Not every man is blessed with charisma or good looks. Not every man can learn how to dress well. What if you’re such a man and yet still want to get laid with BEAUTIFUL WOMEN? Such charisma-challenged men in London had an answer: train with Johnny Berba.

It’s a pretty simple chain of reasoning:

1. Berba has poor social skills and dresses badly.
2. Berba gets laid with beautiful women.
3. I have poor social skills and dress badly.

THEREFORE….
4. I should learn the Berba method.

Now, the cynics among you may dispute one of those four premises [1] but let’s say you really really want to believe that charisma-free lunatics can get laid. What if you live in Warsaw? Berba doesn’t coach in Warsaw.

Don’t lose hope! Warsaw has its own Johnny Berba and his name is Mats Wolf. Let’s have a look at his Instagram shall we?

Right then. He describes himself as a dating coach and assures us he helps guys GET LAID with hot girls [2]. He’ll get you 9s and 10s and is so alpha he has an alpha book out [3]. I think it’s fair to say we are in good hands. Okay, let’s find those elusive 9s and 10s…..

Okay, that’s just a weird-looking guy standing by himself and having dinner alone. Just a coincidence, I’m sure of it. Let’s scroll further down and find the tens……

Nope, still just a weird-looking man with a facial expression like he’s just been anally raped by a hairy Turk in the park outside Terasy mall. Wait!!!!! Found one. I found a ten!

Ok, it’s from almost a year ago but not only has he got evidence with a #sexybeauty but she’s famous! It’s Lena Dunham from hit HBO drama Girls. That’s mPUA level celebrity game!

Captured from both angles

Okay, so we’ve confirmed parts 1 & 2 of the Berba Theory, confirming Mats Wolf has poor social skills, dresses badly, and gets laid with beautiful women. I can’t wait to see his mad skills infield. Let’s head on over to his infields channel [4]. I’ll add a commentary, see if we can bring this up to the Daygame Overkill level [5]

0:32 – Very efficient. He manages to get his entire capture phase done in about half a second, before he’s reached her or she’s looked up from her phone. Slick.
0:34 – Rapport laughter. When you’re so alpha you have an alpha male textbook, you have to deliberately add beta behaviours so as not to freak her out by thinking you are too high value
0:40 – Immediately ask questions. Flip the script and MAKE HER DO THE WORK. Why bother stacking when you’re alpha
0:45 – If you like your opener, might as well repeat it for the third time. Perhaps it’s an NLP trick
0:55 – “What are you up to?” is perhaps the most creative mythology you can do. Nice line.
0:57 – Don’t let her answer! Keep her off balance.
1:29 – “Or cosmetics train you?” You sly dog! Slick!
1:44 – Another pattern interrupt. Mats is keeping this girl off balance so she is easy prey to his alpha charm. He deftly avoids all her attempts to fix onto one topic and create a flowing conversation. Alpha.
2:20 – There’s so much sparkle and attraction here, it’s electric. I think I need to have a lie down to recover. Just as well he’s strictly maintaining social politeness range and not touching or there could be a PUSSY EXPLOSION
2:45 – Boyfriend objection brushed aside
2:55 – Friendly coffee. This is the first moment where I think he’s at risk of not anally penetrating her. If he’s not careful, he’ll just end up giving free English lessons.
3:41 – When you are alpha, you can beg for a friendzone coffee in a tiny break in her schedule without losing value
4:08 – “private English teacher for free”. Oh.
4:53 – Okay, he’s explained it is just a subconscious thing girls do and this set is actually really good. Thank god! I knew there was something I was missing. I’d erroneously believed this was just a terrible set with an uninterested girl.
5:28 – “I’ll be her private English teacher. Know what I mean guys?” Huhuhuh, yeah, I see it now. You’re gonna bang this chick.
5:49 – “I have a dog”. Great, I’ll remember that. Nice that he’s giving away such gold for free.

Okay, I’m convinced. Where do I sign up for coaching? Here? Wow, just 1,550 Euros for two days one-on-one coaching. But Mats, before I pull the trigger and take out my credit card I need to know something.

Can you get Same Day Lays? Can you get me to the FBI/KGB Ninja Level of daygame?

You can? You have an SDL on your YouTube channel? Great, lets have a look…..

