

The Origins of Illimitable Men:



Since the beginning of this month it’s been two years since I begun posting on the red pill subreddit. I’m not one of the first members in the community (if I remember correctly, I found it circa the 4-5,000~ mark,) however I am one of the oldest members who stuck around through all the board’s ups-and-downs. So from my perspective, I’m not “one of the originals” but to most of you, I am, as you found the community after I did.

Most unwittingly, since I started this blog in October 2013, the site has garnered a fair measure of popularity. I’ve amassed a following far greater than I had ever hoped or intended for. Truly, this is a most pleasant accident. I really only began this blog as a hobby, and as something of a vault for all my crudely written essay-length Reddit comments. After I first found the red pill community, I was excited, infatuated with the ideas I had been exposed to, and had much additional insight to add to the topics I was reading. My Reddit posts were quite popular, so numerous voices in the red pill Reddit community were telling me I should start a blog. Taking that into consideration, alongside the fear my essay-length comments I had invested so much thought and energy into were going to be left to sequester in the murky depths of Reddit, I started the blog. I had a desire based on passion, I had a healthy level of fear and I had support from the community.

Over time my writing has developed, as has my depth and clarity of thought pertaining to the world we live in. Men have started to look up to me and come to me for advice regularly. My blog has grown steadily, even though I do not post new articles frequently, neither do I aggressively advertise or pay for marketing. Last month for example, I neither posted nor advertised (apologies for that, you all keep asking me when the next article is coming – I’ll address this further in!) but I still managed a whopping 100,000 pageviews from 40,000 unique visitors. I can but deduce that quality of word alongside quality of thought both speak for themselves in harmonic unison. For a site that updates as infrequently as it does, and gets advertised as little as it does, it’s done well. I can already tell I haven’t tapped into this site’s full potential and – I want to change that, hence this post.

It would seem my little hobby is going from strength-to-strength, as evidenced by the reality that I can neglect this site for a month and it can still show significant growth (don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere – I was merely conducting an “interest/demand experiment.”)

Editing & Enhancing Old Work:

Since I began writing, my style has developed, it has become noticeably better and my grammar isn’t as bad as it once was. Although, to a grammar Nazi, I shall always seem Jewish and thus grammatically imperfect. Be especially astute of my use of commas, colons, semi-colons and periods. Ugh. Terrible, just terrible. To be perfectly honest, a lot of my old stuff wouldn’t make the cut for publishing anymore. That’s how much I’ve raised my writing standards since I first begun to write.

I don’t regret writing that old stuff, it helped me develop into the writer that I am now, and the thinking/knowledge in those articles is still sound, however when you improve at something and look back at your early work, it is something of an embarrassment from an intellectual standpoint. It’s the writer’s equivalent of a bodybuilder seeing an old picture of himself when he was fat. Alas, I intend to go back through all my older work and improve the flow, punctuation, grammar etc. Where I deem it relevant I will add additional insight, perhaps entirely new concepts and trains of thought.

Some articles may benefit from a good few extra paragraphs, some may be re-written entirely. This is of course an ongoing process. As this undergone literary work will be published as revisions to already-published articles, you won’t get an e-mail notification when I update them. To account for this, I will make a new thread in the red pill subreddit when something is remastered. If you’re active there, you’ll see these articles go live as they’re slowly reworked. My highest priority article to rework is “Utilising The Dark Triad – Machiavellianism” which has been bothering me for a while now, and will receive polishing as well as additional content. I also want to better polish The Dark Triad Q&A Part 1 as well as publish a Part 2, I also owe you an article on Dark Triad Shit Tests, but that’s enough of me blabbing on about my intentions.

Writing Style:

I’ve elected to keep rants and informal-sounding posts on Reddit, whilst this blog will house my professionally crafted articles. If I posted rants to the blog I’d post more frequently and give people more content, however rants tend to be of a lower quality and they aren’t so classy as articles I’ve poured my soul into constructing. Alas, all and any such posts are relegated to the fiery depths of the Reddit posting platform. Only the best makes it here.

Frequency of Posting and Post Length:

I am a fixating, obsessive perfectionist when it comes to my writing. I spend far more time on crafting any one article than most writers probably expend on a dozen. That should be immediately obvious from articles like Law 01 In-Depth, which would fill 24 industry standard book pages, or The Shit Test Encyclopedia which would fill 22. I spent 10+ hours on each of those posts. Without exaggerating, I’ve lost count precisely just how many hours they took to write, but be assured it was no small task. In truth, they don’t take so long to write as they do to edit. I will still do very long posts like this on occasion, although I am going to try capping most articles at around 3,000 words and then splitting them into a series of parts should the word limit of the original piece exceed 4,000 words. That’s not me deliberately holding back content, but rather, I want to be posting articles that people have enough concentration to read, not articles so demanding they act as miniature books.

I am an artist, a craftsman, I consider writing to be an art form. I believe that writing without artistic flair or rational philosophical meditation over the intricacies of what one is exploring is a waste of time. If I want to conversate crudely and without refinement, I’ll do so with my voice, informally. When I write, I ask myself “would someone want to make profit off this when it’s out of copyright and I’m dead? – No? Then it’s not worth publishing.”

