Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I spoke to a friend earlier today. She could tell I was on the spectrum but found it hard to describe exactly what made it apparent to her. After talking a while, she said that I always paused before I said something, or before I smiled. It was probably that deliberateness that was a tell. She did make it clear that there was nothing I had done (or failed to do) that was offensive in any way, although I'm reasonably sure that there's proto-offensive shit that doesn't rise to the level of conscious thought and is difficult, but not impossible, to put into words. Ekman and his team might be able to do it.
I also don't think all that many people can put into words the things that I do or say that make people think I'm autistic, or that offend people. If I had to guess, maybe ten percent of psychiatrists or psychologists, and maybe one average person in a few hundred.
I still think that a true UMC gentleman - like aristocracy in ages past - has things that they are fundamentally willing to die over. Like, a lot of duels were fought over things like "honor". I'm well aware that there were plenty of off-ramps in the dueling process that allowed both participants to be satisfied gentlemen. In the case of pistol duels the duelists didn't always shoot straight, and dueling pistols weren't usually that accurate. Even so, quite a few promising young gentlemen met a premature end on the dueling ground.
As a Hockist: perhaps a decent ideal to strive for is better to die than do your utmost to be graceful. It seems fitting and proper for an awkward person to adopt this as an ideal...at least until he is no longer awkward. The Hock is an idiotic and meaningless way to prove that I've got a high level of grit and determination.
I'm also guessing that many of you would think that my view of the 'UMC gentleman' - or the 'petty aristocracy' he described of people with two college educated parents - is out of whack and some fever-dream cross between Japanese bushido and what we think Victorian-era gentlemanly conduct was. And that if pressed, maybe a couple of awkward UMC dudes in a hundred would go on the Hock even if they were guaranteed to not be awkward after.
What's your take?
Has anyone here said anything positive about you doing the hock?
I am asking because if you die and they trace your online history to here, I want to be able to say that we unanimously said it was a stupid idea.
Autistic guys can slay. Get good at standup comedy instead. Some of the best comics in the business are at least a little autistic. They just focused their autistic powers on getting laughs, and their inability to pick up on social cues was an advantage cuz they could do horribly offensive jokes.
I'd side with Southkraut that it's not necessarily a terrible idea. I don't expect it will do anything at all for your social skills or success with women, but it could still be a cool accomplishment. It's at least as cool as climbing Mount Everest in my book, and less over-hyped. The big asterisk is your preparation, which I have no idea about and as far as I can tell you haven't posted much about.
If you're otherwise a generic suburbanite physically who occasionally runs a few blocks when the whether is nice, then you will definitely die doing this and you should abandon the idea if you have any brains at all. I hope you're not that unprepared, but that's one extreme.
If you're spending the 2 years leading up to it training hard at extreme cold weather wilderness survival, long-term hiking and survival, wilderness navigation, solo mountain climbing, and other related skills, then you might be able to do it. Have you at least accomplished something 5% as hard as that already? Hell, 5% as hard should feel so routine as to be boring before you think about trying this.
As someone who has been outside every day of his life and spent a lot of time with like-minded people, it's not really even that extreme of an accomplishment. It's basically just a backcountry ski trip with more complicated logistics than doing it in Maine or Minnesota. It's not hard to get an airlift to a spot in the wilderness if you have the money and know where to look; it's a thing people do, and most of them come back okay. The thing is, most of the people who do it go through outfitters who provide gear and provisions and tell them where to go, even if the tours are self-guided. As such, he's not going to get dropped at some arbitrary location, but a spot where the pilot can actually land the plane, which is going to be a spot that people normally use for these types of adventures. There's a decent chance he may even run into other people on this trip.
That being said, as I mentioned in my last post on the subject, most people who aren't in the outdoor world won't know the difference between any of the finer gradations of how badass something is supposed to be. I wouldn't go out of my way to plan such a trip myself, but if a group were going and I were invited and cost/time off work weren't an issue I'd jump at the chance. I have friends who do a ski touring vacation every winter and they love it, though the fact that they have small children they bring along means they usually stick to the kind of trips where you ski between cabins on well-marked trails. To the uninitiated, though, it doesn't matter. Some people — even outdoorsy people — seem shocked that I've backpacked overnight solo without being scared in the woods. Non-outdoorsy people often ask what kind of gun I bring with me. When I tell them that, aside from the weight alone making it a nonstarter, that a pistol isn't likely to do anything against any animal that could do serious damage, they change tack and suggest that the woods is crawling with deranged hillbillies. If Sookum wants to do something other people will find impressive, a few overnighters on a local trail will probably be sufficient without the additional risk and cost.
