this one. I occasionally browse 4chan, 8kun, and KiwiFarms. In terms of dedicated sites by single creators, I only follow Fash the Nation (https://therightstuff.biz/category/ftn/), which has apparently been wiped off Google as well as The Daily Stormer.

      There used to be a few great guys on Google but after they had been driven off, their output dwindled. Turd Flinging Monkey is a good example. I also quite like American Krogan, but he has apparently gone on a long hiatus.

    2. I’m also annoyed by this.
      It seems like a good business opportunity to create an inverse of Google, a search engine which penalizes corporate sites. There are plenty of search engines, one of them should pivot towards filtering out mainstream/censored content, but unfortunately I do not think they have technical capability to match Google’s web crawling capacity.

      Other than that it seems most content creation has moved to Youtube.

    3. After blogging came YouTube, but just as Google suppresses independent writers, so did their subsidiary YT kick-off anybody who questions the mainstream narrative on anything. A few years ago, creators with comparatively small followings were able to make a few hundred dollars on the side or even a few thousand bucks at times. At alternative platforms, their reach is much smaller.

  8. Going back to another open thread, about computer games…

    I am a big Final Fantasy fan….

    My first was 7, and still rate it as the best. The Remake, is not bad, more action oriented (like FF15 and kingdom hearts) with lots of filler (fetch quests etc), which stopped me playing by the time i got to the tower. Best story i think

    FF8, I probably got 100%, all bosses, summons, cards items etc. Really good game and mechanic (junctioning spells to attributes, so using those spells weakens the attributes).

    FF9 was good, but lots of good stuff, but not my fav, same as FF10.

    FF12, was a slog, esp if you wanted to get 100% completion. But the battle mechanics was clever, basically you could program you character to react to situations. Probably the best mechanic, but once you understood, battles just became boring unless you had a boss battle. Story was alright, but meh.

    FF13 was rubbish, well produced but so boring.

    FF15 did not play, watched it on youtube and glad i didnt

    FF6 that was a good game, most wont like the graphics, but had the best bad guy, great characters, interesting story, great music.

    Similar games that I like to FF, are..

    Octopath traveler and bravely default 2 (playing these on the switch now),

    Person 5, heard persona 4 is good too

    Secret of Mana (just started playing)

    Chrono trigger, played a bit, but never got round to finishing

    xenogears, never played, but watched it on YT, it looked good, great story

    I didnot like … ninokuni (good game until you had to do stratgey stuff), dragon quest (no story)

    I will try Lost Sphear and I am satsuna, similar to FF6, the demo were good

    cani

    1. Nice, man. Looking back, if I were to replay any of the FF games I think it would be 9. It was probably my favorite overall. I agree with you about FF12. I tried playing it back when it came out but just couldn’t get invested in it, and I had also played 7-10 to completion story wise. I want to go back and beat 6 eventually, I highly recommend CT. Did you by chance ever play Chrono Cross? I remember enjoying it a lot when it came out but I actually can’t really remember too much about it now.

      How are you liking Octopath Traveler? I think it’s a lot more tolerable if you turn the voices off and just speed read the text. The gameplay itself is quite good, but there is very little incentive to get invested in the characters imo. I’d love to see more games made in the same vain as OT, though. It looks great. The last action type of RPG (it’s more of an action game like Zelda) I played was Phoenotopia: Awakening. I think it’s pretty underrated, you might want to check it out for the Switch. I think I saw it on sale a couple days ago.

    2. FF6 wish i had finished it. Got really far on ps2, but then it broke and could not be asked to start again

      I did play CT on my mobile, but i just dont like playing games on there. it seemed decent.

      Phoenotopia: Awakening…looks a good game, will give it a go after Octopath

      OT looks a good game, interesting that you can choose x amount of characters and do their stories, and grab the others later. I dont mind the voices. The bosses take forever, unless you grind hard before. I fear I may give up due to the amount of grinding i need to do. But it’s something to spend some time on. Perfect for switch handheld mode.

