Approaching: A Food Chain Analysis

Acknowledged daygame maestro Krauser published his stats for 2013. His food chain - as it's called in the sales business - looks like this:

Numbers / Approaches: 25%
Dates / Numbers: 24%
iDates / Approaches: 1.5%
Lays / iDate: 53%
Lays / Dates: 32%

The least informative ratio to get from the numbers is Lays/Approaches (2.7%). Gross success ratios like that look as if they should be the ultimate bottom line, but are no use for understanding what's happening. Performance ratios are meaningful if they are tied to a discrete section of the process: there's way too much going on between between an Approach and a Lay for the Lays/Approaches ratio to mean anything.

(If you think 2.7% is bad, Direct Mail routinely yields sub-1% response rates, and full-page articles in national daily newspapers for esoteric piano recitals or fringe plays have response rates below 0.05%.)

Now let's have some fun and assume this will do as a representative sample of 20-30 year old 6+ female, mostly foreign, short-term, visitors to London - which is his chosen target group. Let's start by spinning that Numbers / Approaches around. Krauser is a self-confessed half-bald medium-height guy with a Geordie accent - not a Nine. However, he's got high-grade Game, determination and experience: a handful of hot PUAs and the thirteen Naturals in the UK might do better, but that's neither you nor me. Let's assume that Krauser's getting as good as it gets.

Then it's reasonable to assume that the reason he gets 25% Numbers/Approaches is because 75% of girls are hard-line unavailable-at-the-time, and a further 18% (76% of the 25% who did give a number) are unavailable-after-second-thoughts. This gives us 93% (75%+18%) unavailable for any of the 513 reasons girls are unavailable. This leaves 7% who are Up For It If... And only 35% (weighted average) of those will convert to Lays.

(7% doesn't sound bad, but there aren't that many 20-30 y/o 6+ foreign girls on their last day / night in London (it just seems like it), so their needs might be being met entirely by a handful of PUAs and a couple of Naturals. None left for you and me.)

How transferrable is this to girls who work in and around London? Some of it is and some isn't. Lays / Date (or iDate) is a function of your game and her interest. Sure, there are serial daters, freeloaders, husband-hunters, and girls who can't tell the difference between a job interview and a date, but not all girls are like that all the time. Let's say that with K-level game, even London-based girls can be converted 35% of the time.

What takes a huge hit is the number of approachable girls, and the Numbers / Approach and Dates / Number ratios. Most of the girls who come to London do so to get away from the pressure of having relationships, though there are some who still think it's a young person's playground, and are horribly disappointed when they find out it isn't. If London was full of approachable, attractive working girls here for the party, that's who Krauser would be writing about. And he's not. So that in mind, let's say that about 2.5% of London-based 6+ girls are Up For It If...

Applying that pro-rata, we get iDates / Approaches of 0.5% and Numbers / Approaches and Dates / Numbers of about 13% each. And that's on a small population.

In the words of Pete Townsend in Who Are You: "there's got to be a better way". There is, but it's time limited, and we'll talk about it later.

Those Bill's Afternoon Tea Pictures In Full

A while ago I had the Afternoon Tea at Bill's on Brewer Street. Well, you've got to at least once. I couldn't do it now, as I'm on the January not-even-bread low-carb weight loss diet. So here are the pictures. This is what you get...

I know. Where are the lengthy three-part essays? On hold for a while. When it's time, I'll explain.

'Twas the Week After Christmas...

The time between Christmas and the first full week of the New Year: no crowds, deathly quiet offices, half the Italian cafes closed, seats on the train, and the Waterloo & City line didn't open until 08:00. My main task was to get back into training trim after taking a couple of weeks out. Since when was a 20kg plate heavy?

A full moon over Bishopsgate; Old Iselworth from the Richmond towpath, and logged trees by the towpath; the very healthy M&M's chocolate sauce and vanilla ice-cream at Brgr.co on Noel St; Waterloo station at 20:30 Friday night 3/1/14.

