By David Futrelle
“Van Life,” as I understand it, is a growing trend in which young and often quite photogenic people, er, live in vans — hence the name — and post a lot of arty pictures to Instagram documenting their travels.
Over on the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit today some of the regulars are discussing the trend, which many of them see as very amenable to the MGTOW philosophy.
But some worry that the trend has gotten popular with the very women these guys say they’re going their own way from. So what’s the appeal to these women?
Cock, of course. Just listen to Beavis and Butthead here:
Those sneaky, sneaky ladies!
But not all MGTOWs are opposed to the idea of “bitches” driving from city to city in an endless quest for geographically diverse dick. Even if the owners of said dick have to pay a little to get, er toured.
Dude, I feel fairly safe in asserting that no one, not even one of those horny nomadic van ladies, wants to touch your gross MGTOW dick. Regardless of whether the van is in a state of motion or not, don’t go knockin’.
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Ooh, Moggie, I remember To Build a Fire! That was brutal. I can’t remember for sure, but I think I also read that in school rather than on my own initiative.
The hardest book I read while young was actually a comic.
Maus. Yes, the one that describe the concentration camps.
I had to hide myself reading it, because my mother was very much against it (I wasn’t 10 yet if memory serve well), but on the other end I absolutely needed to read everything because it was nauseating and fascinating. “So that’s why wars are bad !” was the message I got from them.
I made the mistake of reading Maus on the train. As my stop approached book one ended and they arrived at Auschwitz. And tears were streaming down my face.
I blog about comics, and that’s on my “never tackle” list along with Watchmen, V For Vendetta and Promethea.
RE: Frugivores/fruitarians: Wasn’t being one what did Steve Jobs in because it made him develop/worsen a pancreatic cancer?
RE: Lobster King: Didn’t he go into rehab due to substance abuse caused by his inability to cope with his wife’s cancer or something? (I think there’s a bitter, ironic “fuck you” delivered by life straight to his philosophy there somewhere…)
His and his daughter’s Twitter accounts still see some activity, and the hypocrisy is still strong (because OF COURSE free speech is mainly under attack from the left, it’s not an excuse to propangandize utterly reprehensible ideologies, honest!); also, holy fuck does that all-red-meat “lion diet” look batshit. Wonder how healthy she’ll be two decades from now (if she doesn’t cheat like over half of those dietmonger quacks). I’m guessing it can work for some very specific people, like the keto diet or the gluten-free diet, but that most who practice them are not helping anything or even engaging in potentially harmful behavior (maybe it actually works for her though, who knows; still stupidly irresponsible to sell it to absolutely everybody).
And that diet would be boring as fuck; red meat, especially beef, lamb, venison and comparable fare are to me, with the slight exception of ground meat, mostly treats/luxuries, for when you go out or have big family/friend meals or other special occasions, and eating it every day, every meal would seriously reduce their appeal, as anything else, especially since everything else seems to takes a backseat or just disappear. Besides the crazy expense (even “cheap” cuts of non-pork red meat like blade roasts are damn expensive these days), I think anyone who follows this blindly falls into the classic trap of “well it’s good for this person so it’s good for anybody!” that’s so often seen.
In fact, I’d hazard a guess that it’s basically a variant on the keto diet given its contents (no carbs, little to no veggies, mostly fat, protein and salt-rich foodstuffs). Oh, and as a bonus, the “Lion Club” thing looks like a one-way ticket to Cultsville. I mean, seriously? “Daily Contact With Mikhaila”? “A Private Support Group”? “Exclusive Semi-Annual Meetups” (paid, of course, and “run in cool locations all over the world (think castles and jungles, of course)”? Why, that doesn’t sound like a dubious scam cult thing at all! (All the stuff in parentheses is literally copy-pasted from her site, BTW) And that second “photo” of her onthe webpage is, well… Anyone familiar with the “Uncanny Valley”?
And yeah, most of the pre-Star Wars previews look like trash, but I completely agree that Call of the Wild looks like easily the most schlocky of the bunch. That FUCKING CGI dog… Harrison Ford and his mumbling mug also look a bit too geriatric for the lead human role (is that ageism to say that)?
@varalys
V for Vendetta is the only Alan Moore comic that I truly enjoy. I recognize the man’s genius, but the rest of his work has no emotional pull for me. Ironically, I like the movie Watchmen a lot – I actually think the movie ending of Watchmen is far better than the comic ending, honestly.
My near-fatal teenage literary mistake was reading Brave New World, immediately followed by 1984, immediately followed by The Handmaid’s Tale. By choice.
Weirdly, I didn’t have much of an external reaction to it all until I finished the next book in line, Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern, which had just come out and which I read to try and get myself out of the emotional morass I put myself in with those three back-to-back. I spent nearly a full day sobbing my throat raw after I finished it.
I am tempted to say it’s not ageist since it’s based on his apparence compared to what he play more than his actual age.
His performance in The Force Awaken was pretty cool, but man did he look out of place. I actually have made respect for him looking closer to 60′ than to the 72 or 75′ he had*, but he still felt like he was out of place.
