All Cool Blog Titles Are Taken

Same old shit

2012-01-06T20:22:00.000-08:00

Life reduces to emotional state management, and I'm not talking about Zen, the observant pacifier, but rather the chase for hedonistic pleasure. Emotions are the axioms of life, and mine are all inconsistent.

My mortal sins are selfishness, vanity and pride. The selfish qualifier may be of inadequate specificity. Here's how it goes: I am emotionally poor, or in possession of large quantities of depressive needy emotions that are dubiously marketable unless there's some channeling twist I really haven't purposed to its full capacity yet. I don't mind being depressed so much, as long as it doesn't prevent me from doing my work, but I do mind the social cost.

When I am poor I only share with girlfriend potential. But some short periods of time I am manically happy and I just share freely, and I know in that time that I can have any girl that I want, but it's never for long enough to sustain interest and gain permanent hooks into girlfriend potential. So there is a problem in that those short periods decide where I set the bar for girlfriend potential, but I'm only over that bar myself for so short periods. Of course, I'm not going to change that because I have my pride. 27 years and no home-grown poon-tang. I really think I should be allowed to indulge in self-pity. Don't I get a prize or something?

I realize that keeping myself above the bar to sustain a relationship with a quality girl really would be a full time job for me, and at some point of continued futility that is exactly what I intend to do. I'd need to be free to feed the emotional cravings through social and sexual substitutes and baseline-lifting exercise and radically scrupulous nutritional optimization. After all, gaining the love of a quality woman is the last thing I feel the need to experience before I can say that I finished the game of life in style as it was meant to. Plus having love might free my mind from bare survival wasteland always just barely staying afloat, and re-open the door to playfulness, ideas and creativity for fun and profit.

And yes vanity, because when I look in the mirror, not all the time of course, but I save the maximums for comparison purposes, I see beauty and cuteness and I want that same level of cuteness in my girlfriend potential. So much do I want it that I really can only have that one requirement because girls of that quality are already scarce if I should not like to dare add a lot of personal characteristics on top of it. Well, maybe later after I've had one treat and didn't like the aftertaste.

I can keep a girl of excellence interested for 5 minutes, but then I burn through my stored positive emotional charge, or rather I feel so safe and warm in her presence that any removal of the newly acquired high causes massive black holes of depression and neediness to open and that doesn't really fly.

So it's the same old problem, still need to get happier to get the girl that I want. Just have to exercise more, more, more to generate endorphins and testosterone or whatnot, and use caffeine to concentrate the bursts when it counts.

Oh yeah and I guess that my position on the sexual spectrum varies over time doesn't help either. I think I lack testosterone, and it's only when I'm angry, pissed or despondent that my alpha dog comes out to play. It's not that I'm gay, but most of the time I prefer to feel more like a woman than a man, but still want to be with women, so I guess that makes me a lesbian trapped in man's body.
Whatever.

But women need that dominant dog factor to pummel their ass into submission and it takes a lot of energy to be that guy. Except when I'm really fucking pissed that I'm not getting laid just because I'm a nice emotional guy and I just think well motherfuckers you want alpha I'm gonna give you fucking alpha you instinct-ridden unappreciative primates I'm gonna fuck you hard and shrink wrap your body into submission till your ass is blue if that's what you want, but then you're gonna give me the snuggling, spooning, adulation and adoration that I deserve for my hard work. Jeez, give me a break you hedonistic sex freaks. All I want is some deep love, and deep penetration is just a tool.

Sick

2011-12-08T08:40:00.001-08:00

I like being sick, under the condition that it is obvious that I am sick and it has the characteristics of a disease that I recognize as temporary infection and I know that I can fight it off. On the other hand I strongly dislike insidious disease that can wear on me for years without it being obvious what is wrong or whether I am sick. Secretly I am imagining that the weak infection is making my body's immune system stronger so that it pushes back on the strong infection, the invisible attacker that follows me like a shadow and strikes at weak moments that I am not exercising or eating healthy, but I have no support for such a statement.

With flu-like infections I can stay in my bed and feel safe and warm, but still it is like my body and mind is actively engaged in working on a problem, a challenge that needs a solution, and I feel achievement and victory as I discover and embrace the nuances in the symptoms of the attacker and how to fight it. I especially like novel disease patterns that I haven't experienced before, because of the way that it alters my state of mind. Being lightly sick makes me happy even if it is painful because it makes me feel like a strong fighter with one clear purpose to get healthy again. I like to think fuck you flu I am going to squash your little invasion like a bug.

I also feel more intelligent and creative after having been sick for a while and getting a grip on it, after the turning point of getting more healthy. I wonder if the immune system enlists creative intelligence in the genesis of new antibodies, if it is the novel experience that inspires, or if it is just the heightened resource allocation to fight off the disease that as the sickness wanes is being reallocated to mental charge, or simply that I am getting more rest that I am not usually getting or that I am only doing fun things that I want to do when I am sick. Maybe a combination of some of the above.

Symptoms of this one are first painful headache like my head was going to explode, then fever, but mostly a stable high temperature, not alternating chills and sweats, coughing with extra mucus in the throat and then muscle stiffness and soreness like I am sunburned from the inside out. I also cried for a night in depression (supposedly over a girl, but might be causal confusion) just before the sickness started, but that disappeared once the sickness took over. I don't know if the short-lived depression caused the immune system to weaken and be receptive of the disease or if it was the disease that caused the initial depression, but I suspect there was some link, one way or the other. Anyway, as the disease progressed I got happier and happier, even though I am in physical pain, which doesn't really bother me unless I get scared that it is causing permanent damage.

Sex

2011-12-05T18:11:00.001-08:00

Every guy who is trying to teach me how to be with women is saying that I need to lower my standards and sleep with more girls to get experience. But why? How does that help me in getting the girl that I really want. The psychology I've been carrying around after too much sexual rejection is that sex is the weapon of women and I can never gain the upper hand, so I've just been trying to eliminate sex from the equation by "advanced" masturbation and focus purely on emotion to regain control. It's much easier to get women to respond to emotion than sex, and I can get most of the comfort and bonding I need that way, especially through dancing, which is the easiest way for me to create emotions in myself that women respond to. The problem is that removing sex from the equation makes the women not see me as a man, that is, impotent or gay, and they will never submit completely without that component.

The way that I've found to do that is to convert raw sexual desire (identified on a facial expression by squinting tensed eyes) into a higher level emotion, from a predatory instinct into a dominating alpha "I know best, let me take care of you, I am the man" (identified on a facial expression by serene commanding eyes). Women only reject sexuality when it objectifies them, so when I mix that raw local desire up with a full body and mind experience she won't reject it as creepy. The idea is to channel the local sexual desire from the cock into a holistic drive that imbues every muscle of the body with strength and sensuality, deepens the breathing and creates a warm ultimate confidence in the mind.

My problem is that to have those emotions requires a lot of energy and need to put a lot of time into exercising, eating healthy to create the possibility that they will arise. I also have a problem to enable the emotions at the right time, when the right girl is present and sufficiently warmed up. Usually only a few times a week. Maybe I need to increase the sexual levels by masturbating less, though then the problem becomes of control again, and she will have the upper hand so I can't dominate her like she wants to and is testing for.

What I want is a really cute girl to fall in love with and stay with, and I seem to have a handle on the emotional situation. I really can't wrap my mind around having to sleep with a woman that I don't want to sleep with just for the practice and experience. The idea is that it has to be a woman I don't want too much so that I can stay in control in order to make it happen. I'm 27 and still didn't sleep with a woman from my own country, so it seems that I should try harder.

Commitment anxiety

2011-10-20T15:53:00.000-07:00

Often I'm very attracted to a girl the first time I meet her, but then I lose interest over time, or rather the interest is outweighed. As I get to know a girl for a longer time, I usually feel that the context of responsibility and commitment is increasing rapidly while the emotional attachment is not increasing or increasing very slowly, and at some point the feeling of responsibility outweighs the attraction and emotional attachment. That's why I feel like if something is going to happen with a girl, it has to happen fast, such that the emotional attachment curve always stays ahead of the responsibility curve and they never intersect, at which point I won't make a move.

I don't know how to reset the context to messing around for fun with a girl that I know. I don't know how to tell a girl that I want to mess around but I don't want her to stick around without making her feel undervalued. My expectations are proportional to the context of commitment. For me that context quickly becomes about exclusivity, which means the girl has to be better than any other alternative (not only on one property, as in pareto optimal, but in all properties) in order to remove the feeling of loss of choice. I'm guessing that most people have a much more slowly increasing perception on the context of commitment and that I often over-estimate it.

There are at least 4 solutions to the equation

Decrease my feeling and expectations on the context of responsibility and commitment.

Which can be done by either

Presenting the girl with a disclaimer about the short-term nature of the arrangement. I find that hard to do with offending her.
Become better at detecting and adjusting for situations where my own inference of commitment context are way out of proportion and the girl is just looking for some fun.

Make something happen with a girl before I know her too long and start to feel expectations of commitment. That usually means within the first time of meeting her and whether I expect to see her again. This has been the only successful route so far.
Find a "perfect" (local non-pareto optimum) girl that I can fall unconditionally in love with (without doing anything invoking commitment) and thus overcome any commitment anxiety. The problem with this is firstly such girls are rare and secondly she has to feel the same to balance the reciprocality, and that is also rare.
Find a way to increase emotional attachment just ahead of the expectation curve, but this requires that I know ahead of time that I want to increase the emotional attachment and make a choice, which can be very hard, so in order to implement this I need to do it for every girl I have some interest in and then at some point before commitment-inducing actions have been invoked cut her off if I decide she wasn't right for me.

Wolves and warriors

2010-11-05T22:42:00.001-07:00

I fault modern society for making me into a feeble child. How can I be the strong man that a woman deserves when I don't fight wolves for scraps of food and make life and death decisions every day. Would that I grew up with wolves, let my brilliant eyes pierce the cold horizon and scout for prey and shelter, and if I faltered for a second or doubted for an instance my crystal mind to outwit starving wolves, crack their legs and snap their necks with bites fiercer than their fangs, by strength of will and daily toil, that nature would take its course. Even romanticizing it in words like this makes me slightly unwell. I don't really need to express it though, because Jack London did it far better in "Call of the Wild". "Fight Club" is a consequence of the same ideas, and though the particular implications worked out by the psychotic protagonist don't really mesh with me, the essential triggers in the search for primal meaning are the same: the disgust with all the softly padded walls that modern society builds around us.

Really the best I can do is make a speech to a deserving amazon that expresses these sentiments and hope that the reflection of ideas in our minds and the tiger in our ideas carry the idealizations to a satisfactory climax in some raw sexual clash of titans. I won't stand for repeating these pearls for undeserving swine to pork at every turn, so a string of merciless qualifications need be administered to select a proper chalice for my sweet red wine and life-blood.

If we allow a return to reality for a brief moment I'll note that the psychology or state of mind to even feel the gravity of these sentiments is hard acquired, and only occurs at the times where the social chit-chat and ritual bore grows to a clamoring scream to break out from this virtual social layer of habitual childishness and grasp at something real, and rigorous reminders must be embedded to save the moment of clarity from its tragic fate as a transient epiphany. Also lots of coffee helps. Well, maybe, but I needed a down to earth sentence to derail the train of pretentiousness. Just an example of the kind of meta thinking that my mind overflows with. I substitute some random concrete instance of an abstract idea I have, and nobody understands what I mean.

I must admit it is very nice to talk to myself in my acoustically self-optimizing echo chamber (trademarked expression borrowed from a dwarf, but I'm sure he heard it somewhere elf) since I'm so intellectually savvy and enjoy bathing in my own luxurious bullshit. I really should put some more swear words in here for some ghetto realism, like fucking pussy ass whipped cream slam dunk crack-a-nut whoopy doo. I don't know. What's the point? You tell me. Maybe I'm just writing silly stuff to test the extent of my vocabulary and verify the integrity of Broca's area. Yes, I looked up the name of a part of the brain related to linguistic processing in Wikipedia just to sound smart. Am I not clever? I'm being sarcastic. Really. No, just kidding. I think there should be some law about truth in sarcasm, like truth in advertising. Because sometimes sarcasm is true, but saying it is not allowed, except in sarcasm (or in bed).

I should be able to talk in the same manner that I write, by projecting my thoughts linearly onto the chick at hand. Why can't I do that? It's mostly just meta though. Thinking about thinking. Who cares about that except me? The problems have something to do with real-time synchronization and so much external processing of sound and vision going on and when is my turn to talk and what does she care to hear, that I can't stay inside my head where the interesting thoughts occur, so that I lose access to their verbalization, and they fly by unobserved. Plus when I write I often reread the last few sentences to generate the next one. When I talk I lose my train of thought because I can't remember what I just said.

Another thing that happens is that I'm in the process of saying something, but then I start thinking "should I say A, B or C next", but I don't say "should I say A, B or C next", and that makes me stop talking and start thinking meta, which usually is disallowed by social rules. Can I really literally say to a girl what I'm thinking when what I am thinking is: "I'm looking at your expression and I think it means x and I'm trying to respond with expression y but it is difficult because of my current sad mood (no self-pity intended) and I really hope you don't interpret my expression as a response to your actions because it really doesn't have anything to do with you" or can I say to her "I'm trying to figure out a subtle question that will elicit your propensity for coitus (thank you, Big Bang) while making clear that I'm not interested in your friend but simultaneously not putting any pressure on you". I guess there is really no way to find out better than a series of carefully laid out scientific experiments. That's one good reason for emotional distancing, because I can't have the results tainted by overpowering emotional modulations in the form of vocal tones or facial expressions on top of the intellectual content. On the other hand, they are non-separable when the thoughts are really emotional, though note the immediate step of discrete difference thinking or talking about emotions in the abstract, which I often do, which is a purely intellectual pursuit, unless the abstract is really just a distancing disguise for a concrete memory.

Maybe I should just print this and hand it out. That would be easier. Oh no, you're thinking, he's gonna do it. Or maybe you are thinking: do it, do it, just because you wanna see what happens. Gonna wanna honey bunny. Because rabbits mate a lot. Way to go with the non-sequitur. But sometimes the mind works that way, guided purely by the acoustic feel of proximity in verbal space between similar-sounding or complementary word constellations. Such a pretty word, by the way, constellations, I almost think I wrote the previous sentence only to use it. Now I should make a forward reference to the next sentence by hypothesizing what I'm going to say next and then do a back-reference for a fully cyclical meta-bonanza. Nah, too much work, besides bonanza sounds like banana, which reminds me that I'm kinda hungry, but I know that I don't really need food, because the caffeine is just making me hungrier than I normally would be, but I can tell by the fill of my stomach that I'm really fine. I could do with some canned corn, none-the-less, just because I would enjoy eating it. If you didn't realize by now, this is a futile exercise of connecting my thoughts directly to the keyboard. It might seems senseless, but isn't really, because it's a fair practice simulation of connecting my thoughts to a chick. Don't know why anyone would want to read it though. You must have a lot of spare time on your hands. Gtfo before you have a snow crash on your hands, or in the words of a famous internet stick bard: Bangarang motherfucker! I think he said it's unlikely to become a movie catchphrase as reverse psychology, because it really is a smashing line. Then again, maybe I, or in improper generalization, xkcd audience, am not or is not the typical target group of movie catch phrases. Now go to instantbazinga.com and click the red button because you listened to all this drivel. Now click it once more for good measure.

Two tomatoes were crossing a road... really, you're still here? WAT? Fucken' idiot. I'm analyzing why I'm writing this: It's a version of the disclaimer that normal people put on the top because they're afraid what people are going to think about what they have written and they think they will be indemnified against their errors and shoddy unfounded opinions by putting a silly clause at the top. Makes about the same difference as a single bug to or from in the Klendathu war. I'm putting it there to really just nail in the amount of time you just waited, and the reverse psychology that makes you keep reading because you think there's going to be something important down the line and you don't want to miss it. That's an utter failure of time-management typical of completionists.

Ok, I think caffeine is starting to wear off. I don't have to rant anymore, and I can take a shower and perhaps get to sleep now. I'm really just writing because my mind will get tired faster that way, and on some belief in a small chance that exercising the mind in writing has some of the same effect as exercising muscles in the gym, so that it will keep a greater state of fluidity or talkativity in the coming days. It also serves as an example of what is going to happen to your life if you live it without direction, by analogy, of what happens when you write without direction. Is your life just a long rant or do you know where you are going? Insert marketing based on associative trigger: "Where do you want to go today?".

In the same manner that an argument that starts out cogently and interestingly and ends with a rant, so does a pick-up that starts with the spark of a good insight but isn't well planned and orderly executed end in a petering out of energy without accomplishment and fulfillment. No, I didn't think of this before now, if you suddenly think there was a moral to the whole story. It's just an accidental save, if it is that much, like getting lucky with a drunk chick at the end of the night. It doesn't feel right, there wasn't any skill to it.

Feeling

2010-06-18T18:45:00.001-07:00

When I take a long time to really slow down and try to relax, not caring about protecting myself from showing that I'm sad I can start to feel things again. Then when I go on the dance floor, I start really slow, not moving my body faster or harder than the expression of the strength of my feelings, just relaxing consciously and breathing at every step. Then I can turn sadness into happiness because it is communicated and expelled in the dance.

The girls see that I communicate feelings in my dancing and they gather around closer. They have circles of 2 or more, and they rotate in this circle, gradually pushing their back closer and closer into me to try to get my attention. As long as I pretend not to notice, they keep trying harder and pushing their body closer to me until they hit some kind of threshold and give up, then the next girl tries. They often talk to each other in brief bursts while doing this, probably the one girl who can see me reports what my reaction is to the girl backing into me and encouraging her, while the girl backing into me is saying "I'm trying, but it's not working!".

It's not that I wouldn't love to grab hold of her and dance with her, but every time I do that, I seem to do something wrong and they go away. Since I just enjoy their proximity and they go away when I try to seize on it I've been conditioned now always to just pretend not to notice when they are trying to get my attention. So I just enjoy the dancing and let my mind wander and become unconscious to what is going on around me. This is very attractive to girls, but I just can't figure out how to keep my mind in such a state, while still taking some action that's going to bring me closer to getting intimate with her.

The problem is that I can only hold my mind in 2 states, girl chosen or not chosen, want or don't want. While I'm still thinking about which girl to pick, they fight for my attention doing sexy dance tricks, but when I pick one and try to get her, it's all too much for her. I don't know how to "maybe" pick one, and then "maybe" pick another. What I should do is reward each sexy thing each girl does with a little attention and switch between them, so that it is never too much for one girl, although they all get more excited as time passes. Since there is always another girl to compete with, she will be thinking about winning me over rather than about a virtual commitment or responsibility she is creating in her mind by getting closer to me.

Being rewarded with attention for not trying is very insidious in that I'm conditioned against trying, because getting the attention by not trying is very pleasant, but I never advance, because I never get above the threshold where I have to show interest to get more.

I think the best way to pick up a girl is to devote 10% of your thoughts to picking her up and 90% to something else entirely. Too bad us guys can only think of one thing at a time. I only know how to seem like the hottest guy in the room by dancing and thinking about something else entirely, or a try-hard creep by thinking only of picking up the girl. It's _so_ hard to stay in between.

Balancing, learning

2010-03-09T21:08:00.001-08:00

Given a trade-off between X and Y I tend to maximize X no matter the cost to Y, then maximize Y no matter the cost to X when I miss Y or get bored with X, and keep on switching back and forth, rather than try to balance them at the same time. In many cases this is suboptimal: for example in learning, let X be "doing things I suck at to get better" and Y be "doing things I kick ass at to enjoy results": A simplified discrete trial version of learning with monkeys show that maximum learning effect occurs with positive feedback rate of around 50% (balance X and Y by 50%), but when you look at the problem of maximizing results over time it gets more complicated.

It's a problem in the same venue as investing resources (time, money) in something to harvest later with accumulated interest versus enjoying the benefits right now. Given a fixed time interval (at one end of the spectrum : the average length of a human life) there ought to be a mathematical solution to this, I should investigate that. Of course there are many additional complications, for example the value of the desirables that resources can get you is a declining function of time : better to use brainpower to do serious thinking while your mind is young, better to get girls while the flesh is young. A degree in economics and statistics would be useful here, but intuitive guess-work and pseudo-science based on Wikipedia will have to suffice, since investing in such knowledge probably won't pay off beyond a certain threshold (that's a meta-problem, by the way : deciding how much to think about decisions, and continues ad infinitum).

Another complication of the learning problem occurs in real-time execution that is a team effort. Consider dancing: Often you can adjust difficulty of learning something by slowing down in an individual effort, but if your partner is better than you then you can't slow down to polish things without annoying your partner. You can, however, adjust difficulty by choosing between beginner courses and more advanced ones . To keep up with the learning curve of others in your course you need to put in adequate time, and if you fail to do so you need to retake the lower level course.

I'm pretty good at salsa so I dropped it in favor of swing, which is more challenging, but I realized I might need the positive feedback from salsa skills to keep me from despairing at my crappy swing skills. Perhaps I just need to put in more training time into swing. There is a big difference between the 2 dances in that I can usually think out sequences of salsa moves in real-time, but in swing I have to plan a long series of moves in advance and commit to memory, because it's too much processing to do real-time, and only when this series is taken over by unconscious competence by frequent repetition can I started to modify the pattern. Salsa lends naturally to improvising with no effort, while swing has to be practiced before you can do it. It's kind of the same difference in mental process as singing versus playing an instrument. Maybe I should start playing an instrument again to get better at swing. It exercises the ability to execute a planned steps of moves. Practiced patterns of martial arts might actually be a closer fit to that mental process since the full-body-motion rather than finger/hand-motion corresponds more closely. Why not just dance swing to learn swing? Because it depends on a partner : too many factors outside my control. But I guess the best approximation is just to dance more, which I don't have time for, or repeat the beginner's course.

Priorities in life : where goes my time?

2010-03-09T13:49:00.000-08:00

I'm a bit discouraged about not having enough time to chase girls, and youth is limited. I might be able to move on to older women when I get older, but I'm guessing only if I've had sufficient experience with young ones to feel reluctantly content with leaving most of the pleasures of tight young flesh behind.

There's a certain threshold of effort needed to get palatable results in game. I've demonstrated that results are attainable, but it requires me to constantly exercise my social abilities up to a decent level, which takes a lot of time. I'm thinking about choices in lifestyles that factor into this.

Of course, I could always wish upon a star that, like most naturally social people, I just happened to meet the girl of my dreams in daily life and then didn't have to spend more time looking, but I just can't handle the pressure and mess up when there are few opportunities for trial and error. It's not that I actually mess up, it's more that I don't dare to make a move when there aren't plenty of similar girls to try later. But I guess at one point I just have to take big risks in any case, unless I'm dating multiple women and they all mean a lot (but probably one is going to come out on top, if I know myself well enough to say). There is a great advantage to having bigger emotional risks come at a later stage in the relationship, because then she's more likely to be similarly invested. From too little exposure grows a mis-calibrated too high initial attraction level, which often wanes quickly once exposure grows and emotions adjusts to abundance-mentality.

Big life-style impact : Ph.D. versus going back to work
Ph.D. is more interesting, more meaningful and it provides more scheduling freedom, but probably requires more time than commercial work and fixes my geographical location to Bergen (or at least Norway). The passion and knowledge of doing something important translates into better self-confidence with girls, a plus, but the nature of the work is more solitary (I could work to change this, but that would also require more time and effort) and so detracts from social skills. I'm choosing Ph.D. because the payoff is more certain than choosing commercial work and focusing more on game : I will have a better skill set and greater access to jobs and more choices later on. No matter what I choose, after working for some years I will have sufficient money to take a year off, since I'm not a big spender, while doing some kind of project or work part-time to keep sharp, and have time to focus on finding a girlfriend / chasing girls, and this would happen sooner if I got a commercial job since I would make more money.

