Some books need to be written. For the most part, the stuff I see in the alt-right and PUAspheres is just “me too” rubbish. I don’t mean the #MeToo movement of false allegations sweeping Hollywood, which was a fabrication of the elite talent agency CAA. I mean in its older sense, of when a company launches a successful product so a horde of imitators release their own products to cash in on the trend.

PUAs are like that. They never stop to think, “has this material already been covered? Does the world really need me to repeat the same thing?” Of course not. They want a slice of the money, even if it means plagiarising someone else’s content.

However, while there’s nothing new under the sun, the world does indeed change. The charlatans of yesteryear get exposed but then a new breed emerge to take their place. Modern idiots need to relearn the lessons of the old timers anew. Vox Day has been on quite a roll in performing this cleansing function. His last four non-fiction books have each addressed the new mask of an old fraud.

• SJWs Always Lie exposed the new book-waving Maoists.
• Cuckservative exposed the new Whigs and Pharisees.
• SJWs Always Double Down exposed the new entryists and infiltrators.
• Jordanetics exposes the new Wormtongue.

How is it that Vox can achieve such a steady hit-rate and always be at the leading edge of the curve? His Cuckservative book came out before Trump won the Republican nomination. His take-down of Jordan Peterson came at the peak of his popularity when pretty much every right-winger I knew was riding the Canadian globalist’s nut-sack. Vox isn’t just outside the mainstream Overton Window, he’s perpetually outside the Alt-Right’s own Overton Window. So, how does he manage it?

Simple. He’s read history and philosophy. Modern retards raised on YouTube, Twitter and hyper-ventilating click-bait conservative bloggers have no sense of perspective. They think Animal Farm is a porno, Big Brother a TV show, and Franz Ferdinand an indie band. Those of you fortunate enough to get a real education are better able to spot the same old patterns reemerge.

There’s nothing new under the sun. It’s just old wine in new bottles.

“I didn’t sleep for 25 days”

The problem when first approaching Jordan Peterson is that he’s a muddled thinker, bullshitting speaker, and incompetent writer. That means to make sense of him you have to straighten out all the knots he himself has created. Reading Jordanetics reminded me of a philosophy lecture I took as a fresh-faced 18yr old scamp in a course called Rousseau and Marx. I asked the lecturer why he’d assigned the Past Masters summary books on those two black-hearted rogues [1] rather than their original writings.

“Oh, they are terrible writers. It’ll take you forever to figure out what they are trying to say. Don’t bother. Just go to the summary books. Those are cleaned-up Rousseau and cleaned-up Marx.”

Cleaned-up? That’s how it feels reading Jordanetics. Vox has done JBP the favour of organising his muddled thoughts for him in order to get at the heart of his true meaning. Actually, it’s not doing JBP a favour at all because to explain what he says in clear terms is to expose him for the evil Satanic globalist fraud that he is. You see, JBP is a wannabe L. Ron Hubbard. He’s a mentally-ill, moral and physical coward, with a messiah complex. His role is to mislead you. There’s a fair chance that JBP was sexually molested by his own grandmother [2] but that can’t be anything compared to the brutal rape Vox gives him in Jordanetics.

Vox’s parsing of JBP’s philosophy, as expressed in Maps Of Meaning and 12 Rules For Life, is that JBP is preaching a post-Christian religion of Balance. JBP uses the terms Order and Chaos as proxies for Good and Evil, and his advice all leads towards a Jedi-like goal of achieving Balance between the two. The goal is not to fight and defeat Evil, but to assimilate it. Obviously that’s ridiculous.

Having read much of the Western canon, Vox is able to trace the intellectual inspiration of JBP to his roots which will surprise the average Peterson fanboy. Vox makes a strong case that JBP is knowingly drawing ideas from Carl Jung and…… Aleister Crowley. Yes, the bald-headed Satanist. He doesn’t just throw those names out as insults but rather draws the connection through exegesis of Peterson’s own written words and a comparison to the gnostics, pagans and Satanists who originated the ideas. Vox firmly believes JBP is knowingly evil, and I agree with him.

The first 1/3 of the book is just set-up, giving the anecdotal background for why Vox decided to look deeper into JBP [3]. I found it all boring because I’d been watching Vox’s Darkstream as all of this background happened in real time, so it was old news to me. The real book begins on page 75, chapter 6, in which Vox finally deals with JBP’s ideas (rather than the man and his fans). Those first paragraphs are the literary unzipping of the fly as Vox prepares to “make him squeal like a pig, pa!”

Vox does a good job of picking out the underlying philosophy. JBP is a habitual liar because it is central to his philosophy. The Left have always been The People Of The Lie because their ideology requires it in order to gain acceptance: the core of Leftism is to steal your shit, clearly nobody wants their shit stolen, so the Leftists first lie to them, and then use the backstop of brutal violence. However, as George Orwell colourfully outlined in Animal Farm and 1984, the Left doesn’t require you to believe their lies but to simply go along with them. I think Theodore Dalrymple expressed it succinctly thus:

“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”

JBP sinks even further into depravity than the communists he pretends to hate. His philosophy elevates lying to a moral imperative. Vox summarises it thus: [4]

“Because Peterson equates truth with survival, or rather, anything that increases one’s chances of survival, truth is intrinsically subjective. And since there’s no such thing as objective truth, the only thing you can do to be truthful, by which he means increase your chances of survival, is to master the art of the lie. Peterson is qualified to teach you this rule because he has, by nature and philosophy, become a spiritual master of lies. Peterson lies regularly and habitually, and here he presents a rule that does not only allow for lying under limited circumstances, but presents dishonesty as a fundamental ethic.”

It’s hard to comprehend how evil such a position is, but you can see why so many PUAs like JBP. The Canadian charlatan is often defended as offering meaning to society’s losers but this is the opposite, a poison pill of the worst kind. By denying an objective reality [5] he is completely pulling the existential rug out from under his poor readers. Vox summarises it thus:

“It’s important to observe that while Peterson refuses to recognise the objective reality of mundane non-things such as “laptop computers” and the transportation devices known as “cars”, historical events such as “rape” or “the Crucifixion”, let alone more abstract concepts such as “truth”, “Jesus”, or “God”, he believes very strongly in the reality of ideas that spring out of the imagination of 19th and 20th century European psychologists.”

You see, JBP isn’t any different to the Crowleyists in the progressive Weyland school in Dennis Wheatley’s The Haunting Of Toby Jugg. He believes everything is relative, except the core ideas of his own paganism. Black is white, except when he wants it to be Black. He reminds me of the famous boxing promoter Bob Arum’s best quip.

“Yesterday I was lying. Today I’m telling the truth.”

Vox makes a compelling case that everything about JBP is fake. JBP was recently in Slovenia attending the Trilaterial Commission globalist convention. He’s signed with the above-mentioned CAA talent agency, and has the effrontery to charge low-paid low-ranking readers $400 to shake his hand and take a picture. Don’t be fooled by the tweed jackets, practised gestures, and word-salad bullshit. Jordan Peterson is an evil globalist rat.

If you prefer your rats to be of the “pussy-” rather than “globalist-” variety, you might well enjoy my four-volume memoir series of picking up girls around the world. Or possibly my video instructional product Daygame Overkill with infield demonstration of banging hotties. I promise you it only looks Satanic.

12 Rules Of Banging Hotties

[1] I didn’t know they were rogues until much later.
[2] Based on JBP’s own recollection of highly sexualised dreams which are more exceedingly suspicious than Mr Kipling’s apple pies are exceedingly good.
[3] TL:DR = JBP wrote a knowingly dishonest essay claiming Jews have an average IQ of 115 and this wholly explains their gross over-representation in elite positions. When Vox debunked it, JBP doubled down on more lies and his fanboys harassed Vox. Don’t poke a sleeping tiger.
[4] JBP is almost impossible to quote directly because it’s like quoting a pile of dog turd. There are too many flies buzzing around getting in the way.
[5] Note JBP is not limiting this position to a moral reality (i.e. “there’s no objective moral truth”) or epistemology (i.e. “we can’t accurately comprehend reality”). He goes way further to deny such as thing as an objective physical reality. What a loon. And a total liar, of course, as is everyone who holds such a solipsistic position. If he really believed it, he wouldn’t look both ways before crossing a road.

Dennis Wheatley was mostly interested in three types of story: Historical action adventure in the vein of Alexandre Dumas (e.g. his Roger Brook series), wartime spy thrillers (e.g. his Gregory Sallust and Julian Day series), and occult horror. As the cover no doubt tipped you off, The Haunting Of Toby Jugg is of the latter style. The plot is much like Stephen King’s Misery, with Satanic overtones.