2014 New Year's Resolutions

I'm giving the resolutions a rest for this year, though I do like the GS Elevator list. My resolutions for 2013 were:

1. One unsupported pull-up by the year end
2. Read Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities
3. Experiment with changes to the daily/weekly routine, diet, entertainment and whatever else until the zip, twinkle and sparkle comes back
4. Do stuff that just occurs to me

And.... 1. Let's not talk about that. I really don't want to talk about my pull-ups. I'm trying. I really am.
2. The Man Without Qualities is much more of a domestic drama than I remembered. Proust has a masculine sensibility for all its setting screams out "domestic drama". Musil's masterwork is a triple-decker for women.
3 / 4. I did do some experiments and some zip and sparkle did come into my life - see the Lisbon and Rome posts. But there's still something wrong. I'm still collapsing on Saturdays.

In the previous post I listed what worked and didn't work for me in 2013. To do something about the things that didn't work...

I'm going back to swimming on the days I don't train, and will try taking some yoga and spin classes like I used to. Maybe even TRX on Friday now and again. Weights on other days or at the weekend.

Which will force me to re-jig my late afternoons and spend more time sitting in Soho cafes (yea!).

I have already purchased (via the Staff Offers) a Cineworld Unlimited card valid everywhere outside the West End. So I will be going to see more movies.

Thai Massage every three / four weeks. The strong version, which is where they dig in and/or walk on your back! Massage is a consequence of training - accept this.

I will have a week's holiday in March, May, June before the start of school holidays and September after the school holidays. I will pass on what I'm going to do at this stage.

The 09:30 thing is an attempt to get at least seven hour's sleep (allow for falling-asleep time). I'm better if I do, but I can get by on six. I need to stop worrying about it.

I don't know what I do about the whole "ugh, it's grey and cold, let's not go out" thing. Except maybe kick myself in the ass.

And I may have to not allow myself to turn on the modem Saturdays and Sundays until it's time for a Curzon Online movie. I have other ideas, but these will do for now.

What Worked (and Didn't Work) For Me in 2013

Here's what worked...
Alternating swimming and training days (when I don't have a cough and cold)
Increasing the weights on at least one exercise each week
Having a snack around 10:30 (Mr City) and a takeaway burger (Byron Shoreditch) at 1:30
Magnesium spray to ease muscles
Monthly Thai Massage (so why did I stop halfway through the year?)
Weekends away with people (Lisbon, Rome, Amsterdam)
Having a locker at the gym to store a change of clothes
Wearing only blue shirts
Wearing tight tee-shirts to make the shirt fit better
Taking job interviews and finding out I was getting a better quality of a life where I am
"Sticking to the knitting" at work
Putting progressive and underground house on the iPhone

Here's what didn't...
Not having a holiday for the first six months of the year
Not going to the movies for weeks at a time
Saturdays
Putting on weight - about four kilos
Staying in every time the weather was cold, grey and rainy - which was a lot
Not learning any new SAS or R this year
Interviewing for "data scientist" roles for me
Trying to get to bed at 21:30 every night - really cramped my evenings
Reading-all-my-favourite blogs as the default activity - time sink

All Hail The Reverend Lawrence Shannon

So there was an article on Return of Kings about this book, written by the Reverend Lawrence Shannon.  It's sharp, hyperbolic, the distilled essence of everything Rollo Tomassi, MGTOW and others are saying, so much so that I began to wonder if all the Manosphere theorists who weren't PUAs or Married Men were just re-cycling it. It was first published in 1985 and has been re-printed since, but not since 1997.

It's everything I and every other born bachelor believes about women, marriage and dating. I have believed something like it ever since I was about, oh, probably five months old. And you know what?

About half-way through, I realised I didn't give a flying toss whether the Rev Shannon was a raving misogynist, a bitter loser who lives in his sister's basement, or any other of those shaming namings. He was saying what I had always known, and he was saying it out loud and proud.