Small/medium life-style impact : Wasting time
Every silly thing I do, for example every funny YouTube video I watch eats precious time and so detracts from the probability of getting a girlfriend. One might argue that there is a cultural heritage intrinsic in such things that adds topics of conversation, but I think it's probably negligible ("did you see that funny cat video on youtube? yeah. cool. ", or at least hugely negligible compared to a directed effort at constructing anecdotal conversational threads based on anecdotes ("there is this parrot named Alex who can talk. he has a vocabulary around 50 words. he can distinguish between concepts like small and large. when he died he told his researcher woman that he loved her".). There is a "humor vs intellectual"-aspect here too, but just calling up the association to something funny in someone is also far from the optimal approach to being considered funny.

Medium life-style impact : dancing

Dancing is skill-building. I haven't met any girls there that I'm unequivocally sure about. I don't see how to choose one over the other, and I can't just "try them" one after another like I can in cold approach. It would get really awkward, and interference between girls is beyond control. Dancing provides the required female touch to not be starved of physical contact and get depressed, but it's also lulls me into a false sense of security and contentedness that leads to less motivation for going out and doing game, which means I have a harder time convincing myself to do it, except those moments that I suddenly realize how fast time is running out. Dancing provides skill, but only impacts game if I actually do game, so if dancing means I don't have time to do game, is it worth it? It probably is if I can use it later to do better game, but might be negative impact right now. It could be considered investment. There seem to be many of such now-future trade-offs in life.

Another choice when time is limited is salsa vs swing. Swing has hotter girls, but salsa has more emotionally enjoyable dynamics. Swing is more challenging, so more intellectually enjoyable, but less emotionally enjoyable in a sense because of having to think about technicalities instead of focusing on the girl and how her body moves around in my hands.

Compensating for little time : Being braver

When I regularly approach women and talk to them by forcing myself to do it, it gets easier. In the start, feedback is poor because my skills have degraded by not being practiced, and if I get a bad reaction I don't have time to rectify the negative emotional reinforcement by persisting until the good ones hit. When I have lots of time doing lots of approaches is a great way to get up to speed, but with limited time it takes a huge amount of willpower to brave it every time I've been away for a while. With little time, the requirements for being brave go way up for keeping the results constant, but there's only so much I can do to control my emotions without being able to distribute them over many social interactions.

Asking subjectively answerable questions

2010-02-07T08:27:00.000-08:00

I will discuss communication, specifically subjectively answerable questions, questions that will have different answers for different persons because they have different properties.

Don't ask me "Do you understand X?" if what you mean is "Would you like me to explain X?". Even better would be to state: "Y, which I'm about to explain, depends on X. Stop me if you need more information on X.".

My answer to "Do you understand X?" will often reflect more on whether there is something about X I know I don't understand yet, rather than how much of X I already understand, and this may differ from your definition of understanding. Since I'm a perfectionist I will also often estimate very cautiously, unless I'm in a cocky mood, or I choose to answer in terms of some other idea of the word than my own.

In general, don't ask questions about vague concepts when you can instead frame them as questions about actions or concepts we can agree on (for example quantitatively definable concepts). Those are much easier to answer, because I don't have to guess or shoot back questions about your intention of asking the question to avoid misunderstandings. In my experience, abstract words have very different meaning for me and other people, and only by guessing the intent of the question being asked can I infer what meaning they attribute to it and what they are really asking.

Of course, there's a difference between satisfying emotions and acquiring information, and here we are talking about acquiring information. For example, if you ask "Do you love me?" as an emotional question and just want to quench insecurities, and the words carry only sentiments, then this is fine. But if you mean for example "At this point do you see any reason which you will want to ever end this relationship?" then that is what you should ask, especially since love has such a multitude of contradictory definitions.

This method of concrete communication that considers a person a universe of facts to be elicited all makes sense in terms of game, where it has been fine-tuned(*1) by evolution in that women(2) come up with tests and hear actions much louder than words. I think of these tests as just reductions of abstract concepts to actions and concepts that can be defined.

1: Fine-tuned in the sense of correspondence to survival. "On average good for survival of the species" is by no means equated with "good for the individual", although they often coincide, but that is besides the topic. What I mean is, the individual has more control and can test more efficiently if he/she can translate the concepts into tests consciously rather than by instinct and emotion.

2: Men seem not to have been granted the same degree of innate ability, and our tests are often simple and visual, though we seem to be internally more encouraged in the use of logic and reason, on average, which can be used to consciously implement the screening process. Thus when a male screens a female in depth it could indicate use of reason and so resourcefulness to the woman. Not to mention that the strictness of the screening process hints at the kind of women available to him and so his value. That's basic well-known game theory.

Values in game

2010-01-18T07:38:00.000-08:00

The topic is values in game, what kind of relationships to aim for and what kind of women to aim for.

We start with the motivating factors:
- Pair-bonding: the desire for an emotional connection and to be understood.
- Sexual desire
- Validation: the need to often make sure to look good in the eyes of others in order to feel good about yourself

We add the fair assumption that it is, to a certain degree, possible to limit one's desires:
- Pair-bonding: having passions about something and feeling valuable by doing something important and belonging, socializing, dreaming and satisfying the need with surrogate fiction. This is perhaps the desire that is hardest to satisfy with surrogates.
- Sexual desire: controlling masturbation, watching porn.
- Validation: having a property of yourself to treasure that doesn't depend on other people's continuous affirmation, or that one can be quite certain is always valued highly beyond the need to validate it.

And now it starts to get fuzzy. How do the primary motivations affect the results you can get positively or negatively:
- Pair-bonding.
- Pros: it's easier to be genuinely interested in other people and it focuses your effort on adding value to the interaction because it's mostly a mental process, not disregarding the bonding effects of touch.
- Cons: you can easily scare off girls by sending out too strong, serious signals about a relationship too early.
- Sexual desire
- Pros: it can make you more aggressive, more macho, give you more energy and incentive.
- Cons: can make you cynical, not genuine, single-minded and impatient.
- Validation
- Pros: (artifically) high standards.
- Cons: grows out of pride. of the motivating factors, it is the hardest to satisfy since arrogance is an unlikable trait, thus self-defeating, and never satisfied for long before you need revalidation.

Now it gets even trickier, and that is how to balance the motivating factors for their pros and cons in order to achieve the best results, and time enters the picture. In a perfect human and in the society we evolved in, all of the emotional instincts would serve to enhance replication value and they would have no cons. But to live in perfect harmony with my desires and be "natural" has not fulfilled those desires in the past, which is the reason to apply reason and science in the hope of better results. This, of course, adds the toll of having to reason about my actions, so the idea is to eventually learn to do the right thing naturally, like learning to ride a bicycle. But unlike riding a bicycle, there seems to be a high tipping point, the point where you don't fall back into the old erroneous ways of thinking. I think at least some of the difference is that when you are not riding a bicycle, you forget it and it doesn't affect your training for riding it, but every social interaction that is not game affects your social conditioning.

So what are the potential effects of controlling one's desires? Here are the 2 extremes. The best approach is probably somewhere in between.

A planned approach:
Bring all the desires to a very low baseline, then rationally evaluate what kind of woman and what kind of relationship you want to decide what kinds of actions to take in her presence to increase desires in that moment. For example, I may converse about deeply important ideas to raise the desire for pair-bonding, or escalate physically to raise the desire for sex. This is kind of turning everything on it's head, by letting actions precede desire, but brings everything more easily under rational control.
- Pros: More rational control.
- Cons: Less natural. You might be too disinterested and not follow the woman's desire escalation curve quickly enough. It can be hard to act rationally in the absence of desire if there are fears that are usually overthrown by desire.

A spontaneous approach:
Bring the desires up to a high baseline and act "naturally", as desire determines.
- Pros: If the conditioning is in place to do the right thing based on desires, less work is needed, you can act more quickly without thinking and it appears natural.
- Cons: Less rational control. I might come on too strong, be too impatient. I'm easily controlled by someone who plays on my desires. If my desires don't make me act I might end up doing something I only wanted in the moment, which isn't necessarily bad, but takes my focus off pursuit of long-term values.

In my life in general, I've decided to value that kind of pleasure which I pay for before I get it, like work -> feeling of accomplishment, exercise -> runner's high and better health, and abstaining from pleasures that I pay for after I enjoy them, such as alcohol, caffeine and sugar, and also valuing higher the pleasures that are longer lasting. The sustainable pleasures all seem to be pleasures that you don't quest for in their own right, but that follow from some other pursuit, which is why I "try to be my best" instead of directly hunting down pleasure.

So if my values in pick-up should be congruent with my values in life, I should maximize the desire for pair-bonding, because it seems to be the pleasure that is most directly linked to the amount of work put into it, and minimize sexual desire and need for validation as they are very temporary. However, minimizing sexual desire does not mean not to put sex as measure of progress or neglect it as a goal, because it is, in the end pleasant even if the actions to get there at the start of the interaction, before I make her turn me on, are driven by rational thought rather than spontaneous desire.

Before you ask, yes, this whole text is merely a justification for masturbating as much as I want to ;)

A complicated story

2010-01-12T07:20:00.000-08:00

Purpose: I've been spending some time thinking about this issue, about her, and have just been avoiding it, avoiding her. I need some fresh perspective. It's also feels like a good story, but I don't know if I can portray it like it deserves. Since the forerunners to to the current state of affairs happened more than a year ago the chronology is a bit jumbled like my memory.

First meet
In fall of 2008 I used to frequent a student bar, let's call it The Blue Horse. I had worked there from 2004-2006 as a volunteer in the IT department, so I knew many of the bartenders and bouncers. I was sitting around reading a newspaper one night, when 2 young girls, let's call them Blonde and Brunette, juniors or sophomores in college, walked in the door. I waited for them to order beer and sit down opposite each other in 2 couches with a table in between, to play some kind of board game. A bouncer I knew sat down next to the blonde. I went up there and sat next to the brunette. The bouncer was explaining to them what it meant to volunteer as a bouncer, and they had obviously shown interest in signing up. Conditions are usually very civil, so not many bouncers need physical authority, allowing tiny girls to be bouncers. The brunette sitting next to me, my target, started foot flirting with me as soon as I sat down. I thought it was a shit test to see how easy I was since I hadn't said anything. So I didn't respond physically, just started talking. After a while, after I'd demonstrated enough value, I started kino escalating and met no resistance. I put my arm around her and my hand on her thigh sometimes, but didn't kiss her (which I probably should have). At one time she said "you should call my friend (Blonde) little shit later" without her friend hearing. I asked why, but she said "just do it". We played the board game until finish. Then she took the game to give it back to the bartender. Soon I noticed a piece for the game she had forgotten and went down there to give it back. It was crowded and she didn't see me so I stretched my hand with the piece out in front of her face, and to my surprise she put her mouth around it and started sucking it. I didn't have a good response to that, so I just said something like "no silly, you can't eat it, it's for the game".

The gay mistake
I went back to the couch and waited for Brunette to return, but she had been caught up at the bar talking to some other guy and I started talking to Blonde. I was in a mood to make her jealous for leaving me there by hitting on her friend instead. The bouncer sitting next to Blonde had left after he had finished with formalities, so it was only the two of us. We chatted and bantered for a while. I used the bit from Brunette calling her "little shit" at one point when she said something about her behavior I didn't like. I had qualms about calling her "little shit", but I reasoned that most men must be supplicating her and that only her friends who she could relate to called her that in a friendly playful way. Her eyes lit up and she smiled very brightly. Suddenly she asked me if I was gay, out of the blue. In retrospect I surmise that Brunette was really hitting on me, it was no shit test, and had expected me to escalate faster, and that's why Blonde asked. But since I didn't understand this at the time, I thought it was an invitation to a role-playing game and I responded with "yes, didn't you get that before now?". Also I'd seen Mystery's bit about disarming her with the "If I hadn't been gay you'd been so my type" so I figured it was a good idea. After I said that, she started light cuddling and hugging me. She's very emotional, bubbly and vulnerable, but she also has a bossy exterior to protect herself, but now her shields seemed to be all down. I fell into the gay-role-playing-frame and when she put on chapstick, I asked to taste it, and when she offered the box, instead I put my lips to hers, then with a serious face, as if it was insignificant that I had kissed her, I made a trivial comment about the taste of the chapstick, and she played along. At one point she said she had a boyfriend, but that he treated her like crap and that it was probably going to end soon.

Our couch and the one on the other side of the table was now filling up with people. She said she liked one of the guys down opposite of us. I played along saying "you want to make him jealous? I'll fondle your breasts and you pretend to like it". She hesitated for a moment, but then pushed herself into me. I was playing my role very plausibly, making no outward sign that I was enjoying myself verily, and actually started to take peeks at the guy to see if it was working, and she had to stop me by saying "don't look or he'll know". Then she moved over to sit next to the guy and started talking to him, but after a few minutes she apparently found what he said (which I couldn't hear) completely uninteresting and came back to me. At this point Brunette came back and she had the guy she'd been talking to (who on closer inspection seemed gay or at least too nice to be anything but friend-zoned) with her and was inviting Blonde to bounce to another place. Blonde turned to me, but I said I was going to stay at this place, but urged her to go with her friend, since I might be going home soon anyway. To my surprise, and Brunette, who started arguing "how are you going to get home safe? bla bla", she elected to stay with me. Blonde was firm though, and Brunette gave up and left with something like "fine, be that way".

Disaster
I figured it was time to try to get Blonde back to my place, so started saying "I'm hungry. I have some delicious chicken meal from earlier in my fridge. Want to come?". My frame had switched out of gay-mode as soon as I realized the possibility of getting her home. I became kind of needy and pressed her, coming up with different excuses to get her home. Then her face turned morbid and she stated "you're not actually gay, are you". The transformation was complete, from loving and caring to cold as a fish, and she would hardly respond, so I figured the best thing was to leave her alone. I think she was really hurt and masking it with anger. I had no idea she actually thought I was gay and that it wasn't just a game. Maybe it was a little more complicated than that: maybe she kind of knew it was a game, but as long as I acted in a way she liked, she didn't mind, but what made it all into a big lie was that I turned "typical needy supplicating male" on her (something she'd expressed disgust with earlier, how all men are with her). It wasn't the actual words that was the lie, but the deception in appearance of having played a better person in order to get her to bed. I wasn't proud of myself, and was feeling really shitty, like I needed to throw up, all the way home until sleep.

Back-and-forth
Next time I met Blonde and Brunette, I talked mostly to Brunette, because Blonde was still angry with me, but more toned down now, and she kept giving off angry comments, but with a playful or lighter hint to them, like she was letting me know she was still angry but making it socially acceptable and livable for us in the same social sphere by not spreading a negative mood to everyone. It was kind of banter-ish, but with both of us having our shields up, not taking up the issue seriously. I was hurt and felt like I'd done something wrong, but faked a nonchalant frame like she'd been overreacting. Brunette still believed I was gay (even though I hadn't even said to her that I was). I tried explaining in a serious voice that I wasn't, but she still didn't believe it, or want to believe it, so I said "what the hell" and played along, because it was fun. I was flirting with her and building sexual tension over time. My hypothesis was that she was just pretending to believe that I was gay in order to play around without having to commit to anything until she wanted to, in which case she could change her mind about me being gay. One night we were eating at the Blue Horse and she asked me if she had something on her face and I dipped my finger in some white dressing, put it on her chin while saying "yeah, I think you got something right there". She smiled and licked it off. Then I asked "Do you swallow?". She responded in a louder voice "if you weren't gay, you'd be so in for it right now. I'd never let a straight person ask me that.", but with a sly smile. I couldn't really tell if she really thought I was gay. Then she asked if I was gay. I said "Maybe", with the same sly smile. She'd asked before but every time I said "no" she didn't believe me and if I said "yes" she just smiled. Sometimes it was kind of frustrating, when I wanted do stuff with her, and she was turning it against me, sometimes it was fun, because it allowed me to get away with things and play around much more freely.

Blonde wasn't really sure if she thought I was gay or not, and she got happier again whenever Brunette managed to convince her I was gay, so I helped Brunette convince her again, if only to make her happy. One time me and a Buddy was sitting at a table drinking with Brunette and Blonde, we decided to play them by pretending we were a couple. Now Brunette got a quizzical look on her face, confirming my suspicion that she really only was pretending to still believe I was gay, but now actually doubting again. That was kind of hilarious for me and my buddy, and we were laughing, and they couldn't tell if we were joking or not, swinging from one side to the other. Another time another girl, let's call her Physicist, since that's what she studies, I'd been gaming a little bit but lost interest in came and cuddled up to me while Brunette was watching, and Brunette started fighting for my attention, driving the balance against straightness again. It was all such a big mess, playing these games with each other and they were continually getting confused to whether I was gay or straight, but I realized it was also a source of their fascination with me, never knowing what to expect.

Playing with Brunette
Sometimes when Brunette was coming to sit next to me I used to do this trick on her, scooching over just as she was sitting down so she'd land in my lap, and I'd put my arms around her. I think that was what finally convinced her I wasn't gay, because there was something hard poking at her from below. She still kept up appearances though. She used to sit there for a long time, and didn't move away, but when I thought I had her and started to escalate, she looked at me with a playful smile and moved away. She's kind of a player, and I had plenty of competition from other regulars at the Blue Horse. One thing to note was that she had broken up with her long-standing boyfriend not long ago, so she was a bit distant and emotionally unavailable, but not sexually unavailable. If you gave her too much attention at any time, she thought she'd won and she'd go play with someone else, so you could never be sure if she was coming onto you or testing you. One time we were going downstairs to fetch something, she walked into me in the middle of the stairs and I felt her whole body press into me. It was hard to tell if she had stumbled, what I thought first, or if she expected me to grab her and kiss her or something, what I thought afterwards when she had pulled away and exclaimed "What's wrong with you?". I didn't know how to react and we both walked on and pretended it hadn't happened. I had major inner games issues at this time and needed very strong hints to escalate, but I thought about it for a while, then at the end of that evening said "I'm going home. You coming with?", but she didn't come. But what really made me ask that was that she was making me jealous by getting cozy with one of my rivals. She had the upper hand. Of course I should have asked when I had it. It had become mostly a game between us, a game ruled by lust and power. There was nothing deep about it.

The reconciliation
Blonde, now believing I was straight, and saying so, got angry at first, but warmed up after a while and started talking to me, but was still not all there. Then one night I finally cracked. I was talking to her and I was trying to tell her I was sorry for having pretended to be gay, but I kept choking up and couldn't get a word out of my mouth. She didn't realize what was going on and she went to the bathroom or something, then came back and sat next to another guy in the same seated group and started talking. Sometimes she looked at me. I was feeling pain and was on the verge of crying, but it was all mixed up with intensely pleasant feelings for her, and when I looked at her I felt like I was staring into the sun, and she must have noticed my look as I kept eye-contact, for she smiled really brightly and openly and said "What's going on? Tell me." and then "Come here. Sit." patting the seat next to her. I did as she requested and she was looking at me expectantly and excitedly. I started trying to formulate something but my voice crumbled and faded away and she asked "What is it you want to tell me that's so important?" and I started to shed a few tears. She was consoling me and being patient and then finally I managed to say "I'm sorry that I said I was gay (that first night). I thought we were just playing a game. But when I saw that you got hurt I got really sad too." She was holding me and said "You're so delicate." and some other things I don't remember, but to the effect that she liked me. The other guy was trying to get back in and make fun of me, but she ignored him completely the whole time. Suddenly some strong emotion for her came over me and I spontaneously put my arms around her and pulled her into and laid down on the couch. She giggled and pushed me gently away and said "It takes time."

Those strong feelings for her didn't last long, but after that we had a sort of deep serene connection and everything was good between us and she always smiled at me like the sun. I kept thinking of her as a friend that I loved but wasn't really that sexually interested in, although there's nothing wrong with her she just isn't exactly my type, as I was still lusting for Brunette. Sometimes Blonde did things like put her hair in my face for me to smell it and blow kisses at me, that I kept interpreting in a friend context. Also one of my friends was hot for her, and though I didn't think he had a chance I used it as an excuse for not really thinking about her in that way. It's not that I wouldn't make love to her, but I don't feel like I need to, and I don't want to jeopardize the connection I have with her. One thing that she said the first time I met her though, after I said "we should just be friends" (don't remember if it was before or after she thought I was gay) was "Oh, I don't need more friends. I have so many friends." might lead me to think I'm jeopardizing the connection by just being friends.

Intermission
I was going back and forth thinking about what I want. My target was Brunette, and we have sexual chemistry, but little emotional connection. I had sort of locked her as my target. Blonde is hot (I suck at estimating HB levels), but she's not really my type, she doesn't really turn me on sexually unless it's "gated through non-sexual feelings", but her personality is shiny, and over time I've built a strong connection with her.

Leaving Norway
I was still chasing after Brunette's tail. We'd met probably around 10 nights (never planned, always randomly) at the Blue Horse during the autumn months. We'd chatted for a few hours on Facebook now and then. Then one night it looked as though one of my rivals at the Blue Horse was winning her over, and I let them be and he kept fighting long into the night, but then he grew impatient and left around 2-3 AM when she wasn't giving in. I stayed at the after-party until morning. This was my last night in Norway before leaving for Boston. We'd been playing games of jealousy all night. Blonde was also there, but peripheral. Sometimes Brunette had been sitting on my lap, sometimes on someone else's, sometimes I had another girl in my arm (kind of a slut, easy to game). At the end of the evening, they were all quite drunk, except me (I don't drink). Another friend of Brunette and Blonde was sitting on my lap (I'd been dancing with her earlier, she was nice enough), but then they inoculated her by telling her I was gay, even though by now they knew I wasn't and she went home. Brunette was sitting in another couch, just staring at me with a cunning smile, and I just stared back right into her eyes. Then she came and sprawled herself on top of me, letting her leg fall between mine and just relaxing. By now I'd tried to escalate so many times before with her on my lap and have her move away that I didn't dare to grab her, I just let her lie there, because it was extremely pleasant, a great victory in itself. Blonde was sitting next to us, not saying anything. We all just sat there for a while, almost sleeping. Then they were ending the after-party and throwing us out. Blonde kind of disappeared before I could say a proper goodbye (jealous or just disappointed that I was still going for Brunette?), but as Brunette was leaving I turned her around I gave her a long hug. She said "Contact me when you get back from the US".

Boston
Then I went to Boston and joined the lair etc. So much with regard to women happened in the meantime. Lost my virginity among other things. I talked to Blonde on Facebook once while there, explaining that I couldn't talk to Brunette while being far away because talking online without any physical contact would only make everything fade away with the grayness of dull text, but I rattled off some detailed memories of Brunette that would imply how much she meant to me, hoping that that would make her tell Brunette and have her remember me when I got back. Of course, most of the things I told her about Brunette could just as well be true of her, and I realized I was mixing up my memories of them, or saying things about Brunette when Blonde was the one I really cared about and the one they were about, and she might have realized just that.

Back in Norway
When I got back to Norway I realized my thing for Brunette was just lust and sort of wanting to finish what I started, and that there was really no point in pursuing it. I'd lost all interest. So I kind of avoided going to the Blue Horse. But one time I did go, I randomly bumped into both Brunette and Blond. A party was being held for people who still worked there, but we were allowed to sit down for a short while and grab a drink since I'd worked there before and the party hadn't started yet. I was there with a friend who wanted to pick my brain about game I'd learned in the US. We'd just been to a lecture about sexual evolution, it being "the Darwin year". As we were leaving I noticed Blonde and Brunette had come in and were sitting by a table with some other people. I went over to at least greet them, and found myself smiling really brightly and feeling slightly buzzed talking to Blonde, while quickly summarizing my life-status and saying I really couldn't stay while backing out, and though I felt duty-bound to acknowledge Brunette I had a hard time tearing my eyes off of Blonde to look at her, and Brunette didn't really look happy to see me either.

I decided it's just too complicated and have continued to avoid going to the Blue Horse because I don't know what to do. I don't want to see Brunette, but I want to see Blonde. I've been putting the issue off and just going out gaming at other places. One night I bumped into a girl I recognized at the bus stop, but didn't remember where or when. I sat down next to her and started talking. I made a guess at where I'd met her and said so and she agreed, yeah, that was it, but later I remembered I'd actually met her somewhere else so she hadn't remembered either. Anyway, the point was that Blonde also appeared at the bus stop, and saw me talking to this girl, perhaps triggering some jealousy. I didn't notice Blonde before she tapped me on the shoulder as I was entering the bus. She was with a friend and Blonde was smiling brightly and her friend was making conspiratorial faces observing us. As I entered the bus I found that my bus card was empty and I didn't have cash, so I turned to go find an ATM, but Blonde's friend, who I'd never met before and was behind me, paid for my ride. The 2 of them sat down next to each other on a double seat and I sat on the closest seat of the double opposite. We caught ourselves up to speed about our doings in life, but everything superficial. I wasn't in the best of moods right then, and I think my frame had switched slightly to desiring her, being more needy, and she had noticed that I wasn't talking to her quite as much as a friend. Blonde seemed a bit distant and disappointed during the ride, but smiled to me as I left the bus for my destination.