0:30 – Well, I dare say that’s a very odd open. Almost as if it was set up in advance and he already knew the girl. And then that sudden “I was driven by it in my childhood”…. dunno, that’s a bit off, I think. Or perhaps she’s just crazy. Some girls are crazy. Maybe she just likes him immediately. It does happen.
5:27 – Why don’t we see her face? It suddenly cuts away as she turns. Perhaps she’s a TEN so he doesn’t want us to be jealous.
9:19 – Still can’t see her face. Odd. Some actresses girls don’t want to have their face on YouTube. I’m skipping this now because it’s all music. Do we ever see her face? Seems odd there’s not even a coincidental head turn in the camera’s direction. Perhaps she said “I’ve noticed there’s a little creepy guy following us with a camera, I don’t want to look over that way.”

Why is the audio cut out for the entire idate? He’s mic’d up. What are they talking about? Is this all secret game technique held back for the coaching sessions? Lets see if part two answers our questions.

1:57 – Still can’t see her face and very odd body language. This is a new form of FBI/KGB Ninja game that I’m entirely unfamiliar with. It looks completely non-sexual to me. I guess I lack calibration. It looks like two friends acting out the script of a bounceback.
5:39 – She leans back every time he leans forwards. I guess alphas can do everything wrong and still win
8:37 – She throws her arms up between him and the kiss, as she simply can’t believe she’s so lucky to be seduced.
23:56 – She flinches again on the kiss. Too alpha. So much attraction she must pretend to be unattracted to avoid a PUSSY EXPLOSION
32:26 – He cuts away while they are still both fully clothed and she is uncomfortably being kissed but I HAVE NO DOUBT that this REALLY IS a same day lay. NO DOUBT AT ALL!

I don’t know about you, but I’m convinced this guy is banging 9s and 10s. This is the game you get when you’ve been in the game for five years.

If you want to do game the hard way, and not necessarily gets 9s and 10s consider by textbook Daygame Infinite and my infield instructional video Daygame Overkill. I regret to say the “I have a dog” boyfriend destroyer is not in them.

[1] And perhaps be so cynical as to point out that in over 100 videos on his channel, Berba has never once been seen scoring with a beautiful woman.
[2] Sorry, I meant HOT GIRLS.
[3] But is he as alpha as Alpha Man and BangUp?
[4] He also has a Mad Rants Of Lonely Fruitcake Wandering Lost Around Warsaw playlist but I guess you guys aren’t so interested in the mental game.
[5] Lets at least hope we get above the Stealth Seduction level

You wish you were more alpha man.

Alpha mens get the chicks. It is alpha male who know how approach sexy girl walking down street and pull her back to your apartment and have the sex. If you are man who must blow his confidence and learn ALPHA SYSTEMS you must train from right man.

Alpha man.

Alpha Mans and definitely NOT a paid actress

Latest number one street-to-pull-bedroom man is Alpha Man of Alpha Man Training [1] Let all beta mens check out his number one website here.

Many real alpha mans

I can’t write in this style any more. Let’s return to normality. Alpha Man is a Baltic dude who has been posting videos to several different YouTube channels to show all the key elements of alpha lifestyle

• Street approaching
• Night game
• Solo dance moves in your small Lithuanian apartment
• Taking your shirt off in public and doing push-ups
• Putting on a suit then talking to a camera in your lounge
• Putting on a suit then talking to a camera in the middle of a forest
• Putting on a suit and talking in an even thicker forest
• Putting on a suit then talking to a camera while driving in the rain

He is possibly the best-kept secret in the PUA community. This is the real secret society, as currently only fifty or so people watch his videos. It’s THAT secret. Alpha Man Training is your chance to get in on the ground floor as a new pick up technology takes the world by storm.

But how can I take advantage of this opportunity, Nick? you ask me.

Fortunately AMT has many products. Many products. Here’s a DVD of a London 1-on-1 immersion coaching available to you for just $5,000 USD $1,997 [2] Let’s review what you’ll learn from these discs of pure seduction gold.

That’s a good start. It’s always wise to be grounded and respect your elders. But, let’s really dive into what you can gain from the AMT program. Bear in mind Alpha Man carves up the beginner/intermediate/advanced player’s journey a bit differently to us old-fashioned London daygamers. Readers of Daygame Infinite (that’s my less alpha advanced textbook) know I consider ‘advanced’ to mean something in the ballpark of a few thousand sets, a few dozen lays, and you’re getting girls mostly of the YHT type, perhaps one to four a month depending how hard you are hitting it and how exacting your standards.

Many alpha levels, yesterday

I thought the player’s journey topped out at ‘advanced’. Evidently not. That’s just level three in the AMT system. There are FIVE MORE LEVELS of alpha mans than in the LDM!

Think of all the room to grow!

