I miss PUAHate. Its denizens used to drive me up the wall with their stupidity…but they brought something to my life I can’t live without. Their raw, naked patheticness. Their willingness to air laundry that wasn’t just dirty, but irradiated and coated in sarin gas. When you get the lowest of the low together, nobody has anything to hide, and all the walls come down. The site’s radical honesty felt incredible, like mother’s milk, except PUAHate was the complete opposite of having a woman’s nipples in your mouth.

PUAHate was too good to last. One permavirgin on a shooting spree later, and the site is one with the dust of Tyre and Sidon. Why should we pay for one dipshit’s mistakes? Its like the real life version of this Onion article. I want to hunt former webmaster Nicholaus down and demand satisfaction.

Anyway, the grieving and mourning process has ended, and I am ready to find a replacement for PUAHate. But where? What sites allow you to admire the very worst humanity has to offer?

1. Reality Television

No deal. Reality TV is so obviously set up and manipulated that it’s not even clever to joke about it any more. Even the shows that aren’t outright staged have an ambience of fake-looking TVness that locks me out of the show. The camera angles, the lighting, it’s too clean, and too professional. It’s cinema verite with the verite left on the cutting room floor. Modern reality TV is like a petting zoo where you touch the animals through a thick layer of polythene.

I do enjoy the little moments that show the reality behind the facade.

Here’s an example: someone from Jersey Shore mentioned in an interview that all the housemates take huge, hour-long showers. Why? Because the bathrooms were the only place in the building free of the prying eyes of the camera. They were trapped inside a panopticon. That’s a turn-on. That’s reality TV. Someone should make a reality TV show that capitalises on that. Where the contestants are told they’re filming a documentary or something…but it’s actually private footage from their bedrooms and bathrooms that gets put on air. That would be exciting.

Until then, I don’t think it’s possible for reality TV to be less interesting.

2. Reddit’s /r/cringe related boards.

The concept is simple. Minor social missteps, captured in film and image for all eternity. This man, crossing the street too early. This man, who left his flash on. This man, who won a contest to lose his virginity to a porn star. Yes, cringers are almost always male.

These places are great but they’re missing another important element: running storylines. In PUAHate you’d get to watch people change over time. Aexexx went from advocating “LMS Theory” (that is, your value to women is determined by your Looks, your Money, and your Status), to a more hardline “FACE Theory” (that is, Face and Age Conquer Everything – your value to women is determined by your facial attractiveness and you not being too much older than her). You’d see Pokerface abandoning his attempts at being a poker pro, descending into a morass of depression, and returning occasionally to threaten suicide. All this cringe stuff has names blurred out, and everything is censored and anonymous. It’s like a sketch variety show vs a soap opera. Good for what it is, but it’s not the same.

3. 4chan, 8chan, whateverchan

Similar problem to the above. People just come and go. Everyone’s anonymous. No “characters”.

4. Remnants of PUAHate

The thing I miss about the old-school web is that pages tended to stay around longer. You could find a website that hadn’t been updated in years, and as long as someone was paying the web hosting bill, it would still work. Even if someone consciously deleted stuff, you could usually find a few bits and pieces (remember browsing someone’s FTP tables after their index page was deleted?)

Now, everything’s driven by PHP databases, and when something breaks, EVERYTHING vanishes into the void. When websites are down, they really are down. Deleting fucking everything has never been easier. Thousands of records can be erased with a few mouse clicks, or by sheer accident. And don’t get my started on that Bobby Tables douchebag.

PUAHate comes from the later era, so 99.9% of the site was swallowed by Nicholaus’s frantic attempts to avoid incrimination and stay out of jail. But you can still find bits and pieces – the website was too bizarre and surreal to not leave a mark on the internet.

PUAHaters were obsessed with male pattern baldness, and you could often find them slinging obscure bits of theory on MPD support forums. Here’s one. PUAHate legend Chinpoko apparently liked to hang out on these websites, and was often banned for traumatising men with his auguries of doom for their sex lives.