Also quite a bit colder at least than Maine; Minnesota can sometimes get as cold. I know that people use Ely, Minnesota as a training ground for polar expedition training. Fifty degrees below zero is no joke. As far as the airlift, bush pilots are expensive and I plan on carrying gasoline with me as stove fuel, so I'll be leaving from Arctic Village and attempting to reach the town of Sagwon.
I like to bring up the time back in 1999 the local Air National Guard had to rescue a Navy SEAL team from the mountains outside Anchorage when a cold spell hit during their training exercise.
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What’s your plan once reaching Sagwon given no one lives there?
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Okay I've never hiked or camped or the like but that does not sound like a good plan. How much weight can you carry? How much weight are you expecting to carry? You're going to burn more fuel than you expect just to keep warm, and you'll likely run out before you reach your destination, not to mention possibility of accident (spilling or losing fuel) or not being able to make your mileage goals because you're too loaded down.
Polar (both north and south) expeditions have foundered on things like this. Scott of the Antarctic was brave and experienced, but things went badly wrong and we know how that ended up. Don't die because of a stupid miscalculation.
Gasoline is the fuel I'll be buying in Arctic Village. The stove is only for melting snow for drinking water, not for warmth - using a liquid fuel stove for warmth seems like a rather impractical idea.
As for weight carried: something like 40 pounds on my back and another 40 to 60 in the sled.
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Alright, I'm going to stop you right there. Sagwon is not a town. Sagwon is an abandoned airstrip that was built to service the construction of the Alaska pipeline. The best you can hope to find there is a passing truck on the Dalton Highway you can flag down for an awkward six-hour-plus ride to Wiseman. It would make more sense to start at Sagwon since at least you'd have a real town to aim for. This is relative, though. When you first talked about this you kept mentioning a trek through the forest so I though you were talking about the lowlands in the vicinity of the southern entrance to Gates of the Arctic National Park. What you have proposed is crossing the Brooks Range in an area where I'm not sure anyone crosses it. Do you have avalanche training? What ski setup are you using? Are you going backcountry xc, tele, or full backcountry touring? Do you have an ice axe, crampons, and screws? How's your downhill skiing ability? Can you at least drop into an easy bowl without more than a cursory look? If so, can you still do it with open heels? How many passes will you have to cross? I could go on but I think you get the point. On second thought, start from Arctic Village; at least then you aren't committed and can turn back.
No, but I've read some stuff online, does that count? Going to read some books on that.
Backcountry touring.
Yes, or I will have these.
In high school, I was a mediocre ski racer; I can ski black terrain but not glades or moguls, at least not well at all. Hopefully that means something.
I hope not to find out.
One, hopefully.
Thing is: if I started around Sagwon, and missed Arctic Village by ten miles due to a navigation error, I could potentially be fucked. If I start at Arctic Village, I just need to head in the general direction of the Dalton Highway, and I should be able to, as you said, flag down a passing truck. The plan is to hitchhike from wherever I finish the Hock (assuming I survive) back to Fairbanks.
I'll walk back my earlier comments in part, in that skis are indeed a reasonable pick for this area -- you will however need boots that fit, and the plastic ones you have are not what I would choose.
People use something like this: https://www.alpinasports.com/en/nordic/backcountry/alaska-75-50082
They are even called "Alaska"!
You can get neoprene booties to go over them, but if you are making enough miles to get where you are going before running out of supplies, cold feet will not be your problem.
I would worry quite a lot about avalanche danger as a solo traveller there -- not sure what the Brooks looks like on the ground, but based on Google Earth everything resembling a pass is quite exposed -- and when you are by yourself even a small slough could trap you enough that you will die through no fault of your own. (other than engaging in solo travel through exposed avvie terrain in the first place, ofc)
The fact that you think navigation errors are even on the table makes me think that you should do some better planning -- the original '100 miles through the forest' plan actually seemed pretty survivable with appropriate gear, but mountain travel is a thing where small mistakes kill even experienced people quickly.
