Open Thread

Open Thread #338

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47 thoughts on “Open Thread #338

    1. This is a pretty lame ad. If panties are so empowering, why don’t those women take a walk through London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, or Cairo, without police protection? They would soon see how “empowered” they really are. Fun anecdote: at a company I worked at, some woman was asked to go on a business trip to Cairo and she freaked out about it. She could not decline it as it was part of her job duties to travel for business purposes but she was really uncomfortable with it, asking people about “trustworthy” cab companies as well as safe streets and hotels. Of course, there was never a leftist cause she did not like.

    2. For such a “strong” gender, it’s funny how women keep having to be reminded how empowered they are. After all these years.

    3. Thus far,my personal experiences has showed me that there are women who can supply great competency,but they don’t tend to be the “prettiest”.

      Some of you here might be familiar with the name “Marie Curie”. She definitely isn’t much of a looker (Not a warpig either though,don’t get me wrong.),but you certainly can’t deny her accomplishments.

      Do note though that I’m referring to “great” personal competence here,I don’t want to spread the false notion that beautiful women are automatically “ditzes” (in much the same way that people assume average or below average looking women must automatically be of greater character).

      Maybe some (not all of course) of the hottest women have the potential (Good Looks and Intelligence are correlated) to be like Marie Curie,but because their beauty definitely eases their general life trajectory (until they hit the wall),they never develop an interest to pursue these difficult matters.

      I’m just theorizing at this point though,but its an interesting observation. I’m pretty sure Marie Curie had no need to proclaim how “empowered” she is though,her accomplishments speak for themselves.

    4. You may want to look up who the husband of Marie Curie was and ponder over the possibility of him helping her out a bit here and there. I know, I know, this is completely outlandish. However, I can’t help but think of a female professor of philosophy I ran into years ago. She came across as pretty dull. Yet, her papers gave you the exact opposite impression. As I later learnt, she was married to a male professor who enjoyed a significant standing in the same academic niche. Obviously, this was all a complete coincidence because people can just have a bad day. I have absolutely no reason to believe that her husband reviewed if not revised her papers to make them publishable.

    5. Not out of question,thanks for clueing me in on that,Aaron.

      I would probably refrain from voicing that elsewhere though. I actually already got folks in mainstream internet circles upset at me for commenting that great female fictional authors are a rarity. haha.

    6. I pretty much gave up on reading books written by women. Such a simple criteria yet it improves quality of an average book I’m choosing to read so much.

    7. @Aaron

      did you ever hear back how she did in Cairo? I am familiar with Egypt, having spent time there twice. Its a shithole, largely, and she can be expected to be pestered by locals nonstop, both catcalling and peddling stuff. Especially if she looks european or american.

      You dont know about “street harassment” until you have been there, it is next level, even by middle eastern standards. Never let your women go there unaccompanied, and have them use a hijab if possible to at least partially shield them from predatory looks.

    8. No, there was no follow-up. I found this peculiar as otherwise employees who travel for business very frequently make cringe-worthy posts about their trips that primarily have status-signally purposes. It seems that the trip was not all that great. I also have some experience with working with people from Egypt. To put it politely, they leave a lot to be desires. In particular, I find their tendency to ass-kiss, presumably in an attempt to cover-up their insufficient performance, most concerning.

    9. @Yarara:

      Do you think Egypt is worse than India in this regard. Recently, there has been a lot of noise about “Pajeet” lame behavior; I don’t know how much it has to do with Vivek Ramaswamy’s “candidacy” in the US Republican primaries, but it might’ve started there.

    10. Pajeets are known for pestering white women. However, I do not think they have a reputation for ganging up on women and groping them. Also, I do not think that Indians accost women in real life that much. In contrast, there is ample evidence of their somewhat unusual approach to swooning the fair sex on online platforms.

    11. @Manuel S

      I have yet to visit India, and there are almost no indian migrants to be found in my country, so I have no good points of reference. I am much more familiar with the Middle East, I travel to the region quite often.

