Well, I’m back after a couple of weeks off. I didn’t get as much accomplished as I was hoping, but on the other hand, I think I achieved the Next Level of Zen. I’ve got some stuff planned in the weeks to come.
Looks like it was an eventful couple of weeks. Glad I missed all of that. I was getting pretty damned tired of all that Game drama, and I may make a point of never writing an apologetic for Game again. That said, there are a couple of new link aggregators out there for ya:
Manosphere.com – you’ve got Kid Strangeglove to thank for putting this one together, and Apocalypse Cometh for registering the domain, way back when.
Red Pill Review by our good friend, Mr Frost at Thumotic. There’s room for more than one aggregator, and with any luck they’ll both develop their own flavours as time goes on. Use both, neither, it’s up to you, but I’m hoping that both will turn into useful resources.
Speaking of live-updates about blogs, I believe that my “follow” button is still taking the piss. I’ll try and play around with different options and get that going, but in the meantime I’d recommend that you get yourself a Feedly account. It allows you to create your own custom list of blogs/sites that you read, sort them by category, and if you install it on your phone it will auto-format them into a mobile-enabled site… with mixed success. Easy-access to read while you’re on the train. If anyone wants to recommend a different reader in the comments, fire away – Feedly is what I use, but I haven’t tried anything else because.
With all that said, there’s one more thing I’d like to address: the upset in the Manosphere over Tucker Max’s comments about his new magazine Mating Grounds.
Now I’ll be honest, I was a bit insulted that I had to find out about it from the Manosphere; I used to work for the guy (for free) as an editor/moderator at his old company Rudius Media, and my good friend, drinking buddy, and Stand-up Comedian Chris Griffin was the driver on the movie tour. That said, we were out of touch for a while, and to be fair my work at Rudius Media was mostly under the pseudonym Ironman. If you’re wondering, yeah – I could talk shit about the guy… but I could talk shit about anybody I’ve known and worked with. The movie was a disappointment (sorry, dude), but in retrospect, shutting down the forum was the right thing to do. That place had turned into a circle-jerk, and though I missed it at first, ultimately everybody was better off – at least, those who moved forward with their lives were.
It’s easy to talk shit about people, especially when an ambitious project doesn’t turn out the way they were hoping, but the people that do that seldom have any ambition themselves. So, yes, I could talk shit about the man – but why would I? I have no grievance with him (heck, he’s in the acknowledgements of my book), and he opened me up to a lot of stuff I hadn’t heard of before (Heartiste and Less Wrong, for instance). It ain’t easy being in the limelight, and I’ll spend a good, long time thinking about it before I attack someone who is.
As to the divide between Tucker and the Manosphere – we’ve got Doc Illusion to thank for sorting that out. To paraphrase, a mountain was made out of a molehill and offence was taken where none was intended. Tucker’s official statement follows:
Of course the Manosphere exists. I never said it didn’t. And of course the Manosphere has been writing about women, sex, dating, etc, for a long time. I never said it didn’t. Dude, I (kind of) predate the Manosphere on the internet, I remember it’s emergence. It’s been great for a lot of guys. I even think there are some really good Manosphere sites (I also think many are badly regurgitated PUA bullshit, but whatever).
That being said, our site (and book, when it comes out) are going to fill a space that no Manosphere site is occupying. We’re going to approach sex and dating in a way it hasn’t been approached before, and provide a perspective that neither Geoff not I have seen.
Or, maybe I should say it this way: we’re going to write about issues like sex, dating and women for young guys in a way that we think will be better, clearer and more impactful than anything else (in or out of the Manosphere). And we are pretty certain we’ll do it in such a way that it’ll get more attention, and have more mainstream reach, and ultimately help more guys.
~Tucker Max
And that’s good enough for me. Personally, I hope the site does well.
- Speaking the truth is always a righteous thing.
- The Manosphere is not a zero-sum game; the more (good quality) writing that there is, the larger the audience grows.
- Competition results in creative-conflict. Tucker isn’t “stealing our ideas” – he’s challenging us to get better at explaining our ideas, while providing another perspective that can compliment them with new information.
If you’re worried about liberal/MSM/entryist/politically correct distortions, don’t; part of the Next Level of Zen that I achieved was remembering that I don’t write for the sake of being popular, my blog traffic is a second-order artifact of my writing, not its purpose. I write because it’s the Truth. Doing anything else puts you into a tail-spin of relativist pandering. Sometimes it’s hard to discern the line between pandering on the one hand, and writing for an audience on the other, but believe me, it’s there. The panderers are frequently more popular, but they’re never more successful.
If Mating Grounds writes in a manner that is palatable to the mainstream, but doesn’t fundamentally deviate from the Truth – so what? As I’ve said before, Lawful Good isn’t Lawful Nice, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be nice, from time to time. If Tucker wants to play nice, that’s his prerogative. And if Mating Grounds does publish an outright lie – well, isn’t that great fodder for your own argument? Sounds like a lambasting will be in order.
At the end of the day, none of it stops you from living and speaking the Truth, which is all that matters in the end – not what other people are doing. Personally, I’m cautiously optimistic that Mating Grounds will turn into a rival of Return of Kings; that would be great. If not, well – Keys to the VIP Room is already a TV show, and that’s hardly worse than anything else in this foul year of our Lord, 2014.
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
~C.S. Lewis
So, best of luck to you Tucker, I hope this latest venture is both Righteous and Successful, and as for the rest of you folks, keep your powder dry. Stares at the World is now back to its regular schedule.
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