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https://realmademen.wordpress.com/2013/01/31/the-genetic-phenomenon/
Very thoughtful and right on the point.
It is firmly in line with our scientific explanation, that ONS is purely about looks.
Assanova did write another piece in the deleted blog. Luckily I have archived them (don’t ask, I won’t give it to you).
He said that if you are not Chad, why do you play the game like Chad? You cold approach, you visit nightclubs for quick pulls, you try to hook up as much as possible. If you are not Chad, try to be one is a disastrous strategy.
He also said that physically attractive men can get away with lots of things. If you are at the top of the totem poll, be a bit careful and conservative about your game. You should not try to replicate Chads.
I start to form a more realistic picture of my success with women. For now, I think my goal should be just talk to girls and enjoy their companies, make them laugh, work on my humours and try to read their personality types. Down the road I can see that I may have 2-3 girlfriends, then luckily 1-2 ONS if I ever get one.
I view seduction like two countries of different sizes. You could not run a small and less resourceful Vietnam like you run Russia, which has absolute abundance in natural resources and enormous in size.
I will silently work on my looks and my careers, hoping to improve my income and social standing. The primary reason is to position myself as a good long-term candidate. This is obviously much less exciting than banging sluts in bathrooms, but it will yield result.
As an end note: you guys should internalise what Sleazy said: learn to be happy with being by yourself, being alone. This is a very powerful piece of advice. You will not appear needy when no women come to you, or that sex somehow doesn’t occur, or that your girlfriend leaves you. It is the core of happiness.
It was such a shame to see MoneyMadeMen (Assanova’s last blog) go down. I can’t recall them off the top of my head right now,but there some very interesting insights on there.
While this is ancient history to most hear, I’ve heard from credible sources that it was the tragic mulatto Stoner With a Boner that brought down the slippery male feminist Hugo Schwyzer. Anyone who has seen Stonah’s postings knows he is a race obsessed troll with little intellect. And furthermore, not someone you would want to associate with IRL. However, it goes to show that with persistence and a willingness to play dirty, one can bring down enemies.
I don’t want to write a huge review of TotK but it’s like a 6/10 or something, maybe a 6.5/10–despite what all the online praise would leave you to believe. I’ll end up finishing the main quest line eventually and then I’m pretty much done with Nintendo. I’m almost positive that Metroid Prime 4 will just be another ubisoft style open world game, so I’ll probably end up passing on that one. I could care less about Mario, Pikmin, Kirby or Animal Crossing etc.
As far as games I am interested in playing in the future it’s like one or two indie studios, Capcom and Konami. Which is pretty sad, I think. I don’t think I can bring myself to play another open world game again.
Gaming is in a pretty rough spot, in my opinion. The focus is on producing content that engages people who have a fairly low minimum threshold for entertainment. One of my favorite examples, which Synthetic Man often uses, is that sped-up rowing sequence in one of those two new God of War games, which goes on for many minutes. Super Mario U is a good game, by the way. I quite enjoyed it on the Wii U, but after finishing it once I had no interest in revisiting it.
I think a lot of those Nintendo platformers would be quite worth a play through. Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze comes to mind. The problem with those types of games is that, like you say, they are worth maybe one play through, and then there’s the issue that Nintendo will still charge you $50-60 half a decade or more after the game was initially released. I will just stick to the occasional PC game from here on out. Btw, if you’re ever itching for a top tier 2D platformer then you can grab Rayman Legends, for example, on Steam and on sale for a fraction of the price than you could a Nintendo game.
You will likely get a lot of playtime out of those platformers, though. Super Mario U is quite easy, so I think it may just take you 20 to 25 hours to 100% it, but Super Mario 3D World took me about 60 hours to see everything, including completing (almost) all levels with all four characters. These play differently, so the gameplay is affected in a meaningful way. There is also a special stage at the very end, which I did not finish. DK Tropical Freeze you can play for probably 200 hours or more. Getting 100% took me closer to 80 hours, if I recall correctly. There are a few optional levels that are absolutely brutal. One took me four or five hours, I think. Afterwards, you can try to go for “200%” by completing the game on hard mode, and there is also a difficult time trial mode. Hard mode takes away check points in the levels, reduces your health so that you can only take one hit, and forces you to play with only one character whereas initially you can get sidekicks that have extra abilities; I think they also have their own life bar.