Written as Jugg’s own daily diary, it begins with him terrified. Jugg was an RAF fighter pilot shot down in 1941, a German bullet breaking his back and crippling his legs. He was sent to a country manor for recuperation, staying with his old tutor Helmuth. In the last few days he’s been menaced by the midnight apparition of a monstrous shadow lurking outside his bay windows. It’s some kind of monster, though he sees only the shadow and feels the presence of Evil. Thus Jugg begins writing the diary – this book – to order his thoughts and the plot thickens over time.

Narratively, Wheatley goes in for the ‘slow reveal’. As Jugg warms to the therapeutic task of writing he begins to fill in the back story. It turns out he’s the sole heir of his industrial magnate grandfather’s vast £14m fortune (in 1942 pounds), having been orphaned since his mother died in childbirth and his father later died in an air accident. Toby’s inheritance is in trust, steered by a Board of eight trustees, until he reaches his majority aged 21. That birthday is only a month away.

Hmmmmmm. This is starting to look like more than a simple demonic apparition isn’t it?

As Toby recounts his backstory it becomes increasingly obvious that since his grandfather and father died, control of his family has been hijacked by Satanists who placed members of their cult to be his guardians, and sent him to a Satanic school in Weyland which has it’s motto the Crowleyian maxim: Do what they wilt shall be the whole of the law.

Understandably, I fear turning into fellow skinhead Crowley

I won’t spoil the plot further (actually, I will). It’s an enjoyable book which I read in a single day and though it’s rather plodding and overlong, the fact it’s a creeping-dread story means slow pacing doesn’t really hurt it like it would an action thriller. It’s not Wheatley’s best, but it is good.

What most interested me was the meta-level. It was written in 1948 and it proves the old adage that there’s nothing new under the sun. Throughout his career Wheatley was at pains to inform his readership of the eternal battle between Good and Evil, and how the particular ideological battles of his time were simply the current recasting of that ancient struggle into modern terms. In Wheatley’s stories, murderers, Satanists, communists, and globalists are all one and the same group [1]. It’s customary for modern soyboys to poo-poo this “out-dated” attitude, because it’s now The Current Year. The thing is, Wheatley is correct. Let me go into that.

The current decline of the European Union and United Nations is not at all unexpected. I knew it would happen back in 2008 purely on economic grounds: you can’t tie the White North of Europe to the Wop South. The North is inside the Hagnal Line and has the high-IQ and work ethic of nationalities created by long cold winters. The South has DNA from outside the Line, lower-IQs and place value on ease, comfort, and massive debt. The result is that the North earns money, and the South borrows and spends it. That can’t last forever, because the North isn’t about to forgive the debts. See the past history of Germany and Greece for the most clear-cut example.

I figured that out in 2008 but I was late to the party. From the very beginning of the Kalergi Plan – the attempt to create the European Union – smart people knew it was doomed. Way back in the 1950s smart people said you can’t have monetary union without fiscal union. They said the European Common Market was but the first foot in the door for the globalists to attempt the full Sovietisation of Europe. And they were right. That was the plan all along.

The Bible tells us of the Tower Of Babel, when Satan persuaded men to abandon God, destroy the nations, and force everyone together into a single global uniformity. The European Union follows on from the United Nations and before it the League Of Nations as the latest attempt to recreate the Tower Of Babel. It’s no surprise that the EU modelled its own headquarters on the most famous painting of the Tower. There’s no “conspiracy theory” to this. They were open about it (to each other, not the public) from the very beginning. It was expressed formally in the Kalergi Plan.

Perhaps you find this stretching credibility. Perhaps the shameless, craven, hypocritical behaviour of the media, Vatican, NGOs, EU, UN, academia and governments in response to Donald Trump haven’t yet convinced you [2]. Well, Dennis Wheatley was onto it decades ago. This stuff is eternal.

There’s a scene in which Helmuth explains the communist/Satanic Brotherhood of which he’s a member, as he attempt to recruit Toby and his millions. They are discussing the likely election of a Labour government post-war that will be full of Communist agents working for the Soviet Union [3], and how that will lead to ever-rising taxes. The theft will begin with a targeting of “The Rich”, in order to secure popular approval and begin boiling the proverbial frog.

I said that I thought, myself, all the odds were on the Socialists coming to power soon after the war; but that most of their leaders were sensible enough to realize the danger of throwing the nation’s economy out of gear by doing anything too drastic. Helmuth shrugged and replied:
“They will be moderate to start with, but as is always the case when the Left gets into the saddle, the masses expect a Silver Age – if not a Golden one – to dawn before very long. That gives the extremists a rod with which to beat the moderate. They will never be able to raise enough money by ordinary means to propiate the Labour electorate, by carrying out all the Socialist conceptions; but it can be taken from those who have it….
…. but political extremists are never statesmen, otherwise they would not be extremist. Such people allow their hatred of the rich to dominate every other consideration. And it would be done in gradual stages. That is the insidious part about it. As you say, they will go for the big fish first; and if you are forced to realize only half your holdings pay up, very few people are going to think that you have been hardly done by.
No one will squeal until some of their own savings are seized to pay the dole.”

This is of course exactly what happened post-War, with mass nationalisations and the 98% income tax rate. It’s what Bernie Sanders and his tax-the-1% gang tried. This struggle is as old as history. Wheatley continues to outline the grand plan of Evil in every facet, as applied to the Britain of the early 20th Century. The Weyland school sounds awfully like the “modern” teaching methods constantly pushed in our own schools. That school featured co-education, males and females sharing dormitories, extremely permissive sexual mores, and a teaching style opposed to discipline and where all values are relative except one: that Christianity is BAD.

Wheatley also explains the Leftist strategy of entryism. The Left are parasites and unable to create, so they must attach themselves to hosts created by real people. The Left has come after Jugg because he’s the beneficiary of a massive fortune, which the Left wishes to hijack and use to bring about communism and slavery. So, the Right built the value (his grandpa the industrialist) and the Left seeks to steal it [4]. Helmuth’s gang initially planned in recruiting Jugg by poisoning his fertile mind with a corrupt Satanic education [5] that promoted atheism, nihilism, and promiscuity. When he unexpected rebelled and joined the RAF, that institution encouraged virtues of nationalism, hard work, camaraderie, and God so they worried they’d lost him. His unexpected spinal injury gave them a second chance, so Helmuth used black magic to initiate The Haunting of Toby Jugg with the aim of softening him up again so he’d go mad, get committed to an asylum, and be unable to take control of his grandpa’s fortune. At the same time, the Satanists began an infiltration plan to place their agents on the Trust’s board so as to attain stewardship of the millions.

Oops, I spoiled the plot.

You’ll note this is exactly what the Left does now. All the major philanthropic foundations of the 19th and 20th centuries have long since been hijacked by Leftists, who use their Trustee positions to pervert the foundations directly against the objectives of the men who founded them. The Left is always about parasitism and negation: they can’t built anything of their own. All they know is how to corrupt and to steal. We see this now, for example, in sports. Feminists (i.e. the Left) don’t try to build their own women’s Tour de France, FIFA, NBA or World Tennis Tour but instead hijack the one men built and then steer it for their own purposes with bullshit women’s leagues.

You’ll note that what Lenin called “entryism” is now called “convergence” by authors such as Vox Day writing about the Leftist takeover of tech and entertainment companies. Jews have always been good at entryism because of their natural nepotism, though now the Chinese are trying it in Hollywood. Commies always be infiltratin’.

And this brings me to the central irony of the book. The Haunting Of Toby Jugg is an occultist thriller about a gang of Satanic Communists who summon a giant Spider demon in order to menace a poor cripple. And yet – there’s nothing fantastical about this story. Literally the only plot element in the entire book that isn’t clear, observable fact is the spider demon itself (which plays a small role). The conspiracy, and its ideological routes, are all real and readily observable in our own world.

The battle of Good versus Evil is eternal. We see only it’s latest incarnation.

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[1] As is anyone with a foreign accent.
[2] You’d have to be an absolute moron to have not noticed Trump is clearly opposed by the forces of Evil, even if your conception of evil doesn’t require a supernatural component.
[3] Which we now know is exactly what happened, as many Labour members of parliament were exposed as Soviet agents and spies.
[4] That right there is the entire crux of political science through the ages.
[5] This really is a common tactic, is it not. Remember your own school?

I don’t think I’m surprising any of you when I say the plots of many well-known fantasy epics are lifted from real history. The most recent case is Game Of Thrones, which started as a retelling of the English War of the Roses. Not just that but you can easily place a map of Westeros over Europe and see what’s what – King’s Landing is so obviously London, for example. This pilfering of / inspiration by history goes further back than J R R Tolkien basing Middle Earth on Europe: The Shire is southern England, the elves are faggots Scandnavians, and Mordor is the Ottoman Empire. Fuck it, it even goes as far back as the first great fantasy land, Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age, where Conan plied his trade. Aquilonia is medieval France, Cimmeria is Scotland, Zingara is Spain and so on.

