online/offline? dating thread for 3Q 2010

[recursivelyenumerable]

So after successfully navigating the employment system and, for the first time ever, finding a job on my own and not through connections, I thought maybe next I could do the same with the dating system. What's troubling me is that, while the online dating stuff feels kind of limited, kind of depressing and there's still a mild stigma against it, I'm having a hard time seeing what the alternative is. So, finding a job is actually fairly straightfoward. You go on to craigslist, monster.com and wherever else and send out resumes every day, you go to calagator.com and attend any programming-related conferences or user group meetings in the area, you maintain a LinkedIn profile and keep in touch with recruiters, you keep studying new technical topics and working on projects on GitHub, blah blah blah. Sites like okcupid vaguely resemble this but the offline system just seems totally incomprehensible. It's like if you were supposed to find jobs by just approaching random companies, hanging out in the reception lobby a bit (but not too much) and asking them for interviews. And there's not even a straightforward way to find out what kind of company it is or what kind of positions they might be hiring for, you have to infer that from the logo design and branding colors/fonts.

[recursivelyenumerable]

After thinking about this a bit more, I've more or less decided that it's a bad idea to make this an explicit goal for the near future. The connection between action and consequence is too weak. Better to apply myself to activities that may be vaguely conducive to "finding a relationship" but aren't specifically directed at that goal. Then it will just be something that does or (more likely) doesn't happen, but it's not something I can make happen. Actually I've always felt that way about finding jobs too, but it's even more true here, and there's no actual necessity to make this happen in any timeframe, so, yeah. It just doesn't work.

[Madrun Badrun]

void findGirlInRealLife(Girl* myGirl) = O(n!)
void findFatGirlOnline(FatGirl* fatty) = O(lgn)

[recursivelyenumerable]

Wait, girls these days expect you to have already allocated memory for them before you even meet?

[Madrun Badrun]

No, they allocate it for you when you find them.  That way it is a pain in the ass to delete them on your own terms.

You can learn more in my upcoming online dating help book Girls and Garbage Collection: a Guide to Programing in LOVE

[drohne]

in olympia my total lack of gaydar is fucking up my shit. i am not exaggerating for comic effect when i say that i have tried and obviously failed to pick up four lesbians in the last few weeks, and didn't even realize what i was doing until like days after. it's a good thing i have a lot of gay friends or i'd probably be run the fuck out of town. i was at this benefit drag show last night and it hit me when i was smoking outside afterwards: here are all those cute girls i get along really well with but don't call me back, and they're here with their girlfriends. i guess i go for hip, well-dressed girls with good taste and slightly masculine personalities, and in olywa that translates to LESBIANS

did real fucking well on my west coast roadtrip tho

edit: like this is how dense i am: i was talking to this awesome girl thursday night, and she was telling me about a female friend of hers she likes as a person but is unattracted to physically, and my thought was 'she's bi, that's fucking hot' even though she'd given me no indication that she also liked boys. and i was all over her good god i probably have a reputation as that dude that tries to fuck lesbians

[recursivelyenumerable]

OK, I have a plan to channel this energy into something productive.

[Bloodwake]

Well, I'm pretty much set on dating for Quarter 3, and maybe longer.

[drohne]

by the way, evolutionary biology would probably convince you of the macrolevel hoplessness of any sort of dating technique. this is controversial admittedly, and more complex than this in humans, but male animals probably advertise their genetic fitness accurately, and female animals definitely gauge this accurately (or their genes just don't persist). on the microlevel there's obviously stuff you can do: touch girls as much as they'll let you, dress and dance well, etc.

then of course there's the actual thing that guys who don't get girls need to do, which is fucking be realistic and go fuck fat chicks

edit: in the sense of its giving you an understanding of sexual interactions, the selfish gene is the undoubtedly the best dating manual ever. it's not going to like give you pickup lines, i've tried quoting it at girls in bars, it doesn't work

[recursivelyenumerable]

I have a sort of complicated ambivalent relationship with your realistic solution, but, putting that aside for now, what you're postulating strikes me as a kind of port of the efficient-market hypothesis to the dating market. My impression is that transaction costs are pretty high and that would tend to reduce etc. etc., anyway I'm off to go do stuff.

[drohne]

whatever, some fat chicks are still cute, a lot of them are cool, and when you're balls deep in one you don't care much that they're fat. you care that they're fat when you're hanging around with your friends

here is the zen koan version of the selfish gene as applied to the sexual frustrations of young men: why don't women want to sleep with you? because you don't get laid.

