To the Son I never had

My boy,

Let me start by saying “I’m proud of you”. Proud of the man you are becoming. Your mother, like women everywhere. looks back fondly on your “baby days”, when you were totally dependent on her. But my approach has always been different; I look forward to the man you will one day be.

The world that you move in is nothing like the one I grew up in thirty years ago; it is far more dangerous; When I was a lad, there were two types of Venereal Disease — syphilis and gonorrhea — both of which were curable. Nowadays they are called STDs, and there are about thirty of them. Some will leave you sterile. Others can kill you.

You were born into an age of political correctness, a concept which has informed the world we live in, and not in a positive way. At school, the rough-and-tumble of recess has been removed, the push-and-shove of the playground has been excised — both to the detriment of boys, who, far more than girls, need to run and play and fight, as boys since time immemorial have been wont to do. Without this outlet for your boyish energies, you will have difficulty sitting still in class — and they will label you as “hyperactive” and give you drugs to “control” it.

You are also born into a world obsessed with safety, where you cannot ride a bicycle without all manner of safety equipment; a world where three tons of metal, plastic and rubber known collectively as a minivan is needed to cart you around.

As you grow to manhood, you will find that women have changed as well. No longer the sweet-natured feminine creatures of my generation, they have freed themselves of the dreaded yoke of male oppression (whatever that is), though curiously, many still expect the privileges of chivalry at the same time.

Avoid women of low character, as evidenced by short hair, large or ugly tattoos, low standards of dress or uncouth speech. Do not waste your precious time or energies on them. Do not waste your breath, just backturn, walk away and leave them to their delusional thinking.

Be distrustful of any girl with an entitled attitude — stay clear of those with “princess syndrome”. Avoid women who think that they are more attractive than they actually are. You have better things to do with your time than to waste it trying to argue some sense into these spoiled and entitled creatures. Remember, you ‘re not looking for a princess, you’re looking for a queen.

Avoid women who are loud, brash, mannish, rude or uncouth. Reject women who are passionate about politics, feminism or “fairness”.

Stay away from women with useless (having no direct applications outside political/paper-shuffling jobs) degrees such as Wimmen’s studies, Gender Studies or “soft” Liberal Arts (Visual arts/History/Political science/Psychology/Social science/Performing arts/Humanities, not to be confused with “classic” liberal arts: Grammar, rhetoric, logic, geometry, music, and astronomy) .

There are still a few feminine, pleasant girls out there to be found; girls who want to be women, wives and mothers, and not men, husbands and bosses; don’t waste your time on the unpleasant ones.

While on the subject of females, never take advantage of one who is drunk; the line between regret and rape is fuzzy and subject to retrospective reinterpretation without notice. On the wrong side of that line is a felony charge and a lifelong reputation as a sex offender. Even if she begs, she ain’t worth it.

There are girls you might marry, girls you could date and girls you should ignore. Know the difference.

If she is indulging in drama, ignore her. Women pull that shit for one reason and one reason only — because they can. Break her of that habit as soon as possible. If she won’t shape up, move on. Life is not a soap opera, and unless she is a Victoria’s Secret girl, she has no right to expect you to behave like a Soap Opera guy.

Never give up your power as a man. Never submit to her demands. Never allow her to define you. Live your life, your way, according to your rules. For submission in a man is the death of attraction in a woman. To put it bluntly, she’s not your mother.

Hang in there; it gets better. Time is on your side. Mother Nature gives women their gifts up front. Attractive young women have *awesome* power over men. But what Mother nature gives so generously, father time takes away. A woman’s powers of attraction — and her fertility — are fading at thirty and gone by forty. And most of them don’t realize what they had until it is gone. A man’s prime years begin around thirty and last beyond fifty. And his fertility lasts from thirty minutes after puberty until thirty minutes after he’s dead. Women will howl and yowl about this, but them’s the rules; life’s not fair.

Blaze your own trail. Follow your own path. Don’t let others decide who you should be and how you should behave.

Choose your friends carefully. Your enemies will choose you.

Be polite, but never subservient. Helpful, but never obsequious. Charming but never submissive.

Learn to fight. You may never need to use it, but it will inform your confidence. And women are attracted to confident men.

Learn how to lose gracefully and how to win magnanimously, for you will learn more from your defeats than from your victories.

Remember the four C’s — Confidence. Competence. Courage. Charisma.

Understand that women are rarely as nice as they make out to be; their minds are just as naughty as yours, if not naughtier. They’re just sneaker than we are, and better at hiding their true intentions.

Hollywood is lying to you; There is no “The One”. There are literally millions of women out there, and statistically speaking, there are several dozen that would be perfect for you. No, she’s not “One in a million”, she is “One of a million”. Don’t get caught up in chick-flick expectations.