Bodybuilding.com was another of their benighted haunts. I note that the word “PUAHate” gets asterisked out when you type it there, something that usually happens only under extreme circumstances (come to think of it, I believe Elliot Rodger posted on BB.com as well).

But perhaps the best legacy of PUAHate is contained in Elliot Rodger’s own memoir (of sorts), My Twisted World. Inside it you will find the entire ethos of the site, bar one important thing: he decided to do something about it.

“I soon found out the name of the beautiful girl in my math class. Her name was Brittany Story. Being the obsessed stalker that I was, I looked her up on Facebook, and what I found shattered my already wounded heart to pieces. She had a boyfriend. Not only that, but her boyfriend was the type of boy I have always hated and despised: a tall, muscular surfer-jock with a buzz cut. As I looked at all the pictures of the two of them together, I shivered with pure hatred. I could physically feel the hatred burn through my entire body. I wanted to kill both of them, and I was capable of doing it. Brittany Story should have been mine, and if can’t have her, no one should! I fantasized about capturing the two of them and stripping the skin off her boyfriend’s flesh while making her watch. Why must my life be so full of torment and hatred? I questioned to the universe with turmoil roiling inside me. I screamed and cried with anguish that day. My housemate Spencer heard it all, but I didn’t care.”

Adolf Hitler was 1.75m tall, a shade shorter than the average German height at the time. Joseph Goebbels was 1.65m. Heimlich Himmler was 1.74m . Erwin Rommel was 1.7m. Erich Raeder was 1.68m.

Benito Mussolini was 1.69m tall. He was a Northern Italian, who are normally taller than the Italian average. Victor Emmanuel III was 1.53. Haile Selassie of Ethiopia was 1.6m. Francisco Franco was 1.60m.

Hirohito was 1.65m tall. Hideki Tojo was 1.63m tall. Yamamoto Isoruku was 1.6m tall. In this period, the average Japanese footsoldier height was 1.6m tall.

The Japanese underwent a pretty unprecedented postwar height increase, now men average 1.7m and women 1.58m. Various driving factors have been suggested, such as better nutrition and reduction of childhood diseases.

Winston Churchill was 1.67m. Anti-war Neville Chamberlain was 1.88m. Bernard Montgomery was 1.65m.

Other than Harry S Truman (who was 1.72m), the US’s big kahunas seem pretty tall. Mac Arthur was 1.83m. Patton was 1.87. Eisenhower was 1.79m. I can’t find information on Spruance and Nimitz’s heights, but based on photographs they seem about average in stature. The the height of the average US soldier back then was was 1.7m.

Famed Finnish sniper Simo “The White Death” Hayha was 1.6m.

Joseph Stalin was 1.65m. Nikita Khrushchev was 1.6m. I can’t find information on Georgy Zhukov’s height, but based on this picture he seems fairly short (probably similar to Montgomery).

You know where I’m going with this.

WW2 = the greatest midget wrestling event ever.

Here’s a good way to tell how enthralled by a celebrity you are – what’s the least valuable thing you’d want to own of theirs?

Ace Frehley’s guitar pick? Kylie Jenner’s toothbrush? Paul McCartney’s used handkerchief? When Britney Spears shaved her head, her hairs were sold for $16 each. A hotel plumber once showed up on 4chan offering to sell Selena Gomez’s used bathwater for $35 a pint.

If you’re a fan of “noir prophet of the cyberpunk subgenre” (Wikipedia’s words, not mine) William Gibson, here’s your chance to own No Maps For These Territories, a documentary that simulates a long and boring car ride with Gibson in the back seat.

“On an overcast morning in 1999, William Gibson, father of cyberpunk and author of the cult-classic novel Neuromancer, stepped into a limousine and set off on a road trip around North America. The limo was rigged with digital cameras, a computer, a television, a stereo, and a cell phone. Generated entirely by this four-wheeled media machine, No Maps for These Territories is both an account of Gibson’s life and work and a commentary on the world outside the car windows. Here, the man who coined the word “cyberspace” offers a unique perspective on Western culture at the edge of the new millennium, and in the throes of convulsive, tech – driven change.”

