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Friday Fun Thread for May 5, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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TRIAL by wager of WILDERNESS.

I have been thinking about something: in ages past, men went to war to prove themselves. They still do, today, and the survivors I have seen return more attractive, although they pay an immense price, and that is only counting those that return more or less in one piece. Now, war is more destructive than it once was, and we don't think highly of war in general, for good reason.

Therefore: I have been training for this for the past year or so. I plan to have myself dumped into the Alaskan wilderness in late February, 50 miles from the nearest road or civilization. I'll walk out, and if I make it out alive, I'll have been hardened by my experience. I'll have stared my own death in the goddamn face, braving temperatures of 40 below 0 just to walk out alive.

Do you think that this will make my ugly, autistic ass any more attractive? I've heard it said that you have never lived until you have almost died, and that tough, masculine men are attractive AF. This seems like something that would harden someone...either permanently, as a rock-solid corpse, or permanently, as a wilderness-hardened man.

TL;DR Is dumping myself in the middle of the woods in Alaska in winter gonna make me more attractive, if I survive?

No it won't. Not unless you spend several years out there. Any behavioral changes caused by a brief period of exceptional activity will be undone by your subsequent resumption of normalcy.

Huh - 'almost dying' doesn't make you more attractive? Thought it did: I've seen PTSD-afflicted combat vets that were goddamn near dead of alcohol-induced liver failure with girlfriends. Guys that were addicted to (and dealing) heroin and Xanax that were full of shame about what they did in Iraq...that had girlfriends. If being a battle-hardened combat veteran is that powerful...I suspect that being in the woods would be a less powerful and less damaging version.

Has it occurred to you that having gone to war, gotten PTSD and started drinking is downstream of whatever the source of their attractiveness is? They are different people from you, and you cannot become them by emulating their feats, not even to a reduced extent.

Perhaps: significantly, these guys more or less signed up for it. That is probably fairly significant. They weren't (as in Vietnam, or Korea, or WWII) ordinary Joes that got a draft notice in the mail one day.

Still: does it sound at all cool? Man vs. wild, trying to freeze the weakness off your soul in the Alaskan bush.

Not when it's your autistic ass trying to do it to score chicks, man.

Some say Chris McCandless was a hero.

I don't know who that is.

I am one of those people. That doesn't change the fact that the world would have been a better place if he had lived longer in it.

Behold:

The First Woodsmaxxer