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DM me your real name before you leave so I can pray for your soul.
From "Catholic Tumblr Gothic":
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Maybe if they're fairly good looking, tall, and insanely dedicated - I'm talking at least as determined as a Navy SEAL. Since they were in single digits. The kind of person that could write courses on communication and facial expressions. The kind of person that makes a social blunder once a decade while sober. The kind of person that can inspire people, ironically, to endure Hock-level privation for no good goddamn reason. As far as I'm concerned, every word and gesture a neurotypical makes is a performance not much less graceful than that of a concert pianist or professional ballet dancer, and they can often inspire people to endure immense hardship in order to make them happy.
As far as positive comments: people almost unanimously said that it was stupid; many had respect for it but thought it was no less stupid.
Look, there's autism or at least "on the spectrum" and/or Aspergers in my paternal family line, and yet many of them manage to get married and have families. You seem to have set up some impossible standard in your mind for success with the opposite sex. Maybe recalibrate a bit on that? And yeah, this is depressing advice, but "lower your standards" may help. If you're looking for the Perfect Woman, she doesn't exist. And you may be overlooking better chances with women who are below the standards of "wants tall, dedicated, rich, handsome guy".
Let's say my standards are something like...
Is that realistic, for someone like me? Is that shooting too high? I hope not; I don't want to be running a goddamn nursing home in my household for someone whose choices were part of what led her to need that level of care. On the other hand, one of my classmates in medical school lived What's Eating Gilbert Grape and did okay for herself, so...
I don't see "can write courses on communication, extremely dedicated to being socially graceful, capable of gracefully enduring Hock-tier hardship and perhaps inspiring others to do the same" to be an impossible ask for a guy on the spectrum, for what it's worth. For example: I know ten guys who are 5'4" or shorter IRL. Only one managed to get a girlfriend who wasn't morbidly obese...or a danger to herself or others. He is, I shit you not, our class president, charismatic enough for a career in politics, and a future neurosurgeon. The four short residents I know are all focused on their careers unlike their average height and tall counterparts. Top 1 percent charisma + being on track for a million a year seems to be what it takes...although if you are OK with someone half again or twice your weight, and you're short, all you need is a body like a Greek God while being otherwise average. I'm talking...can compete in amateur physique bodybuilding competitions, like one of my college classmates. I don't think any of this is bad, for what it is worth.
What do you mean by "someone like me"? That only makes you sound like you have a neurotic, distorted self-image and are determined to follow this course of action based on how you think it will make you feel. Which okay, it's your life, but it has nothing to do with "get a woman" and I wish you'd drop that part of it. Most women don't care a damn about "I did a really stupid hike that could have killed me", and indeed will be motivated to avoid a guy like that, because if you get into a relationship with him, what is to stop him doing an equally stupid could-kill-him stunt? Then if you're married and have kids, you're left a widow with orphaned children and probably a heap of debt and look, it's all too much hassle. Find a man who won't decide to throw it all up and go hiking in the Arctic in the morning because he thought somebody said something mean at work.
I mean: dreaming of a career in the NBA would be pretty realistic if I was seven feet tall, the NBA scouts for pretty much anyone seven feet and breathing - but at 5'6" I'd be the second-shortest player in NBA history, after 5'3" Muggsy Bogues. And even for a six-footer who loves basketball, it's more of a pipe dream than anything realistic.
I was asking essentially about whether or not my standards, as I'd described them, were unrealistically high. For what it is worth, based on what I've seen: unattractive people who would like to date need to choose where they want the ambulances. No, not the Hock. The Hock is stupid and pointless, and it may be a kind of prologue for things that will happen later in my life. Let me just say that I personally know two autistic women that knew damn well that they were very vulnerable to predators yet chose to date anyway. They fell prey to said predators. One is happy that she chose to date and the other has some mild regrets and thinks whatever wisdom she got wasn't worth it. If she had it to do over, she'd have been celibate. On the male side of things...let me see. Morbidly obese wives, supermorbidly obese wives, wives that tried to strangle their 10-year-old child, one attempted stabbing by a girlfriend, one successful stabbing by a girlfriend that very nearly killed the guy but he made a full recovery. Attempted stabbing guy's in a healthy relationship with his wife, one of the autistic women had a husband that raped her who she then divorced and then got in an OK relationship with a reasonably functional and well-off civil engineer that smokes pot and cigarettes like a chimney. So there's a light at the end of the tunnel, and if it's an oncoming train it usually doesn't kill you.
