Post money Silicon Valley Lotharios
There are many amusing stereotypical personalities in Silly Con valley. Steve Sailer coined the phrase “Silicon Valley Adventuress” for the very obvious type of women who try various kinds of shakedowns on tech firms and their executives. There’s the more obvious “Divorce Tick” kind of woman; someone who marries a clueless but rich nerdoid and relieves him of his extra wealth. These are often hilarious to watch at work, even when it’s pointed at you: the divorce ticks often talk these nerds into open relationships. Dude always thinks it means hot threesomes with her friends; generally the way that works out she gets sex whenever she wants from the pool boy or whatever, and he gets bupkiss because he’s a ridiculous nerd with a hot wife who cheats on him. Divorce happens with mathematical certainty when she’s maximized her profits. The free market and regulatory capture can be an awesome thing to watch at work. It’s a shame nobody has written a novel on the sorts of people who populate the place: it’s filled with all manner of amusing characters. I’ve written about the blonde grifter and insecure Indian guy with a sports car before: you’ll literally meet dozens of those if you spend any time there. There needs to be a Flaubert of Silicon Valley Divorce Ticks and Adventuresses and grouchy Harpeet with Becky in the Porsche. The TV show by Mike Judge captures the vibe and some of the superficial personalities, but it’s only skin deep: the actual place, like anything made of actual people is much more weird.
One of the varieties of Silicon Valley character is the post-money Lothario. While people have written about the Adventuresses and to a lesser extent, Divorce Ticks, nobody to my knowledge has written about the post-money Lothario. He should be considered as delicately amusing, as he’s generally even more of a boob than the garden variety sociopaths and their victims mentioned above.
Nerds are as sexually ambitious as anyone else. Nerds suck at being charismatic though; otherwise they’d get jobs talking people out of their money instead of actually trying to create value by doing tedious engineering work. At some point, usually around middle age, the successful ones end up making enough money to be competitive with chads. Some of them get married and live happily ever after. Some of them get married and some divorce tick removes half of their money, and they live less happily ever after. Others decide to become womanizers in their middle age. This isn’t a new phenomenon; it’s as old as time. It’s at least as old as the 1500s where Cranach the elder was making hilarious paintings of the phenomenon.
Note her hand is in his pocket
Beyond the fact that this sort of thing is ridiculous, I don’t have anything against it. Young women have to make their way in the world, and old nerds need love too (feel free to send digits, ladies).
What boggles my mind is one of two situations. One is the situation in which the man makes the woman his protege. This is ridiculous because sucking an old guy’s crusty dick is not actually good training for entrepreneurial work, no matter how smart and helpful the old dude is. Sure you can get him to invest in your startup: you still have to make it work by yourself, and if you’re the type of person to suck a dick for a venture investment, you’re probably no good at actually executing a profitable business. Women who do this are highly unlikely to actually act the role of the protege or Ganymede or whatever. Your average women being what they are, probably thinks her benefactor is ridiculous and a fool. He actually is, though he’s probably giving her decent advice, and she should probably listen. Men involved in this sort of relationship may be hard headed captains of industry, but when the blood flows to their nether regions, they go soft about the cerebral cortex and don’t realize the girl is probably just an ambitious sperm spittoon.
This is an annoying phenomenon for actually productive people as many startups, mid-trajectory ventures and most of all, old companies often have to deal with the fallout. It really, really sucks when you end up with some kind of lame prostitute as your boss in your management chain. I’ve never experienced this, as it’s rare I work for anybody who isn’t me, but you can see it when it happens. Anyone who has worked in such a firm has encountered this whether they realize it or not. It even happened at the national labs. Some of these “couples” go beyond this and the women attempt to start their own companies. Most famous example of this is, of course, Eric Schmidt. I feel bad picking on him as he’s a friend of several of my friends, but it’s not like nobody knows about it. That’s what you get for making too much money; plenty of other retards have behaved in this way but aren’t as rich and famous and subject to scrutiny, he will have to suffice for visual aid. Such investments are inevitably disastrous of course. Maybe it doesn’t matter if they can afford it, but I think it ends up bothering them, because these fools for love think they were doing a good deed, rather than overpaying a prostitute.