Conclusion
I kind of want to start a relationship with Blonde, but I don't see myself staying with her for more than a few months. I also fear that I will be emotionally overpowered and go against my own rational decisions and stay with her longer than that, even though I want something else in the long run. I am still tempted, since it would be my first relationship. But maybe all this is just an excuse, and what I really want is to be with her, but I fear that when I really decide that, my frame is going to shift and I won't be able to treat her like a friend anymore and it will all just fall apart. I don't know how to be her friend and lover at the same time, but she won't let me be her lover without being her friend. Besides, it feels like what we connected on was just random circumstances and emotional turmoil. There's just this history that connects us, not common values, goals or interests as far as I know. Maybe I'm just over-analyzing, but I care about her and I don't want to just jump into it either. Maybe she just considers me a friend after all. Maybe she's pissed at me for avoiding her friend Brunette now. Maybe I'm idealizing her since I haven't seen her much lately and I will lose interest after a short time. Sometimes I feel like just mailing her the whole story as I see it, but that would be crazy. Doing stuff like that has never ended well in the past.

It feels good to tell the story from beginning to end and get it out of my system. Like it wasn't for nought if I don't pursue it.

What should I do? I guess maybe just hang around and try to make it like it used to be before I left and go from there. Maybe it's just too late. I have no idea. The easiest thing by far is just to game on elsewhere like I've been doing, but that's being a pussy. I'm really confused about this. I know it pops up right now because I've been with family all Christmas and New Year and haven't gamed in a while, so I start to think about "girls of the past". I'm also supposed to be studying right now, another reason to start thinking about girls and unprocessed stories. Well, back to the studying. By the time I get to go out and game on Friday if I study enough I'll probably forget all about her, even though I think of her now.

Status and game plan for the semester

2010-01-10T03:08:00.000-08:00

Purpose: Sum up my game status so far and game plan for the semester, mostly for myself. No input needed, but comments welcome.

My game has declined during the fall because I haven't put enough time into maintenance, and this semester will be even busier, but I'll try to make time by dropping unnecessary activities like watching movies and reading fiction. My goal is 8 hours of field-time each week. I've made a preliminary time budget, and I'm going to log how much time I spend on each activity, starting tomorrow, and make adjustments as I go.

Weekly time budget
14*7 = 70 + 28 = 98 hours
1: 3 hours of being TA
1: 21 hours, 3 hours of overhead per day (eating, walking, housework)
2: 8 hours of exercise
3: 40 hours of study
4: 4 hours of salsa
4: 4 hours of swing
5: 8 hours of PUA
3 + 21 + 8 + 40 + 4 + 4 + 8 = 88 hours

College game
I'm back in college now and I see more opportunities, but I still find game harder because of myself. It's hard to break free from my beliefs about people's expectations. Game becomes far less casual seeing the same people again, causing me to weigh my actions too carefully and over-analyze, and I consider my reputation, so mistakes are more expensive. I compensate by doing cold approach, because it affects my behavior also in social circle, providing the needed boost to confidence, spontaneity and aggression. On one hand doing cold approach while being in college is just an escape to a practice realm where my emotions are weaker and an excuse to avoid taking the risk of moving on girls I have invested time in building a connection with, but on the other hand I need to warm up to a higher level of game before I raise the stakes so I don't mess up my social circle in case I make mistakes. It's a balance. I also think I grow too attached too quickly and start sending out relationship signals when they only want something casual. More cold approach also reduces this tendency.

Focus
I need to work on conversation skills. I feel conversationally dried up because there are no major exciting changes in my life right now. I need to make a checklist, by writing down old stories from memory when I think of them, add interesting anecdotes from books or news and think about how can I present my identity and ambition through talking about my goals and how I'm trying to improve my life. Maybe read a book on conversation skills. I watched the video of how Mystery used "only 28000 days to live" to make a connection in-field. I need to think up a story like that but personalized, because that's how I feel a lot of the time: that my life isn't moving fast enough, that I'm not working hard enough. I want a girl that identifies with this and is committed to working hard and improving. Most of the time I want a serious, thoughtful, intelligent, mellow girl for a serious and deep relationship, not a party girl and I have a fairly specific idea of how she should look. I also desire casual sex with random hot chicks in the meantime, so I should make an intermediate list of qualifications that are more likely to be met. My concrete aim will just be to stay as long as possible in set and try to maintain a meaningful conversation and connect on a personal level, while keeping an eye on body language and forcing myself to do more kino.

Foundations
I'm continuing on the next level of salsa and swing training, will extend my interval training as much as restitution allows while maintaining intensity, start proper resistance training, continue to experiment with and improve my nutrition (currently trying low-carb) and keep a strict regular sleep schedule.

Finality and novelty

2009-12-14T16:13:00.001-08:00

I love the sense of finality and accomplishment I get when something is completed, and the sense of novelty I get when starting something new that doesn't seem to be just new content in old abstractions. I value these two concepts highly. They are strong motivators.

The energy gained from finality should always be used to snowball into novelty before it melts.

Salsa dancing and inner game thoughts

2009-09-07T13:03:00.000-07:00

Today I started on a course in salsa dancing for students again. There are maybe a 100 girls in the class, most of which are in the correct age bracket, some very delicate, but some obviously there to get what they cannot get elsewhere. I focused on looking the girl straight in the eyes. If she was looking away often I assumed it was because her confidence was low and I should be the confident one to keep my eyes on hers, relaxed, and teach her that it is okay to look. I'm not afraid to look the ugly girls in the eyes because I'm confident nothing emotional is going to happen to me from it, and if it does I won't act on it because I've already tagged her with a firmly established "no". Then I looked a semi-attractive girl, HB5,6 maybe, in the eyes and she learned much more quickly than the less confident ones that it was "safe" to gaze into mine and then her pupils grew to saucers and I felt some attraction in response. We were dancing all the while and I noticed our body language was falling into tune and made it that much easier to dance, peripheral sensory details were wiped out and we were floating away into a mild trance to the music. When the next guy came along for the partner change he had to physically interrupt us to alert us to his presence. Such a simple technique can be so powerful with good inner game. No chit-chat, no psychology, no bullshit. Just looking her straight in the eye and dancing, as slow as the rhythm allows, without any defenses up to hide my feelings in case they should be inappropriate or unwanted. I expect there will be a calibration period over the semester where the emotional impact on me from eye-contact and kino lessens and it's going to be only natural after a while and not have much emotional impact, but being calibrated to the high intensity of eye-contact and kino that goes with dancing, and with no implications or commitments, I suspect will help me escalate much more quickly in the field. So in conclusion: taking a dance course is a great tool for scaling up your calibration to match the state of a guy who gets all the women.

Below is my attempt to describe some of what I think when I get the best results. It's hard to always think like this, but is an ideal to aspire to. Perhaps it's just a reformulation of "it's just a game".

- I am on the job. I am there to please her romantically and sexually because those are my orders and I do not question them. The pleasure and feelings I experience as a side-effect is only a tool to make my job easier. If I do not experience them I cannot do my job effectively so I should seek employment elsewhere. As long as there is no protest from my feelings, like revulsion over ugliness, over closing in on her I can proceed. This is different from acting on initial attraction because I can build my own attraction for a girl that I am initially neutral to by having her think that I am attracted and feeding my own attraction grow from her attraction that I unconsciously read in her body language, because we are attracted to people who are attracted to us. The peak of this attraction is not necessarily lower than an attraction that initially starts high with my attraction just based on her looks. Removing my ego over how hot a girl I can get from the equation also takes away the variables that destroy my confidence, and so even when I'm approaching a really hot girl my ego is not on the line because it is not adding to any statistic over how hot a girl I can get. If she rejects me it's because I'm not doing my job right and I need to work harder.

- When the job ends I have no commitments. This is how it is. I need to think this because when I take commitment into account, my standards are too unlikely realized. Of course, managing her expectations is important.

Imagining sex

2009-08-22T20:05:00.001-07:00

Imagining having sex with a girl while talking to her and listening to her is the best advice from any PUA method and the credit goes to Gunwitch. Somehow it sends all the right signals and makes the girl just talk and talk and invest in you. I only ended up cuddling with a couple of girls, but it was very pleasant nonetheless.

I started with an easy target, #1, won her comfort, then her hotter friend, #2, came over, and it took a lot more effort to win her over, but I kept thinking about having sex with her and in the end she warmed up. Then I sat down with #3 and #4 and they started edging in and when they noticed the other girl's interest they just squeezed in on me. I cuddled and played with #4 for a while, then lost her to the last bus, but I continued cuddling with her friend, girl number #5. The most desirable was #2, but due to the fluidity of my logistics, just bouncing back and forth and escalating where possible it didn't go anywhere with her. I Facebooked all of them and I have an in for #2, math tutoring, that I will give one shot at following up. It was a really great party, and I was having great fun almost all the time.

I was in a good state. I did most things right just because of having the right mood and frame of mind, but I did not plan logistics so isolation didn't take place. I remember taking 1 step back and 2 step forwards, letting the girls leave and not following them but waiting for them to come back and even hint for kino reinitiation. I remember a good natural response to one girl showing me a Facebook photo with 8 nearly naked guys clamoring over her in a bikini in a small bathtub and I said "our girls were not as lucky, they had to share us", putting the correct frame of mind that she was the one getting value out of it, not raising her up because she was getting all the attention. I guess she showed the picture to provide proof of her desirability but I didn't bite :) .

Quotes from Gunwitch Method

2009-08-21T11:17:00.000-07:00

I will drop love, illusions and fantasizing for just plain old sex. It doesn't put the ego on the line, so much easier to just choose a decent-looking girl to fuck, because you're just giving your body and not your soul. I feel more confident now that I won't lose myself in a, put politely, suboptimal chick, just because she puts out. I choose to look at love and sex as different paths of optimization with trade-offs in one path versus the other. As always I choose the unbalanced path, seeking to optimize for one to the neglect of the other. For sex I'm the master, the dominating force, the man who says what's what and what's to happen, and for love I'm the slave, looking for directions, being dependent etc. Since I have a big ego to satisfy, being the master gives much greater choice because I think of the girls as of lesser authority and in need of guidance and thus being less than me only need to satisfy minimal relations of physical desire, while assuming a mental frame of following a girl in love, thinking of her as better than me, that requires one hell of a girl to satisfy my ego, which limits my choices too much for realistic fulfillment. Beautiful girls are usually turned off when you look at them with puppy dog eyes looking for guidance. So I will just assume I have the most power and authority and lead her, even if it doesn't give me the feeling of love, which I can't feel without submission. Some wise words inspiring these thoughts from Gunwitch Method:

"
Romance writers of old are responsible for all the pain you've ever felt over lost love, remember monogamy and commitment, even the word "love" are a 100^th as old as man, while sex and short pair bonds are timeless. No one ever killed themselves over losing a sex partner until someone decided co-dependant relationships were some mystical bond that must hurt when severed then told and wrote about it.

Just my thoughts on how to stay happy when it comes to love and relationships, tested, used, and approved by me, myself and I. Once I'm complete emotionally, ill find an emotionally complete woman to attempt a permanent bond with. Til then as temporary as possible hot sexual unions, and a little pain in completing myself through future failed relationships and finally the search for the emotionally complete, "semi attractive" woman looks good to me.

Section 16:

WILLPOWER is all you need in life. As a rule try not to fantasize period, fantasy is what tells your super ego that it has what it wants, because you "id" knows it isn't possible. To purposefully fantasize, visualize and imagine things at length is to also tell the "id" that something isn't possible. You must have some slight visualization of anything to create initial desire, but to actively fantasize will only cause you to see something as impossible in the form of diminished willpower. ACTIONS are SPARKED by thoughts, not carried out by them. Thoughts paralyse action after a while. My one life lesson, WILL to do what YOU want in life is all you need.

Priorities

2009-08-16T12:28:00.001-07:00

In-field:
- Work on controlling voice: slow down, pitch down, add pauses, add emotional inflection.
- Think about sex when talking to women.
- Work on not being defensive and closed off to hide depression while talking to girls because it makes them defensive too.
Long-term:
- Increase sex drive: eat more regularly, exercise every day, have a fixed sleep schedule, masturbate less.

Sleep schedule: 00:00-08:00
Meals: 08:00, 12:00, 16:00, 20:00. Make dinner in the morning and store in food box. Figure out how to deal with irregularities.

PUA methods

2009-08-16T07:18:00.000-07:00

I've started to listen to Robert Greene's "The Art of Seduction" audio book. It's quite abstract so far, so I don't know how easily it's practically applicable but I really like listening to it.
I've read some stuff from Entropy and I especially like the conversation demolitions.

A good friend of mine recommends Gunwitch method.
Another recommends Sex God Method.
Steve P's White Tiger Tantra seems legit, for improving sex.

Inner game

2009-08-15T17:27:00.000-07:00

"It's in my mind I'm not good enough and I'm candidly recognizing it which is the beginning of meeting eye to eye with oneself: and then with those we love, so that we can actually experience love which is essentially overcoming insecurity about ourselves and then the judgement of others."

I find myself often postponing love until I can be a happier person. It's easy to pick a girl based on desire when I'm happy, but hard to choose one that I trust to share sadness with and feel secure that she'll accept it and is worth sharing with.

Megan Fox and the Geek

2009-07-26T00:12:00.000-07:00

09:04 <> Megan Fox in transformers: My dad was a real greasemonkey. Geek: LOL whaaaaat, your dad was a firefox plugin? What does that make you, an on-demand javascript?
09:06 <> Megan Fox: oooh, I love firefox, it makes me want to groom your fur and polish your tip until it turns white.
09:07 <> Geek: well, it's a browser, not a real fox
09:08 <> Megan Fox: well, browse this. *shoves tits in geeks face*
09:08 <> Geek: wow! I didn't know you support Flash!
09:09 <> Geek: I have another plug-in for you, you'll really like this one. It might take a while. It's a huge load.
09:10 <> Megan Fox: Wait, I have pop-ups..
09:10 <> Geek: Ok, wait a second, I'll put on my AdBlock plus.

Based on chat between me and my friend kamaos.

Overarching storylines

2009-06-29T23:16:00.001-07:00

Now that I'm not a virgin anymore I should start planning my further goals. I want to do some night game and work on getting more same-night lays to have easy access to sex, but in general I find more women I'm really attracted to during the day, in book stores, coffee shops, malls and the street. I don't like how night game fucks with my sleep schedule, and I most often don't have the energy to run successful night game when I'm on an early wake-up cycle during the work-week. The most important state-building effect of night game is heightening body fluidity by dancing and making me comfortable with kino escalation because of more positive feedback, while the most important state-building effect of day game is building conversational fluidity attached to increased attraction that more often arises due to the serendipitous nature of successful day game. Day game doesn't feel as staged and bound to predictable patterns as in night game, where the environments are more uniform and you have to generate more of the conversational content with less situational cues and more distant memories of interesting day activities and environments.

Social circle game can be used to increase probability of success, but chances are I will see these people again so I need to be better calibrated, more careful and confident in my abilities. The good thing about cold approach is that experimentation and learning is cheap: I never have to see the girls that blew me out again so I don't have to be reminded of rejection and can selectively choose to only think about my successes to boost my confidence. It's also more evident what actions cause which responses since feedback is based on your current actions and no considerations for a social context which you are both part of. When I have solid confidence based on strong memories of successes I can do more social circle game without being haunted by rejections. Social circle game has more quickly reinforcing spirals of success and failure because of constant reminders and because of pre-selection or -exclusion and more firmly established social status. I just need to make sure the spiral is pointing upwards before I start it and be discreet initially.

What clearance level are you?

2009-06-22T23:50:00.000-07:00

What clearance level are you?

I don't know if there's a point to this post. I just had a lot of fun, so I'm writing it down to relive it.

When I enter Daisy Buchanan's there's a 3-set, all girls, sitting at the couch area right inside. My target immediately puts her legs up on an empty opposing chair where I would have sat down if she hadn't, but I open the set anyway. I sit down next to her with a big grin on my face. The side of my leg and arms are touching hers. She doesn't move.
She: h..i..ii? (smiling at my balls, but still skeptical that I think I can just sit down and pretend like I'm at home)
Me: Haaii ! (very slow and loaded with attraction, as in "we both know why I'm here")
Me: What's your name?
She: Connor.
Me: Oh, like the Sarah Connor Chronicles.
She: Yeah, like that.
Me: I hope you're not a terminator.
She: (Smiling.)
A guy comes into the set and I greet him and continue with the girl. I forgot to ask "How do you guys know each other?". The guy leaves pretty soon for a smoke with the 2 other girls, leaving me alone with my target.
Me: Are you guys on vacation here?
She: No, we work here.
She: Where are you from?
Me: Do you want to guess?
She: No.
Me: Good, because you'd never beat the girl I just met over at the Pour House. She made it in one guess, while all the others have used at least 3.
She: What?
Me: Never mind. A lot of people guess Irish because of the hat. Some people told me I look like the Irish mobster guy that ruled Boston.
She: You mean whity?
Me: I guess.
Me: So what do you do?
She: I work for the DOD.
Me: That's the department of defense right?
She: Yeah.
Me: So do you use our search engine software XXX? I know XXX does, and some other federal agencies I can't name.
She: What clearance level are you?
Me: Oh, I have no clearance. I just overhear conversations.
Her friend (who came back in during our conversation): You need to come over here, we've got things to talk about.
She: (Still smiling, not moving). Oh, I have to go over to my friend. We have a lot to talk about. (I can sense the sarcasm in her voice).
Me (to Connor): Oh, I see, she's cockblocking .
She: (Smiling). Well, I guess this would be more of a cockblock than she is (shows me her ring).
Me: Oh, I see. I guess, I don't have high enough... clearance level
I get up. I smile at her and wave as I leave, and she does the same. She never moved over to her friend. It was so fucking on with the attraction. I thought the interaction was hilarious and I was just bursting with glee as I walked home. I mean, how often do you talk to a girl at a bar that works at the DOD and she asks you your fucking clearance level? She might just have been joking around, but she seemed like the type that could work for the DOD. She was hot, but also tough in the way she sat and the way she acted.

The build-up to my awesome state happened at the pour house. I went out around midnight and approached a 2-set at the bar. I start talking to the less pretty girl, blonde (she's still okay). The other one, brunette, is really hot.

Me: Hey girls, how's it going?
She: Where are you from?
Me: Guess.
She: Europe.... (thinking)
Me: Yep.
She: Scandinavia...?
Me: Yep
She: Norway?
Me: Yeah!
She: Oh my god! (gives me a big hug). (at this point I don't feel I can target the hotter one without looking like an asshole, but this girl is nice too: her body is great, just her face has some imperfections)
She: Which city are you from?
Me: Bergen.
She: My grandmother is from Bergen!
Then she basically talks my ears off for an hour and we kino a little bit on-and-off (almost every time I say what? she comes really close to talk into my ear and I can feel the tension) while I nod and smile and throw in a few random associations to what she's saying. At one point her friend gets up to go to the bathroom and I take her seat. I have my hand on the girl's leg for 10 minutes and she doesn't take it away. I squeeze her thigh when she says things I like. Then they have to leave and I invite her to my place, but she declines, and I number-close instead. She gives me 2 hugs before leaving. They're on vacation in Boston until Thursday. I guess it turned into kind of a therapy session, except for my hand on her thigh. She talked about a lot of deep comfort stuff, like her grandma dying from cancer, how she broke off her engagement because they guy was too nice (I corrected her with "supplicating" and she said "exactly!"), and her grandpa's suicide. She was in a good mood all the time while talking about this depressing stuff though and I was in a good mood too. She said it happened a long time ago. I probably should have kiss-closed.

I went through Whiskey's. Few people there. I had a fun interaction talking to some of the girls working there, outside for a smoke. I met a girl who works there another time and was asking if she was around after I came back out. They said she works on Thursdays and they were smiling really wide and asked "So you were just looking for this one girl in particular?". I said "Maybe" with dilated strong inflection and a big grin. I have her on Facebook, but haven't gotten around to messaging her, so I thought I'd just drop by Whiskey's to check if she was on duty.

Avoid scarcity mentality

2009-06-02T20:19:00.000-07:00

Assuming that you have to do things because you have short time, like going out every day in Boston because there are so many cute brunettes here, will lead to "haste equals waste". I should assume that resources, including cute girls, are abundant and that there is no rush, so I have time to study game theory and take the time to apply it and don't worry about the outcome with a particular girl.

Micro-calibration and status update

2009-06-01T19:36:00.000-07:00

The "Mind of Mystery" video collection has an interesting video called micro-calibration. It's a very interesting step on the way from seeing Mystery Method as an event model with triggered verbal and non-verbal responses to female text and subtext rather than a linear pre-programmed algorithm. You're still on a time-line and there is a natural progression of stages reflecting a female's emotional state of mind typical of emitting certain distributions and intensities of IODs and IOIs, but that high-level overview is mostly useful as a simplified grouping of collections of smaller responses into categories that determine your overall behavior.

I realize I've been out gaming way too much and not studying the theory enough for a long time now. In the start I just studied theory and didn't practice. I need to do both. My sticking points are comfort and calibration. I need to work on my voice, adjusting the volume up most of the time and adjusting my tonality to be less confrontational, which can most easily be done by improving my exercising more and improving my mood. My tonality seems fine when I'm attracted to the girl, but when I consider talking work it gets unpleasant.

There is so much theory out there, many art forms and expansions to enrich a structure such as Mystery Method. Going out with the attitude of having fun is much more useful than going out trying to get laid, and they way for me to have fun being with girls is to read or create new patterns, memorize and test them. It's a work-reward scenario. The reverse way of making conversation more fun would be to try to make girls tell me more interesting things, by phrasing questions or leading statements appropriately.

Small mistake

2009-05-26T19:55:00.000-07:00

I caught myself in making a mistake after the fact. 2 girls asked me to take a picture of them. I did well in asking them to make sour faces, and they could not do it so they laughed instead. I talked for a bit and they said they were graduating BU students leaving for the semester, and I blurted that almost all the girls I know are leaving for the semester. That's bad, because it tells them I don't have easy access to a lot of girls and implies neediness. I should have reformulated as "I know many girls who are graduating". If I want to improve I need to pay attention to my mistakes and remember them.

Fashion tips

2009-05-26T18:54:00.000-07:00

Go around in stores to look and try stuff on to build an intuition of what's on the market.
Pay attention to what people around you are wearing.
Copy the style of people in TV series etc that look cool.

Kinowear

Dedication/discipline

2009-05-26T15:58:00.000-07:00

I've been going out a couple of weekends for day game. One Saturday we kept it going from 2 PM to 2 AM. But such random bursts are not enough. I've got to stay on my toes and always be ready. For example a girl was looking at me at lunch today and I should have opened her. Make no excuses. Interweaving pick-up with my regular life will help me keep in state and make it my natural mode and help me be congruent, not just some act I put on for a weekend.

My long-term decisions should not be affected by state. For example when I've decided to exercise I should do it whether it's raining or it's cold or I'm tired. When I've decided to get enough sleep I should go to bed in the middle of what I'm doing, no matter how interesting and important it seems. I must always prioritize long-term goals over short term goals.

Does the probability of falling in love decrease with stimuli overload?