I don’t feel qualified to comment on life at the FBI/KGB Ninja level of Game, having not reached that myself. Perhaps one of you could drop the $1,997 onto the DVD and let me know what I’m missing.

I’m not paying $1,997 for a DVD, you potato-headed fool! you say?

You don’t realise just how loaded with gold these discs are. Look at who you’ll get (quoting the site):

• Amazing approach of 10`s blonde in Central London. You will see her face and how she was reacting to AMT Coach. Blonde has 10 point ass and face. Incredible approach. AMT Coach went on 9:30 PM to Central London and saw this amazing hot blonde in black clothes walking down the street. He approached her and have seduced. You will learn everything from this video. You will hear how AMT Coach opened her and have seduced.
• How to go to your place and not to be taken to girl’s place and reality. Crucial! You will learn AMT systems.
• Where to take girl for sex if you are living with your parents in London [3]

Amazing, is it not? Look, I know what you’re thinking. You have all kinds of questions. Don’t worry, the FAQ answers it all.

What length of this program is?
413 minutes. It is almost 7 hours. It is enough to understand how to approach a complete strange hot girl in public and get her to relationship.

Can I get those videos for free in torrents?
Those videos are forbidden to be in torrents. Our clients accept this responsibility:
If you will send videos to your computer, you agree to pay 1,000,000$ for AlphaManTraining.com If you show those videos to your friend or other person you agree to pay 1,000,000$ for AlphaManTraining.com Once you will break copyright of AMT we will BAN you from our client list and write you a claim. Your friends will not value free thing. They must pay in order to change. Do not talk about AMT to friends or any other person. It is your secret.

Our clients are not stupid and they will not create problems for themselves. [4]

If you think you really can’t handle Level 8 FBI/KGB Ninja Level success with girls and would be more comfortable topping out at Level 3 Advanced, consider my slightly-alpha book Daygame Infinite or even more alpha Daygame Overkill

Pick up many girls with Alpha Man’s system

[1] TM
[2] That’s the price of the DVD, not the immersion coaching itself. A bargain.
[3] BangUp might want to pay attention to this bit
[4] And if you’re a shy Asian male who wishes to be Total Alpha Male, he’s got you covered with a different product, for just $6,085 $1,217. “Asian man rented out 3 bedroom Ranch in Phoenix Arizona. In living room they were doing Alpha Man Training. Asian male bought magnet board, provided food and paid for other expenses. In the End of Training Asian client was superb confident and became Total Alpha Male!”

Regular readers are well aware that daygame is a fast-moving new phenomenon. Although men have always been trying to get laid, what is now considered “community” daygame is new. The USA kicked things off in the early 2000s with the likes of Paul Janka in NYC, Jon Sinn in LA, and Gunwitch in some obscure meth-ridden shithole. In the late 2000s London began to take over and the first wave of London Daygame happened – guys like Yad, Yosha, Sasha, Eddie, Richard and of course myself and my mate from Wales.

Since then, I’ve had my eye on the next generation of up-and-comers. Some of them are blogging such as those listed on this post. I’m starting a new series to highlight the most talented of the new blood.

So, let me introduce you to a daygamer recently released into the community. Bristol’s [1] top PUA and the creator of AlphaSarging [2]….. Bang Up PUA. You can find his twitter here.

Dropping value bricks of pure gold

BangUp formed AlphaSarging with his mates SwitchBack and TenHunter mostly based around the mall in Bristol, especially C&A and the off licence on the corner between Tescos and Sarah’s Tanning Salon. They sometimes “jaunt” across the border into Cardiff. I’m not sure if the AlphaSarging team is still together as, reading between the lines, it appears BangUp and TenHunter have fallen out over a woman and there’s the suggestion TenHunter might not actually be sarging tens [3]

I was going to review BangUp’s new PDF on Wolverine Mindset but I can’t seem to find the checkout link. Again, if anyone has read it, comment below. What is available is BangUp’s text game for his upcoming AlphaSarging [4] text chat guide. Let’s have a look. I’ll add a short commentary.

Ok, that’s a solid start. Snappy, to the point. I’m not sure Llama is the best animal comparison – perhaps squirrel or chipmunk is statistically more likely to lead to the bang – but this girl is presumably very hot and perhaps and Llama-like long catwalk model legs. Chelle is playing hard to get so BangUp keeps the frame and stacks forward with a “crazy” neg and then plows. Good use of a masculine profile image too. So far, the wolverine mindset is strong.