      That said, I have not heard good things about indian guys and women. The culture there may not be as sexually repressive as the most conservative parts of the middle East, but it is repressive nonetheless. In my exp this means horny guys not knowing how to appropiately interact with females from more modern cultures.

  1. I finished Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance (PS2) earlier today. It’s a really solid game that holds up well. If you like to play a relatively straightforward ARPG in the style of the first Diablo, then I warmly recommend it. Brief summary:
    + Virtually no fluff
    + Decent gameplay, perhaps a tad simplistic
    + Good art direction
    + Mostly good atmosphere, good sense of mystery
    + Decent replayability thanks to three different character classes and multiple difficulty levels (one run on “normal” was enough for me, though)
    + All three women in the game are super-hot (one is a playable character, the other an important NPC, and the last one the final boss)
    + Takes only about 10 hours to play through

    There are some negatives, though (minor spoilers):
    – Aiming of projectiles with a controller is not great
    – Some areas are bland and appear to be nothing but filler (ice caves, marsh, bog)
    – Some areas have poor enemy visibility, in particular the bog and parts of the final section
    – Minor glitches: character got permanently stuck to a tree once, necessitating a reload of a saved game; rarely, items float in the air so you need to jump to pick them up
    – The platforming sections are incredibly bad but there are thankfully very few of them
    – One-hit KO bullshit: some barrels explode and it is easy to accidentally smash them when you are fighting off enemies, also some treasure chests contain bombs which also lead to an instant KO, and this is difficult to see if your character keeps standing in front of it
    – Uneven difficulty at times, including some gotcha-moments consisting of very strong enemies ganging up on you; the worst example are hard-shelled monsters in the marsh that emerge from the ground or water. One is difficult enough to fight off, but at some point, I had four pop up around me. It seems they are programmed to move underground.
    – Poorly written cliffhanger ending

    I used the hot elven sorceress for my playthrough, which has multiple possible playstyles. My preferred style was a combination of melee combat with a some spells, e.g. two or three fireballs to the face, followed by some hits with my trusty flaming morning star. The game is engaging but not so much that you end up getting completely sucked in, so my gaming sessions were mostly between 60 and 90 minutes long. It’s a solid 8/10.

    1. “If I do not feel compelled to continue after about an hour”

      – And I’d say that’s the right approach most of the time. When I was much younger,I used to force myself to finish mediocre games/visual novels because of the Sunk Cost Fallacy,but now I remember that this is supposed to be a leisure activity,not something you take all that seriously. This especially applies to games that you got for free. (or pirated,not that I wish to condone it.)

      I know that sounds ironic though coming from somebody who is a big visual novel consumer,where a lot of great or (or well-renowned,some of them are a little overrated. Grisaia to me was a great overall experience,but I would not call it one of the best.) titles require you to be patient before you get to the real meat of it. I’m a lot pickier about VN’s these days though knowing just how time consuming they are on average,especially as I started to get interested in other things.

    1. Yeah, I got it for free from there and played it through. In short:

      Chasing collectibles is the same as in any game of the kind. It’s kinda fun for a while, then gets old. This was the best part of the game.

      The story sucks. Poor writing, which tries too hard to be “cool” (according to modern SJW standards) all the time. The final twist and big bad are ridiculous and come out of the blue.

      You all already know how ridiculous the characters are.

      Can’t be arsed writing anything more about it. Not worth the time. Would advise against playing through it even if you got it for free.

    2. I do not recall if I even bothered to get the game for free, i.e. the cost of a mouse click. My tolerance for nonsense in games is quite low. If I do not feel compelled to continue after about an hour, I am normally done. In the case of the Saints Row reboot, I probably would not make it past the first ten to fifteen minutes.

  2. https://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/19d69n9/consenting_to_sex_isnt_consenting_to_parenthood/

    I’d be interested to hear what are the thoughts of the folks on this blog on “Financial Abortion”.

    In my opinion,if a Woman has the legal right to abort or give birth against his will,then he should have the right to abort any financial responsibility for the child in the case of the latter.