This came to mind when reading The European Emergence, a history of the world covering AD 1500-1600. It covers the Reformation that Martin Luther kicked off, the Conquistadors laying the smack down on the Aztecs and Incas, the birth of England as a world power under Elizabeth 1st, the rather entertaining Ivan The Terrible of Russia, and then caps it off with the peaking Ottoman Empire under Suleyman 1st and the Mughals marching out of Afghanistan to try it on with the Indians.

Westeros, yesterday

Lots going on that century. Most of it warlike. I was struck by how any one page of this book could form the basis of an entire epic fantasy novel. Take this passage from Ivan The Terrible‘s reign:

The lawless last decade of Ivan’s reign was reflected in the chaos and violence of his personal life. His second wife died in 1569 – poisoned, Ivan was later to insist. Two years later he took a new wife, but the marriage was never consummated and the Tsarina was dead within a month; again Ivan suspected foul play. His fourth and fifth wives – both called Anna – were dispatched to nunneries within the space of two years. A brief sixth marriage in 1574 left Ivan widowed again. in 1581 he took a seventh and last wife, Maria Nagaya; this marriage did not prevent him from proposing the following year to Mary Hastings, an English heiress. Queen Elizabeth of England – “the old virgin”, as Ivan called her – had prudently refused his hand in marriage 15 years earlier.

That makes Prince Harry’s marriage to mystery-meat former-whore Meghan seem tame in comparison. Ivan’s personal life sounds like Silvio Berlusconi’s. So should we wish to write an epic fantasy yarn, we’ve got all our court intrigue handled there. But how about some violence, eh? You want some violence? Coming right up. Next paragraph….

In 1581 Ivan came upon his pregnant daughter-in-law in a palace room at Alexandrovskaya Sloboda. Furious to see her wearing only one dress instead of the three dictated by court protocol, the Tsar savagely beat the girl, causing her to miscarry. When [his eldest son] young Ivan dared to remonstrate, his father furiously raised his long wooden staff and stuck him on the head. The Tsarvevich died a few days later, leaving his father crazed with grief.

That’s a scene you could pull straight from Game Of Thrones. I suppose George R R Martin one-upped reality by having old man Lannister shot with a crossbow by his dwarf son while taking a dump. Here’s how Ivan bought it:

On March 18, 1584, feeling refreshed after a long bath, Ivan sat down to play chess with Prince Bogdan Belsky. Suddenly he lost consciousness, falling backwards to the floor. A crowd of anxious officials attempted to revive him, but the rule of Ivan The Terrible had finally come to an end.

Terrible, I tell ya

Look, all those above quotes come from a single page in this 168-page book, which is but one of twenty volumes. There’s a ton of real life inspiration here. So, I’m sure we are agreed that we’ve got the court intrigue and family squabbles handled for our mooted fantasy novel. But royal courts are big places, so lets weave in another few plot threads, this time inspired by the Ottomans. So, their empire peaked with Suleyman but when he died his successors were rather less competent and more taken with the pleasures of the flesh and the cup.

Selim the Sot [so named for his alcoholism] died in 1574, following a drunken fall on the wet marble floor of the Topkapi baths. [His successor] Murad III is reputed on occasion to have changed the companion of his bed two or three times in a single night [1], and his demand for beautiful slaves is said to have grossly inflated the prices in the women’s slave market. [Grand Vizier] Sokollu Mehmed was stabbed to death in 1579 by an assassin hired by his enemies. In the remaining 16 years of Murad’s reign the grand vizierate changed no fewer than 10 times.

Is that enough drama for you? Did you know Suleman had used the ‘Law Of Fratricide’ to have his two brothers murdered upon his ascension to the Sultanate, in order to ensure no counter-plotting? It seems Mehmed III saw him and raised him.

Murad’s death in January 1595 occasioned the worst fratricidal massacre in the history of the Ottomans. All 19 brothers of his heir, Mehmed III, were strangled, and in addition 15 slave women who were pregnant by his father were put to death.

Medieval history is fascinating for how brutal and warlike it is. Now, I get that all the highlights are compressed into a single volume covering the whole world in under two hundred pages. Naturally, it’ll focus on the big stuff. Still, I haven’t even gotten into Cortes sneaking into Montezuma’s chambers in his Aztec capital and holding him hostage, then their late-night escape across the wooden causeways over the lake surrounding the city. Or the southern trek by Pizarro to have at the Incas, and the backstage plotting by rival Spaniards in Cuba and Vera Cruz to have King Phillip replace him. Fascinating stuff.

So, should any of you dickheads readers be struggling for a plot in your next novel, I suggest you peruse one of these Time Life History Of The World books and it’ll be brimming with suggestions.

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[1] Well, I’ve done that several times. Meh! I should be a Sultan.

It’s quite common for people to seek a unified theory of everything. Physicists are always at it, whether it’s String Theory, the Standard Model, or pissing about with fractals. Hippies are equally into it though, because they lack the mathematics, their theory usually involves taking mushrooms, playing The Grateful Dead, and then explaining “it’s all… like… connected man.”

As an INTJ, I’m especially prone to seeking cross-discipline connections. Daygame Infinite is full of it them. So it was with some eager anticipation that I picked up Alex Stone’s Fooling Houdini which the publisher blurb on that back states is his memoir: “in New York City, he plunged headlong into a vibrant [1] underground magic scene populated by a fascinating cast of characters… As he navigates this quirky and occasionally hilarious subculture, Stone pulls back the curtain on a secretive community organised around a single need: to prove one’s worth by deceiving others.”

It’s Neil Strauss’s The Game isn’t it. Well, let’s just see shall we?

The story arc is the usual Heroes Journey, which in this case has Stone start out as a full-of-himself living embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Chapter one sees him in Stockholm for a Magic Olympics [2] where the judges have him escorted from the stage mid-act he’s so bad. That’s in 2006 and after a crisis of confidence he rebuilds, decides to turn pro (in the War Of Art sense) and then goes on a journey of self-discovery. After a period of technical and character development he returns to major competition in 2010 as a superior magician with a personal style all of his own.

So, yeah, it’s The Game. You could say his Heroes Journey is a lot like mine, only with far less shagging.

Jack The Ripper had never figured out how to put them back together

What struck me most about Fooling Houdini are the many parallels to the seduction community. Alex Stone was simultaneously studying in Columbia University for a PhD in physics and was a maths geek. But it wasn’t Stone’s frequent rumination on magic’s links to psychology, maths, and science that got me thinking of unified theories of everything. Rather, it’s the obvious parallels in structure, tone, and progression of and within the magic community itself. Now I think about it, perhaps Mystery’s alter ego as a magician is a big part of why the modern PUA community is as it is. Perhaps he ported over many of the principles of magic – not the performance aspect, but the organisational side and the community tone.

Early in the book Stone actually goes to Vegas to take a weekend magic boot camp at the Magic and Mystery School run out of Jeff McBride’s House of Mystery. McBride even dresses a lot like the famous PUA.

As Stone immerses himself deeper he finds a community that hangs around lots of informal nodes such as Tannen’s magic shop, or Rustico II pizza parlour. In the shop, trainee magicians of various levels mill around showing off their tricks, discussing books, and referring each other to DVD courses. It’s not unlike the forums and meet-ups noob PUAs get into. The pizza parlour is home to magicians advanced in skills and age, most notably a crusty old dude called Wes who becomes Stone’s mentor. These wise old grouches are world-weary but retain a fascination for the magician’s way of life and are fountains of wisdom. McBride explains to Stone the life cycle of a magician, of four cardinal stages of magic: Trickster, Sorcerer, Oracle, and Sage.

“The four archetypes represent the four stages in the age cycle of the magician,” he said. “They are like the four ages of man: infancy, adolescence, maturity, and old age.”
The Trickster is the imp in the family, quick-witted, resourceful, a fast-talking troublemaker who uses magic to contend with the world, overcome shyness, and build self-esteem… The next stage, the Sorcerer, is dutiful and hardworking, a serious student of the art who views magic not as a tool but as an end in itself. “Where the Trickster feeds on mischief and chaos,” McBride explained, “the Sorcerer focuses on transforming chaos into order. Sorcerers are skilful, disciplined, and put considerable time and energy into their work, acquiring the various technical skills that it takes to become a magician.”

If you’re mapping this to your development in daygame, you’re a very smart boy. You could liken these stages to the forum dabbler / weekend experimenter who then moves on to become a serious student of the game, an actual “daygamer”. Stone continues:

In the third phase, that of the Oracle, the focus shifts from the body to the mind. The Oracle explores the hidden realms of perception and strives to master the psychology of magic. Finally, the enlightened Sage, master and elder of the art, passes on a lifetime of distilled wisdom to the next generation, completing the cycle. If magic were basketball, the Trickster would play for the Harlem Globetrotters… while the Sage would coach his team through game seven of the NBA Championships. The Sage is Magic Infinite [3]

Stone’s book stays faithful to this typology throughout the book, using it to thematically organise his own progression towards Oracle.

