• Doing Things You Don’t Want to Do

    It’s funny how difficult pickup can be. Not even the part about attracting girls, but just pushing yourself to go out there and do it. On Monday I wasn’t able to. I had just spent the weekend at Real Social Dynamics’ Hot Seat 2, which, frankly, is an amazing program. Tyler comes in with nine…

  • SETT is now Live on Tynan.com

    Sunday night was a scary time for me. After more than a year of work, SETT was ready to be deployed on Tynan.com. Well, maybe not “ready”, exactly, but I was sick of putting it off. One line in a configuration file was changed, and my site switched from WordPress to SETT. And then… nothing…

  • Pina

    I was going to just email this to Tynan but noticed Tynan.com is running on SETT now so figured, what the hell, I’ll share it with everyone. The reason I came to the site was to find the quote from his post on meditation. It’s the first sentence of the post. “The thing that really…

  • A Frame-by-Frame Rebuttal to XKCD’s Pickup Artist Comic

    A Frame-by-Frame Rebuttal to XKCD’s Pickup Artist Comic

    The only web comic I read is XKCD. It’s smart, funny, and often times educational. I’m a fan. The latest comic is a criticism of pickup. There ARE certainly valid criticisms of pickup, but Randall took a cheap and inaccurate shot at it.  I’ve shrunken it below, but you can see the original here. I’m…

  • How To Become a Profitable Mid-Stakes Poker Player

    How To Become a Profitable Mid-Stakes Poker Player

    First, the results. Since the World Series of Poker last year, I’ve played 174 hours of poker. I play limit hold’em, with almost all of my play at the $10/20 or $15/30 level. In that time I’ve made $7594, which is $43.70 per hour. I say that I’m a semi-professional, because obviously 5 hours of…

  • Week Three Pickup Update: Vegas, Mystery, Complacency

    Week Three Pickup Update: Vegas, Mystery, Complacency

    Well, now. It’s been three weeks since I started this pickup rampage, and although I still have a long way to go before I get to where I want to be, I’ve made a huge amount of progress. Unfortunately, finding a tactful way to report this progress is difficult. People have made comments insinuating that…

  • 11 Days In: What I’ve (re)Learned about Pickup

    I’ve just completed my eleventh day of my thirty day get-back-into-pickup challenge. No… I’m not going to beat myself up this time– I’m going to talk about what I’ve (re)learned over this week and a half. The interesting aspect to this whole process is that I’m not actually learning anything new. I’ve been through this…

  • Why I Won’t Quit, And Other Responses to Last Week’s Comments

    Why I Won’t Quit, And Other Responses to Last Week’s Comments

    I’ve been really surprised to see some of the responses that have come in on last weeks post about me quitting. In particular, I’m shocked at how many people think it’s okay, or even best, to quit. I can only assume that I did a poor job explaining why I’m getting back into pickup, because…

  • Letting Myself Quit

    Letting Myself Quit

    I did something really scary and dangerous today. I let myself quit. It’s the second day of my Month-of-Pickup, an intensive course correction aimed towards making myself extraverted and social again. Yesterday was the first day. My friend and I set a goal of doing eight approaches each. We did it just as the mall…

  • Being a Mutant

    Being a Mutant

    It didn’t occur to me until about a week ago that I am a mutant. When genes duplicate, the overwhelming majority of them are copied with perfect fidelity, with only the occasional rogue gene mutating into something unexpected. Most of these mutations, called neutral mutations, have no real effect. Once in a while, though, a…