The other annoying one is the full on playboy nerd. Schmidt kind of did this too, or at least was fairly active in his romantic adventures in the past. To be clear I’m not picking on him, Larry Ellison was even more notorious for it (generally speaking, Larry is the only interesting silicon valley member of club billionaire: no h8 -also thanks in advance for fixing Star Trek muh nig nog), though since Larry is adept at buying media organizations, people don’t talk about it as much in the funny papers. Anyway both these guys have cut a wide and not entirely disreputable swathe through local adventuress vaginas. That’s just nature, naturing, life in balance. It’s the dudes who go all grody on it. I had a series of booty calls while I was still in grad school to these very fancy loft apartments. Apparently the girls I was smashing had the keys to these places from Silicon Valley Lotharios, and were part of their harems. As a poor grad student I was all in favor of free hookers who thought I was more interesting than the guy with the fancy house, and appreciated their hospitality, high thread count sheets and fine taste in alcoholic beverages. The stories I heard was that these dudes were off porking prostitutes, so it was OK to drink his booze and pork his allegedly not-prostitute (according to them) women in his house. Later on, I (more or less) aged out of being That Guy, and ended up knowing similar characters whose lives and fortunes were dedicated to playing space invaders with different kinds of women, pretty much as avocation, hobby and meaning of life. You ever meet a 50 year old who is really into coke or weed or mushrooms or whatever? Kind of pathetic, right? Same difference; hoes are also a vice.
Carravagio noted this happens to younger men as well
I guess I was lucky in some ways, in that I always did reasonably well with ladies. Even went through a chad phase where I was avidly pursued, due to absurdly modest local fame, requiring little effort on my part. Despite my advanced state of disintegration into my constituent elementary particles, I still occasionally get the hairy eyeball from comely and fertile ones. As such, these sorts of degenerate “bro I had a threesome with a blue haired asian and a redhead” antics aren’t impressive to me at all, or my idea of the good life. It’s just lame shit I did before I could afford more interesting hobbies, like telescopes or having machine tools in my spare bedroom. Doing such things at my age, which a lot of these guys continue to do, seems downright tedious. It’s just not a good use of my time, and I’m not as wealthy or accomplished as a lot of these assholes, so from a time value of money point of view I don’t know WTF they are thinking. I don’t know how they can do it, in the same sense I don’t know how a heroin junkie can stick the spike in their arm as their meaning for life.
Look we all love the poosy, it’s great. Women fucking you because you’re a rich asshole is not the same thing as young love, or being popular because you’re an actual charismatic chad rather than some chode who gets in the newspaper for being awfully rich. Being a balding, flabby dot com deci-to-centi millionaire who spends most of his time arranging threesomes with Stanford educated sl00ts you met on a website for “arrangements” is just lame shit. Join the liftwaffe, lift weights, become freeking hyooge, learn ancient greek, become a great martial artist, start right wing death squads: you’ll probably have a better romantic life than buying stanford educated prostitutes, or spending half your time managing your polycule. End sermon; I know you faggots won’t change, and I won’t stop making fun of you.
If you want to live some kind of baller lifestyle that nobody will fault you for, look to mafiosos or wealthy Russians for your model of the good life. Having a “goomah” who was a gymnast or ballerina or something is based. Porking a bunch of money grubbing sluts who are too lazy to be a good wife or goomah to a rich guy or whatever is just lame.
Related: marriage advice from the likes of me (never married, therefore winning at life) on Man’s World.
Exercise science is not science
Neither is computer science, political science, economics, nutritional science or anything else with the word “science” in the name. I tire of internet weight lifting dorks talking about “science based lifting.” None of these faggots know what they’re talking about, and the “science” they base their assertions on isn’t even pre-scientific. All of the “studies” they do are bullshit. There are no meaningful control groups. There is no way of making everyone do the exercise the same way. There is no way of controlling what they put in their gobs afterwords. There is no way of controlling the vast genetic differences in the groups of exercisers. The closest anyone came in all of human history to turning this sort of thing into science was the communist countries, as they did control some of these things. Soviet exercise science has some interesting ideas, it really just represents another shade on coaching. One which is absurdly confounded with the drugs they were pumping into people, and the fact that they were dropping the non-drug-responders off the training programs to go back to glorious people’s nickel smelting plant.
