Miscellaneous Feeds

HackMoor 2019/02/21 Into the Wilderness

Furiously Eclectic People - Wed, 02/27/2019 - 02:45

Games are on Thursday nights sometime after 6:30PM at World's Best Comics, 9714 Warwick Blvd Newport News, Virginia 23601.

I decided to make something unusual, a bacon double-cheeseburger pizza. The cook used bacon, ground beef and American cheese. Finely chopped onions (I think), tomatoes, and pickles, with a little mustard in the background. Yes, it tasted like a bacon cheeseburger.

If anyone likes this unusual recipe (and to give free advertising), and lives locally, it was built at Anna's Pizza #2, 9708 Warwick Blvd, Newport News, VA 23601. (Two doors to the right of World's Best comics.)

++++ START OF SESSION ++++

In order to put a little initiative into the game I enjoined the presumption that the Party's Druid Glaxx and her trusty Elven Wardawg, had a burr on her backside to re-explore the wilderness that she wandered about for five years before coming a Druid. Having their "take" from last adventure, they all had two hundred and fifty gold pieces with which to buy horses, saddlebags and kit. (For those who didn't already have horses of course.)

However the wilderness was about 400 miles away, and over a river. Not one of those rivers you can ford on horseback, judging from my GM's map, it was a 12 mile wide estuary-like river. So I made the characters travel. (For you BlackMoor aficionados, they started in hex 2219 in the DA1 map, and headed Southwest to the Plains of Hak.)

So they headed south toward to the town of Lake Gloomy, and turned west to the Gar's Hold, choosing to delay crossing the Misauga River as long as possible rather than crossing early at the Tower of Midges. (Especially after I explained what midges were.) They made it to Gar's Hold without incident, meeting only once with a Giant Patrol. The patrol were Plain's Giants wearing the livery of BlackMoor, so nothing untoward happened besides "Greetings little citizen.", and the Giants went on their way.

The crossing at Gar's hold was just a nominal fee, since diplomatic relations between the Duchy of Ten and Blackmoor were reestablished some thirty-three years before (after Players from my earlier campaign kicked out the Afridhi Barbarians).

The Party set out overland until it started getting dry. Very dry, as if everyone in the Party had brought their own Towelie from South Park. Then came the Party's first real encounter, Orkin Wardawgs, who seemed very hungry. Glaxx our Druid, was able to smooth things over using her Animal Lore and Handling skills but only because these were "wild" Orkin Wardawgs. If they were part and parcel of an Orc tribe, she would have had no such luck. And you'd think that her Elven Wardawg would attack on sight the Orkin Wardawgs, or vice versa, but there was no codicil in the Hacklopaedia of Beasts that indicated mandatory combat, so I let the dawgs do what they normally do when meeting other strange dawgs, which was to sniff each other's butts more or less. I don't think this relationship will last long however, even though Glaxx found tracks that led the party to a rabbit hole, and was able to use the rabbits to feed the dawgs. (Sorry no pocket watch was found, that belongs to a higher level adventure anyway.)

Finally the Party reached their goal, which was a hallucinogenic vision remembered from Glaxx's formative years of three huge statues atop a sand dune. Making it to the top of the dune, the party found the blatantly obvious secret door. A door that was mainly held open by the body of a dead Hobgoblin on the ground with a crossbow bolt in its back. The degree of dessication indicated the body had lain there for about two weeks. Checking inside the entrance Namo the Thief spotted the obvious crossbow trap set to release if anyone opened the door. Sham the Samurai took the crossbow and the bolt from the back of the Hobgoblin.

Turning around the corner the Party came to a door for which out Thief Namo detected another trap but was unable to disarm it. With some ingenuity the Party came up with the idea of pulling the door open from a distance with rope. Making a formal case for it, I had each Party member make a die roll, not telling them what why. Fortunately someone heard a distinct hiss. Guessing some form of gas, the party decided to wait until sometime after the hissing ceased and the gas dissipated.

The party took this time to tie up their horses outside to the statues and leave the wardawgs to their own devices.

Waiting a minimum of one Turn, they entered a 40' by 40' room with no deleterious effect. Apparently the gas had gone, the room contained three bronze pillars five foot in diameter, each with a hatch and a rotating dog lever.

It was blatantly obvious the three bronze pillars corresponded to the three huge statues topside.

Namo learned his usefulness to the Party quickly and checked for traps, finding traps on the first two hatches but not the third. The first two were simple spring traps that threw darts and spears. Not finding a trap on the third pillar he took his queue from prior door openings and stood aside while opening the hatch. Instead of a projectile, the tiled floor in front of the hatch simply gave way. Fortunately our intrepid Thief made his Dexterity check and did not fall in.

Meanwhile while Namo was checking the 2nd and 3rd pillars, Sham the Sam(urai), started exploring the first hatch to the bronze pillars. Sham went up inside the first pillar and yes, he could see the out the top, he also discovered well rusted machinery that could have made the arms of the statue move by the operator inside.

Going down, Sham found another hatch on a level below the one he entered. He opened it, and was immediately attacked by a Giant Fire Beatle, complete with haircut. This was about the same time the Namo triggered the trap that dropped a tile this this level in front of the third pillar. This revealed two other Beatles in the lower level, so it turned out to be a Hard Day's Night.

Combat ensued, the party eventually squashed the three remaining bugs which also means there will never be a reunion, however what follows are the major highlights: Sham scored a hit for 13 points which was just over half the bug's hit point score. This Giant Fire Beatle in turn rolled a almost scored a critical hit but scored penetration hits causing more that half damage on Sham. Sham therefore had to roll a Threshold of Pain check and failed. At this point Sham should have fallen back into his room, only to find Gideon's Bible. However the player noted that his first roll also required the bug to take a Threshold of Pain check. In the back of my mind I was certain insects did not require such a check but I relented. So I rolled the check for the bug and it failed, meaning Sham was never hit and survived. Other than that, Paveltepec the Painted Mage cast at two Magical Mystery Fireballs, Sidewinder Factor 1, down the broken tile for minor damage on The Beatles.

On the following day I checked for the rule about bugs and the Threshold of Pain check and found it on page 4 of the Hacklopaedia of Beasts, essentially saying there is no such check for "most" insects. Without going into the meaning of "most", it meant that Sham the Sam should have gone down for the count unless rescued by the Party. But I decided it was water under the bridge and I wouldn't revisit the timeline on this matter.

After the Giant Fire Beatles were squashed. The explored below which turned out to be another 40 by 40 foot room with three external doors. There was also some spare machinery parts and some clay jars with a strange marking of a diamond shape subdivided into four other diamonds colored red at the top, blue on the left, yellow on the right, and white on the bottom. Each colored diamond except the white had black runes in an unknown language. The blue right and the yellow left diamonds had the same rune which looked like a vertical bar with a slight tick at the top. The red diamond had a rune with a curly shape at the top and flat on the bottom, while the white diamond had no rune at all. (This was actually different than what I drew for the Players, but this is the official version.)

None of the characters were willing the open the jars, except Paveltepec the Painted Mage. Inside the characters found machine oil, which they deduced would have kept the rusted machinery above in good order had it been applied. But the shelf life had reduced the oil volume to six flasks worth that the party duly collected.

++++ OUT OF CHEESE ERROR ++++

BBBB

PART 2.

++++ CHARACTER ROSTER ++++

CHARACTERS

Paveltepec, first level Painted Mage
Sham, first level Samurai
Cadfael, first level Cleric
Glaxx, first level Druid
Namo, first level Thief

BBBB

++++ RECORD KEEPING ++++

PART 3.

This is also posted on two forums, and a blog.
http://www.kenzerco.com/forums/forumdisp...ster-Tales
https://blackmoor.mystara.net/forums/viewforum.php?f=76
http://furiouslyeclectic.com/hackmoor/
http://www.furiouslyeclectic.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=13

Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/empire/
BT

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HackMoor 2019/02/14 Love Letter

Furiously Eclectic People - Thu, 02/21/2019 - 04:14

Games are on Thursday nights sometime after 6:30PM at World's Best Comics, 9714 Warwick Blvd Newport News, Virginia 23601.

We had a combo pizza much to the chagrin of the player who won't eat pepperoni. I picked them all out and I ate them.

++++ START OF SESSION ++++

Last week we had the debut of a new batch of characters. Bottom line, I ran the situation easy just to get the hang of Player interaction.

Since it was Valentine's day it was a bit unusual in that I ran a game day at all. Usually as a married gamer all games are cancelled and I stay home. However after 42 years of marriage life is good, and both of us are of the opinion the celebration of St. Valentine's day is mostly an American invention by Hallmark. It isn't even a day of obligation. But still because of the day I pulled out an old stand-by, called "Love Letter" from the Planescape campaign.

But first our new characters.

One is a Roman Catholic Altar Boy name Cadfael, gamewise a first level Cleric. Next we have a human albino Painted Mage named Paveltepec who worships a gawd from the Central American mythos. Originally he wanted to be called Pavel, but that sounded Polish, so I suggested Paveltepec and it stuck. Still, we will call him Pavel for short. Next we have an albino Half-Elf Thief name Namo who spent a year in gaol, a female Wood Elf Druid named Glaxx who wandered for five years in the Wilderness Finally a pyromaniac Samurai named Sham-shung Garaxi, Sham for short.

This albino stuff is going to be great in the wilderness or desert.

Back to the adventure. The Party as with all role-playing adventuring Parties, is approached in a bar by a hooded figure. (Insert your own stranger walks into a bar joke here.) The stranger offers them a job to deliver a letter to his lover "Chiryn" in her castle with a 250 gold piece and one magic item payable upon proof of delivery. The proof will be a return letter applied with her unique "scent".

Of course the Party accepts the job and they are told to meet the hooded figure outside of town in twenty minutes. They are advised there is no need to bring any foodstuffs nor mounts, as this will be a mere day trip. So twenty minutes was enough time to stable their horses they that had so laboriously paid for with their starting funds.

Meeting the mysterious stranger outside of town, he cast some dust into the air and a glowing portal appeared. With some debate as to who would go first, Pavel went. Finding nothing amiss except the glowing red sun and orange and a vast wasteland, stuck his arm back through the portal and beckoned the Party to join him. Once on the other side the Party took a cursory view of their surroundings and saw a recent battlefield filled with carcasses of various creatures, their banners, and their weapons. Creatures who mostly had leathery skin and bat-like wings. There were some carrion eaters lurking about made up of mostly teeth and legs but they scurried off, afraid of anything bigger than themselves.

There was a trail that lead to the obvious castle-like tower afar off, given the lack of obstructing terrain, or vegetation, perhaps maybe thirty furlongs in the distance. Thus situated, the Party went on their way.

The first item of note that they encountered, was a gaggle of small craters to the left. While they passed, out of one crawled another leathery-skinned humanoid with bat-like wings and it flew off. The party did not investigate the craters further.

Next the party came to a fork in the road going upon a long pole with a skull impaled on it, whose eyes began to glow green and start to babble at the party. A strange thing aside from the eyes, as it had no tongue, lips, nor jaw as well as vocal cords to speak with. But speak it did, babbling at first and growing more intelligible as the Party came closer. It mostly gave loud warnings about monsters and danger going either to the right or the left. One Party member decided to break the pole and take the babbling skull with him.

The party went left.

The next item on the Party's agenda was the lake with a high acid content, complete with a wharf and a rowboat and the obvious continuation of the trail on the other side. The party shambled into the boat and started rowing, they made to the other side mostly without incident. Except for the leak that sprung near the end, so they used to babbling skull as a bucket and bailed until they made it to the opposite side. (And yes, they also avoided the whirlpool.)

Once landed it was only a few hundred yards to the castle-tower, making their way there they met the castle's only guardian, a man-size fly who asked them their business: "Who are you mortals, coming willingly? Only fools are dragged here to enjoy Chiryn's thousand and one ways of pleasure and pain before their souls are relegated to the Abyss."

Quickly thinking, (and taking the queue from Futureama), the Party declared themselves the delivery company "delivery from Planar Express".

Non-plussed, the creature felt satisfied and buzzed off. (These was the Party's first adventure and at first level, I wasn't going to easily kill them off right away.)

Finding their way inside, they made their way up several levels. The Thief made his only successful Remove Traps die roll on the only real trap and saved his knees from a scything blade. One room they found two trapped chests and left them alone.

On the top floor they found several bedrooms one with a skeleton chained to a four-poster bed and it was still struggling to escape. Another room had a dead body on the bed with a strange smile on its face, the Party assumed it was death by snu-snu.

Lastly they met their letter's recipient in another bedroom, a scantily clad Succubus wanting to know their business:

"Planar Express! Delivery for Miss Chiryn!"

"As expected." was her reply. I'll accept delivery but only if you give back my skull on that pole.

Sham asked for and got a pair of magical Samurai Swords out of the deal. But only if he foregoes any magic item promised by the mysterious stranger.

The deal was made, and the Chiryn composed her lover's reply and applied her "scent". She in turn created a portal and the party stepped through back home.

They were met on arrival by the mysterious stranger who as promised delivered the gold and gave various low level magic items. Namo got a Love Potion, Cadfael got a Staff of Curing with 4 uses, Glaxx got a Scimitar plus one, And Pavel got three Beads of Force.

++++ OUT OF CHEESE ERROR ++++

BBBB

PART 2.

++++ CHARACTER ROSTER ++++

CHARACTERS

(Character list given in text.)

BBBB

++++ RECORD KEEPING ++++

PART 3.

This is also posted on two forums, and a blog.
http://www.kenzerco.com/forums/forumdisp...ster-Tales
http://furiouslyeclectic.com/hackmoor/
http://www.furiouslyeclectic.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=13
--

Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/empire/
BT

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HackMoor 2019/02/07 Campaign Reset New Character Development

Furiously Eclectic People - Tue, 02/12/2019 - 02:29

Games are on Thursday nights sometime after 6:30PM at World's Best Comics, 9714 Warwick Blvd Newport News, Virginia 23601.