When the time comes to seek a wife, remember that some of the best ones are to be found elsewhere, in countries where women have not been spoiled or ruined by the dubious “blessings” of Western Civilization.

Travel. Learn. Improve. Seek greatness.

Don’t take advice about women from women. Ignore what they say, believe what they do.

Do not let women tell you how a man should behave. They may say they want nice guys, but they don’t think about, chase or rip of their panties for “nice guys”, so don’t be a nice guy.

There is a difference between “Nice Guys” and “Good Men”. Choose to be a Good Man. Or better yet, be a “Magnificent Bastard”.

If she tries to make it all about her, she is not the woman for you.

If she is more interested in what you can do for her, she is not the woman for you.

If she wants to know what you own, what you are worth or what you drive, she is not the woman for you.

If she is willing to exchange bodily fluids before exchanging last names, she is not the woman for you. You’re not the first, you won’t be the last.

Do what *you* want. Do what pleases you, as long as nobody else has to pay the price. Live your life on your terms, not somebody else’s.

Never change who you are to please a woman. If she can change you, she can break you. If she can break you, she owns you.

Remember that she is not the prize, you are. Life is an adventure, and you are inviting her to share it with you.

Real Racing 3: Looking Forward, looking back

Real Racing 3 is a game that is near and dear to my heart. I started playing it over a year ago, and have blogged on it on several occasions. I almost quit when they “broke” the game and I had to start again. Since then I have spent — or wasted, if you prefer — over 20 days of my life on this game. Also since that time there have been several major updates to the game, adding cars, tracks, series, events and features to the game.

I had been content to play the same old version (1.1.12) that I had played from the beginning. However, a few weeks ago, I finally “completed” the game, having purchased all 53 cars and won every race. With no more worlds to conquer, I decided to look at some of the later versions and see what was out there. I took a backup of my profile — 56 cars, R$3 million and 500Gold — and checked out the various upgrades that are on offer.

Before looking forward, a brief look back might be in order. The earliest version that I have is 1.0.56, which has 46 cars, with Cup, Elimination, Speed Snap and Speed Record Races, and support for social racing (“race-against-your-friends’-virtual-bot-lookalikes”) via Facebook. 1.1.7 was the “Chevrolet” upgrade, adding the Camaro ZL1, and the Cobalt SS to the lineup, as well as “Hunter Mode”, a one-lap race where you attempt to pass a slower car that is given a head start, and are graded on how far ahead of them you are when you cross the finish line.

The next version — 1.1.11 — was the “Dubai” update, adding New cars by Lexus and Dodge (Lexus IS-F, Lexus LFA, Dodge Charger RT, Dodge Charger SRT8), along with a collection of new circuits at the Dubai Autodrome. Which brings us to 1.1.12, which adds the Corvette ZR1, bringing the roster up to 53 cars. This is the version that I have played, eschewing all updates, for over a year.

The next version — 1.2.0 — known as the “Prestige Update”, added five more cars (Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG, SL 65 AMG Black Series, SL AMG GT3 G140, and Bentley Continental GT Speed and Continental Supersports), bringing the total to 58. It also added two new Series — Prestige Powermatch and Euro Supercar Duel, along with a new event — Time Trials.

Time Trials are both a blessing and a curse. The idea of a timed lap with a worldwide leaderboard is a stroke of genius; a chance for drivers to test their mettle against all comers. However, the implementation has cause a bit of an uproar, due to another new feature: “Drive Points”. You start the game with two drive points out of a maximum of two. Each Time Trial uses up a drive point. If you run out of Drive Points, you have three options:

1. Wait for your Drive Points to regenerate, which they do at a rate of one every eighteen minutes.
2. Refill your Drive Points, at a cost of two Gold pieces.
3. Raise your Drive Points maximum. The first upgrade — from two to three — costs 50 gold. To raise the limit further to four costs another 100 Gold, and to raise it to its highest level — five — costs an mind-numbing 200 gold.

This was perceived my many, quite rightly, as a money-grab by the publishers, as gold is the most scarce resource in the game. Their hope is that they can entice you into spending all of your gold, in the hope that you will head over to the store where they will sell you Gold Coinage at prices ranging from 10 for $1.99 (20c per coin)  to a jaw-dropping 1000 for $100 (10c per coin). While I have no problems with In-App Purchasing, they are overpriced by a factor of 10 in my opinion. Asking a game player to fork out the equivalent of $50 in real money to buy ONE high-end car (and a similar amount to upgrade it fully) is ridiculous. If they ever offered me 1000 gold coins for $10 I would jump at it — but $100? — surely you jest. Rant over.