These guys bug me because they all have their One True Way; do this number of sets and reps, pre stretch your whatever, do keto, don’t do keto, weigh your food, eat broccoli, go in the Sauna, don’t go in the cold plunge, take african beans that cannibals use to make their junk bigger, take X Y Z amino acids. They publish videos criticizing people more successful at sports than they are. Oh noe if only Sam Sulek had done a slower eccentric he would be n% huger. Or something. “Exercise science” is a cult, like veganism, keto-tardism, HIT-jedis, people who take follostatin gene therapy: it’s all cult bullshit.
The reality is, any sort of sport or training activity will have esoteric coaching knowledge which totally works, and which is totally unstudied by exercise science, or, worse, studied in a way where you couldn’t possibly learn anything real. Strongman, bodybuilding, arm wrestling, powerlifting, olympic lifting, strand pullers, grip training, gymnastics, wrestling, boxing, karate, judo, pretty much anything is going to have a lot of esoterica and the “science” journals won’t be of much use. If you just go to the gym to keep fit, you might learn something from any of these disciplines. If you want to excel in any of them, you must learn from coaches. There are schools of coaching for each discipline which say opposite things from other schools which are equally effective, all other things being equal. Also, if you have bad genetics for any of these disciplines: no kind of coaching is going to make you a champion. I will never be a good basketball player because I’m short. I’ll never be a high end armwrestler because I have shitty wrists. I can probably beat you in arm wrestling though, and it’s not because I’m a scientist.
The ancient Greeks built tremendous physiques without barbells, sterons, protein powders, supplements, the scientific method or much of anything recognizable to “science based training.” Old timey strong men wearing singlets and sporting unfashionable mustaches had feats of strength unmatched by contemporary strong men. No science involved there either. They did all kinds of things which ain’t “science based” and it all seemed to work.
The things we actually know were basically known by Milo of Croton, probably by strong cavemen: progressive overload, high protein diets, consistency in training. That’s pretty much it. Anything which has these three qualities will work. It will work better if you have a coach paying attention to what you’re doing and watching the results. One of those three things, progressive overload, might actually be optional in certain conditions. People do “grease the groove” training where they do an exercise a few times spread out over the course of a day, doing a casual amount of weights; maybe 1-5 reps of your 10 rep maxes, or even less, several times a day, many days a week, and they still make improvements. Same story with gymnasts whose motions confer strength, but done mostly in a “grease the groove” way to make progress. In fact, I’ve found this a great way to make progress on high skill quasi-gymnast exercises like handstand push ups or chinups.
When you read the actual studies, anyone remotely acquainted with experimental design will see the problems with them. The human material isn’t controlled for. The human material may be untrained, might be old, young, or unspecified. Anyone who has never trained basically hasn’t gone through puberty yet. When the untrained finally train, pretty much anything will work. Comparing two kinds of training in untrained subjects is useless; whatever differences there are in progress are essentially going to be statistical noise, dominated by the genetics and condition and nutrition of the subjects, none of which can really be controlled for. Studies with trained athletes? How trained? Can you quantify this? I doubt it.
Bybon lifted this rock overhead with one hand in the 6th century BC
Learning to get healthy and strong by reading “the science” makes about as much sense as learning to have a good life and satisfying relationships by talking to psychologists. Nerds were useful when they were inventing things like electricity: the idea that nerds can tell you anything useful today beyond how to program your computard is delusional scientism. Talk to a coach; not a nerd. The nerd may been in pretty good shape, or not as the case may be, but it will always be because of consistency in the gym and kitchen (and possibly sterons) rather than any edge their knowledge of “the literature” has given them. The “science” part is shit, and always will be.
Exercise is an art, not a science. Renaissance artists were also strongmen: Leonardo could bend horseshoes with his hands through art, not science, which was pretty much unknown in his day. The same artist mentality that made the subtle smile of the Mona Lisa made Leonardo capable of incredible feats of strength and built him a strong and aesthetic physique. Get some exercise; make progress. Be an artist if you can, or read a book by one if you can’t. Just don’t send me any more “science based” training videos.
