Modern Mars Hill

I got to BYU - a large university with a lot of beautiful people. Hardly a day goes by when I don't tell some random girl I've never met that she's beautiful. Almost every time, the compliment makes her day. The times when it doesn't, the worst that happens is that she says "thanks" insincerely or in a confused way. It is entirely possible to compliment someone on their looks without being creepy or sexually harassing. Even I can do it, and let's be honest: I can be a jerk of a flirt sometimes. If you don't know someone and your first sentence is a compliment for  the purpose of flirting or otherwise getting the person to like you, then that looks like a compliment, but it's really flattery, and in Dale Carnegie's words "it ought to fail and it usually does." On the other hand, if you sincerely compliment someone with the goal of making their day better, it's almost impossible for this to go wrong. Since sexual harassment i...

My friend Nate Tucker recently asked "How do you improve your Mutual game?" Other friends asked "Are there any cheat codes?" and "How do you lower the difficulty level?" The Konami code only gives your character +5 Charisma, & it only works once. But there are some more organic ways to improve your characters' stats: With enough XP, you can tweak your profile in a way that will generate better scenarios and allow you to play with better players, but those sometimes cause harder boss-battles (If you thought the DTR at Level 11 was difficult, look at what happens at the Water Temple on Level 32). The most effective way to increase XP (along with developing skill trees and increasing travel distances) is unlocking new dialogue trees for your character and the other characters around you. A lot of players treat the other characters as NPCs, which leaves them with a very limited dialogue tree, usually set to either Small Talk or Jerk. You can unlock s...