We had a large sausage pizza.

++++ START OF SESSION ++++

In continuation from last week we continued developing new first level characters, the end results are thus, one each:

Wood-Elf Druid
Half-Elf Thief
Cleric - Roman Catholic
Painted Mage
Samurai

The Painted Mage is an interesting choice. Instead of a plethora of spell books to memorize, all that is needed is sufficient skin space to put spell tattoos at the rate of one level of spell per pound of flesh. Unfortunately as the Painted Mage gains more levels, he has a tendency to become more corpulent and the chance of spell fumble increases. As the Mage may need to look under folds of skin to find a particular tattoo. This shows a certain affinity with some gamers.

I see potential party conflicts already brewing as everyone but the Cleric has chosen other gawds. The Painted Mage follows a Central American gawd. I fully expect the Cleric attempting to force the Painted Mage to start building a Mission out of adobe. The Church is rather intransigent after all. Notwithstanding the Druid and the yearly burning-man ritual.

It may be a good harvest this year.

++++ OUT OF CHEESE ERROR ++++

BBBB

PART 2.

++++ CHARACTER ROSTER ++++

CHARACTERS
See text.

BBBB

++++ RECORD KEEPING ++++

PART 3.

This is also posted on three forums, and a blog.
http://blackmoor.mystara.net/forums/viewforum.php?f=76
http://www.kenzerco.com/forums/forumdisp...ster-Tales
http://furiouslyeclectic.com/hackmoor
http://www.furiouslyeclectic.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=13

Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/empire/
BT

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HackMoor 2019/01/31 Campaign Reset

Furiously Eclectic People - Tue, 02/05/2019 - 01:22

Games are on Thursday nights sometime after 6:30PM at World's Best Comics, 9714 Warwick Blvd Newport News, Virginia 23601.

++++ START OF SESSION ++++

This week we did a campaign reset and scratched out all the old characters and rolled up new one.

This was predicated on two new Players showing up and rather than deal with assimilation into the party everyone starts at first level.

We rolled up one Samurai, one Druid, one Cleric, one Thief, and one Magic User.

Sounds like one interesting First Level party.

There were a couple of no shows, but one had just rolled a First Level sidekick, I can roll that in to the new campaign. That leaves only one Player who has not yet re-rolled.

++++ OUT OF CHEESE ERROR ++++

BBBB

PART 2.

++++ CHARACTER ROSTER ++++

CHARACTERS
None compiled at this time.

BBBB

++++ RECORD KEEPING ++++

PART 3.

This is also posted on three forums, and a blog.
http://blackmoor.mystara.net/forums/viewforum.php?f=76
http://www.kenzerco.com/forums/forumdisp...ster-Tales
http://furiouslyeclectic.com/hackmoor

Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/empire/
BT

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HackMoor 2019/01/24 Samurai Swords

Furiously Eclectic People - Thu, 01/31/2019 - 21:32

Games are on Thursday nights sometime after 6:30PM at World's Best Comics, 9714 Warwick Blvd Newport News, Virginia 23601.

++++ START OF SESSION ++++

Last week we played old Milton Bradley's "Samurai Swords", the week before that on the 17th, there was no game, and the week before that on the 10th I forgot what we did.

But anyway back to "Samurai Swords", it has a "Risk-like" feel to it and even has a card per territory like "Risk" albeit used more like ownership titles. One Player was thoroughly amazed and wanted to Play it again.

Tonight we have on schedule a new Players so we should be spending the evening rolling up a new character.

++++ OUT OF CHEESE ERROR ++++

BBBB

PART 2.

++++ CHARACTER ROSTER ++++

CHARACTERS
Grok the Dwarf, a sixth level SpellSoldier (Battlemage subclass of Magic User).
Aerys, an Elvariel, a Fingersmith (Thief class).
Baronet Huang - a Master of the West Wind of the Stone Tiger Order, (Monk class).
Numrendir - a human Conjurist (a Conjuror, Magic User subclass)
Junkbot Jackson - a human Tracker/Friar (a Ranger 5th and Cleric 6th level).
Jacko, an Albino Dork Elf, a Multiclass of 15th level (Infiltrator, Ranger and Battle Mage).

NPCs/Proteges:
Baronetess Honda - a Human Datai Samurai, Steward of Catan (formerly Temple of the Frog)
Gnomex, a Gnome Friar of Geardal Ironhand (Cleric class.)
Tanzen - a Fae-Born first level Exciter. (Fourth level Invoker, a Magic User subclass).
Fundisha - a half-Elf Hero/Tout (Fighter and Infiltrator, a Thief subclass).
23 dwarf miners.

CAPTURED CHARACTERS (both PCs and NPCs)
Gerry Castagere, human Fingersmith, (Thief class) and ever loving devotee of Elefus, abandoned to the Blood Cult in the City of Brass on the Plane of Fire.

MISSING/OFFLINE/RETIRED CHARACTERS
Serena 2.0 - First Level Battle Mage Second (a Protege of Jacko) topside.
Count Elefus, a human Abbot of Heimdall (Cleric class). RETIRED
Felipe the Dwarf, a third level Sigil (Chosen One subclass of Cleric).
Sir Weasel, human Guild Soldier, Warlock, & Champion (Thief, Magic User, & Fighter classes) he stayed back in BlackMoor.
- and nine Pilgrim henchmen of various levels. (They wear hoodies.)
Slade Wilson - Dwarven Professional (a Bounty Hunter, Fighter subclass) Left behind at Catan.
Zamon, a fifth level Thug. (Player disappeared)

BBBB

++++ RECORD KEEPING ++++

PART 3.

This is also posted on three forums, and a blog.
http://blackmoor.mystara.net/forums/viewforum.php?f=76
http://www.kenzerco.com/forums/forumdisp...ster-Tales
http://furiouslyeclectic.com/hackmoor/

Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/empire/
BT

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[thepuck 2019-01-19] Flyers 5 @ Habs 2 EN

Furiously Eclectic People - Wed, 01/23/2019 - 21:36

Scratches:Peca, Alzner | IRL: Shaw | Suspended: Byron

First
More than half the period was gone before the Flyers achieved a shot on goal. 14 minutes in they had a 3 on 2 against a collapsing Mete and Weber, performed a nice play and missed the net. The period end 0-0 and despite the lack of SOGs by Philly, it's a tight free-flowing game with only ten faceoffs so far with both teams playing well.
Best Hab of the period: Chaput

Second
The Flyers get their first few scoring chances 3 minutes into the period. Lehkonen has an awkward collision 4 minutes in. So far it's a great game with the refs letting the players decide until a weak call 7 minutes in against Kotkaniemi. So the refs give the Flyers a weak makeup call to balance out their poor decision earlier (Kotkaniemi just missed a puck and when checked by Voracek, it was called Interference). The Flyers push and work hard. Konecny gets a good angle and scores on a rebound while being knocked over. Later, van Riemsdyk tips a point-shot past Niemi. 2-0
Best Hab of the period: Niemi

Third
Drouin takes a silly penalty. Simmonds and Patrick cash in on a two-on-one versus Petry; 3-0. Both teams play hard but the Flyers keep getting offensive odd-man rushes (https://www.sportingcharts.com/dictionary/nhl/odd-man-rush.aspx). Tatar pulls the puck to Domi who buries it; 3-1. Gallagher rushes the net but Hart stands tall and his teammates protect him. Patrick skates in on a pass from Voracek and beats Gallagher, Weber and Niemi; 4-1. Kulak gets a rebound; 4-2. A beauty rebound plops out to Drouin who misses the net. Habs pull the goalie in desperation and foolishness. The Flyers snag an empty net goal; 5-2.
Best Hab of the period: Domi

Hab's Three Stars:
1. Domi (1 goal, -1, 2 shots, 1 hit, 1 block, 18 minutes)
2. Chaput (1 shot, 9 minutes)
3. Danault (-1, 1 shot, 5 hits, 2 blocks, 18 minutes)

Weber led the team with a time-on-ice of 25 minutes but didn't have a particularly good game. Other than Danault and Domi (who is excelling since parting with Drouin as a linemate) only the fourth line constantly made things happen despite their low ice-time (under 10 minutes). Niemi also played very well with most of the goals not being his fault.

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[Movie Review] The Forest (2016) 2 Catkins

Furiously Eclectic People - Wed, 01/23/2019 - 19:46

IMDB | Trailer

The Forest is a well paced tense ride with appropriate jump-scares but fails in the end by not following the verisimilitude it built up.

The cast was excellent and the production values felt solid. Even the concept had a lot of potential and again, the constant tension was near perfect as this film keeps you glued.

The ending simply falls flat.

What would fix it? First, Michelle Trachtenberg could have pulled off the twin role instead of the poorly fleshed out identical twins. Second, give us some hint as to how the ending could be achieved or change it to a couple really diabolical finales leaving us speechless.

Other than that, it hits the other numbers solidly and while not a waste of time to watch, don't expect to be fulfilled at the end.

2 Catkins (out of 5)

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[thepuck 2019-01-21] Avs 0 @ Habs 3 EN

Furiously Eclectic People - Sun, 01/13/2019 - 04:09

Press are still yacking about MacKinnon's temper tantrum. Ex-Hab Mark Barberio is in the lineup for the Avs.

Below is the lineup with my rating for each player in the game. This is not a direct reflection of their skill level but how they impacted this specific game. It's rated from 1-10. It does not take into account intangibles like how they lead off the ice.

Scratches: Hudon, Peca, Alzner; IRL: Shaw

Star of the First Period: Artturi Lehkonen
Star of the Second Period: Jordie Benn
Star of the Third Period: Brendan Gallagher

Weber appeared hesitant to shoot in the first couple periods but leaned into a few in the third. The first three (and really all but one) penalties were pretty chintzy. Agostino is getting time on the PowerPlay. The new KK (Kotkaniemi) line gets pinned in their zone the way the old Domi line used to. Drouin seems to be trying harder than usual. Reilly takes exception to a blindside hit in Chaput (more because of the suicide pass he sent up the ice) before Deslauriers can get involved but they both get penalties.

While shorthanded but with a faceoff in the Avs zone, Danault draws the puck back to Kulak who strafes, fires and scores!

Instead of pulling back and “setting up” when the puck exits the Avs zone, Weber tosses it to a player just exiting and they rush back in catching the Avs off-guard allowing Drouin to send a cross-ice pass to Kotkaniemi who one-times it into the net!

This was a close, hard hitting and exciting game much like the 1-0 game vs the Wild. The score is inflated by an empty net goal.

Kersus' Three Stars of the Game

It was cool to watch this game with archergirl and from a distance, DWfan9. Cheers!

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HackMoor 2019/01/03 Thief Caught ... Not

Furiously Eclectic People - Thu, 01/10/2019 - 16:27

Games are on Thursday nights sometime after 6:30PM at World's Best Comics, 9714 Warwick Blvd Newport News, Virginia 23601.

PART 1.

++++ START OF SESSION ++++

Jacko realized at some point that the person with no personality who was resurrected from the pit containing stolen weapons, was not the thief who they had met earlier in the mushroom forest. Sure he looked like a thief, was dressed like a thief, but it wasn't that thief. Jacko had to go back to his house of ill repute (where they had put him to work) and remove the mask off the gimp suit they forced him to wear to confirm this.

So Jacko hit upon another idea, using the same method he used to find the stolen items, he used it to find the Thief. Not knowing the thief, he used his Mirror of Mental Prowess (again) at 50% because he had seen the target once. Even if failed, he had a couple dozen other party members who could use it.

He found the lost Thief, buried inside a Mushroom in the Mushroom Forest. Extracting the Thief, he had to get this one also raised from the Dead.

Once alive Jacko used his Ring of Truth to ask if he was the one who had stolen the items. To which the answer was a resounding "No.".

Then the Thief was asked, "Who killed you?" And the reply was, "I don't know, my throat was slit from behind."

Stymied, Jacko is still looking to exact retribution from whoever stole the Party's items.

(This was just a short 10 minute after session sidebar after having played "Ticket to RIde". We did not have a quorum for a regular game.)

++++ OUT OF CHEESE ERROR ++++

BBBB

PART 2.

++++ CHARACTER ROSTER ++++

CAPTURED CHARACTERS (both PCs and NPCs)
Gerry Castagere, human Fingersmith, (Thief class) and ever loving devotee of Elefus, abandoned to the Blood Cult in the City of Brass on the Plane of Fire.

BBBB

++++ RECORD KEEPING ++++

PART 3.

This is also posted on three forums, and a blog.
http://blackmoor.mystara.net/forums/viewforum.php?f=76
http://www.kenzerco.com/forums/forumdisp...ster-Tales
http://furiouslyeclectic.com/hackmoor/

Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/empire/
BT

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Remove the Man 2019

The Rational Man - Wed, 01/09/2019 - 01:41

In October of 2017 I wrote an essay titled Male Control. It was actually the second time I’d covered the topic of how a feminine-primary social order (a Gynocracy if you will) seeks to control its male population by deliberately sowing confusion about masculinity into multiple generations of boys, and later men. Prior to this I’d written another seminal post titled Remove the Man in which is outlined the ways in which that Gynocracy makes efforts to systematically remove men from our language. Usually this takes the form of ‘erasing’ the letters m-a-n from the English language wherever it appears in an official capacity (i.e. state bylaws, universities, legislative documents), but also in gender-neutral translations of the Bible now. The only real constant in all of this the deliberate erasure of ‘man’ and/or ‘men’ from that language.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

George Orwell

I wrote Remove the Man back in 2013 in response to one such effort by the Governor of Washington, Jay Inslee, who passed a bill to make state laws gender neutral. The effort actually began in 2007, but in 2019 a simple search for ‘gender neutral language’ will show you the extent and scope of this much larger effort. This essay served and the starting point for a larger awareness for me – that of the push to remove men and masculinity from more than just our language, but rather the removal of all things conventionally masculine. As Orwell states here, the thought, the thinking, about masculinity and men is the focus of the corruption.