HG Wells was awful in every way
HG Wells is one of those figures who loomed large over my childhood. His stuff was popular with previous generations: he was given the title of prophetic by my grandparents, a fair achievement in early marketing and public relations. This is intensely silly as most of his science fiction was ridiculous fairy story tier stuff, and his near future “prophetic” stuff was along the lines of “there will be a war with Hitler in Europe and airplanes will be important.” Something blindingly obvious to anybody in 1933. A lot of his work was made into movies in the 1950s, some of which are quite charming; Time Machine, Earth to the Moon and War of the Worlds. These films from that era are better than the books. The reason they’re so much better: they are only very loose adaptations. Most of the reason they succeed as science fiction films is due to the work of the screenwriters; men like Nigel Kneale (unsung genius; everything he did was good), David Duncan and Barre Lyndon. Also producer-director George Pal. If Wells had written them, nobody would have seen them.
I recently rewatched “Shape of things to come” 1936 edition. It’s a reasonably close adaptation of his book of the same name: he wrote the screenplay. It is touted by various kinds of art-poufs as being important as a film somehow. It is insanely bad. This was supposed to be muh hard science, yet people are running around with ridiculous capes and useless giant helmets. The movie is a series of speeches given by the same couple of actors, portraying different characters and their descendants through history. The connecting material is 1935 era special effects set pieces. There’s no dramatic arc. The smarty pants guy makes smug remarks about war, the dorky guy makes dumb remarks about war, then the same actors do it again in a post apocalyptic future, then again in their totalitarian “utopia.” Some “bad” man who hates progress (played by post apocalyptic warlord actor) gives a speech about how we should stop all this progress nonsense, foments a riot, then they shoot a couple of kids into space in a big gun, wiping out the evil rioters. Then the father of one of the kids (a totalitarian Klaus Schwab dictator who probably wants you to eat the bugs) gives a rousing speech about how progress is good, actually. I wanted to kill all the characters in this movie. I watched it as a kid, figuring it would be like all the cool 50s HG Wells movies, but it wasn’t: those took enough liberties with Wells stories to make them halfway decent. This was the pure, unadulterated Wells, and it sucked.
apparently, in the “future” pilots will wear enormous retard helmets
I don’t think Wells was popular for his actual writing: he was more of a sermonizer for a “better” sort of future of undemocratic socialist technocracy. Socialist technocracy was a popular utopian idea back then. Probably starting with my hometown’s most famous son who isn’t Doug MacArthur’s pappy: a tubercular wastrel by the name of Edward Bellamy. Amusingly most of Wells’ utopian writing was forgotten: largely because it sucked. It also had the sort of IQ eugenics baloney which is popular with a certain kind of nerdoid today. While almost all of our contemporary kakistocracy believes something like this in private, IQ-eugenics is not the sort of thing which is presently popular to say out loud. Earlier nerdoid clerk types had no such inhibitions. The main thing modern people get from Wells utopias is the cutting criticism of it in Huxley’s “Brave New World.” While he did sprinkle some science in his stuff, unlike Jules Verne, it was barely science fiction: most of it was just magic in technological drag. Technology was very popular back then, as it was skyrocketing in a way that hasn’t happened since. If you wanted to talk about future worlds you had to make some genuflections in its direction, even if your “technology” was magical woo tier. Wells was also a feminist, and stood for a long time as feminist icon for writing a preachy book on the subject.
I had read a biography of his a decade or two ago (I think this one): as a human being he was a nasty piece of work. His womanizing was absolutely ridiculous and disgusting. It was done in a time (Edwardian) when such antics were socially, even medically destructive, and he conducted his affairs with a sociopathic frenzy which was both vile and shockingly contemporary. I say this as someone who admired Casanova’s autobiography. Wells wasn’t a Casanova; he was a bounder and a cad. Also a male feminist: a tribe generally disgusting in their treatment of the female sex, since they’re usually in it for the pussy: Wells absolutely was.
yeah baby I support womens rights
As a writer of fiction, he was execrable. His characters weren’t even one dimensional: they’re not self consistent enough to be one-dimensional cartoons. His stock 0 dimensional characters are the spazzmo who freaks out when confronted with the unexpected, the evil military man, the country rube, and the above-it-all self-regarding proto-redditor narrator, which was presumably some version of himself. Nobody has a recognizable psychological motivation. The stories are unbearably preachy. Usually the stories relied on Victor Hugo style coincidences to wrap up loose ends, because Wells was incompetent and apparently not organized enough to write outlines which make it all fall together in a logical way. His science was mostly magic and his scientist characters were functionally wizards, bearing no resemblance to any of the actual scientists Wells had social access to. Jules Verne by contrast wrote actual science fiction: stuff which made scientific sense, was of high literary quality and was an admirable human being in almost every way. Wells was a popular writer in the anglosphere, and his stuff was popular more for its moralizing content among midwits than it was for any of the science stuff. Verne was the man though. I’ll never have a harsh word for his work which is all of the highest quality.
