on wednesday NUMBER september NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER am robert harley wrote and with the crucial hair feature enabled that got a good laugh out of me just saying crucial hair feature improves my day immeasurably i ve done a fair amount of thinking about the media intermediated meeting thing it seriously loses for reasons like rohit s just encountered one is both rejected for trivial reasons and rejects for the same some people loudly defend that these choices are not trivial i d have never met my best friend if i had to pick her out of a crowd for getting to know i was a teen at the time but i won t say i m much improved at being able to spot interesting at a distance interesting isn t an external thing i have that brought home to me again every so often i may think that interesting people dress differently or whatever but that s total superstition how do i know what your version of creative attire is maybe it s purely functional i was at a loud party recently sufficiently loud that conversation of any kind was extremely difficult and intoxication was the norm i was working on what my algorithm for meeting people there should be and one of the candidates was women in order of attractiveness i flinched from that rather violently at a trade show or something i might elect to talk to the people who are looking at interesting exhibits at a party well if you can t hear the conversation they are having or if on the net all you have is a photo you just can t tell important things from a picture and a few words it s not how we are built there s no geek code for the heart and soul and if there were people would lie and game the system it s too easy to say oh no he s a geek or she s a cat person ick when you might have a great time together we are constructed to form alliances based on how we fit together as people how we feel in the other person s company how well we partner on tasks and recreation this is all entirely speculative based on nothing but superstitious association unless you actually have time in the person s company which is why we tend to be screwed when our circle of exposure shrinks after school personally as a writer the whole internet meet email thing ought to work better for me than it does for other people but interestingly it doesn t i have to put out the same amount of effort and reap about the same poor results i have to think it s not the people but the tool an aside okay yes i m a tool geek speed dating speed dating aka NUMBER minute dating is a live action stab at actual time in the company of a variety of people compressed into one event i think it s noticably better but still absolutely nothing like working on a project together cooking climbing a mountain or whatever it was in fact invented as a jewish thing seeking to match up the young people to avoid total assimilation it has too much interview context and no shared activity beyond that i give it several points for effort though i guess my impression that even the speed dating thing doesn t do much for you means that the traditional advice of join activities groups is actually sound eirikur 