But language is only one way that the concept of what is masculine is distorted for a purpose.

Today the American Psychological Association issued its first-ever guidelines for practice with boys/men’s. In it the concept of conventional (traditional) masculinity is outlined as ‘harmful’.

The main thrust of the subsequent research is that traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression—is, on the whole, harmful. Men socialized in this way are less likely to engage in healthy behaviors.

It would be easy to refute this basic presumption with countless examples of how all of these traits, most of which are innate parts of men’s evolved mental firmware, have been key in developing a civil society as well as healthy masculine identity. But what we’re seeing in this is a corruption of language that is leading to the standardization of the corruption of thought.

Stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression are evolved aspects of the male psyche that have served men for millennia. To the Red Pill aware man this is self-evident. What is less evident is the new context in which these ‘educated’ men apply meaning to these terms. Academia has been so thoroughly assimilated by the Feminine Imperative that the men making official decrees about psychological principle no longer have the insight to understand that their perspective is informed by ‘female-correct‘ thought.

There are two presumptions being made here:

First, is that men’s predisposition for stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression are the results of a patriarchal societies adverse influence on boys and men.

The belief is founded in blank-slate social constructionism. I addressed this in Old Lies:

They hate the very idea that a boy might act in accordance with an inborn masculine proclivity. They hate the idea that a boy might learn to be tough and resilient at the expense of a vulnerability (weakness) because it contradicts the equalist belief set. They hate the idea that boys and girls have innately, biologically, different ways of dealing with emotions that don’t align with their belief in a blank-slate. To force them to accept this would be to force them to abandon deeply ego-invested beliefs that they themselves had conditioned into them by the same feminine-primary education.

Boys don’t naturally emote like girls, but when they refuse to align with the female-correct way of emoting we say that some patriarchal macho man, somewhere, in some movie, in some song, in some household taught that kid not to feel. He somehow learned that allowing his emotions to rule over him, to be vulnerable, to prioritize his feelings above his sense of rational self is what it actually is – a weakness that in our evolutionary past was far likelier to get him killed than to earn the praise of his equalist teachers.

Boys are simply not as emotional as girls – our brains did not evolve that way – but because we value the feminine above the masculine today we say this kid is doing it wrong. We say he learned to be an asshole from his macho dad or he learned to love firearms because of the latest rap song or a toxically masculine society that doesn’t exist.

Now, granted, the men responsible for these psychological practices and their standardization tried to walk back the idea that conventionally masculine attributes weren’t “all bad”. This is expected because an aspect like stoicism can still be considered useful to a feminine-primary social order. It’s just that the larger social order wants the aspects of masculinity to manifest on its own terms and serving a female-centric utility.

A determined hard-driving man is what they want when the floodwaters start rising and women need to be carried to safety, but when a man uses that aspect of his masculine nature for his exclusive benefit, or a purpose that conflicts with feminine primacy, that’s when the aspect is defined as dangerous. However, the overall preconception is that there is some sinister influence of an old-school chauvinistic patriarchy teaching boys and men to be ‘toxically’ masculine. I addressed this fallacy in Old Lies, but this is one more example of how fem-centric society must cling to a clichéd parody of how boys must be being taught in order to cover the fact that boys are raised like defective girls today.

What is glaringly ignored is that these traits, and many more, are endemic parts of men’s evolved nature. Our emotional natures are not the same as that of women’s. Our brains are not wired the same as women’s. Men and women process emotions differently from the other, particularly negative emotions. This is a feature of the male brain, not a bug. But today the APA has decided unilaterally that men’s way of dealing with emotion is “incorrect”. Incorrect because the only correct way would be one that aligns with the women’s interests they’ve been conditioned to believe are only beneficial to larger society. To the APA, masculinity itself is a bug.

Secondly, this deliberate misconception relies entirely on social constructionism and almost entirely ignores the biological factors that contribute to masculine gender identity. I’m presently working on another essay that explores the dependency on blank-slate equalism as the basis for virtually every presumption the mainstream has about gender identity, so I don’t want to give too much away. However, the whole presumption of gender in humanist psychology depends on the falsehood that men and women are functionally coequal.

Accepting that failed notion of blank-slate equalism is what scaffolds the entire premise of this standard of masculinity. Masculinity is something that cannot be removed from society if its source is something that is unique to only men by virtue of their biology. They cannot ensure female-correctness as a societal standard if men and women are different. People like those in authority at the APA know this. It’s why merely talking about those innate gender differences is deemed a hate-crime today. Inspiring doubt in the blank-slate standard risks destroying the scaffolding for all their preconceptions of gender.

In the end this is one more, I think significant, effort in removing men and conventional masculinity from our collective thought. This standardization of how men should be ‘dealt with’ in therapy, or colored by in just considering men’s role in psychology is an ideological power play. Modern psychology officially doesn’t ‘get men’ anymore.

The latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) will now officially list ‘traditional’ masculinity as a hazard or a disorder for male humans. They can’t be called ‘men’ because that would gender them.

I read a few Twitter threads about this change to the DSM and I think they’re worth reading to get a better grasp of the gravity of this standardization:

The link below will take you to the new APA guidance document that defines "traditional masculinity" as unhealthy for men. I encourage you to read it and to evaluate its arguments & suggestions. This matters and I will explain why. https://t.co/1KAwizWfQy

— John P Wright (@cjprofman) January 7, 2019

On December 29th, 2018 I made some pretty ominous predictions about what I thought the manosphere and men in general could expect to see in 2019-2020. We’re not eve a week into the first month and a lot of what I expected is starting to develop. The gender divide is now a gender ‘Cold War’ and going forward I see the polarization between the sexes becoming even uglier than the 2016 election cycle.

This issuance from the APA is a foundation for how psychology – our Lords of the new church – will define what is acceptably ‘male’ and what is not. Furthermore it defines what aspects of masculinity is officially hazardous based on social constructionism and science denial.

Going forward I think Red Pill aware men will have to view mainstream psychology with even more suspicion than we do already. My Red Man Group colleague, Rian Stone, has mentioned that this equivalent of a “Papal Bull” from the APA represents a call to action for the Red Pill community and the manosphere in general to help men understand that conventional, “traditional” masculinity is not a disorder.

The Red Pill saves lives. I can only see this standardization as a net negative for men who are already five times more likely than women to take their own lives. Men seeking psychological help will only find their problems compounded by psychologists trained to believe masculinity is inherently toxic. And as a result we need to be prepared to help our Blue Pill brothers unplug and show them their inherent worth as conventionally masculine men.

Categories: Miscellaneous Blogs

HackMoor 2018/12/20 History of the World and 2018/12/29 No Game

Furiously Eclectic People - Thu, 01/03/2019 - 16:17

Games are on Thursday nights sometime after 6:30PM at World's Best Comics, 9714 Warwick Blvd Newport News, Virginia 23601.

PART 1.

++++ START OF SESSION ++++

There was no HackMaster game this session. I had a visitor from uttermost West attend and we played a "History of the World" game. Players had not played it in awhile, the boxtop was fading with age from too many days in the sun baked back of the vehicle. It is only a 7 turn game, but it was refreshing to remember that the loser of the previous turn gets to decline bad cards on the next turn and give them to his opponents.

The following week we had no game.

I'm not sure what to do this week either. I have no more adventure planned. I'll just have to "wing it".

Jacko still has two goals, to bring retribution on the thief who stole company magic items and to find the Crown of Thrain and ascend.

++++ OUT OF CHEESE ERROR ++++

BBBB

PART 2.

++++ CHARACTER ROSTER ++++

CAPTURED CHARACTERS (both PCs and NPCs)
Gerry Castagere, human Fingersmith, (Thief class) and ever loving devotee of Elefus, abandoned to the Blood Cult in the City of Brass on the Plane of Fire.

BBBB

++++ RECORD KEEPING ++++

PART 3.

This is also posted on three forums, and a blog.
http://blackmoor.mystara.net/forums/viewforum.php?f=76
http://www.kenzerco.com/forums/forumdisp...ster-Tales
http://furiouslyeclectic.com/hackmoor/

Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/empire/
BT

NNNN

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Categories: Miscellaneous Blogs

[KEZ 2018-12-29] Lejends 1:1 TRS

Furiously Eclectic People - Sun, 12/30/2018 - 05:02

Kersus Excorticates Zines

A hodgepodge of review, synopsis and related thoughts. By no means one of those things and yet not all. Just what I felt like writing. :)

Lejends Magazine

Vol 1, Issue 1
May 2000; 32 pages; $5.00
Total Reality Studios

These magazines have nice cardstock covers and the front cover looks nice. It's all black & white. Some of the graphics kind of bleed into a blur like the Hekaforge logo.

The back cover has an advertisement for upcoming Lejendary Earth fiction; “Dawnstar Chronicles” coming Fall 2001 (www.darkwurks.com). It's mentioned again inside.

The inside front cover has the words offset to the left so the first letter of each sentence is cut off. The art here is a little better than the cover (the cover art is nice but the ink bleed takes away from it a bit) and I believe pictures some type of Sorcerer/Demonurge. There is also a plug for the artist Tina Druce-Hoffman.

The Courier's Pouch

We start with a welcome letter from editor Lady Amanda who mentions “All of us here at the Forge and within the halls Castle Gax and Falconsflight Keep have pledged our utmost effort toward bringing you a magazine you will use and enjoy.”

From the Forge

Some fun words from Forgie (Chris Clark) and the unfortunate news that his IBM was infested with a virus and replaced which cost them time and work. He also uses a Mac that never connects to the Internet. The writing is playful giving the virus some Lejendary Adventure stats.

Chris goes on to talk about the back cover advert which is for a comic book; GAMA and getting LA into distribution which I never actually realized it was - perhaps at the time Lion Rampant couldn't get it which meant few gaming stores in Canada would get it. Back then, and this is me talking, not Chris, I think Alliance was still separate from Diamond.

There's talk about cartographers in the stable, the new German artist Tobias Brenner who did the cover for Mouth of the Marsh (adventure and great series IMO), the Learth series and how the Fellowship of Lejendary Gamers web site is being stymied.

Chris talks about the demo program, which I never actually knew about other than talking to Gary about convention support where I received personalized adventures The Rock and later Seizon of the Son (both well after the conventions I ran LA at - and different years I think). The Rock I've used quite a few times but SotS only once. Anyway, he talks in this column about The Rock, The Judas Goat, A Question of Tribute and Dead Calm.

The big thing is that these tournament modules will only be released under this program and never see full production.

So, time changed things. Perhaps one of the names became Seizon of the Son (Judas Goat?) But probably only Chris could answer that. I don't believe A Question of Tribute ever came out however since I playtested and helped edit it for the defunct Gygax Games, I did get my own copy and have run it at conventions and for a few gaming groups to much success. It really shows off the mechanics of LA.

So, what was The Judas Goat and Dead Calm?

The Rock ended up being released under Troll Lord Games (minus the special convention extras).

I don't know if the noted Dwarven Forge figures and dungeon geomorphs were available at Gen Con that year.

Eye of Glory by Martin Dougherty is mentioned and was truly a masterpiece of a novel much like Saga of Old City in feel but very uniquely awesome. Absolutely one of my all time favourite novels.

There's a sarcastic comment about litigation, the work being done on Lejendary Lite and the difference of opinion between him and Gary on what to include. There's mention of 74 events they organized for the two companies (not sure the second company) at Gen Con.

Chris is explaining here all his different sections where he'll write about things like the above in The Hammer, The Anvil, Augury and Wrap-Up where I am now.

Many pleasantries toward the fans and a note about how tinkering is within the intent of the rules.

Laws of the Realms: A Sufficient Presupposition by Dan Cross

This is a nice article on dealing with difficult players who want ‘the rules Bent to their ideas regarding verisimilitude’ and the difference between that and genuine questions. As well he talks about how radically malleable the rules are (without breaking) when the LM feels the need for change.

With that in mind Mr. Cross tackles Orders, Abilities and basic perception (within the game).

Lost Lore

Gary adds some new Psychogenic Powers bringing the total to 34 at this point in time. Five years later when Living the Lejend (I think TLG listened to Kenny G when editing) came out, the four Powers listed in this article are not included.

By the time the unpublished Revised Edition was ready, they were included plus seven more.

I wonder if Gary's Psychogenic Veshoge used any of these?

Xagig's Fables

Gary talks about Orders and those who attempt to munchkin the system and how it fails to work with LA.

Orders were added because of the appeal in archetypes. I personally think they were added to accommodate those who couldn't get their heads out of D&D. LA is one of those systems if not THE system where it's best to unlearn all you knew and start fresh. It's so very intuitive to new gamers but very hard for those ingrained in rigid thinking.

At the end is included the errata for Unordered progression of Abilities. I think this is less because it was necessary and more to tweak the system. In play I've found that Merits are enough for Avatars and there is no need for these progressions however when they're used, it works as well. The system is not only malleable but dynamic enough that these parts of the mechanics are very plug and play even during an ongoing campaign (although I'd recommend deciding beforehand).

Adventurers’ Tales
The Invisible Dreadnought: Fun With Panprobability
By Evan Torner

Lejend Master Torner tells of a one-shot adventure he created around the use of Panprobability. Now, either I've read this article multiple times or it's also elsewhere as I know this story quite well. It's an ingenious adventure that feels like a fantasy scavenger hunt meets Divine Intervention (a Traveller 1e adventure). He gives us enough information to recreate this adventure as the locations are easy enough to slap into a town.