    I feel like that should end a lot of conniving women attempting to baby trap men. But then again,maybe there’s a few factors I’m not taking into account. so I’d be interested in the input of the folks here.

    1. No, you’re right, bro. It’s been discussed on cable news before. Albeit, not enough. I remember Joe Rogan scoffing at the idea of men’s rights organizations. That it only applies to divorce settlements and nothing else. It actually permeates society.

  3. The YouTube algorithm is glitching out again. Today, it pointed me towards this channel filled with clips of attractive Chinese women:
    https://www.youtube.com/@nahem18
    As you are all men of culture, I am happily sharing it with you. Also, and I mean this completely seriously, this kind of content, i.e. brief video clips of attractive women, will soon be able to be created via AI. If you want another 1,000 clips to watch, you will only need to push a button and wait for a bit.

  4. Speaking of AI again, there is a new smash hit on Steam called Palworld, an open-world game with the following key elements: fantasy animals, guns, slavery, and resource harvesting. It sold five or six million copies at launch, and had a peak player count of over two million, which is the second-highest ever on Steam, after PUBG. Palworld was developed by a relatively small team and, apparently, generative AI was heavily used. The monsters in this game take quite a few queues from Pokemon, for instance. You can bet that there are a lot of indie studios right now who are looking at this success story. We will have to see if generative AI is going to lead to a second age of gaming. However, given that the time people have available for playing games is fixed, this development will almost invariably undermine the woke Western video game industry.

    1. I have not yet watched it but I intend to do so this weekend. The last couple of weeks I have been pretty busy.

    2. I just finished watching The Outsiders. In summary, I liked the movie. It is very well made. The actors are great. I was also really impressed by the audio mixing but Hollywood used to be better in this regard in general a few decades ago. There is a scene where dogs bark in the distance and I thought they were barking outside of my place. This compares quite favorably to the audio mixing in a more recent movie like Tenet where you barely understand some of the actors.

      I do not fully buy the premise of The Outsiders. The movie centers around the conflict of “greasers” and “socs”. The latter are upper-middle class teenagers whereas the former belong to the working class, and both factions hate each other. It is not clear to me why there is this animosity. Sure, there is a chick from the “socs” who flirts with some of the greasers but this is not believable as women are extremely status-conscious. Similarly, white women from an upper middle-class background don’t fuck the ethnic drug dealer either. Even if we accept jealousy over women as a premise, the outburst of violence on display is exaggerated. I am avoiding any spoilers here, but let’s just say that this movie could have toned down the violence a bit without compromising its message.

      I did like the coming-of-age undertone quite a bit, i.e. those teenage boys realizing that in the real world their gang affiliations amount to nothing and that high school is only a temporary phase in their lives. That one scene where one of the “socs” spells this out explicitly, talking about all the “breaks” he enjoys due to his background was perhaps a bit too on-the-nose. This could have been an attempt of the director to ensure that nobody misses the point. I found this quite disappointing. In contrast, I really liked when one of the boys gets a used copy of the book “Gone with the Wind” and flips through it, which I thought was well made.

    3. I think the reason why the story is a bit far fetched is because the writer, SE Hinton was 15 years old when she wrote the original manuscript. Pretty remarkable. It was inspired by a group of “Soc’s” beating up a greaser at her high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She exaggerated it onto a full blown gang war between the two groups.

      Mainly, greasers gangs fought each other during that era, and the rich boys stayed out of that behavior. The Soc’s coming to the fight formally dressed was pretty funny. That was Coppala’s doing though, as you said overemphasizing the class differences.

      But I think the greasers may have had a sex appeal to upper class female teens due to the “bad boy” effect, forbidden fruit etc, especially if they were Chads…….which every one of these guys were. And men go crazy even if their girl looks at another man (both genders do). I think that’s where it got a little absurd. No gangs look like that. But that’s Coppala’s fault, not Hinton’s.

