I had a hell of a weekend. It seemed like almost everyone I know in this town, and some from out out town, showed up. My Dad and his new wife flew halfway across the country to visit. I went out sarging Friday and Saturday, I saw my alcoholic stripper ex-girlfriend that I haven't seen in months, Catfish Noodler Girl and her sister Fattie, Nurse Girl, oh, I forget the entire cast. But I'm not going to talk about any of that. I could write another epic FR (and I have one already half written) but I'm going to discard it and instead, talk about something that is bothering me. And then I'll give a related incident in the field.

What has been bugging me this week is trolls. It seems like seddit has recently acquired a group of trolls. I ascribe this to several influences. First, there was a thread in /r/2XChromosomes that incited their female readership to attack seddit. Then there has been a recent influx of juvenile idiots who recently left Digg and came to reddit and don't understand what's going on here. Also there are a lot of kids just back in college with no hobbies except trolling.

But in general, I think it's just that seddit is drawing too much attention. It's getting close to 8000 subscribers, it's open membership and there is no effective mechanism to keep out the trolls. I've seen several accounts that were created especially to troll seddit, and other longer term users who have never posted to seddit before incitements like the /2XC post. I am especially irritated at long-term reddit trolls who recently decided to spread their mayhem in seddit. They often bring a troll crew with them. Moderators can ban accounts, but any troll can instantly create a new one and resume trolling.

The trolls seem to be divided into two main groups. One group is deliberately hostile to pickup or sedditors. The other group is more subtle. It seeks to undermine seddit by giving seemingly plausible advice, but that advice either ridicules pickup, or it is delivered in pickup jargon but guaranteed to cause trouble to anyone who would be tricked into following it.

What I am seeing is tragic. I feel like seddit is becoming a hostile environment, and while I know better, I can't help but sometimes getting trolled. I am committed to the Game and to seddit, but I am rethinking my efforts here in seddit. I'm studying hard, I'm no expert, but I feel like the best way to learn something is to help others learn it. There are few sedditors who are out there working hard at learning the game, and there are experienced guys who are always glad to help others. But there is an endless supply of critics, trolls, and general idiots. It makes me want to move my efforts to a private online lair where trolls can be effectively excluded. I'm not going to do this unless it gets a lot worse in here. And I expect it will. I have some good sedditor friends, and I work hard to contribute back to the community. But the hard work of a few hardcore sedditors is no match for an army of trolls.

Now that being said, I'll get to my FR. It was a football weekend, the first home game of the season for the local university. This town is small enough that the game dominates everything, you can't even drive across town due to traffic jams until the game is in progress, and then there is hardly a car on the road. I hate football. I especially hate the local football fans. Nothing brings out drunken idiots like football weekends. And this weekend was no exception. This is one of the reasons I stopped going out to bars, nowadays it seems like every bar is a sports bar, and they're all full of drunken sports idiots. I wasn't feeling well this weekend, I had mild food poisoning for several days and was only barely recovering by Friday. But I went out into the idiocy of a football weekend bar crowd anyway, just to see if my game improved enough to deal with the drunken idiots.

I had some successes, I studied some Love Systems material about what to do after locking into a set. It had storytelling strategies to create attraction. They work. I also tried to "foot plant," where you don't move from a set until either they walk away or you close. I always thought it was preferable to walk away from a set before they walked away from you. This is probably why I often eject too early. But the results of foot planting were positive. I was able to keep the set running by stacking stories until it was a natural time to break out. In two cases, I kept a set running way beyond what should have happened. For example, I opened a set of two girls at a bar. I kept the set running for 10 minutes, and then they said they had to go and deliver these 2 extra drinks back to their other 2 women friends. I hadn't noticed they were buying 4 drinks. They had enough attraction to stay with the set for 10 minutes when they knew their other friends were waiting.

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