Chelle continues to push back, as TENS always do. Sensing the need to draw her in with rapport he begins The Cube, to elicit values. She continues to pattern interrupt but was clearly impressed with his moon-walking skills. This is callback humour from her suggesting BangUp is FLIPPING THE SCRIPT.

This is all about holding the frame.

Tens can often go silent. Chelle is probably on a high value yacht party somewhere with high value men doing high value things, so BangUp needs to build his stack and pour value in. Here’s a chain of masculine ALPHA dominance. Following BangUp’s twitter you’ll see many such nuggets of mindset wisdom.

Be Alpha. Don’t be beta. BE ALPHA

You can see Chelle’s frame is crumbling because she throws out a token “boyfriend” defence. This is PRECISELY what Bang UP HAS BEEN WAITING FOR and he SMASHES it out the park with his BOYFRIEND DESTROYER [5]

He reverses the final frame-snatch by deftly positioning Chelle as waiting for BangUp to call her and not the other way around. That means each time she’s strutting down the catwalk, or at a photo-shoot in Venice, or sleeping with her boyfriend she’ll be constantly worrying whether BangUp calls her. It’s an open loop.

Overall, I give this text game 8.5/10 and the Chance To Bang [6] is about 94%.

If you’d like to adopt the Wolverine Mindset so you can AlphaSarge [7] at the new hotbed of daygame in Bristol, check out BangUp PUA’s twitter feed here.

[1] And Cardiff’s and Clapham’s, depending on his mum’s travel schedule
[2] TM
[3] Perhaps BangUp and TenHunter could clear this up for me?
[4] TM
[5] Although I suspect he got this one from RSD.
[6] TM
[7] TM

This is a good Jordan Peterson talk relevant to daygame winging and state-crashing – particularly the opening minute. Most consistent daygamers are familiar with the following cycle, one that hits especially hard when euro-jaunting:

1. Two guys fly out together, share an apartment. Full of optimism
2. They hit the streets. Collect numbers, wait to see what hits
3. Guy A gets laid
4. More streets, more numbers, more filtering.
5. Guy A gets laid again. Guy B still struggling despite doing equally good street work
6. Guy A buzzes with enthusiasm. Guy B crashes

Intellectually, we all know the stats. We know that daygame success is like a poker player waiting for his big hand, and he can be getting ante’d away by the crappy cards until that happens. Sometimes you get your luck early (like Guy A in this example), sometimes late, and sometimes not until the next euro jaunt.

Knowing all this intellectually doesn’t make it feel any better. Jordan Peterson explains why this is not a problem of mental constructs (i.e. how you process and interpret reality) but is actually neurochemical. It’s your body’s natural changes to your brain chemistry that state crash you.

In the video he’s talking about dominance hierarchies. When your brain tries to regard itself in the face of difficult problems, it will defer towards the group conclusion. If you rise up in the dominance hierarchy, that is the group giving a favourable regard to you, which you can then give to yourself. Here is Peterson’s key contribution:

Your brain then rewards you with serotonin.

You get more ‘feel good’ chemicals, lower neuroticism (i.e. “in your head” self-talk), and your body language and facial expression naturally reflects it (which girls notice, putting you on a roll). This is when daygame becomes extremely good fun because you are in a virtuous circle of success driving serotonin production which itself drives success.

When you’re euro-jaunting with the wing, you are in a dominance hierarchy of two [1]. If he starts pulling away, your brain will reduce serotonin production and give you the symptoms of state-crashing.

People chase pleasurable stimuli. It’s a form of self-medication. I think every intermediate daygamer comes to understand the value-tap / state-crash dynamic and it’s tempting to take advantage to give yourself a boost to serotonin and thus improve your results and mental state. In the virtual realm, this is why so many pricks are trying to one-up each other on forums puffing themselves up with (often imaginary) successes. They are trying to climb a rung or two higher up the dominance hierarchy and get a serotonin boost.

I go into detail in Daygame Infinite about how wings should behave to avoid such problems and I list out three pages of dirty tricks to watch out for so you don’t get value-tapped and, for the conscientious among you, so you don’t value tap your wings. It’s also why I promote the “daygame river” type of daygame that sidesteps these silly dominance games in the first place.

If you’d like to get good at daygame, you can’t be without Daygame Infinite, the cutting edge textbook for street pick-up instruction.

[1] If you obsessively compare your results against other bloggers and forum guys, you have a virtual dominance hierarchy to compete with too.

I have a low opinion of modern universities, which is hardly a controversial one to hold nowadays. There was a time when only a small proportion of the UK population attended higher education, being those who were from lower orders and had graduated grammar school due to intelligence and hard work, or those from the middle and upper classes who benefited from a private-school-to-university escalator system.

