Open Thread

Open Thread #322

Aaron "Sleazy" Elias

The Open Thread is a place for open discussion among my readers. Post anything you feel like sharing! From now on, the Open Thread will no longer be monthly. Instead, there will be a new Open Thread whenever it is adequate. The stage is yours. Go ahead!

The latest Open Thread is made ‘sticky’ to improve access.

Please consider throwing a few coins into the tip jar, and buy my books! They are great. Your support is greatly appreciated.

29 thoughts on “Open Thread #322”

  1. Have you goys seen Ron DeSantis being height shamed? I am no fan of the man but it is absurd. There are studies saying that tall men make more money and US Presidents have overwhelmingly ben taller than the average man. So DeSantis is merely “playing the game.” Just imagine if AOC went Lindey West and got all fat. Then if she wore clothing to hide her flab and anyone in the media dared call out the privilege princess, we would here misogyny and how men body shame wimmenz. Yet when the shoe is on the other foot, the fatties think it is ok to demean the shorties…

    Reply

    2. Women trick men all the time. High heels, make up, push-up bras, compression shirts, etc. Most of it is completely socially acceptable. In my opinion, DeSantis mistake was not using lifts per se, but using four inch lifts in particular. If he opted for adding just 5 cm instead it would’ve been much better. Especially if it would be mostly accomplished through the external sole. Internal sole makes you look like a complete fraud, but platform shoes are much more honest since everyone can see that they are tall from the outside.

      Btw what’s your opinion on using lifts and tall shoes when going to clubs, Aaron? My opinion is in line with what I described above: an inch or two (depending on your height) is ok, make it three and we are entering clown territory. Then again, whatever makes your dick wet.

    3. My personal view is that for shorter men, such height adjustments give disproportionate benefits, so there is no reason not to do it, within reason. I likewise think that it is better to not be deceptive about it. Leather shoes are therefore a better option than wearing sneakers with lifts, but you may not like wearing the former. Interestingly, I recall some PUA guy from back in the days who used to wear platform shoes, which he deemphasized by wearing flared pants. It was a pretty unusual style. This guy got laid every once in a while, as he was LARPing as a 6 foot tall guy. I am not quite sure how he pulled it off. Perhaps he only banged chicks with his shoes. Also, this approach required finding chicks who were a bit buzzed. It is no surprise that this guy had a really hard time getting any chick to call him back. Just imagine how the women he pulled must have felt when they woke up next to him, wondering why there was this manlet in their bed.

    1. There are plenty of people with an IT background who have very uninformed opinions on AI. What is worse, there is also the problem that some of the people who are most knowledgeable are incentivized to lie about AI, its current status, and future potential. Researchers want to keep the government gravy train going, engineers in industry want to keep their jobs, and investors as well as business owners want media hype and a torrent of money coming their way. As an example, years ago Tesla used to boast about their “autopilot”, claiming that it would soon be able to drive cars fully autonomously. Today, this company is much more conservative in their claims. They no longer even promise fully autonomous driving but instead sell this product as a driving assistant that requires the human driver to be behind the wheel and ready to take over any time.

  3. Konami is basically irrelevant from a gamer’s perspective at this point. Check out Digital Foundry’s coverage of the Metal Gear Master Collection to see how slapped together and half-asses that was. Then check out this video to see how they handled Silent Hill: Ascension: https://youtu.be/pL1d0KXEkbk?si=oU0_fbJQpZflztRE

    It’s basically a shitty “pay-to-win” TV series with battle passes.

    Reply

    1. The new Silent Hill game looks absolutely horrible, and the monetization is crass. On a more uplifting note, yesterday I fired up Super Mario World on a whim on a SNES emulator, and now I am already halfway through. It is quite incredible how well this game holds up, after more than 30 years. I may play through the GBA version as well as it tracks which dragon coins you have collected, unlike the SNES original.

    2. Super Mario World was pretty sweet. The exploration was pretty good – finding those hidden paths.

      Another good one is the first Wario Land for the original Gameboy. The main goal is to find all of the hidden treasure rooms so that you get enough coins to unlock the best ending of the game. Since it’s original Gameboy, screen crunch is present, but it’s dealt with quite adequately in design.

    3. I have played through Super Mario World as a kid many, many times, getting a perfect save file, i.e. 96 exits, repeatedly. I was quite obsessed with it back then. Amusingly, now that I am replaying it, I realize that some of my approaches were a bit suboptimal. For instance, there is a hidden exit on the stage Cheese Bridge Area. As a kid, I practiced reaching it with the cape, and succeeded. It is not easy at all, and you can take multiple routes, weaving your way through the floating saw blades. Then you need to take a dive and pull up again. When I pulled this off the first time, I was thrilled, but also floored as I thought that this was ridiculously difficult. When replaying it decades later, I realized that you only need to take Yoshi with you, float to the exit area, and then dismount, which is trivial. As a kid I did not do this because I did not want to exit the level, getting Yoshi somewhere else, as you cannot get him in this stage, and returning. I thought this was “cheating”, and arguably it is a less pure way of playing. I think it is bad game design if you need to backtrack and get certain items. This is one of the gripes I have about New Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo DS as there are exits to hidden levels for which you need to farm special items elsewhere. Speaking of childhood approaches to playing Super Mario World, and on a related (inverted?) note to what I wrote above, there is an infamous stage called Tubular, supposedly the hardest level in the game, and it seems that people are not aware that you can cheese through it with the P-block by just hugging the top of the screen for the most part.

