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.

This nasty story from future could only have been written by a nasty man from the past, 1980s Stephen King. This was back in the day when he didn’t care, when he broke rules, when he threw “faggot” and “nigger” around liberally, and when he wasn’t pants-wettingly anxious about being a remembered as a Great American Author. He was already something far better than that: a good writer.

He was considered trash at the time. But even if he was, he was a unique kind of trash that defies obvious and easy comparison. Ray Bradbury wishes he was this pissed off. Harlan Ellison wishes he was this coherent. Dean Koontz wishes he was this misanthropic. Apparently the entire book was written over the course of a week, which works just fine – he doesn’t have the chance to get snarky and arch and clever-clever.

The plot is familiar to all, and honestly, not all that sensible. At one point, he moves the story to its next junction by giving the main character a supernatural vision. Then at the end, King can’t figure out what to do, so he blows everyone up. But the story always seemed secondary to The Running Man. The real star is King’s gritty, quasi-cyberpunk world, which he shows off through flashbacks, monologues, and those unexpected shots across the bow King is so good at. A good example of the latter is when the main character meets a woman with full breasts, and concludes she must be corrupt or criminal (because she’s eating well.)

The pace is breakneck. You’re afraid to stop reading because you might get whiplash. The book simply doesn’t have a dull or boring moment, from the man’s run-in with gangsters with hearts full of gold (and lungs full of cancer), to the incredible high-stakes bluffing game at the airport, to the final catastrophic flight to the FreeVee offices. It’s impossible that an out of work every-man could be this good at outshooting and outwitting trained killers, but the relentless pace of the book quashes these objections in your mind. You can’t smell a fart when they’re travelling at Mach 3.

This is one of those “look at me” books that does anything for your attention, and tries to be bigger and louder than a movie. A comparison to Ellison seems appropriate here, because he’s also known for doing anything in his stories for the sake of holding a punter’s attention. But unlike Ellison, King doesn’t seem to have Narcissistic personality disorder, so I don’t know what his excuse is.

This is the best Bachman book (although Misery would have edged it out, had it been released under that name), and probably the darkest and grittiest of King’s novels. 1984 pastiches are dull and overfamiliar these days, and so are cautionary tales about couch potatoes and reality TV, but The Running Man still scorches and sizzles on the page. This isn’t a maudlin, sentimental old man who writes with his literary reputation first and foremost in mind. This is 1980s Stephen King. Don’t walk, run.