Either way, the end result was universities taught students towards the top 20% of academic ability. Then the communists came along and decided it should be 50%. Anyone who knew the Bell Curve could predict what happened next.

Before long, you got this

Retards, yesterday

The modern university is now a Satanic institution. I don’t mean that literally. However, a modern university functions only to completely corrupt the younger generation. It turns the men into faggots, the women into whores, and all of them into mindless Marxist drones. More recently, it’s also been turning blacks into uppity racist vandals. Thanks Obama!

University is now something to avoid. Back when I graduated it had three things to recommend it to students:

1. Tuition was paid by the taxpayer, as was a small maintenance grant
2. The educational content was still pro-civilisation. Even the Sociology department was only half Marxists.
3. A university degree helped get a professional job.

In 2018 it does none of those things. You finish university with massive debt, no prospects, and a head full of dogshit. So what does a young man do if he wishes to replicate the old-style classical education that university once delivered? Well, that’s easy. The internet changed everything.

There are many quality YouTube channels out there so you could do a lot worse than to follow Stefan Molyneaux, or Voxiversity, or the multitude of channels uploading Jordan Peterson courses. There are channels devoted to Medieval history, or warfare, or philosophy, or….. well, everything really. The only problem is in filtering the wheat from the chaff but I’ve already given you a good start. Decide what you’d like to study then schedule a “study course” with an hour or two every evening and a set “reading list” of lectures.

It’s really easy [1]

Easy, I tell you!

For as much as I like YouTube and the explosion of blogs, there’s no substitute for reading and writing. There is something about the long-form book that can cover topics in greater detail and penetrate your brain deeper than simple video can. This was made especially vivid to me when reading a Jordan Peterson essay on the flip-side to reading: writing. It’s a fantastic essay and I thoroughly recommend it.

For Peterson, writing is thinking.

He begins by explaining that most students don’t realise why they are assigned essays. They treat them instrumentally, as the thing they need to do to get a grade. Peterson stresses that though this is what they’ve devolved too, originally they were a tool for learning:

“The primary reason to write an essay is so that the writer can formulate and organise an informed, coherent and sophisticated set of ideas about something important.”

Writing is inseparable from thinking, and actions based on good thinking will lead to far less painful outcomes than those based on muddled thinking. He builds a strong case for the why, for the reasons to want to develop your own writing (and thus thinking) capabilities. He then patiently leads the reader (it’s intended for his undergraduate students) through a methodology for essay writing. For me, it’s his theoretical and psychological observations between the technical advice that is most illuminating [2]

I don’t want to write more on his essay. They are Peterson’s insights and I don’t want to claim them as my own. Read the essay (second red link). You won’t regret it. Then come back to this post.

Done?

Now you see why I’m engaged in Project High Value Man [3] and it is accomplished through massive amounts of reading and then writing an essay on every single book. These reviews are essays. I’m taking a point or two from the book and then organising my thoughts around it. This encourages me to read each book actively, with a student’s mind rather than an idle chump looking for easy entertainment. Even the pulpiest of pulp fiction can inspire thought on the deeper issues in life.

My Time Life history project was designed to reproduce the historical education I never received at university. I asked myself what did I most want to learn and the answer was “all of world history”. So I thought it through and prioritised breadth of learning over depth, determining to fit all the pieces of world history into my mental map first and only then choose particular themes to dive deep into.

I’m currently ten books through the twenty, so the breadth phase hasn’t yet finished. It’s a long term project and I just happened to take advantage of winter hibernation to get off to a fast start.

This book, Adam Smith from the Past Masters series [4], could fit nicely into a History Of Ideas course, should you wish to reconstruct a classical university education on that topic. I’m quite amazed at how easy it is to be spoon fed such incredible scholarship. The Past Masters series from Oxford University Press is all available on Amazon and Ebay, starting at 1p for paperbacks and £5 on Kindle. As of 1989 when my copy was published, the series had SIXTY FOUR volumes.

Count ’em

They are short books, about 100 pages each. You could read one in a day, no problem. Imagine the potential. Read ONE Past Masters book per week, and write a short 1000-word essay on it when you’re done (if you blog it, I’ll link it). In one year you’ll have covered 52 of the world’s greatest minds [5]. Not just skimming them either, you’ll have really thought about them.