      I will check out Wario Land, which I don’t think I ever played. I found it quite difficult to get back to the Game Boy after I had gotten a Super Nintendo, with the exception of the original Tetris, which has not aged terribly well. New game releases did not really interest me, but I recall that I quite liked Link’s Awakening.

    1. Yes, this is a total mystery. Maybe look into what the people who allegedly, in your view, built Western society, contributed to this. Then branch out a little bit and research which people create mixed-race pornography, despite it not making money. What you find may surprise you.

    2. I doubt that it’s the jews who are responsible.

      I mean… they are not all-knowing and all-powerful conspirators.

    3. Read a bit more and drop your cartoonish depiction of views you do not agree with.

    4. Just look at the film industry in general. How can one tribe be overrepresented by 2,000 percent? No nepotism? Even though a guy like Mel Gibson can make better movies without their money nor Leftists agendas?

  7. Another update from street chicks. Most chicks are still fatties, the ones who aren’t respond even better. I don’t know if it’s the skincare, or that I’ve been getting back into shape, or the increased confidence from my status-based business finally picking up and them seeing it in my demeanor.

    They now actively seek out my eye-contact and smile. Just went to grab something in the store, every non-fattie on the way was eye-fucking me. One made sure to walk by me, and go “ohhh heloooo tehhhhee”.

    I’m mostly ascribing it to the skincare, since at my peak I was in much better shape and 10 years younger, but I didn’t get this stuff. The other explanation is my vibe has changed due to actually accomplishing things in life (confidence).

    Additionally a couple of days I confirmed I am indeed well-endowed, which did give me quite the ego boost. Maybe I’m walking around with that “big dick energy”. Who knows.

    It’s a very useful calculator in any case. Wish this existed 10 years ago:
    https://calcsd.info/

    Gives you a percentile.

    Reply

    1. Hopefully the fat/ugly chicks are being sent into auto-rejection just from your presence. I think that’s what we all want here. Unlike chicks,we generally don’t care about attention for validation’s sake.

      I have a feeling that was what was going on with me before I got into self-improvement. I have height and face,but because I was fat and out of shape,I probably looked homely/”attainable” enough to them to bother. These days,that hasn’t happened. Actually,I often get nasty looks from fat chicks without me even doing anything. If they are auto-rejecting,good.

    3. Yes Maou. Fat women HATE men who are attractive and know it. They take it as a personal affront.

  8. What is your opinion and thoughts about V2K (voice to skull), RNM (Remote Neural Monitoring), Brain Hacking and synthetic telepathy?

    Reply

    1. This sounds like transhumanist b.s. However, I recall reading about voice-to-skull technology having been prototyped in government labs. I am not sure how reliable those stories are, though. I just did a quick online search and came across some abstracts and patents, but there are a lot of patent applications for appliances and processes that do not exist:
      https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/scientists-are-citing-patents-for-things-that-dont-actually-exist

  9. Sam Bankman-Fried apparently has to go to jail, despite donating untold sums of money to the Democrat party. More interestingly, a book by best-selling author Michael Lewis, “Going Infinite”, came out weeks before Bankman-Fried’s trial, surely completely by coincidence and not at all in an attempt to rehabilitate that guy’s public image. Had he embezzled just a little bit less money, or had the West been able to defend the Ukraine against Russia, he would probably have been able to shake off all legal problems. Here, the context is that Bankman-Fried was heavily involved in money laundry in the Ukraine, but this is now a hot-potato issue.

    Reply

  10. Aaron, have you seen American History X from the late 1990s? I have to say this is a very watchable movie. Good directing, great acting (Edward Norton). But that’s the problem. It’s complete politically correct propaganda. It’s they’re playbook essentially.

    Here’s the trailer for those who haven’t seen it:

    https://youtu.be/LZGVcd5clgg?si=DPOkYdtnAKH5GMdt

    Reply

    1. I watched it way before I had become “woke” to how the world really works, and even back then I thought that it as an incredibly simplistic anti-white propaganda movie.

    2. Unfortunately most see it as informative on skin head culture. Having reasonable views on racial problems in the US makes you a violent criminal. Most of the things Derek said are 100 percent correct and verifiable. The deceit in this film is flabbergasting.

      They don’t know how to fight a fair fight.

      Jew director of course.

    3. In the original script Derek shaves his hair back to skinhead-mode at the end of the film…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.