This is a gem of an article.

New Optional Orders

Alchemist, Merchant and Scholar are fleshed out. Jay Witthoft's illustration of an Alchemist is quite nice as is much of the art in this issue.

Out of the Wilderness

Gary, Daniel Lewis and others bring us a handful of new creatures for Learth. All of them are useful and well fleshed out.

The key here is that each creature has a blurb from Aryen the Watcher based on his experience, knowledge of myths, and even monetary values of remains, tips and warnings from his scant 38 years of travelling.

All of these creatures appear in the published book More Beasts of Lejend (2006) without Aryen's interesting blurbs.

The Star Chamber

In this article Gary welcomes us to the LA Game Multiverse talking about AsteRogues (Fantastical Science), Elder Worlds (Science Fiction), a Weird Science, Wild West, Horror, Cyberpunk genre and more! LARs Kowloon Wharf Station is mentioned and how short the learning curve from one genre to the next would be. There is also a link to the beta-test material for LARs.

The most notable sentence in this article is:

“The system is, as well you know, skill-based, rules-lite, and participant friendly.”

To me LA is simple, dynamic and versatile however Gary's sentence above is perfect as well. The concept of skill-bundles (also used in Savage Worlds as broad skills) works very well allowing a great deal of customization or playing it as-is.

The Watcher's Way

Daniel Lewis talks about survival and staying alive when leaving the confines of a city. Specifically here about surviving in the fens (swamp) directed at enhancing the gaming experience.

Shadoweavings

Some clarifications on rules and changing the Warlock Order to be called the Augur Order.

Gamesmythe's Faire

This speaks to become a place for players post things as well as a retailer listing.

Inside the back cover is an advertisement for Castle Wolfmoon which is the conclusion to a trilogy.

Final Excortications

This is a pretty full issue setting the stage for greatness.

It's dedicated to one system and really isn't that old so it doesn't feel dated. Much of the information is not only still pertinent but there's also thoughts useful for any system.

Some of the material made it into published products, but not all.

These magazines are some of my favourites next to Journeys but when they were released it was near impossible to get copies.

You

The question I have for you is, what makes a review/synopsis/banter about a magazine issue interesting?

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Categories: Miscellaneous Blogs

Little Big Head

The Rational Man - Sat, 12/22/2018 - 02:56

One of the dichotomies I consistently see in the manosphere is the differences in how men approach the importance (or feigned unimportance) of sex. I got a bit sidetracked in last week’s essay. I was planing on writing about this phenomenon when I saw the need to explore how it impacted a larger social narrative. So, let’s consider this essay an addendum to The New Polyandry.

How men publicly and privately prioritize sex is always something that leads to a judgement call about that particular man, how he lives his life, and what it says about his integrity. If you openly make sex a “big deal” in your life, or you acknowledge its importance in intersexual relationships, you open yourself up to men’s Beta Game virtue signaling. The presumption is that if you were a real Alpha sex is just something you should have mastery over. If sex is at all important to a man, and he expresses this, that guy runs the risk of being seen as “obsessed with sex“, a “pussy beggar” or in someway less of a man for allowing sex to control his decisions.

Why is this the perception?

Two weeks ago I had a lively debate with the producer of Pat Campbell’s morning show. While we did have other topics to hit on that morning, she and I dug in and talked about how “sex is the glue that holds relationships together.” You can listen to the full segment here if you like.

As I mentioned last week, the notion that men need sex is nothing I haven’t covered in the past. In You Need Sex I made a case for the importance of sex and how it was, until recently, something that constituted part of a man’s life experience. Now it seems that being a sexless virgin at age 40 should be considered an accomplishment by certain factions in the manosphere:

One very common dismissal of Red Pill awareness I read from Blue Pill men is this feigned, blasé indifference to sex.

“All that Red Pill, PUA shit is for guy’s who obsess over sex. They only go to the lengths they do to get laid and never see the bigger picture. You don’t need sex you know? You wont die from not getting laid.”

For the most part this false-indifference is really a conditioned, response couched in Beta Game. The idea is for the Blue Pill guy to promote the public perception that he’s above his sexual impulses in the hopes that any girl within earshot (or reading his comments online) will recognize his uniqueness in not letting his cock do his thinking for him. From a male deductive logic standpoint it makes sense to the feminized male – women have all told him how off-put they are with guys who only think about sex, so he’ll identify with the women he’d like to get with and “not be like other guys.”

[…]Thats the Beta Game behind the “you don’t need sex” Buffer, but there’s more to this rationale than that. Technically the Beta reasoning is correct; physically, you’re not going to die if you don’t get laid. You could probably masturbate to relieve yourself or live a sexless existence due to a physical disability and live a productive life as satisfying as you can manage it. If you don’t know what you’re missing or if a sexual substitute does the job, what’s the difference, right? The line of reasoning is that if it isn’t food, water or oxygen it isn’t really a necessity for existence.

You’re All Obsessed!

Self-righteous Blue Pill men always look to make their necessities into virtues. It also helps the men who fall on the 80% side of the Hypergamous Pareto curve to convince themselves and others that their sexual strategy – one that follows enforced monogamy – is the moral one; or the logical, common sense one absent the moral context. If you cannot get laid yourself, at least you can make getting laid into an ‘obsession‘ for the 20% of men who can. By doing so you encourage the 20% of men, who women desire to fuck, to police themselves and women by adopting your own, self-superior, one-woman-per-man sexual strategy.

Pretty much every MRA I’ve listened to, most Traditional Conservatives and a few MGTOWs, like to qualify men who can get laid as being in some way obsessed with getting laid. We’re told how morally superior they themselves are for essentially thinking with the big head instead of the little one, thus confirming their own part in a monogamous sexual strategy. As I mentioned in the last essay, a majority of men tend to fall on one side of the Strategic Pluralism Theory with respect to their sexual strategy.

Low SMV (sexual market value) men are basically forced to invest in one woman at a time if they are to successfully reproduce. This is the basis of a socio-sexual order founded on enforced monogamy. The larger pool of men benefit reproductively if the majority of men can be relied upon to follow the dictates of socially accepted, socially enforced, form of monogamy.

In the past this emphasis also had a culling effect on the worst aspects of women’s Hypergamous tendencies. If all men – including the 20% who could enjoy many women – agreed to play by the old social contract and adopted monogamy as their sexual strategy (in spite of being able to reproduce outside it) then more men would have the opportunity to reproduce. Furthermore, women’s Hypergamy would also be forced to accept lower SMV men’s monogamous strategy as a buffer to worst aspects of their own.

In the past, religious and social mores used to act as a buffer against Hypergamy, but the compromise for women was that they could expect to have the Beta Bucks provisioning aspects of their Hypergamy more or less provided for by the majority of men who adopted this strategy. In an evolutionary sense, protection and provisioning are already an integral part of the male mental firmware. But all of that went out the window after the Sexual Revolution, unilaterally female-controlled hormonal birth control and the socio-sexual/socioeconomic landscape that sprang from the Fempowerment narrative.

Today there is a radical imbalance between the old social contract upon which enforced monogamy was a key element and the new social contract dictated by a gynocratic social order that places women’s sexual strategy well above that of men’s. So it’s small wonder that men would revert back to 80% of low SMV men insisting on, and shaming, the 20% of high SMV men comply with a sexual strategy that women readily confirm isn’t in their best interests.

On the male side of the strategic equation a majority of low SMV men cannot afford to have Alpha men playing by the rules of polygyny.

That polygyny is really a form of female-directed polyandry (see last week’s essay), but to the 20% of men who enjoy the benefits of falling on the enthusiastic consent side of Hypergamy it just makes sense to go with it. As such, low SMV men are compelled to find ways of discouraging these Alphas from following their r selected sexual strategy. They realize women will want, and pursue, Alphas. And in a polyandrous socio-sexual order based on the Alpha Fucks side of Hypergamy low SMV men drew the shortest straw.

Intrasexual Combat

When Beta men shame women for wanting to fuck Alpha men it has the effect of making those Beta men seem more insecure. In a feminine-primary social order one of the highest crimes is to attempt to challenge Hypergamy in any way. Even in a religious context, to challenge Hypergamy is to be guilty of repressing women’s sexuality. Today, just this impression is conflated with ‘toxic’ masculinity.

In truth, it would never occur to most low SMV men to shame women for their sexual strategy because they know that in doing so they reduce their own chances of reproduction. Women simply deem them ‘losers’ in the SMP (sexual marketplace). They become scolds, or worse, they become men who are “insecure in their masculinity” because they confirm their low SMV status in doing so. In today’s socio-sexual environment men policing women’s Hypergamy is a lost cause.

The solution then becomes an effort to disqualify the Alpha men they compete with by changing the rules that “real men” are supposed to play by. If you can’t win the Game, change the rules to better fit your strengths.

The ‘Real Man®‘ becomes the guy who exclusively invests himself in one ‘Quality Woman‘ – just like they do.

The apex of masculinity becomes whatever definition best aligns with what they believe they represent.

The’Real Man®‘ is the guy who best fulfills a woman’s, often duplicitous, sexual/life strategy by adopting the K mating strategy of socially/religiously enforced monogamy – just like they do. Oh, and the Quality Woman becomes whatever woman whose necessity compels her to agree with and adopt that strategy (Epiphany Phase).

The Real Man®‘ is the guy who plays by the old social contract rules of enforced monogamy, so more Betas might have a better shot at reproduction. True ‘Manhood‘ becomes a title Betas now feel qualified to bestow on other men; just as women also do with men who help complete their Hypergamous life-strategies.

Trads vs. The Playboy Lifestyle

In order for Beta men to effect this reigning in of the Alpha men women want to tame and breed with, the high SMV man must be demonized and disqualified from the SMP for following his sexual/biological imperatives. The most common way to do this is by conflating his strategy with a degenerate hedonism. he must be made to seem as if he’s not in control of his sexual nature. So the effort becomes one of building an archetype around the ‘Playah‘ – A man who would be a bad long term bet for women’s Hypergamy because he lacks self-control. For this straw man character his little head does the thinking for the big head making him unreliable as a prospect for parental investment.

If enforced monogamy defines the accepted SMP, and women are presumed to be coequal, co-rational participants in it the ‘Playah’ needs to be cast as the outsider. The latent message is the same intrasexual combat method women use with ‘slut shaming‘; the ‘Playah‘ is a bad bet for long term security even if he is the guy women want to fuck.

However, that Playboy is a cruel reminder to low SMV men that they’ll never be able to fully exercise their own masculine imperative – unlimited access to unlimited sexuality. The closest the majority of men will ever get to this is online porn; which of course is why it’s so popular. There is a reason why 68% of Christian men watch porn. They understand that it’s the only viable substitute for their sexual imperative that they’re likely to experience in this lifetime.

While MRAs and MGTOW tend to reserve a special hate for ‘Playahs‘, it’s the Trad-Con mindset that is the most vocal against the Playboy lifestyle. There’s an overarching need amongst Trads to confirm their ego-investment in locking themselves into enforced monogamy.

There’s two complications to this:

First, Trad men (and women) tend to superimpose their religious and social belief set on their own sexual strategy. It’s a sin if they don’t accept monogamy as the standard. Today, this belief is a vestige of the old buffers that used to guard against either sex getting too far into their primal sexual impulses and strategies. It’s much easier to impose your sexual strategy on other men, effectively policing their strategy, if it’s ‘God’s Will’ that everyone behave according to that old social contract. I should add that this is the primary reason most Trad men suffer the worst from having their belief in the old set of books destroyed by Red Pill truths. It is galling for men who’ve invested their whole lives in the old social contract to have it vividly disproved by ‘Playahs’ (and women’s behaviors that confirm it) who understand the new social contract well enough to make it work for them.

Second, there’s the self-fulfilling idea that a man who opts for the traditional monogamous lifestyle is in some way more progressive or evolved, or life-satisfied than the ‘Playah‘ with the option to enjoy his non-exclusive sexual strategy. These are the guys who play up the ‘sour grapes’ Law of Power:

Law 36 – Disdain the things you cannot have

If there is something you want but cannot have, show contempt for it. The less interest you reveal, the more superior you seem.

MRAs and Trads alike don’t like being reminded that sex has always been an integral part of a healthy life experience for the majority of men who’ve ever lived on this planet. However, to them, sex is almost always a reward for desired behavior that they believe women expect of them. For most of them sex is always transactional so they never live out any frame of reference of having sex with a woman in a validational sense. It’s likely that they will never experience sex in any other context than the transactional. This is simply one of the visceral realities of a Darwinian sexual marketplace. As such, this pretext colors all of their understanding about what is, or should be accepted as, a legitimate sexual strategy – which unsurprisingly is his enforced monogamy strategy.

“Meaningful” Sex

The low SMV majority have many contrivances to corral uncooperative Alphas to adopt their sexual strategy. However, there’s also an involved necessity to convince themselves that their Blue Pill conditioning is the best sexual strategy that would benefit everyone if we’d all just see the validity of it as they do. To effect this they apply a subjective “meaningfulness” to their enforced monogamy (K selection) and “meaninglessness” to pursuing men’s biological imperatives (r selection) or the Alpha sexual strategy.

As a result, low SMV men tend to deemphasize the importance of sex in life. I asked this in the introduction; why is there a perception that a man who enjoys many women is somehow having sex that is less ‘meaningful’ than a man whose sex live is dependent on his relationship with one woman – or, a man who is ostensibly celibate?

The tactic involved here is the control over what constitutes meaning in sex. Low SMV men need this control to direct a meta-Frame that foments their sexual strategy; sex is only valid if it’s ‘meaningful’ in a way that aligns with an enforced monogamy sexual strategy. Thus, they can disqualify high-SMV men by delegitimizing his sexual experience. The higher the notch count, the less meaningful the sexual experience – and the likelier he can be seeen as “obsessed‘ with (meaningless) sex.