Perhaps the biggest surprise for me in reading Fooling Houdini is how technical magic is. Now obviously I’d heard of things like double lifts, bottom deals, false shuffles and so on but not until Stone’s patient explanations did I realise how technically precise these things are and how they continually evolve. There’s a whole lineage to magic with individual sleights of hand named after the talented magician who invented them – the Vernon Lift, Hofzinser Cull, Bobo Switch, Elmsley Count [4]. Stone describes working for weeks to perfect the Ambitious Card, wherein a chosen card is inserted mid-deck and then magically rises to the top. I had no idea there were so many permutations and such technically-precise movements and means to master them. Stone goes into the pizza parlour to show off his trick to grumpy old Wes:

“No, no, no,” he rumbled, grabbing my hands. “That’s not right.” He moulded my fingers into a more forward grip, freeing them up to cover the bottom half of the deck, protecting it from exposure. This way, the lower two fingers of my right hand screened the move, making it undetectable. “I spent a whole day trying to teach Johnny Thompson this,” Wes said, sipping his diet soda. “But he was so used to doing it the other way that he just couldn’t get it.”
I gave it another shot. “No, straight back,” Wes said. “Keep these fingers relaxed.” He gestured at the lower three fingers of my right hand. “Always point your index finger directly to the left of the left-most line of vision.” This, I later learned, was a general principle for neutralising angle issues.

That’s like me coaching a residential: grumpy old guy admonishing a young lad for small technical mis-steps and then him looking wide-eyed as he didn’t realise there was so much he didn’t know. Close-up magic – or David Blaine‘s version of Street magic – isn’t at all far from Street game. So many of the concepts carry over, so much so it’s possible to forget that magic is trying to deceive and game is not. It’s the performance aspect that’s most shared. The magician’s audience wants to be deceived, the girl you’re trying to fuck does not.

After the sluggish and badly-written first chapter I’d been ready to dismiss Stone as a nerdy gamma trying to write himself into coolness. As he finds his feet he becomes more likeable – though always a bit gamma – and the writing keeps improving. There’s a wonderfully warm chapter about a blind card mechanic who is rated best in the world due to his heightened sense of touch. There are some gamma backslides though. Gammas are always a force of instability in an organisation, as they don’t accept their lowly position. Thus they’ll happily throw others under a bus in order to advance themselves, tear down the organisation, and cloak it all in self-righteousness. In Stone’s case, he blatantly betrays his signed oath to the Society of American Magicians by exposing their secrets in a Vanity Fair article.

Classic gamma betrayal for personal advancement. Utter selfishness and disregard for the good of the commons [5]. The SAM board write him a letter asking for his resignation from the Society. His response?

As the days passed and I recovered my presence of mind, the sting of rejection gradually subsided, and in its place indignation welled up like a volcano. I’d been a loyal, dues-paying member for over three years. I regularly attended meetings and ceremonies and was an active participant at lectures and workshops. I dutifully carried my laminated SAM membership card in my wallet next to my driver’s licence and student IDs. Many fellow SAM members were friends of mine, people I hung out with on a regular basis. Imagine my horror, then, at finding out that these very same individuals now wanted me excommunicated. How dare they!

Yeah mate. Because you broke bread with them and within three years you’d betrayed the 100+ yr old Society. Because you’re a gamma cunt.

So Stone hired a lawyer, sifted through the Society’s bylaws and looked for a loophole to lawyer his way to remaining in the Society…. as if nobody would know that’s what he was up to. “Oh yeah, mate. We’ve changed our minds. You’re clearly not a cunt after all. I mean, bylaw 4.5 section 2 has a loophole in it. Our mistake!” Now, to Stone’s credit, this is all information he willingly provides in the book. He’s not trying to paint himself in a favourable light. Just because he was a gamma cunt then, doesn’t mean he didn’t get past it and, frankly, by the end he sounds like a much better person.

The book gets increasing more unified-theory-of-everything in a pleasing way and the PUA parallels continue. For example, here’s a nice passage about the respect paid to the real innovators in magic from the accomplished pros a little further down the tree:

We spent the rest of the afternoon talking about an Italian coin expert named Giacomo Bertini, who was in town for the elite FFFF convention and was giving a lecture and teaching a workshop at the SAM later that week. “I’ll tell you one thing,” Wes wheezed. “He’s got the best classic palm I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t look like anything. It really doesn’t.” As with everything, Wes knew the score. He had a copy of an underground DVD containing some of Bertini’s top-secret material, which had been put out by a close-up worker in Chicago. Bertini had now become somewhat of a star on the international coin circuit.

Tell me that doesn’t sound like the PUA community when a good new infield, lecture, or technical blog post comes out. I can remember now sitting in bars or restaurants enthusiastically discussing latest developments in the daygame scene. “Have you heard? Torero has a new variation on the Toe. He’s got it elevated at a new jaunty angle. Its, like, the best ever!” [6]

As Stone begins his passage into the Oracle stage he begins to take the techniques as read, and moves into the psychological dimension. An adage I especially liked was, “Magic happens not in the hands of the magician, but in the mind of the spectator.” I’ve long said the purpose of game is to create the desired thought patterns in the girls. Game happens not in the moves of the player, but in the mind of the target. That type of daygame is infinite.

Look, I’ve twice tried to subtly incept you with the idea of buying Daygame Infinite. Why don’t you do us all a favour and just buy the bloody thing. Have a look here for more details and a video display of the book. Also available on Amazon.

[1] Fortunately in the literal sense of the word. Getting too vibrant in diverse NYC is likely a fast route to getting shot and your Nikes stolen.
[2] Don’t laugh. It’s no more dorky than the World PUA Summit.
[3] I may have added in that last sentence myself.
[4] Much like daygame’s Torero Toe.
[5] The equivalent of daygamers who burn a town to the ground by spamming sets, then rationalise it all after selfishly destroying the commons shared by all daygamers.
[6] Daygame and magic both have “mentalists”, but the connotation of the word is entirely different in the two spheres.

Personally, I preferred the Corgi covers

“Fucking get in there, my son!” is an expression of enthusiastic support that I rarely shout aloud. I’m a very rational, circumspect kind of man who likes to keep his opinions to himself. I dare say few of my regular readers could even suspect my political affiliations, so inscrutably do I hide my thoughts. But when reading Sven Hassel’s Reign Of Hell I kind of gave the game away.

“Fucking get in there, my son! Kill the commie bastards, you fantastic Nazi hero, you!”

Dunno, not really the best thing to say in a Belgrade cafe. Yugoslavia got the shit end of the stick in WWII and due to Tito’s partisans, they suffered Nazi reprisals on a scale exceeded only by Ukraine, Belarus and maybe Poland. The thing is, I’m not even pro-Nazi [1]. While I’m reading a book, I tend to take whoever’s side is doing the narration [2] as that aids immersion in the story. Thus had I been reading a Dennis Wheatley WWII Gregory Sallust story I’d side with the Allies, and if reading a Russian memoir, I temporarily side with the Reds.

It’s odd really, wanting the Germans to kill the Russians one minute and then the Russians kill the Germans the next. I suppose I’d make a natural Jew. If there’s an opening in The Cabal for a shameless propagandist, I’ll take the one Jordan Peterson vacates, thanks. Ply me with speaking tours, loose women, and lots of good food and I’ll serve your Satanic ends. Sign me up.

Wait. Where was I?

Okay, Reign Of Hell. So, I read all fourteen of Sven Hassel’s WWII pseudo-memoirs a coon’s age ago, when I lived in Japan. I absolutely loved them and for a while he was my favourite writer. As a rule I never re-read books so I put them on my shelf and that was the end of it. So when the WWII pseudo-memoir itch needed a scratching in 2018 I sought out many of the Hassel-a-like knock-offs such as Heinz Konsalik, Leo Kessler, Wolf Kruger and that Panzer Faust guy. I even enjoyed them. For a while, I began to think they were almost as good as the original Hassel novels.

Section 7

Oh how wrong I was. It’s like comparing Michael Avallone to Raymond Chandler. Yeah, they are competent but that sprinkle of magic dust isn’t in the hack books. Oh no, going back to Hassel after a decade away was like dusting off Daygame Mastery again after years spent street hustling. Reign of Hell was fucking awesome, and so much better second time around now I know more about writing.

