How to Attempt and Fail at Profiting Off the Misery of Others During the Daytime

by Admiral Fartmore



Editor’s Note (Beau Dashington): Finally, a book about meeting women during regular business hours.

I Hope it’s Sunny Out: A Guide to Meeting Women in the Daytime by Tony D. is a guide to meeting women in the daytime. It is the second guide to meeting women in the daytime that I have read for this club, the first being Daybang: How to Casually Pick Up Girls During the Day by Roosh V. Having now read two guides to meeting women in the daytime, I feel confident that I can weigh in with some expertise on guides to meeting women in the daytime. At least in the daytime, that is. I’m useless when the sun goes down.

It is with this expert knowledge in hand that in this review I will focus less on the blatant misogyny involved in pick-up-artistry (which has been covered extensively, including by us here and here) and focus instead on reviewing I Hope it’s Sunny Out based on the book’s function and place in the PUA subculture. Why did Tony D. write it? Does it actually teach anything? Does it deliver on what Tony D. promises? How does it compare to other similar works?

To begin: this book is a piece of shit, like all of these books are pieces of shit, and like all of the authors are pieces of shit. It is an attempt by a man claiming special knowledge to make money off sad suckers by preaching a credo that denigrates women. In writing this book, Tony D. joins a long line of social snakeoil men offering a special secret if you pick up their bar tab.

Why do these books get written? Because life is difficult and confusing, and one of our society’s many shortcomings is a failure to connect with disillusioned, lonely young men. That creates a market to exploit, so people try to cash in. Tony D. may claim to have a higher motivation than personal gain, but it’s a lot more likely that he’s just bought his own bullshit. In reality, people like Tony have few true convictions beyond basic self-promotion, and in another time or place they might be trying to start a cult, a YouTube career, or a paramilitary group. On the flipside, if Joseph Kony were born and raised in a middle-class Maryland suburb, he almost certainly would have written a book on how to seduce women by now.

A 2012 New York Times bestseller

These men often blend good advice, which lures people in, with more extreme advice, which makes people reliant on them for further guidance. A typical book on picking up women (or changing your life in whatever way) will typically contain lots of regular steps like eating healthy, exercising, meditating, and so on. These tips are branded, to add the illusion of originality, and are combined with novel jargon, to create the illusion of expertise. So very general advice like “if you find someone interesting, you should introduce yourself,” turns into “run a cold approach on a 7,” or some other stupid shit. The validity of this common, unoriginal advice is then used to validate the more bizarre lessons, like advising readers to demean, harass and sexually assault women. Once you’ve bought into the bad stuff, well then they’ve got you by the balls.

Joseph Tony tries to do all this in I Hope it’s Sunny, but his scheme falls short due to a blend of laziness and unoriginality. This is where the book really differed from Day Bang: it is neither specific nor provacative enough to stand out amidst a sea of bullshit. To illustrate this point, I’ve tried to put together a graphical representation of how books providing life guidance generally work.

Let’s say we took every piece of advice or lesson from a book and placed it on a graph where the X axis is a range of “general” to “specific,” and the Y axis provides a range of “conventional” to “extreme.” I define conventional in this case as advice that is both widely accepted and widely understood. Extreme advice is going to be both uncommon and outside of social norms. Specific advice is situational and rigorous, where as general is about more of a mindset or broad approach.

For example, my mother taught me to treat others the way I’d like to be treated. That is conventional, general advice. That would go on the bottom-left quadrant of the graph. She also taught me to always approach a horse on the left side, because that is where the buckle of the halter is. That is specific, conventional advice and would occupy the bottom-right quadrant. She also told me you can’t trust Sikh men to board their dogs at the kennel on credit, which would be specific, extreme advice – top-right quadrant.

Rules established, lets look at how the various tidbits from I Hope It’s Sunny and other books plot across this chart:

A book like Day Bang by Roosh V. provides some general advice that is good, like exercising and eating right, but also provides very specific, very extreme advice, like hiding in the bushes waiting for women to follow, camping near the toilet at a café and waiting for women to use it, and other more sinister but less laughable examples. Also included are very general and very extreme lessons, like saying women are nothing more than a hole with a heartbeat. By contrast, a book like How to Avoid Huge Ships by J.W. Trimmer provides extremely practical and extremely specific advice on how to avoid huge ships. It’s also fairly conventional advice, as it hinges on the idea that you should avoid huge ships.