As I've said repeatedly here - I do not think that things are any better for unattractive women and they are probably worse. As a man, I'm not privy to as many of the tales of woe from that side of things, but hear other short and/or spergy guys - or their children - sharing stories of the things they or their parents endured. I believe I'll be going through Hell of one form or another. I realized, I think, rather late, possibly too late, that the question facing unattractive people who want to date is this: "Where do you want the ambulances?" But you need to and should choose, and that choice, freely and willingly undertaken, is in itself noble.
For what it is worth, I do not think that telling people about the Hock or even people learning that I Hocked and survived is going to do all that much for how attractive I am. In the words of Steve from the Friendly Southern Gossip discord: Sufficiently extreme challenge will just be thought of as stupidity or mildly suicidal. No, any benefit from the Hock will come from freezing the neuroticism or perhaps the hypocrisy off of me and making me accustomed to pain, discomfort, and struggle. That this pain, discomfort, and struggle are considered pointless and idiotic is a feature, not a bug: living What's Eating Gilbert Grape or some other shit is kind of on a par with that. Ask @Southkraut; he warned me in no uncertain terms about how bad an idea it was to marry someone that was digging herself a very early grave with knife and fork - or any other addiction.
I don't know where you got this idea that every unattractive person who wants to date people will at some point end up in an ambulance as a result, but it's bullshit. To illustrate my point:
Attractive people can be victims of domestic violence. Rihanna. April Hernandez-Castillo. Tina Turner. Robin Givens. Bree Olson. Whitney Houston. Tyra Banks. Denise Richards. Brett Rossi. Oksana Grigorieva. Alice Kim. Kelly LeBrock. Pamela Anderson. There are numerous other examples, but I think I've made my point - none of these women are unattractive, and all have been victims of domestic violence.
Many unattractive people in romantic relationships go their whole lives without needing to call an ambulance for any reason, including domestic violence. This point seems so self-evident that it hardly even needs justifying, but if you must see hard data before considering that you might be simply wrong, Women's Aid Ireland reported about 30,000 contacts with Irish women reporting domestic abuse in 2022. Even allowing that this is a huge undercount of the real number of victims (let's say, of a factor of 3): if 90,000 women are victims of domestic abuse in Ireland every year, there's something like 2 million adult women in Ireland. This suggests that (thankfully!) domestic abuse is something only experienced by a minority of people, between 1.5-4.5% of women in a calendar year. Even the most pessimistic feminist campaigns I've seen suggest that 1 in 4 women will experience it in their lifetime, which obviously means that 3 in 4 won't (and this 1 in 4 figure sometimes includes types of abuse for which no ambulance would be necessary). We're privileged to live in an era in which even the most passionate progressive campaigners must begrudgingly acknowledge that violence is the exception rather than the rule.
Perhaps you're making an inappropriate generalisation from a social circle made up of unusually unlucky people. Perhaps your social circle is actually no more unlucky than average, and you're just fixating on the one or two unusually unlucky people it contains as a means to justify/excuse your self-pity and avoidant tendencies. If you can show me hard evidence that literally every single unattractive person who wants to be in a romantic relationship will at some point be the victim of domestic abuse severe enough to require an ambulance, I would love to see it. You won't show it to me, because we both know it doesn't exist and this is all just part of some weird mind game you're playing with yourself.
Please don't insult my intelligence by backtracking and claiming that "ambulances" can refer to something other than domestic violence. You said 'the question facing unattractive people who want to date is this: "Where do you want the ambulances?"' You can be single your whole life, never seek out a relationship with anyone, and still end up in an ambulance from a heart attack caused by your obesity.