“Meaning” is deliberately ambiguous to better salve the egos of low SMV men, but meaning only aligns with what better promotes the enforced monogamy strategy. This strategy conflict actually serves Hypergamy in the long run as well. Women will endorse the importance of meaningful sex since it helps to convince the r selected Alphas that they should (eventually) shift to K selected commitment and parental investment with them. To the Beta moralist, any sex that doesn’t implicitly lead to marriage, children and the formation of families it’s always ‘meaningless’.

For the less moralistic low SMV man the idea that sex is something easily had, something inherently cheap, serves in devaluing Alpha men’s sexual experience. A popular idea among MRAs is that meaningless sex is something any guy can realistically achieve in a random club on a Friday night. This also serves to debase the value of learning Game; something MRAs never seem to have any facility with. By unrealistically cheapening the process of Game the same ‘meaninglessness’ imperative is created.

If any guy can find a worthless club slut with minimal effort then the low SMV man can raise his value by appearing to have higher standards than to lower himself to doing so. See how that works? This is a variation of the ‘sour grapes’ strategy I mentioned earlier. The Alpha who can easily get women becomes common. And by enjoying what Beta men believe should be a common sexual experience that man is reducing himself to his baser instincts. They say he’s “obsessed with pussy” or a “pussy beggar” because he’s applied himself to learning, in the most marginal way, how to have sex on his terms. And if he plays by a rule set that doesn’t align with the “correct” rules all his efforts become “meaningless”.

I should add here that MRAs and some Trad-Con men also like to foment the idea that because they eschew all that easily-had “meaningless” sex that Alpha men and Low Quality women are engaging it frees him up to pursue more esoteric, philosophical and creatively productive pursuits. Again, this helps to boost their esteem while presenting the appearance of uniqueness in spite of the fact that few of them ever have anything concrete to show for it. Along these lines they also love to imply that famous celibate men of antiquity were somehow more accomplished because they had the forbearance of mind to understand sex was a hindrance. When no one believes you aren’t making your necessity a virtue it’s sometimes necessary to paint men more famous than you with the same false-virtues.

The common refrain is that they’ve reached some Nirvana state of higher purpose or that they’ve evolved above the common need for sex. They shame the Alpha’s intelligence by claiming they allow their sexual nature to dictate to their rational nature. This too is a sexual quality signaling (or they believe it should be). They hope that their coequal, co-rational, Quality women will respond to it because they presume they’re using the same enforced monogamy rule book. Most Beta moralists are egalitarian blank-slate equalists. If they are evolved above their sexuality, then evolved, rational women should be too – but only if they are quality.

Categories: Miscellaneous Blogs

Hackmoor 2018/11/29 and 2018/12/12 Departure from BlackMoor Dungeon

Furiously Eclectic People - Thu, 12/20/2018 - 03:56

Games are on Thursday nights sometime after 6:30PM at World's Best Comics, 9714 Warwick Blvd Newport News, Virginia 23601.

The Player for Jacko ordered the pizza again with a steak and mozz both weeks.

This report compresses two sessions.

PART 1.

++++ START OF SESSION ++++

From the prior report the Salamanders chose option #1, a return to the Plane of Fire. Their reasoning was their return point would be a different point from where they left. If I read the dungeon correctly, the Salamanders were originally tired of the fighting on their original Plane of Fire. Return to a different location on the same Plane would give them the same respite in an environment they were more comfortable with.

Since Jacko has a Mirror of Mental prowess, he used it as a Portal, the entire troop of Salamanders exited thereby. Jacko already had been to the Plane of Fire, he didn't need to research the entry point. Although Jacko made it a point that he would use the portal to send the Salamanders to the Town of Noob, into the crematorium where there was a known Gate to the Plane of Fire and just hold the portal at the entrance to the Gate and have them shuffle through.

Then Jacko returned to the rest of the Party who by that time had negotiated themselves back up the cliff overlooking the mushroom forest. Using Jacko's portal again, their first stop was the town of Noob where the party reacquainted themselves with their Thieves lair and their contract house of ill repute.

Jacko, still determined to discover the thief who stole the Party's goods used his Mirror of Mental Prowess again.

"Knowing" the subject to be viewed (the stolen items), he used his Mirror's scry ability. (Why he didn't think of this before, who knows?) So he used the Mirror's portal ability to go to where he scryed them. Stepping through he found the Party's missing items on a pile of dead Elf bodies and one a little more fresh Human body, sans its head.

He found himself in a circular room with no openings on the walls. Pondering this impossibility for a minute, Jacko looked up and realized he was in a pit. Hanging over it was an Iron Maiden. Climbing out, Jacko recognized the room as one of the Torture Rooms of the "Bloody Duke". Retrieving the dead body, Jacko returns through the portal back to Noob. Having been dead too long it seems, they had to use a Resurrection spell. (How they got their hands on that spell, I forget. I presume it was a contracted spell.)

In any case when the body became alive again, it was unresponsive. Snapping their fingers in front if its eyes, it blinked, but could not talk, nor relate. It could eat, sleep and poop, but that was about all. Apparently, it had no soul.

Except the Rubber kind, because the party decided to put him in a gimp suit and employ him in the house of ill repute.

As a last resort the Party posted drawings of the resurrected man, with the caption "Have You Seen Me?" in various placed in Jacko had ever visited (using his portal). The Party is still waiting for a response.

Meanwhile the rest of the Party did the following:

Huang, Honda, Junkbot, Fundisha and Numrendir left for Huang's Barony of Catan.

Aerys, hung about in the town of Noob with Tanzen. Perhaps frolicking with the periodic visits of the home ported merchant ship, "The Raging Queen" at the river dock.

Grok, leveled up, using a Tempis Fugit spell to compress time. He also opted to roll up a Sidekick which took up most of the second session.

Meanwhile Jacko went back to the Dungeon of Blackmoor, retraced his steps one more time and determined that the Thief could not possibly have gone past the party nor further than level 15.

Using Sherlock Holmes's methodology, ergo: "Whatever remains however improbable, must be he truth." Jacko used his Portal to return back to Noob to ponder his next move.

++++ OUT OF CHEESE ERROR ++++

BBBB

PART 2.

++++ CHARACTER ROSTER ++++

CHARACTERS
Zamon, a fifth level Thug.
Grok the Dwarf, a sixth level SpellSoldier (Battlemage subclass of Magic User).
Aerys, an Elvariel, a Fingersmith (Thief class).
Baronet Huang - a Master of the West Wind of the Stone Tiger Order, (Monk class).
Numrendir - a human Conjurist (a Conjuror, Magic User subclass)
Junkbot Jackson - a human Tracker/Friar (a Ranger 5th and Cleric 6th level).
Jacko, an Albino Dork Elf, a Multiclass of 15th level (Infiltrator, Ranger and Battle Mage).

NPCs/Proteges:
Baronetess Honda - a Human Datai Samurai, Steward of Catan (formerly Temple of the Frog)
Gnomex, a Gnome Adept of Geardal Ironhand (Cleric class.)
Tanzen - a Fae-Born first level Exciter. (Fourth level Invoker, a Magic User subclass).
Fundisha - a half-Elf Swordsperson/Tout (Fighter and Infiltrator, a Thief subclass).
23 dwarf miners.

CAPTURED CHARACTERS (both PCs and NPCs)
Gerry Castagere, human Fingersmith, (Thief class) and ever loving devotee of Elefus, abandoned to the Blood Cult in the City of Brass on the Plane of Fire.

BBBB

++++ RECORD KEEPING ++++

PART 3.

This is also posted on three forums, and a blog.
http://blackmoor.mystara.net/forums/viewforum.php?f=76
http://www.furiouslyeclectic.com/forum/f...php?fid=13
http://www.kenzerco.com/forums/forumdisp...ster-Tales
http://furiouslyeclectic.com/hackmoor/

Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/empire/
BT

NNNN

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Categories: Miscellaneous Blogs

[thepuck 2018-12-13] Canes 4 @ Habs 6

Furiously Eclectic People - Fri, 12/14/2018 - 05:37

For being the only consistently good player in a losing cause last game, Deslauriers is scratched for Peca. Reilly also steps in for Schlemko.

Scratches: Hudon, Deslauriers, Schlemko, Armia(IRL)

Kersus' 3 Stars: Peca, Juulsen, Gallagher/Shaw(tie)

1st
Domi's line starts. Kotkaniemi hooks a Cane down and goes to the box to feel shame. Habs have been dominant so far. Canes get a delay of game penalty and the most notable event of this Habs PP was the Canes shorthanded tow-on-one rush which was the best scoring opportunity of the game thus far. Byron takes a stick in the face and goes into the boards hard – leaves for the dressing room. No call. He returns shortly thereafter but doesn't go on to play his normal brand of opportunist hockey.

Hab of the period: Mike Reilly

2nd
Benn takes a wee hook, holds the stick and then embellishes a fall down. He gets caught and goes to the box embarrassing his whole team and the sport. Weber gets skated around and the Canes go up 1-0. Svechkinov steps up in the crease and slams his forearms into Price with the Ref watching and leaning on the goalpost. No call. Habs are heavily outshooting the Canes.

Domi embellishes however the call goes his way. Karma, er, Byron gets his stick caught up in a Cane player's legs. Four-on-four. Later the Canes get another penalty. Price rushes to the bench, the extra man comes on, we're deep in the Canes zone with everyone ready, except Drouin who just stands there while the puck slips in front of him and the play's called down.

Weber sends in a nice low shot that Byron easily tips but the save is made. Shaw dives across to knock the puck away and somehow the refs think a Cane tripped him. Price turns over the puck on a bad pass and luckily the Canes miss the net. Peca and Petry score, 1-2. Habs are still doubling the Canes in shots.

If you watch, Shaw plays the Centre position for Domi and even takes quite a few draws. Domi and Drouin both float with Domi seeking the break-out and Drouin either trying to do a Gretzky or just lost.

Hab of the period: Matthew Peca

3rd
Petry gives up a goal. Gallagher answers back. Lehkonen drives from the opposite side as Gallagher's goal, scoring and even taking the late hit! Price gives up an easy goal. Shaw replies on a play he started taking the pass from Weber on the rush.

Domi leaves his man wide open and covers no one. Juulsen goes down, gets slashed and then a Cane looks at him in a vulnerable position spearing him in the crotch. No call. Maybe the puck was in his jock.

Domi tries to protect the lead by flipping the puck up into the neutral zone to a Canes player instead of any number of solid plays. That Cane makes stuff happen and they rush in beating Kulak and Price for a goal.

Price has yet another turnover but the Canes miss the net. With 2:14 left, the Canes pull the goalie. Petry bounces the puck off the boards and into the empty net. Gallagher almost gets another ampty netter.

Hab of the period: Gallagher

Notes

Watch the replays – many goals were scored by a guy skating across the crease without any interference by the defencemen – that's hard on a goalie.

Weber didn't look good. He hasn't for a few games. He started off with a bang but either he's aggravated something or he's still working back up to 100%.

Petry had seven shots on goal.

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Categories: Miscellaneous Blogs

The New Polyandry

The Rational Man - Tue, 12/11/2018 - 05:29

About five years ago I wrote a post called You Need Sex. In that essay I asserted a few key points about the importance of a healthy sex life for men. If I’m honest I kind of expected most of the reactions I got from that post and even now it remains one of my more contentious pieces. Even when I was in my Blue Pill youth in the 80s and 90s I’d run across the guys who always wanted to deemphasize sex in some reverse-psychology effort to get women to believe that they were deeper than the guys who just wanted to bang them. These were the guys who’d listen to a girl say something like, “I don’t see why sex is such a big deal to guys” or “Am I just a piece of ass to you?“, they’d take it to heart, and then construct some kind of personalized Game around how they respected women and wanted to really relate with them ‘beyond the sexual’.

That’s exactly what the Blue Pill teaches guys; they should always defer to, empathize with and identify with the feminine. This is Blue Pill conditioning at its most basic. It is a boy/man’s imperative to place women’s existence as more important than his own – and with men’s innate protection instincts for women this Blue Pill training is key to establishing a gynocratic social order.

But guys also have to find some way to set themselves apart from the competition in the Blue Pill sexual marketplace. They have to find someway to make themselves unique in how unlike ‘typical‘ guys they are. The miscalculation is, of course, the belief that the more alike, the more they identify, with (as?) women the likelier a woman would select them for intimacy and reproduction.

Men are natural problem solvers. It’s part of our evolved firmware to look for solutions to challenges in our environment. This makes us constructive, creative, often innovative and more ready to take risks. It also makes us competitive and that competitiveness extends to the sexual marketplace. So it’s not too much of a stretch to see how Blue Pill conditioned young men might look for creative ways to outdo one another in the ‘female-identification olympics.

One way this identification competition gets pushed to new heights is in how well a man might better devalue and abase his own sexual strategy to better accommodate that of the woman he believes will appreciate it. Taken to the binary extreme this means finding some way to devalue all men’s sexual natures. What better way to set oneself apart from other guys than to not be a guy? What better way to empathize with the feminine than to tear down the gender women say they despise?

Does all that seem kind of ridiculous? I used to think this way when I was younger. There was a time I might’ve even jumped on the “masculinity is toxic/confusing/outdated/outmoded/ridiculous” train because I truly believed it was the way to a woman’s vagina heart and mind. Even in the 80s and 90s this was a popular misconception. It wasn’t until I’d been through my first bad breakup that I realized the truth. Then I had nothing to lose by making myself more important than the women I was idealizing and behold! The women I wanted, wanted me – sexually to be sure, but they wanted to lock me down in commitment.