Most of Wells’ short non-fiction is also bad. Wells is the numskull who described World War One as “the war to end all wars” and despite his socialist tendencies, was an enthusiastic jingo. Not the kind of healthy mild jingoism formed by love of country: the kind that thinks “one Englishman is worth 15 Russians or 4 Germans in a fair fight.” I believe his writing on WW-1 eventually made its way into the Official British History of the Great war: a brobdinagian collection of the most preposterous and ridiculous wartime propaganda imaginable. Even if it hadn’t (it doesn’t have an index, and I couldn’t find it on a first pass through a yard of oversized books); it would have fit right in. Great series of books to own though: hilarious in its assertions, endlessly fascinating for the photographs, the actual facts it contains and the mindset of sheer bloodyminded imbecility. In any case, Wells would fit right in with his war-mongering Reddit nerd contemporaries in being a bloodthirsty fool. Wells also wrote scathing reviews of the books of Henry James. James wrote books which are of eternal value, unlike anything Wells did, which was essentially comic book tier.
The only book of his I thought was decent was his Outline of History, which, as it turns out, he probably stole from a woman, which is about par for the course for how this bag of pus conducted himself in general. Aka fucking all the women in every way physiologically and sociologically possible. Wells was a thoroughly unpleasant and deranged man: his books are all trash, and he was pushed to heights thoroughly undeserved for his political filth. I encourage people to notice this, and cleanse the palate with a delightful adaptation of several Jules Verne novels by the amazing Czech filmmaker Karel Zeman.
Dune 2: Life of Brian with Space Mexicans
It’s funny I thought the first one was not a good movie, but at least it wasn’t bad. This one is actively bad. In the interests of saying something nice about it: the sets looked cool, especially Harkonnen land. Everything else about it: it is space version of “Life of Brian.” I guess the first one was a tragedy, this one is a comedy and the last one will be a farce.
Feyd Rautha: I get it, dude’s supposed to be bad. When you make a character go around just cutting people’s throats for no apparent reason, he goes from le bad to le cheesebag comic book character. Why not give him a moustache he can twirl while we’re at it? Sting isn’t a good actor, but he was directed better, and so his portrayal wins. Also him imitating his titular uncle’s voice was cringe, as was his acting like a man of honor (as opposed to a cartoon of a psycho) in the end.
Stilgar: still can’t decide if he’s mexican or ostjuden rag merchant. Worse than that, he’s an active grovelling dumbass in this movie. The book character, and Lynch’s stiff portrayal of him had nobility. This one, he’s a groveling and bumbling bugman; a character not from Dune but “Life of Brian.”
I can get it for you wholesale vato
Fremen: acted like a bunch of filthy imbecile peasants rather than noble desert warriors. The black ones disappeared somehow, perhaps genocided along with the Atreides, so in this one they were more like a bunch of tweaker space Mexicans. I kept expecting them to roll out in Chevy Impalas with hydraulic suspensions. There’s no sense of nobility or why they might be so badass: just a bunch of credulous, excitable ethnic numskulls with no self control who seem eager to follow some floppy haired pasty twink and his hippy mom for, like, reasons. The Fremen don’t even have burritos; they’re just groace slobby peasants who mysteriously have super fighting powers because it’s in the original source material (which actually explains why the Fremen were awesome). I was rooting for the Harkonnens in every scene they were in. They were mostly actively comical.
Sardaukar: The director made them interesting in the first part (they were just dudes in garbage bags in the Lynch Dune). Suddenly turned from fearsome warriors and the source of Imperial power into a bunch of incompetent and passive wimps quickly defeated by a bunch of excitable space Mexicans because the script didn’t want to deal with dramatic tension or, like, reasons.
Irulan: the actress portraying her gave a convincing performance as a middle aged American office worker, complete with skin glycation from excessive sugary starbucks consumption and speaking her lame thoughts about galactic HR policy out of her schnozz. The actresses name is also “Pugh” which sums up my reaction to her ‘orrible faaaaaace. Compare to Lynch version.