* I mean, as much in behavior / speech pattern as in actual physical age. Makeup artists help the appearence, but the actor sell the age.
@Paireon
I’m guessing she is cheating. She’d be in much worse health if she wasn’t.
As if Peterson wasn’t culty enough. The difference between Peterson and Molyneux’s cults are that Peterson’s cult appears to have found him first before he started consciously running it, while Molyneux originally set out with the intention to form a cult with all the “deFOOing.” Regardless, both are very culty and kind of creepy.
@Gaebolga
I read Brave New World when I was 10 years old over the summer and really didn’t understand the sexual aspects of it. It wasn’t until years later that I understood it and realized how it probably affected my sexual development.
That same summer I read Animal Farm and The Giver (aka 1984 for kids). I was feeling quite down by August.
If you want some diet based entertainment go to reddit.
There’s r/carnivore and r/zerocarb, both only eat meat, dairy and eggs.
For some real lost souls, try r/rawzerocarb for people who only eat their meat, dairy and eggs uncooked.
I’ve managed to get banned from all of them for creative trolling, but seriously most of it is them complaining about lacking in energy. Complaining about pooing. Either they never do, or their liver stops being able to process the high fat content and they start passing raw liquid fat. And lots of bogus science to excuse why their LDL cholesterol is so high and how that’s actuallly good for you.
Seriously hilarious stuff. As I sit smugly on my throne of soy.
@Weird Eddie:
No, the screenwriters have lots of new ideas, but the big money sources generally only want to pay for things that they are certain will sell. Remakes have (in theory) a guaranteed audience.
There’s a reason why a lot of the new ideas either come out of smaller studio operations or are being run by big name directors who have enough clout of their own that they can convince people to pay for things on spec.
@Gaebolga:
I’ve got a friend who agrees with you that the Watchmen movie ending made more sense than the comic book ending.
A different friend once (jokingly) suggested a dystopia movie night of 1984, A Clockwork Orange, and Brazil (the original ending). Unsurprisingly, nobody took him up on it. Granted, the same friend used to claim that Brazil had a happy ending: after all, the protagonist managed to escape in the only way available.
@varalys the dark
I wonder why they want to avoid vegetables? Do they really want to own vegans and vegetarians that bad by eating like cats? Do they think foraging for plants is something only women should do?
I am someone who doesn’t like vegetables and would almost always choose a meat-based diet since I’m quite a fussy eater, but my parents weren’t stupid enough to deny me vegetables (even if there are certain things they’d not agree with the left, owing to them, like the rest of many people in the Philippines, being very religious and from religious backgrounds). Heck, they’ve even attributed a poor diet (of almost exclusively meat) as to why one of my relatives died so soon just less than half a decade after I moved to the UK with them.
I also think that veganism should be the standard for a human diet to reduce the impact of the climate crisis and to save more animal lives. So far, I haven’t transitioned to a vegan diet because I’m not paying for my own food and sometimes I would prefer to eat free food. As mentioned before, I am also quite a fussy eater too, and I would prefer vegan-friendly food if it were prepared quite well. Vegetables alone or vegan-friendly food that doesn’t look different from its original ingredients just don’t seem filling or satisfying to me, partly because of how my parents have prepared such food loaded with vegetables.
@varalys
Both of those sound quite unpleasant.
How much of this carnivore diet/zero carb stuff is motivated by toxic masculinity and the idea of meat as a masculine food? Maybe they think their bowel problems are the mark of being a manly man.
I’m a vegetarian and even before that I never ate much meat (kosher meat is expensive). To me an all-meat diet just seems very unusual and expensive.
@Jenora:
I actually experienced something like this. Years ago, we had a theater called The Granada, which was something like an art house theater, & they would often run thematic double bills, say, 4 example, The Sound of Music” & South Pacific.
Well, I went with a friend to see “Blade Runner” (the director’s cut) & “A Clockwork Orange.”
We took to calling that excursion the “Come and See the Violence Inherent in the System” night…and I was shell-shocked 4 days.
I think the Granada still exists but has become more like a Movie Studio Grill type set up, which is a darned shame.
The people posting generally do seem to be men. I know we don’t internet diagnose but there is a thing called “orthorexia” which is a complete obsession with food, and the carnies are some of the most obsessed I have ever seen. They have a terrible fear of carbs, carbs are the devil, carbs will make you fat. Plants have anti-nutrients and will tear your insides apart. Get your energy from fat, the ideal seems to be 70% fat to 30% protein ratio. And it fun aside, it’s a fucking immoral and despicable diet, it’s ridiculously expensive, makes you sick and the environmental impact is ridiculous.
And dangerous too, I got banned from r/rawzerocarb for pleading with a pregnant follower of the raw meat diet to get some folate. I really hope her baby will be OK.
Well, poot!!! Sorry about the grammar/punctuation epic fail on my previous comment.
That’s what happens when I try to post from my cell, dad drat it.
@Naglfar
Owning the libs by developing bowel cancer.