In my 20s I had unwittingly shifted from one sexual strategy to another, and I liked the change. It didn’t happen overnight. I had to learn to adopt the attitude, the swagger, the character that would get me laid, but I found that the most important part of playing the game well was putting my own desires well above those of any woman.

Suddenly I discovered I could easily nail the girls I could only jerk off to in my younger years. I can remember the time I first had sex with a girl I thought was the apex of hotness when I was in my teens. She was the best friend of the girlfriend of the drummer in the band I was in then. Both were swimsuit models and I thought I’d finally reached the goal. It wasn’t until after I dumped her to get with a centerfold model that I knew I’d set my sights too low.

Does that sound like a humblebrag? If you’re still held back by a Blue Pill mindset it probably will. I mentioned on a podcast recently that a majority of men will never know sex as anything but a mitigated, compromised transaction. They’ll never know what it’s like to have a woman lust after them. They’ll never experience the dilated eyes of a woman that would give anything to please him in that moment. Not because she’s obligated, but because her ego is validated at the same time her body is aching to have sex with him.

Strategic Pluralism Theory

According to strategic pluralism theory (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000), men have evolved to pursue reproductive strategies that are contingent on their value on the mating market. More attractive men accrue reproductive benefits from spending more time seeking multiple mating partners and relatively less time investing in offspring. In contrast, the reproductive effort of less attractive men, who do not have the same mating opportunities, is better allocated to investing heavily in their mates and offspring and spending relatively less time seeking additional mates.

From a woman’s perspective, the ideal is to attract a partner who confers both long-term investment benefits and genetic benefits. Not all women, however, will be able to attract long-term investing mates who also display heritable fitness cues. Consequently, women face trade-offs in choosing mates because they may be forced to choose between males displaying fitness indicators or those who will assist in offspring care and be good long-term mates (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000). The most straightforward prediction that follows is that women seeking short-term mates, when the man’s only contribution to offspring is genetic, should prefer muscularity more than women seeking long-term mates.

from Why Is Muscularity Sexy? Tests of the Fitness Indicator Hypothesis

The latter quote here is a simple outline of Hypergamy, but the first part, Strategic Pluralism Theory is what I want to focus on today because this is where the “sex is no big deal” cop out derives from for men.

The first sexual strategy, the one in which a higher SMV (sexual market value) male can enjoy the sexual experience of many women is a strategy predicated on what our most basic, evolved, biological instinct directs us to. It served ancestral men better to ‘hit it and quit it’ and move on to the next girl as expediently as possible for a variety of reasons. This is also a reason why women’s Hypergamous filtering is a base part of women’s sexual selection process today. The investment cost of becoming pregnant was so high that it became part of women’s evolved firmware to be hypersensitive to reproduction cues as well as parental investment cues (provisioning resources) to ensure survival of herself and her offspring. If you ever wonder why rape is such an existential fear for women you have to understand that this fear is written deep into women’s evolved mental firmware because of men overriding this filtering process by violence.

The first archetype of Strategic Pluralism Theory we could day is the Alpha archetype. This is the guy who has the luxury, by effort or genetic lottery, to pursue what I’d speculate was our ancestors’ pre-agrarian, hunter-gatherer sexual imperative. This is what guys like to call the “Natural” with women. Thanks so any number of intersexual advantages (looks, Game, social proof, preselection) it serves him best to spread the seed and women are only too happy to enjoy him as well. He represents the 20th percentile in the 80/20 Pareto distribution of the sexual marketplace.

This side of Strategic Pluralism Theory reflects the r aspect of the r/K reproductive theory. A lot of well meaning Red Pill theologians seem to think that r/K reproductive selection is only limited to the female side of the equation. I’d also point out that this applies to the male side as well. Hypergamy is women’s evolved sexual strategy, however, I would argue that men’s innate, default sexual strategy is unlimited access to unlimited sexuality. This r strategy is manifested today in our base predilection for pornography. Untempered by societal restraints, Alpha sexual strategy is what men a majority would default to if given the choice.

More attractive men accrue reproductive benefits from spending more time seeking multiple mating partners and relatively less time investing in offspring.

I’m establishing this perspective to better illustrate the Beta side of Strategic Pluralism Theory. For sake of convenience I’m labeling men who fall into the ‘more attractive men’ category as Alphas. I don’t think this is too much of a stretch for most of my readers, but if you have a problem with this just consider the statistics laid out in the book Dataclysm. A majority of women rate 80-85% of men as “unattractive”. That last 15-20% are our ‘more attractive’ Alphas here.

This then leaves the remaining ‘less attractive men’ as the Beta cohort.

…the reproductive effort of less attractive men, who do not have the same mating opportunities, is better allocated to investing heavily in their mates and offspring and spending relatively less time seeking additional mates.

This then is the Beta mating strategy and if it sounds like the conventional idea of monogamy you’re not too far off. This is the K side of the r/K selection theory. Before I continue I want to stress that monogamy or non-exclusivity is not a value judgement in this essay. Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks has male sexual strategy implications beyond women’s Hypergamy. I refer to Alpha and Beta as placeholder terms here.

For the Beta side of Strategic Pluralism the reproductive strategy is one that, in part, aligns with one side of Hypergamy. The 80% of ‘less attractive’ men find it necessary to compromise their biological imperative (unlimited access to unlimited sexuality) in order to successfully reproduce. This is the nuts & bolts of what is today being called “enforced monogamy”. While this idea is taken to absurd extremes by critics, the premise is rooted in Strategic Pluralism. Since monogamy serves the largest block of men’s reproductive efforts it follows that it would be the institutionalized standard for ‘civil’ society.

Monogamy is Beta

Monogamy is a social norm, if not an evolutionary norm. A lot has been written about how monogamy in its present incarnation – one man, one woman – is really the result of a post-agrarian social order that optimized the sexual strategy of Beta men. In essence socially-enforced monogamy serves the largest population of Beta males.

However, the tradeoff for women was long term provisioning, protection (in as far as the man was capable) and parental investment – all thing conducive to sustainable futures for women and their children. All that was expected of women was a compromise on the Alpha arousal side of Hypergamy. And naturally, Alpha men and most women found ways to circumvent this socio-sexual adaptation that benefitted women in spite of Beta men.

Monogamy serves Beta men. Alpha men still get sex, broke or not.

I had the above video passed along to me by a Twitter follower about 2 weeks ago. I think he expected me to take issue with how she was defending ‘gold-diggers’ but, ironically, she unwittingly detailed the basics of Hypergamy and Strategic Pluralism Theory. She’s not wrong. Women’s sexual strategy is optimized in conditions of polygamy and polyandry, while men’s sexual strategy – the Beta sides anyway – is optimized in a condition of socially enforced monogamy.

What’s really ironic is that this girl discounts what so many men discount when they consider Hypergamy. She couches her total perspective on the Beta Bucks, long-term provisioning side of Hypergamy while conveniently omitting the Alpha Fucks side of Hypergamy. The only consideration she has is for resource transfer – again perpetuating the Beta sex experience – and ignoring the fact that even poor men still get to bang women like her if they’re “hawt’. ‘Monogamy is made to benefit men‘, no it’s made to benefit Beta men; Alpha men solve the reproductive problem irrespective of (in spite of) socially enforced monogamy. ‘Broke men don’t get women‘,…unless they’re hot broke men.

I’ve seen Jordan Peterson and more than a few notable evo-psych professors make a similar mistake. They deliberately make Hypergamy solely about the Beta Bucks side of a dualistic mating strategy. Mostly this misdirection is due to personal bias or a want to present the feminine in a positive light. But likewise we also tend to see focus of men’s sexual strategy centering on what long term resources a man has to measure his worth by. Historically, women have generally been the losers in a social order based on a monogamy that tries to ensure that the most men (majority Beta) are solving the reproductive problem. Because women lacked the same resource generating capacity of men, because up until 50 years ago women needed men to solve the Beta Bucks side of Hypergamy, monogamy was a at least a workable solution to their own reproductive problem.

In 2018 this is no longer the case. For all of the bleating of women wanting a ‘good man’ once they exit the cock carousel, the reproductive problem they’re trying to solve isn’t founded in the Beta Bucks side of Hypergamy it’s on the Alpha Fucks side. For as much as the women in this video tried to defend their mercenary sexual strategy of being justifiable gold diggers they really didn’t need to. All of the provisioning needs side of Hypergamy is relatively provided for for women in western cultures today.

The monogamous priority – the one that tried to ensure that most Beta men reproduced – that priority has now shifted to a neo-polyandry. This new social mechanic attempts to solve the Alpha Fucks side of the reproductive problem for the largest number of women. Just as patriarchal monogamy attempted to aide men who wouldn’t otherwise reproduce, the new polyandry seeks to ensure that even the lowest SMV women are entitled to breed with an Alpha male of their choosing.

Once all social stigma and religious buffers were removed from Hypergamy (since the Sexual Revolution) it has been a rapid shift from a male-beneficial monogamy that’s been the social norm for millennia to a form of polyandry that benefits the female sexual strategy.

I’ll be continuing this post in the next essay, but before I leave this essay let me reiterate the Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies: For one sex’s strategy to be fulfilled the other’s must be compromised or abandoned. Think of this on a sociological meta-scale.

Categories: Miscellaneous Blogs

State of the Manosphere 2018

The Rational Man - Fri, 12/07/2018 - 03:51

On October 12th, 2018 I delivered what a lot of men told me was the best speech I’ve ever given. I worked really hard on collecting my thoughts and observations of the manosphere, but I’m afraid I’m really not much of a speechwriter. My initial intent was to write a full analysis of the state of the manosphere – as requested by Anthony Johnson and a few others – and then give an impassioned reading of it.

I couldn’t do it. It seemed kind of stale to me to just read what was really a much better essay than a speech. The night before my time to speak I decided to distill the ‘essay’ down to my key points and use them as a roadmap for what I wanted to convey. I’m actually very good at digital media. I’ve been a designer and art director for most of my professional life. I could very easily have whipped up a presentation in PowerPoint or Keynote, but for this I want to connect with the audience face to face and distraction free. So I went old school and fell back on my trusty flash cards and notebooks, and then went up to speak from the heart rather than read from my head.

But damn it, I worked hard on my speech/essay. Anyone at the 21 Convention who saw me in the mornings prior to my speech probably saw me, nose in laptop, at the breakfast buffet working on the guts of it. Since it never made it to the podium in whole I thought I would polish it up a little bit for you here and let you in on what my thinking behind the speech was like. This is not the speech I gave at the convention, but it is the thought process behind it.

One key element of my talk was the SWOT analysis I did of the future of the manosphere going forward. This is the only part I’m omitting from this essay because I’d rather it not get confused with the actual talk. And that talk, by the way, will be forthcoming either this month or January of 2019 courtesy of the 21 Convention. I will make a blog announcement when the video becomes available. For now, this is the work behind that talk.

Good morning gentlemen.

There’s a lot I want to cover today, but before I do I wanted to let a few people know how honored I am to once again be here to relate with you all.

First and foremost, I want to thank my friend and co-host of the Red Man Group, Anthony Johnson. With out Anthony there is no 21 Convention, but most importantly I want to thank him for believing in what I alway hoped this convention could be. The 21 Convention has become what I believed would be necessary a while ago. There was a point right after I began to see how my first book, The Rational Male, was being received that I knew how needed an event like this would be.

If you read me on Twitter or you’re a fan of my blog you’ll know I’ve developed a reputation for predicting the future. I joke around about it, but one of my quotes is “I hate being right all the time”. I’ll tell you now, I don’t actually have super powers to predict the future. However, I like to think I’m fairly adept at seeing trends and recognizing patterns. I knew there would need to be some sort of Red Pill Summit. The manosphere was expanding then, as it continues to today and something would need to develop if the message was to expand with it.

As most of you know, I’m not a fan of seminars; particularly now. The motivational speaking and the self-help industry has exploded with the rise of the internet – and with that the number of gurus intent on cashing in on the insecurities of others (mostly young men, the ‘Lost Boys’ generation) has exploded too. I knew then that I didn’t want to have anything to do with 21st century snake oil reheated to be relevant in today’s age. So whatever this Red Pill Summit would be, I knew I wanted to avoid the selling of good-vibes. It needed to be real, and that meant taking chances.

When I met Anthony I was skeptical.

That’s a nice way of saying I thought his old format was essentially nine years of Purple Pill seminars which were exactly the kind of thing I wanted to avoid in a Red Pill summit. So I turned him down that first time. To his credit, Anthony wasn’t put off by that. He had every reason to be, but he’d had his life changed by my own work, was becoming Red Pill Aware and he was determined to take the chance on radically shifting the direction of the ‘old’ 21 Convention toward something that had more substance than just being an advertisement for some over-priced non-credentialed ‘coaching. So we looked to find the right men to create this summit.

This year, and with this roster of men, that idea for a Red Pill summit is finally coming to fruition. So, I want to also thank all of you, the people who believe in this venture, the people who work hard to make it possible and the men who make this convention a priority to attend.

All of this might seem like a long winded way of telling the story of this new convention, but I snuck in a lot of the key points I’ll be addressing today. It’s an important story to tell because not enough men really understand what it is they’re a part of today. I’ve been part of what we call the manosphere since its inception. Now that’s not me trying to establish red pill street credit; it’s to say that I was a part of what’s now known as the manosphere from the beginning. But it’s important to look back on where we came from to understand where we’re going.

I’ve been called The Godfather of the Red Pill. I’ve been called one of the three ‘R’s of the manosphere – Roosh, Roissy and Rollo – and while this is still an honor for me, it’s also a reminder of who I am, what I’ve become and how this community has shaped me and the millions of men who’ve “unplugged” from the Matrix of a feminine-primary social order.

