Red Scare is a podcast hosted by @annakhachiyan and @nobody_stop_me Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere "But it is the most (inaudible)y god damned board you could ever imagine." cross to comply, still in control, understand a hand, a hand moved me, just like a station on the radio
i (F 45 biracial) used to have a really nice book club with a bunch of funny smart (virgin) men and a jewish woman who let us make jokes about hitler. one day we were joined by a beautiful protigese woman. this woman really enjoyed sharing things with us. oftentimes we would be discussing hejel and she would say 'omg look at my dog' (it was a cute dog) or 'im tanning and i will soon look african american'. she is really pretty
when some of the men got irritated by these interruptions and asked her if she was reading anything the woman was offended and all the girls decided that my book club was not friendly or accepting towards women. also they said that the women were not being allowed to speak and complained that sometimes the men wld tell them to shut UP during literary discussions
anyway there was a lot of arguing and finally the funny smart (virgin) men quit my bookclub because they were tired of being called women haters (they loved the jewish girl). the protigese woman decided to invite her friends instead and then other people heard about my book club and joined and now my book club has a ton of members but they are like fat people who never leave the house and they chatter non stop and one of them is a (chinese) man with a harassment and role play problem. i miss the way things used to be i dont really know what to do. there are too many people for me to deal with i want to cry
I just googled "protigese" and this post was the first result
Is it just a misspelling of Portuguese? Intentional? I thought it lent some quirkiness to the post.
Idk if this is the intent, but Portuguese people from Hawaii (whose ancestors came to Hawaii to work on sugarcane plantations) always refer to themselves this way with a silly little accent that’s all their own. Like “poor- dih - geez”
we call them portagees in new england too ❤️
Its the French word for prodigy apparently
it sounds like how a filipino would pronounce it
Welcome to r/redscarepod . I don't know why you googled that word today, but you're here now. You're safe.
Neither you nor anyone else realise how funny your comment is.
Placeholder comedy
Does he think I googled protigese for no reason?
finally some drama that isnt my fault
Following, expecting drama
It’s YOUR FAULT those men were all virgins, you know
But then they wouldn’t be funny or smart
Preach, brother.
"Wahhh I'm tired of all these virgin incels complaining about not getting pussy."
Have you considered being a part of the solution, ma'am?
I can't get over protigese
I don't know why this whole post is so funny to me. I feel like I'm reading my own scatterbrained train of thought, with random unnecessary details but still vague and confusing at the same time
For me it's the unnecessary capitalisation in "the men wld tell them to shut UP during literary discussions"
Michigander OP
I couldn't even figure out what it was supposed to mean at first. Felt embarrassing but I googled the word and the first result was this post. I guess it means Portuguese.
protigese
Genuinely thought it was some fancy French word I wasn't understanding
The funniest thing about book clubs and pop lit readers is most of them can barely spell. Sort of has “the cobbler’s kids has no shoes” vibe.
Edit: to clarify, I’m a reformed grammar Nazi and prefer informal speech and writing online, but these women will be like “avid reader 📚” and then you talk to them and you can instantly sense they’re afraid they’re about to get busted for being phony. It’s like, why overcompensate? Why not be into something you’re naturally good at instead? Because they’re trying to attract people who have the quality they desire to have most in themselves? Honestly scares the shit out of me.
Comment deleted by user
HEJEL
The amount of people who complain about the fucking locked tomb using too many big words is really funny and bleak
i was rather rude to OP here, though, and knew when i posted that i wasn't really addressing their post. they're clearly living in Europe or South America or god only knows where they don't worship the English language because they're a heathen (jk), but frankly, the story here is very complicated.
.. so the Portuguese woman (hot, flirty bimbo, a manipulator at heart), eventually the bookish, chill guys got sick of her bullshit. so the other less hot women rallied behind the bimbo who wasn't upholding the true standards of the book club and showing respect to the older members, really. anyway, they rallied behind her by exaggerating their grievances with the men, validating the slutty bimbo. Now the Portuguese bimbo has used the momentum from this win to invite in all of these random people from her favela to the book club, and OP is voicing her disgust at the injustice of it all.
