A rare shitty cover for this series

There’s a reason I try to review books immediately after finishing them: everything is fresh in my mind and there are usually a few ‘hot takes’ I have on the content or writing style. It wouldn’t seem a big deal to leave a book a couple of weeks before getting around to writing it up, but in 2018 those couple of weeks have likely involved finishing another five books, the ideas of which have pushed the older book out of my consciousness.

Sigh. Life is hard.

Donald Hamilton’s second volume in the long-running Matt Helm series, The Wrecking Crew, is such a book. The story is pretty good. Helm has now rejoined Mac’s group of Cold War assassin’s working off-the-books wet-works for the US government. After fifteen years out, he’s put back through a battery of tests so Mac can assess if he’s still sharp enough. It turns out he’s off the pace as well as the books.

Of course, wet-works would never happen nowadays

Intriguingly, Mac spins this as a positive by sending him to Sweden on a job knowing full well that their partnering Swedish intel counterparts have a leak, and thus Helm’s cover (as a photographer for a top nature magazine) will be immediately compromised. From there, the opposition will find out he’s past it and thus underestimate him. His job is to accompany the widow of a suspected double agent. He was murdered behind the Iron Curtain after touting publicly (he was a journalist in Sweden) that he’d discovered the identity of the USSR’s top agent in Europe. The widow is researching an article on fascinating locations in the isolated rural north of Sweden and needs someone like Helm to take photos.

Of course it’s all very fishy. His Swedish connect gives him away immediately before being gunned down in a double-double-cross by the shadowy USSR agent. He’s then palling up with a hot Swedish teen who is a competitive cross-country skiier and seems to fancy him. Eventually he finds himself in the northern mountains being directed to take very specific photos by this odd widow. It looks like her story is a ploy to get permission to photograph Swedish military installations.

As you’d expect from a Matt Helm book, everything is smoke and mirrors. There is more deceit and calculation than in the Jewish World Series Of Poker. It’s this feeling that everyone is lying and nothing is as it seems that I like about the Helm stories. Hamilton never loses his grip on the plot so it never spins off into gotcha moments or deus ex-machina. It’s tightly plotted throughout and all the characters stay in character.

The key conceit of this book is that Helm is a fantastically savvy agent who has to deliberately play the part of a bungling idiot. For example, he arrives at his hotel and goes to his room:

A canny secret-agent type would, of course, have looked the place over carefully before turning his back on the closet and bathroom doors. Under other circumstances, I might even have done so myself, but I was playing a part, and my script didn’t call for any displays of professional vigilance. Mac had been emphatic on this point.

Mac had told him:

“But in many ways you’d have been better prepared for the job at hand if you’d spent the past month in a hotel room with a bottle and a blonde. Now you’ll have to use restraint. Don’t betray yourself by showing off any of the pretty tricks you’ve just learned. If somebody wants to follow you, let them follow; you don’t even know they’re there. What’s more, you don’t care. If they want to search your belongings, don’t set any traps for them. If you should get involved in a fight – God forbid – forget about weapons except in a clear and desperate emergency. And don’t give any unnecessary judo demonstrations, either. Just lead with your right and take your licking like a man. Do I make myself clear?”

The reason is that Helm’s real job isn’t to take the photos and keep an eye on the widow, but rather to draw out the Soviet super-spy and kill him. That spy is going to observe, circle, and nibble before deciding whether to come out of cover to bite. Helm can’t afford to tip his hand and send the spy back into deep cover. So in an early scene when the Soviet has some goons jump him, Helm has to forego his chances to beat them in a fight because he knows the Soviet has manufactured the fight merely to assess his competence.

It’s this kind of subtlety that shows why I vastly prefer the Matt Helm books over the Remo Williams Destroyer books. Remo just slaughters everyone in the blink of an eye. If anyone exposes him, he just ninja-death-touches them into silence. Helm follows the Sun Tzu school of strategic deception

Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.

Who does that remind you of? Oh yes, this guy……

It isn’t just Helm who entered enemy territory on a mission to draw out hostile shadowy actors. Trump is cleaning out the Deep State and it would’ve been suicidal to take them on by a frontal overt assault. Instead he’s set all manner of traps, misdirections, and subterfuges to leave the traitors over-confident. He’ll tweet like he’s confused, make big noises about NFL players kneeling, and encourage former staffers to plant false stories in the MSM about porn stars and candid tapes….. and all the while secret assassins like Jeff Sessions, John Huber, and Michael Flynn are amassing the evidence that will take the Deep State down in one thunderous swoop.

You don’t purge enemy cabals by announcing your plans and letting them take counter-measures. Nope, you do it the Saddam Hussein way

Of course when you deploy strategic deception, it has to be so good that everyone outside the inner circle is fooled by it. That means you fool your own followers half the time, at least until the hammer drops. For the past two years I’ve felt like I’ve had Donald Hamilton narrating a new Matt Helm story to me, explaining the misdirection in the White House like he does in the Helm books. I’ve been watching all the chess pieces move into position and the clock tick down.

It’s been wonderfully relaxing.

My books are still on sale, believe it or not. Nothing has changed in the past hour since I linked them in the previous book review. Get ’em by clicking here.

Some Jordan Peterson fans are cunts. Let me explain.

One of my favourite courses at university was called Introduction To Informal Logic given by the philosophy department [1]. The idea was to clarify the thinking of students when reasoning verbally, as opposed to the syllogisms and algebra of formal logic. Thus rather than learn all the logical syllogisms like this:

If A, then B
If B, then C
A, therefore C

We instead learned argument fallacies such as the No True Scotsman or the Logical Black-Is-White Slide. Then we’d be given sample texts and try to spot the fallacies. This is perhaps why to this day I get riled when a normal person says “fallacious” to mean “mistaken”, or “refute” to mean “repudiate”, or “invalid” to mean “false”. Each of the first terms in these pairs has a specific meaning in the study of informal logic.

I consider informal logic to be part of the meta-level of a well-trained mind. In crude terms, you could say there are several levels to a well-trained mind as follows [2], from most abstract to most concrete:

Me, yesterday

Meta-level – The operating system of how you process information, classify information, and weigh evidence. The study of logic, scientific method, statistics and so on belong here. As does a purification process to purge sloppy thinking and ego that may corrupt the hard drives upon which everything is stored. This is all the how of thinking itself. It’s about the curation of your mental garden.
Theoretical level – The axioms and principles you’ve divined that seem to drive the world, including heuristics and rules of thumb. So that could be theories like r/K, evolution, Great Man theory, Hegelian dialectic or simple ideas like “everything is mating strategy” or “every situation has both the seen and unseen effects”. This is mostly the why but has a bit of what. These are the ideas that are applied to facts.
Classification level – The groupings of data, subject disciplines, and the interrelations between them. For example, you may divide martial arts between classifications of living/dead, or academic disciplines as bullshit/real, or decide one data set belongs in psychology but another in sociology etc. This is about allocating space in your mental matrix. You have different lines of soil for cabbages to the carrots etc.
Factual level – The raw data of observations about the world be it first, second or third hand. This is what most people would call ‘facts’. This is all what. It’s the individual vegetables in your garden, that you plant into the correct place determined by the classification level.

I’ve noticed over time that some people can be really good at some levels and awful at others. For example, Joe Rogan is a veritable treasure trove at the factual level because he has an inquisitive mind, hundreds of long interviews with experts in various fields, and his own interesting background in comedy, martial arts, and behind-the-scenes UFC. Unfortunately, he appears to have no solid world-view within which to locate and organise everything. He is a ‘surface skater’ rather than a systematic thinker. These guys are great at dinner parties because of all their interesting stories and factoids. It’s basically the Pub Quiz guy.