I don’t relish the role of being the manopshere’s chronicler, but I understand why it’s necessary, so I accept it. I would much rather be connecting dots and developing ideas to consider about what we call intersexual dynamics and the true Red Pill. But that term, “The Red Pill”, has become bastardized to serve as an ad-hoc brand for many pet ideologies and personal beliefs recently. I don’t care to talk about the manosphere – I would rather be doing the real work – but I’m one of the few men who have the history to do so accurately.

As the manosphere expands and more men are drawn to this tribe the need to accurately know where we’ve come from is more important. Even I fall into the trap of assuming that men just come equipped with a foreknowledge of Red Pill history and a grasp of the fundamentals of Red Pill awareness. When Anthony and I, and later Rich Cooper, started the Red Man Group podcast I quickly became aware of the need to go back over the basic Red Pill 101 for men who have become a part of the tribe.

I also became aware that if I didn’t step up to tell the real story of the Red Pill that it would be told for us by others who see this community as a convenient niche to exploit and to twist to their messages.

So, here I am.

What is the Manosphere?

For as much as the mainstream would like to demonize it, the manosphere is really a collection of the minds of men. The manosphere is a Gestalt. That’s going to be an important word going forward here. A Gestalt is an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts. And there are many parts of the manosphere.

For some, the manosphere is a convenient collection of like-minded men who share a common ideology. This is where the mainstream gets the idea that the manosphere is a gathering of misogynists. To our ideological opponents any collection of men, no matter the intent, is always suspect of misogyny. We’ll get back to misogyny later, but even a gathering of 200 of us here, no matter our purpose, is enough to make a feminine-primary social order very nervous.

To them, men gathered together has dangerous implications.

Keep this point in mind; it is a means of control over the Gestalt Masculine.

The primary strength of the ‘sphere is that we are a consortium of men’s experiences. We are gestalt; an aggregate of men who’ve come together to share, debate, to improve, to fight and to agree or disagree on the realistic state of men everywhere – all based on observations, empirical evidence and commonality among all men’s collected experiences.

Usually a man’s first experience with the manosphere is through his becoming Red Pill aware. I mean this in the sense of intersexual dynamics. I know the “Red Pill” has been bastardized to mean whatever ideological or political bent a person may have, but this isn’t where the term originated. Men generally find the ‘sphere because they want to improve their understanding of women.

Some become so distraught that they’re on the brink of suicide.

It may be from a life long confusion about the decisions they’ve made with women; a girlfriend, a wife, an Ex. What they find in the manosphere is answers. Maybe they find the works of any number of the men speaking here today. Maybe they find MGTOW, or the Men’s Rights Movement.

Maybe they find the Red Pill forum on Reddit (or maybe not today since the forum is still quarantined).

Maybe they discover more of the same in Purple Pill hacks – life coaches – who are feeding them just enough Red Pill awareness to them so that it seems novel.

Or maybe they find my blog and books.

Regardless, each of them is looking for a means to improve their lives. We don’t advertise in the manosphere. Not much anyway. The Red Pill, by its nature, is something that a man has to be looking for. Anyone who’s ever tried to “red pill” his friend or brother to help them avoid a life-ruining decision knows what I mean. It’s an unfortunate truth that men are often Zeroed Out and at their lowest when they become most open to introspection.

Men are often looking to understand women, but this eventually becomes an education in understanding themselves. It’s never enough to simply learn some PUA techniques. Game is integral to a Red Pill awakening in a man, but it is an incomplete act without internalizing the truths that the practice of Game reveals to men. As men learn about the nature of women they also come to realize why they did what they did, and why men do what they do. I often have men tell me how they wished they had the knowledge of the Red Pill before they made some debilitating decisions in their lives.

And this is what I’m talking about.

Eventually the man who just wanted to learn enough Game to get his ‘dream girl’ interested in him, that guy comes to see that solving the problem of himself is the key to that challenge and so many more.

It leads to him seeking mastery of himself.

Men unplug from their life-long Blue Pill conditioning, but in doing so they come to question more than just their conditioning. They question what they’ve been taught to think of themselves. That self-revelation is often a very rough experience for men who’ve invested so much of themselves in a paradigm set against them.

The Red Pill, the manosphere, saves lives in a literal sense. As my friend Pat Campbell has related, men are living today as a result of their having read my work and the works of others. The manosphere is a vital community that not only saves men’s lives, but it points them to a better one. The Red Pill is a set of tools for men to use to improve their lives. It is not a set of rules or a formula for guaranteed success. It is a map to follow while you make your own path as a man. It is concrete, evidence based, and always open for debate among the tribe that is the manosphere.

As the manosphere has evolved there have been various subsets of the community that have hived-off to form their own sub-tribes. I could probably devote entire talks to just these sub-groups. But the nature of men is tribal. Not to steal any thunder from Jack Donovan, but it is in men’s nature to form tribes and coalitions of like men. No matter what a certain misguided pop-psychologist would tell us about individualism, men evolved to be stronger within tribes. The manosphere itself is a tribe and within that tribe sub-tribes will establish themselves.

As I mentioned earlier, restricting men from gathering as a tribe, cutting those tribes off from communicating, is one way a gynocentric social order exercises control over the Gestalt Masculine. If you’ve ever wondered why it is that women feel an obsessive need to either join and assimilate, or outright destroy male-exclusive (Male Space) organizations while insisting on the gender-exclusivity of their own, look no further than their instinctive, base understanding of male tribalism. Together we grow stronger, we test each other, we form pacts and coalitions, we collaborate in ways that challenge what I call the Feminine Imperative. And the largest gestalt of that Feminine Imperative is now what we refer to as the Gynocracy.

In the beginning of the Red Pill, in the beginning of what’s now the manosphere, the Gestalt of masculinity, was beneath the notice of our feminine-primary social order.

We were – and sometimes still are – “those small-dick losers who don’t know how women work”. We were dismissed as Incels (now re-popularized), misogynists, neck-beards, or “dude-bros”. It was the convenient ridicule stage. And that was made all the easier by the decades of masculine ridicule in sit-com deliberate misunderstandings about masculinity that began in the early 70s.

Now things have changed.

The manosphere has evolved into something that’s much more of a threat to the Gynocracy. Once Trump defeated Hillary, the stakes were raised. I’m not here to debate politics, but the gender landscape has undeniably, unignorably, altered in the two years since a hyper-masculinized man put down the bid of a hyper-gynocentrist female-supremacist woman for the presidency she believed she was entitled to. We didn’t witness Trump defeat Hillary, we witnessed HIM defeat HER. The Gestalt Masculine prevailed over the sure-thing, “her turn” presumed victory of the Gestalt Feminine.

Gender Warfare

Do you understand what I’m saying?

This was the first test in a larger gender war that was to come. And make no mistake, we are in a gender war today.

Granted, it is a cold-war at this stage, but the Gestalt Masculine is at war with the gestalt feminine today. Both those gestalts found their perfect embodiment respectively in Trump and Hillary. This defeat gave rise to what is called the #resistance. The ‘resistance’ is another name for the Gestalt Feminine; replete with “allies” (Vichy Male collaborators), sloganeering (The Future is Female) and uniforms (Pink Pussy Hats).

You can witness this resistance, the Gestalt Feminine, in every Women’s March, in every face wearing a pink pussy hat, in every ludicrous new, weaponized, MeToo allegation that strips men of their basic civil rights not in a court of law, but in the court of social media.

There are more manifestations of this Gestalt Feminine than I have time to list in this talk, but each has the express purpose of destroying conventional masculinity. It is no longer enough to inconvenience men or to spray paint “smash the patriarchy” on a stall in the women’s bathroom. The true intent is now unmasked, and that is the systematic removal of ALL masculinity.

“Men need to be actively disadvantaged for equality to be achieved”

These were the words I read on a college chalkboard not too long ago. This is the sentiment that’s become normalized. This generation sees the advantage of a cover story like “equality” as if it were a nuisance today. They almost begrudgingly speak about equalism as if it’s the necessary wink and a nod before they move on to how justified the Gestalt Feminine is in disadvantaging men in the name of equality. But we’re expected to know that ‘achieving equality’ is the backstory to systematically removing men from all narratives. In a feminine-correct social order men should already know this is a facade, but go along with it anyway.

Today, we’re moving past the questions of whether or not the Gestalt Feminine should care about issues of equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. That was a nice distraction, but making a distinction between the two is important, if only insofar as who you’re debating it with actually has the capacity to change their minds about anything. The Gestalt Feminine wants what it wants, like the sum total of all the Ids of women who believe in anything they’ve ever seen, heard or read about their own oppression.

Never in human history has there been such polarization between the sexes. In our contemporary gender landscape the Gestalt Male is the openly declared enemy of the Gestalt Female. And no one raises an eyebrow about it.

This isn’t how we would have it, because it’s my belief that the sexes are far better off as complements to the other. We can be, we have been, better together than adversarial of each other.

But any issue of gender conflict, any slight, any instance when a woman’s power may be challenged, any time a man might dare to raise a questioning awareness of an issue that is uniquely concerned with men is when the collective awareness of the Gestalt Feminine is roused into action.

I’ve called this phenomenon The Sisterhood Über Alles – the sisterhood above all other considerations. Before religion, before race, before political stripe, what benefits the Feminine Imperative is the prime directive of womankind.

As a result of continually feeding this beast we find ourselves in a state of sexual polarization that has gotten so bad that even “woke” male-feminists are now viewed as “stealth misogynists”. The stereotypical Nice Guy isn’t ‘nice’ anymore, he’s an operative that’s trying to fool women’s Hypergamous filters. The old trope of men getting in touch with one’s feminine side is now viewed with suspicion. Why would a man be motivated to identify with the feminine if not to use it to his manipulative advantage? Identifying with the female is almost more distrusted than openly Gaming women today.

You are never a ‘man’ to the resistance. To call you a man would be too old school patriarchal and aggrandizing. “Man” is reserved for the Alpha men women want to fuck. No, you are just an ‘ally’ and even then you’re only an ally so long as you remain useful. When that usefulness ceases, when you serve your purpose and look for approval from your mistress, when you hope to enjoy some reciprocal intimacy in return fo desired behavior, there’s now a new and much improved social convention ready made to remove you from the resistance.

My Twitter feed is littered with stories sent to me about infamous celebrity male-feminists who are now facing MeToo allegations. We don’t even call them misconduct allegation now – MeToo is synonymous with rape, harassment, even social missteps.

To get “me too’d” is now a verb.

Segregation

The mistrust this war is engendering, is leading to a new form of gender segregation. In some orthodox churches it’s customary for the sexes to be separated in worship. Being the intelligent, evolved progressives we are, we call this segregation barbaric or demeaning of women. Yet MeToo is leading to a similar, more stringent form of segregation in our workplaces, in our social engagements and now even coming full circle back to the church. But this segregation isn’t about honoring old ways of religion, it’s based on distrust of women who now possess an immediate means to the personal destruction of men.

So we cordon ourselves off from women for fear that we might say something that could be interpreted in an unintended way – not by a court of law, but the court of social media. We don’t fear the expense of an actual court case, we fear the far more expensive costs of having our bread, our reputations and our capacity to make a future living taken from us by the court of social media and the politics of wanton personal destruction.

These are some things I feel we need to wrap our heads around before I consider where the manosphere is going next. Because, in essence, this state, these conditions will guide this tribe into the future.

The mainstream is controlled by the Gestalt Feminine today. In our present gender Cold War that Gestalt is looking for a concrete enemy to fight. The Sisterhood Über Alles united behind blocking the nomination of Bret Kavanaugh recently and with that straw man enemy behind them they are now looking for a concrete enemy to unite against today. My fear, gentlemen, is that the manosphere will become the face of the enemy the resistance so desperately needs as a focus for its anger.

Lets face it, we’re the antithesis of what the Gestalt feminine would teach men they should be. We resist their unending efforts to contain conventional masculinity. We are the last line in keeping that male-defined masculinity viable. We’re an easy enemy to vent on, and the more we continue to grow, the more we will be that focus. The mainstream wants crazy and the manosphere is a made-for-TV villain that looks a lot like the people Women’s Studies professors tell their students it’s OK to hate.

How do we, the men of this tribe, define what we call the manosphere?

I’ve always made it a point to never directly involve myself in issues of politics, religion or race on The Rational Male. The only time I address such topics is when they cross over into issues of intersexual dynamics. Now I see just how much cross over there really is.

They say everything is about sex except sex; sex is about power. Think about that in the context of today’s gender Cold War.

If we do not define the manosphere it will certainly be defined for us by others who only see it as a niche market to exploit. The manosphere will fall prey to the Brand of Me. The Success Porn gurus, the Cassie Jayes, the Purple Pill Life Coaches, the Men’s Rights Movement – even Vichy male organizations like The Good Man Project or We Are Man Enough will claim an authority over the manosphere that they’ve never merited all in order to build their own brands.

And I’ll leave you with this as a primer for the rest of my State of the Manosphere talk I delivered at the 21 Convention, October 12th, 2018.

Categories: Miscellaneous Blogs

[thepuck 2018-12-04] Sens 2 @ Habs 5

Furiously Eclectic People - Wed, 12/05/2018 - 04:04

1st
Domi has started coming back to support in the defensive zone but his line still gets stuck a lot there with only Shaw being aggressive. Domi and Drouin tend to float.

Gallagher was double shifted in the first, playing in Peca's spot.

Batherson clips Shaw and Domi takes exception but Batherson hugs him to death. Kotkaniemi serves the extra penalty because Domi scared Batherson.

Kulak and Peca's hard work sees Domi and Drouin get a 2on1 which Drouin puts in Anderson's five-hole. Afterwards Price faces a scoring chance as Drouin doesn't cover his man. Domi's line gets pinned again in their own zone along with Reilly and Benn.

