believed to be pickup artists who tried to "pick them up", and some men recount trying out pickup techniques. Catherine Townsend, writing for The Independent, describes a negative experience with a man she believed was a pickup artist and used a lot of "negs" on her: "The problem is that some guys clearly don't know when to quit." An article in San Francisco Magazine recounts the experience of the blogger "Dolly", who is the author of the popular sex blog The Truth about Cocks and Dolls, with pickup artists. According to the article, Dolly was: After spending three days immersed in a Mystery Method Corp (now Love Systems) seminar, Gene Weingarten expressed his uneasiness about "a step by step tutorial for men in how to pick up women, make them comfortable in your presence, and bed them, ideally within seven hours of your first meeting" and wondered aloud, "Is there something inherently wrong with the notion of sexual conquest as a classroom-taught skill, complete with a long hierarchy of 'lines' that work, seemingly spontaneous topics of conversation that are anything but spontaneous, tricks for seeming 'vulnerable', and tips on how to behave so as to deliver subtle but effective nonverbal inducements to intimacy?" For an article for the Times Online, Hugo Rifkind participated in a seminar by Neil Strauss. Rifkind describes initially struggling with pickup techniques, eventually learning to attract women's interest, and then feeling guilty. Rifkind writes, "After a little more practice, my 'game' is improving dramatically. I can open with fluency, and there's an injection of confidence which comes from knowing exactly what you are going to say next." When he attracts a woman's attention, "she is—quite honestly—looking at me like I'm the most fascinating person she's ever met. As a human being and, perhaps more crucially, as somebody with a girlfriend, I feel like absolute scum." Commercialization The media attention and rapid increase in pickup artists has led to commercialization and competition. Gurus sell workshops, books, e-books, DVDs, CDs and online video courses and video-call mentoring over the Internet. In The Game, Strauss describes the competition between gurus. In The Journal, teaching of these methods is shown by way of 50+ examples. Academic research An academic paper on the community, published in 2012 by Eric C. Hendriks in the journal Cultural Analysis, details the value system guiding successful pickup artists based on an international study including participant