2009-05-24T20:43:00.000-07:00

I wonder if the probability of falling in love decreases due to the comparatively high levels of entertainment stimuli we receive from other sources than women we have everyday relations with these days, such as music, movies, abundance of tasty food, sugar, alcohol, fiction, theater. Women are also abundant in cities, so there isn't exclusiveness to let you get sufficiently attached to just one to fall in love before another one pops up. Not that I would do it, but I believe if you became a monk or similar and lived a simple life that you would treasure any kind of fun much higher and it would be much easier to develop strong feelings for a girl. It wouldn't necessarily put you in a better position to attract them though. All these distractions might make women have relatively less emotional impact. I haven't been in love in a while. I'm curious as to whether having sex for the first time will make me fall helplessly in love again or if women will become just another fun pastime. I've noticed that I haven't been as passionate about any activity the latest years as before, not staying up all night hacking on exciting projects, except when artificially induced by caffeine. Perhaps I'm just getting older and less enthused, or putting a more positive spin on it we could say I'm getting more refined and slowing down to savor life rather than eating it all up in bursts of passion. Being at the anime convention this weekend made me feel younger again, a little bit like a kid.

I've been thinking about happiness curves, and whether there's a tradeoff between enjoying various kinds of entertainment regularly for relatively less emotional impact or abstaining and enjoying them rarely for relatively higher emotional impact. When you listen to too much music it stops having the same emotional impact, if you always eat more than you need it doesn't taste as good as when you're really hungry and when you talk to too many beautiful girls you're not as attracted by their beauty anymore. There's probably also interference between these domains to a certain degree. Female singers with fabulous voices probably detract from the attraction you feel when you hear women's voice in conversation etc. Women is the only form of entertainment that I have to work hard for in modern society. It's healthy in that it makes me think and learn in order to gain rewards. Once you've surpassed a certain threshold of unconscious pick-up knowledge that probably get's pretty easy too, but for now it's still a challenge.

I want to maximize my potential for feeling and use it to display more emotion in the presence of girls on a more consistent basis. I want to exercise more, get more sleep, eat healthier, read more, write more, converse more and participate in activities that are not mundane and gives me some kind of skill or deeper topic of conversation.

Helpful old women

2009-05-10T20:31:00.001-07:00

I was at the drug store and an old woman came up to me and offered me coupons for the lubricants I was looking at. I saved 5 bucks.

Musical "hallucinations"

2009-05-09T23:19:00.000-07:00

I wrote a blog entry before about hearing music in my mind. There's a book called Musicophilia - Tales of music and the brain, which describes the phenomenon under the chapter on musical hallucinations, which is later softened to inspirations, because it's usually clear that the music is originating from within. I'm relieved that it's not uncommon and has been researched because then I don't have to feel responsible for describing it when it occurs in me.

Friends zone

2009-05-09T00:41:00.000-07:00

It seems that a good rule of thumb for me is that if I don't make out with a girl the first time I meet her, nothing will ever happen. It's just too hard for me to change my conception of the relationship and switch my personality from friend to lover after we've become friends and I also lose the exotic aspect of attraction that comes with new faces. I was hanging out with a bunch of girls today and except for the new one I met, which I had a bit of sparkage with, all the decent ones ended up with other guys. When I'm hanging out with girls as friends I partially adopt their behavior like a chameleon to fit in and it makes them comfortable but it doesn't make them think of my dick inside them. This behavior on my part is reactive and imposes their frame as the stronger one, which is not dominant alpha and thus unattractive. The girls are louder than me, they swear more than me and allocate more space with their body language. It doesn't help that there are a bunch of them who have been friends forever and are "talking their own language" which makes it harder for me to be relatively more interesting and demonstrate higher social value.

Difference between "with" and "to"

2009-04-18T17:43:00.001-07:00

It's a tiny linguistic subtility, but every details helps:
"With" indicates a symmetric relationship and equality. "Have you spoken with her?"
"To" indicates an asymmetric relationship and estrangement. "Did you talk to her?"

The lesbian

2009-04-16T19:32:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday I kiss-closed a girl that several people told me was a lesbian. When I started talking to her the attraction was just naturally and mutually there from the start and I fluff-talked for 10 minutes until the attraction subsided and we went into comfort. She wanted to go out with some friends to a club and asked me to come along. I went upstairs to my room to get my things and I noticed she was following me and I stated "You're following me.". She said "Yeah, but I'm not a stocker or anything. I'm just going to go look for my friend." When I came back down she was in the friends room but the friend wasn't there, so we happened to be in isolation.

I'd checked out the club she wanted to go to on my laptop when I was upstairs, and it seemed like a gay/lesbian club so I told her I didn't want to go there. I told her that I made out with a guy once when I was drunk, but it didn't work out. I explained to her how I could sometimes be attracted to a guy with a lot of charisma, but when I got closer (and I moved close to her face) something clicks wrong when it's not a girl (then I moved away). I asked her who she thought was a better kisser of guys or girls. She said she had only made out with guys who sucked at it so the girls were better. I said "Wanna try it?" and when she hesitated I said "Let's sit down" and grabbed her around the waist and pulled down on the couch and started making out. After making out for a while I asked her how she managed to bite my lip, and I said that I'd been puzzled about that since the last time I made out with a girl and she was biting my lips but I couldn't catch hers to bite back. She told me the trick was to suck to catch the lip and then bite. She told me that she didn't like to define her orientation as strictly lesbian.

She went to the club and came back a few hours later. She sat on my lap for a while and then we made out again, but then her friend called and she had to catch the last bus back to her dorm, but she gave me her phone number.

The result of caffeine

2009-03-29T19:12:00.000-07:00

"The unthinking traveler and the scholar living in abstract conceptual systems are alike incapable of acquiring a rich sum of experience." -Rudolf Steiner

I'm quoting stuff like this when I contract philosophers disease: undue emotional satisfaction related to personal interpretation of ambiguous general quotes fitting a wide body of commonplace human experiences. I think it's a form of mental masturbation on the power high from the illusion of concentrating previous knowledge into compact essences, while it really just serves as a label for sets of more concrete knowledge. It's useful if the compact form enables you to generate more examples, but very abstract contemplations like this are usually resistant to new applications and more prone to poetic interpretation. One way to think of it is that there are just degrees of fuzziness and an emotive versus a functional perspective separating equations from aphorisms.

bah.. I think there was more caffeine in that green tea than I thought, because my brain wants to think too much with no sense of direction and without considering energy cost.

More action potential

2009-03-29T16:17:00.000-07:00

Slow down, think more, stay longer in the set, go the 20% extra on improvisation. Get her to think to distract her from external discomfort and get her into her own safe mind space. The cube is really good for that. Another good one is to ask if everyone in the room was her twin sister, what would she do to set herself apart. That's also a qualifier. My body language and energy seems much more potent when I feel an inner power that's expressed subdued externally rather than forcefully exaggerated on the outside with no inner power behind it. Slowing down, building tension and being unaffected helps bring about this inner power.

I'm much better at opening sets that have low opening resistance and staying there and so I'm having trouble at places where girls get hit on a lot. I also lack closing skills.

Mystery has a really cool laugh that I should try to imitate. It sounds kind of fake because it sounds very structured and controlled, but it's like he's laughing at the world because it's got nothing on him and he has all the power.

More heart

2009-03-29T13:56:00.000-07:00

I need to put more heart into it. When I open 20-30 girls in a night it starts to become unreal and just a game. It's good for reducing approach anxiety to a minimum, and if I can keep state, that's very helpful in day game approaches, which should seem casual and impromptu. I need to be ready to game always, because there are all these chances happening to me all day, but if I'm not out specifically to pick up girls I just let every cute girl giving me a look or asking me something pass by and focus intently on the other activity I'm out for.

Going out to the bars is good because it's target-rich but it takes the spirit out of it when I have to ask 5 times to hear what they are saying. I need to find more quiet places, and I need places with coat check. I should be quick at bars/clubs: get in, get a number or bounce to comfort and kiss close. I need to start peacocking more too.

I should watch out not to exhibit too much energy. I should smile while opening but then drop it because it's unnatural and exhausting to smile and gleam all the time.

I should study PUA theory more actively: memorize and take notes. I should dare to hit on girls on the dance floor and be more experimental when my approaches don't work.

New masturbation rule: once after running but not limited to Sundays. It's a reward model for exercise.

Boston sushi

2009-03-24T18:34:00.000-07:00

Sashimi: Maluken at Kenmore. Not open lunchtime weekend.
Weekend lunch sashimi: Finn's at Kenmore.
Fancy weekend dinner with friends/date: Fugakyu at Cleveland Circle.
Good fancy rolls, cheap custom picks, brown rice: Shino sushi express on Newbury.
Great sashimi: Suishaya, Chinatown.

Dance floor game

2009-03-22T09:53:00.000-07:00

It's still a trap, but here are some enabling tricks:
http://www.seduction-chronicles.net/2007/12/22/dance-floor-game-by-craig/
http://www.becomeaplayer.com/articles/dancefloor.htm

This is a bit weird and in poor English, but all info is good inspiration and field testing is the arbiter: http://www.venusianarts.com/forum/showthread.php?p=111729

A clever trick I've seen done by girls at a concert is that 2 friends are standing side by side, then the one that's interested in me and closest to me leaves for a bit, while the other friend moves closer to me but is still at a respectable distance, but such that when her friend returns, she'll rejoin her friend and be naturally very close to me standing right in front of me without seeming like she did it on purpose.

Another thing they do is that the girl that wants me keeps looking away from me while the other acts as the observer and looks at me and tells the other whether I'm looking at her or reacting if she displays sexual body language. I should probably blink to the observer in the direction of the other girl to show that I'm wise to their game and I like it.

The fundamental principle behind opening on the dance floor with higher probability of success, even more important than in talking openers, is a smooth transition and fun. You don't ask her "Would you like to dance with me?" such that she has to stop, think and evaluate and lowers her fun because she's doing that instead of dancing and that will affect her decision, but act in a way such that it's only natural that you two start dancing. Dance around her with palms facing up or out at an energy level slightly higher than hers. Demonstrate high value by dancing and smiling and she won't be able to resist, for she will rarely turn down fun.

Boston nightlife

2009-03-21T23:20:00.000-07:00

I went to Middle East Downstairs today. 4 bands were playing, Manakin Cicada, Boatyard Resin (10th year Anniversary Show), Richard James, Groove Kitchen, 3 of which I caught. All of the music was great, but I was rather tired when the last band, Manakin Cicada, came on.

There were the most gorgeous women I've seen in Boston so far there, and there were many of them! I love it when they "accidentally" bump into me while dancing. I'm excellent at dancing free-style when there's good music and I've got plenty of time to warm up and become self-unconscious. A girl remarked on my nice dancing skills and a guy came up to me and asked me to have a dance off against another guy who also had his moves down good.

I didn't hit on any of the gorgeous women because I felt like they liked me because I had demonstrated higher value with my emotionally expressive dancing skills. They were coming up to me and standing or dancing near me and I didn't want to give up that status by hitting on one and risk being rejected. I was having a great time dancing most of the time, but in the end I felt sad by being so close to these beautiful women without holding them tight.

A short time before the last band was finished playing a girl came up and she started bumping into me from the side and when I didn't move back she came closer, then she looked at me and I smiled at her. Then she waited a little while standing in side-touch with me and then she went away. I guess I was supposed to do something. Bah.. the dance floor is a trap for pick-up artistry. I prefer not to talk when I'm dancing, because I'm very emotional and into it and talking breaks my state. It's sort of the same as not wanting to talk about mundane things while having sex.

An argument for brain plasticity

2009-03-15T16:18:00.000-07:00

I'm reading How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker and about neuroplasticity on Wikipedia, and I had this thought to jot.

If the brain is a general processing machine that adapts to its hardware a boot time, then evolution can change DNA for the hardware using mutation or crossover without having to induce a corresponding change in the DNA for the brain, which makes it much more probable that individuals with mutations that changed their hardware will be able to utilize it efficiently and survive. If, on the other hand, each hardware mutation must randomly coincide with a brain mutation then it's much more unlikely that this will happen(1). Species with plastic brains will evolve more rapidly and oust competing species with less mutable controllers. This doesn't say anything about the probability of a general processor evolving in the first place, but if hardware independence happens gradually then a general processor is simply the natural evolutionary successor to a brain with more genetically hardware-tuned components.

General brain hardware has learning costs associated, evident in the long childhood (sexually immaturity) of humans and compensated for by pair bonding and resource transfer from adult generations. The generality and plasticity of the brain is a result of an evolutionary cost-benefit calculation, not an evolutionary lust for abstraction.

1: Of course, if the changes are not essential for survival but just offer a strong competitive advantage, then evolution can afford to wait a long time, negating the unlikelihood of simultaneous events. General brain hardware will still be more adaptive of course.

Schedule adjustments

2009-03-15T14:35:00.001-07:00

Less caffeine, more exercise -> more energy.
More day game -> less defensive women, more relaxed atmosphere.
Less night game -> healthier sleep cycle -> more energy.

I'm too diluted for night game with the life style I'm running at the moment. Since I work all week on caffeine and that way chemically concentrate my energy into the work week, I don't have the time or energy to digest many interesting data sources nor the energy to talk about them at parties. Work is fun, but I want to fit game into my time and energy schedule.

I don't drink caffeine during weekends and I notice a significant headache as a result. This work week I'm going to drop caffeine, except the iced green tea I drink in the morning, which has a near negligible amount of caffeine.

Associative beauty confirmed

2009-03-11T19:42:00.000-07:00

I have a new Asian female friend, and on account of me having inaccurately detailed perception of the differences in Asian facial expressions the associative attraction and valuation in beauty she's encouraged in me through kino and kinship has evidently increased the valuation of Asian beauty in general and overpowered earlier negative impressions, thus confirming my suspicion that beauty and attraction is very dependent on experience in me.

Forced blog entry

2009-03-08T01:03:00.000-08:00

I'm not really blogging much these days. I have little spare time since I'm working full time, and there are people I want to see and talk to and interesting reading to do.

By analogy with Mystery Method, social proof works on the dance floor, and continuous smooth interactions implicitly assuming a frame of success work better than discrete questions with expectant observing behavior. Push-pull works too. Dance with any girl that seems ready for it to build social value. Smile, take the target's hands, then let them go and then dance around her body without waiting for a response, so that if she rejects you, she becomes the lower value person who is halting the fun. If she turns her back towards you but stays close, you're supposed to grind against her ass. You're allowed to put your hands on the front of her thighs, on her hips, her stomach, the side of the stomach and her arms. If she is backing away, do the same for a while, then go back. If you always follow her and face her even if she's not facing you it's a sign of neediness. Adjust and roam freely and rotate when she roams and rotates. I think that, for me, talking on the dance floor is an underestimated tool. I should investigate further. I prefer talk spots over dance clubs for picking up women, but it often happens that I find myself at a place where all the hot women are on the dance floor.

Oh, and fleshlights are very enjoyable. I recommend you get one. It's a good way of telling yourself you can have pussy any time you want, in order to be less needy around women. Sometimes I get more turned on by imagining masturbating with my fleshlight vagina instead of fucking a real woman's vagina.

Geography

2009-02-28T12:42:00.001-08:00

I'm keeping Google Earth open and looking up every mention of a place I don't know. Good for spatial training.

Rules versus intuition

2009-02-21T04:13:00.000-08:00

I want to think about rules and intuition to illuminate their respective qualities and usages scenarios. Rules are formulated in language. The more concrete and hard they are, the easier they are to follow, but they are also more fragmentary, providing responses to some situations but not fully completing the puzzle to give the full picture. Intuition is learned behavior formulated in some innate structure of the mind which can only be introspected and evaluated analytically by formulating examples of the intuition into language. Sometimes learned behavior is completely wrong, and to build a new healthy intuition it's necessary to follow concrete rules in order to gradually build a new intuition. The long term goal is to build an intuition and have feelings that produce the right actions without thinking in rules. This is what's called inner game. Outer game is based on rules and routines. They start out as supporting devices and examples of more general behavior in order to develop a generating creative ability in the space spanned by the examples. Failure to learn the general behavior results in a robotic awkwardness.

I believe there is a qualitative difference between rules and intuition, regarding their formulation in language and another unknown structure that allows one to predict responses to actions in a situation and respond naturally by simulating the expected sensory environment. Functionally however, they may be the same, if there are rules for every contingency, and the simpler the scenario, the easier it is to build a complete action profile using rules. Rules can be formulated more abstractly at the cost of fuzziness to encapsulate a slew of more concrete rules. For real-time purposes intuition is necessary, because the human mind works much faster with intuition and it's necessary to generate new material to sustain an interaction for longer periods of time. The problem with intuition is that it is more fixed or learning at a slower rate, less conscious and thus less susceptible to introspection and correction. Analysis is a more abstract process to control intuition, while intuition and experience guides further analysis. Naturals depend on intuition alone, but lacking the ability to introspect their intuition through language, they cannot progress beyond a certain point, but that may still be more than sufficient for most aims. Social robots use only analysis and come off as weird staccato wannabe actors. PUAs use both analysis and intuition for their respective advantages.

Good game, but slight heartburn

2009-02-17T17:16:00.000-08:00

I entered a set and hooked it so she asked me to sit down. I went almost straight for the target though instead of talking to the obstacle. I had lots of kino going, with hand-holding, hugging, hair sniffing and back rubbing, but I miscalibrated when to ask for a kiss. She was laughing like she was flattered and amused when I asked her to kiss me or bite me but she said no. I should have followed up with an IOD and DHV loop and tried again. I couldn't remember any appropriate IODs so I just did the DHV loop, but it didn't hook. At least I baited her attraction and made her invest in the conversation and qualify herself. She was laughing and having a good time almost all the time. Psychology students seem to be really good targets for gaming. I had very little small talk going, and this is my limiting factor. I can pull up routine after routine, and with practice I'll get better at reward models for reinforcing positive behaviour, but I have problems connecting conversationally to girls who aren't really intellectual and talkative. A few select girls seem to need very little talk, and that's very nice and relaxing when we're both comfortable with it.

My target was saying several times that she was thinking about getting another beer. I think she was hinting me to buy one for her and it was a DLV that I seemed like I didn't take the hint. I should have said "Good idea! Will you buy me one too while you're at it?" to at least demonstrate that I got it and try to get compliance and investment also.

Still, I was thinking mostly of the girl I didn't get after the set was over and I fucked up some other interactions and blew away some good sets by being needy and heartbroken. But I would have been much worse off had I not taken that first set and realizing that I was going nowhere with the girl I really wanted.

Leopard

2009-02-16T20:37:00.000-08:00

Clothes that look like leopard skin make me want to throw up, even on an SHB. I'm telling you explicitly and with conviction not to wear that shit.

Turnaround

2009-02-16T20:12:00.000-08:00

If you don't know how to respond to something a girl does, try doing the same thing to a girl of high value and then save her response for use at a later time when a girl does it to you.

Anger

2009-02-16T17:18:00.001-08:00

I've learned to always repress anger because I was always punished for being angry with my sisters. I learned to let the anger build up until I was ready to do as much damage as possible and then accept any consequences. This hampers my pick-up game, because I allow people to bust my balls without busting back. I suppress the anger automatically and unconsciously, most often not even noticing that were was reason to be angry. This comes off as having a weak frame. I really have a bloody steel-reinforced concrete frame underneath, but it doesn't show because I'm suppressing it.

Dancing

2009-02-16T16:46:00.001-08:00

I was dancing with a girl, and another girl I'd been gaming came up and tested whether the girl I was dancing with had more rapport with me or with her too see if she was a threat or if I was just dancing with her to create jealousy. She probably tested me too if I was looking at her or the girl I was dancing with and I failed the test. She knows her game all right.

If a girl doesn't keep eye contact while dancing I should disqualify her and say I can't dance with her because not keeping eye contact shows weak character. If she doesn't comply I dump her.

Two guys broke in between me and a girl I was dancing with to create a 4-set. I should have blown them out, but I did nothing since I didn't really care. I was just dancing with the girl to build jealousy, even though she was hot. I should always protect my allies and never allow myself to get AMOGged. Fuck that.

I, Robot

2009-02-16T16:09:00.000-08:00

I take this opportunity to quote from Mystery Method:
"Don't go off the deep end and respond to every social interaction like it's a power play for dominance and like you are so clever for recognizing it. You will turn into a social robot and will lose your ability to vibe naturally with people. Be relaxed and enjoy the process."

Strange perspective

2009-02-15T16:53:00.000-08:00

It find it a bit strange that I had a much stronger sexual drive when I was just sitting at home watching porn and jerking off rather than going out often and trying to pick up girls. I wonder why. Perhaps going out feels too much like work and too little like play. I have to train if I want to get a girl though and that's the goal I've decided on. Nothing comes for free, or if it does, it's not worth anything. I'll cut back on masturbation again to increase sexual tension and make girls more attractive to have more feelings and improve the play/work ratio so I can have more fun. I have almost no opening fear anymore after I've warmed up, so I don't get a rush from talking to strangers. Thankfully I'll have new territory to explore soon and that'll naturally increase my adventurousness and sex drive.

Shared conspiracy

2009-02-15T16:04:00.001-08:00

I just read this term in Mystery Method and I dig it. It's an accurately descriptive term I've been missing in my vocabulary. It's what I feel when I smile devilishly at a girl like I know she wants to have sex with me and she returns the same type of smile. Shared conspiracy.

Facedancing

2009-02-15T14:29:00.000-08:00

I'm transitioning through a series of rapid facial expression as a kind of dancing while listening to music in order to get smoother face skin and exert greater muscular control over my expressions. I've noticed the facial effect of going out and talking and expressing myself with other people, but why not become a true Face Dancer by taking it to another level? Are geeks pimply because they rarely engage in facial communication? Sometimes I'm singing along with songs to train vocal tonality control and full diaphragm exploitation. This gives me empowering tools of social interaction utility.

Mellow

2009-02-14T23:30:00.000-08:00

Chocolate and dancing makes for a very mellow and relaxed state of mind. I just don't give a shit. I feel good and I need nothing. The drawbacks are that I fart more and they smell worse when I eat chocolate and I get depressed the day after using chocolate and if I'm not strict about restricting usage to weekends I get addicted.

Random observations on a night out

2009-02-13T20:20:00.000-08:00

This is a rant: of descending quality.

I forgot that I was speaking to older women, and I asked them what they were studying, and they started laughing, and I got that they laughed because the implication was that they looked young, so I said "yeah, you are so young and beautiful :)". So it's a nice trick to ask older women what they're studying with a serious face :).

I also told the older woman she was being a "silly girl" and got a nice laughing response. She was actually rather cute now that I think about it. I left the set because I ran out of material and didn't come up with any small talk, but it was still a warm set.

I did some improvisation talking to guys to gain social proof. One guy I told I was out grazing for green grass and he understood that I was talking about girls and continued the metaphor. It was cool. Another guy started speaking exaggerated New Norwegian, and I responded loudly in the same manner and we improvised being peasants and dealing with problems on the farm. It was crowded though, so I didn't find a way to get to the only girl there I was attracted to utilize my social proof. She was looking at me. A lot of other girls bumped into me, but it might have been random.

A girl walked right into me and bumping me quite hard earlier also after I had generated social proof, but she didn't display any engaging body language afterwards, so she might have been just drunk and raving. I'm starting to get good intuitive calibration and being able to more quickly gauge the interest level of a girl.

Yesterday I used Style's evolution phase shift routine to make out with a girl. She was breathing heavily and was moving into foreplay, but it was not the right location for sex nor the right girl, so I shut it down.

I was on the dance floor and I recognized her from trying to dance with her unsuccessfully another night. I smiled to her and she returned the smile like she could not help it while retreating with her friend. I found it curious and attractive that she seemed attracted but acted contrary to her feelings; it must mean she was a very rational girl.

I opened a 2-set with two quite beautiful girls who responded immediately with wide smiles. I should have made them qualify themselves or kino-escalated immediately, but I just continued running my openers and after a while they lost interest.

One problem I've started to feel is that my calibration to a room of moderately quiet and inactive sets is cold when I've been talking to people and having action, and I'm becoming attracted to action, energy and game and less to beauty. I would have everyone dancing and singing and messing around the venue to convey their personality in a great big chaotic mix. Most people just feel to slow, lazy and uninteresting. Some drunk people are as energetic as me and unravel a fun dynamic. I'm starting to feel the sleep deprivation now as the game high is running out.

My favorite way to open a cute girl I'm instantly attracted to is to go over and start talking to her with my face so close to hers that we can feel each other's breath and warmth. I seem to do that naturally when I'm really attracted and they always respond with facial expressions of attraction that I can really feel. Almost all women I've approached with emotional attraction on my face respond really positive. I should try to kiss-close next time it happens, but I need to be aware of buyers remorse and make them qualify themselves.