Chaput gets called for holding and Tkachuk for slashing. 4on4. Gallagher gets a phantom hold call ending a Danault breakaway prematurely.

Hab of the period: Shaw
Score: 0-1

2nd
Drouin dives and draws a penalty.

Petry stands up Duchene.

Much of the period had very little flow. Neither team knows what to do after the Sens tie it up.

A Sen loses his footing, Drouin tosses the loose puck to Domi and he puts it in the top corner.

Gallagher gets away with an errant stick.

Drouin feeds Domi again. Buried.

Kulak sends the puck to Shaw who carries it end to end, dishes to Kotkaniemi who pops it over to a driving Lehkonen who puts it home.

Hab of the period: Domi
Score: 1-4

3rd
Reilly makes a diving defensive play that while desperate, looked cool.

Tatar steals the puck… To Gallagher; goal!

Ceci takes a huge dive and Kotkaniemi goes to the box as the refs give Ottawa a freebie.

Danault and Lehkonen gain a 2on1 shorthanded and Danault doesn't pass.

Falk goes after Domi and the linesmen break it up too quickly. Smith sucker punches Shaw when Shaw is held back by a linesman. The other linesman protects Smith from Shaw.

Dzingel tries to run Kulak, they wrestle a bit and Dzingel finally gets a punch off after they go down and the linesmen move in.

Sens get a late goal as the Habs are all out of position starting with a bad pinch by Petry.

Domi tries for a hat-trick and misses the net.

Tkachuk interferes with Gallagher using a big shoulder. No call.

Hab player of the period: Puck boy. No one stood out.
Score: 2-5

Habs special teams looked good against Ottawa however the Sens really didn't have a good game.

Archergirl's 3 Stars: Domi, Drouin, Kulak
Kersus’ 3 Stars: Domi, Danault, Shaw

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Categories: Miscellaneous Blogs

Red Pill 101 – Ep. 6: The “Rules”

The Rational Man - Sun, 12/02/2018 - 19:45

Do you feel like you’re playing by by one set of rules while everyone around you seems to be playing by another? Do all the women you interact with seem to have a restrictive set of hoops for you to jump through in order to qualify for their intimacy while they eagerly break their own rules for a different type of guy? Do the married guys you know still cling to their wives rules like their sex live depend on it?

The rules that a woman creates for a man she perceives as Beta carry over into that man’s LTR and marriage. A marriage/LTR usually retains whomever’s Frame that relationship had when the couple first became intimate. A lot of Beta men (and even some well-meaning Red Pill men) carry over this need for female (their Mother’s) approval into their relationships, proudly integrating their personal beliefs into how well they satisfy a woman’s rules and plans for his own life.

Are the ‘old set of books’ social agenda really the same set of personal rules women have for their own approval for Beta men?

Pat and I will discuss these issues and how to help men avoid the most common problems that lead to dead-end and damaging relationships for men.

Bonus: Why ‘Promise Keepers’ issues are really mommy-issues not daddy-issues.

Relevant Links:

Promise Keepers

Men in Love

The Second Set of Books

Blue Pill Frame

Categories: Miscellaneous Blogs

Male Authority – Provisioning vs. Duty

The Rational Man - Fri, 11/30/2018 - 03:15

I’ve been watching Outlaw King on Netflix recently. There’s a part where the wife of Robert the Bruce says ‘Power is making decisions, and whatever course you are charting, I choose you, my husband’ It struck me that my own wife had said almost these same words to me in 2005. When I’d decided to take a job in Orlando that would uproot us from family and friends. There was no “,…but what about my friends, career, etc.?” from her and I had no hesitation to consider anything but taking the position. She said, “You are my husband, I go where you go.”

How many men hold a default Frame in their marriage? Many women are reluctant to even accept their husband’s last name today. There’s a lot of bullshit reasons for this, but the core truth is that women have no confidence in their man in the long term. They don’t trust his ‘course’. There’s holding Frame, and then there’s establishing a long term Frame, a paradigm, a reality of his own, that defines a man’s authority in his marriage and family relationships. Women today still want marriage, but few want to defer to their husband’s ‘course’. They don’t trust him with her life.

And why would they? For the past four or five generations men have been portrayed in popular culture as untrustworthy. Either they are Beta buffoons in need of women’s uniquely female ‘reasoning’ (which is really male reasoning with breasts) to save them from themselves, or they’re malicious Alpha malcontents (or perverts) also in need of female correction to bring them to female approved justice. It’s the retribution fantasy of feminism played out in popular media, but the societal result is generations of women who have no inherent respect of men and even less trust in any beneficial course they might plot out for them as future wives.

There’s also the male perspective to consider in this. Most men approach their marriage and long term relationships from what is ostensibly an egalitarian perspective. “Equality”, playing fair, being an “equal partner” a pretense of egalitarianism, is all a cover story for a power dynamic that is truly based on resource dynamics. In a ‘modern marriage’, male authority, even just the idea of it, is ceded by default to the woman. I’ll explain why in a moment.

Today’s marriage stats and the socioeconomic variables within marriage point to a very cold truth; if you make less money than your wife, statistically, your marriage is far more likely to dissolve. In couples where a woman outearns her husband divorce rates increase. Virtually every article written about this power dynamic attempts to paint the men involved as ‘feeling threatened‘ by their wives’ success, but the visceral truth can be distilled through the process of women’s Hypergamy. As you might guess, our feminine-centric social order can never allow for an unflattering picture of women, thus men must look like ridiculous, insecure, man-babies – this is another piece of the puzzle – but the stats don’t lie, only the reasoning for them misleads us culturally.

In an “egalitarian” marriage it is actually financial considerations that imbalance that idealistic fantasy of a “coequal partnership”. Men and masculinity are made to look ridiculous, insecure, potentially violent and incompetent on a social scale. This effort to delegitimize anything male has been going on since the late 1960s. The social impact of this has resulted in several generations whose default impression of men in general is one of distrust. Either distrust based in men’s potential for abusiveness, or largely more a distrust based in a default presumption of incompetence. Women cannot trust a man with her life because a majority of men are ridiculous buffoons, no better than big children and now we add that almost 40% of them are outearned by their wives.

Is it any wonder women have no default respect for a man’s course for their lives? In fact, given these modern circumstances, fantasies of an egalitarian marriage being the ideal notion are really the only way to justify marriage at all for women. Thus, we’ve crafted a new ideal of marriage that furnishes women with legal and social failsafes to make what looks like a really horrible, life-long attachment to a buffoon or an abuser just palatable enough to have women believe things might work out for them. Don’t worry ladies, the egalitarian ideal, that any potential husband worth your consideration will subscribe to wholesale, provides you not only with options that will absolve you of all responsibility for his (and your own) failures, but you’ll never have to really do anything he says. The law is on your side, and the very premise of an egalitarian marriage frees you from ever having to go along with one of his half-baked life plans for the both of you. In fact, as long as you make more money than him, you’ll almost surely be doing the ‘course’ setting for the both of you.

Needless to say this is not conducive to women entertaining a default deference to men’s authority. If women’s baseline impression of men is one of incompetence, ridiculousness and distrust, and then you combine it with the fact that over a third of them wont be earning the same financially we begin to see the reasons for the decline in marriage today. If the default perception of men is one of expected incompetence, why would a woman ever want to get married?

This is kind of a quandary. In marriage, a man’s authority today only extends to this monetary wealth – there is no inherent authority associated with being male despite what feminist bleat about ‘male privilege’. Wealth enforces will, but women still seek to find ways around accepting that authority by assuming control of that wealth. This is one reason why “financial abuse” has been fashioned into a form of spousal abuse, but there are many other means of emotional control that mitigates male authority-by-wealth.

Even when a man is the primary breadwinner his means to authority in his marriage is still mitigated. A man’s provisioning for his wife and family has always been considered a ‘manly duty’. Even the most masculinity-confused, Vichy Males are still conditioned to assume providership as a masculine trait that is ‘non-toxic’ and approved by their teachers. In most Trad-Con thought a man isn’t even to be considered a “man” unless he can prove his competence in generating more resources than he needs for himself. The direction of every aspiration he has must be applied to providing for a future wife, their children, likely their (her) extended family and then extended to society. By the old set of books a man can’t even be given the title of “man” (or “a real man”) unless he can prove he’s prepared himself to be a good husband, father and community leader.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with a strong desire to fulfill this provisioning agenda, the men who do accept this as their “manly duty” are conditioned to only see their sacrifices as their expected responsibility. They are actively discouraged from ever assuming any authority might be forthcoming in exchange for their sacrifices. Not even a man’s wealth is a guarantee of authority; certainly not if he’s been conditioned to believe that an egalitarian marriage is an ideal, much less a possibility.

And now we come full circle – the promulgation of an egalitarian ideal in marriage, in gender equity, in the retribution and restitution that feminism is based on, all of this and more has the latent purpose of stripping men of any concept of authority, while enforcing the ideal of male responsibility. In The Second Set of Books I made the case that most (Beta) men today live by, or would like to live by, an old social contract that on the surface seems noble. They believe in an anachronism that promises them that honor, duty, chivalry and a default respect of women will, sooner or later, be appreciated by a woman with the “quality” enough to appreciate it and show that appreciation by accepting him for her intimate attentions. Only later do they come to realize that their dedication to that anachronism is misplaced and the exchange of duty for authority is not only erased, but he’s perceived as a “toxic” monster or a ridiculous “macho” fool for ever expecting that exchange. The world is actually playing by a second set of books that expects all of his ‘honor-bound’ beliefs are his responsibility, but nothing he sacrifices grants him any authority.

Last week I hosted a Special Edition of the Red Man Group in which we discussed whether a married man today is by default Blue Pill or Beta.

It’s almost impossible to broach this topic without accusations of bias or personal circumstance coloring a man’s perspective of marriage – and that’s from either side of the topic. I wasn’t endorsing marriage in this; if anything I made a case against marriage based on the same questioning of men’s authority I’ve explored in this essay. By today’s standards, marriage is far too dicey a prospect for me to ever advocate for. But how far are we willing to take this abandoning of dominance hierarchies in intersexual relationships? I recently got into a debate as to whether monogamous relationships – outside formal marriage – were even beneficial for men today. In that discussion we dissected the history of monogamy and in human relations it’s at least somewhat accepted that monogamy and two-parent investment in offspring was a dynamic that’s been beneficial to our own and some other species. I think that in the past, when social circumstance was different, the concept of monogamy and the institution of marriage were instrumental in our advancement and largely beneficial. All that’s changed now and much of the second set of books I referred to in this essay is predicated on an egalitarianism that has erased male authority and placed it on the shoulders of women who are ill-equipped (and honestly not wanting) to use that authority.

This last sentence here is going to seem like heresy to those invested in blank-slate, egalitarian equalism and fempowerment, but the truth is evident and unignorable that an evolved patriarchal authority has progressed us to an age where we’ve become prosperous enough to entertain thoughts of abandoning it. Stripping men of authority while still expecting a default, and total, responsibility is a really good summation of the two sets of books – the conflict between the old and the new social contract. And yes, I’m aware of the all the arguments that this state of disempowering men is by some political design. Destabilizing the family starts with delegitimizing male authority and confusing generations of men about the aspects of masculinity. Doubt and self-loathing are key in men policing other men for presumptions of authority. It’s crabs in the bucket – when one man presumes authority there need to be ten more to pull him back down into confusion and doubt.

So where do we go with this from here? Even the most ‘Con’ of Trad-Con women will still default to their fempowerment conditioning when presented with a default male authority they are supposed to follow. Can a man be a leader in his own home anymore? MGTOWs will tell you no, and they’d be right. You can’t out-Alpha the state. But the state is still comprised of men and women with their own preconceptions and belief-sets. Our evolved firmware still predisposes us to conventional gender roles, and that predisposition is also one of women expecting male competence, decisiveness and dominance. Women still want a man to follow in spite of their conditioning to distrust men’s competence. Maybe a new form of monogamy is in order. Egalitarianism is a dead end, it only defaults to 100% female authority and 100% male responsibility. But perhaps at some point, when things get so bad that women are forced to take a chance on the men they think are potential buffoons and abusers, a new kind of “marriage” can come out of the morass that egalitarianism has made of marriage.

How do we get back to a state of male authority based on a woman’s trust of her husband? I would like to believe I have this with my wife today, but I know that this is tenuous from the perspective of true, actionable authority. I once came down hard on a pastor who was advising the women of his congregation to “allow” their husbands to lead them. He was basically asking the women to stand down and trust God that their husbands we’re actually worthy of their trust. He didn’t know it, but his entire premise stemmed from women already acknowledging that they had ultimate authority over their husband as a given. Most pastors are pussy-whipped, so this default authority is usually presumed as a sexual threat-point women will exercise over their husbands. What he didn’t understand was that women’s authority is his default for a much deeper, more socially expansive reason. So even to ask women to allow their husbands to exercise ‘headship’ is ludicrous – it’s something even those women have no power to do because the presumption of authority is always in their favor. They can’t allow their men authority over them because the social paradigm they live in wont allow them to allow it.

Categories: Miscellaneous Blogs

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HackMoor 2019/02/21 Into the Wilderness

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Remove the Man 2019

HackMoor 2018/12/20 History of the World and 2018/12/29 No Game

[KEZ 2018-12-29] Lejends 1:1 TRS

Little Big Head

Hackmoor 2018/11/29 and 2018/12/12 Departure from BlackMoor Dungeon

[thepuck 2018-12-13] Canes 4 @ Habs 6

The New Polyandry

State of the Manosphere 2018

[thepuck 2018-12-04] Sens 2 @ Habs 5

Red Pill 101 – Ep. 6: The “Rules”

Male Authority – Provisioning vs. Duty

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