something_else

If a woman is genuinely cruel or rude to me I don't think "oh wow, she must really like me, I'll keep pushing!". I just leave and go chat to girls who are receptive and playful.

She was playfully teasing him and he didn't engage. It wasn't that he failed a "shit test", he just killed the conversation stone dead with "yea I am". I don't disagree with learning basic social skills, but framing everything in terms of pickup lingo is a detriment to that goal. You start interpreting everything women do as a "shit test" or whatever, meanwhile they're just trying to playfully flirt with you and you're viewing it as some kind of hostile battlefield where she's trying to test your masculinity.

Not everything in life has to be about achievement. Many of the best memories I have are from when I was just vibing with friends with no particular goal. There's a reason people typically don't develop particularly deep friendships with work colleagues despite spending 40 hours per week with them. You rarely get a chance to just have fun and be fully authentic in a professional / goal-oriented environment. I disagree with the premise here. People would benefit from many things they could do but don't do. Eating healthy, gym, meditation, reading etc. The incentive for these activities is far in the future, requires work, and is relatively abstract. This means it doesn't really activate your brain's reward system very well. The same is true for socialising, if you aren't naturally sociable. It's very easy to sit at home alone, scroll on social media, and watch videos. If you do that long enough your social skills atrophy and then you end up in a situation where you can't pursue a fun social life because the barrier to entry becomes so high. Even if you have an abstract sense of "this would be good for me" as an incentive, it actually isn't very motivating and doesn't really drive most people towards action.

I used to go out with specific goals like "talk to X many women, and then you can just relax and have fun for the rest of the night" I stopped doing this when I realised that 90% of the time I hooked up with a girl, it was one I met when I had completed the goal and I was just vibing and having fun. After that I just started going out to have fun. Girls can often pick up when you have a hidden agenda, it reeks of desperation. There's a term I've heard girls use, "meerkating", it's used to describe guys who stand in the middle of a club and scan around for the next girl to approach. It is not a positive term. Now I mostly just go out with friends to have fun, and if I find a girl to hookup with then great. I find this much more enjoyable than going out with goals and an agenda, and it gets me better results.

What pickup calls a 'shit test' is just playfully teasing someone, it's part of basic human social interaction, especially so when flirting. I don't like the term because it makes it seem like women are actively and intentionally trying to test you, which they are not. They're either teasing you playfully to flirt or they're telling you they aren't interested. It's usually easy to tell the difference.

I hate this term with a burning passion

Yea, I agree 100%. There are basically three reasons to incarcerate someone; deterrence, rehabilitation and public protection. I think prisons should be built primarily around the latter two. Deterrence doesn't really work that well because most criminals typically don't think they're going to get caught anyway. It ends up being a kind of revenge where criminals suffer to make the victims feel better. Which, while I empathise with it, isn't really something you should build your society or prison system around. The death sentence falls firmly in the deterrence category. It's just systematic revenge. You could make an argument it was about saving tax payer money for criminals who clearly have zero chance of rehabilitation, which I think is somewhat valid reasoning, but in the end most of them are still imprisoned for 15 years in top security prisons which ends up costing the tax payer a fuck ton of money anyway. So that doesn't really stand up to scrutiny.

Are you friends with the group of monks I met on a Thai beach? They carried five coolers of beer down on their backs, each had five packets of cigarettes hidden in their robes, and they were sharing them all with everyone on the beach I hope so because those guys were fuckin awesome hahaha In general I absolutely love Thailand. I want to live in Bangkok so badly.

I really don't understand the nofap thing. Maybe for some people it works, but for me it just makes me less focused, more horny, and more desperate. If your confidence is so fragile that jerking off makes it vanish then you're not really that confident deep down. All of the most confident guys you've ever met in your life probably jerk off on the regular.

I don’t even think about it. The more you’re in your head trying to follow some ruleset like this the less charismatic you’ll be

Fabric is good, although expensive as shit for drinks. I’ve only been out in London a few times so I don’t have any recommendations beyond that

Fuck clubs with tables man. I’m so glad I don’t live in the US where that’s standard. In the UK clubs with tables like that are almost non-existent and I’m so glad. My favourite clubs are ones that are big, almost maze like, with multiple dance floors, and a big smoking area, and ideally a chill room with seats. You can always keep moving around and exploring and just chat to new people while you do it.

Clubs with good smoking areas are exceptional for this reason. There’s always somewhere quiet you can go where you can chat, and it’s also very socially acceptable to start conversations with new people there too. I think probably half of all the girls I’ve hooked up with in clubs I met first in the smoking area.