That’s no small thing, learning how 52 of the world’s greatest minds thought. And doing it in one year and costing only a couple of hundred pounds [6]

As I wrote in Daygame Infinite and elsewhere, I’d become a little disillusioned with Euro Jaunting. Though I was enjoying the day-to-day experience of chasing and clacking skirt, I was neglecting my more wolfish interests and slowly hollowing out. Thus when winter hibernation rolled around I decided to rededicate myself to my higher passions: literature, philosophy, history, and writing. I wanted to forestall my decline into a dunderheaded rabbit driving around chasing low-calibre skirt like its the only thing in life.

If you’d like to ignore everything I said about reading Past Masters and instead chase skirt like a dunderhead, then I’ve got just the book for you: Daygame Infinite. From April to October the dunderhead lifestyle is actually a whole load of fun.

and this is pretty good too

[1] Of course you won’t actually do it, because that requires thinking and commitment, the lack of which is why you haven’t done anything before and won’t ever change.
[2] I’m already a very good writer. And a modest one.
[3] A somewhat tongue-in-cheek title
[4] Which, I realise now, I’m not actually going to review properly because I’ve gone off on such a tangent already. It’s very good, though.
[5] And if they write asking permission to do a Krauser volume, I’ll grant it
[6] But of course you won’t do it. Because you don’t really want to be high value. You just want to talk about it in blog comments.

Tommy Robinson visits Telford

Are you an adventurer?

Now, let’s be clear what it means to be an adventurer. Back in 1929 you might skip bail ahead of the bondsman in New York and sign onto a ship headed for the South Seas. At other times in history an adventurous spirit might trek his way through the Himalayas with just a guide, a goat, and a curved blade. Or perhaps he’d run security on a rubber plantation in the Ecuadoran jungle, horsewhip in hand and a hundred sweaty natives cursing his name.

Adventure is harder to find in 2018. We live pampered, sheltered lives, never far from Wi-Fi or video gaming. Are we condemned to experience our adventures vicariously through others? [1] Are we limited to storybooks, movies and games?

It was when reading the letters page at the back of this pulp magazine reprint that I considered what role the magazine had originally played, who its readers were, and why they read it. Wide World Adventures was evidently quite a new periodical and the editors were soliciting reader opinion on content and help in spreading word-of-mouth to friends and newsstand buyers [2]

In particular, this letter from one Fred H. Barner of 7 Valentine St, Roxbury, Mass. [3] caught my eye. I’ll reproduce it in full because it really jumped out at me:

Dear Editor,

Even though I have only read two or three copies of WIDE WORLD ADVENTURES, I can call it the best magazine I have ever read. You can bet that I won’t miss a single copy. The stories can’t be any better.

The article in “With Pick and Pan” by John A. Thompson, on opal mining, struck me just right. Have any of the readers ever tried opaling or any other kind of mining? Let’s hear from you.

“Adventurers All” is great [the name of the reader’s letters section, K.] Aren’t we all adventurers at heart even though we may be chained to a desk in some hot stuffy office? We can’t all roam around the world looking for adventure, but we can at least read about what someone else has done – someone who has been more lucky than most of us.

I would like to hear from some of you fellows who live in South American, Australia and Africa. Let’s hear from anybody, no matter where you live.

Aren’t we all adventurers at heart?

That letter could easily be a reader’s comment on a Player’s Journey blog or a post in a pick-up forum like RVF or Naughty Nomad. Not much has changed in 89 years. Young men still burn with the thirst for travel and adventure. In 1929 they’d walk to the newsstand and pick up the latest from a selection of their favourite pulp magazines. Nowadays we have daygame blogs and memoirs.

The newsstands have really gone downhill since then

It comes to the same thing: Adventurous men dreaming big and building a community to facilitate it, either those lucky enough to chase down experiences, or those slaving in an office and patiently plotting for a future where they too will be free to roam. I’m so used to the lifestyle that I’ve come to take it for granted. I’d like to (posthumously) thank one Fred H. Barner of 7 Valentine St, Roxbury, Mass. for reminding me just what a great time it is to be alive.

The world is still full of adventure. It’s really not hard to find, be it a long weekend to spam approach Galleria mall and Florianska street in Krakow, or to live by a beach in Thailand to swim, surf, train BJJ, and chase dirty tourist girls [4]

Oh, and what about this issue of Wide World Adventures? Is it any good? you ask.

