i try to notice things
the opportune time to publish this post would be on the 20th anniversary of the book’s release, september 2025, but i am impatient and this is on my mind right now so i’m going to mis-time it on purpose slightly
the game, pickup artistry, etc was a huge wave. sometimes this feels almost so obvious as to be not worth mentioning, and yet when obvious things go unmentioned for too long, they have a way of being overlooked. we each tend to assume that what is obvious to us is obvious to everyone else, but what is obvious is often significantly a matter of personal experience, and so the world is full of non-obvious obvious things. this can “obviously” be phrased better. i might rephrase it on second read.
the game opens with a warning about how pickup artistry can and likely will ruin your life. it’s almost hilarious how that warning was completely ignored, which i think is something worth investigating. it’s like that tvtropes page about smoking, “do not do this cool thing”
the game was an obvious direct influence on the character barney stinson in the popular tv show How I Met Your Mother. HIMYM is one of those shows that seems to have tanked in popularity because the fanbase soured on the ending. but at the time when it was running, it was wildly popular. there was a period of time where barney stinson was a very popular role model for young men
in retrospect he didn’t age well. HIMYM was very pre-MeToo, and the dating norms in those years seem outdated
this feels like something that was memoryholed… was it because the ending was bad? Game of Thrones was definitely memoryholed because the ending was bad. I know some people are watching House of the Dragon because I catch some snippets of discussion on Twitter, but it’s nothing like the all-consuming phenomenon GOT was during its run
HIMYM’s intro opens with a bunch of blurry photographs, reminiscent of the digital camera age, and maybe early Facebook
https://www.blameitonthevoices.com/2012/10/the-pictures-from-how-i-met-your-mother.html