The Steam Deck is powerful enough to run Doom Eternal at over 30 fps with ray-tracing enabled:
https://www.pcgamer.com/valve-just-enabled-native-ray-tracing-on-the-steam-deck-and-it-actually-looks-pretty-wild/
Funny enough, I actually booted up the Nintendo port of this game a couple months ago for a few mins, and after having been using the Deck exclusively for a while was taken back by how fuzzy the port looked. It also seemed to be running somewhere in the 20 FPS range consistently. It’s a wonder they ever got that game on there to begin with, but it did have the issue of crashing from time to time which is a major issue when doing a master level with no save states.
Whistleblower who exposed the ‘Biden bribery scheme’ has been found dead.
https://twitter.com/LeadingReport/status/1669409171140165645
Ah, the old Clinton playbook. Absolutely nobody could have predicted this. Thank God we live in a democracy where such things only happen in the movies.
No, even movies, that would not be allowed to happen.
Aaron,
During your days in London, did you ever get a chance to visit the Palladian Bridge in Buckinghamshire? It was built in 1738.
This is a nice-looking bridge! I did not know about it at all. Also, it seems that you can only easily get there by car, so visiting it would not really have been an option for me back then anyway.
I found another gem in England, the Cromford Mill in Cromford, Derbyshire. It was the first water powered cotton spinning mill.
This is interesting, too. Do you have plans to visit England?
I’m debating between Germany or England. I’m thinking of going next year 2024. Hopefully, the government doesn’t start imposing digital vaxx passports. Its time for me to explore Europe.
I’m hoping there’s no plandemic soon as that can ruin my trip. There seems to be another pandemic around the corner that the elites have for 2025 S.E.E.R.S.
https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-pandemic-seers-virus-2025-784933703300
I’m more inclined to visit Germany since its really enriched with a lot of history. Have you been to Potsdam, Erfurt, Wurzburg?
I’m not sure if the following are hidden gems in Germany – Sanssouci Park, Cecilienhoff, Sanssouci Palace in Potsdam
Merchant’s Bridge ( Krämerbrücke) in Erfurt.
All of those places are worth a visit. Potsdam is a really lovely city. A significant part of the political elite of Germany lives there rather than in the hellhole that Berlin has become because they high real-estate prices of Potsdam shield them from the consequences of the laws they passed, and all the laws in the books they conveniently choose to not enforce. I would also recommend the “Romantic Road“, if you have the time. However, arguably the most noteworthy architecture of the country is to be found in Bavaria. The former king Ludwig II almost bankrupted the state with the many castles and palaces he built:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_II_of_Bavaria#Architecture
If you like nature, check out the Alps. A road trip from the South of Germany to Austria and finally Italy would expose you to many great views.
Aaron,
1. What are you thought about keeping pictures from past relationships? Should one keep them for memories or destroy them?
2. When I was a kid my parents had me involved in my arts & crafts like stain glass, wood carving, wood shop, blacksmithing, glass blowing etc. Over the years, these traditions and skills have been lost. Many schools that taught these skills have disappeared. Does Europe have schools where people can learn how to make Medieval Armour, Chain Mail Coifs, Stonemasons, etc?
Currently, my dad has been teaching me how to repair cuckoo clocks. I know that Black Forest Germany is know for cuckoo clocks.
1) I don’t keep around many pictures, period. I think this is more of a personal decision, but I would certainly find it odd if a girl you are seeing keeps detailed records of her past lovers or even a picture album. In the pre-smartphone era some women collected all the love letters they received, to go through them when they needed to boost their ego. Today, they get the same effect by posting a heavily edited video on Instagram and collecting “likes”.
2) Stone masonry is still around, as far as I know, but any kind of chainmail crafting is most certainly a lost art. I think once the intergenerational master-apprentice chain is broken, those skills become extinct. The same even happened in art and music. There is no modern Rembrandt or Beethoven, because the system that produced such geniuses was systematically destroyed.
I never thought politicians are THAT cheap… 10k to buy a senator.
On a side note, I recommend setting the comments’ sorting function to “best” and enjoy.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/blackrock-recruiter-claims-senators-can-be-bought-10k-war-good-business-okeefe
This guy is a low level recruiter with a few drinks in him larping to impress the undercover bimbo recording him.