This is a curse endemic to anyone who hasn’t studied the canon of Western thought and literature. You need a reasonable grounding in the classics and history to begin mapping out your own world-view in organised fashion.

His friend and frequent guest Eddie Bravo is a weird conspiracy nut who seems incapable of processing the most basic things said to him, and is awful at the factual and classification levels. However his brain is naturally systematic and he operates well at the theoretical level. It is thus unsurprising that he revolutionised Brazilian Ju Jitsu by creating his own theoretical paradigm – which all fits together beautifully like a physical jigsaw – and inventing a ton of positions, transitions and ideas to fit into it.

Watching him ramble on in The Joe Rogan Show you’d think he’s a doped-up moron, but his undeniable world-class BJJ and submission wrestling achievements absolutely belie that first impression. He’s smart. Just…. odd.

If you’re an ambitious young man who wishes to cultivate his mind and become a renaissance man it is not enough to simply read a lot. Filling your mind with facts will not suffice. You need to cultivate the structure of your mind in addition to pouring in lots of new data. For this reason I absolutely recommend the study of informal logic. If nothing else, it armours you against rhetoric from others because you can immediately x-ray their arguments to spot the underlying logical bone-structure and the mistakes within it. It becomes harder for people to pull the wool over your eyes.

Thoughless with his 1930 prototype

I chose to read Robert H. Thouless’ Straight And Crooked Thinking for a different reason. I consider it spring cleaning for the mind. The human brain is like an install of Windows 10 in that, if left untended, it will degrade over time. If all you do is pour in new information you are neglecting the structure and thus it’s easy for your ego to swoop in and begin fooling you with your own argumentative fallacies. It’s good to revisit informal logic to apply it’s lessons to yourself. That’s what I did here, pausing during each chapter to ask myself, “Do I make that mistake? Are my recent arguments fallacious in this regard?”

Though I’d recommend Weston and Flew over Thouless, I did get a lot of value out of this book. It’s written in 1930 and then revised in 1953 so it has a patient style without the recourse to fancy that a modern how-to-think paperback would have (Scott Adams, I’m looking at you). In 1953 writers didn’t feel the need to put bells and whistles on everything to maintain their ADHD reader’s attention. I like the old school style.

As for content, here are some interesting snippets I took from the book:

– Choosing emotionally-loaded words over more neutral words is a rhetorical device that is likely to stir up obstacles to dialectical reasoning. Just be clear the purpose of your communication and choose your vocabulary accordingly.

– Many arguments sound convincing until you realise the proposer is implying the qualifier “all” but will only defend the qualifier “some”. For example, “Muslims are terrorists” is very easy to defend factually if prefaced by “some” but not by “all”. Thoughless states it better than I can:

“We can put this in a more general way by saying that a common form of dishonest argument is the statement “A is B” when “Some A is B” would be true, but in which the untrue statement “All A is B” is implied for the rest of the argument.”

– There’s a very good discussion of arguments over words vs arguments over facts. The crux of it is that both sides may agree the facts but they define their words differently and therefore can’t reach agreement. Thoughless uses this example early on, about whether the colour green is a fact of the world or just how its experienced inside our minds:

“If it is realised that this is only a verbal question of whether we are to use the word ‘green’ for the colour of grass and leaves or for the experience we have when we look at grass and leaves, it is clear that there is nothing of interest to discuss. We use the word in either way…. all that matters is that we should use not use it in both senses without making a distinction between them when confusion might arise.”

That might sound like Captain Obvious once more triumphing with his Hammer of Obvious but Thoughless develops the idea in ways that were new to me and really helped. His key insight is that such arguments are really about “ought” not “is”. Both sides believe there is rhetorical power in recruiting a particular word to their side (e.g. ‘democracy’) so this is really a battle over ownership of the word, to use it to denote their preferred interpretation. It’s a rhetorical sleight of hand while the real factual world underneath isn’t changed at all. It is often a preliminary step before taking that word and committing the informal logic fallacy of equivocation.

No, you clean YOUR room, pal.

Vox Day noted this is Jordan Peterson‘s primary sleight of hand and it exposes him as a worm-tongued charlatan. JBP constantly defines words his own way, far removed form the normal usage, at the “defend” stage of argument. He then picks up that word and carries it over to a new argument hoping to keep its power under the everyday use of the term. I realised it’s like a magician’s trick. Let me explain with a visual metaphor.

Imagine a gym where all the free weights are the same physical dimensions, but the density inside the plates and dumbbells give them different weights. So, they look identical but are different weights. They are identified with stickers, from 5kg, to 7.5kg etc right up to the big man weights. Jordan Peterson comes in [3] and walks over to the lightest girl weights. They are very easy to lift. He puts his own sticker alongside the 5kg, a number 3 to the left so that it now reads 35kg.

“Hey, Canadian” shouts a big beefy Texan. “Sticking a new number on doesn’t make it any heavier.”

Peterson isn’t phased. “Oh no, I’m not pretending it’s heavier. It’s just I’m recording my exercise regime on a different scale, where I apply a discount factor of x7. It’s just a precise way I like to define my numbers. It makes sense in the context of my own system. I don’t actually think it’s 35kg. It’s just a labelling convention I have.”

“Oh, I see” says the Texan, walking out the room at the end of his workout.

Peterson takes his dumbbells and walks to the other side of the room where some hot girls are working out. They never heard the earlier exchange. Peterson starts curling the dumbells in front of the girls. They see the 35kg marker on them.

“Wow! You’re strong!” they coo.

“Yeah. Special technique” he says, his ego preening in satisfaction at the successful con.

I see this type of move all the time, especially in the media. You define a term narrowly or specifically when pressed (e.g. the “Some X are Y” above) and as soon as the audience’s vigilance is reduced, you begin applying the term in the wider general sense (“All X are Y”). Personally, I’d never use such a sleight of hand.

So, I have conclusively proven all Jordan Peterson fans are cunts.

Perhaps you’d like to assign me ideas and positions the opposite of those I actually take, like Peterson’s fans do to him. If so, you’ll probably want to avoid reading my actual books, just like JBP’s fans don’t read his books either. However, I’d rather you did read them because then I’ll get paid. Order here.

[1] The two core texts were Anthony Weston’s A Rulebook For Arguments which lists all the fallacies very clearly, and Antony Flew’s Thinking About Thinking which is a discursive treatment of the same general content. Both are great.
[2] I’ve literally just invented this schema as I started writing this review, so don’t take it as anything more than a convenient typology to illustrate a point.
[3] Probably in a really gay cyclist Lycra outfit

There’s something strangely alluring to me, in fiction, about the border towns of Mexico. It’s puzzling why this should be but it is so and I shall attempt to reason it out. Before I go any further, why don’t you have a quick look at Robert Rodriguez’s [1] mariachi trilogy, of which the second – Desperado – is my favourite

Cool, no?

Many early hardboiled detective stories were written in the 1930s by writers based around LA so it was a common theme to have border-hopping as a plot convenience. Murders could flee south to escape the law, or smugglers could infiltrate north from Juarez. This built upon earlier Western novels that used the Mexico-US war as spice to it’s own Wild West.

There’s something sweaty, grimy and desolate about the border region. Even the wilderness is fraught with danger to a cowboy on his horse: thirst, rattlesnakes, bandits…. somehow it’s more exciting than the desert country in North Africa. Then of course we get to the border towns themselves.