[recursivelyenumerable]

hatever, some fat chicks are still cute, a lot of them are cool, and when you're balls deep in one you don't care much that they're fat. you care that they're fat when you're hanging around with your friends

yeah, tbh most of caring about looks in general is more about ego/peer pressure than anything else. and the peer pressure I think is mostly a cartel-like thing

[recursivelyenumerable]

tbh when I started this thread this morning I wasn't that emotionally invested in any of this, but now you've put me into full-on angst mode

[drohne]

oh, even richard dawkins would be horrified by my use of genetic calculations to determine sexual behavior, angst mode is a perfectly natural reaction

edit: it might cheer you up to know that the important evolutionary fact about humans is the extreme mutability of our behavior. it might depress you again to know that this trait diminishes rapidly with age

editedit: and it might cheer you up again to know that brains with particularly complex programs often take longer to get set up than ordinary ones (this is more of an intuition that i share with my professor than something that i have real evidence for)

[recursivelyenumerable]

Another problem I have with making evolutionary biology your go-to field for explaining human behavior, is that evolution works over very long time frames and is largely about adapting organisms to their environment, but humans have made radical changes to their environment over very short time frames (in evolutionary terms), and so it no longer much resembles the one we evolved in. For example, sex is  "supposed" to be about producing offspring to carry on your genes, but I bet on your west coast roadtrip adventure you and whatever other parties were involved weren't particularly interested in producing offspring, and in fact probably actively took measures to avoid doing so. From an evolutionary-biology standpoint that's like a postmodern parody of sex - are ironic orgasms more prevalent than generally thought?

[bagofeyes]

the way you guys analyse dating means you'll be single for life. sorry.

[drohne]

Birth control is one of those environmental features we haven't adapted to, so from a neurotransmission perspective, sterile sex is probably just as good as the productive kind, and I think the genetic math is still useful. At least for young people - I've been considering the distressing possibility that I will eventually be unhappy if I don't actually produce babies, particularly as I watch a lot of my friends settle down. Cheeringly, being a deadbeat dad is a huge genetic win. Like HUGE.

Edit: or actually the more distressing possibility is that babies will just start to look like a good idea, and once you've made a baby, not raising it either takes a lot of resolve or some serious moral degeneracy. I'm doing good on both, but am I doing good enough

btw using the phone hence the caps

[recursivelyenumerable]

the way you guys analyse dating means you'll be single for life. sorry.

Yeah, we should probably be using a database and an OLAP cube, these ad-hoc approaches won't scale.

[recursivelyenumerable]

Birth control is one of those environmental features we haven't adapted to, so from a neurotransmission perspective, sterile sex is probably just as good as the productive kind, and I think the genetic math is still useful.

if the neurotransmission reward system is set up to encourage people to reproduce with the genetically fit, but it's possible to game the system w/r/t the "reproduce" bit via recent technological/cultural innovations as yet unaccounted for by biological evolution, that suggests the possibility of gaming the system w/r/t the "genetically fit" bit as well, which would undermine your efficient-meat-market hypothesis.

[ToxicAdam]

the way you guys analyse dating means you'll be single for life. sorry.

Yeah, we should probably be using a database and an OLAP cube, these ad-hoc approaches won't scale.

This is my favorite post in months.

[recursivelyenumerable]

I liked my "efficient meat market hypothesis" coinage better. Nobody ever appreciates how clever I think I am  :'(

[Madrun Badrun]

Lack of recognition of Recursive's cleverness depresses me too.

[ToxicAdam]

I think the fast food industry needs to co-opt a fancy word like barista for their employees. They have the same skill level.

 

[Madrun Badrun]

You're talking down the girl that Mojo talked up.

[bagofeyes]

You're talking down the girl that Mojo talked up.

explain that one, recursivelyenumerable!

[Cormacaroni]

we just need a few more virgins ITT and we'll have enough to sponsor Wrath's trip to the US

[ToxicAdam]

You're talking down the girl that Mojo talked up.

That's what makes baristas so hot. No marketable skills, hired for their looks, but they don't have the low self-esteem baggage of fast food workers.

Best part is you don't have to worry about co-workers snaking your woman. All the men there are gay.

[Madrun Badrun]

we just need a few more virgins ITT and we'll have enough to sponsor Wrath's trip to the US

[BlueTsunami]

This thread depresses me.

Same here. Online dating threads in general are a sure fire way to make me feel sad.

[Madrun Badrun]

This thread depresses me.

Same here. Online dating threads in general are a sure fire way to make me feel sad.

So true.