Truly, anyone can write, we live in an age where literacy is common, but few become writers in the truest sense of the word, a real literary wordsmith, an author. This is a level I aspire to. I don’t just write any old nonsense into a text box and call it writing, anybody can do that, it doesn’t require any talent. I very carefully pick my words and connect up my thoughts, I try to be clear without sacrificing detail. I have a quality over quantity mantra, I allude to this on the “about page.“

I shan’t probably ever update any more than 4 or 5 times in one month, simply because I really like to iron out the logic and wording in each article. I do a lot of fine-tuning because I’m a perfectionist. Like I said, to me, writing is a craft and a process that you do with a sophisticated measure of depth. Short and frequent 500 word updates full of copious short paragraphs discussing basic principles at a superficial level aren’t my style, and they never will be. I’m aiming at a more intellectual audience, or at least, people who try to use their brain and genuinely enjoy reading for the sake of reading. When I see lots of short 1-2 line paragraphs on a site I think “this is aimed at stupid people with very low attention spans, this is what magazines and tabloids do.” I strive to put my writings in a class that is completely antithetical to this.

Ideally I want to post once a week, although, due to the bustle of everyday life, this may not always be possible for me. I’ve never committed to a schedule for this site before, in fact since the site begun I have written intermittently on and off, inconsistently. However, as the site has gotten more popular, it would be foolish to pass up on its success. I have a following (that’s you) who want me to provide a certain something they don’t get anywhere else, I aim to continue providing that certain something. I’m taking the site more seriously now, and no longer treating it as a mere hobby. As such, I’m at the point where I think it’s time to commit to a timetable. I will only deviate from said timetable if it is in the interest of artistic integrity to do so, eg: I won’t rush an article just to hit the Friday deadline, but I’ll try not to keep you hanging as long as I have in the past.

“Are You Going to Release a Book? You Should Release A Book!”

It almost seems like if I don’t release a book, people will be annoyed, save all my articles and make a disjointed PDF out of it as an act of anarcho-Libertarian protest. It would be as if I had broken some cardinal law embedded into the unspoken meta social fabric of the red pill subreddit. Of course, I mock in jest, but there is truth to what I’m saying. I’ve been asked about this countless times, so figured I’d include this within this meta announcement, too. Yes, I’m going to write a book. In fact, I have a rough timetable for 3 different books. I aim to have the first one out by the end of this year which will consist of entirely new material (zero-content copied and pasted from this blog.)

However, let me be clear. This book will be something of a collection of short essays derived from aphorisms that are categorised into different groups, eg: Machiavellianism, Women, Masculinity, Self-Improvement, General Philosophy, that kind of thing. It won’t be marketed as red pill, so if you know a young guy and you want to help him out, you’d hand him this book and he’d have easy-to-access knowledge in his pocket that has none-of-the-taint of our community’s reputation “Ooooh it’s red pill, it’s evil! Surely the book must be full of utter delusional trite!” – “news just in, IllimitableMan’s released a rape manual!” This book will be a different approach from what you’re used to on the blog in the sense that it’ll be easier to pick up and put down. Effectively, it will be more condensed without sacrificing depth. I’m unsure of price point as of yet (open to suggestions in the comments) and I aim to have this out before 2016, hopefully in time for Christmas!

Monetising:

I’ve been writing a long time now for the red pill community for free. I haven’t run any advertisements or done any proper monetisation of the site (just a few Amazon links here and there, which produce pocket change, really.) I’d be pretty stupid not to capitalise on the success of my blog by refusing to monetise it out of some poorly fabricated ruse to seem saintly. Let’s be honest, I write about some pretty fucked up shit (I am alluding to dark triad theory here.) Nobody who reads my site imagines me to be anything close to saintly in the slightest, some even believe I am a psychopath (hilarious, actually) yet they appreciate what I do and enjoy reading what I write. Great, so why shouldn’t I get paid for that? Quid pro quo as the Roman’s said, or in English: “something for something,” indeed, a fair exchange of value. I provide value, I deserve value back.

Speaking of Amazon, I recently added a banner to the bottom of this site that goes to Amazon. If you click it and buy the things you were going to buy anyway, I get paid a commission. If you use Amazon a lot, consider making this a regular habit, if you’re a regular reader, it would help me out a lot.

I have considered running ads on the site, but I don’t really want to clutter the site with advertisements unless it’s the only effective way to monetise. A lot of people use ad blockers anyway, which would only cut into potential revenue. That’s why, as of this announcement, I’ve begun experimenting with crowdfunding my work using a service named Patreon.

Essentially, and this ties into the previous point on posting frequency, every time I post an article I get paid by my most devout fans. The content here will still be freely available to everyone, but those who consider themselves to be the most loyal of readers can pledge a voluntary dollar amount they’re willing to pay for each post I publish. In turn for this, you receive small perks for supporting me. Naturally, you’re not going to be the only one supporting my work, others will be too, so even if it’s only a dollar per article you pledge, it doesn’t matter. With many people doing the same thing, this will build up a sizeable pot. As I gain more and more patrons, the total pot size I get paid for publishing something new rises, acting as an ever-increasing financial incentive for me to post more frequently. Although, please allow me to stress, and I cannot stress this emphatically enough: I will not begin posting banal bullshit with increased frequency simply to get paid. Please refer to what I said above about taking the art of writing and crafting well thought-out articles very seriously. Even this announcement has gone through careful planning. Writing is my art and has been for quite some time, I’m looking to capitalise on that now, but I’m not willing to sell out to do so.

You can find out more about supporting my work via Patreon by checking out my Patreon profile or clicking the link in the “Support IM” widget that’s recently been added to the sidebar.

To conclude:

I want to take Illimitable Men to the next level by turning the heat up a notch. I have hundreds of unpublished drafts at various levels of completion, as well as some exciting projects/concepts under wraps for publication in the future. You’ll be happy to know that one of these projects is finishing my work on the in-depth 48 Laws of Power. Just be patient with me, and I’ll deliver quality. 2015 looks like it’s going to be a great year for Illimitable Men, and I’m glad to have you along for the ride on the wave of success I’ve been enjoying. So thanks for being a reader, and should you choose to support my work, a patron.

– Illimitable Man