Who could ever forget the Titty Twister?

This fourth Matt Helm book, The Silencers, gets off to a flying start in Juarez, Mexico. A female agent has infiltrated a strip joint to observe the operations of a suspected Soviet spy but her handler now worries she’s turned into a double agent. Matt Helm is sent down to El Paso so he can hop over the border, meet his connect, then extract the agent.

Dead or alive. Hence the title.

Stepping off the south end of the span, I was in a foreign country. Mexicans will tell you defensively that Juarez isn’t Mexico – that no border town is – but it certainly isn’t the United States Of America, even though Avenida Juarez, the street just south of the bridge, does bear a certain resemblance to Coney Island.

I brushed off a purveyor of dirty pictures and shills for a couple of dirty movie houses. I side-stepped half a dozen taxi drivers ready to take me anywhere, but preferably to the house of a lady named Maria who had lots of girls, it seemed, one of whom, at least, was the girl I’d been looking for since birth. If I didn’t like girls, there were many interesting alternatives. I was surprised to learn how many.

This daytime trip is merely a feint to see if he picks up a shadow. He returns the next evening for his mission.

Outside, we ran the gauntlet of taxi drivers and shills and the porteros of the various joints we passed who did their best to collar us and haul us into their respective establishments. A tall, gaunt, evil-looking character with a knife-slash across his nose was playing safety man for the Club Chihuahua. We let him make the tackle. It took him less than fifteen seconds to get us seated at a table in a dark room with a bar at one end and a girl undressing on a lighted stage at the other.

They are joined by two hostesses and the female agent takes the stage for her strip.

“All the way, Lila!” somebody shouted from the back of the room.

She smiled. The bloodhounds might be on her trail, but she was going to do her stuff regardless. The kid had guts. Well, I knew that. She’d tried to jump me, the time we’d got our identities confused in San Antonio. I’d been holding two guns at the time, like Wild Bill Hickok, but she’d jumped me anyway.

“All the way!” the M.C. yelled, and the loud speakers threw his voice at us from the dark recesses of the room. “All the way, baybee!”

She made her corner and passed across the front of the stage, swinging away from us. Her back turned toward us, she reached up and did something feminine and provocative with her hair, teasing, before she reached for the zipper. As the yellow dress opened from top to bottom, baring her back, a knife, coming from nowhere, buried itself to the hilt just below her left shoulder blade.”

And so begins a tale in which Helm attempts to track down a Soviet agent named Cowboy by baiting him with a microfiche of atomic test plans and a missile launch he intends to hijack. It’s good stuff, like a James Bond story at a lower pay-grade of spooks. All the usual Helm themes are there: gritty purposeful action, strategic deception, utterly untrustworthy women, and impersonal cold-blooded murder.

In the late 1800s it was all about Mexican bandits and revolutionaries. In the 1930s it was wetback dope smugglers and pimps, and by the 1960s its cold war duels. Lately the border town action is the drug cartels. The six primary border crossings into the US are now the scene of unprecedented carnage as cartels fight for control of these lucrative routes. The recent Sicario movies are a good example of how the old story structure has adapted to new villains and cultural tone. As are the Don Winslow novels.

Border towns appeal to the bottom-world grittiness of a hardboiled story. They have a geographical tone you couldn’t get in a Bavarian castle or a Yukon forest. There’s a sweaty, degenerate sexual vibe. It’s tequila, mosquitoes, sombreros, and street walkers. Love it.

If you like your degeneracy of the realistic sexual type, consider my products here.

Very sleazy book

[1] Rodriguez is a pioneering filmmaker in shooting big movies on tiny budgets. He was among the first to use digital cameras and do edits and scores himself. He also famously had Johnny Depp star in Once Upon A Time In Mexico by cramming all his scenes into three days of filming to get him cheap. Sadly, RR is just another Hollywood degenerate.

Most readers will be only dimly aware of Rock Solid Game founder Jimmy Jambone [1] who was my next-door neighbour at Chateau Hampstead. Those of you who’ve read Balls Deep and A Deplorable Cad will have a rather more fleshed-out image of the man [2]. He is perhaps best known in the modern London Daygame community by his nickname, “Krauser’s Jimmy”.

Memoir readers are well aware that for several years in my player’s journey I’d encounter perplexing problems with girls and game. I’d get a text message I couldn’t interpret, or get blocked on a date and not know why, or stumble in constructing a good DHV story. Whenever something in game confused me I had a simple go-to strategy to solve it:

Ask Jimmy.

Oh Mr. Jambone, what did you say?

It crossed my mind that perhaps my readers would like a similar opportunity. So with that in mind allow me to announce a new irregular feature on my blog [3] – Ask Jimmy. I’ve got the ball rolling by pitching him a few high-level game questions that he’s written answers for that I’ll post across several days. If you ask questions he fancies answering, this could go on quite a while. So without further ado lets get to it.

How do I differentiate myself from other day-gamers? Does other men stopping girls hurt my odds e.g. with same girls?

I remember back in 2010 people in the London game community were saying that game was becoming too well-known and the bars were full of pickup artists asking the same questions (to girls). They were probably right to some extent. Certain bars in London then were as populated with PUAs as Oxford Street is today. The saturation complaint has been consistently raised for as long as I’ve been around. First it was London bars that were saturated; then it was the London streets, now it’s the European streets.

These days the London bars are all so loud that the only pickup I see being done is physical escalation. AKA: Filtering for sluts, drunks or girls that just happen to like you and are up for it, rather than working a girl’s nature and ever changing social dynamics with finesse to get her to see you in a positive light. It’s now just turning cards until you draw an ace.

We complained in 2010 about game imminently becoming too well known, then things developed and everyone moved on, got married and never thought about it again. The guys from 2010 aren’t in the bars anymore. They’re not the guys I see on the streets. It’s all fresh faces. The girls of 2010 are by now in their 30s and even 40s. If they were complaining about pick up artists then, I seriously doubt they are now. I bet they think it’s a fad that ended, if they think anything of it at all. They certainly don’t realise they’re simply no longer the target. Every year that goes by you get a new influx of girls who are suddenly old enough and to them it’s all new. Guys drop out all the time for a variety of reasons. Eventually some guys get good, then they get what they want, then they drop out: removing some real competition from the market.

Much of the cohort of current players are fruits and losers. It was in 2010 too, believe me. This doesn’t mean you’re a fruit; there are tonnes of top lads in pickup too. You’re probably a fruit though, statistically speaking.

A fruit salad, yesterday

When I see the dinks in the London bars trying to escalate skirt, it looks pathetic. I politely nod and smile, but they’re not pickup artists really. They’re just pussy beggars flipping lots of stones, calling themselves pickup artists. Some of them are even ‘coaches’. Coaching what exactly? You can see stone flipping in any student union in any town all over the country. Flipping stones is just what lads do before they suss proper game. We reference it as ‘that time before I knew game’. Turn the music down for ten minutes and we’ll eat the stone flippers for breakfast, coaches and all.

I have no room to complain. I remember my uni days. My technique was to go into a bar with 5 to 10 friends and behave loudly and outrageously. After 20 minutes I’d know the 3 to 5 girls who’d been looking at me and I’d just turn those stones. A crude method, which worked well, but we got ourselves into a lot of fights (not great if, like me, you can’t fight all that well), banned from a lot of bars and a few nights in the cells on several occasions. I was lucky to make my graduation; I had so much legal strife in my final year including a court case in a foreign country. But, hey, I was really well known for getting laid.