[Sorry Aaron, accidentally posted this as an independent comment below].
Buying one senator is not nearly enough to get laws written the way you want. If you have to pay for 150 or 200, you are already in the millions.
It’s probably exactly as Conrad says – the guy’s a low-level nobody trying to sound cool.
Incidentally, U.S. Senators make $174K per year. Anybody who thinks you can “own” them for $10K is delusional. And if it really were that easy, how long does he think it would take before someone came up with $20K, then $30K, etc? His “ownership” wouldn’t last through the morning coffee break.
I don’t know if anyone saw this. But apparently that missing billionaire with the submarine? He was bragging how he didn’t want to hire “old white guys” (i.e. experienced mariners and engineers); because diversity hiring is more important.
Could it have cost him his life. Go woke, go missing?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDOUOVIED5Q
– Video is from “Better Bachelor
– Title is “Diversity hires, vs. 400 atmospheres of pressure. Looks like we know who won.”
I read about it here:
https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=63826
Not only did he not want to hire old white guys because they’re not inspirational, but he had an old white guy with experience and knowledge who made a report of a load of flaws and in the submarine and improvements that needed to be made. He fired the guy, used the submarine, and now will mostly likely die (if he hasn’t already) for it.
I can’t believe some of these “woke” idiots.
On the plus side, this anti-white billionaire (probably a white guy himself, and not a self-made billionaire) died for his beliefs. I can get behind that approach.
This guy is a low level recruiter with a few drinks in him larping to impress the undercover bimbo recording him.
Alek,you mentioned going on walks from time to time and witnessed how most women of today (Although honestly,we’re talking people in general. The average person in general isn’t an impressive specimen,but I think we all knew that already. lol) have become…”soft/physically unimpressive”,to put it politely. haha.
I saw more overweight,quite a good amount of them even outright obese (I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them weighed as much or even more than I do even though I am now much less fat-looking than they are. there is a clear difference in our body compositions.),women than I saw ok looking ones. I can’t recall a single one I came across today who I could even generously guess to be in shape. The best ones I saw were skinny/ok looking.
I’m currently 258lbs now. Its been more than 7 years since I’ve been under 260lbs,hope to keep it going. and I do hope some of the folks I saw are on a similar pursuit. Although I know how it is when the “average person” goes on a diet. typically they follow some fad for a week or two before forgetting about it altogether and going back to the status quo. hah.
Saw it all the time with some of the women I knew in my life. Always going on a diet on a certain season of the year (If I’m to be frank,I think “New Years Resolution” is a crock of shit. if you are serious about making any major change in your life,you don’t need a “special year” to have an excuse to go at it.) that ends very quickly with no real changes made at the end of the day.
I suppose this is now the new “Mediocrity”.
At the risk of sound like an old guy… “back in my day” we fatties were the exception. Now it’s the opposite. It was the chubby guy/girl in the group that stood out. Now it’s the non-fat person who stands out.
At the risk of sound like an old guy… “back in my day” we fatties were the exception. Now it’s the opposite. It was the chubby guy/girl in the group that stood out. Now it’s the non-fat person who stands out.
Just watched SkillUp’s review of FFXVI…it looks to be a dud. It’s as if the majority of the game is a borefest with some moments of visually brilliant spectacles peppered in. The supporting cast might be some of the weakest in any FF game to date, the fact that it has completely stripped itself from the RPG elements that made the series recognizable will certainly alienate longterm fans while the action based gameplay aspect seems half-baked, offering nothing new in terms of innovation. The overworld, while visually stunning, leaves much to be desired, and the new game + feature sounds not too enticing either. Well, all of this according to SkillUp. The game gets a Metacritic rating of 88, but I would seriously not be surprised if it weren’t just another 6-7/10 game.
I did not have time to check up on gaming news last week, so the release of FF XVI had slipped my mind. I just watched parts of SkillUp’s review, and the game really seems quite disappointing.