The point of this, I suppose, is insight porn. Just get this reclusive genius in front of a camera, and let him regale us with his genius. The problems with this documentary are twofold.

First sin (venal), William Gibson just isn’t that compelling as a speaker. He stutters. He drifts off. He sounds unsure of his own words. This is one of those times when you want a narcissistic egomaniac who loves the sound of his own voice. Harlan Ellison or Bruce Sterling would have been great in the back seat of that car, pardon my Freud.

I have friends who’ve met Gibson in person, and they concur: he’s not equipped to be the spokesperson of a movement, and furthermore, he never even wanted to play that role. he wrote a book, it blew up, and he had the role foisted on him. I keep thinking back to Dylan Avery’s 9/11 conspiracy film. All he wanted was a directorial credit, instead he became Sauron’s Mouthpiece for a movement of crazies who think the collapsing buildings were holographic projections (and ironically, this poisoned his chances of actually becoming a serious director).

But the second sin (mortal) is this:

If you want to celebrate the power of change, the 90s-2010s are an extremely underwhelming time to do it in.

In the 50s and 60s, you could feel optimism. We were roaring ahead. Lasers. Jet engines. The double helix. Man born of the Earth, stepping down a ladder to stand upon the cold regolith of the moon.

Then, it all seemed to stop. The Concorde was retired. Our technological brief is now “rebuild the things of the 50s and 60s so they’re a bit smaller and fit in your pocket”. You no longer need even a single percentage point to write NASA’s share of the budget. And we started to learn more about the environment, and our planet, which forced a shift of perspective: progress at any cost is not always a possible or worthwhile goal. Resource-wise, we’re definitely now coming down on the wrong side of the Hubbert’s bell curve. Worse than Peak Oil, we’ve also hit Peak Ideas – it seems all the $20 bills are finally gone from the sidewalk, along with the $10s, the $5s, and all but a few of the coins. Any further technological progress is likely to be slow and expensive.

The past twenty years has given us mass user adoption of the internet – a toy which was first invented in the 60s and 70s. It’s a little like picking up a jacket at the start of winter and finding that you left money in the pocket at the end of winter last year – it’s the past generation we have to thank.

How does this relate to Gibson talking in a conspicuously non-flying car?

It’s easy to be underwhelmed by prophets of the future, whether it’s cyberpunk or transhumanism or anything else. In the words of a CS Lewis character, “your wallet’s empty, your eggs addled, your fish uncaught, your promises broken. Stand aside then and let others work.”

Just look at the vernacular thrown around in the 1990s, and see how dated it seems now. Strangely, language that attempts to evoke the future ages much faster than the rest of our vocabulary. “Smooth” and “fun” sound timeless and contemporary, despite their old age. “Electrolux” and “Spectravision” sound tacky and old, like appliances you’d see around Grandma’s house.

Then you have “cyberspace,” which is supposed to sound cutting edge but is now exclusively used by politicians trying to scare old people. The cutting edge stops cutting damned quickly. If it’s a knife, it’s a knife bevelled at an extreme angle that quickly snaps, leaving bluntness behind.

Cyberpunk came, and went, and the world kept turning. It had the rise of home computing and the internet to fuel it, but mostly, I just think it was a brief fashion. Like how for a few months every white girl had a bindi on her forehead because of Gwen Stefani in the “Just A Girl” music video. Did I mention that Gibson wears dark sunglasses through much of the car trip, even when it’s overcast?

Gibson’s prognostications are interesting, but we’re still not living in the world he imagined, and I doubt we ever will. This documentary is interesting, but mostly you feel like you’re watching someone wander up a blind cul’de’sac while pronouncing he’s discovered the route to India.