So if you want to differentiate yourself from other day gamers, or PUAs, just be good and stick around. Ride out the saturation, they all fuck off eventually and in two years it’s all new girls anyway. The good news is that ‘good’ doesn’t have to be that high a standard to be better than the rest. Don’t be creepy, don’t be deceitful. Just be confident, fresh and happy, and dress in clothes that fit and colours that go well together. After that, slowly but surely build up a bit of game and let the attrition rate work its magic.

Just don’t be a fruit. If you stop her to tell her she looks ‘interesting’ and she starts to tell you about her university course, don’t ask her to ‘tell you a secret’.

‘I’m stopping you because, oh I don’t know, you just interest me in some way; you look like a little scientist’

‘Oh I am! My parents sacrificed all their lives and now I am the only girl ever to reach the final year at the Einstein schoo….’

‘Cool. So they’re the second best SHOES I’ve seen this week [4]. Hahaha’

Try to get to know the girl and work out what her switches are. Nobody I have coached in the last few years is even close to doing anything like this. It’s just not a philosophy that’s out there anymore. It’s all gambits and routines reeled off in any random order like they’re supposed to be magic spells.

I don’t deny that in the early 2010s we had it cushy; we were the first to go to Europe and do this type of game. I remember the first time I went to Zagreb with Nick, he did the first stop of the trip and I remember thinking ‘that’s probably the first ever street stop in this city, the first of many’. I even remember what the girl looked like. We were there for about eight days and we had the whole city to ourselves. Everywhere we went in Europe there were no day-gamers. Today it’s admittedly harder, there’s more competition. Back then even Nick could get laid.

You may suffer on occasion the dreaded ‘oh I’ve been stopped three times already today’, but for me this was never a big deal. I’d just nod, ignore the comment and talk about something else, assuming that the other guys were probably pencil necks anyway. Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t, but we don’t care. We are absolutely convinced that our crew is the cool crew. If you’re not a fruit; then the chances are your crew is now the cool crew.

Every cloud has a silver lining, I am told. As it gets harder, people give up and before you know it, you’re the last of the few men standing. You’re all trained up and on easy street. You may actually get laid at some point.

If you think Jimmy is someone worth asking, leave your question in the comments but please, try not to ask obvious bullshit. If you don’t know who Jimmy is and thus whether he’s worth asking, try reading about him in Balls Deep and A Deplorable Cad. Or you could even try his blog here.

[1] Consider yourself lucky
[2] He’s also in the two Death By A Thousand Sluts books. So, four volumes of PUA memoir have him as a central character. Not bad going for a lazy layabout.
[3] If you know Jimmy you know why I’m not promising it as regular
[4] I am not saying this is a bad line; it’s just a bad choice in this context.

A week before announcing the release of my latest book, Younger Hotter Tighter, I sent a copy to a friend and asked him to give me a review for the blog. Here it is:

I was very fortunate to be one of the first to get my hands on this book after seeing Nick in Warsaw. I’ve been waiting for this for quite some time, especially as volume 4 has been available for ages. Hopes were very high especially off the back of the master level quality I had just seen in Daygame Infinite [buy this now – it’s the definitive book on the subject, its great]. Younger, Hotter, Tighter did not disappoint, its been fantastically put together and is in glorious colour which adds to the first class reading experience.

So to the actual book.

Nicks memoirs are page turners, you don’t want to put them down. This latest volume is no different. As a writer Nick has grown, this is still characteristically a Krauser work, but its some of his best most developed writing to date. Its frequently laugh out loud funny, brutally honest, self-deprecating, and provides a jaw dropping insight into the life of a successful pickup artist.

There are lot of great jewels throughout the book if you are learning these skills yourself. You will likely want to read this book a few times; its engaging and a pleasure to read as a novel the first time, but worth a second and third slower read.

Its 540 pages and packed with photos from the trips and great illustrations of each of the girls Nick conquered. Younger, Hotter, Tighter only covers one year – but this one year is probably equal to what the ‘average man’ would experience in the course of three lifetimes.

Highly recommended A+ work, after reading many of the community’s memoirs – this is head and shoulders the best one yet. Thankfully I can now read volume 4 as soon as Lulu get around to sending it.

That should give you an idea how it is. There’s also the first YHT review available reading here. If you’d like to get your hands on your own copy of Younger Hotter Tighter in spectacular full colour, click here to find out how to order.

There is a big difference between show and tell. Much of old-school game advice is based on the latter. For example, a DHV story does not – ironically – demonstrate any higher value. That would be showing. You are literally telling a story. You are telling the girl about your high value [1]

Game that involves showing is more effective. Lots of that comes under subcommunication but banter, teasing, challenging and passing congruence tests are all cases in which your behaviour is showing you possess attractive character traits rather than merely assuring the girl you possess them.

Good writing will also prioritise show over tell. Rather than simply tell the reader that a character is angry it is better to have that emotion expressed through their actions or dialogue so the reader can infer the anger that produced it. Effective writing invites the reader to paint the picture themselves. Donald Hamilton is rather good at that and it was only when reading The Removers, the third in his Matt Helm series, that I could finally conceptualise why I enjoy his writing.

I dare say this vibe has something to do with it too

Let’s give an example, beginning with the context. In book one, Helm was a retired government assassin who married a woman, Beth, who knew nothing of his past. After fifteen years of married life as a civilian he was dragged back into Cold War espionage, culminating in his wife walking in on him just as he tortured a Soviet female spy to death. She divorced him, on the grounds that she couldn’t bear his savagery and he wasn’t the man she thought she’d married etc [2]. Book two is all overseas and she doesn’t feature. This third book brings her in as a main character.

She sends him a letter asking for help, as her new family is in danger and his skills are now in need. This is the first bit of show. Hamilton doesn’t make a big deal of Helm ruminating on Beth’s chutzpah in divorcing him over his savagery and then not two years later asking him back precisely because he’s a hard man. The reader makes the connection. “Cheeky bitch, tell her to fuck right off” was my instinctive reaction.

She’s married a British ex-pat called Logan and runs a ranch in the Nevada mountains. Helm shows up and his introduction to Logan is more show-not-tell. Logan asks Beth to give them some privacy then leads Helm into the study, pours him a drink, and politely explains his help isn’t needed.

I’d picked up my drink. As I turned from the bar, I brushed against it, and the camera in my hip pocket struck wood with a solid, quite audible thump. I reached back instinctively to check on its welfare. He was still speaking in his polite way; but at the sound, and my motion, his voice stopped and his hand moved, very fast, towards the lapels of the khaki bush jacket he was wearing.

It was a gesture that called for some violent response on my part. Fortunately, my encounter with the boy, earlier, had put a guard on my reflexes. I merely stood still and waited. His hand stopped. I drew a long, slow breath and continued reaching back without haste, drew the Leica from my pocket, and laid it on the bar.

“I thought I’d get some pictures of the kids before I left,” I said.

His face was quite wooden. HIs hand rose to straighten the knot of his necktie. “Quite so,” he said.

Then there was silence in the big room. I wanted to laugh, or to cry. I had him taped now. The practised, instinctive gesture had told me everything I needed to know about him. That’s the trouble with holsters. They give you away too badly, shoulder-holsters in particular.