Yes it is. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s towards the upper end of writing quality for the pulps and every one of its seven stories was fun to read. The Cross And Rubies is a novella about two yahoos who take a boat to Burma on a hot tip for buried treasure only to run into local bandits and an odd white secret agent in their midst. The Coffin Ship is an undercover investigation into Chinese bandits waylaying their own countrymen on the shuttle boat to Indonesian copper mines. Three Graves On The Beach is like a wild western revenge tale as a grim man-hunter pursues the bandit troupe who murdered his friend – but set in the South Seas. That was my favourite. Spinifex and Gold is an Australian Outback story of betrayal. The Jest Of The Jade Joss is a far east tale of confronting a Triad warlord aboard his merchant ship. African Outlaws retells the legend of a hardy adventurer in the Transvaal as he leaves mayhem behind him. Lastly is the hilariously-named Chink-Running about coyotes trying to outwit ICE on the Canadian border, smuggling illegal immigrants into the USA.

Like I said, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

I find it hilarious, and that’s all there is to it

If you’d like to live your adventure vicariously, be sure to grab my memoir series. If you’d rather live it directly, get a hold of Daygame Infinite.

[1] I put rather a high price on my own hide, so you won’t see me picking up a rifle to fight ISIS in the Iraqi desert or infiltrate Mexican drug cartels for the DEA. I’m quite happy experiencing that vicariously, thank you very much.
[2] I’m sure this approach is more commercially successful than my own rather high-handed attitude towards my own readers. Sorry, the fact remains that I’m still a bit of a cunt.
[3] I guess I just doxxed him, 89 years after he wrote the letter.
[4] One reader knows exactly who I’m talking about.

If you’ve heard the phrase “the postman always rings twice”, that’s because it’s the name of James M. Cain’s debut novel which was subsequently made into a movie. I wish someone would tell my postman to ring twice, because that work-shy public-sector cunt doesn’t hang around at all when an Amazon delivery needs signing for. He rings once, then I have to hurry out of the shower dripping wet or quickly crimp out the last turd and race to the door trying as best as I can to hold my arse cheeks apart so the fudge doesn’t spread before I can get back on the throne.

But I digress.

Cain is widely considered to be one of the three greats of hard-boiled detective fiction, the other two being Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler, both of whom I’m read extensively. This is my first Cain book. Chandler didn’t like him at all, saying “He is every kind of writer I detest… a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking.” You could say I was intrigued.

If new to the genre, try LA Confidential

Hard-boiled fiction dragged murder out of upper-class drawing rooms [1] and into the alleyway where it belongs. It’s characterised by tawdry motels, cheap tarts, alcoholic men, and every character has an angle to screw every other. I learned a lot about humanity from my sojourns into hard-boiled, because I’d always preferred a view of the world closer to Sir Nigel and his gallant knights. For any men who struggle to shed their naive view of the world, I recommend an immersion course in crime fiction. Pick any five Hard Case Crime novels and see how your mental map changes to incorporate the new worldview.

I spoke yesterday about how some writers present mundane everyday situations but fill them with nuance, deception, and sinister implication. It’s good training for a wannabe player, to practice tuning your mind into the hidden wavelengths of human interaction, like seeing the world through infrared googles or in x-ray. You see levels of scheming and manoeuvring otherwise invisible [2].

“IOIs!! I see them now!”

For example yesterday evening I had a Skype consultation with a daygame client. We were reviewing the status of his leads. He’d describe the set (sometimes with audio), send me screencaps of the messages, and describe the dates. We’d then try to figure out where he was at and how to proceed. Each time, a key stage in the analysis was this:

Put yourself into the girl’s position and try to understand her objectives and motivations.

It sounds obvious but many men have a personality that defaults to considering only their own actions, or of taking her actions at face value. If you are such a man, consider your homework assignment to read some hardboiled fiction. Get used to seeing angles. It comes naturally to rabbits, but not to wolves.

This preamble is particularly relevant to The Cocktail Waitress. It’s written from the first person perspective of a gold-digging slag who is recording her side of the story to clear her name after several murder accusations. Cain does a very convincing job of simulating the sophistry and self-delusion of a Machiavellian woman [3]

The principal device here is of the unreliable narrator. The reader is entirely dependent upon Joan Medford’s (the waitress) account as she introduces only those facts she wants us to see. Cain deftly hints by omission at those she tries to conceal. Medford wants us to believe she is buffeted by forces beyond her control and the victim of terrible luck. She is shocked – shocked I tell you – by the string of wild coincidences that seem so suspicious until you can just listen to her side of the story and how they aren’t anywhere near as bad as they first appear.