In previous versions, you could buy any car you wanted, as long as you had the R$ and Gold to pay for it. You could complete series in any order you wanted, and skip a series and return to it later. This is what I did; starting with road cars, moving up to sports cars and then on to supercars, then circling back and doing the GT cars, before getting the Lexus LFA and finishing up with the “Orphan” cars in V8 Naturals, that were not used anywhere else. As of the Prestige Update, this was no longer possible; your progress was laid out as a linear “Career Path”, where you had to complete the basic series before you could move on to the more advanced ones.

This was annoying because it forced you to buy cars that you didn’t want — like the Lexus LFA — in order to “Unlock” the cars you actually wanted — like the Koenigsegg Agera R. “Locked Cars” and “Locked Series” were the main reasons for me avoiding this update for over a year.

I did find one minor bug – one of my cars had a funky paint job. As soon as I tried to race with it, the game would crash.

Re-spraying the car fixed the problem.

Another gripe is what they did to the repair-and-maintenance screen. After each race, you had the option of repairing the bashed and broken bits of the car. This had to be done manually, and took no time at all, but it showed you the cost of each repair. In the new version, the game goes ahead and fixes your car out of the “Clean Race Bonus”. This is not so bad — the game giveth and it taketh away.

The maintenance system, however, was ruined. Prior to this, you had the choice of five different types of maintenance — oil change (acceleration), engine rebuild (top speed), brakes, suspension (grip) and tires (grip). You could choose whether or not to perform maintenance, so you could put off tire replacement, running on bald tires at the expense of lost grip. Depending on the car, an oil change could take 5 to 20 minutes, while an engine rebuild could take from an hour to almost a day. They replaced this with a single all-or-nothing scale; easier, to be sure, but less “real” — and an unnecessary “dumbing-down” in my opinion.

Another change was that your view from the Car has been lowered to a more realistic level. Personally I find this change to be quite irksome, as it has the effect of making it much more difficult to see the field of cars ahead of you. It also makes it more difficult to judge the width of your vehicle, which makes it easier to inadvertently stray from the track (Off-Track Penalty!). In addition, the track has been rendered in a lighter, silver-grey color, which is more difficult to distinguish and is reflective in places.

As of this version, the game also adds support for Sina Weibo in addition to Facebook.

Perhaps the worst thing about this upgrade is that the payouts have been lowered, which means you get less money for most races. But it’s not all bad news; one neat new feature in this version is the “Daily Race Bonus”. Once a day, you get a bonus for your next race. This bonus starts at 20% on Day 1, then on subsequent days goes through 30%, 40%, 50% to 100%, and stays at 100% as long as you race at least once a day.

Here’s the TL;DR version:

The Good:

• Daily Race Bonus
• Upgraded Graphics
• New Cars: Three from Mercedes-Benz, two from Bentley
• Time Trials

The Bad:

• “Career Mode”
• Lowered View
• Automagical Repairs
• View Hotspot Enlarged
• Drive Points

The Ugly:

• Locked Cars
• Locked Series
• Dumbed-down Repairs
• Ridiculously Expensive to upgrade Drive Points.

The Bottom line: I was so underwhelmed when I saw what they had done to the game that I skipped this version and went straight to the next version along: version 1.3.0, “Classic American Muscle”. More on that next time.

By George!

I am probably the last person in the western hemisphere to know that George Clooney has become engaged. And this is precisely how it should be; I care nothing for the to-ings and fro-ings of celebrity culture.

So why is this piece of inconsequentiality blog-worthy? Because there are so many lessons to be learned from this, and most are too busy cackling with glee at the apparent fall of the most eligible bachelors in America to notice the elephant in the room.

It hardly surprising that Monsignor Clooney has decided that the time has come for a change. At 52, the idea of dating hot twentysomething models and actresses, while pleasant enough, is probably starting to pall. As Dave Ramsey likes to say: “If you eat enough lobster, eventually it starts to taste like soap”. He is at the age where he is beyond games for the young, and getting married starts to look like a smart move.

What is remarkable, though, is the choice he has made. With literally millions of eligible females in this country, and almost unlimited access to the most attractive women in TinselTown, he has chosen to look elsewhere. He found his bride-to-be in Britain, of all places.

An attractive, mid-thirties “Barrister” (Trial Lawyer), who is at the top of her profession (which means that she is probably not after his money). Her name and appearance suggest that she is not of western culture (which means she is probably a lot more “traditional” than most American women). It seems to me that you can take the boy out of Kentucky, but you can’t take Kentucky out of the boy – and I would know. I wish them both the best of luck; but it does not bode well for western womanhood that one the world’s most eligible bachelors chose to look elsewhere to find a life partner.

There’s a lesson to be learned from this, but those who need to learn it – namely western women, with their drama, entitlement mentality and overinflated egos – would rather bend reality like a pretzel than admit the obvious:

He didn’t consider you good enough to marry.