At that point it hit me: we born bachelors are simply genetically different from you married chumps. Sorry, but with a few exceptions (like maybe Roman Abramovich and Barak Obama) that's how we think about you. What you have done is literally incomprehensible to us. Self-harm, anorexia... and getting married. It's so incomprehensible we assume that you simply don't share the same values, no, it's more fundamental than that, you don't have the same hormone soup and brain structure as us. If we were scrawny green plants with yellow flowers, botanists would deem us different species (there are a lot of species of scrawny green plants with yellow flowers).

Am I kidding when I say it's genetic? Let me see if I can explain this. Not even in the alcohol-soaked depths of the most awful depression and self-pity did I ever think that that marriage would make it better. Not even in my most Gamma moments of guilt-for-being-me did I ever think that I should get married to prove I was a Real Man. Every time I heard people talking or read people writing about how I should be making commitments to women, getting married, having children, how maybe I was gay because I wasn't chasing after a bride (oh yes, but that was back in the Bad Old never-you-minds), how I was shallow and empty because I wasn't sharing my life with a special someone, and yadda yadda yadda... I would wonder why they were lying to me. I never day-dreamed about a house, a wife and mother of my children. I day-dreamed about my future when I was a young boy, of course I did, but it never included a wife and children. Any more than it included a Bengal tiger. There has never been a time in my life when I thought marriage, or even a live-in, would be a life-improving thing to do. No matter what I might have said, thought, felt, or said I thought or felt, I was no more likely to get married than I was to jump out of a fifth-floor window. I could no more do it than a sailor could piss into the wind. It's a reflex, not a policy.

So here's the Rev Shannon on what amounts to MGTOW:

Q. Having been single a long time, I nearly married one of our corporate attorneys last year when I was thirty six. I was rescued solely by the accidental discovery that she was occasionally sleeping with her uncle in New York. But for that windfall, I would have been trapped and put on exhibit in the public square with other married men. I am now happily resigned to remaining off the playing field, watching the fracas from the bleachers and, if a truly remarkable female makes her debut, running down for a quick scrimmage. I would suggest this alternative to anyone who is tired of the daily slamming of heads—the frantic grinding that occurs in the field.

A. You have arrived at the eventual hiding place of most men who have experienced the predatory female, learned something, but still enjoy the game. Most, like yourself, prefer the exhilarating breath of freedom to the sack cloth and ashes that accompany a "commitment." In the end, a predatory female, no matter how beautiful, will always be the succubus: exciting, momentarily thrilling, mesmerizing—but dangerous as a green mamba.

Here's the Rev Shannon on the Good Life:

Condition yourself physically and mentally. Most people look like gunnysacks full of doorknobs. This is partially due to heavy doses of dependency on predatory females. Work out every day and get yourself into good physical shape. Take up a sport and start running. Do what predatory females have done for thousands of years — concentrate completely on yourself. Rid your mind of the garbage dumped into it by the matriarchal society. Occupy it instead with good books, films, and a hobby that benefits you, that you enjoy. If you get horny, don't play the matriarchal society's hackneyed dating game, RENT a woman. For two or three hundred dollars you can rent a sexual partner skilled enough to turn you into a boiled chicken. Spare yourself the tedious sales pitch that accompanies dating. There is no such thing as a free lunch, period.

Damn right - though I don't have the money for prostitutes of that calibre. Reading the Rev Shannon caused me to laugh aloud. Here was someone else saying with zero apology what I have always felt I couldn't say to others. I could quote the whole damn book, I don't think there's one single thing I seriously disagree with. I have been walking around with a lighter heart ever since.

Across London Part 124

Brushfield Street on one side of Spitalfields Market; more Gherkin; the Nido student building in the fog; a plastic reindeer at one end of Exchange Sq; St James' Park one Sunday afternoon; actual reindeer at the top of St Johns Wood High Street for a charity fair; the only tree anywhere near my house that fell over during the last Big Gale; through the ICA cafe windows; the Space Painting by Zhang Enli at the ICA.