holy shit, it’s Ready Player One for race scientists

He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup Rlb. She was giving damsel in distress, pill-popper pixie dream girl, Haplogroup K. He was in his fall of Rome era. She was serving sixth and final mass extinction event realness. His face was a marble statue. Her face was an anime waifu. They scrolled into each other. If they could have, they would have blushed, pink pixels on a screen. Monkey covering eyes emoji. Anime nosebleed GIF. Henlo frend. hiii.

Here’s The Cut puff piece on Levy which just mentions in passing her podcast with Curtis Yarvin.

anyway, nice to know they’re still trying to make Dimes Square a thing

  • @pyrex
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    7 months ago

    I read his blog a while and I agree with you.

    Overall the Dimes Square guys seem very similar to each other. To me they’re interesting in aggregate, described once, but there’s nothing to look at beyond the surface. If you read any two blog posts on Mike’s site, you know everything about them.

    Of course they have day-to-day lives – every so often one of them releases a book or something, but this has no real purpose – none of them ever change. It’s not like a man with six funny hats becomes more interesting when he acquires a seventh funny hat.

    The social pattern Mike is describing seems pretty fast-paced and destructive. They do a lot of signings and court a lot of press attention, and as long as you’re still shocked, they’re interested in you. Past that, you kind of have to behave exactly like them to get invited, but it doesn’t seem like they actually like their own – I would be really, really surprised if they read each other’s books. They just kind of brood next to each other and engage in disaffected, ironic narcissism.

    I can see why he’d be valuable to them, though. Mike has his own pattern – he’s clearly learned how to be entertainingly shocked, but only intermittently – on other occasions he denies them supply, and sometimes he burns them by being a surprisingly coherent critic. He’s hard to reach but ultimately attends often enough that they remember him.

    If you substitute “affection” with supply in the form of outrage, and leave everything else the same, he’s basically a pickup artist.

    I suspect that the actions that make up Mike’s pattern are deliberate, but when it comes to explaining them, he has zero self-awareness. He’s doing it too well for it to be accidental though, as much as there’s a lot of denial there, and when he makes comments like the one I’ve selected, I think that’s the mask slipping.

    • @gerikson
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      77 months ago

      These people all sound like they want to be Ernst Jünger but instead of being wounded in WW1 they all just got very high at liberal arts colleges.