      I did play “Overboard”, very short game, but nice fun. Text based game, where you have to get away with murder.

  9. I just finished the story of Sleeping Dogs on PS3. Overall, I think this game is a solid 9/10. It lacks the budget of GTA, which explains the somewhat lackluster in-game graphics. In contrast, the cut scenes are pretty good. The game lack s a bit of polish as well. It nonetheless plays much better than GTA IV. Sleeping Dogs is well-written, contains very little PC garbage (there is a shoe-horned in mission with a black guy named “King”, though), has very good fighting mechanics, decent driving, but only basic shooting. I like that the length is quite modest; it’ll take you about 15 to 20 hours, I’d estimate. My biggest dislike is the absolutely excessive amount of violence. It is far worse than God of War III, which I found quite tasteless.

    Minor issues with the game are that the collectables are pretty pointless. Furthermore, by virtue of the relatively simple but effective fighting system, you can put up formidable opposition even without all the special moves and combos you can learn throughout the game. I think all of this was just put into the game to provide a constant supply of goals to achieve and tasks to tick off, which is very common in the open-world genre. Among others, there are a few dozen “health shrines” scattered around the game world. These can be used to permanently increase player health. Yet, this is not really necessary because once you have gotten the hang of the fighting system, which probably happens pretty early in the game, health is not really an issue.

    I’m not sure whether I’d like to replay this game. In any case, I’ll put in a few more hours to do a few side missions, and tie up some loose ends in the game world, like the sometimes hilarious romantic side stories. It’s a shame that this game will not get a sequel. It did not get the level of success it deserves.

    EDIT: I just noticed that the game keeps track of total playtime, somewhat hidden in an extensive menu on various game stats. My total after the very long credit roll was a little over 13 hours. If you only do the main quests, you can probably get through the game in about ten hours.

    1. Nice! Thanks for the review. What is it about the overt violence that disgusts you? Do you find it too gimmicky? I recall you mentioning that you were turned off by Doom’s overuse of gore.

    2. The violence in Sleeping Dogs is actually quite realistic. You break people’s legs and arms in combat and can use the environment for insta-kills, such as impaling your opponents onto iron rods, ramming them into butcher hooks, electrocuting them, pushing their face into a grill (with a mini-game where you need to push a button quickly to break resistance). In contrast, the violence in Doom is exaggerated and glorified, so you can’t really take it seriously. Yet, Sleeping Dogs seems to want to portray the brutality of triad gang warfare. Violence is doled out in a rather casual way. You also see people dying, soaked in blood.

      Also, I think I do want to play through Sleeping Dogs game again. The mechanics are simply a lot of fun. Also, the world building is quite complex and I probably missed some foreshadowing or did not pick up on some key relationships here and there. The relationships in the game are not fixed and there are a few supposed small-time characters I did not pay much attention to in the beginning of the game. Also, after having gotten quite comfortable with the fighting system, the first few hours of the game will probably play out smoother, and with more variety. You can tell that the designers wanted to create a game that is mechanically fun to play. In that regard, it’s probably similar to Saint’s Row: The Third, and it is in stark contrast to GTA IV, which is story-heavy but controls poorly.

    3. SD was fun for a bit, got with Psplus on PS4. I just found it boring after a couple of hours. Is just an open world GTA, doing good and bad things , and bringing down triads. The fighting was fun though, esp the environmental destruction. I did find the driving controls were too sensitive. But the bus route mission was fun

  10. I have a pickup question for you guys. I was out last night at the grocery store picking up some things and I ended up going through the line instead of self-checkout since the girl working there smiled at me when I walked in and quickly averted her eyes downward. She’s a bit nerdy-looking but has a nice slim waist and a nice butt (I checked her out when I walked by), and is approaching her 21st birthday.