I’ve experienced this quite a bit, and I think it’s one of the major downsides of pickup. You learn a formula that works for you, broadly speaking, for hooking up with the average girl. But then you meet someone you genuinely like and could see yourself with long term, and you instinctively fall back on the same formula. Then it falls apart. she picks up on the inauthenticity and the rehearsed “fuckboy” dynamic almost immediately. I think it’s really important to learn to balance out the “script” that works in general with authenticity. But it’s so easy to just keep running that script habitually because it gets you laid a lot. I still struggle with balancing these two things

This is not true at all. Women are attracted to intelligence, just the kind of intelligence that accomplishes real things in the world. High IQ doesn't really correlate that much with success in the real world beyond a certain number, and it probably negatively correlates with it at higher levels because really high IQ people tend to lack in EQ. Women aren't attracted to men they think are actually dumb as a general rule. You don't need to be super cool to get a wife. You just need to be relatively interesting to her, and capable of achieving stuff in the real world. Competence is attractive. If you want to hookup with a bunch of girls you need some spark of coolness. But if you don't want that and you just want to settle down with a wife, you really can get that with basic social skills and a normal job, which are pretty much the minimum requirements to be considered a functional human. All this bitterness is not helping you at all.

There are some situations where correlation vs causation is a valid criticism, and to a degree it is here too, but for something like prostate and ejaculation, which are inherently very closely linked, a heavy correlation is enough to suggest that a causation link is very likely. I'm not taking it too literally, it's exactly what you said. You softened your argument afterwards, but those were your words.

Interesting. I do like Astra, and I find a lot of models work better with a lower reasoning level for most tasks, unless it's complex. I've been using Astra on medium. Fast mode is also really cool if you haven't tried it, though it burns through usage very quickly. My usual setup is to have a Terra session, and tell it to spawn subagents using Sol or Astra if it needs to do something more complex. This seems to be a nice balance of capability and usage limits. I guess you could also have an Astra session and tell it to spawn terra / sol subagents if it needs them, though I find that can be quite slow. Fable is, IMO, still the king for PR review. It finds a lot of things OpenAI models miss, but I agree that for daily use it's expensive, slow and I absolutely fucking hate how Claude models talk. It's so verbose and unclear. Where I work we started out with Claude, but we've now mostly all switched over to Codex.

I think that's a worse experience. Threads already have a tendency to go off topic here which isn't ideal, and comment chains would only make that even worse.

I think that is the case. I'm sure Leo has said he intentionally doesn't want likes/dislikes. The purpose of the forum is to be as simple as possible. I agree the blog could do with some love though. @Leo Gura I'm a web developer if you need someone to spruce the blog up a bit

I didn’t say it causes it, I said it increases the risk. Perhaps still too strong of a statement, but there is certainly strong evidence for a link between the two, which means it quite likely that ejaculating less or not at all increases risk of prostate cancer. This is a lot less absolute of a statement than you first made with “All forms of fasting are beneficial for human health” You also need to provide an argument for what this principle is, or why fasting as a general rule is good for the body. Different types of fasting have very different effects and there is no evidence that as a general concept “fasting” is good for the body. Some types of fasting are beneficial for some people, sometimes. That is about as much as has been conclusively proven. As a very simple counter example, if you are anorexic or severely underweight, fasting is not going to be beneficial for you.

They’re pretty great if you look at least decent and have good pics

It isn’t false, there are several large well respected studies showing that there is a link between ejaculation frequency and prostate cancer. Ironically ”all forms of fasting are beneficial for human health” is a far broader statement for which there is absolutely no solid evidence for whatsoever. Some forms of fasting are beneficial to some people.

If anything sex energises me, I feel more drained when I go without it for extended periods. I don't really feel drained day to day in general either, so no fap or semen retention just feels like a solution to a problem I don't have. Not to mention, not ejaculating increases your risk of prostate cancer. The only thing I regularly do that makes me feel drained is vaping nicotine, and that's largely because it is such a strong addiction with lots of shame associated with it.

I think it has value for guys who struggle with excessive urges to masturbate or watch porn. In my case, I enjoy sex, and I enjoy jerking off. Neither has really impacted my life in any direct way. I don't really feel any shame around either and I don't find that abstaining has any significant impact on me, beyond making me less able to focus on important stuff because my mind focuses on sex. I guess you can argue that eventually you learn to control those urges after lots of abstaining and somehow that benefits you, but I struggle to see what the mechanism would be there. Most likely you just end up more desperate than you would otherwise be because women are your only source of orgasm, so you need women more. IMO if you don't naturally struggle with an addiction to jerking off, all you do by getting into nofap and semen retention is give yourself a massive complex of shame around something that's pretty natural and healthy.

Honestly I find when I don't cum it makes me more desperate for women if anything.