OP, here's my suggestion: link up with the Jewish woman online, I'm sure you all email each other and stuff. Start Book Club Version 2.0, now you and the Jewish chick are the queens and call the shots. Bring all the guys back into the mix, they're gonna be so excited.
Now all you really have to do is contact a community building in your area that you can rent a room for the book club every two weeks. Each member pitches in a couple bucks to keep the lights on. That should be easy. You've already been going to this community building for the current book club, right? It's not hosted at someone's house. I'm sure you know this stuff, but I'm just encouraging you now to do this because you sound like a good person to form a conspiracy with this Jewish woman and these bookish cool guys to start your own club.
Here's the kicker for me, this might be important: Use what happened with the Portuguese lady as the pretext to convince your core book club members that the option to remove a member is on the table. I think you will need to be able to hold a vote in an emergency to virtually remove a person from the club (you can't physically remove someone, it's just a book club, but like, there should be a process where a symbolic removal can take place). I think these two things are your only solutions: start a new book club with the old members and instate an option to remove a member in emergency situations.
Goes to show how far grammar goes that u think this is ESL English and not just someone being intentionally funny
because they're challenging themselves. how can you grow as a person if you only engage in things you're already good at?
She’s a prot?
I run a book club, though it's public through the meetup app. People are busy and it's a nice way to replenish members that move away/don't want to read the book. I have ~220 members but average 8 people who show.
Vibes can totally shift based on the makeup of members. I took over from someone else who ran it and have slowly transformed it to be much more diverse. I used to be the youngest member by far at 25, now I'm a little under the average age. I try to cultivate a group of people who are willing to read just about everything, fiction, nonfiction, everything else. It weeds out all the typical people who ruin these things.
One controversial thing I've done is to always be the sole person picking the books and the venue to attract the type of people I want to discuss books with. Without fail every time I let someone else pick the book they don't make it that month. Or they pick some book that doesn't encourage good discussion.
Very funny occasionally getting some closed-minded old person tell me that they don't like the books I pick (while never having come to a meeting). Why would I want you there?
Good luck getting your book club vibe back. It can be a struggle. I'd recommend picking some books that turn them off entirely. Picking otessa moshfegh really helped weed out the people I didn't like lmao
The reality I think is that any great group like this is powered by one or two passionate people, so your approach makes sense. Any chance you can send me some of this book list? I feel like I spend a lot of time trying to think of new types of books to read to not get stuck in a rut
I'll just post it here. It's not a long list. No idea what your personal taste is so not sure if you'd like/dislike.
Educated by Tara Westover - recommend
Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam - DNF
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb - fine
I take over after this
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami - recommend
I'm Glad my Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy - recommend
The Room by Jonas Karlsson - best book we have read by far, strong recommend
The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman - fine
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh - recommend
Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica - recommend
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson - fine, interesting tho
The Resisters by Gish Jen - can skip
Moneyball by Michael Lewis - recommend
The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead - DNF
Stiff by Mary Roach - interesting
Dr. No by Percival Everett - recommend
Still definitely some random booktok stuff and some suggestions from others. In general I try to pick a wide variety of stuff that also samples world literature/authors of different backgrounds and doesn't fall into pop science for non fiction or thrillers/mysteries for fiction (I don't want to get people joining who want to argue politics or pick books where there's nothing to talk about).
It can be hard to figure out exactly what to read. I tend to skew towards unreliable narrators/weird books but I find that makes for really interesting discussion.
What's the role play problem?
Yes, this is the real question
jorge hejel, protigese philsopher
There's this old 4chan comic that explains the life cycle of clubs so well. Keeping disingenuous outsiders from polluting the nice little world you've created is one of life's greatest challenges.
Anti-Gatekeeping rhetoric and its consequences
r/redscarepod
me in the baseball cap
I'm the guy who convinced everyone that he's actually a pink girl in a triangle skirt
I literally get downvoted now for pointing out people post in videogame subs. Makes me sick.
