*AUTISM INTENSIFIES*

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6 years ago
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#travel

Okay so boring stuff first. Have a few new projects in the works and I'm looking for help.

What I need:

  1. Javascript developer
  2. Python developer
  3. Article re-writers
  4. Article writers
  5. Someone willing to run a private node

These are for two separate projects. I'm working with the incoherent genius @tibra to create a new Steem front-end that for some reason is better than what currently exists. Not gonna lie, I actually don't understand why it is but @tibra does and he's much smarter than I am. So I'll just let him explain:

"It's a new Steem front end that will allow posting pdf, webm, like Scribd and Gfycat, and even live software; users can then view, navigate it, and use it." - @tibra

Payment for the work will be built into the code itself, similar to how projects like @dTube/@Utopian work. Users submit content via our platform and we take a few % for our trouble and split it between everyone on the team. Profit sharing FTW baby.

As far as the article writing stuff goes, I've found a source of extremely cheap articles that I'll need rewritten for the @omniloquent page and upcoming website. These are shit articles that are actually painful to read, and while I know they'd fit in perfectly with the rest of the content on Steemit, I'm still looking for people who want to rewrite them and make them somewhat legible.

Rewards for article rewriters will be the same as contributing authors: 40% of the SBD payout.

The private node person will get a % of our % for essentially doing nothing. We also need fast access to the API so keep that in mind as well. Read this for more information on private nodes.

Here's my contact info in case you want to get involved:

For the article stuff you can contact @flashfiction: editor@storyhackers.club

Also, if you like my writing style then you should definitely grab my book, High Risk Behavior - 120+ pages of my stories that I haven't published on Steemit.

Just click here and type in your email and you'll be directed to the download page.

Okay, now onto the more interesting stuff.

My computer is the only friend I need

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm currently combining an extended work/travel trip with no set plans. I hate the term "digital nomad," but I admit that it's an accurate description of this lifestyle.

Still, for someone like me who is essentially still in the beginning stages of his DN career, I was extremely concerned with being able to make enough money to live without fear of having to go back to selling hair straighteners.

So since January, I've been working like a madman to build a pipeline of deals and clients so that I don't have to worry about cutting the trip short.

While most of the people I meet are busy planning trips to rivers, temples and street food tours, I'm lying on my back clacking away on my laptop. I normally work 6-10 hours a day, 7 days a week on whatever projects I had going on.

Add a little bit of Muay Thai, the occasional meaningful connection with a member of the opposite sex, and you have a pretty good idea of what my [relatively boring] life has been like since the beginning of January.

Since coming to Vietnam, however, things have changed.

After reading over my last post, I can honestly say that I wrote that from a place of loneliness.

It's not so much about making friends only to lose them a week later. The real issue is not having a constant supply of new friends to replace them.

It's not that I miss the people that I've met, it's that I don't have enough rapid rebound friends to erase them from my memory.

When I got to Nha Trang, I was still stuck in my typical routine. I'd wake up in the morning, work for a few hours, hit the gym and then go to the beach. The weather was incredible there, much different than Phuket. No rain, literally not a cloud in the sky. And it was HOT.

There weren't as many people as I would like. And definitely not as many fit young girls in tiny bikinis, but it was still nice to cover myself in coconut oil and cook myself in the hot Vietnam sun with the sound of crashing waves in the background.

Anyway, the DN life can get lonely if you're not careful. It's hard to relate to your fellow travelers because your motivations for traveling are so different. They want to visit some random temple while I just want to hit the gym and get my work done.

The Venga bus is coming

And then there's the party people.

I'm sure it won't surprise anyone here to learn that I am borderline autistic when it comes to social interactions.

I'm like a conversational savant. Sometimes I can have a group eating out of my hand in five minutes, and other times the shit that comes out of my mouth is the most cringe-worthy nonsense that I've ever heard anyone say.

This is why I don't like going out.

I mean, forget about the fact that I don't like being hungover, I just don't enjoy the chaos of being around lots of people that I don't know and the pressure that comes with feeling like I have to be the coolest person in the room at any given time.

