Elliot Rodger used to post on a forum called PUAHate. Don’t look for it, it’s gone now. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown, and also the head that runs a website implicated in mass murder. It is safe to say that the PUAHate webmaster is currently looking at travel brochures to Ibiza and shitting himself every time he hears a knock at the door.

I was a member there for a couple of years, and I can speak with some authority on what the culture was like. Many feminist websites are running hit pieces, calling PUAHate a one-purpose training ground for serial killers. This is wrong. PUAHate was a nuanced and complex training ground for serial killers.

It started out as a project by a disgruntled former PUA (Pick-Up Artist) called Nicholas. At first it was a place for people to expose scams and cons in the PUA industry…and lots of exposing happened, like when a former Venusian Arts student revealed that after he fell behind on payments, the VA CEO extorted him with threats of door to door debt collection.

Occasionally you’d get celebrity PUAs (oxymoron?) like Ross Jeffries and Mystery making a big entrance on the forum, perhaps under the impression that they could win PUAHate over (and use them as an army against their business competition). All such attempts failed. Two types of people were not tolerated on PUAhate: women, and PUAs. Anyone belonging to either group was trolled and ridiculed until they left the site.

But Nicholaus also had a section called “Shitty Advice”, where people could get dating advice outside the traditional PUA framework. Thus, a monster was born.

Shitty Advice rapidly became the most active part of the site, until eventually the rest of PUAHate became all but redundant. The tone at the start was one of comic negativity. People would go on “performance rage” style tirades about how women will only date male models, and how you will remain a virgin forever if you do not have a perfectly proportionate midface.

From time to time, people would get banned, and come back under awesome, self-pitying names like “EveryGirlTurnsMeDown”, “fatchicksrejectme”, “wankingandcrying”, and “BaldingCorpse”. But they always came back…Nobody was able to stay away for long. It became a running joke that Shitty Advice was almost impossible to quit. You had people literally begging the mods to IP ban them, so that they could get their free time back.

PUAHate was home to a frankly hilarious cast of characters. There was Chinpoko, inventor of LMS theory (ie, the idea that men need a trifecta of looks + money + status to succeed with women), who once spoke the Zen utterance “It is better to have a male model face and cancer than a 6/10 face and no cancer”. Then there was Pokerface, a terminally depressed poker pro who had tabled the WSOP a few times. Then there was jankinoff, a licensed therapist who dated an insane girlfriend who was apparently given to shitting herself. My favourite poster was aexexx, who may have been an actual comedic genius. He was given to entering random threads and recommending either 1) creative methods of suicide, or 2), that the poster perform DIY plastic surgery with nearby household tools.

But do you know the trouble with telling a joke? Eventually, you run into someone who thinks the joke is real.

Starting from around early 2013, a tide change began to occur at PUAHate. A new generation of posters started to appear who didn’t get the joke, and who thought it was all serious. I found this bizarre at first, and assumed they were playing along. I guess we now have proof at at least one of them wasn’t.

The tone went from mock tragicomic, to plain tragicomic, to tragic. The ideas and theories that had been suggested as idle mental masturbation were now being taken seriously. This was driven home one day when I posted a ridiculous troll thread about how parents should be legally required to mix Propecia in their son’s breast milk. For the most part…I got straight replies, giving me honest and well-thought critiques and refinements on my theory. This was disturbing.

I stopped posting by the end. The forum was getting too big and unwieldly. it was impossible to have a conversation. You’d start a thread, and within the hour that thread would be on the second page. The same topic would be posted at least ten times a week, the wheel laboriously re-invented each time.

I don’t think I ever talked to Elliot Rodgers, but I likely would have seen his screen-name a few times. I wonder what the nu-school PUAhaters would have thought of his actions? Maybe a few of them would have found them brave.

I don’t find killing unarmed people with a gun brave. Even by the standards of mass murderers, Elliot Rodgers was a coward. He shot himself at the end. What bigger act of cowardice could there be? A truly brave mass murderer would leave himself alive at the end to face the music.

The internet has midwived a style of short horror story called the “creepypasta”. Where horror novels are MOABs and fusion bombs, creepypasta are IEDs, designed to be efficient, minimal, and easy to transport (ie, memetic). And if they fail to blow up, no matter. This was a surprise attack from the shadows. There will be another one tomorrow.

Creepypastas are bound by two rules: they must be posted anonymously, and everyone who reads them must play along with the idea that they are real. One of the more famous ones I’ve seen is called Killswitch, about a creepy videogame (a popular topic.) The author is Catherynne M Valente. Either that or she’s stealing someone’s story, because it’s found in her 2013 collection, The Melancholy of Mechagirl.