A publication like Inspire! by al Qaeda was generally filled with specific instructions on how to commit local acts of terror. It details extreme things with high specificity, like how to most effectively start local forest fires. It’s mostly pretty extreme stuff, of course, but it also contains plenty of new, useful information if your goal is to commit an act of terror. This brings us to Tony D:

The difficulty with Tony D. is that he doesn’t get into the nasty stuff all that much. He doesn’t seem to feel comfortable getting too specific, and for whatever reason he seems to avoid getting too extreme. He tells you that you should do pushups, and that you should eat well. He says you should be a conscientious worker, get a good job, pursue healthy hobbies, and that if you find someone interesting you should introduce yourself. Sure, there’s a bit of sociopathic analysis of how to speak to women and some 1920s pseudo-psychoanalysis that women are naturally frantic, afraid, and seeking guidance, but he doesn’t spend much time on negging, one of the more well-known lame things PUAs do. Granted, I believe it is industry standard that you should neg women more at night and less during the day, but still. Overall, Tony D. is content covering the same topics you would have learned in your high school career and personal planning class. If this kind of insight makes you a pick up artist, then my grandmother trained me to be a fucking pimp.

As a result, Tony’s advice almost exclusively inhabits the bottom-left quadrant like a little acorn dick:

By contrast, the typical advice of PUAs like Roosh V. spills across the graph like a bloated, disease-ridden demon dick:

There is hardly a single unique insight, misguided or not, to be found in I Hope it’s Sunny. Instead, the majority of Tony Acorn’s advice is so shallow – so unoriginal – that at one point he just gives up and starts listing stuff that he thinks is cool:

Imagine paying money for this.

Now, Tony D. might come back and say “hey fella, I only wasted 3 pages listing cool jobs,” or he might say “it was tongue in cheek,” but here’s the thing: the book is only 31 pages. 12,229 words. The book isn’t even five times longer than this review. But even without a page to spare, Tony has to pad it by just listing bullshit. You know what I call that? Lazy.

In fact, laziness might just be the defining trait of this unedited, nonsensical mess: it is riddled with grammatical and spelling errors, which tells you Tony didn’t bother editing or asking someone else to edit. This results in annoying reptitive mistakes as well as stretches of total nonsense. For example, look at how bad Lazy Tony fucks up explaining the very simple idea that you should not grab a stranger from behind for no reason:



You’re a fucking idiot, Tony.

Two-foot Tony’s complete lack of creativity or originality traces all the way back to the book’s title, “I Hope it’s Sunny Out.” This references the idea that people are in a better mood in the sunshine rather than the rain, a complex concept that Tony mentions a few times. He also isn’t very creative when it comes to his pen name, as it took all of five minutes to find him on social media, including a quaint little account on couchsurfing.com:

If you stay with Tony, remember to look over your shoulder once in a while. He might be right in front of you.

Tony does have one specific lesson for all the boys out there: you should cut your tits off. A big part of his personal journey as a PUA was getting a cosmetic surgery to remove his gynecomastia. He references this several times. I don’t really mention this to make fun of anyone with manboobs, because it can certainly be a source of embarassment, but Tony goes on about his old rack to the point of bragging so I feel obliged to mention them. Furthermore, breast reduction surgery is the only unique piece of advice in this book. The cosmetic surgery appears to be presented as a kind of symbol for “confronting whatever is holding you back,” and it seems to be Tony’s only real unique insight on life. He even has another book called A Thousand Tiny Failures – fiction, based on a true story – about a man that undergoes a similar kind of social metamorphasis by offloading his bazookas.

We get it, Tony – you had a beautiful set of tits.

I was in Tokyo while reading this book, and by chance I ended up talking with a “retired” PUA at a bar. The guy ran seminars, had a website – the whole nine yards. He told me that “the pickup artist community used to be great, but it’s filled with assholes now.” He no longer identified as a PUA but still worked as a “lifecoach” on the side of his low-skill employment as an English teacher. Yeah. He was vague about who the assholes were, and so I was left wondering if he meant the most extreme pieces of shit like Julien Blanc that make the news, or the lazy nobodies like Tony that are now sadly a dime a dozen.

I Hope it’s Sunny is a lazy attempt to make $5.99 per copy off the misery of others. It is a pathetic contribution to an already pathetic industry, and in the end it’s simply embarassing.

Tony was better off with tits.

ADMIRAL FARTMORE