Posted by Daniel Lyons
Fri, 05 Oct 2007 08:31:00 GMT
I find it amusing that most women writing personals on Craigslist want a “decent” guy, but would never dream of dating a conservative religious person. They want a decent guy who is OK with getting an abortion if they have sex without a condom. They want a decent guy, but aren’t looking for a long-term relationship. They want a decent guy who will put up with all of their quirks and hangups without having any of their own. On top of all this, they want a guy without an ulterior motive. It should be obvious that all of these things are, taken together, insane.
I’d like to say this reflects poorly on women, but we all know that in reality it’s just economics. Women on any personals service can make arbitrary or insane demands because they will get a ton of responses either way. Though I find it hard to understand why the world’s most completely generic personals ads get a bunch of responders, I’m sure that they do. As an ex of mine once observed, every woman has three guys who are dying to sleep with her.
And then there is the attractiveness of the blank slate. Kate’s character in Dodgeball is a perfect example: very attractive, apart from the scene when you see inside her house and everything is covered in cheesy unicorn art. A pretty girl loses some luster when she reveals her passion for orthodontics. In Free Enterprise, Claire is completely detached from our experience in reality through her complete detachment from other people. In reality, getting to know a person involves getting to know their parents, their best friends, their siblings, their roommates, their coworkers. In the movie, Claire has none of those complicating aspects. We want to fall in love with someone simple, a free radical bouncing around the universe unattached to anything, ready to bond into our molecule without any entanglement with foreign substances.
Online personals really represent a hilariously horrible dilemma. We are becoming more isolated like these atoms, bouncing around unattached. We wind up trying to be explicit about what we’re looking for, but we lack any kind of network that might produce what we really need. The eye cannot see itself, yet we are expected to write to the world what we are with the hopes that another eye which cannot see itself can perceive in this note that we are what it needs to complete itself. Wouldn’t our family and friends do a better job if they had a chance?
We have, really, no chance of communicating what is essential about ourselves in one paragraph of text written specifically to woo someone we haven’t met. Our friends and family have an image of ourselves in their minds. They can talk about our qualities generally. We can only mime it based on what we have heard from them about ourselves. A human can hold an image of another human within, and it is mostly valid. It can be off by a tone or two, and certainly lack some of the details, but this image is almost completely inaccessible to ourselves. If you have the slightest clue what you’re all about, it’s only because you’ve had someone tell you or a guess you’ve made based on looking at your bookshelf or your CD collection.
This leads us back to the number one thing people talk about in personals, their likes and dislikes. What could be less relevant? Yet it’s the only thing we can talk about that differentiates us from each other spiritually. Our souls all crave the exact same things, but our minds naturally appreciate different things to different degrees. And of course tribal affiliations are handy for weeding people out. But when we are trying to create relationships for ourselves, it’s always a process of weeding people out, disqualification. If we actually were being treated as people, as images within the minds of those who know and love us, then the process is completely different. I don’t have much first-hand knowledge of it except that every time I ever entered an intense relationship, we both suddenly felt like experts on all matters of the heart and tried to set up our friends, and it never worked. But we weren’t working from a basis of lists of mutually exclusive qualifications, but more like from the thought of finding two colors that complement each other. (There is a joke that a Jewish matchmaker calls any two Jews who are about the same height as one another a match.)
I don’t really know where I’m going with all this, except to say that dating is miserable and I think I can blame the country and the culture.
Tags relationships, whining
Posted by Daniel Lyons
Wed, 02 May 2007 11:50:00 GMT
I can’t believe somebody has gone and named a bunch of different ways of changing a program. Does everything need to be named?
Tags whining | 5 comments
Posted by Daniel Lyons
Sun, 08 Apr 2007 11:01:00 GMT
I hope you’ve all enjoyed the hiatus from my programming language rants, because it’s just come to an end.
For the past five hours, I’ve been received a stern lesson in two facts:
- Back up your data. Seriously.
- Running bleeding-edge software for production work is dumb. Without backing up your data, it’s dumb squared.
First I took my broken SQL backup and brought it to my home computer. Then I loaded it up in a database. Then I manually edited the SQL until it would insert that data into a fresh database created by the newest stable version of Typo. That took a lot of massaging. Then I ran Typo and debugged it, beating my old data until it worked without crashing the system. Then I took two different kinds of backup (SQL dump and Typo’s new database backup facility) and copied them up to the server. Then, unbelievably, I had to beat on it more to get it to work. And now, as you can see, we’re back online and miraculously, I haven’t lost any old posts or comments.
I even got the old theme to work again. This must be my week. Except for getting my car egged, finding out I can’t really continue the driving job because of my obligations at home and spending most of yesterday trying to make 1and1 fix their networking problem which had brought down Michael’s server while he was on a pilgrimage to Chimayo and his best client was understandably somewhat unsympathetic over the phone to me, a non-employee contractor-type.
It’s been quite a week!
Tags meta, whining | 1 comment
Posted by Daniel Lyons
Tue, 29 Aug 2006 00:52:45 GMT
On reading The Lord and His Children in The Forward, I’m struck by how un-Jewish the last paragraph is:
And still He wants what He cannot have: Knowing man’s imagination to be evil from his birth, He wants His Children to be a holy nation. Foreknowing they will worship golden cattle, He demands that they love Him and Him alone. In His aspect as a father of children one might almost grieve for Him.