The story opens at the funeral of her husband. He was a heavy drinker and abuser – though we only have her word for that. She mentions her young boy Tad’s damaged shoulder but there are later hints that it might not have been her husband Ron who hit him. Joan and Ron had a shotgun marriage when she fell pregnant at 17 and was cut off by her well-to-do parents. One night he comes home steaming in his friend’s borrowed car and she throws him out. He drives into a culvert wall at 70mph and dies.

Unemployed, widowed and broke, Joan must temporarily entrust her three year old son with her sister-in-law Ethel, who hates her. Ethel is the main antagonist in the book, a jealous woman who’s recent hysterectomy has rendered her barren, so she is scheming to take Joan’s son for her own. But remember this is written by an unreliable narrator. Ethel doesn’t ever do anything bad, but rather Joan ascribes nefarious motives to her. It’s a whispering campaign. Joan is attempting to demonise Ethel to her readership, accusing her of the very scheming and whispering campaigns that she herself is engaging in.

It’s the classic Alinskyite tactic of the Left. Accuse others of what you yourself are doing [4]

Very much in love

One of the two cops assigned to Ron’s death is highly suspicious of Joan, thinking she may have laced his beer with the sedative Thalidomide. Joan’s narrative treats him as young and impulsive, rather vindictive, and writes that his older partner assures her he’s just hot-headed and there’s nothing suspicious. As a narrative device it’s common – disagreeing cops in a case – but in The Cocktail Waitress it has an extra layer of meaning: Joan is using an appeal to the older cop’s authority to discredit the judgement of the younger cop who is against her. It’s the unreliable narrator advice again. Remember, this book is written as if she’s justifying herself to the world (to avoid punishment).

She takes an emergency job at a cocktail bar where she wears a revealing costume and scores big tips. She assures us she really didn’t want such demeaning work but she simply had no choice: it was to secure her son’s future. Almost immediately she’s receiving the attentions of several men and again we are left as readers to wonder if this is an unfortunate coincidence to befall a bereaved widow who just wants to make an honest dollar, or if she’s actively harvesting dopey men and hiding that from us.

Two men fall hard. A young attractive hot-head and a battered old rich simp. The rest of the book has her make the familiar dual-mating strategy decisions: sex with the attractive guy, bilk the old guy out of his life savings. Being a crime story, she gets herself into all kinds of trouble and some people die.

The first crime doesn’t actually happen until halfway through the story and until then I felt like the book dragged. The book is clever, but it’s slower than I’d like. When it picks up in the second half you realise why it’s published by Hard Case Crime and not Harlequin. Still, I prefer my sex and violence to come thick and fast from the beginning, just like my real life.

Cain keeps turning the screw as he entices us to see through Joan Medford’s bullshit and begin treating all of her words as syrupy lies. The book becomes more interesting in trying to reason out what Joan is hiding from us, more than what she tells us. Because the book is, within the conceit of its narrative place, tied to facts. She’s writing for readers who’ve read the newspapers, read the trial reports, and some of whom work for the police in the district where the murders happened. She must persuade those readers, so she can’t tell any lie that can be disproved by a third party or the credibility of her elaborate self-justification would fall apart.

That forces her to admit unsavoury details, then scramble to explain them away. You get the feeling any conversation said one-to-one in private is recounted as a tissue of lies but things said publicly are truthfully reported (if spun to her favour). It really is very cleverly written.

Unfortunately the greatest strength of The Cocktail Waitress is also it’s undoing. It’s 254 pages of a silly tart justifying her own bad behaviour and spinning stories to manipulate you into white knighting her, or at least taking her side. Every player who has ever dated a silly tart knows how gruelling it is to endure such nonsensical self-serving prattle. At least on a date you know it’s over in a few hours and you might fuck her. This book took me three days to finish and there was no sex at the end of it.

If you want a fast-moving, gritty crime story then skip this. If you’d like to conduct a psychological experiment of putting yourself into the position of a dirty gold-digger and seeing how she’d manipulate her targets, give this a try. Next time you’re on Seeking Arrangement it might save your life.

She’s costing him $1m a month according to Hollywood gossip

If you’d like to dodge gold-diggers entirely and just bang birds who fancy you, consider Daygame Infinite. It is one of the “big three” of Game textbooks, alongside Daygame Mastery and something else that some magician in a furry hat wrote.

[1] That is to say, Agatha Christie locked room puzzles
[2] No, I’m not talking about the Jews. At least not today.
[3] Otherwise known as “a woman”.
[4] Russian collusion, sexual harassment, and using your political position to enrich yourself being three you might have heard the Democrats accuse Trump of. Oh, and yes, Alinsky was a Jew.