In reverse though, where girls and rtarded men are being chased away by nerds
the av iq of this forum has gone down like 20 points in the past 2 years
The idea that this sub was started by a bunch of square-jawed normies is delusional. 5 years ago it was all effete left-leaning mfa and philosophy students
I'm the green guy...trying my best not to spoil the mood
im the alpha who came here to pick up bpd chicks
We’re all drinking from a fountain
This comic was the first thing that came to mind as I read this post. Generally, I've found that the only people who bitch about gatekeeping are the exact sorts that the gate is meant to keep out.
Fundamentally, all groups throughout history (that lasted more than 5 minutes or actually did anything) have required some amount of gatekeeping. If you literally don't have requirements to be a part of a subculture then you're just a bunch of people, not a subculture. By definition it requires signifiers that set it apart from the mainstream.
If you don't police the people entering a subculture on some level, however small, it'll be pumped and dumped when it becomes trendy and die when a new thing comes along in a month and they all leave.
There is a reasonable and healthy amount of gatekeeping required to create group cohesion. Imagine if you tried to start a pickup basketball game and one guy just wants to play football. You'd tell him to fuck off, not listen to his complaints about how you're gatekeeping the group from him.
It's a big reason why most of the groups that have lasted the longest and been the most successful are ones which require substantial sacrifice/social signaling to get into. Most small religious cults/societies have specific ways you have to dress or live or wear your hair that make it obvious to the world that you're part of that group. Many societies have required some form of tattoo or other marking. Even if unintentional, the ultimate effect is that it keeps casuals away because someone who isn't serious isn't going to put in that amount of effort.
Whatever dude I'm not accepting pedophilia as a valid shibboleth for priests or billionaires no matter how much "group cohesion" it engenders or how many casuals it keeps out of the church / politics / Wall St.
henry rollins deciding what is or is not punk rawk energy
“Hating from outside the club”
The only good alternative is to “gearification” it which is just people buying things around the hobby rather than doing the hobby itself. And then losers from outside try and make money off of it.
this happened with mechanical keyboards. the hobby was almost entirely having pallets of old hardware shipped to your house to dig up old mechanical keyboards with rare/interesting switches or keycaps. it was a fun little hobby and at that point the group buys (for keycaps) only ever had like 50-75 people total, and only from a single supplier (signature plastics). that was basically the extent of the hobby until maybe 2012-2013ish when it started being commodified. now it's all about The Gear and people spend ridiculous amounts on keyboards/keycaps, with resellers entering the mix in recent years to gouge people on coveted gear.
It's funny to watch this happen to tabletop RPGs over the past 5 years ago so to a nightmarish degree. I don't really enjoy playing them (roleplaying is exhausting to me) which is why it's funny and not infuriating I guess, but goddamn. Podcast D&D and Discord TTRPGs brought in enough HR-brained libs that everyone I know who used to play it has a story about getting chewed out for making a problematic joke about elves or something.
This happens with everything though. It happens to basically every single company, in which the culture formed by the founders is eventually replaced by the kind of corporate culture that naturally takes hold.
One of the only interesting April Fools things online, aside from the original and only the original r/place, was when reddit did the thing where it would put you in a chatroom with randoms and every few minutes it would let you choose to combine with another similarly sized one or to stop and make a subreddit out of your group. What consistently happened is that once you doubled in size only a few times, you immediately go from an organic vibe unique to each group into a bunch of copy pasted meme spamming and attention grabbing from randos.
Do you know the Circle of Diversity? It is a political variant of the meme you shared.
"The game has become an excuse to hang out, flirt, drink, smoke..." so the game has become cool or?
You still have to make the effort...a book club may on some level be an excuse for the girls to get together and drink but it falls apart when half of them don't bother to read the book
Yeah that gave away the game a bit lol. The essence of the comic is pretty true but you can tell who made it.
r/redscarepod
This is just incel shit. Yeah what happens to hobbies resembles this, but this particular explanation is just incel shit
MODS
That image is fucking stupid though and implies that all women or “females” as the loser who made the comic called them are seductive harpies focused on distracting the male players
This just describes discord servers lmao. Also why are there even drawings this is just an essay.