The next step is to fully embrace the primitive diet fad, and get horribly infested with worms. Soooooo manly. The romans did it. The vikings did it. Modern western society is barely afflicted by parasites in food at all, and look how weak it is. Obviously, the solution is worms. Flatworms, roundworms, tapeworms. Libs hate the thought of invertebrates burrowing through their flesh and organs, so it must be a good thing.
Just wait for general recreation time and get one of the other prisoners to help you out with the editing.
@varalys
I’d be quite worried about that baby and the mother. Raw meat sounds like it will destroy your insides much faster than any carbohydrate. I’ve never eaten raw meat for any reason, but I can’t imagine the texture or taste being very good either.
It’s all related to the ketogenic diet. Although glucose is the brains preferred fuel, which you get from sugars in carbs of course, by removing carbs you force your body to burn fat as you sole source of body fuel. You enter a state called “ketosis” which always sounds awful, I see people writing about “keto flu” and “keto crotch” etc. It’s a temporary weight loss fix and staying on keto long term has been linked to all sorts of fun kidney disorders, especially kidney stones.
The rawzerocarb bunch are on another level. They like to leave organ meat in jars for months to rot into slime, then they consume it and call it “high meat”. I’ve seen video of such consuming going on and well, if you ever need to lose your appetite, check them out.
So, This Exists (as the meme goes). But why???
Re books that are stressful – this fall I was tutoring a CEGEP (college) student doing a course on Comics as Literature and the books were Maus, Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid in the World, and Watchmen.
I don’t think I helped him with the first essay as much as I could because the book made me anxious. And usually I’m not affected by the content of books, either mine or my students’ (e.g. Song for Night and 1984 are brutal but the SF elements make them less…immediate, I guess). And I read Maus before!! But this time, I’d just tutored another student in 20th-century history and two of the WW2 projects gave me lingering worries, specifically an essay about whether the atomic bombs were justified (whatever you think, the whole thing is terrifying) and then a powerpoint about the Holocaust.
Oh yes, and that made me wonder whether anyone from my cousins’ family was there; this was before I knew. Her great-grandparents were able to escape Poland, I think I mentioned that in another thread.
ANYWAY. When I was in class with the student I saw the book and was all, “No, no, that’s the last thing I want to look at now.”
I think I’m more affected by real vs. not real things? Same with movies.
Watchmen has all this nuclear war symbolism & content, but what I found happier to contemplate were the two small references to electric vehicles. I might write about that on Twitter later.
Lastly, I’m glad I was introduced to Jimmy Corrigan; I read the whole thing! It’s difficult in another way, as it’s kind of surreal and the pictures can be tiny sometimes, but I think it can function as a kind of antidote to the incel mindset. The main character starts off like a stereotypical “loser” type who’s shy about speaking with women and has parent issues, but the story shows that a bitter mindset just fucks him up further and a compassionate one works better.
It’s not that it has a super happy ending, either with romance or family, but it’s kind of hopeful, if that makes sense.
@varalys
Thinking about people doing that to themselves, voluntarily, makes me want to cry/scream/throw up. Possibly all three at once. Those folks seriously need help, IDK how you can find their disordered eating hilarious.
Seriously, fuck eating disorders.
@varalys
I’ve gone into what I think was ketosis (I had the symptoms described) unintentionally while fasting and it is not pleasant. Would not recommend.
That’s disgusting. How do they not get all manner of diseases from eating rotting meat?
@Katamount,
Probably the same way its spiritual sequel White Fang also became a “family film” property, ‘a boy and his dog’ division. The main character in both are dogs, kid stories usually have animals as the MC, ergo they’re both kids books.
(For those who’ve never read WF, it’s the story of a wild half-wolf who slowly leaves the wild ways of the Yukon for a quieter life in the lower 48 states. And there are no teenage boys, white or otherwise, involved in the parade of humans that owned him. As I recall it, London was quite sympathetic to the Native guy who started Fang’s domestication and his eventual ruin, as well as making parallels between Fang’s puppyhood and the criminal who shows up at the end to kill everyone. But apparently all that stuff isn’t good enough to make an interesting kids movie with, so….)
Btw, speaking of Brazil, can someone describe for me what was done for the network TV version that destroyed the movie’s ending? Because from what I recall all anyone had to do to give it a Hollywood Happy Ending was cut off the last scene. But I also get the impression that a lot more editing was done to the ending then that. So does anyone remember what was done? Please and thank you? :3
@Naflgar: They do get sick. Like there is a dude called Sv3ridge who likes to “protest” vegan events by eating raw squirrels etc. He got a severe life threatening infection from raw bone marrow which required hospitalisation. There is another dude big in the carny crowd called Frank Tufano, every other video he puts up seems to be complaining about various fungal infections, candida, projectile vomiting and so on. Very lovely.
@epitome
In the graphic novel it’s explained that electric cars are standard in Watchmen-verse because Dr. Manhattan can make rare earths pretty much at will, so there’s no shortage of catalysts etc.
@varalys
I hope for their own sake that they realize that what they’re doing is harmful and stop.