On a related note, I caught up on Nintendo news as well. It seems the Switch has another two years or so in it, and I would not be surprised if Nintendo wanted to make it last at least until 2027. The GameBoy also had a very long run, and it was, in terms of specs, ridiculously underpowered. Yet, when I look at footage of the upcoming Super Mario Wonder, the Mario RPG remake, or that Princess Peach game, I cannot help but wonder if this is a level of graphical fidelity a lot of customers would be happy with for a very long time. The graphics obviously lack detail but they clearly represent a very particular style of 3D graphics that is quite appealing as it has no obvious visual flaws. Games run at a solid 30 or 60 fps, the games are very colorful, and the 3D models are reasonably detailed. Only for games like Pikmin, Splatoon, and open-world Zelda would more horsepower be obviously beneficial.
Back when I bought the MGS HD collection on PS3 a few years back I really wished at the time that I could just get the equivalent for the Switch. However, that itch has been scratched and I have no desire to go back to them now. Also, after beating Chrono Trigger I was pretty interested in Mario RPG before getting side tracked. The problem now is that I feel I’m a bit too spoiled to give it a try or to try the remake out. In any case, it’s commendable that Nintendo is able to turn consistent and significant profits with such a conservative approach to hardware. If they’re able to keep the Switch alive as it is for a few more years then I certainly can’t blame them despite the obvious performance issues with certain titles. I imagine most people are like me and can live with 30 FPS with occasional dips and not really care too much.
Square-Enix had a pretty foul-mouthed black female protagonist a while ago. As it turns out, they are also embracing brotha-dom in FF XVI:
Sheift? Lol. That’s actually pretty funny considering how much sheit has been memed by the right. It has the effect of coming across as racist.
Btw, I beat the main quest on TotK. I wanted to draw a bit of a parallel between how the final boss fight with Calamity Gannon works in BotW and Gannondorf in TotK. In the former, you do also have the option of doing all the main quest lines and accumulating 4 powerups that will significantly help to simplify the fight, but the latter just gives you way too much freedom which results in an “optimal” way of defaulting to (I’ll explain).
During BotW’s final fight, CG will eventually cloak himself in an unbreakable armor, for example. This is actually cool because it forces the player to utilize the shield parry system that you practice during the random Guardian encounters throughout the game in order to break CG’s barrier by deflecting his dangerously powerful laser shot back at him. However, in TotK, often the most optimal way to dispatch an enemy is to simply fuse a rocket (which are cheap resources with hoarding potential) to a shield, blast up like 50 ft into the air before disengaging it, and then go into bullet time mode with the bow and arrow while fusing your strongest items to your shots as you slowly fall back down to the ground, loosing several perfectly placed shots at the enemy’s critical spot.
You’d think there’d be some kind of restriction during Gannondorf’s final confrontation, such as only the Master Sword is capable of damaging him to any significant degree, but that isn’t the case. During the final boss phase, I attempted for a while to play by the game’s rules but got kind of tired of Gannondorf’s ability to perfect dodge. You basically have to land two perfect dodges in a row to counter him and land a few strikes. So, what I ended up doing is just blasting off into the air and sniping his head half a dozen times or so with whatever strongest bow and fusable items I had available. And with that the boss fight was over.
Lastly, I will say that the gimmick fight that takes place afterwards was a step up from BotW’s final gimmick. Anyways, this is probably the best review of TotK I’ve found. Nerrel says of TotK something like, “the worst case scenario for when Nintendo announced they would be reusing the base map”, and that it, “comes closer to fixing Skyward Sword’s issues than BotW’s.”
Source: https://youtu.be/XiIfnG1XTSc
Thanks for the extensive feedback on TotK. I think I will skip this one, just as I am not going to bother with FF XVI. However, I recently started watching a playthrough of FF XVI — I found a “game movie” video on YouTube that is about 20 hours long. It cuts out some of the repetitiveness, such as boring traversal or big portions of boss fights. Bizarrely enough, I still find myself fast-forwarding the video at 2x speed quite often. The story is not bad at all, thus far, but the gameplay looks lackluster. Another negative is the foulmouthedness of the characters. One quotes that black chick from Forspoken verbatim by saying “f*ck” many times in a row. The game is also quite sexually explicit. Unlike Forspoken, the women in FF XVI are superhumanly attractive, and they are eager to get dicked down. The two most prominent female characters, 90 minutes in, are both shown trying to seduce their Chads. This is considerable fan-service as their horniness is quite irrelevant to the story. I wonder how Benedikta lovingly calling her guy a “cock” made it past Square-Enix’s ethics department.