      But I’m glad you liked it. Damn Diane Lane was hot. I never liked red heads, but it looked great on her. Even if it wasn’t the same red hair she had on her “eye brows” hehe

  5. Hit a PR on Deadlift today. 285lbs for 6 reps,with no belt.

    In the past,I’ve done around that many reps at 290lbs WITH a belt. Its only a 5lb difference. (and a belt of course gives much more of a strength increase than that)

    so I think its safe to conclude…my lower body as a whole in general is definitely stronger than it used to be.

    5/3/1 is a weird program,but its definitely doing its magic for me.

  6. I’m liking this guy more and more. He used to identify with the” Left.” Now they hate him. God Damn, I hate binary labels. I’ve never seen their use for society. Except for making people simple and dumb. He’s been on Tuckers show a few times and they agree on many issues He explains it well here:

    https://youtu.be/JaHT9XxrwJI?si=mtk0rhQbYECqYi6M

  7. I would definitely get called a creep if I asked this in most mainstream forums,but if you are a considerably older man (lets say 30’s. I’ll be turning 30 on my next birthday),and you want to hitch it off with someone as close to the legal age as possible,how would you go about it?

    LMS is a given. You better be well-off and took care of yourself,I’m just wondering how one is supposed to go about this. presumably,women in this age range is probably at college or so. if you are significantly well-off enough that you can study as a hobby,I suppose that is one possible way to pull this off (I wouldn’t do it even if I could though. I’ve already spoken about how just horrifying the system is in my country,lol),but if not,what other possible avenues do you guys know of?

    This probably really only matters if you are looking for a wife to have kids with though. (I believe you yourself advocate this if it is within one’s ability to do so.)

    1. As you rightly point out, the first question is where to meet them. I also do not think that any man is able to pull this off. I met both my first and second wife close to their 21st birthday, +/- a few months. What absolutely helped me is that my biological age is lagging my chronological age. Clearly, I am getting older, too, but the average guy my age cannot compete with me at all.

      You do not need to get another degree, and pay for more leftist brainwashing. Instead, you only need to be able to meet women in this age group and be able to elicit a positive response. Most certainly, not all of them will respond positively to an older guy hitting on them, even one that looks a lot younger than he is. However, the default response of those women should not be that she sees you as some creepy old dude. Let’s say you saw a cute young woman in a shopping mall, could you strike up a conversation, and if you did this a few times, would at least some women find you interesting enough to want to keep seeing you?

    2. What absolutely helped me is that my biological age is lagging my chronological age

      Did you try those age-checking tools we were discussing on the skincare topics? Like for example facialage(dotcom), howolddoyoulook(dotcom) and age.toolpie.com; Is it substantially younger?

    3. No, I did not. This is based on me comparing myself to people my age and feedback I have gotten. In my mid-30s I could still easily fit into a mid-to-late 20s crowd, though.

    4. @Maou; one of the best exaplanations I saw on this topic was from some guest blogger on girlschase(dotcom); I loved the way he put it.

      Basically he says, an older guy is creepy because he’s had all this time to make something of himself, and didn’t. Older celebrities are never creepy. The 47 year old high status club promoter will never be labelled creepy (etc).

      Basically, with chicks it’s like if you’re 19 and you’re awkward and you haven’t done much in life, it’s not creepy. Because it’s like you have time to prove yourself. The older you get and you’re still ordinary (unaccomplished) the more the label creepy gets thrown. But it actually makes sense. If you had DECADES to handle your shit and still haven’t, that is creepy, not the age itself.

    5. Or an a simpler way to put it. A 21 year old bum will never be labelled creepy. I’m not saying chicks will line up to bang him (they might if he has chad looks). But they will not label him creepy. A bum who’s 40 years old will be labelled creepy.

    6. “If you had DECADES to handle your shit and still haven’t, that is creepy, not the age itself.”