Look, it’s still a schlocky gruesome war story. It’s not winning any prizes for literature. But I had such a good time reading it. It concerns Section 7 of the 27th Tank Regiment, a penal battalion populated by coerced “volunteers” from prisons and officers busted down to ranks in courts martial. Sven narrates first person with his friends of Section 7: Tiny the huge potty-mouthed Berliner with a dog’s hearing and a skill at placing T-mines on T-34 tanks; Porta the skinny gap-toothed rogue who wears a yellow felt top hat into battle and goads officers constantly; Legionnaire the small wiry veteran of the French Foreign Legion and the Section’s silent assassin. This is what is missing from all the other hack WWII stories. Hassel’s books are full of character. You get to know these soldiers and they are very interesting.

Reign Of Hell hits the usual Hassel topics. It begins in the Sennelager military prison where raw recruits are abused and murdered before the survivors are press-ganged into Dirlewanger’s desperate pioneer battalion operating behind enemy lines. Section 7 is soon on the Eastern Front holding the front in a marsh against an amphibious Russian attack. Later they are tasked to hold a narrow pass atop a hill in a rearguard action but the Army never signals their retreat, so they tumble down a mountain side with the Reds hot in pursuit. Finally they end up brawling with military police in a Polish brothel during R&R. Standard Hassel fare, then.

Getting stuck in, yesterday

It’s only now, in 2018, that appreciate why I loved Hassel’s stories so much. It’s the vividness with which he sets scenes, the Bottom World depravity of trench and parade ground life, and the pulsating combat scenes. You won’t find any of Leo Tolstoy’s grand philosophy on human action like the Battle of Borodino scene in War & Peace [3]. These are desperate men huddled together and dragging their comrades through hell and back.
There’s one chapter that really leapt out in how ghoulishly immersive it was. Section 7 has been evading capture in a huge forest, heading towards a river they must cross to get back to German lines. Approaching this, they spy a large farmhouse garrisoned by advancing Russians who are all blind drunk. They’ve roasted boars on an open spit outside and the Polish civilian Section 7 has leading them suspects his wife and daughters are prisoners inside.

We crept forward, crouching low in the long grass. The farm was in darkness, not a light shone in any of the windows. The horses in the stables had caught wind of us and were rearing and whinnying, stamping on the floor and kicking at the doors in an effort to be set free. They were good military beasts, and they sensed instinctively that we represented danger. But their masters lay in a drunken stupor and did not respond to their calls of alarm. The warm, sweet smell of hay and horse mingled with the acrid stench of stale vomit and spilt vodka. The smoke from the dying fire drifted towards us, bringing with it the fragrant delights of roast meat, and Porta ripped off a chunk with his bayonet as we passed. The flesh fell easily from the bones. Porta crammed a piece in his mouth, and the juice dribbled down his chin and on to his collar. His eyes clouded over in sheer ecstasy, and as if in a trance he reached out his hand for more.
“Oh no, you don’t!” said the Legionnaire smartly. He prodded him towards the farmhouse with the nozzle of the flame-thrower he was carrying. “You can come back for the rest of it when we’ve cleaned this place up.

You see, Section 7 are predators. While in pitched battles in tanks or ducking into trenches under artillery bombardment, Hassel presents his men as tiny, fragile figures swept up in the tides of destruction. But when they are in small teams, they are something entirely different. They are tigers on the hunt. Even when infiltrating a farmhouse stacked with Russians, the small section have time to squabble and stuff their faces. It gets ghoulish fast.

We stepped forward over the bodies and made our way down the hall. At the bend in the stairs were two enormous Cossack sergeants. They were seated side by side on the same step, wedged together by the width of their shoulders and sleeping with their heads drooping forward on to their chests. They had machine-guns in their laps. We took no chances. Tiny strangled them both with his bare hands.

As I carefully skirted the two dead sergeants, there was a sudden noise and a vodka bottle came hurtling towards me, followed at full speed by Tiny, who had trodden on it in the semi-darkness and missed his footing. They both crashed on to the stone floor. One of the sleeping Russians opened his eyes and sat up in panic, but Heide slit his throat before he had time to take in what was happening.

I’m telling you, it’s a vivid, spine-chilling scene and it really pulls you in. Hassel has really mastered the art of casual savagery. Often, dead strikes in an instant and is immediately forgotten. It reminded me of the first time I played Operation Flashpoint, years back. I was used to Call Of Duty and Medal Of Honour, games full of explosion and drama, with tightly scripted battle scenes. In Operation Flashpoint‘s first mission I had to drive a jeep out to a forest and run a patrol. My squad encountered a Russian patrol and a very brief firefight ensued. Most bullets missed but I shot down a Red and…. he just fell, and the corpse stayed there. We moved on. Somehow the randomness of the skirmish and the meaninglessness of the computer character’s death was far more impactful than the scripted bombast of other games.

Sven Hassel battle scenes often feel like that. Other times, he’ll make a really big deal out of it and let you get to know the unlucky soldier / partisan / civilian first. The sweep of his narrative from high-level down to the mud-between-the-fingernails of trench warfare can be thrilling in it’s fast pace. Don’t take these books as serious – I’m sure actual soldiers would consider them an insult on the integrity of most armies – but as schlocky war entertainment you can’t do any better.

It would be rather nice if some of you would buy my textbooks Daygame Mastery and Daygame Infinite, or possibly Daygame Overkill, so I can buy myself a few new video games this Christmas. Check out my products here.

[1] Not much, anyway.
[2] Unless they are gay, feminist, black, tranny, Jewish, Paki, Arab, Turk, Chinese, Indian, Brazilian, Canadian, French, or a PUA.
[3] Haven’t actually got that far through Tolstoy yet. But then again, few have. Tolstoy’s take on “Great Man” theory of history as expressed in the Battle Of Borodino is clearly explained in the Wordsworth Classics introduction. Thus any time I hear someone show off making this point, I always think they just read the introduction and are faking it. I mean, a 650,000 word book and you all pick exactly the same chapter and interpretation thereof?

There’s something deeply satisfying about taking a chance on something unknown and being pleasantly surprised by how well things go. Think of it like doing an hour’s gutter game late on a blustery Saturday night and bagging an SDL with a 19yr old Czech girl [1]. On an equally sexual and dramatic note – though vicariously – consider my surprise when picking up Ryu Murakami’s In The Miso Soup on the discount shelf in Belgrade’s Laguna book store. I knew absolutely nothing about it bar the sleazy red cover with Mr White’s girlfriend on it [2].

If there was one word to describe this book, it would be immersive. Such immersion is the holy grail of many video games, to suck you in so deep you lose all track of time. It’s the immersion of Dark Souls that had me playing ten-hour marathons where I forget to eat and put down the controller only for toilet breaks. That’s how In The Miso Soup enthralled me. I began reading at 7pm in the Hostel Moskva lounge cafe and didn’t stop until I’d finished it at midnight, lying in bed. I was there – in Tokyo – with the characters.

So, to what do we owe such immersion?

My own background in Tokyo must be part of it. When the main character, Kenji, is working as a late-night sex industry guide for his small chubby American client Frank, I felt like I was there in Kabuki-cho with them. I knew lots of the districts. Murakami mentions walking past Seibu Shinjuku station or changing at Yotsuya on the Yamanote line and images of myself there spring to mind [3]. There’s a long-running series of RPGs called Yakuza about rival gangsters fighting for control of the sex and drugs trades in Kabuki-cho and In The Miso Soup nails that vibe exactly. I’m currently playing Yakuza Zero and it’s a perfect synchronisation of entertainment forms for me.

Yakuza series is pretty oddball

Make no mistake, In The Miso Soup is Bottom World. It’s as bottom as it gets. It’s a one-weekend deep dive into the lowest grime of Tokyo’s seedy underworld. Kenji knows all the touts – lost young men at the end of their rope, trying to hustle businessmen into clubs – and all the juvenile delinquent women working. It’s the kind of vivid convincing detail that makes me wonder where Murakami spent his adult years. You can smell the ramen drifting from late-opening kiosks, and touch the cum-stained velvet carpet in the cramped peep shows. Murakami paints a bleak nihilistic world of a Japan hollowed out by the long post-1989 decline. No-one has any hope. The young ‘uns struggle to get by with low-paid dead-end arbeit jobs and the businessmen are still working themselves to death then paying hostesses for attention. Murakami paints a world of soulless automatons.

This dehumanizing of the locals is important when it comes to the murderous violence. You see, this is actually a serial killer thriller not unlike the Tom Cruise movie Collateral: Kenji is the stand-in for Jamie Foxx’s cab driver and the American Frank is the killer. For the first two acts Murakami masterfully foreshadows Kenji’s growing unease with the seemingly omega Frank, a soft timid non-entity who is autistically enthusiastic about trying to get laid [4]. As we move into the third act shit gets real FAST. I won’t spoil the plot, but here’s a taster:

Frank grabbed her by the hair and plunged the knife into her chest. And like a gnat flying out of a clump of grass, something went missing from that peculiar smiley face.
That’s when Lady #5 at last began to scream. It wasn’t like a reaction to #3’s murder specifically, but rather as if someone had finally hit a switch to turn on the volume. Frank pulled the knife from #3’s chest and then tried to take the mike from her, but her fist was so tightly clenched that even he had trouble prying it loose. Her fingers had turned white and puffy, as if they’d been pickled. Frank grabbed her by the hair again and rammed his index finger into her eye.