Also I'm like into fitness and shit, so drinking every night isn't really something that I felt was worth doing to sacrifice that.

Sure, I've had times in my life where I enjoyed going out. I had no problem approaching strangers and entertaining a group of people.

I was into the whole PUA shit when The Game came out and must have devoured thousands of pages of theory written by all the old school masters. We'd all go out and try out our little lines and strategies to varying degrees of success. Before I started my 7 year hair straightener grind, I was at the top of my social game.

But those days are long behind me. My social skills had all but evaporated over the years in favor of the pursuit of "happiness" (read: money) and a few long relationships that removed any need to maintain my conversational skills.

I could sell a hair straightener to a girl no problem, but ask me to hold a conversation about anything outside my own warped opinions and I would struggle.

So here I am, an antisocial autistic digital nomad voluntarily living a lifestyle which forces me to interact with people 24 hours a day. I probably talk to and meet more people in a week than most other human beings on earth, yet I find it painfully awkward to engage in the lets-get-drunk-and-talk-about-retarded-shit-all-night experience that is the #1 reason people do long term travel in the first place.

But it's even MORE awkward to turn down invitations for socializing because on the outside I actually look like a normal person.

Shit, I'm so autistic that I had actually been spending 3-4 hours a night in random Vietnamese internet cafes playing Dota instead of socializing with my fellow travelers. And I'm not some skinny nerd either. I'm a 6' good looking American white guy in great shape. You'd think I'd also be a well-adjusted human being who has no problem talking to strangers without pissing them off with controversial opinions.

Them: What are you doing tonight? Are you going out?
Me: Nah. I'm just gonna chill.
Them: Ah. Ok.

Meanwhile there's literally NOTHING to do at night in whatever town we're in except drink.

How to kill a phobia

About a week ago, I came to Hoi An. It's a fairly touristy town in Vietnam that obviously attracts a lot of backpackers. People go on tours in the daytime and drink at night. Same shit, different toilet.

The first day I got to the hostel, I was sitting in the lobby with my computer on my lap as usual. People were coming in and out, and I randomly struck up a conversation with some Canadian chick. She was a little weird (most Canadians are) and kept picking at her skin while we were talking. Kind of gross but whatever.

I spent the rest of the day doing my usual routine of gym/work by myself, but later in the evening I found myself once again in the lobby on my computer. Canadian chick comes downstairs with a few other girls who I assumed were her roommates. They were all chattering about some random tours or something, I don't know.

Canadian girl and I started talking again.

She goes, "So what are you doing tonight?"

"Hmm," I said awkwardly. "I dunno." I knew where this was going.

Then she's like, "It's almost rum and Coke time."

I forced a laugh. "Oh really?"

Meanwhile, the other three girls had gone silent. They weren't looking at us, but I knew they were listening.

"Yeah," she said. "Do you wanna come?"

I felt my heart rise up into the back of my skull and did one of those like, uncomfortable shifts in my chair. "Ummm... yeah? I guess so."

I could have said no. But ever since I've made the transition from agency to consultant, the amount of actual hours that I have to spend in front of the computer has dropped.

So I've found myself with a lot of downtime during the day that I normally would have had to spend writing articles or managing accounts. But now that I just refer clients to my service partners, they handle it directly and I just have to hop on the phone here and there and send some emails.

And after doing so little during the day, it's hard for me to mentally justify doing nothing at night, too.

Anyway, I packed up my shit, stuffed my computer under my bed and went downstairs. There were already a lot of people down there drinking, laughing, having fun. I don't know if any of you have had the backpacker experience in Vietnam, but the alcohol here is dirt cheap and people get drunk literally every night.

So we're all standing at the "bar" and I'm looking down at the menu with a big grimace on my face. The only thing I could think of was how many calories the beer had and how my morning workout would be fucked. But I was already there, so I said fuck it and ordered a round of shots for myself and my new friends.

It was me, the Canadian skin-picker, two more 20 year old Canadian girls and an 18 year old German chick. We start playing some drinking game and the only thing I could think about is how I would bore them.

No idea where this sense of insecurity came from to tell you the truth. I have no problem talking one on one or even to a group in a non-party setting. But turn on some music, add alcohol and 20 more people and I freeze up.