      Another eye-opener from you,as usual. haha. Especially when you think about it from an evolutionary perspective,it makes sense that this screams red flag subconsciously. I’ve read several reports from guys on reddit (and other internet forums) who have had an enthusiastic date all of a sudden lose interest the moment they reveal their lack of sexual experience. Its sometimes made me wonder why this happens (I’m sure none of us would dump a genuinely great catch if she’s a virgin. if anything,that’s a plus in our case. haha),but now that you put it this way,this phenomenon too,starts to make sense to me as well.

    7. I can’t take any credit for it. I wish I had come up with it myself, it was an aha moment for me when I read it as well.

    8. who have had an enthusiastic date all of a sudden lose interest the moment they reveal their lack of sexual experience. Its sometimes made me wonder why this happens (I’m sure none of us would dump a genuinely great catch if she’s a virgin. if anything,that’s a plus in our case. haha)

      I’ve even seen the reverse cases i.e. a woman complaining that the guy stopped pursuing her once he learned she was a virgin. People interested in casual sex aren’t too keen on banging a virgin because he/she might become attached.

      But as a guy there is absolutely no reason to bring this up on a date. Your job is to show sexual interest and escalate, not disclose your insecurities.

    9. No, I did not. This is based on me comparing myself to people my age and feedback I have gotten.

      The reason I ask is because I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon, and it’s apparently been studied in science as well. Apparently people are deemed as younger on criteria such as mannerisms, vitality, dressing, fitness levels etc.

      So I’m one of those guys who was always deemed much younger than I am, and I don’t mean just the “people being nice”. I mean even at 29 many people I assumed I was 21 and were like “Wtf???”, like genuinely. But I passed my pics from then into the age-detectors, and it says I looked 29 or 30;

      I think since the age-detection tools can only look at the actual physical features, they are not influenced by these other things, but humans are.

    10. Your “Vibe” (or “Factors other than Looks/LMS”) definitely influences your attractiveness. (or how people perceive you in general)

      But I think your vibe is something you can’t purposely manipulate (besides the obvious shit like not having a scowl like Lisbon.) like PUA’s were selling. They are things you do subconsciously in your day to day as a reflection of your true self in the world.

      The only reliable way to change your vibe,as this forum has always advocated,is through real life accomplishments.

      As an example,if people have always perceived you to be a wimp and a weakling,how do you change that? Its not by puffing up your chest and being unnecessarily aggressive (not only do you end up stooping as low as the bullies you despise,but you put yourself in very real dangerif you end up pissing off the wrong person this way),you do it by,as someone else has said it; “You want to be Strong? Start doing Strong man things”.

      Lifting weights to get big and strong,taking up challenging hobbies,learning to fight (some would argue me on this one,but in my opinion,especially if you have a history of being bullied,this is a necessary step. I think the important thing here though is having some form of a challenging physical hobby),taking up responsibilities for causes that you care about,etc.

      So yeah,interestingly,the only reliable way to change your vibe is to pursue things that also happen to boost your LMS.

    11. Yep. There is another way to achieve it… By “working on your inner-game”, which is absolute bullshit. I was just thinking about it these days.

      You will often see coaches tell anecdotal stories about the guy with no-real world accomplishments who got laid because he was confident, despite being a bum.

      And while that is true, such people exist… for must humans, unless you’re naturally like that; choosing that as your strategy is the SLOWER path.

      Like working on your “self-acceptance” and “inner work” so you be *confident* despite having no accomplishments… TAKES MORE WORK than actually achieving shit lol.

      It’s EASIER to obtain higher LMS (the real deal) than to convincingly act like you have higher LMS without having it. And besides, having higher LMS has value to your life outside just getting interest from girls.

      *I’m using “confidence”, “confident” as shorthand. It’s more than just confidence. It also include mannerisms associated with having higher status, indifference to female charm etc… You naturally develop those when you actually achieve stuff. Which is why women are attracted to those things. And yes sometimes the female radar misfires and she ends up banging a bum who displays those things without having earned them… but that’s not a wise thing to emulate.

  8. And good catch on Gone with the Wind. Both stories were written by women, and centered on bad boy, non-atistocratic Chads. Who had soft underbellies.

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