Detachment openers

2009-02-13T06:57:00.000-08:00

I've been using my own opener about recycling juice cartons. I ask whether you need to cut the plastic cork off the juice carton while recycling. It engages me with shape-describing body language because I'm visualizing the juice carton and making out shapes and cutting actions with my hands, and the opener is becoming emotionally anchored to my game state because I've used it many times. By being in my visual headspace, I'm detached from and not reacting too much to her initial disinterest. I should make more openers that make me go into my own internal world and forget about the external world while conveying my reality to them. Same goes for DHV stories.

Obsession

2009-02-12T22:40:00.000-08:00

What is it about this girl? I don't have deep feelings for her, but still I'm thinking about her all the time and I want her. I just don't understand her. It drives me crazy. She's so cute and I'd very much like to fuck her, but I'm just sort waiting for her to display feelings for me that I can relate to and mirror in order to make my move. I feel like she's wearing clunky armor and she's this precious treasure inside a bulky exterior that I just can't get to. But perhaps it's me that's wearing armor. I'm not sure how to really connect with her. Fuck. I just mess up around her. I just keep repeating her name in my mind. What's up with that? It's crazy, is what it is. I should just drop it and go interact with other people. I did that for many hours, but afterwards I'm still just thinking about her. Argh.. It's so annoying. I'm not in love or anything, because I don't feel the intense pulsation of euphoria, but she's in my head nonetheless. Damn. Perhaps it's her there's something wrong with. I'm just thinking in circles passing the time until next time I see her. Should get some sleep.

Hypnotic rapport

2009-02-12T05:40:00.001-08:00

I've experienced immense rapport and a strong connection with a girl when I am extremely calm or being detached, imagining somewhere else in my thoughts. It seems almost hypnotic in nature. It can happen when I'm down but not discomforted by it, just after I've cried, when I'm talking about something serene, after being exhausted from intense action or emotional turmoil or just after I woke up. One time was with a Spanish girl in Germany and I was talking about how I missed the ocean. Another time was talking to a girl at a bus stop here in Norway shortly after getting up. It happened with a girl at the supermarket while thinking of something else. I want to be able to control and invoke this infinite calm and use it at my leisure, but I don't know how. Perhaps I should try to anchor the feeling when it happens or perhaps start meditating.

New masturbation pattern #2

2009-02-10T15:20:00.000-08:00

I decided to go back to unlimited masturbation for a while. It means that my sexual appetite for women goes down so there are really few I want to fuck on first impressions, but since I know more about the game by now I should be able to objectively evaluate her beauty and personality and consciously choose to interact and let her seduce me over time. This will also synchronize better with women's game curve. I should approach many sets containing no viable targets anyway to practice and build social proof. One problem is less energy so I won't be as interested in the conversation, but I can alleviate this with willpower and acting and by approaching high risk sets to pump adrenaline. On the other hand, I'll have a more detached and controlled viewpoint, and will perhaps seem more laid-back.

Hook point

2009-02-08T11:53:00.000-08:00

It's much easier to open sets with at least one ugly girl or a guy, because they are not as defensive as HBs and they'll more often want you to stay, allowing you to talk to them in the vicinity of the HB. Your goal is getting the HB attracted with time by passive listening. It's easier for her to get attracted if she has no expectations on her to contribute conversation or facial expressions but can just relax and tune in and when she takes the bait and gets hooked she'll want to join the conversation, at which time you should neg her a little bit and then isolate her later by telling her friends you've been neglecting her too much.

Avoiding one-itis?

2009-02-05T19:05:00.001-08:00

I met this really cute brunette that's exactly my type and I might fall for her. She's not sure if I'm straight or gay, because I've been messing around and joking about it too much. That could be both advantageous and disadvantageous. Perhaps I should just use the gay role to get comforting cuddling and friendship from these girls and do my pick-up elsewhere. It's like having them as home base as a safe haven to return to from missions into enemy territory. She's so cute I just want to hang out with her even if it's just as friends. She makes me feel good when she's with me and jealous when she's with someone else. I shouldn't get too attached to her since I'm leaving for the US soon. There's no really strong feelings involved yet, but I feel a connection and trust with her.

Her blonde friend is still angry with me because she doesn't believe I'm gay anymore and I sort of tricked her into doing things she wouldn't have done if she knew I was straight, but we're trying to be cool and put up a tough face and joke it away, even though I believe both of us are still a little hurt each in our own way. It's not that important, since I'm not interested in her, but it still feels wrong.

Limiting belief

2009-02-05T07:37:00.000-08:00

I believe that girls like to go out, get cozy, mess around and feel some fun and excitement, but I don't really believe that they go out to meet a guy to have sex. This is a limiting belief. It controls when I sit back and relax, because I know they want it and are going to come for it, and when I try to supplicate them because I don't think they really want it. I need to change this belief. Girls are horny. They want sex. As soon as I get that frame firmly lodged into my mind, it's going to happen with little effort.

Sauce

2009-02-04T14:28:00.000-08:00

I just remembered I asked a girl to come home with me to eat chicken. She said it depended on what sauce I had. I started qualifying myself by listing all the different sauces I had. I should have negged her on it instead. Fuck it, I don't like people who are picky about what they eat if it's food that's good for most humans. Everything I make is good and healthy. If you don't like it there's something wrong with you. I genuinely think that, so it's a true neg, but I should remember to have a playful voice when saying it.

Some rules

2009-01-31T21:07:00.000-08:00

- Never notice or comment a large-breasted women on her breasts. Guys stare at them all the time and say nasty things. She hates it. Maybe a breast neg would work, but I think it's better to do that only if she brings it up to test you to pretend you don't notice them. Neg her on other things instead.
- Negs work only on really HBs. I met this blonde who had a major turn-on by being called "little shit" (her friend told me). Negs are hurtful to babes with little confidence, but turn-ons for HBs.
- The Game is only made for HBs with lots of nasty defense mechanisms. Girls with less confidence just want to be treated right. Calibrate.
- Don't forget to make them qualify themselves even if they're super hot. Why should you want to be with them? Beauty is common. Not everyone's got brains.

Greed and revenge

2009-01-31T20:12:00.000-08:00

I successfully used a combination of Mystery method, Annihilation method and jealousy plot lines but I failed in the end by being too offensive. She was disappointed because I had done so well and then I failed in the end and that made me kind of sad. I just felt good with accomplishment by pleasing her in the start but then I got greedy and asked her too many times to come home with me. I should be more laid-back and just let them do what they want and not ask for anything, just work on creating feelings in them so that they want to do things. So I should cleanse my soul of greed.

I should also have forgiven her brunette friend, who I liked better, for being too friendly with another guy and I should have taken her back when she got jealous and came back to me. So I should cleanse my soul of revenge.

Nothing comes of wanting and none will give me what I need for no reason other than satisfying their own wants and needs, so the best I can do is be as self-sufficient and nonchalant as possible and just try to give them the feelings they want and hope it works out. I need to work on my inner game.

New masturbation pattern

2009-01-31T09:10:00.001-08:00

I've confirmed that masturbating less gives more energy and stronger feelings for girls. However, it's a multiplier that can work both ways. Sexual frustration can come out as fear of rejection and depression, so keep a keen eye on it. The energy seems to peak after 3-4 days after no masturbation and subsides after that. My new policy for February is to masturbate as much as I like on Sundays to improve sexual peak performance and once on Wednesdays to maintain the sexual "metabolism" and take the lid off a little bit before the weekend. Controlling levels of sexual energy is about keeping a balance between caring too much and not caring at all.

I've also been experimenting with jerking off but stopping before orgasm. It seems to work fine for keeping long-term sexual energy while decreasing long-term sexual frustration. I use olive oil to reduce friction and watch some good porn and I can do it for several hours off and on, stopping at the point of orgasm and waiting a short while before resuming. It's also a nice exercise in discipline. I also spent 3 hours one evening trying to induce an orgasm mentally, albeit unsuccessfully, as I read on Wikipedia that some paralytics are able to do that. I guess it takes a lot of time, willpower and sexual deprivation in order to train for it, but if you're paralyzed and have no other way I guess you're pretty motivated.

I remember when I masturbated before puberty and ejaculations that I could have 5-6 in a row. I also read on Wikipedia on orgasm that it in some males ejaculations are dissociated from orgasms even after puberty and they can have multiple ones without restitution time just like women. Without the ejaculation there is no restitution time, but you can also cut the restitution time with ejaculation on rare occasions. The other day I masturbated while thinking of a girl I felt really connected to, and lo and behold, I discovered that after orgasm and ejaculation my penis was still rock hard and ready to go again. In conclusion, there's more to masturbation than meets the one-eyed snake's eye. I encourage you to reinvent yourself and experiment. With masturbation analysis you can now have mental masturbation and throbbing dick masturbation at the same time :). Ain't life swell!

Stages

2009-01-31T08:39:00.000-08:00

Attraction, comfort, seduction. Attraction is sparking interest, building energy and getting the attention. Comfort is building trust, relaxing and connecting. Seduction is raising and releasing sexual tension.

Attraction is standing up in a bar, on the street, where you meet people. Comfort needs a comfortable sitting location. Seduction needs a location that doesn't interfere with her social relations, that is, a private location or a location containing just people outside of her social sphere.

You've got to have the plan ready for moving from attraction to comfort to seduction and time-bridge if necessary. It's imperative to calibrate and progress according to the interest curve, or you'll break it.

Look to master Mystery for details.

I'm working on hypotheses for classifying and breaking down the dance floor into body language openers and which stages apply. My current working assumptions are that you need to calibrate to find out which dancing women are conducive to be opened and then open those with confidence to build social proof in order to open more and then you can choose which one to go deeper with. Being playful, socializing and talking on the dance floor works to decrease opening resistance. I think she worries initially about you hanging around her and dancing all night if she starts dancing with you, so you need to work on strategies to seem nonchalant while charming her with your moves. Dancing with multiple partners alleviates this expectancy. It also says that you're not just going for the first one that happens to you, but evaluate them all, and this will start making them qualify themselves.

Silly games

2009-01-29T08:55:00.000-08:00

I've been working jealousy plot lines. Well, not really: I've just been naturally social and friendly with many girls and I see what it does to them and so I call what I did jealousy plot lines in retrospect. They seem to be a good test for women who'll become needy or possessive. At first, women respond positively to my social proof of higher value, but after a while they who are less confident lose faith that they can have me and they start feeling down and go into protective mode and shut down emotionally or avoid me. To me that feels like an ultimatum strategy designed to make me choose between them and the other participants in the jealousy plot line. I refuse to do that so I spend more time with the girls that play it cool when I'm standing close to another girl and talking to her, and is still happy and open when I come back to her.

I don't put up with women who play games. I'm stronger, more intelligent and most importantly, much, much more stubborn than you are, so give it up already. If your games seem like unconscious strategies for protection I'm more forgiving and will look inward for what I did wrong to unleash those strategies, but if you display conscious knowledge of your active rejection game then you're out.

I know nice, friendly and smiling girls out there who are secure and don't need to put up walls around themselves or mess around and I choose to be with them so have fun with your silly games because that is all you're going to get.

Of course, if there were no nice, friendly, smiling and secure girls one of us would have to concede and suck up and I'd be the better man and do that in spite of my stubbornness if I felt you deserved it. I guess my stubbornness is just my own protection mechanism at work.

You are all good-looking in various aspects and fairly smart and willful women. I chose the happy and care-free one who never put her fists up. Maybe I acted differently with her to make her act that way, but so be it, that must have been my unconscious decision. Of course, she's my choice in your local group and I choose more from other groups, because one is not enough for me. If you have a problem with that, go fuck yourself. I love you, but go fuck yourself.

I want a girl with a mind like a diamond

2009-01-25T20:04:00.000-08:00

I'm going to update this post as I think of things. I'm not sure about the point of this post, because I know intuitively when I like a girl, and I doubt any girl I'm going to meet will be reading this blog in order to make herself more attractive to me.

Types of like
There are many ways to like a girl: as a friend, for kissing, for fucking and for LTR. I haven't contextualized the types of likes into those ways below. In general I want to kiss a cute girl, fuck a sexy girl, be friends with a smart girl and have a LTR with one who is cute, sexy and smart.

Speech
I want a girl with a mind like a diamond. When solving problems she should be able to reason and express her ideas in simple understandable terms, and when conversing for mental masturbation she should display high verbal intelligence by using long sentences with subsentences and side trails and have the attention span to return, employ a large vocabulary and articulate her words with precision and controlled speed depending on the articulation complexity. She should speak fast when we are discussing something fuzzily and we want to immerse ourselves and synchronize our thought processes (which incidentally can lead to saying the same sentences at the same time and completing each other's sentences, even within hours of meeting for the first time) and with slow confidence and authority for emotional emphasis.

Sound
I'm very emotionally and sexually attuned to sounds a girl makes and her use of voice (Bene Gesserit anyone?). I love sounds like mhmm, ahh, owww. The more drawn out and confident the sound the better.

Breasts
She doesn't need to have sexy breasts if she has a cute face. I don't focus much on breasts because few girls have really attractive breasts. Perfect breasts to me are a little less than half spheres, and not too big. Small breasts that bristle and do not sag are much more attractive than larger breasts that sag or seem disconnected from the torso. I think breasts count in the total impression of their upper body, but they don't surface in my conscious attention very often unless they're naked.

Face
I like petite, compressed, fox-like faces. I like at least two types of face surfaces. Standard beauty faces have great flat areas that seem cut out of a block by mathematical planes. Girl-next-door faces have some of the same delicate bone structure but with a slight roundness of flesh on top. I like faces that I can't seem to categorize and don't look like anyone else, and I like faces that remind me of someone I've had feelings for before.

I dislike a pronounced masculine-like chin.

Body language
I like it when a girl squints and smiles at me. I like girls who display sensual and carefree body language, like she's off dreaming in her own world. I like women whose foreheads crease in concentration when they talk. I like alluring smiles.

Misc
I prefer brunettes and dark hair in general. I like latino, spanish, slavic and mexican looks.

She should have a sexy ass and smooth, not-too-fat thighs.

I like a girl with sky high ambitions.

I like extroverted girls with high social status and introverted girls if they show signs of mystery or intelligence.

I love girls who do something for someone else that seems to me like they're putting someone else's happiness before their own. It shows that she can love. It can make me connect deeply with her, but doesn't necessarily mean I want to have sexual relations with her.

I like girls who like me.

I like librarian-type chicks with nerdy glasses.

Some girls look great when they're white as chalk, like vampires. Others look great with a Jessica Alba tan.

Dislikes
I dislike girls who are testing me or are emotionally closed down, but I realize I should just give myself the patience and persistence to open them.

I generally don't like asian, african or african american looks, but there are exceptions.

I'm repulsed by too much make up. There's a certain kind of girl that go to solarium and use a lot of make up that I can't stand.

Improvement focus

2009-01-25T19:13:00.000-08:00

One attribute of PUA media is putting focus on potential areas of improvement, regardless of the tips provided. You can think about improving those areas yourself as you see fit. You can work on facial expressiveness and test eye configurations in the mirror and analyze what they convey, practice engaging your hands in conversation, take dance lessons, study correlations of outward signals and mental states in people, think about your own perceived limits in order to dissolve them, describe and classify your experiences and much more. Dedicate time intervals to having special focus on each area.

Never disregard available information, but prioritize according to projected value and align the amount of information absorbed with actual practice so you don't become just a walking encyclopaedia on pick-up with no clue to application. Don't worry about internalizing faulty material because when you are in the field and see what works you're going to automatically adapt through the positive and negative feedback you get if you have a working learning mind. Think of PUA media as intuition molded into structured forms in order to be communicated effectively, and that you need to recreate that intuition from the inspiration of the structured forms. It's so much more inspiring going out when you know new things you want to discuss and test instead of just going out and falling into the trap of talking about the same old and following the same old patterns.

Mood control is very important for me. I need to talk about things I care about, dance or sing in order to get into an energetic fluid state that is conducive to pick-up. I should focus on that.

Another thing I'd like to focus on is converting news items into interesting stories that convey my personality. I'll work on timing, intellectual content, intonation and building DHV spikes. I want an infinite easy accessible input stream and a general process to extract and make anecdotes from it, so that I'll always have new material. I'll set aside time during the week to read and convert news and then test my stories in the field.

I should also practice turning on and off the gleam in my eye and be more conscious about using it. In my experience it blows women wide open when I use it, but I've only been doing it unconsciously when I'm highly emotionally charged and confident. You create the illusion of gleam in your eye by tensing some of the muscles around the eye and smiling: gleam is not an increase in the reflection of light, but that is the impression it makes and the metaphor it invokes. Maybe I'll try to incorporate it as a reward model: when a woman says something I like I should give her some gleam. Gleam creates tension and can get exhausting or drive up expectations too high so it should probably be used sparingly.

I should also keep my eyes more open because I look much younger and more attractive instead of aloof, old and tired. In general I should control facial attributes in order to make myself engaged and engaging. I like my forehead. It's sort of like an erogenous zone.

The Game

2009-01-24T15:06:00.000-08:00

I've now read The Game in its entirety. The cool thing about it is that you realize how deeply integrated with the rest of your life pick-up really is and that the positive changes you need to make will help you in all areas of your life. It's not just pick-up, but socializing with women and people in general, at school or work or any place. Picking up girls is a hobby that all guys can share passionately so it makes it a lot easier to connect with other guys and make friends. Having a common terminology is great for enhancing communication. Getting to know the personalities of the PUGs through The Game and videos, and knowing there's a whole community out there who have worked hard to build this common knowledge base helps to have faith in the material and deliver it with enthusiasm. Field testing and personal experience should always have the final say, but you might be doing something wrong. I believe the greatest mistake one could make in reading such a book is thinking "that would never work" without testing it. Same goes for "that just isn't me", since you want to change, not to keep doing what you've been doing wrong. People evolve. Another possible mistake is just reading the material and then going out and believing you know it. You need to go over it in your head and ideally test it on a friend and have him criticize your performance.

Although The Game has many illustrative concrete examples that will get you going, it also contains deeper theories that are as constant as the nature evolution has given us and which you can generate your own content on top on. Practice makes perfect, but you need to remember to go over your past performance critically, discuss and verbalize experiences with friends and build a consistent reproducible repertoire of material. I should try to remember to ask a girl after successful game what her hook points were and what made her attracted to me. Repetition is important. You can be in a dazzling mood one night and make up one genius pattern after another on the fly, but you're not always on top, and it's when you're not on top that you really need a trusted step-by-step routine to get you back up there.

The Game gives a good general understanding and overview, but I need to really work on the concrete techniques now and grow my repertoire. I'm going to start internalizing Mystery Method next.

I recognize features of myself in both Mystery and Style. I like them both. I identify more with Mystery on an emotional level and more with Style on an intellectual level.

Mystery has this explosive emotional force which can lead him into deep feelings of attraction, agression or depression, but he harnesses it through strict rules and structure and sometimes distances himself too much behind the science of evolution. His ambitions are sky high, he's cocky and he doesn't back down. He's a bit damaged and dark inside, and that's sort of what makes him mysterious.

Style is a happy, friendly, humble, laid-back and well-reasoned creative intellectual. I like the way he is open to accumulating the material of other PUAs and I believe that is what allows him to supersede the energy of Mystery. Style has good consistent game, but I sense his inner nice guy is preventing him from doing many fun out-on-a-limb things that would seem uncalibrated but which he could get away with just asserting a stronger frame. That isn't strictly necessary since playing it close to the rules gets the job done, but I know these guys always want to improve their game. No wait, that's untrue, he got out and committed to an LTR with Lisa. Or did they break up?

Method man

2009-01-21T08:30:00.000-08:00

Energy is the the power of verbal and bodily expression such as intonation and smile. Affection is proximity and touch. The affection curve must follow the energy curve. Affection greater than the energy you exhibit expresses neediness. Energy greater than affection gets frustrating for both parties after a while and is the result of insecurity, so you need to follow up energy with affection. When your energy level drops, pull back and when it rises, advance.

NLP can be summed up as accumulation of previous emotion. To do this, one must simply bring forth earlier associations to emotions. In earlier time one can build strong associations by repetition in order to bring them back more easily later. You can actually talk to a girl about your earlier conquests to bring up your own energy level. If you are confident that she won't mind hearing how you did another girl then she won't mind. If you are less confident, you can still visualize your scenario but just tell her it was your friend who did it. I find it's hard to use NLP to get a girl to talk about her previous experiences, but using NLP on myself works great. It's hard because you need to start with abstract questions and then dig deeper into one of her concrete experiences so she starts visualizing. I think yourself is where you need to start to get NLP flowing. Insight from the inside is deeper than black box prodding. Another trick of NLP is sentences with implicit assumptions that work like self-fulfilling prophesies.

I should make up good openers for taxi queues and kebab shops for getting girls to afterparties in case I didn't win any over inside the bars. One could open a taxi line by asking if this is the end or beginning of the line, to insinuate that one is going to wait for a taxi and then start saying something like "Hmm.. perhaps I'm stupid to stand in line here waiting when I could just call my friend and have an afterparty. Maybe you would like to join me?", but one needs to demonstrate higher value before suggesting an afterparty.

I should make an afterparty call list of phone numbers where girls write their name, number and cut-off time for last call. The more numbers on the list, the more social proof and the easier to get more numbers. I could make it more desirable by saying that I don't call all the girls for one afterparty because there isn't space for too many people so don't be disappointed if I don't call tonight. I think having a specific purpose that implicitly requires a phone number is better than directly asking for a phone number.

Scale rant

2009-01-21T05:22:00.001-08:00

Code quality can be measured on different levels of zoom or scale. There's the composition of the expression in the current line, the partition of related blocks inside a function, functions inside a module and intermodule dependencies. The metacognitive process of controlling code quality needs to contain awareness of scales. Design is a name for large scale composition and implementation is a name for small scale composition.

Scale is a very general concept. Different aspects can be elaborated by looking at something on different scales. Hmm.. fractals can have a simple mathematical formula behind them, but look very different on different visual scales. If you started with the visuals of a fractal and wanted to compress its description, how would you do it? If you have a complex behavior, how do you look at it on different scales and merge the descriptions on different scales into one, or at least compress it as much as possible? One could try the usual form of abstraction, by identifying common features in the descriptions on different scales and writing down a general form that can be reused by those descriptions to make the total description shorter. One could use a general compression algorithm, like LZW, but what about AI compression algorithms that preserve structure? By preservation of structure I mean keeping the description human readable. But perhaps the shortest description is not the one that can be read and understood by a human in the shortest time with a sufficient resulting capability of solving relevant problems. This isn't even taking into account optimalization for different kinds of specialized intelligence. We could do a comparative hypothesis testing of different descriptive structures by measuring the time a number of individuals require to understand a subject, measured by exercises, and take the best mean time to optimalize for a certain target group for which the sampled individuals are representative.

The individual must always translate information to fit his internal representation. It's called learning. Communication seeks to minimalize the amount of translation needed and loss in translation, which can probably be assumed to grow or decrease with amount of translation. Higher intelligence increases the number of possible translations of underspecified information. There is a degree of fuzziness going from algorithmically reproducible science to inspirational art. Precise knowledge is easier for the rational mind to apply, but fuzzy knowledge has broader applications given sufficient intelligence to fill in the blanks. The value of inspiration or knowledge is the time difference between solving a problem with or without it. Fuzzy knowledge with the blanks filled in can always be turned into precise descriptive knowledge for the problem at hand given sufficient metacognition.
Stop.

Feed or succeed?

2009-01-18T19:00:00.000-08:00

I lead. People are cattle. They gather to feed on me. Their love gives mostly a sense of accomplishment and alpha maleness. Their affection is just a mechanical response to the things I say and do to them. It's just a game. It's not real. I get it. They give what I ask and more. Domination and total annihilation.

I follow. People are gods. I imitate their behavior and long to have their properties. They don't give their love away because they can tell I need it so much and so I want it all the more. Their affection is all I cherish and dream about. It's you and me. It's very real. I don't get it. Nobody cares. Average frustrated chump.