It's not like I've never done anything in my life either. I've done a lot of cool shit. Fuck man, I used to talk to women literally all day every day and convince them to give me hundreds of dollars. I think it just comes from lack of recent exposure to this specific type of situation.

Anyway, I quickly realized that none of them gave a fuck if I was boring or not. A few drinks later I finally loosened up and actually managed to have a good time.

About an hour later, we headed over to one of the other hostels in the neighborhood owned by the same company. There were about 40 extremely drunk and loud backpackers there playing Flip Cup. There was also a pool.

We unironically loved Zyzz for his personality too

I'm not going to give you the play by play of the entire night, but suffice to say that I realized that this whole time I had been making a big deal out of nothing. There is literally 0 reason to be worried about what any random person thinks of you because most of the time they actually don't give a fuck about you anyway.

This isn't exactly a new concept for me, but when your biology takes over and your chest starts pumping, you can't really think yourself back down to a normal heart rate.

Not only that, I realized that most of the people I talked to actually had WORSE social skills than I did. They had no conversational ability, overreacted to innocent comments, and/or were just boring people in general.

Working out every day in an attempt to cure your autism has its benefits as well. When you finally DO get over your mental retardation and put yourself in a social situation, you're normally the most fit person in the room. Or in this case, at the pool.

One of the Canadian girls had been eye-fucking me all night, and while the alcohol had definitely helped to clear some of the gunk from my social pipes, there was still some residual autism that prevented me from taking advantage of it.

At around midnight we came back to the original hostel to wait for a bus to come pick everyone up and take us to a nearby club. They were playing some hip hop shit or something, I don't know. All I remember is these Canadian girls gyrating in front of me while I sat there - expressionless and exhausted - and did nothing. Literally all I had to do was get up, take her hand and pull her back to my room and that would be the end of it.

Instead, I started talking to some sour-faced girl next to me and ignored the mating dance happening a foot from my face. I felt like an idiot when they wandered off in search of someone with bigger balls.

Exhausted, I figured that was enough for one night, so I went up to my room and collapsed onto my bed.

There were two new guys in there. One of them asked me, "So how was your night?"

I'm obviously not the type of person to beat around the bush. So I told them straight up about the Canadian girl offering herself to me and my lack of action.

Long story short, this lead to a 2 hour conversation about all kinds of shit - girls, 4chan, feminism, the army, money... all kinds of shit. One of them was actually Jewish, so once I told him that I had been in the IDF it was off to the races. Two very cool guys from Denmark.

I woke up at 7:30 in the morning with a mild hangover. Three cups of coffee later I pondered what to do with myself while everyone else was still sleeping. I felt inappropriate levels of guilt for filling myself with liquid courage the night before, so I did what any of my /fit/ bros would have done - I went to the gym.

One of the best things about working out is that you begin to feel less guilty about eating food that may not be super healthy. The same goes for alcohol. You feel like as long as you get your workout in, you can have a couple beers/shots at the end of the night.

So I pounded out a two hour workout fueled from shame, three hours of sleep, and a few grams of creatine. Went back to the hostel, checked out with my two new Danish friends and moved down the street to the hostel with the pool.

Nothing without great labor

That was six days ago.

Since then, I've been going out every night, slowly drinking the autism out of my system and flushing the alcohol out of my blood with two hours in a local Vietnamese gym. Come home and eat some food, spend a few hours at the pool and then do my work for the day.

What I've noticed from this little six day experiment is that my party game is fucking garbage tier. Very humbling for me, especially since I'm a tall good-looking American and should be dynamiting the fish in these barrels. I've started watching old school PUA videos again, but I can tell I have a long road to hoe.

Actually what I want to do at some point is go to one of those PUA bootcamps where they like coach you for a few days. There are a few "immersive" ones where you go out literally every night for as long as you want and you get help from coaches. I think that's the best way to learn. And with my location-independent lifestyle and semi-constant flow of income, that's something that I can actually do.