It’s not very good. But it’s the greatest kind of not very good story…the sort that’s interesting to talk and think about. Most copypastas are vapid and hollow, Ikea-assembled by teenagers using dull ideas from horror movies. Try to analyse them and your hand closes on empty air.

But Killswitch is interesting, at least. It’s kneecapped by the fact that so many of her descriptions of videogame playing seem “off” or wrong. I doubt she plays games much. Maybe she was motivated to write it by the relative mysteriousness or exoticism of gaming (the same way white kids in Cleveland are attracted to Japanese culture, I suppose, because it’s unlike what they’re used to), but what seems mysterious to an ingénue will not seem mysterious to someone “in the know”. It will seem dead, and artificial.

Old-school videogames are popular topics for creepypasta partly because they invoke nostalgia, and also because there’s much more room for “creepyness” in a 8-bit 460×360 game where everything is displayed in blocky pixels and your imagination has to do the rest. The “cow level” in Diablo is a good example. For years it was rumoured that the player could access a secret part of the game by clicking a cow or some such, and gamers used large amounts of electricity trying to do this.

But the details have to be right, or the artifice is exposed and the creepyness is gone. The trouble with Killswitch is that we get things like this:

On the surface it was a variant on the mystery or horror survival game, a precursor to the Myst and Silent Hill franchises. The narrative showed the complexity for which Karvina was known, though the graphics were monochrome, vague grey and white shapes against a black background.

The game described sounds totally different to Myst or Silent Hill, and if it’s a survival horror game, comparisons to Infogrames’ Alone in the Dark would seem more appropriate than a 1999 Playstation game.

Porto awakens in the dark with wounds in her elbows, confused.

How does the player know that Porto is confused? How can we see the wounds in her elbows when the game is black and white? Valente’s describing a movie here, not a game.

Killswitch, by design, deletes itself upon player completion of the game. It is not recoverable by any means, all trace of it is removed from the user’s computer. The game cannot be copied.

That’s HUGE. If a real game was discovered that could not be copied, nobody would give a shit about the story or the characters. It would be one of the biggest tech stories ever. The software industry would spend millions or billions trying to understand or decipher the copy protection – if would be their chance to stomp the windpipe of piracy forever. Karvina Corporation would be the industry’s fair-haired child. But Valente just throws that out there as a plot point. The game cannot be copied, here is a full and here is a stop.

At least tell us what happens when we try to copy or reverse engineer the game. Is there an error message? We want to be in the midst of this story but Valente’s inexperience is holding us away at arm’s length.

When a dice flies, it bears seven fates on its vectors. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Or you can slam a bowl over the dice, and never know.

People choose the seventh option every day. It’s easy to throw a dice, or throw a stone, or fire a gun, if you don’t have to look at the consequences. The worst development in all of war was when we found a way to kill over a distance. Once, killing meant committing violence against a tangible body. Now, you can do it without thinking or knowing or caring or understanding.

Seeing is a gift, but gifts are more trouble than they’re worth sometimes. It’s easier sometimes to not see, to look in a dark corner and be blind, or to have a thought and not follow it through it its conclusion.

Let me tell of a man who rolled the dice and couldn’t look.

Shaka Zulu was a 19th century Zulu king who won a kingdom and defended it against enemies black and white. He was successful on the battlefield and plagued by witch doctors at home.

The Zulu held shamans in high regard as a class of lawyer priests. It was customary for shamans to receive half of a convicted man’s property, and they grew overfond of accusing wealthy people of crimes so as to share in their wealth.

One day, the actions of a particular witch exceeded Zulu’s patience, and he decided to punish her.

He imprisoned her in a hut and – because she claimed a hyena as her familiar – he put a fully grown male hyena in the hut with her before barring the door. He did not wish her to be lonely.

Hyenas are not timid scavenging animals. When hungry, they are dangerous predators. Snarls and barks came from inside the hut. The people in the kraal heard these sounds, and knew that a king’s vengeance was underway.

But then there was silence. No more snarls and barks. No sound at all came from inside the hut. The beast was quiet, and Shaka’s subjects whispered as to the meaning of this.

A few days later, Shaka ordered the hut burned down. He did not want the door opened, or for anyone to look inside. Flames devoured the hut with a million sucking mouths, and the secret inside was lost to history.

Behind Shaka’s back, there were whispers.

He’d been afraid.

Afraid of the hut being opened.

Afraid of seeing the hyena lying in the witch’s arms, sucking on her nipples. So he’d set the hut to burn. He threw the dice, and then turned his eyes away.

That this is the right way is hard to accept. Walking around with one’s eyes shut seems dangerous. You might fall into a hole in the ground.

But there’s a hole in the ground waiting for you anyway. There’s one waiting for all of us, and it will take everyone, blind and seeing alike. But you don’t have to think about that, if you don’t want to.

Please be blind.

Please don’t look.