So I dominate. Perhaps in a longer relation an interaction of alternating domination and submission will give both success and feelings. Mostly the two seem contrary. Success is fun, but it's not deep. I start to fear loss when I sink into deeper feelings. Perhaps if I train myself for shallow success for a while I will relinquish fear and overlay my success-inducing behavior when they happen.

Girls, prepare to be pwned. Don't be surprised when I'm rooting your shell. When you're feeling crazy it's my root kit fucking with your head and there's nothing you can do about it so just give in already. It's my world and you know it.

Kayden Kross is the perfect porn star

2009-01-17T07:21:00.000-08:00

This is a review of my favourite porn stars at the moment. Of course, tastes change and you grow tired of them, but these have been permanent for quite a while now.

Kayden Kross
After years of watching porn I've finally found a flawless porn star: Kayden Kross. Many porn stars have repulsive faces but decent bodies (but often flawed with unnaturally large breasts; a grotesque turn-off). Not so with this one. She's also one of few blondes able to compete with brunettes. Kayden reminds me of Kara from Smallville. In addition to an angelic body and face, she's got the same cheerful disposition as Kara when she's having sex and her body language screams confidence and an inner calm that no other porn star can even begin to compete with. Sometimes she even laughs during sex.

I'm linking a softcore video. She's got hardcore videos too, perhaps surprising for a beauty such as her. She could easily be a model, so I guess she must just enjoy sex that much. I prefer her hair straight instead of curly as it is in this video.

http://youporn.com/watch/267171/kayden-kross-is-simply-stunning/

Naomi
The prize for a piece of well-oiled smooth action sex machine booty goes to Naomi. You should see that ass just go round and round churning your guts out like a fucking cement mixer. You need a robust dick to survive a treatment from her hungry behind. She's a regular sex kitten with the appetite of a wolf.

http://youporn.com/watch/4715/naomi-awesome-booty/

Nella Mirta
She's got a cute face with that fox-like cleverness and slightly evil gleam of secret knowledge. She's only done one hard-core film, but her area of expertise is erotic dancing, for which she gets an honourable mention.

http://youporn.com/watch/20455/mirta-stripping/

A great hot chick
This nameless one has the cutest alluring smile and girl-next-door look of any female I've seen engaged in sexual activity on tape. Her tits are slightly too large and unoptimally shaped but it's not a major flaw. She reminds me of someone I was in love with, so I guess this one is rather subjective. Comment on this post if you can find more videos of her.

http://youporn.com/watch/120066/a-great-hot-chick-masturbating-in-many-ways/

Fluctuations

2009-01-10T20:56:00.001-08:00

I was having rather intense emotional fluctuations in the course of one night. It's always a combination of environment and the shape my body and mind is in. Girls are modulating these strong feelings up and down, so I tend to link them together and think that I fall in and out of love with several different girls in one night, but I guess the girls are just connecting and letting loose the things that live inside me. They give me shots of love. I fell out of it and into some darkness later. I expect that. After feeling intensely good there's usually feeling intensely bad. They equalize each other. No need for alcohol when these much stronger fluctuating feelings happen to me anyway. I consider girls sufficient stimuli. I think it's hard for people to tell that I'm feeling these things, because I rarely try to express them as I'm usually too busy being inside myself and feeling them, but I guess I give off at least some involuntary signals that seem to either attract or repel girls quite forcefully depending on their nature. I seem to enjoy hurting myself by rejecting myself from girls that are attracted to me and that I'm attracted to. It's a hard habit to break. I'm a bit damaged in that way. Sorry about that. Sometimes I just want a girl that I can hold and cry with, but she must be hot and cute. Other times I want to kiss or fuck. Kiss, cry, laugh and fuck all together would be perfect.

The moon is a harsh mistress

2009-01-07T14:14:00.000-08:00

I dreamed that I was in an asylum for lunatics. There was a brunette I knew there. Was she as crazy and interesting as me? Our asylum was selected to be sent off in a high-tech spaceship to colonize another planet, like British prisoners were sent off to Australia. We hit a planet, a sandy and rocky place. Much more rocky than Dune, with hills but no really high mountains. Our spaceship automatically deployed our settlement underground. Later we established an observatory, with a huge dome on top. More spaceships from earth arrived, a cute blonde on one of them. The brunette and the new blonde were somehow the same girl morphing, never both present at once, much like places often blend into one another in the peculiar way of dreams.

We fought wars against tall black humanoid invaders with long guns in our cold futuristic dark underground steel bunkers, running from room to room, breathing quietly and listening for footsteps. We won in the end. I became entranced with this girl as we fought and our paths crossed again and again. I looked at her sitting at another table during our crude tasteless meals in an ambience not unlike 1984.

The observatory was on top of a rocky hill at the end of a precipitous unstable sandflooded road we put feeble trust in our AI-driven military buslike vehicle to navigate within negligible margins on the side of success. None of us wanted the responsibility, so we'd all rather die together and blame the computer. The ride was one of many hazardous experiences shared with the cute blonde. We never acknowledged our attraction; there was just this tacit agreement that we were in this fight together. Our society evolved. We constructed a spaceship to go back to earth and tell our stories. I was selected to go. She was not.

We took the precipitous road up to the observatory next to the launch site. As the spaceship rocketed out of the atmosphere, I felt my thoughts leave my body. My body fell down like a sack of modestly sized round vegetables and my invisible apparition through which I now perceived the world drifted back to our new home planet and dwelled near this girl to be with her as an unseen ghost for the remainder of all time.

Multiple streams

2009-01-05T10:12:00.000-08:00

Cause
Sometimes, especially when I'm sleep deprived, and also after being at LAN parties with many people playing different music on their speakers, an unconsciously driven playback of music starts in my head. The phenomenon doesn't happen very often, mostly when I've been up 24 hours or more and I've been doing something intellectually engaging and listening to music at the same time. It usually happens when I'm lying in bed relaxing and planning to go to sleep.

Description
The playback is a medley, merge and improvisation upon many music pieces I've heard before. I think it's more often classical music. I can hear many different tunes part of the same piece at the same time, like many instruments in a symphony. It's very beautiful: More beautiful than any music I've heard from a source outside my mind, but I guess that is to be expected, since the mind uses music I've heard and customizes it to itself dynamically as I listen. Sometimes it goes into strongly recognizable patterns from music I've heard before and sometimes it's highly improvisational and I can only recognize certain elements of style. It usually starts out with a familiar song and then goes into improvisation.

Reproduction?
I wrote a poem about the phenomenon when I was in high school, where I expressed a wish that there was recording equipment that could read the music off my mind. I don't think I could express what I hear in musical notation even with years of training because it rolls by much to quickly and I don't remember the music afterwards. I would also have to be able to cause the phenomenon to happen consistently without unhealthily depriving myself of sleep. I think it would also be physically impossible to play in real time all the different tunes/parts of the music piece I hear, since I have too few hands.

Inspirations
I'll try to listen to several different music tracks at once more often. I challenge the preconception that one should listen to only one music stream at the time. It seems I separate and listen to only the most emotionally prominent music while more or less tuning out the others, but it's interesting how the different tracks pop in and out of consciousness with variations in volume and emotion. I wonder if the positive emotional feedback from being able to perceive more music will make me better at doing multiple things at once. At least I'll probably get better at distinguishing the pertinent conversation in a noisy room. You can only be fully conscious of one thing at the time, but you can do a lot of things unconsciously if you've learned them so that they don't need attention, like thinking or talking while driving a car. It may be that you do all the things more slowly, but perhaps you'll build a higher capacity over time. I'm used to reading while listening to music and coding. I wonder if I can listen to music while watching a movie, or play movie sound together with music. I wonder if listening to porn movie sound while reading will boost or detract from how much you remember of what you read or if it's just too distracting. I don't care too much what the consequences are. I just like to experiment.

Ideas for the clique problem

2009-01-04T04:48:00.000-08:00

This blog post would be so much more illustrative with images, but I describe my ideas early on in case I choose not to explore them further. I'm not aiming for clarity here. This post is mostly to help my own memory, but you may receive some inspiration. The 3 first paragraphs are more computer science while the 2 last paragraphs are more psychology.

Representation(1)
I wanted a representation for a graph that immediately tells me explicitly what the maximum clique in a graph is, with a bijection between this representation and any graph. It could be useful for generating test sets(2) of input graphs and correct output for the clique problem, and perhaps for thinking about isomorphism and algorithms for the clique problem. My representation can be constructed by finding the maximum clique or cliques with n nodes in a graph and for each make a regular polygon with n edges. The n corners of the regular polygon now represent the nodes. For overlapping cliques, identify points on the polygons representing the different cliques. For edges connecting different cliques not part of a clique connect the corners of the polygons representing them. I haven't thought it through yet. It might not work.

1: Represent: A word that has been so overused in rap songs, that it has lost all meaning.
2: I wonder if test frameworks for NP-complete problems exist.

A divide and conquer, binary search and dynamic programming approach
Think of nodes as 1-sets, 2-sets, 4-sets, ... Check for the clique property in a k-set by dividing it into k/4-sets and check that the k/4-sets have been previously verified as cliques and that the 6 connections between the four k/4-sets are satisfied. Binary search is because k is powers of 2, divide and conquer is because you divide the k-sets into k/4-sets and dynamic programming is because you can reuse connections between k/4-sets in different k-sets containing the same k/4-sets. Further investigation is needed to determine if the reuse actually speeds up computation or is just a roundabout way of doing it brute force and which partitions into k-sets are most efficient. I also need to investigate graphs of size not a power of 2. Graphs can always be extended with disconnected nodes to have number of nodes a power of 2, but perhaps one only bounds the clique size between two adjacent powers of 2.

Test frameworks and success statistics
If there are many different algorithms that each are faster or more approximation algorithms that are more accurate for specific versions of the clique problem, then a general framework to test, combine and generate statistics for the algorithms would be useful. The statistics could be space and time needed as a function of problem size and perhaps other characteristics of the graph and whether the algorithm returns the correct answer.

Global considerations
Do the smartest people in the world choose to work on the most challenging problems or the problems with the potentially most useful applications? I'm not convinced. There are people who memorize thousands of digits of pi. I'm all for improving memory, but why don't they memorize something more useful? I believe that variation of thinkers is needed, but nothing can come of it without a certain focus. Granted, beating the Guiness record on memorization of pi is a sure way to some fame. All it takes is time and work. Whether you gain fame by trying to solve P ?= NP is more uncertain. Do the smartest people in the world want fame and fortune? They should realize it's fairly useless for other purposes than hedonistic pleasure. Our solar system is going to collapse after a few billion years, so in a sense everything is temporary and durability of ideas is no real reason to work on great challenges. Perhaps one could say that one's life is equally (un)important to the grand scheme of things as the grand scheme of things is (un)important to one's life. I guess the problem must be motivating in itself. I find the NP-complete problems motivating because of all the reductions that are akin to analogies or metaphors, which I consider key to intelligence, so they provide many inspired ways of attacking the same problem. Also, intelligence is not a guarantee of success. Self-discipline, motivation, practice and persistence are crucial. Perhaps smart people understand that they can be relatively lazy and still have a great life.

Shoulders of giants
It has been proved that a general class of proofs called natural proofs cannot be used to prove P != NP. I wonder if similar efforts have been used to discard a class of algorithms that cannot be used to prove P = NP. I'm guessing that if everyone collaborated to describe and classify their failed attempts at writing algorithms for NP-complete problems we could work to discard greater and greater parts of the algorithm space. Granted, the space of algorithms is huge, but the process could still provide more insight and bring us all slowly and iteratively closer through the hard work of many. Test frameworks and general algorithms, for example genetic algorithms, for selecting and mating other algorithms would also be nice.

Relative coordinate systems

2009-01-04T03:47:00.000-08:00

I was reading Joel on software, and one of the questions he asks in a job interview is how to write a program that projects a triangle onto a plane. That sidetracked me into a foray on coordinate systems.

I started like this. Ok. What does projection mean? It means you look at at something on a 2D surface that simulates(1) the light sent out by a 3D object. Your point of view is a point in 3D space. Looking at the triangle, which is 3 points in 3D space, creates 3 lines, the joining of your point of view with the points of the rectangle, respectively. The plane is behind the triangle. If you want the light(2) from the plane to appear as a 3D triangle, the light needs to be sent along the same lines as it would had you been looking at a real triangle in 3D space, so the projection of the triangle onto the plane is merely the intersection of the 3 aforementioned(3) lines with the plane.

(1): Or emulates. I don't remember the distinction.
(2): Or lack of light. More specifically, the degree of light.
(3): Strange that beforementioned and aforementioned means the same thing.

Ok, now to solve the problem, we need a mathematical representation of the plane, the 3 lines and the 4 points. A plane can be represented as an equation with 3 variables ax + by + cz + d = 0, as a function of 2 variables z = f(x, y), as 3 points not all 3 on a line lying in the plane, as 2 lines that don't coincide. The equation representation seems a good fit. Equations for the lines can be calculated from the point of view and the 3 points of the triangle. Then solving is a matter of combining the equations and solving. At this point I became confident I could do it and lost interest and began thinking of other representations of planes and points.

A plane can be represented as 2 numbers denoting rotations on 2 axes. The most common coordinate systems are polar coordinates and cartesian coordinates. A point in 3D space can be represented as 2D polar coordinates in x and y plus a cartesian z coordinate. The representations differ in utility on how easy the symbols are to calculate with for different problems and this is what motivates different representations. I began thinking of weird representations, delving into mathematical art beyond usefulness, but it was a creative process that opened my mind to possibilities I can explore later if I feel that calculations are unwieldy in a known coordinate system. I also made some metacognitive observations regarding creativity.

I asked, what is a point in space? It can be seen as a movement away from a point of reference called origo. The movement can be represented by polar coordinates and cartesian coordinates. Now think of polar coordinates as a circle and a mark on that circle growing to infinity or shrinking to a point. Then we think of cartesian coordinates as a square that grows and shrinks in the same way. Our 2 numbers are then the size of our shape and the percentage travelled around the shape from a fixed point on our shape. By abstracting our description, or making it fuzzy, allowing interpretation, we enable ourselves to see that any shape that can shrink to a point, origo, and grow to infinity in all directions while touching all points in between can be used as a coordinate system. We could now proceed to write down a precise mathematical definition of such a shape. It seems related to topology, and I wondered if growing shapes with more holes than one could be used and what numbers would be needed for choosing your path at crossroads of lines in the shape. Calculations might be very awkward for awkward shapes, but perhaps useful for very obscure problems.

I then thought of 3D space with degrees of red, green and blue on the axes, and cutting out a 3D object such as a sphere in that space and projecting its colored surface onto a plane and whether it would look cool. I also thought of how various known curves such as a sinus curve embedded in a 2D plane would look if it's plane was rotated in 3D space and the curve then projected onto another plane. I don't think it's too hard to write a program that does these things if you want to make art or look at it. I don't know if many professional mathematicians are interested in mathematical art. I've certainly seen a lot of mathematical art on the Internet.

I thought of the relation between art and artificial. Creating artificial problems and solving them could be considered art. Pure mathematics is not primarily concerned with utility, but has had great applications later, such as public cryptography. So it starts out as art, but becomes useful once someone sees applications. I guess art that has an explicitly described rational process behind its creation is more likely to be useful later on. I think that mathematically generated images as art could motivate more people to study mathematics. Perhaps you would say "for the wrong reasons", but I don't think there are any wrong reasons to study anything. I do remember the pretty fractals in our high school math books, so someone has probably thought along the same pedagogical lines. I was more of a symbol manipulation fan(1), but everything helps.

(1): Heh. I remember in high school that I refused to understand the proof of Pythagoras, a*a + b*b = c*c, because it used pictures of geometrical figures as part of the proof instead of symbols. My intuition was probably that if a computer cannot check it then it is not a proof. My intuition coincides with axiomatic systems for geometry and computer proof theory.

I also thought of some other generalizations of the shape coordinate systems. Polar coordinates, or circle sphere has a fixed point east from origo that the angle is measured from. This fixed point could instead be made a function of the distance from origo, that is, the radius of the circle. This idea applies to any shape. It would be cool to see how translation to this rotating shape coordinate system would transform known shapes and images. Einstein's seminal paper on relativity contains some ideas pertaining to relative coordinate systems, some with constant velocity relative to each other and others rotating(1) and accelerating(2), though for different and more useful purposes.

1: Corresponding to non-fixed starting point for angles on the polar coordinate circle in our case.
2: Corresponding to a non-linear distance(3), function.
3: Circle radius.

At this point I got tired with Euclidean spaces and wanted to apply my thoughts of representation to the NP-complete clique problem. Watch out for my next post.

2009, here I come!

2009-01-03T12:49:00.001-08:00

Time management
I will become conscious about my time usage and priorities by spending 5 minutes after every 3 hours, or ~ 3% of my time, writing a short summary of what I've been doing and whether or not my activites are related to my long term goals. I will use kalarm as alarm. I will carry around a notebook and pen when outside my house. I will add and modify time management rules based on my log. I might read Getting Things Done in spite of my arrogant prejudice that I'm smart enough to tailor better rules for my subjective needs.

Intellect
I will find a new long term software development project with challenging depth, preferably related to algorithms and/or artificial intelligence. My current candidates are attempting to write a program for solving IQ tests and writing reports on analyzing and generalizing classes of failed attempts at solving NP-complete problems in P time.

I will participate in Top Coder or similar to improve my problem solving skills and work up a motivation for studying classic algorithms. I will seek inspiration in my algorithm books and on Wikipedia for solving the problems.

I will study logic and category theory regardless of whether I'm enrolled in University and I will work on my metacognitive skills while doing so.

For news, I will continue to read New York Times for vocabulary and diversity, Scientific American and other science magazines to satisfy my curiosity on intelligence, mind and brain, Joel on Software and others to improve my knowledge of higher level software development and management and to become more goal-conscious regarding work.

Girls
I will go out on the town every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night that I'm not otherwise occupied and train my communication skills with girls, to have better confidence, perhaps find a worthy partner, as a motivator for generally positive behavioral changes and to satisfy my socialization needs. I will recruit one or more wing men.

Motivation
In January 2009, I will masturbate no more than once every Sunday. It will be an exercise in discipline and I will determine if excess sexual energy gives me even more motivation and drive to pursue intellectual goals and more energy for interacting with women. I will carefully examine my thoughts and actions for symptoms of sexual frustration. On February 1st I will decide whether to continue the pattern, to increase or decrease masturbation frequency and/or move to Thursday. It's unlikely that I will start to consume alcohol again, but if so I will have a 3 month grace period between my publicly announced decision and rationale for doing so and actually doing so, during which time any change of heart requires a new 3 month grace period.

Nourishment
I will only eat chocolate, chips and similar unhealthy snacks on Friday and Saturday. I will continue my diet of nuts, vegetables, fruit, meat, fish, rice, pasta and non-alcoholic beer. I will take cod-liver oil every morning and fluorine pills every night.

I will continue to expand my cooking skills. I have a new Sushi cook book and an Asian foods book. I will bring one of the books in my backpack when shopping and determine where I can buy the articles needed. I might buy a rice cooker for the sushi rice. I will locate and buy whole-grain rice.

Exercise
I walk around a lot in the city when trying to pick up girls. I consider this sufficient exercise.
I enjoy incidental exercise. A trained body is useful for solving physical problems and have many useful side-effects, but I don't enjoy training when the physical problems are artificial and have too little intellectual content. If I feel like it I will take a walk in the woods and mountain now and then, but I will not force myself to do so. I will consider taking up either dance lessons and/or martial arts again.

Entertainment
I will continue to listen to music every time I'm in the vicinity of my computer. I will try to explore new music and renew my collection. I will continue to read challenging science fiction literature, stimulating adventure literature, follow my TV series and watch the occasional movie. I will watch more documentaries and Discovery Channel.

A rant on duality of associative emotion, what the word love is and ranting itself

2009-01-01T14:14:00.000-08:00

Welcome to my overtired rant. Have fun! Rant: To suddenly give a long speech that usually results in rambling and repeating of nonsense.

There are basic wired feelings such as temperature. There are also slightly higher feelings, such as attraction, wired to certain combinations of touch, visuals and smells. Then there are emotions related to ideas that have been created by associating to basic feelings. Then there are ideas relating to other ideas related to other ideas which in turn are associated with basic feelings. To what degree is the emotional content of ideas in personal history affected by current impressions and to what degree does previous emotional content of ideas affect the emotional content of ideas related to newly acquired impressions? Simplified: Does the music you listen to control your mood or do you let your mood control the music you listen to? What are the effects of choosing one or the other as your modus operandi?

I'm also interested in narrowing and broadening of emotional scopes. What determines whether you like all kinds of food, women or music or specialize in particular kinds? Can associations be reverted and manipulated to expand your choices? I like nearly all kinds of food and music, some worse than others but none really intolerable, but I'm very picky about women. Food and music don't have feelings for you, so it's easy to explore them, get to know them and start to like them all. Why do I have such great barriers against letting most women in? Are those barriers useful or detrimental? What do I really want? Are my emotional associations to female beauty too specialized and based on what is societally accepted as modern beauty and my personal history? Is this hindering me from exploring and should I override them rationally and try creating emotions for less attractive women more based on deeper personality and interaction in the expectation that my emotional associations eventually will override my concepts of beauty? I tend to not act on any chemistry I have with a girl unless I've rationally decided that she's sufficient on all accounts, but of course, my non-verbal and implicit communication says that I'm attracted to her even though I'm not considering her for anything. I'm getting better at being friendly and flirting with a girl without really having any intention for me and her, but I find it hard. It really helps to think that she wants me, and I'm just giving her some of what she wants and she will be happy for what she got even if I might decide to stop giving it to her after a little investigation. I'm way too loyal. I need to be more selfish.

I think that all degrees of attraction exist, varying in intensity over time and duration. I'm liking very much to explain everything with continuous models currently, whereas previously I liked to explain everything with discrete models. In truth there is a duality of perspectives, both valid and useful for different things. There are just models and their applications. That again is just functionalism or utilitarianism. But what else is there than thoughts and the actions they bring about? Love, being in love, desire, playfulness. They are all just qualitative concepts that describe characteristics of certain areas of the attraction spectrum. Are there really distinct evolutionary concepts of pair-bonding and random reproduction or are they just terms for certain traits on the edges of a spectrum of behavior patterns? Do you wake up some day and love someone because you or your subconscious decided to, or do you just realize you love someone with certainty after a certain threshold of signs have made your conscious attention? It's just a word. It doesn't mean anything and still everything. It's a really imprecise word, because it could mean very different things to very different people, by which I mean that people have different thresholds or basis for saying it. One possible meaning is "I'm all in". Is it a word describing the feelings you have, is it a promise of how you are going to act or continue acting in the future, a symbol of commitment, decision, normative or descriptive? Since the word is so fuzzy, and it's impossible to know what it really means, perhaps one should think of the consequences saying it will have instead of what it means. I love you. I've never said that to anyone. Not in the serious meaning anyways. It feels great thinking of an imaginary dream girl and testing saying it to her in my mind. But I really think it's too explicit. It's not proof. It's redundant. If you love her you should prove it implicitly, not say it. But I know she would love to hear it anyways. I would. But people marry and divorce all the time. What does "I love you" mean? When is its meaning diluted beyond redemption? It can obviously not be taken as a promise if you trust statistics. Or perhaps it can, just that many people break their promises. But that's really the same thing, said in a different way. When you think of all these things, what can you really trust in words? They can at most only be affirmations of what you know to be true. Touch and subtle displays of affection is the truth of attraction, not words. I used to think that words describing my feelings would make everything all right, but they're really useless. I rarely write poetry anymore, but if I do I'm conscious that I write mostly for myself. All that words can do is be implicit indicators of the mentality and ideas behind them, but they need to be always coupled with action, and the true message always between the lines. They say that when you're ready to say it, you'll know. No need to think about it, because you'll know intuitively. But are you not then just putting yourself at the mercy of fleeting emotions? You need to think it many times to be certain, and saying it should be a little scary, so that you think twice before saying it. Perhaps one shouldn't put too much weight on a few so simple words. What is language but a tool of communication? I could debate with myself forever and I'd never get anywhere. It's better to just experiment, but I love thinking.