Honestly though, I feel SO much better after just saying fuck it and partying. I would never have thought that I could exist on 4 hours of sleep, drink myself retarded and then wake up in the morning to crush it in the gym almost a week straight.

The parties weren't even really that fun, but just the fact that I've eliminated this fear from my life is unbelievably liberating. I can't count how many social invitations I've turned down because they happened at night and involved alcohol.

And here, just because of one slightly less socially awkward Canadian girl, a new world has opened up for me virtually overnight.

I think a lot of guys these days are too focused on looks. We read shit like r/TRP on Reddit, talk about "Chad" and how things like height and physical appearance are so important, how women are biologically programmed to be promiscuous during ovulation and it totally fucks with our heads. We start to think that we need to be the most jacked alpha male anywhere we go or we're literally worthless.

It's obviously stupid if you think about it logically, but that's really how we think. PUArtistry has fallen out of favor and is even seen as "outdated," but meanwhile those guys got laid like rockstars and with high quality people too, not just a bunch of average looking backpackers who are thousands of miles from home. Not to mention they built massive networks of influential people as they worked their way up the social foodchain through nothing more than simple conversation.

It's just so much easier to chalk your lack of success up to biology or some other excuse that's beyond your control. But to actually go out every night and do cold approaches on girls with inflated egos is not as easy at it used to be. Validation through social media and online dating have skewed the dating game way out of our favor.

But just because it's "harder" doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Honestly I don't even really want to have sex with most of these girls that I talk to. I never used to consider myself particularly picky when it came to girls, but this trip made me realize that it takes more than just being a walking pair of tits to get me interested. Depends on how nice they are I guess.

That's not cool, bro

The craziest thing is that all this "#metoo-esque" bullshit I read about on the internet is actually a thing.

The other night we were walking to a bar and I found myself next to two Australians, a guy and a girl. I heard the girl speaking some Hebrew so I struck up a conversation about Israel, etc. As we're walking, somehow we got on the topic of the bahn mi - a local Vietnamese sandwich that is Vietnam's go-to sandwich like a hamburger is in America.

There's a few famous bahn mi places here in Hoi An and this girl told me that one of them was especially good.

I was like, "Yeah... I dunno. I've had bad luck with Vietnamese food so far. I don't think it's so good."

She goes, "No, but you HAVE to try this place. It's amazing."

"Ok ok," I said, waving her off.

I leaned over and said in the guy's direction, "What do YOU think about this banh mi place? You're a man - I trust YOUR opinion."

Dead silent.

Finally the girl goes, "Oh my god, did you really just make a sexist comment?"

I wasn't sure if they were fucking with me or not. I had heard about people actually getting offended at shit like this, but I just chalked it up to people exaggerating on the internet.

I had watched a video earlier about "offering perspective," which is where you just try and reframe the meaning of what you say in case it's viewed as inappropriate. I thought this would be a great time to try that.

So I said, "Oh, I just say that to people to see where they stand on the issue."

They didn't buy it.

The guy piped up and said, "You can't just say stuff like that bro. It's really offensive."

I had to actually look at his face to see if he was joking or not. He looked legitimately angry.

"Yeah," the girl said, "it's really offensive to hear things like that."

They really started ripping into me after that about how it's sexist, blah blah blah. Now I was the one who actually started getting angry.

I interrupted them and said, "Actually I wasn't joking. I really do think that. I don't care if you're angry. Learn to take a joke."

The girl's like, "Oh... well that's... good to know."

Meanwhile, I looked over at homeboy and he legit looked like he wanted to strangle me.

Now, I've been doing Muay Thai for a few months, so I wasn't actually scared for my well-being. However I WAS scared that this guy would try something and that I'd have to hit him, which when you actually know how to fight, you actually tend to avoid in situations like this.

Anyway, they "went to go see their friend" and disappeared behind me as I walked onto the bar.

Not gonna lie, that conversation tilted me for a while that night. I couldn't believe that there really were people out there who were playing games like this in conversation to score morality points with each other. Mind boggling.

I'm with Him

Traveling as an American, a lot of people ask me what I think of Trump. I used to be scared to give my actual opinion, so I would just give the standard, "oh he's an idiot ha ha ha" and leave it at that.