The author spent a full chapter painting these victims with utter contempt before having Frank murder them. He’s making a statement, no doubt inspired by Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho as the book sometimes feels similar. It got me thinking.

In particular, it got me thinking about my favourite TV show, the long-running anime series Detective Conan. That’s a murder-mystery based on the locked-room puzzles of Agatha Christie, with a dash of police procedural and Sherlock Holmes. After watching several dozen of them I realised a big difference between Japanese and English crime stories: in Detective Conan the victim almost always deserves it, and the killer is a sympathetic character. There are plots where a brutal asset-stripping businessman is murdered and the killer turns out to be the mother of a child he killed in a hit-and-run accident, for example.

Japs aren’t just slanty. They are weird too [5]

Deepak’s regular girl in Tokyo

Towards the end of In The Miso Soup Kenji tries very hard to ‘understand’ Frank and seems to develop a Stockholm Syndrome. It’s written in self-aware terms so I don’t think Murakami is trying to have us sympathise with the serial killer but rather to show the absurdity of Kenji doing so – it’s meant as an indictment of what he considers the nihilism of modern-day Japan. I felt my skin crawl more at Kenji’s rabbitry – of licking the boots that kick him – than of Frank’s murders. It was well done.

I thoroughly recommend this book, especially for anyone who has visited Tokyo. It gripped me from the very beginning and the prose is beautifully written.

If you like stories of seediness in Tokyo you’ll likely enjoy my upcoming Balls Deep second edition, which has several new chapters of me living it large there. Check my products page here.

[1] True story. See volume five of my memoir, when it’s written.
[2] So he claimed when I sent him a photo of it.
[3] Though not at the hostess clubs, as I’ve never been to one.
[4] Absolutely unlike PUAs who go to Asia, of course.
[5] I still like them, though. The white men of Asia.

Can barely be arsed to review it

Death Around The Corner…. is it worth a buy? Let’s read the words, the words, of the publisher:

Leopold Gorman studies the World Economic Conference with interest – and then picks five rich and powerful men to bring his plan to fruition.
If any one of them show reluctance to fall in with his scheme, he’ll be dead within the hour.
Gordon Craigie, Chief of British Intelligence, is the only thing standing between Gorman and success. So Gorman turns his attentions to Craigie’s greatest asset, the men of Department Z.
As Craigie attempts to undermine Gorman’s plot, Gorman decides which agent should be next to “disappear”… Can Craigie and his men outwit this master criminal before it’s too late?

You’re all aware that I’ve been in a struggle recently, the nature of which would strike fear into the heart of a lesser man. Namely, can I gather my courage and successfully plod through John Creasey’s early Department Z novels until they finally become good? I still have no idea why I took on this challenge but there it is. I’m glad to report that the fourth such book, Death Round The Corner, is the best so far and comes quite close to being decent. I’d even go so far as to say I enjoyed reading it.

DING!

It lacks the crisp punch of Elmore Leonard, the deft plotting of Erle Stanley Gardner, or the historical insight of J. D. Davies. But it also lacks the long stretches of boredom of Redhead and the ludicrous developments of The Death Miser. It’s…. okay. Creasey is honing his craft quickly, with all these books being written in a twelve month period.

I’ve now realised that Department Z has set its stall out into a recurring formula. Rather than pick a single spy and stick with him, Creasey is using the Department and the tone as the only constants. Each of the four novels so far feature an entirely different cast, Department Z’s leader Gordon Craigie notwithstanding. This time around the hero is Tony Beresford, a big strapping young lad of upper class background with a few other chums in the service. There’s a shadowy financier called Jacob Rothschild Leopold Gorman who has create an equally shadowy cartel of international financiers like Emmanuel Macron [1] with a Five Year Plan to buy up strategic companies so as to corner the market in food and energy, in order to….. well, I don’t know. Their endgame isn’t explained, but Creasey assures us it’s nefarious.

They probably intend to set up some kind of supranational undemocratic institution that seeks to tyrannise the populations of Europe with communism and authoritarianism while stealing all their money and corrupting the national governments to betray their own populations. This Union Europa sounds a bit far-fetched, to be frank.

Something that’ll never happen, yesterday

Craigie sets Beresford to investigate Gorman, trying to figure out just what he’s up to while Gorman simultaneously decides to have Beresford murdered. Apparently Gorman has surreptitiously iced a few Department Z agents already and Craigie hasn’t spotted the pattern. It’s not explained why Gorman would risk stirring up the ire of Britain’s premier Secret Service at a time when his planning is all otherwise legal. Now that I think about it, very little of the set-up to Death Round The Corner makes sense.

What does make sense is the plot. Once the ball gets rolling the characters all act with reasonable logic in accordance to their aims and abilities. It all hinges on a blustering fool called Major Odell who has a fancy for a slutty young chorus girl called Adel Fayne, who is run by a shifty Jewish manager Solly Lewistein [2], who is blackmailed by Gorman. Odell makes a suspicious trip to Paris and when Department Z try to figure out why, all kinds of shit hits the fan.

Look, I know you don’t care about the plot. I didn’t care about it either. It’s a nice bit of cops’n’robbers with an espionage flavour, wrapped up in 1930s London and Paris. It’s primarily this latter fact that kept me interested. When Creasey was writing, this was a modern, contemporary spy thriller. When I’m reading, it’s a period piece transporting me back to the 1930s. It’s that authentic picture of (fictional underworld espionage) Britain that entertained me. Everything is a little different: the cars are open top, the Air France plane flies out of some tiny pre-Heathrow airport, the chorus girls can’t get their tits out [3] and it seems every single person in England is either a toff, a copper, or a guttersnipe [4].

There’s very little to say about this book. I rattled through it in a day and I’ve almost forgotten it already. All that matters is I’m still on the Creasey Challenge and I’ll be reading the fifth Department Z book presently.

If you are wondering why Daygame Mastery and Daygame Infinite stand apart as by far the best books on pick-up ever written, you just need buy me a beer and I’ll explain at quite some length. If you’d rather avoid that, just buy them here.

[1] Incredibly, no Jews. But then again, this is fiction.
[2] Don’t worry, the dirty Jew gets knifed in the neck before he can corrupt the white girl.
[3] Unlike dirty Meg, who only needs a few quid. DING! DING!
[4] Add in rich Arabs, and that’s like Mayfair now.

I was browsing the display tables in a Belgrade book store yesterday, my attention focused on the ‘local knowledge’ section. It had the usual established famous writers such as Ivo Andric and Vuk Draskovic, and then glossy coffee-table photo-books on the wonders of Serbia [1]. One thing Serbia does well is book covers. Sadly, they write those books in their own silly language so I can’t read them. I picked up one paperback that was both in English and with a great cover, The History Of Serbia.

Hmmm…. interesting. Should I try this one next? I flicked through the pages.

Boring!

An internal dialogue revved up and I was soon perplexed. I consider reading to be primarily about expanding one’s mind and clarifying one’s thoughts. If I simply wanted entertainment, I’d watch Netflix. Even when reading trash fiction such as Michael Avallone’s Ed Noon detective series my mind is scanning it for value: turns of phrase, insights into particular human psychologies, plotting logic, recreations of a singular time and place, and whatnot. You can always learn more from reading fiction than watching fiction [2].

But surely reading avowedly educational books is more valuable than mere fiction? So I began to wonder if perhaps I should lay off from the hard-boiled detectives and superspies and read some honest to goodness history. Then my mind drifted to the stack of paperbacks waiting for my Christmas break in Newcastle, including a whole raft of history books. Shouldn’t I spend my last week travelling indulging guilt-free in fiction?

Just finished Season One of this on Netflix. Pretty good.

It was all making me hungry, so I went and had a cheeseburger.

I resolved the internal debate by considering The Mountain of Gold [3], a treasure-hunt adventure tale not unlike what Wilbur Smith or Clive Cussler would write. The difference is that J. D. Davies is a navy nut. A proper hard-core nut for the navy during the English Restoration that put Charles II on the throne. So much a nut that he won the 2009 Samuel Pepys Award [4] for his Pepys’s Navy: Ships, Men and Warfare, 1649-1689. I must say that there are few writers I love more than nerdy well-educated monomaniacs with an obsession for recording unique historical or technical areas for posterity [5]. Having written the dry historical tome, Davies turned his hand towards historical fiction.