Holy shit this bitch is ugly
Chani: portrayed as a grouchy Gen-Z Americunt who has never experienced authentic genital quakes without the use of power tools and thinks her boyfriend (literal world conqueror and savior) is a retard because he can’t ring her bell. I guess this is supposed to be relatable, and probably is for most Americans under 40. Unlike the character in the book, who was a religious fanatic, this one is an atheist (and of course a heckin badass girl-boss). I guess she’s the main character in this movie; it would be fine if her dramatic range were a little wider than between frowning and “can I speak to the manager” tier frowning.
The Emperor of the Known Universe: Looks more like a homeless schizo muttering to himself while wearing a mumu. Walken’s character has no gravitas, intelligence or strength of will, making his defeat kind of ridiculous and obvious. Wow how surprising a bunch of bumbling Space Mexicans and a dumb kid defeated the schizo homeless guy: I was on the edge of my seat. More cowbell.
I’m emperor I can wear a dress and not brush my hair if I want to!
Lady Jessica: got facial tattoos for some reason. None of the other reverend mothers or Fremen got them. Otherwise the same dimwit portrayal as in the first one; maybe a little more bitchy. Stupid and still neurotic psychedelic witch, now with talkey embryo Northman-witch inside, not the most interesting character as in the book.
Paul: played the same way as in the first one; a Mary Sue phoning it in who’d rather be playing vidya. BTW he has zero chemistry with Zendaya, which is sort of hilarious and pathetic at the same time. They might as well be in different rooms in their “love scenes.” Their indifference was actively funny: it would have been better if they hated each other.
Rabban: was a little too retarded and comical, honestly. The whole movie would have been a million times better if Bautista played Paul.
Gurney: he displayed more elan in the first film; morphed into more of a janitor surf bum in this one.
Things missing from this movie:
- Explanation and world building; aka CHOAM and the Guild and the Mentats are MIA. The guild is what drives the actual story: they need the psychedelic worm vomit to drive their spaceships. Lynch understood this and had the good graces to tell the viewer about it.
- Dramatic tension: nobody knows why Paul doesn’t just go souf and take his destiny -his white friends are all saying “do it do it do it,” and he mostly gives the impression he’d rather play vidya, smoke spice and bang his animated menstrual cramp of a GF.
- Human emotion: nobody has a normal human emotion through the entire thing. Even the “love affair” doesn’t rise to the level of teenage boner tier human emotion.
- Jihad: as we know the Fremen were supposed to be Chechens, and so their holy wars are called “Jihad.” They don’t use the word in this adaptation; presumably for some fake and gay political reason. I have nothing against space mexicans, but their religious fervor was more comedy than scary.
- Acting: even hammy overacting would have been worth watching. Lame performances all around.
One of the most striking things is how ugly everyone in this movie is. While the backgrounds and sets look cool, there isn’t a single handsome man or pretty girl in the entire film. Everyone looks like a shambling bum, a grease stain or an office dwelling thing. I don’t think Zendaya is pretty, but she manages to look worse in this movie than in any other context. Looking at the list of producers: there needs to be more horny jewish guys working on things like this, and fewer middle aged women with empty egg cartons. It will be easier on everyone’s eyes, plus, this is traditional, from the times when Hollyweird could make watchable movies. It’s a movie: I want to be entertained and see unrealistically good looking movie stars. I can go get a job in NYC if I want to gawk at homely pre-diabeetus glycation-skin office workers, smelly mystery meats, skinnyfats in plastic suits and shambling schizoid bums.
The “music” is also considerably more irritating when listening on the computard instead of in an IMAX theater. “Hans Zimmer plays the whoopie cushion in 3-d sound” doesn’t work so well at home.
As I said earlier, Villeneuve is a sperdo. He is incapable of directing actual human beings or making a plot arc with characters that make any kind of sense. He should be some kind of special effects director and let someone with normal emotional range do the stuff he isn’t interested in.
The movie was more Life of Brian with post apocalypse Mexicans instead of an interpretation of the Dune book. Someone should recut it with Laurel and Hardy or Benny Hill music and a laugh track instead of Hans Zimmer playing the fart machine; it would make more sense.
Locklin on science 
16 comments