The TotK review you linked to was quite interesting. Am at a point where I don’t really trust any reviews, and this includes fan reviews on Steam, as people who like a game oftentimes overlook its flaws. He pointed out some pretty serious issues with this game, albeit some are seemingly due to trying to break the game’s mechanics. For instance, being able to access a boss room before the story has advanced to that point, and the boss not showing up, is nothing I would blame the game for. It gives you a lot of freedom, and the implication is that you can more easily break the game. This follows directly from the freedom you are given. The converse is that without game-breaking freedom, you would not get such a flexible gameplay system.
“I wonder how Benedikta lovingly calling her guy a “cock” made it past Square-Enix’s ethics department.”
My humble guess is that they were quite lax on this installment as they were desperate for it to succeed, and with the cataclysmic failure that was Forspoken they knew they ought not fuck around with the woke BS in a mainline FF game.
Considering how this game turned out, maybe they would have been better off not making this a numbered title and instead designating it to a spinoff series of sorts that is more action-oriented. In any case, I do find the heavy political themes and horniness pretty intriguing. It sounds like a less woke version of Game of Thrones or something. Would you mind linking to the video you’re watching?
This is the playthrough I am watching:
I downloaded it with 720p resolution via savefrom.net so that I can more easily adjust the speed while watching.
I agree that FF XVI does not feel like an RPG. It is more of an action-game with RPG mechanics, but nowadays it seems that almost every game has those.
That opening scene was about 11 mins long, which led to about 20 seconds of gameplay before another cutscene took over. Synthetic Man is going to love this game. From this perspective of just watching the game, though, the story so far is pretty cool. Benedikta (obviously a play on Benedict), btw, is quite certainly fucking “everyone” with significant political standing or outright power while seemingly being in love with Cidolfus. She’s this story’s cluster B histrionic!
Synthetic Man really loved FF XVI:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocN-HPG0_zg
He said he did not even finish the game. As a game to play, it may put you to sleep but so far it has been a great game to watch, and progression-wise I am probably at about the point where he dropped it. However, I find the story better than a lot of live-action TV shows, and you could not even replicate FF XVI in a Netflix show because you would not find human female actresses to cast as Benedikta. Well, if it was on Netflix, they would of course update the cast for “modern audiences”.
I’m a little over an hour into this and I cannot believe how much dialogue there is. To be clear, I really like the story so far. It’s perhaps top tier for a video game. The problem is the gameplay, if you can call it that. You can seemingly button mash through just about any encounter and it rarely looks as if the player is struggling even the least bit. The gameplay was made to be as accessible as possible, genuinely retard-proof. Even the “cinematic strikes” give you like 4-5 full seconds to press what will apparently always be the square button. The game essentially plays itself. It’s taking the Scandinavian era of God of War’s formula to its logic conclusion.
Funnily enough, I had actually done the exact same thing as that reviewer and found that boss room earlier than intended. I’m pretty sure the developers had found that it was possible during testing, which is why nothing happens until you activate all the points of interest within the dungeon. As you allude to, however, there are many “incorrect” ways to solve shrines and dungeons given that Link has so many game breaking abilities. During the Fire Temple under Death Mountain in particular is where I found some pretty interesting exploits, basically bypassing a lot of the tedious rail system traversal puzzles.
I’ve watched up to the point where Jill and Clive enter the Phoenix Gate, go after the heart of the Mothercrystal and then end up in some desert town. I agree that it is quite entertaining. I’m surprised at how it turned out in that regard. I’m not surprised, however, that SM dropped it haha.
SM brought up the point at the end that the sales numbers might make this FF the actual final game ironically. As you pointed out a while ago with that FF theatrical movie that cost a ton of money to produce and then bombed, it seems that Square has a knack for dumping huge amounts of cash into a project only for it to bite them in the ass later. With rumors of a FFIX remake in development and the way current gaming trends are with remakes in general, I wouldn’t be surprised if FFXVI is the last numbered title for a long time, and Square just remakes all of their FF IPs from like VI-IX. I don’t think it helps the sales of the new game with it being confined to the PS5 either, so I hope that exclusive bonus paid well.
Update: FFXVI sales are doing pretty good actually, totaling over 3 million in 6 days.