It’s accurate though.
That image is older than discord.
Yeah I figured, just saying I’ve heard this story a million times about discord servers
Nobody reads things online if it doesn’t have pictures attached
Talk to the men who left and ask to join the new club they made when they left this one - or try to remake the old one if they haven't already. With more strict gatekeeping requirements - learn the lesson from this experience.
This only works if you didn't hop on the bandwagon when they were being pushed out of the old one and they still have a good opinion of you.
I was once in a book club of 20-something Catholics I met swing dancing. I knew it was two major red flags but what can you do. Fun aside - Catholicism and swing dancing share a similarity in that the women are usually well-socialized and beautiful while the men are ugly and weird.
The first book was Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life and most of these dudes spent their speaking time claiming that while Peterson was correct on every point, his Jungian background prevented him from acknowledging that his truthful arguments derived from God, not the common discoveries of disparate civilizations throughout history.
I left before they moved to another book. I heard after that they read Brothers K, or maybe just the Grand Inquisitor chapter, I can’t remember.
great post. the funniest posts ive ever seen were all in that server, next level shit no lie.
It's wild the majority of comments are just ignoring how bizarrely this post was written lmfao.
Genuinely how is nobody understanding that this is a shitpost
“You pass yourselves off as cynical people but you still have some faith in the system, don’t you?”
The sub is cooked. That's how.
When you make a comment like this, what is the actual goal here? What would you prefer the comments section is filled with? 50 acknowledgements that it's a shitpost? Just a slightly less sincere engagement with the post? Truly at a loss
You can barely spell. What the fuck is 'protigese' and 'hejel'? You are the terrible thing that happened to the book club.
Is it Portuguese? Honestly I just wrote it off as some niche regional people or something lol
It's bait, you took it.
It's my dick, you sucked it.
Getting real riled up over a shit post.
Just meet up with the gay fellas and jew in someone elses place without the protigesi
I've done this many times. DM the people who like and reform the group somewhere else.
Why an emphasis on virgin?
The aggressive, repeated sexual qualifier in parentheses is something I (non-virgin) am going to try and include in all future correspondence, business and personal.
Start a book club with the virgins then take their virginities.
hejel
The reason people have joined the book club recently is because there was a post about the server being bad
post
Can you make another book club with the dudes and maybe invite the Jewish woman?
it's over, & over in an spectacularly ugly way, but every second that I don't regret spending on the internet is a second I spent on RSBC; I'd never have met any of you, & I'd never have started writing, were it not for it, so no regrets, it's maybe the best thing that's happened to me, since I've been on my own, I'll remember it
I keep reading and reading it thinking it’s some kind of allegory for the sub
(chinese)
Tangentially related: this happened in like the early 2010's I had dropped out of high school and I joined a screenwriting class. I (16/maybe 17) was literally the only guy because it was all women in their forties and after the first assignment I made a sort of casual observation "isn't it weird that we have class of 95% women but no one has written a female protagonist?" and I dropped out a week later lol
That's the way of clubs these days. Some bullshit happens and nobody has the balls to point it out and stand their ground. Nor the idea that what makes your club special is focus on the specific thing you're about. Gatekeeping and vetting is alpha and omega.
it just accelerates the fall
Portuguese?
pro-geese bitch is being underutilized sounds like a good woman at her core maybe an animal activist? could be the PR you need to attract some hot vegan (skinny) women and solve ur fatty problem. good luck
Protigese didn’t follow protocol
I’m confused
You're 45 and write posts like a zoomer? I'm betting it's you who's the problem
another bread banger, thank you
no thank you thats very kind
Protestant Portugal is a cool idea tbh
I feel like the Portuguese are the most Germanic romance people so I could see it fitting their national character
Plus it would guarantee constant wars with Spain