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Test your might.
Aug. 18th, 2009 10:20 amTechnology marches ever on in its quest to inveigle into all aspects of our lives with the release of iPhone Passion. An application for the iPhone, this nifty little downloadable application rates your bedroom skills bsed on things like vigour and duration; all you have to do is pop it into your pocket (for those of you who like to keep your jimjams on) or into a strap on your arm just before you start getting frisky and when you're done you'll have been tracked and measured and graded. Who said romance was dead?
Personally, I reckon that the inventors missed a trick by having the application only mark you out of ten rather than making the scores open-ended, meaning that the opportunities for setting up hiscore tables and competitive leagues remain limited.
Overall, as a tool it strikes me as completely superfluous unless someone puts togther an Iphone Passion/Mortal Kombat mashup which makes my phone bellow Flawless victory! and Finish Her! at appropriate moments. Then I'd be first in the queue.
I was out drinking with a friend of mine a few years ago and we were chatting away about our respective train-wreck lovelives. At one point, she smiled in that what-are-we-going-to-do-with-you sort of way and said "David, you really are a player, aren't you?"
I was delighted. It was quite the nicest thing anyone had said to me in quite some time. Wildly inaccurate, but lovely.
Since the dawn of time, promising self-conscious and nervous young men opportunities to meet attractive ladies has been a sure-fire way to make your fortune. Military recruiters throughout history have sung the irrestistability of a man in uniform. Fifty years ago, Charles Atlas showed weedy young fellows how to attract girls on the beach by working out. Back in the 1980's, I remember reading adverts for 'pheromone sprays' which would make a chap irresistable.
The latest iteration of the self-help/build your confidence with girls industry is the 'Pick up Artist' or PUA. The first time I heard about this movement was reading an article in one of the papers about its founder, a man with the embarrassing name of 'Mystery'. Mystery, a former stage magician and roleplayer, had (he claimed) identified certain patterns which any man could use to make women find him attractive, and he was willing to let you into those secrets - for a price, obviously. The article followed him and a bevy of trainee pickup artists into clubs around LA, where obviously the trainees failed miserably; they stared at girls, didn't bother washing, spilled their drinks over girls cleavages, fell over their own shoelaces into bowls of trifle and so on. Then Mystery moved in to show them how it should be done and walked out an hour later with the phone numbers of a dozen ladies and a couple of lovelies on his arm.
My suspicions were raised, mainly by the words 'stage magic' and 'roleplaying' both of which are arts of deception and misdirection, and I immediately assumed that the whole thing was a set up. LA is full of frustrated wannabe actresses and for a small fee I was sure that this whole scene had been arranged as a trick to prise more loot out of the pockets of the desperate girl-free pupils.
Since then, PUA has grown in fame; Neil Strauss' book The Game, which purported to expose the secrets of this art sat on the bestseller lists for ages, and simply googling any relevant phrase will find you any number of sites offering to sell you The Secret Tricks Which Work On Any Girl.
Anyway, a while ago I was plonked in a lonely hotel room of the sort I spend a distressingly large amount of time in due to my zooming around the country being a dynamic entrepreneur at people and, whilst I was there, I found myself watching an episode of Mystery's reality TV show in which he had taken his pupils to a nightclub (again). The pupils once again blundered about the place, going up to girls and using chatup lines like Would you like to see my character sheet? and Is heaven missing an angel? 'Cause you've got nice cans and generally failing miserably. Then, to show them how it's done, Mystery had a go. I had been expecting to see a setup, but it turned out I was wrong. He walked round the club, saying hi, telling jokes, showing card tricks, working the room and generally being the life of the party, and indeed he got a lot of female attention and phone numbers as a result. After all my suspicions about The Secret Tricks Which Work On Any Girl, it turns out that what girls actually like is men who are self-confident, funny and don't look desperate.
Which I think proves that my friend who called me a player was actually dead wrong.
Personally, I reckon that the inventors missed a trick by having the application only mark you out of ten rather than making the scores open-ended, meaning that the opportunities for setting up hiscore tables and competitive leagues remain limited.
Overall, as a tool it strikes me as completely superfluous unless someone puts togther an Iphone Passion/Mortal Kombat mashup which makes my phone bellow Flawless victory! and Finish Her! at appropriate moments. Then I'd be first in the queue.
I was out drinking with a friend of mine a few years ago and we were chatting away about our respective train-wreck lovelives. At one point, she smiled in that what-are-we-going-to-do-with-you sort of way and said "David, you really are a player, aren't you?"
I was delighted. It was quite the nicest thing anyone had said to me in quite some time. Wildly inaccurate, but lovely.
Since the dawn of time, promising self-conscious and nervous young men opportunities to meet attractive ladies has been a sure-fire way to make your fortune. Military recruiters throughout history have sung the irrestistability of a man in uniform. Fifty years ago, Charles Atlas showed weedy young fellows how to attract girls on the beach by working out. Back in the 1980's, I remember reading adverts for 'pheromone sprays' which would make a chap irresistable.
The latest iteration of the self-help/build your confidence with girls industry is the 'Pick up Artist' or PUA. The first time I heard about this movement was reading an article in one of the papers about its founder, a man with the embarrassing name of 'Mystery'. Mystery, a former stage magician and roleplayer, had (he claimed) identified certain patterns which any man could use to make women find him attractive, and he was willing to let you into those secrets - for a price, obviously. The article followed him and a bevy of trainee pickup artists into clubs around LA, where obviously the trainees failed miserably; they stared at girls, didn't bother washing, spilled their drinks over girls cleavages, fell over their own shoelaces into bowls of trifle and so on. Then Mystery moved in to show them how it should be done and walked out an hour later with the phone numbers of a dozen ladies and a couple of lovelies on his arm.
My suspicions were raised, mainly by the words 'stage magic' and 'roleplaying' both of which are arts of deception and misdirection, and I immediately assumed that the whole thing was a set up. LA is full of frustrated wannabe actresses and for a small fee I was sure that this whole scene had been arranged as a trick to prise more loot out of the pockets of the desperate girl-free pupils.
Since then, PUA has grown in fame; Neil Strauss' book The Game, which purported to expose the secrets of this art sat on the bestseller lists for ages, and simply googling any relevant phrase will find you any number of sites offering to sell you The Secret Tricks Which Work On Any Girl.
Anyway, a while ago I was plonked in a lonely hotel room of the sort I spend a distressingly large amount of time in due to my zooming around the country being a dynamic entrepreneur at people and, whilst I was there, I found myself watching an episode of Mystery's reality TV show in which he had taken his pupils to a nightclub (again). The pupils once again blundered about the place, going up to girls and using chatup lines like Would you like to see my character sheet? and Is heaven missing an angel? 'Cause you've got nice cans and generally failing miserably. Then, to show them how it's done, Mystery had a go. I had been expecting to see a setup, but it turned out I was wrong. He walked round the club, saying hi, telling jokes, showing card tricks, working the room and generally being the life of the party, and indeed he got a lot of female attention and phone numbers as a result. After all my suspicions about The Secret Tricks Which Work On Any Girl, it turns out that what girls actually like is men who are self-confident, funny and don't look desperate.
Which I think proves that my friend who called me a player was actually dead wrong.