The guy with the 450-pound partner and the woman married to Smokestack our engineering hero aren't facing domestic violence in relationships. The ambulances can be and often are domestic violence, but they can come from plenty of other things as well. Like congestive heart failure from supermorbid obesity. Or good old-fashioned lung cancer from a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit and smoking pot like fucking Snoop Dogg.
Consider the sky high - 80 percent, by some metrics - abuse/victimization rate reported by autistic women. This is still well north of half even if you just look at autistic women with normal IQs.
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Does Mark Normand look good, Jerry Seinfeld? I'm not the best judge, but they seem passable at best.
You don't really have to look that good as a guy anyways. The most sexually active guy I ever knew was fat and had what I would consider some unattractive facial features. He was a terrible listener in conversations, he was dyslexic, and he came across as very goofy and happy go-lucky. Prior to covid he was probably averaging sex with 5 different partners a week. He was a divorcee, so he could also claim to have managed to do the whole long-term relationship thing too.
The Hock doesn't sound like it is something that will impress women. It something that might impress other straight guys.
How old was this entertaining character at the time?
I think around 30
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He looks like Jim from The Office, of course he looks good.
We must be thinking of different people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Normand
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Okay, contrarian time: The Hock is a noble endeavor. Stupid but brave. Self-destructive but benign. I think Skookum is crazy in an entirely undesirable way (IMHO his biggest problem isn't awkwardness, sexual frustration or autism, but being straight-up delusional and obsessive), but I also don't think that him doing his Hock thing is necessarily bad. It won't solve his problem and it won't get him what he wants, but if he actually goes through with it then women will not consider him one jot better than before, but I for one sure as hell will be impressed. A rare display of masculine virtue in a domesticated age. Even if it kills him. Maybe even especially if it kills him? Don't quote me on that last part, I'm not sure about it.
If he survives it, and right now it doesn't sound survivable. "Well that was dumb but I have to say I'm kinda impressed" isn't the problem here; nobody is much concerned about trying to keep everyone from ever doing anything stupid. What it sounds like is the kind of hairbrained notions that get people killed, from "I know all about bears" to all the climbers who die on Everest.
Gallant death is not wrong, but "he died because he was too stupid to live" isn't a good way to go out.
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I find myself nodding along and basically agreeing, but one thing...
Do any of us know what the fuck this is? I kind of love that it now has mythical status, means a thing in and of itself on this board. You'd know what I meant if I said, "it's kind of my Hock" even though I literally don't know what the Hock is.
Does it even matter? It's outdoor activity in nature - I'm already on board by that point.
You support people doing any "outdoor activity in nature"? Christopher McCandless starving to death in Alaska? Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend getting eaten alive by bears? Green Boots? The Titan?
Respect for the guy
Respect, but jackass got his girlfriend eaten
Respect
Some respect, but also come on guys, you cut too many corners.
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It's bad for those people that they died and bad for their families. But in the end, nobody forced them as far as I know. Yes going out of doors is dangerous. Yes its better to correctly judge the risks and to not do anything overly stupid and to come back alive. But there's always some danger, and there will always be some people who happen to be the bad end of some bell curve by disposition or by bad luck. Someone will die.
I fundamentally don't understand the idea of exposing yourself to extreme danger for no discernible payoff other than to satisfy your own ego. The whole thing just seems so pointless and masturbatory.
Exposing yourself to extreme risk in order to save someone else's life? Noble. Exposing yourself to extreme risk in order to expand the range of human knowledge? Admirable. Exposing yourself to extreme risk just 'cause? Why not just OD on heroin instead of going to all this trouble?
I don't get the big egos either, but wanting to be outdoors I understand. Wanting to be more outdoors to the point of ignoring potentially fatal risks I understand. So I don't actually understand Skookum, because he's crazy, but I'm not fundamentally opposed to wanting to be outdoors so bad it has an elevated risk of killing you. It certainly beats ODing on drugs.
But in the end neither of us understands his motives.
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"The Hock" is a long-range wilderness hike through extremely inhospitable terrain, alone, at serious risk to one's life. Skook's plan is to hike through something like a hundred miles of Alaskan wilderness, alone, in the dead of winter, with no communications or access to emergency services if something goes wrong. His explicit plan is to either complete the hike successfully, or die in the attempt.
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