[Mupepe]

holy shit this thread is wtf

[Robo]

in olympia my total lack of gaydar is fucking up my shit. i am not exaggerating for comic effect when i say that i have tried and obviously failed to pick up four lesbians in the last few weeks, and didn't even realize what i was doing until like days after. it's a good thing i have a lot of gay friends or i'd probably be run the fuck out of town. i was at this benefit drag show last night and it hit me when i was smoking outside afterwards: here are all those cute girls i get along really well with but don't call me back, and they're here with their girlfriends. i guess i go for hip, well-dressed girls with good taste and slightly masculine personalities, and in olywa that translates to LESBIANS

did real fucking well on my west coast roadtrip tho

edit: like this is how dense i am: i was talking to this awesome girl thursday night, and she was telling me about a female friend of hers she likes as a person but is unattracted to physically, and my thought was 'she's bi, that's fucking hot' even though she'd given me no indication that she also liked boys. and i was all over her good god i probably have a reputation as that dude that tries to fuck lesbians

I have the exact opposite issue re: gaydar.  I will let gay dudes talk me up, me being totally oblivious to the fact that I'm being hit on, the whole way up to the point where they break the touch barrier, and even then I sometimes don't realize it right away.  My friends all think this is hilarious, of course.

[bagofeyes]

in olympia my total lack of gaydar is fucking up my shit. i am not exaggerating for comic effect when i say that i have tried and obviously failed to pick up four lesbians in the last few weeks, and didn't even realize what i was doing until like days after. it's a good thing i have a lot of gay friends or i'd probably be run the fuck out of town. i was at this benefit drag show last night and it hit me when i was smoking outside afterwards: here are all those cute girls i get along really well with but don't call me back, and they're here with their girlfriends. i guess i go for hip, well-dressed girls with good taste and slightly masculine personalities, and in olywa that translates to LESBIANS

did real fucking well on my west coast roadtrip tho

edit: like this is how dense i am: i was talking to this awesome girl thursday night, and she was telling me about a female friend of hers she likes as a person but is unattracted to physically, and my thought was 'she's bi, that's fucking hot' even though she'd given me no indication that she also liked boys. and i was all over her good god i probably have a reputation as that dude that tries to fuck lesbians

I have the exact opposite issue re: gaydar.  I will let gay dudes talk me up, me being totally oblivious to the fact that I'm being hit on, the whole way up to the point where they break the touch barrier, and even then I sometimes don't realize it right away.  My friends all think this is hilarious, of course.

and then you beat them down so your friends still think you are straight, right?

[drohne]

roboJ, that routinely happens to my drummer, but he met his employer at his awesome job that way, so hey. and as far as i know he didn't even have to suck his dick. as far as i know.

well, 'my drummer' is premature given that we haven't even jammed yet, but he's down for it when we've got time. starting to call someone 'my drummer' is even harder and lamer than starting to call someone 'my girlfriend'

n.b. i think the appeal of message boards is that they make you write down your thoughts, which i don't do otherwise. sometimes collaboratively, which i definitely don't do otherwise. fuck yeah tennin

[Boogie]

roboJ, that routinely happens to my drummer, but he met his employer at his awesome job that way, so hey. and as far as i know he didn't even have to suck his dick. as far as i know.

well, 'my drummer' is premature given that we haven't even jammed yet, but he's down for it when we've got time. starting to call someone 'my drummer' is even harder and lamer than starting to call someone 'my girlfriend'

damn musicians, stealing all the womens.

[The Fake Shemp]

Wait, RoboJ isn't gay?

[Madrun Badrun]

Ya I thought any dude that has an internet name like Rimjob had to be totally gay

[drohne]

wait, maybe i've just taken my total lack of gaydar to the opposite extreme, one of the girls isn't a lesbian, she's just got a boyfriend (this also explains why he fucking hates me), and the thursday girl might actually be bi, or in any case she wants to hang out. is there like a gaydar iphone app, you point it at someone and it's like 'GAY'

oh wait there is one, i just downloaded it, lemme point it at willco

GAY

[Yeti]

wait, maybe i've just taken my total lack of gaydar to the opposite extreme, one of the girls isn't a lesbian, she's just got a boyfriend (this also explains why he fucking hates me), and the thursday girl might actually be bi, or in any case she wants to hang out. is there like a gaydar iphone app, you point it at someone and it's like 'GAY'

oh wait there is one, i just downloaded it, lemme point it at willco

GAY

If you're pointing it at an Evilbore screen it may just be a false positive, although in this case I doubt it.

[recursivelyenumerable]

I'm grateful for gay dudes, they're like the only people who'll come up and talk to me at parties.

[Madrun Badrun]

Not even gay dudes talk to me