And thus resolved my inner turmoil on the fiction vs non-fiction reading debate. You see, Davies has used the fictional form in order to relate a deep and vivid – and factually correct – account of navy life in Restoration England. The plot, character, dramatic tension, and literary flourishes of The Mountain of Gold kept me reading in a way the overtly factual The History Of Serbia would not. If someone was to recast periods of Serbian history in a novel, then I’d read it. Indeed I already have, once.

This is what I like so much about historical fiction over and above imaginative fiction. It’s all well and good reading Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat, or Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings – there’s plenty of meat to chew on intellectually if you’ll only just look – but they are not attempting to educate on specific times and places. It’s allegory at best. I like them, I recommend them, but I still prefer Dumas or Wheatley.

Of course now I want to watch Black Sails for more pirate vibe

Speaking of Dumas, The Mountain of Gold covers precisely the same period as Dumas’ D’Artagnan Romances that I so enjoyed. Whereas Dumas focused on the French side, especially the Court of Louis, Davies is a Brit and takes the Charles side. Both writers set their dramas upon a stage of real historical events and personages so I was frequently able to tie in the respective books. For example, The Mountain of Gold makes several passing references to the same Monsieur Fouquet whose Fountainbleau castle is the main site of The Man In The Iron Mask‘s plotting, and also refers to Cardinal Mazarin, the scheming rogue featured heavily in Twenty Years After.

So what factual background is it that Davies strives to educate us on in The Mountain Of Gold? Unsurprisingly, it’s all about the navy. This book is packed with vivid and technical descriptions of life aboard British frigates. We learn how they are built, provisioned, caulked, and bilge-pumped. We learn of the Articles Of War governing discipline, the chain of command, and the Admiralty’s goals. Barely a chapter goes by without Davies patiently constructing an understanding of naval life. You can really see his research specialism soak into the prose and, to his credit, it’s rarely boring. There is also much about the political division following the English Civil War and Britain’s squabbling with the Dutch over trading in West Africa.

The story is pot-boiler stuff. In chapter one, Captain Matthew Quinton and his crew are thrilled to capture a corsair pirate from under the nose of a Maltese Knight. That pirate turns out to be an ex-pat Irishman, one Brian O’Dwyer, who spins a desperate yarn about a hidden mountain of gold deep in the African continent. Quinton considers it a ruse to save his neck but is compelled to pass the story back to the King, who green-lights [6] an expedition to find the mountain. The French try to beat him to it. Surprisingly to me is the expedition didn’t actually set sail for Africa until page 183 of 355. There’s as much plotting and scheming in merry England as there is adventuring overseas.

Davies doesn’t write as well as a Bernard Cornwell or a Robert E. Howard. The Mountain Of Gold sometimes plods along, making a meal out of story elements that could’ve be dispensed with to shuttle the plot along quicker. Nonetheless I enjoyed it and can see myself reading more from Davies.

If you want to see stories hurtle along with no bullshit then consider my memoir series. It’s a shooting star, leaping through the sky. Like a tiger defying the laws of gravity. Available here.

[1] Personally, I think my private video collection contains far more wonderful Serbian beauty but that won’t ever be on sale.
[2] More-so considering how pozzed and anachronistic modern television is. I just saw a trailer on Netflix for The Pinkertons featuring a kick-ass female agent as a major character.
[3] Which also has a fantastic cover.
[4] The same guy who wrote the famous diary that is a principal historical record of life in 1660s London. You’ll be pleased to know my own memoir has way more shagging.
[5] You can make a case that the entirety of my Sigma Wolf publishing house’s content is precisely that, concerning Euro Jaunt daygame.
[6] Green lights didn’t exist in 1663, but you get the idea.

“Nick, you should write an inner game textbook!” are words I’ve heard many a daygame savant speak to me. Now, I dare say I’ve been tempted. Tony Robbins proved a long time ago that “mindset” books are a license to print money. It’s simple, really. Just tell everyone what they want to hear, and wrap it up in language that seems to elevate the reader. They’ll sit on their fat ass, lap it up, and then recommend it to all their friends.

Mark Manson recently proved this with his execrable The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F**K. His singular contribution to the advancement of mindset literature was to uses asterisks [1] in the place of swear words on the front cover, thus guaranteeing every mid-wit passing through the airport bookstore would pick up a copy. Smart move, Mark. That he’s a snake-oil seller with nothing to say doesn’t matter. It didn’t for Tony Robbins.

Something I realised years ago is you can either be good, or you can be successful. You can’t be both. To hit mainstream acceptance, you must be shit. The lowest common denominator in our retard culture demands it. There are very, very rare cases – The Godfather, Dark Souls – where an authentic vision can achieve financial success but even then they are drowned out by the likes of Avatar and Fortnite. Within the Game world, the key point is this: does your book make people feel guilty for not approaching? If it does, you’ve just limited yourself to a tiny audience. You should’ve gone the Models route, of bromides and platitudes that never require the reader to get off his arse but he still feels like his Game has improved.

I’d be laughing my ass off too if I’d monetised his scam

The reason no-one wants to read books that force you to work hard [2] is that forces the reader to confront Resistance. In daygame we call them Weasels, but in Pressfield’s The War Of Art he calls it Resistance and it’s the foundation of his book. That, dear reader, is my segue into the review.

The War Of Art is an inner game book for creatives which can easily be re-written into a daygame inner game textbook [3]. It concerns three main ideas, each the subject of a separate ‘book’ within the same volume. These are:

1. Resistance
2. Turning Pro
3. Muse

Pressfield’s larger point goes as follows. We are all built for a purpose, for a higher calling that requires we express ourselves creatively, be it writing, painting, businessing, or charitying. It is the pursuit of our purpose that brings us happiness and contentment. The problem is that any time we attempt to rise to the higher plane, Resistance prevents us. It is our death wish, our shadow self, seeking to sabotage our greatness. Pressfield’s solution is to Turn Pro, meaning you approach your calling like a professional approaches his profession and a craftsman approaches his trade. Sit down, focus on technique, and grind it out. That sets up the conditions for the crucial third phase: your Muse arrives and brings with her divine inspiration.

Pressfield sees artists as vessels through which divine inspiration flows. Their works are not from or of the artist, but rather flow through the artist from the eternal to the flesh-and-blood real world. The artist’s job is to knuckle down, get cracking, and prepare themselves to receive the inspiration. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. To give you a flavour of it I shall now quote Pressfield at length, using word substitution to turn it into a daygame inner game screed.

Everything that follows below is from his book, adapted slightly by me, dipping in across many chapters.

I get up, take a shower, have breakfast. I read the paper, brush my teeth. If I have phone calls to make, I make them. I’ve got my coffee now. I put on my lucky work boots and stitch up the lucky laces. It’s about ten-thirty now. I step onto the streets and plunge into my first set. When I start making mistakes, I know I’m getting tired. That’s four hours or so. I’ve hit the point of diminishing returns. I wrap for the day. How many sets did I do? I don’t care. Are they any good? I don’t even think about it. All that matters is I’ve put in my time and hit it with all I’ve got. All that counts is that, for this day, for this session, I have overcome Resistance.

The kiss of the Muse

Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

Resistance is the most toxic force on the planet [4]. It is the root of more unhappiness than poverty, disease, and erectile dysfunction. To yield to Resistance deforms out spirit. Every sun casts a shadow, and genius’s shadow is Resistance. I looked everywhere for the enemy and failed to see it right in front of my face. How many of us have become drunks and drug addicts, developed tumours and neuroses, succumbed to painkillers, gossip, and compulsive cell phone use, simply because we don’t do that thing that our hearts, our inner genius, is calling us to?

Resistance attacks when we take any principled stand in the face of adversity. When we want to chase the woman of our dreams [5]. Resistance cannot be seen, touched, heard, or smelled. But it can be felt. It’s a repelling force. It’s negative. It’s aim is to shove us away, distract us, prevent us from doing our sets. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. Resistance is the enemy within. It will assume any form, if that’s what it takes to deceive you. Resistance is always lying and always full of shit. It cannot be reasoned with. It understands nothing but power. It is an engine of destruction, programmed from the factory with one object only: to prevent us from doing our sets.

Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.

Resistance has no strength of its own. Every ounce of juice it possesses comes from us. We feed it with power by our fear of it. Master that fear and we conquer Resistance. So if you’re paralysed with fear, it’s a good sign. It shows you what you have to do.

Procrastination is the most common manifestation of Resistance because it’s the easiest to rationalise. We don’t tell ourselves, “I’m never going to talk to girls.” Instead we say, “I am going to talk to girls; I’m just going to start tomorrow.”

Frankly, I’d rather have this bird kiss me

Grandiose fantasies are a symptom of Resistance. They’re the sign of an amateur. The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work. The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like. Aspiring daygamers defeated by Resistance share one trait. They all think like amateurs. They have not yet turned pro.