    We made some small talk and what not but I couldn’t think of a good way to ask for her number. It’s also kind of awkward when you have a bag boy standing there and customers behind you in line. Thinking back, I thought that a more under the radar way of asking would be to simply say something like, ‘hey, let me show you something real quick’, then hand her my phone with the new contact screen up and see if she intuitively puts her number in. Alternatively, I suppose I could just not give a fuck and ask for the number. Btw, I would only consider this if the girl is visibly interested. What do you guys think? It isn’t like you can really wait for the opportune moment in this situation.

    1. You could find some fancy way…but regardless, she is working and not great for her with her boss to be giving out her number. Unless you are super famous.

      Instead, write your number on a card/paper while she is checking out your goods and tell her to text you. Give it to her secretly.

      You will see if she is really into you.

      if she into you, she will text you

    2. Did you guess her age? I find that it can be very difficult to accurately guess the age of young women, and normally it is because their chronological age is way higher than their biological one. A 16-year-old may look as if she’s 21, and a 21-year-old can easily be mistaken for a woman in her late 20s.

      You could say, “Would you mind giving me your number?” as you hand her your phone.

    3. Thanks for the advice, guys. I didn’t guess her age, it came up when she mentioned her birthday as she was ringing up some alcoholic beverages. If I had to have guessed, I honestly probably would have pinned her for about 23-24 years old.

      Cani, I see your point. If she is attracted enough it should do the job. We could make the swap during the receipt handoff, or if no one is around I could just ask for it.

  11. An interesting anti-pua argument that I didn’t think about before. At least I didn’t formulate it up until this point. Face and LMS had a debate with some pua coach.

    I found this great comment on the debate:

    Saying I have an Indian friend who has 150 lays so anyone can do it is a fallacy. Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. Saying I have seen it is not enough. If your program worked that well you could easily charge 30,000 a year because many millionaires would love to increase their notch count that much. By the way, I also live in Florida and got a lot of lays last year but I have a lot of money and unique gimmicks I employ.

    If 30% of men did not get laid in the last year (study is old and number are worse now), and that number is skyrocketing every year then something is causing that. It’s super clear ladies standards are increasing and game isn’t enough. Money and game and logistics and strategy works but to act like game is the end all be all is an outdated strategy from 10 years ago

    “Indian Guy” is in reference to that being the main pua-coach argument. I know an indian guy who got 150 lays. That’s literally his only argument, a claim he knows a guy.

    Anyway, I responded to said comment with this comment:
    That’s a great point, and proven by basic economics. This PUA/Game stuff has existed for 30 years now. Millionaires would have had time to learn that you can just buy a skill that gets you laid.

    If it really was possible to get those results by just paying for a skill, then PUAs would be able to charge ridiculous sums and work with millionaires. Why do they bother so much to convince us plebs that this shit is real? They’d be too busy working with millionaires.

    1. India? I know more (not personally) than 1 Arab sheikhs who have got laid with wen of exquisite beauty, and they don’t need game.

    2. Yah, saying “I know an indian guy who got laid, therefore game isn’t a scam” is also ridiculous for that point as well. We attacked that point separately though. This guy was just responding on the angle of “if game isn’t a scam, why are millionaires wasting money on lambos, when they could pua programs instead?”.

      Most chicks would rather bang a bollywood chad than an average guy in their country. Some of those guys look like male supermodels.

  12. I recently learned that Germany pays 30,000 Euros to the families who fell victim to vibrant enrichers:
    https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article232275139/Kein-Islamismus-keine-Entschaedigung-Opferbeauftragter-daempft-Hoffnung.html
    The caveat, however, is that said enricher has to have been an extremist. In a recent incident in which a few Germans got knifed to heaven, however, the attacker’s consumption of ISIS propaganda as well as his insistence that Allah is great does not mean that he was an extremist, however. Instead, all of this is seen as an example of “mental confusion”. Too bad, goy! The government would really have liked to wire you 30k but the rules are the rules.

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