That’s excellent subtle writing, as it’s the first real sign that Logan isn’t just a regular guy. What did you take away from the scene? What missing pieces did your brain insert to make sense of it. To me, all of the following spring from the page:

• Logan has a background in gun-play and violence
• The family is in a state of high alert and acting jumpy
• Beth wasn’t honest with either Matt or herself about disliking men of violence as she appears to have married another one
• If Beth thinks Logan isn’t enough to handle the problem, it must be serious
• Logan telling Matt he doesn’t need help isn’t an empty boast
• Matt probably shouldn’t turn his back on Logan

There is a lot going on in that scene that Donald Hamilton doesn’t need to spell out for you. He doesn’t need to tell you “Logan was a hard man, scars etched on his face and psych after a career as bodyguard to a local mobster. Though he’d tried to put his past behind him, the emergent threat to his new family had caused the old skills to reawaken inside him.”

That would be lame. Hamilton’s version is far superior.

If you want it in-your-face try this kind of thing

As an aside, I find instinctive gestures tell you a lot in daygame. I find a girl’s first reaction, in literally microseconds from when she realises you are opening her, tells you a lot about how it’ll go. If her immediate unthinking reaction is to light up with pleasure, you’re onto a winner.

Helm comes to learn that a local mobster is pressurising Helm’s ex-wife and children so that Logan will come out of retirement to fix a smuggling problem in Mexico. At the same time, that mobster’s chief henchman is a Soviet assassin – Martell – hiding under the criminal front and Helm’s superior, Mac, has tasked him with trying to figure out why such a high-level operative would be messing around as a mob henchman. Towards the end of the book, Helm and Beth are held captive by the Russian in a forest cabin, with Logan semi-conscious and incapacitated on the bed there.

Hamilton uses show masterfully to leave the reader thinking Beth is a vile cunt. He’s dropped little hints that Beth has been manipulating both ex- and current- husbands, that she’s hypocritically jealous of a young woman Helm has started banging, and that for all her sanctimony over the moral turpitude of Helm’s profession, she herself has conspired with Logan to send thugs to kidnap that young woman as leverage over the mobster (she’s the estranged daughter).

Despite this, Helm is helping. Hamilton doesn’t spell out his motives too obviously but we are led to suppose it’s more because his own two children are involved rather than any chivalrous instinct towards the ex-wife. Helm is a hard man, not a sap.

They are captured because Helm is exhausted and needs to sleep. He gives a shotgun to Beth and precise instructions that if she hears any noise at all she’s to fire the gun into the wall immediately, so that the potential assailant pauses and gives Helm time to wake up. The assailant – Martell – comes, Beth doesn’t fire, and both are captured.

Beth moved forward as awkwardly as if she were trying out her first pair of high heels. She stopped by the sofa and looked down at me.

“I, I’m sorry, Matt.”

“Sure,” I said.

There were no signs of a struggle. They’d just walked in, probably through the open study door near the fireplace – there was an outside door in the other room, I recalled – and taken the loaded gun from her before she could bring herself to shoot. I should have known that was what would happen, if the occasion should arise. I’d asked too much of her, although it hadn’t seemed like much at the time.

She had that strange aversion to making a mess, or a loud noise – to making a fool of herself – that seems to afflict all respectable people. The idea of discharging a great big destructive firearm, or even a little one, in her own living room, perhaps for nothing, had seemed just too outlandish. She’d waited until she was absolutely sure it was necessary, and then, of course, it had been too late.

Read out of context like that, you may have the impression Helm is forgiving her. No, he’s not. Partly it’s in the “sure” he replies, a somewhat understated version of “I don’t believe you and now you’ve fucked us royally you silly bitch”. In context, it is more support for Helm’s low opinion of sanctimonious civilians. Throughout the book Beth is painted as a useless hypocrite who wants to talk from both sides of her mouth. She hates violent men until she wants their help. She’s a horse-riding sassy gal who can handle herself, until she wants to play frail doll to be excused for not doing her job. She thinks a soft word and fingertips gently on a man’s forearm are enough to atone for a disgusting irresponsibility that will now get her ex-husband tortured to death after she dragged him into the problem and then obstructed him from solving it.

Frankly, I was hoping the Soviet assassin would just rape and murder her [3]

A theme throughout the Helm books is that civilians don’t appreciate the seriousness of real violence, and through their own wilful ignorance they end up making that violence far worse than it needs to be. Beth is poison for everyone around her, getting herself into scrapes that get noble men killed trying to extricate her, yet she never loses her sense of entitlement and her gratitude is false.

Hamilton doesn’t tell you she’s a cunt, he shows you. It surprises me to know he was married to the same woman throughout his writing career. He knows women like only a bachelor or divorcee should know them.

If you’d like to read more about an elite-level professional who takes down targets with consumate ease, consider my memoir series and other products here.

[1] A DHV story is just one type of DHV. There are others which involve showing, such as preselection or a display of competence in something.
[2] She took the house and kids too.
[3] He does rape her later, and she manages to fuck that up too, squandering a glorious chance for them to escape

Totally off topic… this is hilarious. The fact you have to stop and think before you realise it’s parody is a good tell for what a complete fucking moron Jordan Peterson is:

Have you ever wondered why the French are such faggots?

I have. Why is it they spend all day chomping on onions, riding rickety old bicycles, and surrendering their entire country to Muslim immigration? There was a time when the French were proper hard bastards. Napoleon would sit his generals around a large table [1] and say, “right lads, which major military power will we start a war with today?”

I’m pretty sure Napoleon picked a fight with pretty much the entire proper [2] world. And that, according to Clausewitz, is a big part of France’s modern day faggotry.

France, yesterday

Prior to the little Corsican’s military rise, European wars were fought mostly by expensive professional armies in the service of a monarch, such as Frederick The Great of Prussia. Frederick had, after the Seven Years War, reverted his army back to being led by the aristocracy and sent the middle class officers back into the regular economy. This had the effect of distancing them from emotional engagement in war.

“As a result there developed in the Prussian middle classes the impression that the king’s wars were nothing to do with them; and from that it was a small step to the belief that, if it were not for the king and the nobility who fought his wars, those wars need never happen at all.”

But then came the French Revolution [3] and a complete change in how the French people organised war. It was now a war for the masses. The technology of the day (unrifled, muzzle-loading guns effective to only fifty yards) dictated a strategy of long lines of soldiers firing off broadsides in mutual up-close slaughter. This was attrition warfare and very costly to victor and vanquished alike. Especially costly when you have professional highly-trained soldiers.

This led to military strategy of the day being mostly concerned with manoeuvre rather than fighting. Nobody really wanted to fight. Theoreticians would even profess that wars could be won by the enemy conceding through being out-manoeuvred rather than beaten on the field of battle.

Napoleon crushed that idea.

Napoleon’s armies had been rag-tag skirmishers who overwhelmed such small professional armies with long unstoppable columns that wore down and then overwhelmed the long thin lines, and chaotic scattered skirmishers.

Is that the Bastille, or just a Muslim celebration after winning the World Cup?

That set Clausewitz thinking. He wanted to analyse war not through abstract principles to tell generals what to do, but rather to look at successful generals such as Frederick and Napoleon and then figure out and theorise what they’d already shown to work. Central to this was the observation that France’s unique political situation opened up new avenues for military strategy.

“The French armies were able successfully to break all the military rules because the politicians discarded all the normal political and economic constraints. For manpower they depended not on highly trained and expensive regular troops but on patriotic volunteers and, later, conscripts in apparently unlimited quantities whose services were virtually free. The French troops foraged for themselves, and if they deserted there were plenty more to take their place.”