Now that I give far fewer fucks, I tell them the truth with no hesitation. I tell them that I love Donald, how I'm so happy how he won the election instead of Hillary. Then I look to the sky, interlace my fingers and unironically say, "thank you, whoever you are. Thank you!"

I know some of you just groaned as you read that. You're probably like, "Welp, guess I'm not reading HIS blogs anymore."

Nice knowing you.

I always tell them WHY I like Trump too. My standard explanation is something like:

"Look, I don't agree with everything he says. But I have respect for him because of how he handles himself. The guy is facing pressure from so many angles and has managed to stay congruent the entire time. There is a literally media empire working 24/7 to bring the guy down, and not only did he WIN the election, but he's still getting shit done and doing what he said he would. I don't agree with him on everything, but I can still have respect for someone even if we don't agree on everything."

Something like that.

Then people's next response is something like, "But he's an idiot! Building a wall in Mexico, the Muslim ban, how can you respect someone who says shit like that?"

This gives me the perfect opportunity to explain how he's such a savvy negotiator.

"When you enter into a negotiation with someone and make a ridiculous demand, you use it as a starting point for your deal. And the US has the upper hand in most negotiations anyway. So if Trump says he's going to build a wall between the US and Mexico AND that Mexico is going to pay for it, he can use that as a bargaining chip later in other dealings between the two countries. Maybe they don't pay for the whole wall, maybe they only pay for part of it. Or maybe they concede another point in the negotiation instead."

Then the lightbulb slowly starts to flicker.

So last night, we're all talking outside a club and I gave some vodka-RedBull-powered variation of the above explanation. There was a black guy from Denmark there listening to everything. We had met officially but never really talked. I only mention that he's black because it's very rare that you have a black person from Denmark, and also because on average I've noticed that black people do not like Trump. Maybe some do, blah blah blah.

So he says to me, "Hey man, I heard something really bad about you and wanted to ask you about it."

I couldn't help but smile. "Sure, go for it."

He goes, "One of these girls told me that you said some really sexist shit last night."

I go, "Yeah, probably. But what did they tell you SPECIFICALLY that I said?"

He goes, "Uhhh, I don't really remember, but it was something like 'girls should stay in the kitchen' or something. I don't know."

I'm sure he was drunk last night like the rest of us, so I don't blame him for not remembering exactly what was said.

I told him the story of what really happened. Before we could talk about it, the girl in question actually walked by with a female friend of hers. I had a drink in one hand, so I grabbed my giant balls in the other and said to her,

"Hey, this guy is telling me that you told him that I said women should stay in the kitchen or something?"

The Danish guy goes, "No no no! I didn't say that! I said I DON'T remember exactly.."

I refreshed everyone's memory, emphasizing how it was a joke and how ridiculous it was that some people would get legitimately offended about something so mild.

The Danish guy goes, "Look man, I understand what you're saying, but it's 2018 and you have to be careful what you say now."

I cut him off with another wave of my hand. "No. You're wrong. That's the worst thing you can do."

He looked confused. "What do you mean? Why?"

I felt all the blood start rushing to my face. "Because I don't care what fucking year it is, a man shouldn't have to worry about saying that he trusts another man's opinion over a woman's ABOUT A FUCKING SANDWICH!"

That got me some laughs. And the fastest way to win an argument is to make your opponent laugh.

Even the girl was smiling. She had this sly look on her face that said, "Yeah, you're right. I was just fucking with you last night to see if you'd buckle."

The other guys there were like, "Yeah! Yeah, you're right. That's right!"

Most of them were Danish or Dutch, and from what I understand this shit is out of control over there. Plus Europeans are less likely to say outrageous shit, even after too many drinks at a bar, probably because their culture is more socially progressive on average than the US.

In fact, as I made the comment, I looked at the black guy's face and a huge toothy smile practically split his head in half before he tried (unsuccessfully) to hide it.

"Yeah yeah, you're right man," he said.

And then everyone stood up and started clapping.

That black guy's name? Abraham Lincoln.

What do you think about... something?

Tell me in a comment!

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