I think all the time. Perhaps I'm not really all that intelligent by nature. I just like to think more than other people and that makes me better at it for having more practice. So motivation is key. But doesn't everyone think all the time? Perhaps it's the things I like to think of or the ways that I do so that makes me different. I can write lots of incomprehensible bullshit with incomprehensible driving purposes and still be intelligent, just not goal-oriented towards a goal someone else cares about. Could it be then that I misjudge the intelligence of others by misjudging their purposes? It's easier to judge the intelligence of people who are rational, goal-oriented and scientific. Patience and persistence are more important virtues than intelligence anyways. It's fairly useless to evaluate abstract qualities of people without knowing for what purposes you need them to have those qualities. Everything is relative.

Why am I really writing all this? Because I like to see my thoughts in written form. Other than that I don't know, but if I ask why, I start asking why am I here, what I am doing, what should I do and what is the meaning of life? Probably very few people read this crap anyway. Everyone is too absorbed with their own thoughts. Ranting makes me feel good, and exhausted in the end. I wonder if ranting could be made into a social communication concept. Too much disturbance from others' ideas and too much energy spent on perceiving and fitting into the social context to get into the flow maybe. I should practice thinking aloud in order to be able to ramble. I'd have to start by saying my thoughts aloud, but isn't talking to oneself a symptom of being crazy? But it isn't really that different from writing, I think, or singing for that matter. Heh. I could sing my thoughts aloud. That would be really weird. Heh. I should try it. It would then be easier to allow others to listen in on my thoughts later by just doing what I've practiced. It's just like singing in public becomes much easier if you're used to singing for yourself. You don't really care that much whether people like it or not, because you're not doing it so much for them as for yourself. Bah.. I'm so tired. Must go to bed.

Metacognitive thoughts on learning, music, math and abstractions

2008-12-25T10:12:00.000-08:00

I became conscious today of how I press a tangent more gently when I'm less confident that it is the correct one, because I feel annoyed, getting negative learning feedback, if it is wrong. Vice versa, I press it down with great force if I'm confident that it is the right one, because the expectancy of positive feedback is greater. It's the risk management of learning. The same is at play when you are picking up girls, or anything else related to learning that has negative and positive reinforcement. The fact that I recognize this abstract concept of risk management and can identify examples of it in widely varying aspects is something I consider key to all intelligence. One need not always be explicitly conscious of the abstract concept. By here naming it as "risk management" I make it explicit, but I can see that many particulars of an abstraction have isomorphic aspects(1) and that they are related without giving their collection a name. The mind does this associative lookup of isomorphic structures, or finding analogies, very quickly and I wonder if the process is sequential on a very smart data structure or if it is a massively parallel process on a less clever data structure. I hope it is sequential on a smart data structure because then it is easier to reproduce on cheap computer equipment.

1: They have certain properties with the same structure.

I believe that this metacognitive consciousness arose because of breadth of examples within an abstraction: doing as diverse things as playing music and picking up girls and recognizing the similarities helps to eliminate that which is specific to those two particulars and retain that which is common but unspecific to them. The more different the particulars of an abstraction are, the better they map out the abstraction. An important consequence of this to learning is, for example, that you do not need to do all the exercises in your textbook to learn the subject, only as many and as different ones as to map out the abstraction you are trying to learn. A good metacognitive task is then how to select the optimal set of exercises for learning the subject sufficiently. This depends on the intelligence of the learner, which is why an author who provides an abundance of exercises and similarly textual examples is accessible to a larger audience while an author who provides less is less accessible but more efficient for people who can stomach it. I think a lot about these things, and do not worry that spending most of my time thinking about them might give me a bad grade in the particular subject at hand, because my goals are more ambitious than that. I have studied mathematics because I believed the degree of insight into the metacognitive processes of learning abstractions is potentially higher since the subject at hand, mathematics, is very abstract and has many isomorphic knowledge structures, but I'm starting to guess that depth into this one subject is insufficient. A greater breadth of subjects is needed.

A week ago I booted up my laptop and started playing Chopin. I tried to reproduce some of the songs, with less focus on trying to play great music than to think about the process of playing piano by ear. I discovered how some of the songs are easy to play poorly, because they have low discrete complexity, that is, it's easy to find the correct tangents, but their true complexity lies in the continous domains of timing and pressure, and this is where one can express subjective emotion. It's also very beneficial to be on a continous scale of mostly positive reinforcement with regards to learning. Pushing the wrong tangents is an annoyance and a negative reinforcement, but I'm rarely conscious of it if I use the wrong timing or pressure, because it's off by amounts I'm not conscious of, or I would have corrected it dynamically. Thus playing something on a continous learning scale can be challenging without being annoying. I think one should aim for expressing subjective emotion in music because we already have the technology to sufficiently reproduce accurately plays by the masters. I'll grant that the acoustics of live instruments are very different from speakers, and much more pleasurable, but for me this doesn't provide sufficent motivation to reproduce a performance. Another view to take is of course the one that performing is a rational process, where one aims to learn something to perfection despite the annoyance, and adds the emotional subjectivity as the last step after learning it. Music and in general all art is about emotion, even if it is emotion through intellectualization and mental masturbation or socialization on top of the art subject at hand. Functionally, I tend to think of emotions as the control scheme of learning, and so art becomes an artificial problem created to stimulate and satisfy the abundant processes in us related to learning. I tend to take a radical stance in all things, so since I consider art to be purely about emotion, I often prefer instant gratification, keeping it rather simple, but since I'm now conscious that I think like this and of my interest in the learning processes, I might contradict myself and start rationalizing learning music in order to become more proficient. I usually prefer to focus the bulk of my learning processes for utilitaristic purposes and keep the complexity of my art down to the minimum that creates the level of emotion I would like to express or experience. Most often I just play simple right-hand melodies on the piano by ear, because it is sufficiently stimulating emotionally. If I wanted more intellectual stimulation I'd probably do something of more utility.

I've also been thinking a little about the efficiency of representation of notes, visual symbols, as the representation of audio. When I was younger I wished the notes were letters and numbers, but I realize now that even if this would be easier in the beginning, it would limit the speed of performance by direct reading more for advanced players. It would probably help for playing by memorization though if one thinks better with those familiar symbols. Packing 2 properties, duration and pitch, into one visual symbol, is more efficient and intuitive to process. There is also the isomorphism between visual symbols going up and down and the pitch going up and down, which is beneficial because one can use it to more accurately pinpoint the tangents due to the extra information of their relative position to other tangents mirrored in the visual symbols. When the notes are close, one can use this to find the other tangents using the delta from the previous notes, instead of absolutely recognizing the correspondence between visual symbol and tangent. Of course, someone made design decisions when they chose to use notes to represent music, but I think it's unlikely that they described their rationale for doing so or how conscious they were of those design decisions. Someone has probably guessed at the design decisions in posterity, however, so I can probably read about it on Wikipedia, but that's little bit besides my focus, although it might be interesting in itself.

Another question that popped up is whether the partitioning of the scale and what is considered harmonious is more nature or more nurture. I think this needs a scientific study to decide and probably someone has done some work on it and I can probably find and read about it on Wikipedia and the Internet.

On another note related to abstractions, I've noticed that the key to solving a lot of riddles posed in social situations is being conscious about challenging preconceptions and implicit assumptions created by underspecified information. For example, a man in 1990 is 10 years, and the man in 1995 is 5 years. One assumes falsely and implicitly by the time associations made that the 4 digit numbers denote years in our calendar after Christ, while they are years before Christ. The sentence doesn't claim anything about the numbers. They could be humidity measurements on Mars for all we know. Solving those kind of riddles thus becomes a simple matter of going through each piece of the riddle description and asking whether it is underspecified. I realized that the numbers were underspecified when I heard the riddle, but didn't bother to think too hard of a likely completed specification. The important lesson of the day is to recognize underspecification and not whether you can make up a plausible specification.

Music, art and mathematics. That makes me think of that book "Gödel, Escher, Bach". I only read a little about it on Wikipedia. I have that book on my toread list.

Bad girls

2008-12-24T01:51:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of girls out there who are nice, cute and smiling and mostly I want to cuddle with and kiss them. It's good for confidence to have them smile and so most guys with low confidence go for this kind of girl, mostly including me in the past. The girls who are cutest are probably the ones who are most sexually starved with repressed naughtiness, because most guys can't help being overly nice to them. But I'm guessing most of those nice ones really want a tiger too. It's human nature.

I'm discerning another type. The one that looks at me with mean, skeptical, squinting eyes, that's angry with sexual tension, that argues and criticizes my terminology and talks about fucking like it "ain't no thang" (even though it is). That turns me on and makes me want to take them. It brings out the tiger in me when I have sufficient confidence, because I often seem to mirror personalities. I'd like to meet more girls like this. Like Faith in Buffy. She's tough on the outside, but I believe there's always a soft core you can bring out with patience and affection. Maybe it's possible to be so damaged so as to be beyond emotional reach, but I'll consider that a challenge.

I really like both good and bad girls, but prefer one over the other depending on my mood and confidence. It seems bad girls are more scarce, which sort of makes them more valuable by supply and demand.

X

2008-12-23T11:43:00.000-08:00

I have two new friends: let's call them Idealistic Emotion and Artful Reason. They are members of something called X, which I like to think of intuitively as "that which people like them are examples of". It's too vague to be put down in words. In one sense, X is just the boundary between us and them from evolutionary psychology. I'm not sure if X is all of them or just certain aspects of them, but I don't think they have defined the concept clearly or strictly either. I am similar to them in many ways, and so being similar I consider myself more or less a member of X. I don't think it's the kind of club you ask permission to join. It's just something you are or you are not.

Emotion is obsessed with feeling, and he does so all the time, and it comes easy for him. He is art, music and poetry and paints his life with broad impressionistic strokes and uses abstract word constellations which are given very subjective meaning for every reader and true meaning only for himself. He realizes what he is doing. For him I proscribe turning his passion to science, because it will give him a clearer outlook and allow him to shape his future and not just flow along in the river of impressions. He's diluting himself in matters of no permanent substance. Don't get lost in all that beauty, inner and outer, and forget that the world is a harsh, cold place where one should struggle to survive and do better.

Artful Reason is always thinking and very analytic but he's applying it a lot for mental masturbation, not focusing enough on the big picture and he's missing out on many feelings. I see myself in him a lot. I proscribe for him the same things as I proscribe for me: pulling out his issues by the root with introspection, arduous practice and more courage to live in the moment and test his hypotheses. Less stimulating substitutes like alcohol and tobacco will probably give more motivation for following long-term productive goals and a stronger sense of direction, but it's of course a personal choice. I hope he realizes that he's mostly just boosting his ego when daydreaming about exaggerated powers of control. It's most likely a synthetic psychological structure to compensate for things that are missing in his life. This is not necessarily bad if it helps bring about useful actions, but don't spend too much time weaving elaborate fairy-tales for their own sake. I'll admit that I'm a prejudiced skeptic, so in the end I ask only that he looks at the functional utilitarian consequences of his thoughts and administer his time on them in proportion to how useful they are relative to other paths of inquiry. Overall I propose an analytical quest for love, because he's smart enough to succeed and it's a basic human need, but not so much as to overrun other passions.

Of course, I'm probably not in a position to proscribe anything, but who cares? Not I. Besides, I just met them, so I'm just guessing wildly and projecting my own issues onto them. Also, if they were not troubled in some respects, no matter how resourceful and intelligent, I would find them boring. Problems are food for thought, and if they are problems with real benefits from solving and not just mental masturbation, then all the more reason to rejoice for us thinkers for seeing them, although from a purist perspective it's all the same what the source is.

Without further ado, I give you Idealistic Emotion and Artful Reason. Don't blame me if they don't float your boat. For me it's the subjective art and the psychology of what drives the author to write what he writes that's interesting. For other stuff you've got Wikipedia and New York Times.

Wheels within wheels

2008-12-22T23:51:00.000-08:00

"You are faced with Trogdor the berzerker troll. In order to dodge the blow of his hammer and escape, you need to get a number from the bored blonde standing over by the stairs. The one nursing a beer in the hand connected to the elbow supported on the arm she has slung across her stomach. If you want to stab Trogdor with your shortsword before the hammer hits and inflict critical damage, you need to make out with the cute bartender brunette." says the guy in the black cape with narrative authority while sometimes glancing down at the large tome of knowledge he's holding. Brian adjusts his glasses with his index finger and looks down while turning slightly to glance over at the stairs, then decides he's feeling lucky and heads over to the bar to the girl he has ordered a couple of beers from earlier.

He stands by the bar looking down at the fridge and quizzically pinches his smooth non-existant beard with the thumb against the length of the index finger. The others are subtly monitoring his progress from afar. The brunette comes over and asks "What can I get you?". He waits a few seconds and then looks up at her distantly as if she just woke him up from a deep sleep. He smiles a slight detached mysterious smile at her and reaches into his pocket to get a red 1d6 with white spots. Tapping the dice three times against the bar, focusing her attention on it, he intones with the slick experience of a street entertainer: "Greetings, mylady! May I interest you in a game of chance this evening?". She smiles bemusedly and then glances to the sides to see if there are any real customers needing her attention. There are none.

"What can I win?" she asks. "If you roll a one, then I will buy you an orange juice, seeing as you are working. If you roll a six, I'll give you a kiss. If you roll a three, you roll again, and if it's another three, you go over to my friend with the cape and move as if to kiss him, but then as your face is close to his you deviate from your path and whisper into his ear that Trogdor is dead. Do you accept the challenge?". She hesitates, clearly amused, but not quite certain what this weirdo is up to. Then her curiosity gets the better of her and she submits: "I accept". She's now thoroughly amused. "Open your hand" he says while holding out the dice. He cups her hand from underneath with his free one and puts the dice slowly into hers with the other and curls her fingers up around it. He pats it twice and retracts. Her eyes are gleaming now. "Now roll", he commands. She's excited for the roll and doesn't notice the other customer who is walking up to order before another bartender walks out of the kitchen and serves him. She shakes the dice with her two hands and rolls it onto the counter. It's a three. She reddens a little with the prospect of having to go through with the stunt he described. "Please go on", he nudges. She rolls again. It's another three. "Oh oh!", she exclaims smiling and strokes her forehead slightly embarrased of the predicament she's got herself in while glancing over at the cape-clad figure.

Brian reaches out and lays a comforting hand on her shoulder: "Relax! You can do it. Now go.". She walks out from behind the bar, past Brian, who esoterically observes his new inititate with a certain pride of accomplishment. The guy with the book and his group have gathered she is on the approach and are wondering a little scared and excited to what Brian's been saying to her. She's now gotten into the mood of her task and forgotten about her embarrasment. Breaking into the circle, which opens smoothly to her intrusion, she faces Mr Cape but looks off into the distance, then leans over slowly to his intrigued amazement and breathes him warmly on the face for a second and then insinuatingly permeates his personal facespace over to his ear and whispers with unapologetic confidence and authority that "Trogdor is dead".

The barmaiden smiles with accomplishment and is returning to her normal life with a slight hunger for more excitement, giving Brian an expectant hot look like a good puppy that wants a treat. Brian disentangles his casual observer stance and leaning elbow from the bar counter and smiles rewardingly at his student. She slows her walk to a creeping halt while passing him and he flows naturally towards hcr and takes her soft cotton-clothed upper arms into his caring hands. She relaxes and tones down her overt and tense smile into a subtly pleased one. Her desiring wanton stare with eyes wide open and a wild dilated blackness advancing on retreating brown irises reveal her intentions. They are now as relaxed as if lying in a meadow of warm moist grass on a sultry summer's eve and he feels the pull of her softness that make them come closer and closer to each other without remembering how they got there and sailing their heads around each other like ships in a whirlpool going down into deep dark tropical waters in a silent storm until their cheeks brush together, then their foreheads meet like their minds are one, and they close their eyes, let go of everything and kiss softly on the bottom of the sea.

Later they wake up and part in a contented warm purple haze. Their arms and hands slide along each other to maximalize their last touches until the distance between them is greater than the length of all their bodily extensions, but they can still feel each other like a veil on top of all their senses. Mr Cape is gleaming with Brian's genius and pronounces with finality at his return that "The winds of warm change have brought peace to Trogdor's berzerker attitude. He lowers his hammer in resignment and raves in a dopamine-induced stupor back to his cave and tumbles into a deep contented sleep." Brian gets a knowing smirk on his face to looks of admiration and a symbolic subdued applause from the circle of friends. "So, anyone up for spin-the-bottle?" one of the younger fids queries with false solemnity over unbridled enthusiasm. They laugh heartily.

A dream

2008-12-22T05:19:00.000-08:00

I dreamed that I was the psychotherapist of a young Alexis Bledel and Angelina Jolie cross-breed. She lived in a great rich house with many huge windows on the sunny edge of a hill in colorful early autumn. The house was partly shrouded by foliferous wood. It was sort of like the elven estate in Lord of the Rings, but had more glass, steel, marble and persian carpets. I seduced the girl and had sex with her while her husband was away. After a while he got suspicious and I sometimes had to climb out the window on a string of towels. It was very frustrating to have to run away in the middle of the deed, so we started making love in the woods instead.

One time we were finished doing that we were lying together in a small crevice and enjoying the sun, a short distance from the crooked path through the woods. Then we saw a couple of badgers walking down the path with a frozen fox between them. They put the frozen fox in the sun and it gradually melted from the sun rays and the body heat of the badgers. Then one of the badgers turned into another fox, and together the two foxes started clawing at the other badger. It was hurting and it looked like they were toying with it and were finally going to eat it, but they disappeared out of sight down the path before that.

Then the husband and a host of other people came walking down the path with pitchforks and at this point I probably decided I didn't like the dream anymore so I woke up.

Attraction patterns

2008-12-22T04:08:00.000-08:00

When emotionally overwhelmed I tend to seek safety in action sequences previously analyzed and thought out. I have a hard time letting go and just act in the moment. So if I feel something for a girl I do what I've planned in advance or if I did not plan anything I want to withdraw and pause to think and dream about her instead. So I need to either make rules for action sequences that I should follow when severely attracted to a girl, or learn to act impulsively even under the explosive force of heartbeat in my chest.

I seem to have submissive attraction patterns, like most girls have. I feel like I want to deny my attraction to her and want her to take initiative and try to seduce me. This is what most girls also seem to want, and two passive patterns do not fit together. There are dominating girls too, but they are much more rare, and tend to be a little strange. When I think rationally about it, being the controlling and dominating side is good because it gives me choice. It must be hell to be a girl and just sit there waiting patiently to be picked up compared to a guy who can just walk around like a tiger and chase his prey. It takes some guts to gut the cute bunnies sitting around though. I'm like a scared little kitten inside a tiger, pattering around and awkwardly scratching the bunnies with my big fangs instead of slashing them to pieces like they expect me to.

I'm still a virgin and have only made out with a handful of girls in experimental drunkenness and not any girl that I had developed any strong feelings for. I don't have a problem admitting that, because I have faith that with sufficient training and introspection I'm going to be so much better than most other guys. I have the patience, willpower and intelligence to pull it off. Consider the plays I make now as a virgin, and just take a wild guess at what I can do when I'm not. I'd be scared if I were you ;) . Any bunny not having faith in me just because I'm a virgin tiger can just go stroke her fur alone, and sit there eating carrots when I have sharpened my fangs and am slashing bunnies left and right. It's not like I haven't had plenty of opportunities with girls that were hot and bothered around me, but I just wanted unconsciously to deny it and have them chase me. I just have to take control, get into a dominant groove, make it my natural mode and enjoy the empowering sensation in order to turn the tables.

After I've found that I respect and like a girl, it doesn't matter if she rejects me. I just think of it as a denial pattern. If she's smart she'll realize that I'm very good for her and cave in the end or if not she's probably too stupid or issue-ridden for me anyway. Her loss. However, it annoys me a lot when girls I consider less than me and I'm just practicing on reject me. It goes away if I think that perhaps they can tell that I'm not really going to stay with them anyway and so have to low self-esteem to try to take advantage. There aren't that many girls that I genuinely want to pick up, so that means I have too few to practice on if I only try to pick up girls that I want. I'll always answer truthfully and directly if she asks what she can have from me though. I actually have rather low confidence most of the time, but I'm making structures of explanation in my mind that convince myself of doing things that require more confidence than I have. I also have an insane amount of pride that makes me push away girls I don't really want no matter how desperate I may be and how low confidence I have, even if my friends all say I should just tolerate them for a while to get more experience. I know rationally that a lot of girls are attracted to me, but I have too low confidence to emotionally believe it fully, most of the time. I expect that I'm going to be arrogant as few with confidence, down to the bone, not just rationally, after I take advantage of a few of the situations that I usually run away from in denial.

Girl versus woman

2008-12-22T04:02:00.000-08:00

For me the words girl and woman have little to do with age. Girl has stronger emotional connotations and woman has stronger sexual connotations. I tend to say girl most often.

Miss softy and miss ocean

2008-12-21T05:04:00.000-08:00

She was in the corner. People were joining arms to shoulders and she looked alone. I put my arm around her and pulled her towards me and she came. I kept looking at the stage. She looked at me a couple of times at an angle in her peripheral vision. She was wearing a very soft sweater. The song finished and I let her go. I moved around. Let's call her softy.

There was another girl and another soft song. I put my arm around her and she came towards me. I could feel the length of her body against my side. She looked at me at an angle, or she looked at the band member at the edge of the stage. I couldn't tell at once. The doubt that creates suspension. She was taking pictures with slow and articulated movements. Maybe she was looking at me, maybe she was the girlfriend of the guy to the far right on stage. Loves me, loves me not? She looked at me more and more from the side and the angle of her vision slowly rotated towards me. I didn't meet her gaze, not once, but I certainly stared at her out of the corner of my eye. Was she beautiful enough or was she not? I couldn't tell without looking directly at her, but I pretended like nothing was up and just kept feeling her on my side. I felt that if I looked at her the spell was going to break. She looked at me with the depth of the ocean, and she swayed like the waves of the sea, so let's call her ocean.

After the concert I wandered down to get my jacket. Softy came up behind me and leaned towards the wall, too far away to be in the jacket line and too far away to be in the bathroom line. I think she wanted something. I turned to her and asked "Good concert?". She smiled and said "Good concert". Suddenly my face was feeling warm and I was smiling coyly and I looked down. She saw me clearly. She was smiling too. Then I could not think anymore and the only thing I could remember was I had to get my jacket. Very important! Had to get it. Couldn't wait to get the jacket. Denial, denial, denial! Couldn't bridge those inches over to her face and kiss her as I should. I turned around and joined the line again, and every step away from her was heavier, but I couldn't go back. Why, why, why? Nothing was stopping me. I was such a coward. I got my jacket and softy was gone.

I went upstairs and wandered about. I spotted ocean at a far table. She held my gaze from afar. She was between many other people in an unreachable spot, but the way she spotted me and locked on to me with her eyes I knew that she knew so I went back into the other room after having alerted her to my presence in a few precious seconds. I hung around for half a minute and she came. She lingered near me. I moved between tables towards her, at too confronting an angle and too fast. She walked away and disappeared behind a column. I thought I made a mistake and scared her off, but maybe she wanted me to follow her to a secluded place. I left and went to another room. After 10 minutes or so she and two friends came into that room and settled in a very approachable position at the centre. I was going around and exchanging informative messages with relatives, but circling her. She looked at me once with the depth of the ocean and once more casually glancing as I sweeped by. Then I suddenly had to get a new beer, even though I wanted to go to her so much more. Denial again! I was so tense while ordering the beer. I was so scared that she was going to disappear on me, and I wanted to get back so badly. She was there when I got back. I talked to her for 10 minutes or so. She was certainly not stupid. She was 10 years older than me, but I had guessed her age much younger, because she was quite attractive. I was too nervous and clumsy and I defused all that sexual tension that she was throwing at me earlier from the depth of her ocean, and then she gradually came to the surface and I think she got impatient with me not advancing so she said goodbye and left. I touched her wrist twice and I sometimes leaned against her thigh while talking to her. She didn't mind.

I walked around and talkes to relatives again. Then I noticed that she was on the other side of the wall with a friend, but sometimes looking at me through one of those small round windows. Then I think she saw that I noticed her watching and she went away from the window.