The French could overwhelm the opposition because the entire country was militarised and the people supported the war objectives. It wasn’t just a “king’s war” for them. This would lead Clausewitz to focus upon morale and political conditions in the homeland as critical components of the war. Lenin and Trotsky would later bring that into the USSR and Stalin learned that lesson in The Great Patriotic War beginning when the squareheads gave the russkies a bloody nose in Operation Barbarossa.

The problem here is that Napoleon mortgaged the entire future of France to win temporary supremacy in Europe. He burned through his entire male population, throwing them into the meat grinder. Worse still, as any keen student of r/K selection will tell you, total war has a horribly adverse-selection effect on the population. The sly rabbits find ways to escape military service and the brave wolves volunteer for the front. Winning rabbits rape all the women when sacking cities. The net effect is total war turns you from a population of hardy warriors into a country of cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

The French Revolution ruined France and it has never recovered.

Clausewitz was at Borodino, fighting for the Russians

But Nick, what did Clausewitz have to say about daygame? Well, sonny Jim, I’m glad you asked. There is a lot of On War that addresses the strategy and tactics of chasing skirt. First lets hear him criticise earlier prescriptive theories:

“They aim at fixed values; but in war everything is uncertain, and calculations have to be made with variable quantities.

They direct the inquiry exclusively towards physical quantities, whereas all military action is intertwined with psychological forces and effects. They consider only unilateral actions, whereas war consists of a continuous interaction of opposites.”

So, routine and lines are out. Game is about recognising interactions as an ebb-and-flow. A man must take account of these interconnected elements – the uncertainty of information, the importance of moral factors, and, lending emphasis to both of these, the unpredictable reactions of the adversary. “Everyone has a plan until they get hit,” said Mike Tyson.

The best generals are successful gamblers who had the nerve to back their judgement.

Clausewitz developed the concept of friction to explain why plans rarely work as intended. “With uncertainty in one scale, courage and self-confidence must be thrown into the other to correct the balance”. War is dangerous and that leads to elevated tensions. It involves suffering, confusion, exhaustion, and fear.

“Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is very difficult.. Countless minor incidents – the kind you can never really foresee – combine to lower the general level of performance, so that one always falls far short of the intended goal… The military machine.. is basically very simple and very easy to manage. But we should bear in mind that none of its components is of one piece: each part is composed of individuals, every one of whom retains his potential of friction.

Fog can prevent the enemy from being seen in time, a gun from firing when it should, a report reaching the commanding officer. Rain can prevent a battalion from arriving, make another late by keeping it not three but eight hours on the march, ruin a cavalry charge by bogging the horses down in the mud.”

This friction is what distinguishes real war from war on paper. Any seducer will know this from dating. Chasing skirt is rife with friction. Phones run out of charge, mobile signals drop for hours, and trains are late. A girl can get bogged down in a rain shower and not show up, or go to the wrong McDonald’s as a meeting point. Even opening is fraught with difficulty when you spot a girl outside the mall but drag your heels too long and she’s disappeared into a store or hugged a friend who just showed up.

Daygaming in the Clausewitz era

Clausewitz thus focuses a lot on the ‘moral’ forces – of the ability of the commanders, the army, and the people to endure friction and push forward. In daygame we all know this, the stubborn determination to do “one more set” and to just push that girl to “one more escalation attempt”. It is the daygamer’s ability to push through friction that will improve his results [4]

You go on a date even though you’re knackered. You rack your brain for the recovery text. You take the chances.

What are the characteristics of a good player? Clausewitz suggested two.

“The first was intuitive, the quality labelled by the French coup d’oeil: the almost instinctive capacity to discern through the fog of war what was happening and what needed to be done; [5] a flair for essentials that enabled the commander to select the right course almost without thinking, and certainly without going through the elaborate process of calculations of possibilities and probabilities that would paralyse the decisions of a lesser man [6].

The second requisite, said Clausewitz, was the capacity, having taken a decision, to stick to it: determination. Everything would conspire to convince the general that his decision had been wrong.”

There is much in Clausewitz to direct the aspiring player but I’ll leave it to the reader to pursue this further. If you’d like to read Krauser On Game, get yourself Daygame Infinite.

[1] While chomping on high-class onions
[2] That is to say, European
[3] I’ve read so much about the Revolution from so many different angles that I’m starting to wonder if it wasn’t the worst event in the history of the human race.
[4] Likely why I got laid far more when I was really into chasing skirt than now, when I barely care.
[5] That’s calibration to you, pal
[6] Say, a Deepak Wayne or a Lithuanian rapist PUA

For most of 2018 this has not been a daygame blog. The reasons are not hard to fathom to my regular readers: I’m sick of daygame and don’t want to talk about it. Is this a periodic revulsion or a sign that I’m finished with it and wish to move on in life? Probably the latter, but I don’t know yet as there are some confounding variables.

I feel a little like my war is over. I’d like to settle into comfortable regular life. Wear a suit, attend some dinner parties, and perhaps drink an aperitif. There’s only so much I can enjoy about flying overseas, lodging in small apartments, and hunting down girls with the help of cold-blooded wingmen.

Clearly, my main passions are reading and writing and that expresses itself in what I talk about on the blog. But, I wondered, is there someway to twist these threads – daygame and reading – into one single rope with which to scale the tower of regular blog content?

In yesterday’s review of the Dark Soul’s companion book You Died I could easily draw parallels between its content and daygame, and thus tease out themes that interest those of you who visit my ‘umble blog just for the skirt-chasing talk. When I get round to reviewing Taleb’s Skin In The Game (which I read three weeks ago) I can easily do so for that book too.

But what about today’s book, Donald Hamilton’s Death Of A Citizen? It’s a 1960 spy novel about a former WWII agent of the OSS who is dragged back onto the job to protect a nuclear scientist under threat of assassination by a rival SMERSH team of Russians. Let’s try, shall we?

The movie adaptations added in lots of utterly unnecessary light-heartedness

I found this book by searching Google for “ten best spy novels ever” and then ticking off all the ones I’ve already read. I love the John Le Carre “Smiley” novels and read a few in Zagreb in 2017 while visiting Lee and John. Equally I like Len Deighton’s “Game Set Match” trilogy of MI6 potboilers even though each novel is just 400 pages of a people talking in cafes and restaurants while the main character tries to suss them out like a poker player reading tells. I also loved Robert Ludlum’s “Bourne” novels and that guy Ian Fleming wrote about, I forget the name.

Donald Hamilton’s “Matt Helm” books were new to me, and there are tonnes of them. Imagine you’ve only ever watched RSD Max or RSD Todd videos, or Johnny Berba, or Deepak Wayne and then you suddenly discover Sigma Wolf and it’s Daygame Nitro, Mastery, and Infinite. That’s how this felt [1]

Imagine

The title of Death Of A Citizen refers to the process of Matt Helm being pulled back into the grimy murderous world of Cold War spying. As an OSS operative on a tiny team run by a super-spy coordinator called Mac, Helm was a machine. His assignments took him deep into enemy territory as part of a small murder-squad to assassinate high value targets. It was off-the-book, kept plausibly deniable to the US government. Each “touch” (their term for hit) was a short operation of a couple of weeks, inserted behind enemy lines with a couple of other operatives. They were instructed not to get pally with each other as operational security might require them to leave compromised or injured team members behind.

Kind of like a euro jaunt.

The war changed Matt Helm and he became a killing machine. Always on edge, always scanning for threat, and always reading the angles that people give him. He inhabited a world of deceit, betrayal and ruthless takedowns.

