The Alpha Dogs on the Red Pill Subreddit are totally taking “text game” to the next level.
You know how it is when a Hot Babe 8 texts you and you start typing out a reply because, you know, that’s what people do when they get texts, and then you get ready to click “send” because that’s how you send texts? DON’T DO IT! SENDING TEXTS WHEN YOU WRITE THEM IS TOTALLY BETA.
Instead, show her who’s boss by scheduling your text to be sent later. THEN SHE’LL THINK YOU REPLIED LATER BECAUSE YOU’RE SO COOL AND BUSY AND ALOOF and totally not desperate to get in her pants or anything!
And your phone makes it easy! As noahbish explains:
She’ll be like, why didn’t he answer me, maybe I’m ugly and he’s too SUPERCOOL for me, and totally not someone playing stupid high school dating games by scheduling his response for later because, really, who would even do that.
Truly, there is nothing more alpha as fuck than scheduling your texts so you won’t seem beta as fuck.
Also another totally cool thing you can do is to text “370HSSV 0773H” to people and when they ask what it means tell them to turn their phone upside down. Ha ha! OWNED.
They don’t sell horses and violins either. I am thinking I might write up a petition to have them punished for that cruel injustice.
Do it, thebewilderness!
Yeah, as far as I know there are places here in Aus where you can get the game, just not in Target. There’s plenty of places devoted solely to selling videogames where I’m sure you could buy that particular game.
Bingo.
There didn’t use to be a “manosphere” as we now know it when I first heard of guys trying to pick women up (this would be in the late ’70s). Just a bunch of sleazy dudes using cheesy lines in an effort to “score” sex, and striking out more often than not. Now it’s morphed into a whole pseudoscience, in which women are defective computers and PUAs are the hucksters and charlatans claiming to sell a universal cheat code to make them “work”. Of course, it’s no more successful than the dude of the ’70s in his ugly polyester shirt (and looking at a lot of them, I feel like there is a serious fashion time warp going on, too, because that undone-shirt thing is still happening). But the corny kernel of the old pickup subculture is still there, just overlaid with a whole slew of various decades’ worth of pseudo-scientific bullshit from NLP, evol-psych, etc. Plus a whole slew of various decades’ worth of political bullshit, from the “caveman” stuff of the ’50s and ’60s, all the way through to ’90s flibbertigibbertarianism. All of it aimed squarely at putting women in “their” place…which is, of course, under a man’s thumb.
@Michelle:
You’re very welcome! I am glad to spread the message of Good Old Games.
I should probably start apologizing in advance to people for showing them a new way to spend a lot of money, kind of like how TVTropes is up-front about how you’re gonna waste hours on the site.
A store can choose to sell or not sell whatever they want – of course you can buy it elsewhere. I just don’t think it was a particularly grand gesture on their part, or that (as WWTH said) they were being political – it was good PR.
Lol, agreed! I thought most of them liked the whole ‘free market’ thing (when it serves them… dog forbid when it doesn’t)
Re: air quality – Busband and I once asked a guy we knew at WalMart why it always smelled slightly… bad in there. His reply: “dead rats in the ceiling”.
Lol….”in my experience”
Translation: In the fantasies I make up in my head
It is indeed pretty weird to get upset about decisions by Target and KMart. Australia is a country with actual state-enforced censorship of video games. I would think that actual australians (or people who care about Australians) would save their protest for that, but I suppose instead of perspective it breeds reflexive defensiveness.
Seriously – guys – I just think it’s sort of silly for some stores to ban games. I’d like to think my opinions are based on some informed stance (“Banning stuff in general is fair less productive than having actual conversations about the content in question”) and aren’t merely reflexive upset defensive cries of freeze peach anti-feminist-analysis rage without perspective, and I’m a little confused as to the sentiment I’m reading here.
Am I missing some crucial part of this conversation that sailed right the fuck over my head?
Stock fluctuations. If the rumor starts going around that Target stores are doing air quality tests, the assumption is they’re doing them for a reason that is negative and it might cause a bit of a drop in listed stock prices. That’s a loss for investors.
I’d agree that discussing problematic things in all media, not just games is preferable to banning. My point was more just that Target probably doesn’t care about the problematic things in GTA and isn’t being political in any way. They just pulled it because it got complaints and it seemed like a good business decision to do so. I really doubt Target is trying to provoke a conversation about sexism in video games. Since they weren’t trying to accomplish any kind of political goal, it doesn’t really make sense to argue whether or not they’re action is effective.
Their action, rather. I blame only being on my first cup of coffee.