Later I saw her in another room. I went over to her again and she smiled and said hi, giving me another chance. I talked to her briefly, but then another guy came and talked to her, and I turned abrubtly and my hat hit her on the face. Clumsy me.. I instinctively put my hand on her face to soothe it and said "sorry" and I could feel her smooth hair and cheek and she didn't mind, but she turned to talk to the other guy so I got insecure and ran away when I should have stayed and started talking to the guy to be in her presence while faking disinterest. After that I had no more chances. She was gone forever. The other guy didn't get heir either, because I saw him around several times later in the evening.

For the rest of the evening I just wandered around aimlessly thinking about Miss Softy and Miss Ocean. I was detached and preoccupied with thought. Some older women smiled at me and discussed a little too loudly the prospect of taking me home. One of them was kind of attractive, but really too old. One of them was decently attractive and barely within acceptable age range but she wasn't part of their aforementioned discussion and had a guy hanging around her which she was obviously attached to. I was too lost in softy and ocean anyway to pay too much attention. The bartender girl was mighty cute. I casually asked her to come to an afterparty just for the hell of it. She respectfully declined, although she said she found the offer very interesting, probably just being polite.

Some girl sat down next to me and offered me gum. We had a short amusing talk with sign language, but she wasn't attractive enough to hold my attention for long.

Relatives and I went home and had excellent nachspiel food. Homemade sausage. We had a great breakfast too. I'm still reiterating the mistakes I made with softy and ocean a thousand times in my mind, reading the same sentences in a book over and over while thinking about them. Well, well.. another time I'll do better.

How picking up girls is like betting

2008-12-17T18:22:00.000-08:00

I tried to pick up a girl in full trust mode with all shields down. She rejected me politely but firmly. While I sipped at my ginger ale and contemplated at another table I realized slowly the loss I felt. I contained it and tried to mask my sorrow with a disenchanted polite smile when the girl (and her friends) sometimes looked at me to check up on me or whatever reason. I finished my drink and I went outside and waved to the girls with a fake smile and they waved back with the same polite fake smiles. I waited until I was out of sight, then started crying slightly. I looked into the brightly lit shopping gallery for a while. Then I approached another bar and ignored the less attractive girls who wanted to take advantage of my sadness. They were asking me to come with them back to the place where I came from anyway, and I certainly didn't want to go back there. I went inside the new bar and to the bathroom and cried, then examined myself in the mirror and waited patiently until the red around my eyes had subsided and my eyes were no longer too glazed. Like a true warrior I went back into the game and tried to pick up another girl. Later in the evening I had more success and fun again.

I learned that picking up girls is like watching the race horses and decide which one to bet on. If one bets little, with shields mostly up, then there is little emotion to gain and little to lose. Conversely, if one does as I did, and approach with full trust, then there is much to lose and much to gain. Therefore one must read the signals for which horse is the faster and stronger and gradually bet more, or lower the shields, as one gets positive reinforcement. A problem is that most girls can see when I have shields up, and they don't respond very well when not being emotionally invested in, so one has to risk at least something as the initial investment.

My fundamental rule

2008-12-16T03:14:00.000-08:00

One fundamental rule I act according to is "never let anyone manipulate you". It's a protective psychological measure, and I don't know what has caused it to became so firmly entrenched in the very core of my being. I guess it must have something to do with the fact that I have incredibly strong emotions that can be easily abused by other people if I don't protect myself from them emotionally. I believe that other people let their emotions influence what they want me to do more than I can accept, so I mostly trust people who seem emotionally detached from me or very intelligent and rational and express themselves in detached cause and consequence and not absolutes. I trust very few people to be as rational and intelligent as I am, so I don't trust them to make decisions for me. I tend to get silently very angry at people if they say "you must do x" instead of "if you don't do x, then y follows". I thoroughly despise premature assumptions. To make a radical example that shows how deeply this rule is embedded in me: I will get angry at people for saying "you must eat" instead of saying "if you don't eat, you will starve to death". I hate that people make the assumption that I will choose to do x without fail instead of considering the alternative of y, no matter what y is. It's one of my fundamental principles that I am extremely stubborn in following. If anyone tries to force me to do something and I feel that they have emotional influence on me I will do everything in my power to do what I think they least want me to do regardless of what they express that they want me to do, because I am so angry with them, but if they present the information in a detached manner then I can evaluate it rationally. I also strongly dislike when people have too much emotion in their voice or manner when trying to convince me of something. I would much rather have them write down their opinions and read it so that I can form an unbiased opinion. If I don't have any emotions for people then I won't get angry if they say "you must" because then I will just ignore them if I don't agree. I have been trying to get around my anger by internally translating sentences by people who say "you must" into their longer form containing the consequences and pretend that that is what they really said, with limited success. Another small quirk that arises because of my principle is that if I see advertisements for products that play on emotions, then I'm more likely to consciously decide to buy another product in the store in order to compensate for subconscious emotional bias.

I admit that it is very tiring to be around other people when I constantly have to guard myself of any irrational emotional influence they could have on me. The only people I choose to let my guard down with are extremely intelligent and rational people and attractive girls. Because I have a large potential for feeling that I suppress around most people, this can cause me to have very strong feelings for the people I do let my guard down with. I can be emotionally attracted to intelligent people of both sexes, although I'm only sexually attracted to girls. It's confusing for me to have an attraction to intelligent and authoritative males at the same time that I feel repelled when I try to approach their physical form, but I'm not often intellectually impressed so it happens much more rarely than the feelings I develop from girls' physical appearance and body language. It makes me think of how the Greek philosophers of old used to have sexual intercourse between the student and the mentor, and I guess they perhaps developed the same kind of intellectual attraction based on their shared feelings for high ideas in philosophical discussion and that they got over their inherent biological sexual limitations somehow.

When I'm emotionally invested in a girl, my feelings for all other people seem utterly insignificant, so I can let my guard down and relax with other people without having to worry about them emotionally affecting my decisions. This is one of the reasons I desire a girlfriend so much, because she can keep my heart safe. I deliberately choose to focus all of my interpersonal emotions and trust into attractive girls and this can make me feel rather intensely for them. I'm not exactly sure why I do this. Anyway, this is they way I like it. I realize it's a very high risk scenario to put so much feeling into very few people, but it's my prerogative to play it that way. I believe the reward corresponds to the risk.

Judging girls

2008-12-15T00:56:00.000-08:00

Depth and breadth
For the time being I'm choosing to be relatively shallow with respect to judging girls, because primitive instincts provide sufficient motivation and emotion. If I sleep with a really beautiful but stupid girl I expect this to change because the feelings will probably fade when I get bored with her. There is no shame in realizing the harsh reality of crude instincts and useless to forcibly try to entangle them with deeper purposes and pretend that they are of a refined nature. I'm not going to preempt the decision to favor depth before my own experience and feelings tell me that it is a good one, even if I can rationally agree that it is. I sort of know what's right, but I'm trying to teach my feelings the same thing.

I'm currently mostly doing quick scans of many different girls, thereby building intuitive knowledge for more quickly and efficiently discarding unqualified first-level entries based on shallow parameters and learning about the seduction process. I choose to do deeper scans mostly based on emotional motivation that arises because of looks and superficial personality traits. I'm not going to focus on a single girl until I'm confident enough of my skill of being consistently able to seduce a large percentage of qualified girls with high probability, so that I can easily replace my girlfriend if she starts acting like a bitch. I'm hard to impress intellectually in a degree that creates emotions, which means it's hard to find qualified participants to choose that path, so I favor looks and superficial personality when consciously looking for girls. Searching for a girl that is both smart and suffices on the shallow parameters could be a very long if not never-ending process, so I let that one be more of a serendipitous background process. Anyways, since there are few of the smart ones, I should have excellent basic seduction skills before wasting my chances with them.

Pride
Pride is something I have a lot of and probably should try to do away with to some degree. The effect of my pride is that I always want the best girl in the room (read: localized time-space relative to the fading of memory), and I'd usually rather live off the memory of the best one than be with the second best. I also tend to hit on more beautiful girls the less confident I am because I feel the need to prove that I can get them to satisfy my pride, even though I might feel more for a less beautiful one but smarter one in the long term. That is another reason I need to get over beauty, or relink my pride by realizing in my personal intuitive experience that smart girls are harder to get. I will rather accept the predicament that finding a matching partner is impossible than compromise my criteria, but I believe that my criteria are satisfiable once I acquire sufficient skill. I have problems accepting a "temporary substitute" even though I need her for the experience, so I'm looking for ways to avoid growing dependent on her while looking for my end-game soul-mate. I suspect many people get "stuck" with what they thought to be a "temporary substitute" because it becomes a habitual convenience. I don't plan on falling into that trap.

Looks versus time
I look at a girl and I think yes, no or maybe, but this is just the initial decision at a point in time, which is changeable, except for the "no", which always stays "no".

A "yes" can drop into a "no" for many reasons, for instance an unpleasant personality, or certain types of stupidity (usually not including naiveté and ignorance).

The "maybe" can grow into a "yes" if they initiate contact and have a great personality or intellect, or by familiarity if I look at them a million times. I tend to continue looking at the "maybes" because I'm waiting for the part of my mind that decides those things to come back with a definite answer. A more rational thing to do would be to contact also the "maybe" to determine if other factors than looks tilt the decision, but as long as "yes" occurs sufficiently frequently there is little motivation for doing so.

Internal states and axes
My mood decides whether I'm attuned to sex (anger, annoyance), intense emotional attraction (happiness) or comforting cuddling (sadness). I'm most aggressive and seem to have most success when I'm looking for sex because I take initiative and there is little emotional risk, but anger and annoyance quickly dissolve in the presence of an attractive girl, which makes be back off again or transition into happiness and emotions. When I'm looking for something emotional I end up being too nice and end up as "friend material" so I need to force myself to be more cheeky.

I have two major states for defensive position and degrees in between. When my shield is up then I'm intellectual and scheming with actions delayed by thought and I act slowly and feelings are superficial. When my shields are down I'm more deeply emotive, trusting and open and act impulsively and quickly. My goal for controlling these states is to be on the defense when the risk of rejection or other emotional injury is high and gradually lower the shields as the perceived risk lowers. An alternative that I'm trying to get into for working with shields down is to deliberately construct thoughts that explain rejection in detached impersonal terms, such as "she's confused, I need to show myself more clearly", "she's not ready yet, I need to give her more time" or "your loss, good bye". I won't quit training until I don't understand the concept of rejection emotionally anymore. A useful trick is to always have multiple cards in play and rushing on to the next play instead of thinking about lost cards.

Jealousy and other games
I have a lot of defensive mechanisms in place for dealing with jealousy, so it's hard to game me on it. If I really want the girl then I think of the other guy as a loser and that she will understand that I'm the best choice in the end anyway, and if she doesn't she must be stupid and good riddance. I most often think that the girl wants me to be jealous, and that often makes me do the exact opposite of what I think she wants me to do, as I tend to do when I feel that I'm being manipulated. In general I guess knowing that I react opposite by default can be used to apply reverse psychology on me, but don't count on it. I generally think that if I'm going to compete for a girl then I should be certain that I like her enough to offer her the same terms with regard to the length of the relationship as the competition, and I usually assume the best intentions for my competition if he seems an okay guy which means I often back out because I doubt how long I will stay interested in her. I guess I should be more selfish and compete harder and don't try to think ahead like that.

I'm an engineer!

2008-12-08T22:48:00.000-08:00

I'm an engineer, designed to solve real problems in the most functional and simple way possible. Then what good is the intellectualization of hedonistic subjects of discourse? I'm ambivalent on whether or not it is an interesting hobby, so herein I muse a little bit about it.

Musings
I thought of this blog item as I was drinking a glass of non-alcoholic white wine, and was musing on memories of a girl I once knew that had a book on wine tasting and liked to talk about music. Then I wandered into delicate tasteful memories of Belgian beer and then about music and how someone recommended me to learn something about a few bands that I found to be popular among the types of girls I choose to court in order to provide food for social thought. With my love of abstractions these thoughts quickly called on the topic "intellectual discourse on hedonistic subjects".

Informative exchange?
What good is talking about music, wine, food and other things whose only connection to symbolic processing are the associations of words to incredibly fuzzy and subjective collections of examples within the space of many subjective collections that word encapsulates. If the purpose is to discover new music, then huge collective pools such as last.fm and other artist-associative sites are much more organized and efficient, are they not? Cooking is an old art, so there are countless books and probably more modern online associative recipe aggregators too. It seems informative purposes are not sufficient to explain intellectualization.

Socialization?
Is intellectualization of hedonistic subjects primarily of a social nature, that is, exploring your partner in conversation's hedonistic associations? One could still easily imagine a dating service based on last.fm that matches people with high musical compatibility. Perhaps it is more motivating to share and discover information about pleasures when linked to a physical persona and facial expressions, even if the same information is readily available in greath wealth online. But surely, smart people must have better things to talk about that solve real-world problems? Perhaps it is the effort of learning how to specify hedonistic preferences with greater accuracy for the explicit purpose of recognizing similarity in social partners that distinguishes from knowledge one has to learn for other purposes anyway.

History?
Genres such as blues and jazz have historical connotations for when and where they originated. Is music history useful? Is it useful only for musicians who don't want to repeat history or also in choosing what music to listen to? It's easy for me to find music to like, so history must serve a more abstract purpose if it is to be useful. Perhaps if I want to explore as large a musical space as possible historical genres are useful in order to select from music of different origin with the assumption that different origin implies different content.

Thought process considerations?
Perhaps intellectualization on hedonistic subjects is just a sort of mental masturbation for people with some but not too high interest in thinking. Pleasure is a driving concept of learning, so it makes sense that people who derive too little satisfaction from thinking alone can enhance their thought processes by mixing in subjects fertile with pleasure. But true thinkers can thrive better on real problem solving, can they not? Hmm.. let's call mental masturbation that is shared in conversation for mental sex, and then it becomes a social phenomenon again.

Elitist psychology?
Maybe those who intellectualize hedonistic pleasures just set out to separate themselves from the mundane and form elitist subgroups, so that it is a form of self-aggrandizement or higher level pissing contest among peers deemed mutually worthy of competing.

Fuzzy categories
I've long thought of genres as too fuzzy to describe music, because you can never trust that the recipient has the same genre associations, so I much prefer using a short list of examples of artists to describe a genre. The proliferation of genre and taste descriptors is probably a symptom of their fuzziness: trying to use unions or intersections of fuzzy descriptors will probably narrow down the final description, but it will still be quite fuzzy. Just use examples and associative links and let the genre context be implicit, thus mirroring its true nature better than artificial groupings.

Dance with the punches

2008-11-30T23:38:00.000-08:00

This is a sort of analytic fiction based on well-formulated thoughts, but encoded in a very fuzzily ambiguous manner and interspersed with free-associative absurdities. You will read this text for fun and recognition. You won't know more about what is real and useful knowledge than what your critical self can tell you, so you're probably not going to learn anything you don't already know. This text is high on sleep deprivation and caffeine. What it aims to describe is mostly of an intuitive nature and as such can only vaguely and implicitly purport.

So I saw some nice bunny buns, a little chubby around the cheeks, but pegged to their dominating controller I dream that they are sleek bonanza mirroring the super model of a forceful temper. I want to look at her and see what she thinks that she is, because that is what she is. So as Anya says, "they've got them hoppy legs and twitchy little noses", but when you see them red eyes glow you better pet that fur with care. And don't you eat that yellow snow! I'd like to dance with such a bunny, but I should practice some more on the docile furries first. But those docile kittens are so boring. They just want to be stroked and purr. Nay, give me the claws of a fiery playkitten and let it dance with the threads I dangle for it and dodge my taunting punches. I wonder how to bring out that sparkling wistful eye of the tiger in a sleepy slacker kitten. Perhaps they are just dead meat on a stick. I want it fresh, ripe and pulp and potent with the sudden smash of a bear slashing fish in the river. I want it raw! Stupid fat hobbitses who want to cook their rabbit. Hmm.. but hitting the fish on the stroke of the clock requires a certain precision and real-time processing I have not yet acquired. I'm a steady tortoise pacing his steps to end the race victorious, but I need to cache my steps and build a repertoire to become a turbo turtle, and preferrably a hero ninja mutant one. I'm missing a certain trickster element to set the stage for a breath-taking illusionist show. A Da Vincian aptitude for criss-crossing arts and science is helpful, but predictable in the sudden aftermath of the recent now that looks at the funnies the bunnies of the past have spoken. Without the surprise of a twin sunrise on a unisolar planet the levitational antigravitons are no more than particulars in a well-defined pattern of uniform laws. I should be a copy cat and CAT scan the brains of the seasoned alley cats for their tricks. They have songs, allusions, references, instruments and anecdotes that tie into the beliefs and suspended gazes of the feline slender birches that sway and swoon to their felixes' theatre. The alley cat acts without boundaries and paints improvised blots of well-intoned words that blur, flow, enrapture and immerse their otherwise fanged recipients into a lull of soft complacency and barechested vulnerability for the final penetrating slay. Fear nought and know thyself and know thy peers and merge the windows of opportunity with cocky advancements and thou shalt reap the blood of the innocent with ease. Outsmart your elders you will not, because you are not a jedi yet, but Lestatize them with the prodigal cunning of a wicked child and they will let you drink heartily from their power and lend you their cleopatric rogue warrior maidens and not until it is too late shall they realize what a dangerous god you are. Never turn a kitten into a ceiling cat who is not a solid rock in earthquakes' rustle, for she will spiral into her own demise and drag you with her, but prick her gently and suck no more than to leave her spirit within its human abode a fuller whole on a partially regenerated blood stream.

I'm bored with scarlet iron ore and crave a filling of gourmet lore. Talk to you l8r silly demigods. Just playing for peanuts. Just in it for the lulz. Get your class act together or there's going to be an aristocratic uproar. I would give you million miles of more, but that would make me such an attention whore. Jostle, jostle little lamb. Oo, I want to eat fried sheep steak. It's more than 300 NOK/kg at Coop, but I want it because I should have the slaughter of the lambs that offer what a smack-dab-in-the-middle-of-the-heavens-Power -That-Be deserves. Smack your lips and squeeze your hearts for blood l8r silly demigods. Ah.. the pleasures of social pyromania; setting hearts on fire and basking in the warm glow. Ok, I'm done basking, what are you doing here? You silly demigods.

Sexual and emotional pornography as a lesson in empathy

2008-11-30T13:10:00.000-08:00

I argue that watching sexual pornography can be used as a training tool for kinesthetic intelligence and act as a stepping stone to the more abstract emotional intelligence that can be trained by the emotional pornography of TV series.

Human learning works with positive reinforcement. Identifying(1) kinesthetically with the male actor in a sexual pornography gives the reward of feeling like you are having intercourse with a desirable woman and thus reinforces the kinesthetic identification (KI). I never understood why there were scenes of the woman orally pleasing the man before I trained this kind of KI. Once you have sufficiently mastered sexual KI you can start to identify with the subtler facial contortions, symptoms of emotion, in mainstream television and movies and thus bring about the emotional states that they are symptoms of. Women are usually easier to identify with emotionally because they have more prominent expressions. To some degree one always empathizes, depending on the level of emotional intelligence one has established without conscious focus throughout the years, but being conscious about it gives the ability to improve it even further. TV series are in general better than movies because familiarity with the characters ease identification. These skills can then in turn be used to more easily empathize with people you meet in real life.

(1): By identification, I mean a mental reproduction of kinesthetic sensations, not a physical reproduction.

The verbal slowdown trap of reading

2008-11-23T15:42:00.000-08:00

I think this problem has been treated extensively in existing literature under the term "speed reading", and I should read up on it, but right now I want to bring my own thoughts to it and remind you that the problem exists.

Decoupling the verbal process, thinking out the pronunciation of a word, from the reading process is essential for reading faster. At one end of the spectrum, one reads every sentence aloud within one self, and at the other end, not a single word is pronounced. Every time one finds one self pronouncing a word, thinking is severely impaired, because sound is one-dimensional. If one instead can think entirely visually(1) or symbolically(2), one should enable one to think an order of magnitude faster. It's still desirable to retain a certain degree of coupling between the auditory and visual systems so that one can communicate one's visual ideas in words, but words can be thought of as visual symbols and translated into pronunciations only when necessary.

(1) Visuals have more dimensions at disposal; 2 for a static image, 3 for volumetric thinking or animated static images and 4 for animated volumetric thinking. (3)
(2) It's possible one is thinking in symbols natively in a way beyond dimensional measure, but this is probably on a level below consciousness. (3)
(3) I don't know if visual thinking is symbolic or vice versa or if they are completely different mental processes.

I think it's a hard habit to break. Background music helps me occupy the auditory processing parts of my mind so they are less likely to want to pronounce things and thus speed up reading. Another trick is to read way faster than you can internally pronounce things, at the expense of also losing some information because you can't absorb it that fast, but this could be a period of adjustment until you have disciplined yourself to visual reading. But even using this trick the occasional word in between is pronounced. I seem to have a strong affinity for pronunciation, even if I don't usually talk a lot, but as you can tell I'm working on it.

Intellect versus emotion when communicating with girls

2008-11-23T07:57:00.000-08:00

I seem to have currently two disparate mental processing modes that I'm trying to merge. I intentionally paint it black and white to make the distinction clear, but the distinction isn't really that clear.

Emotional mode is of a flowing smooth nature. It combines with visual and kinesthetic imagination, thinking in images, colors and volumes of kinesthetic sensations, not words or other symbols. It's easier to mirror the flow of her body language and establish rapport. The decision to touch is based on the feeling of a sort of magnetic attraction that moves my limbs without my fully conscious decision to do so. A drawback is that if I loose touch with the flow and become physically immobile, a dam of desire to do something starts building up and prohibits the expression of same because of a felt risk of rejection. I can break this spell by forcefully drawing on more courage or avoid the problem altogether by trying to always remain mobile in the flow. Dancing tends to call on emotional mode, but not necessarily.

In the intellectual mode I care for ideas, and have a hard time building emotional rapport with a girl. There is little risk involved and I can talk about anything without fear because I'm concerned with the elaboration of ideas, not acceptance or rejection. The intellectual mode is based on largely symbolic processing: thinking and talking in words. Any rapport has to be generated analytically. My legs and arms are vehicles of a continuous space of expressions that are controlled by analytically hypothesizing consequences and testing their validity. I feel somewhere underneath it all the beauty of her face and the desire for her body but the decision-making process is rational. I'm asking myself the question of which fundamental assumptions posits that I should touch her given that she has a hot body and that I desire it, and I get caught up with this internal intellectual discussion instead of actually touching her. Another question is that of there being several girls that I like present and their beauty seems incomparable such that I cannot choose between them. I guess the answer is to scan deeper and use the process of elimination, but the choice of where to start deep scanning remains. Perhaps I should just randomize the choice, or just pick the closest one. These are just example questions to demonstrate the way I think in this mode. Mental states are hard to describe but I think this should capture the gist of it. The upside of intellectual mode is that it is easier to be conscious of theories on how to attract a girl, and the downside is that it is hard to synchronize with her and feel something. I go into intellectual mode when I start to think as if I were alone and the surrounding dialogues are just text coming in from an environmental book that I'm reading. Talking and listening to people talking tends to bring on intellectual mode, but not necessarily.

So my quest is to merge the preceding two states so that I am both able to attract, by thinking, and able to be attracted, by feeling.

How love is like math

2008-11-13T13:49:00.000-08:00

Love is like an abstract theorem, in fact the abstract theorem. You can't transfer the knowledge of it by shoving the explicit formula in someone's face out of the blue. They need a familiarity with the theory that it builds upon, so that they can understand it bit by bit. You have to make a lot of small examples to demonstrate the theorem implicitly and show its value. You have to build up supporting lemmas and sometimes go out on a limb and make wild conjectures about what she wants. Once the subject has acquired familiarity with the theory, she can start to grasp more abstract theorems and formulating them explicitly will start to make more sense. It seems then that seduction is a form of teaching, and watching for signs of the student's understanding and evaluating her rate of learning is critical, so that she shall remain neither unchallenged by trivialities nor burdened with expectations of wisdom she has not yet attained. As always, easier said then done.