A little bit like a euro jaunt.

My last euro jaunt – actual photo

When the war ended he wanted out so he got married to a girl ignorant of his past and tried his best to fit in on Civvy Street. He attended cocktail parties, chatted about theatre, and drank aperitifs. The whole time he was denying, to himself, the man he’d become during the war. Was he permanently changed? An outcast forever? Was he now a man only fit for war and unable to adjust to normality? Would he only be comfortable in the company of killers like himself?

I ask myself that about the Player’s Journey. You could liken Matt Helm’s war to a player’s red pill and womanizing career. Is it something you just leave behind? Even if you could smoothly transition back to a world of Netflix, John Grisham novels, and David Guerta songs would you actually want to? Once you see the world as it is, you can’t simply choose to go back to believing the delusions.

Once you’ve experienced the thrill of chasing, and clacking, skirt you can’t really go back to normal dating.

Death Of A Citizen opens with Helm at such a cocktail party in New Mexico, ruminating on his nagging dissatisfaction with civilian life but determined to shake off the echoes of his past. And then a women walks into the room, a former partner in his assassination squad of fifteen years earlier. He experiences a chill, a flash of an earlier life, not unlike I do when a greyhound struts past me and gives a sidelong glance that I log as an IOI. It becomes increasingly clear to him that he isn’t done with the spy’s life.

Matt Helm is about to revert to his real character, the assassin. Comfortable only when on the hunt and outwitting his enemies.

This book was highly successful and spawned a series. Aside from being well-told, it is remarkable for how hard-boiled (or, cold-blooded) it is. Most classic spy novels refuse to look into the abyss and thus although people are murdered in LeCarre or Deighton novels, it happens “off camera”. In Helm books, the callousness is front and centre. By the end of Death Of A Citizen Helm has hunted down a spy who has kidnapped his baby. He tortures her to death to uncover the safe house she’s stashed the kid in, then has the inconvenience of his wife walking in on him as he’s standing over a mutilated corpse with a bloody razor in his hand. Unlike modern novels, it manages to write these scenes without revelling in the bloodshed.

The wife doesn’t like that much, breaking Helm’s last link to his civilian life. He calls up Mac and reenters the service.

I really enjoyed this book and promptly bought #2 in the series. It does to spying what Mack Bolan books do to special forces, but is even more cold-blooded. It has none of the Remo Williams humour or mysticism. This stuff is bleak. In short, it was exactly what I was looking for. I expect to read a lot of them.

My newest book

If you’d like to dispense with allusions to daygame and just read about actual daygame, why not check out my textbooks, memoirs and instructional videos here.

[1] Okay that was quite a reach. I’ll try better with the next allusion to daygame

You lot haven’t heard me bang on about Dark Souls in quite some time have you? For those unfamiliar, it’s a series of five video games from Japanese developer FROM Software, a tiny outfit previously known for their mecha Armoured Core games. It’s quite an enchanting underdog-done-good story in a video game industry generally throttled by the grip of twice-voted Worst Company In The USA Electronic Arts and the OCD-collectathon every-game-is-the-same Ubisoft [1]

Video games are very expensive to make and, like movies, most are not commercially successful. Back in the 1980s budgets were so small that I could go into WHSmith’s magazine shop and they’d have their own line of ZX81 games on cassette tape. I remember buying one called Catacombs, a fantasy dungeon crawler in which a lone swordsman wanders dark labyrinths while terrifying monsters stalk him.

The original Souls

Kinda like Dark Souls.

Many great games were designed and programmed by a single man, such as the golden age of the Commodore 64 home computer with men like Andrew Braybrook creating Gribbly’s Day Out, Paradroid, and Uridium. Now a major release will employ a team of hundreds and cost an average of $50m and need to sell 2.5 million copies just to recoup development cost (not to mention marketing and then profit).

Unsurprisingly, with a studio’s entire future dependent on the success of a single game, they tend to be risk averse. Thus games follow trends. In 2009, the trend was to make games that handhold the player through a linear story with almost no risk of failure. It was the era of Call Of Duty.

The competing platforms at the time were the Microsoft Xbox 360 and the Sony Playstation 3. Pretty much nobody in Japan buys Microsoft consoles so when Sony Japan were signing deals for the next round of platform-exclusive titles one such project was to get FROM Software doing a mid-budget Japan-only title based on Tolkien style fantasy. Knights, castles, dragons, that sort of thing.

Project lead Hidetaka Miyazaki had plans. To cut a long story short, he colluded with his manager in Sony Japan to hide to staggeringly original (and staggeringly difficult) nature of the Demons’ Souls project from management until it was quietly released onto Japanese store shelves, lest it get cancelled or dumbed down. It barely sold and was considered a flop. It needed to sell 75,000 but only managed about 10,000 on initial release.

Somehow, it was released in China and Korea with an optional English translation and suddenly the game-importer crowd in the USA and Europe started hunting it down [2]. Word of mouth spread about a fantastic, compelling, original fantasy game. That secured it a Worldwide release and Demons’ Souls went on to be a cult hit, and Gamespot famously gave it a solid 9/10 rating.

Three sequels followed, Dark Souls 1, 2 & 3 and the spiritual sequel Bloodborne. Of these, it is the original Dark Souls that has drawn most praise. I’ve completed all five. I tell you all this because Dark Souls has a fanatical fanbase. One expression of this is today’s book You Died. Penned by two Japanophile journalists who were on the Demons’ Souls bandwagon before the worldwide release, it is part creator interview, part exegesis, and part oral history of the game’s creation and suffusion into the wider global consciousness.

As an obsessive fan myself, I rather enjoyed it. If you haven’t played the games, you won’t like this book at all. It pretty much requires you’ve finished at least the first Dark Souls in order to make any kind of connection to the book’s content.

I often compare Dark Souls to daygame so I’ll do a bit of that now, highlighting themes from the book. For example, in the chapter Why We Play Keza MacDonald outlines the Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology, “which is essentially a Myers-Briggs test for gamers.” Through a series of questions it assess your motivations for playing games.

“Do you like competition? Achievement? Finding things out? Making friends? Every person has a different combination of four characteristics: Explorer, Achiever, Killer and Socialiser.”

That intrigued me because you can likely submit a daygamer to the same test. Why do you chase skirt? I’ve noticed that different wings I’ve had seem to have different motivations. Dark Souls is unusual in that it has ways of satisfying every kind of player, as does daygame.

“Is there no-one else?”

Explorers take pleasure in seeking out hidden spots in their towns or boarding flights to second-tier European cities to scope the place out. They’ll wander, often alone, seeking to discern footfall patterns or find a good cafe, or find that city’s linguistic university. They can get impatient with the same old streets. For them, the adventure is at least as big a part of it as the girls.

Achievers want something to brag about online or in WhatsApp groups. They want to tick checklists like a catwalk model, or an 18 yr old, or a threesome [3]. They want to score themselves against the wider community and argue about it. Each likely has his own personal ranking for every daygamer he knows. You can bet he can tell you his exact notch count, flags, and average age of girl he’s banged this year. When he talks about girls, he’s proud of the achievement and the best date in the world is a bit shit if it ended as a near miss.

Killers need to compete, and taking down the girls is the core of it. They like the scent of the trail, the thrill of the chase, and the win of the notch. They see the women as prey and killers have long involved lay reports describing in detail every element of the hunt. In contrast, the socialisers want to be out with a group of mates having a good time so the winging, the coffee breaks, and the after-daygame drinking is at least as important. They enjoy the connection with girls even in social-not-sexual chats that ultimately go nowhere [4].