I suspect most of the people whining about this are not Australian. It’s rather funny that Americans are thinking of boycotting Target over when American Targets are still selling the game. Plus, Wal-Mart bans things with explicit content all the time or they sell the radio version of music with swear words in it. So it would be silly to switch from Target to Wal-Mart when the latter does this kind of thing far more often.
WWTH – the only Australians I’ve heard complaining were two men and one woman in a straw poll on the news, and they sounded like they hadn’t given it a moment’s thought beyond “Oh they’re only games.”
Fibi, yes, I do think you’re missing the point by talking about banning. Two stores not stocking something is not any sort of banning. They’re not obliged to sell the goddamn things. This conversation is echoing trolls who complaing about their FREEZE PEACH and CENSORSHIP! when they’re told they can’t trot out their nonsense in this particular space. Whatever their reasons, Target and KMart have done no more than moderators do in responding to their customers’/commenters complaints.
I also side-eye the idea that “banning” is automatically bad even if it had taken place in this case.
@ Fibi
I think something may be getting lost in internet communication, yes. Certainly it’s a bit silly to stop carrying one violent game and still carry others if the goal is to eliminate violent games, but the thing is, that’s not actually the store’s goal? Like I said earlier, the games may as well be cans of soup from their perspective, they’re just removing a product that lots of customers have complained about, same as they would for any other product where it seems like the benefits of carrying it are outweighed by the negative PR and/or customers who may decide to shop elsewhere if they don’t pull the product.
People are way talking past each other here, because every statement made on this topic by a non-troll can pretty much all be true at the same time. Like I haven’t heard anyone, least of all Fibi, talking about free speech or censorship or denying that stores have a right to stock whatever merchandise they like or claiming that Target and Wal-Mart have some motive beyond the obvious fiscal one, and I really don’t know why that stuff is being brought up or who it’s aimed at. (I think Fibi is being a bit loose about the distinction between the action taken by the stores themselves and the action taken by the people petitioning the stores, though.)
Since I don’t want to get caught up in any misunderstandings, my opinion is:
-That stores do, obviously, have the right to stock or not stock whatever merchandise they like.
-That people have the right to petition stores to stock or not stock something for whatever reason they like.
-But that, however, doing so may or may not be a very effective way to accomplish your larger objective.
-And that in this case, if the larger objective is reducing misogyny and/or violence in games, it’s not, IMO.
-And so I would not participate in this particular campaign, and would preferentially encourage other forms of activism.
-But I am not actively opposed either to people doing the campaign or the stores responding by not stocking the game (see points 1 and 2).
I hope all of that is acceptable to everyone.
I brought up the usual “free speech!” stuff because this seemed to be paralleling those things, and it was eyebrow-raising to see Fibi talking about it in such similar terms. The idea that a store choosing not to stock something = banning is nonsense. I simply say good on their customers for bringing it up, and the stores for responding as they did.
Ah, thanks. That cleared that up. I guess we just meant different things by “ban” and talked past each other.
Also Katz summed up what I meant perfectly.
I actually don’t think there is a moral right to petition for the removal of arbitrary items. In this particular case there are solid justifications — target and kmart presumably don’t have extensive game libraries, so anything they cut is making room for something else. They’re invested in a family-friendly image, and if you go there for that atmosphere finding GTA on the shelf would be incongruous. This is one of the few instances where I’d be sympathetic to a “what about the children” argument.
That said, I think one does have to have a justification to have something pulled, and that preventing other people from getting things you don’t want them to have isn’t valid. I don’t think anyone has a right to lobby WalMart to stop selling Narnia or to stop selling the Golden Compass, except the most technical legal sense.
Sorry if this has already been mentioned – I haven’t read all the comments….
It was not that long ago that GTA games were censored in Australia. There were elements of the sexualised violence that was cut out in the Australian version, and people actually petitioned the govt to remove the censorship.
Censorship in Australia has a history of being draconian though, and people could fight against it on principle rather than a real desire to do/see whatever it was that was banned. Least I hope that’s what the point was – the bits that were censored added nothing at all to the game after all. Rockstar should just leave it out of their next game entirely, then everyone wins.
Personally, I really like Rockstar games, and despite them being problematic I’m going to keep playing them. But there are so many ways they could make them just as good, or even better and less problematic at the same time. That’s where the pressure should be – on the game makers. But how to do that when I’m not voting with my wallet, I’m not sure.
IMO, if Target wants to be family friendly, they are quite right not to sell GTA5. It really, really shouldn’t be sold to minors, and while it’s reasonable for a person working in a video game store to be carding people and refusing to sell things, it’s less reasonable to expect someone working a cash register at a place like Target to do it.