Today I finished reading ‘The Game’ by Neil Strauss. It’s a fascinating read, although I wouldn’t say it really had a happy ending. I think the message is: have confidence, be yourself and don’t get so hooked on a girl before she even knows you exist that it makes you overly nervous and you end up scaring her away.

I started reading ‘The Game’ after throughly enjoying one of Neil’s other books, ‘Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life’ which I saw mentioned on Boing Boing Gadgets.

I think I personally enjoyed ‘Emergency’ more than ‘The Game’, but they were both very well written and fascinating insights into cultural niches that I honestly knew very little about before reading Neil’s books.

All that talk about PUAs and AFCs was fascinating and it was an interesting coincidence that I got a letter about the other AFC today. The NSW Office of Fair Trading wrote to me to let me know that the Armidale Food Co-Op will finally be completely dissolved in 90 days.

It was sad to be on the Board of Directors who had to shut the place down. Unfortunately, the AFC had developed so much debt over the years that there was little chance of trading out of it. I was pretty keen to get a loan from the local credit union and attempt to re-float the operation, but nobody else supported that idea and the Board ended up voting to shut it down.

In a way, what has risen from the ashes (The Food Shed and the Goldfish Bowl Bakery) is bigger and better than anyone could ever have expected…