Another chapter, Tough Love, considers the notorious difficulty of Dark Souls and the apparent paradox that players find that rewarding rather than frustrating.

“If a game is punishingly hard, people tend to just give up on it; we’ve all been there, throwing the controller at the floor after the 12th attempt at some badly-checkpointed level or irritating boss. What is it about Dark Souls that makes us persevere? Is there something essentially masochistic in the makeup of a Souls fanatic?”

You could ask yourself the same about daygame. Let’s try some word substitution on that.

“Most Daygamers can name the moment that they broke through ‘the wall’; you need one big, hard-won victory to cement the cycle of effort, frustration, reward and release that drives people through the streets. That first big victory, where you’ve faced something that seemed impossible at first and conquered it after hours of failure and death and learning, is also necessary before you come to understand the core idea at the heart of daygame: failure as education.”

Yep, sounds about right. Was yours your first number off an eight? Your first idate? Your first SDL? Lets continue the word substitution game in another quote from the chapter:

“Understanding the psychology of daygame and what it does to our brains is the key to understanding why its version of difficulty is so rewarding and absorbing, where difficulty in other activities is just frustrating and off-putting. One of the key psychological models behind human motivation is something called self-determination theory, which posits that for a person to persist and feel motivated by an activity, it has to satisfy three different needs: mastery, autonomy, and relatedness.

Daygame offers mastery in spades [5], in that you always feel like you are getting better. Autonomy is the feeling that you are free to make choices, and that those choices are meaningful, which daygame also accommodates. And finally, there’s relatedness: the feeling of connectedness to people. That’s one of the things that prevents daygame’s difficulty from being too demoralising: it had a sense of community. You know that you’re going through it with thousands of other people, too, and seeing their messages and ghostly presences in your own game helps you feel like you’re not alone.”

Writing that out makes me wonder whether I should play Dark Souls again, or go hit the streets. Hmmmm.

You should probably buy my products. They are great and, best of all, they give me money.

[1] I actually like many of these companies’ games, just a shame about their effect on the industry.
[2] Gammas can occasionally be useful in their attempts to out-do each other
[3] Or pissing on a girl, I guess. Not for me.
[4] Not many of these in the daygame community, mind, seeing as it attracts introverts.
[5] Literally. You can have yours for just £79 in full colour from here.

I have been very interested in the new-to-me discovery of many long-running schlock adventure / spy paperback series from the 1960s onwards. I’m talking about Mack Bolan The Executioner, Remo Willians The Destroyer, Matt Helm The Remover [1] So far I’ve been choosing them almost entirely based on the lurid covers. I mean, it’s an established fact that books are best judged by their covers.

If you didn’t gasp “Coooooool!” you need your testosterone checked

Paul Kenyon’s Baroness stories didn’t run very long but they’ve chalked up a fair following to judge by the paperback prices on Amazon [2] and they are at least as preposterous as the Remo stories. The set-up is that the Baroness Penelope St. John-Orsini is the boss and top model of an international supermodel agency, and it’s the cover for her real job as a ultra-highly trained killing machine working for the NSA. James Bond with tits. To give you an idea of just how silly it is, consider the back cover blurb:

“Penelope St John-Orsini, NSA’s crack double agent, is sent on a secret mission across the Russian steppes into the desolate wastes of Easter Siberia. Her objective: to track and destroy a Red Chinese scientist who has invented a formidable laser death ray.

Masquerading as Mongolians, Penelope and her team of professionals have to face hostile Tartar warriors, and the savagery of the Kinghan mountains before they reach the shores of the mighty River of the Black Dragon – the threshold to Red China, and the second round in the game of death.”

So, we’re talking about Fox Force Five. Charlies Angels ramped up to level 20.

The book was written in 1974, so you have to expect this kind of thing. This was the era of disco, Bruce Lee, and muscle cars. As a work of genre fiction it fits the bill. The story makes sense, it’s clearly written, and the colourful cast of characters keep it lively. I enjoyed it. One thing really stood out though: the mismatch between the child-like imagination and accessibility of the writing (suggesting a teen or young adult audience of marginal IQ) and the lurid, brutal and highly sexualised violence. Let me give examples.

Penelope’s team link up with a Russian GRU team to do a joint infiltration of the Chinese base in snowy mountains. Their guides, Mongols, turn on them and Penelope is cold-cocked with a rifle butt. She wakes up in their yurt:

“She hurt. Her whole body felt sore. She had a crashing headache. The air was smoky, with an overpowering smell of grease and sweat. She opened her eyes.

Her arms were tied behind her. She was naked, lying on a pile of greasy furs. She was inside the yurt. It was hot, stifling. She was dizzy for a moment, and the felt dome reeled. She was surrounded by leering Mongol faces that bobbed like tennis balls until she shook her head to clear it.

There were finger marks on her breasts and thighs. There was a burning sensation in her vagina. She’d been raped. She wondered how many times.”

That strikes me as a bit salacious. Fear not, she escapes her bonds and violently murders almost every Mongol. Her Russian-US team come to her aid just as she runs from the yurt, which is now burning down after she kicked over a brazier to blind an attacking Mongol.

“There were two sprawled bodies at his feet, rifles lying beside them in the snow. Those were her two pursuers. Their bodies were stitched with slugs from the AR-10. A third body lay closer to the smoking ruins of the yurt.

The Russians stood around in a little knot, silent. Penelope took a step forward. A blackened body lay within the charred framework: the man she’d knifed in the belly.

Something was writhing weakly at the Russians’ feet. The man she’d treated to a faceful of hot coals. He must have managed to crawl, blinded, outside. She started toward him. If he could talk, perhaps she could get a clue to the plot to take over the expedition.

Before she could get there, she saw Alexey turn to speak to Tania. The blond girl nodded eagerly, and with unholy anticipation on her face knelt beside the blinded Yakut and sliced his throat with a knife.”

That’s what really jumps out in this book. It is chock full of sex, violence, and sadism in addition to the high adventure and tally-ho courage. The Baroness herself bangs two different Soviet spies, one in the beginning in her swimming pool and then that Alexey character in the mountains. Both scenes take about ten pages each and my fingers refuse to type sample paragraphs. It’s like reading a soccer mom’s kindle porn. I literally skipped those pages [3]. The violence is described as if those creepy pervs who directed the Hostel and Saw movies were writing it.

Dunno, man. I didn’t like that aspect. Revelling in sexual sadism just doesn’t sit right with me. I get that it’s written for the titillation of young lads, but I’d rather it played the action straight like in the Bolan and Helm books. I’d like something more like Fox Force Five.

Or if the Spice Girls were actually hot.

Anyhow, salaciousness aside this was a fun read of the kind of hi-jinks that never get made into TV shows or books. About the closet thing to it is the beginning of that crappy Zak Snyder movie about the tarts. What was it called? Ah yes, this one….

Nowhere near as good as it looks here

If you’d like to read an equally silly adventure in Russia with lots of salacious sex scenes, consider buying my memoir Adventure Sex. Or any of my many fantastic products here.

[1] and also The Silencer, The Ambusher, The Shadower, The Ravager, The Devastator and pretty much every other bad-ass sounding verb one could use as a code-name.
[2] Sadly, no Kindle unlike the £0.99 Destroyer volumes.
[3] And I never skip or skim-read pages. I consider it an unholy sacrilege against books.