The amateur plays for fun. The professional plays for keeps. The amateur plays part-time, the professional full-time. The amateur is a weekend warrior. The professional is there seven days a week. In my view, the amateur does not love the game enough. If he did, he would not pursue it as a side-line, distinct from his “real” vocation. The professional loves it so much he dedicates his life to it. He commits full-time. That’s what I mean when I say turning pro. Resistance hates it when we turn pro.

Someone once asked Somerset Maugham if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. “I write only when inspiration strikes,” he replied. “Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.” That’s a pro. Maugham reckoned another, deeper truth; that by sitting down and starting work, he set in motion a mysterious but infallible sequence of events that would produce inspiration.

The daygamer must be like a Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier or swabbie or jet jockey. The daygamer committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt and humiliation.

What exactly are the qualities that define us as professionals?

We show up every day. We show up no matter what. We stay on the job all day. We are committed over the long haul. The stakes for us are high and real. We do not over-identify with our daygame. We master the technique of our daygame. We have a sense of humour about our daygame. We receive acceptance or rejection in the real world.

Rejection is the price for being in the arena and not on the sidelines. Stop complaining and be grateful. That was when I realised I had become a pro. I had not yet had a success. But I had had a real failure.

The professional respects his craft. He does not consider himself superior to it. He recognises the contributions of those who have gone before him. He apprentices himself to them. The professional dedicates himself to mastering technique not because he believes technique is a substitute for inspiration but because he wants to be in possession of the full arsenal of skills when inspiration does come. The professional is sly. He knows that by toiling beside the front door of technique, he leaves room for genius to enter by the back [6].

There is no mystery to turning pro. It’s a decision brought about by an act of will. We make up our minds to view ourselves as pros and we do it. Simple as that.

If you’d like to see this attitude directly translated into daygame in textbook form, I think you’re gonna want Daygame Mastery and Daygame Infinite, available on Amazon. For a closer look at them go to my product explanation page here.

[1] Or whatever the plural of asterisk is.
[2] As opposed to paying lip service to it that the reader nods his head along to.
[3] Should I write one, I expect to reference it liberally.
[4] After Leftism.
[5] Or of the Euro Jaunt.
[6] OO-ER Missus!

I wonder how hard-boiled and ruthless a protagonist can be before he ceases to become the hero, or even anti-hero, of a novel. There comes a point where the reader can think, “hang on, it isn’t just the baddies, but everybody in this is a cunt!” I found that while watching the first three seasons of House Of Cards. Absolutely every character is a soulless, nihilistic rat. Even when one of them is initially set up as honourable, something will happen to reveal their true snake-like heart.

For example, the Secret Service bodyguard to Hillary Hatchet-Faced Man-Jaw Cuntlady takes sick leave and as he’s dying of cancer he admits he was a creepy gamma obsessed with her. His replacement appears to be a by-the-book man of honour until suddenly he’s revealed as a degenerate faggot, actually kissing Kevin Spacey’s character [1]. The female journalist crusader turns out to be just another greasy-pole climber, not unlike the New York Times slag caught sleeping with the Head of Security for Senate Intelligence Committee in exchange for the un-redacted 82-page Carter Page FISA application [2].

Anyway, House Of Cards is total shit. The Trump era has aged it badly. Now it’s just a load of wrinkly old faggots bumming each other [3]. The point is that everyone in it is a cunt. How can you possibly watch drama when there’s no goodie to support? I think perhaps this whole meta-trend started with the flawed-good guy trope that was big in 1990s action movies onward, such as Bruce Willis in Die Hard (mildly flawed) on through Arnie beginning some movies as a suicidal drunk. It seems many movies and TV shows dispense with the “good” in good guy altogether.

Goody, goody yum yum. Yesterday.

Everything is relative. Who is to say what is good and what is bad? Don’t be so judgemental!

Anway, it makes me sick talking about millennials and their bankrupt nihilistic culture so lets get back to Matt Helm in The Ravagers. He’s a hard, hard man but he’s also a patriot and willing to sacrifice for his country. Consider the famous George Orwell quote:

“We sleep soundly in our beds, because rough men stand ready in the night to do violence on those who would harm us”

By the way, that’s the entire lesson of The Lord Of The Rings. The only reason the Hobbits in The Shire can fuss about who has the best marrows at the village fete is because the men of Gondor are keeping the Turks Orcs at bay on the frontier. TLOTR is a warning to the English not to take their ideal society for granted [4]. Matt Helm is one of those rough men. That’s what’s good about the stories: he’s a ruthless killer, but he’s our killer.

God, I wish we still had plenty of these men in the West. They could assassinate all the top brass of the world’s NGOs in a single evening. Imagine a world free of Medicin San Frontiers, Oxfam, Barnardos, UNICEF, and Greenpeace. Wouldn’t that be amazing!

Lock everyone in the hold, then sink it

Anyway, I bring this up because of the brutal ending to The Ravagers. The plot concerns the wife of a scientist who has run off with his briefcase full of military secrets, attempting to make a rendezvous on the East coast of Canada [5]. It’s the usual spy-vs-spy tale of Team Helm trying to outfox Team Corbyn Russia with brutal professionals engaging in deceit and counter-deceit. It all ends in an abandoned mine near the rendezvous. The female commie aims an acid pistol at the aforementioned wife and Helm is able to get a shot off first, shattering the pistol, spraying acid all over the commie’s face [6]. She screams and stumbles off into the mine, clawing at her disintegrating formerly-pretty face.

Helm escorts the wife out of the mine, makes a phone call, and only then returns to find the enemy agent. Here’s how the scene plays out, as he tries to get her to divulge a last snip of information.

“Dave?” [Helm’s cover identity]
The voice was strange and kind of thick. It seemed to come from deep down and far away. I said, “That’s who.”
“Kill me, ” the voice said.
I said, “Sure. Just hang on while I find a suitable rock. Do you prefer having your brains bashed out from front or rear?”
“I mean it. You did this to me. Well, finish it. Kill me.”
“Take it easy, doll.”
She clung on to my hand. “Don’t let them save me! Don’t let them take me to a hospital and … and wash me off and transfuse me and… I saw what it did to Mike Green. I don’t want to live like that. I’d be a freak, a blind, faceless freak with a claw for a hand. Kill me!”
“Sure,” I said. “Sure doll. But it will cost you.”

That’s cold-hearted stuff. I have rather too much empathy to imagine myself in that position [7]. I mean, I tear up when watching videos like this.

Helm continues to stand firm in order to get the info.

She gripped my hand tightly. “I love you, Clevenger [Helm]. You’re almost as mean as I am.”
“Meaner,” I said. “I’ll come visit you in the hospital. See how you’re coming with your left-handed Braille.”
I heard Jenny stir behind me. I guess she thought I was terrible, even though it was her child I was fighting for. She didn’t count here. She didn’t know how it was. She wasn’t a pro, like the two of us.
Naomi laughed harshly. “You’re a darling,” she gasped. “You’re a wonderful, coldblooded beast. There isn’t a drop of sympathy in you, is there?”
“Not a drop.”

Aside from it being a tight, symmetrical conclusion to a good little chase story, that’s a harsh scene. I can’t imagine being so utterly cold to someone in trouble [8]. It’s refreshing to read this stuff in a spy thriller though. Donald Hamilton gets the right balance. If he’d made Helm sadistic, he’d be impossible to support even if on the right side. Too weak, and I’d be shouting at the pages, “why is this soft bag of shit a spy, he’s as delicate as a soyboy.” One thing you’ll never ever hear Helm say sincerely is “Okay, I’ll drop the gun, just let the girl go!” [9]. Thank fuck for that

No girls were sprayed in the face or abandoned in mine shafts during the period covered by my excellent memoirs available here.

[1] At least he’s over the age of consent, which must be a novelty to Spacey.
[2] Expect to hear a lot more about this in the coming months. General Flynn’s leak-hunter team set up Wolfe and caught him red-handed in treason. The NYT has had the un-redacted FISA application for a year. There’s a reason they don’t reveal it publicly: it completely exonerates Trump of Russian Collusion. The NYT isn’t just Fake News. It’s fully-blooded Enemy Of The People.
[3] Presumably. I stopped watching it during the Pussy Riot / Russian angle.
[4] Little did he know that Sauron would win the rematch by setting up NGOs to resettle Orc refugees throughout the Shire.
[5] Or wherever Nova Scotia is. I’m not checking a map because literally nobody gives a fuck about Canada, not even Canadians.
[6] YES!!!!
[7] She was hot, 22-year-old, and the mine is black dark. The acid only went onto her face and one hand. As far as I’m concerned, there’s still a rape-notch up for grabs.
[8] Subject to their skin colour, of course.
[9] Whereas it seems to be standing orders in Department Z that every agent must drop the gun, no matter at what cost to the mission, if any woman at all is even slightly threatened. That’s what happens when men in their twenties try to write spy fiction.