- “Knowing man’s imagination to be evil from his birth…”—What is this, original sin? The Jewish doctrine is that man has a good inclination and an evil inclination, and sinning is what we do when we give in to the evil inclination. G-d wouldn’t pre-ordain us to be evil—wouldn’t that be a sadistic G-d, if he created us and demanded that we not sin while simultaneously programming us to sin? Nobody can really believe this.
- “Foreknowing that they will worship golden cattle…” From what source do we know this? The Torah doesn’t make this claim. Only philosophy would make such a suggestion, but we do not have the god of the philosophers but the G-d of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
- “In His aspect as a father of children one might almost grieve for Him.” Quite an insinuation on the part of the author! What comes to mind is that any pity one might have for G-d because of how sinful people are would be better directed at the problem.
Tags judaism, religion, whining | no comments
Posted by Daniel Lyons
Mon, 28 Aug 2006 03:36:12 GMT
Let’s talk a little about the obnoxiousness of Page E in the Albuquerque Journal tonight. It’s a big job, and hard to know where to start, but let’s start with what’s above the fold: a giant Enneagram. The daft 9-pointed star is usually obnoxious enough, but now it’s enhanced with a picture of Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” behind it.
I didn’t know the name of that drawing until I looked it up to write this post, but let’s deviate for a moment and complain about it. It’s almost always hauled out to back up a pseudo-scientific claim. I’m pretty sure one of those shady massage schools around here has it in their logo. What did Da Vinci intend to communicate with that drawing, if anything? Does this image move anyone, anywhere?
Naturally, the appearance of anything Da Vinci brings to mind the Da Vinci Code, which brings to mind powerful knowledge suppressed by The Church. It should bring to mind the concept of poor fiction.
There is a connection between the Enneagram and Catholicism, but I’ll leave that to someone more qualified to talk about it. In a nutshell, the Church said, “people, this is bullshit.” Bullshit isn’t compatible with Catholicism even when it isn’t explicitly anti-Catholic; something very respectable about Catholicism. Anyway, now you’re hearing it from me: it’s bullshit.
Below the fold, we get to more of the good stuff: a picture of Ron Bell, the disgusting Albuquerque lawyer, and his girlfriend (they’re in their forties or fifties), at a furniture store having an argument about a sofa. Apparently, Ron is a “7”, which means he is “versatile, distractible and scattered,” A-grade lawyer material if you ask me—though it does explain the expensive-looking gigolo suit. Apparently the Enneagram helps you through the difficult times in life, such as when you’re a rich playboy lawyer and have to buy furniture for your mansion. Because, G-d knows, that’s what I need help with.
What always surprises me about horoscopes and the Enneagram and similar bullshit is that there is a mentality that goes along with it that almost nobody really has. Does it really seem true to you that everyone you’ve ever met falls into one of nine categories? Does it really seem true to you that everyone you’ve met could fit into one of any number of categories? If it were true, wouldn’t smart people like us simply notice the similarities and re-formulate the system on our own? The Enneagram system tries to distract us by having each type be affected by its “wings,” that is, the types across from each other, but that just makes things more complicated without even meaningfully changing the number of boxes. Western astrology at least tries to complicate things by adding the locations of other objects to the mix.
As long as we aren’t thinking about G-d, truth or reality, I suppose someone is benefitting from all this, but it isn’t the followers.
From time to time I hear strange things in Judaism about this kind of thing. Someone suggested recently that because of Urim and Thummim, Tarot card reading and other fortune-telling must be OK in Judaism. By what reasoning? Urim and Thummim were only available to the king and were lost ages ago. Apart from the strange witch episode in the Torah (a one-time event), nothing else ever appeared to fill the gap. When G-d allowed the second Temple to be destroyed, there was another system which filled the gap. G-d doesn’t take big things away from us which we definitely need. I find it very difficult to believe that my troubles—finding a date, choosing a job, etc.—are of the same caliber as those of national leaders and thus warrant prognostication, if G-d even bothered to preordain them. (I’m not saying he doesn’t have the power to pre-ordain everything, just that I don’t think he does.)
It all smacks of people searching for supernatural reassurances in spite of their faith. Many of the atheists really are on a better track regarding idolatry insofar as they reject the authority of these systems as strongly as valid religions. It’s worth pointing out that the first Noahide commandment is “Do not worship false gods.” That certainly permits a rational atheism that strongly condemns idol worship.
Tags religion, whining | no comments
Posted by Daniel Lyons
Thu, 10 Aug 2006 05:09:46 GMT
Since about two months ago, the Gas Widget reports about a 15 cent difference in price. Gas can be had in Albuquerque for $2.96 a gallon right now. Nevertheless, every day this week there has been a story on the morning news and the evening news about the rising cost of gas and what effect it will have on “consumers.”
Since the rains started, interspersed between scenes of amazing flood damage, they talk about the drought. A drought, you may note, is a negative phenomenon, in the sense that it is defined in terms of what it is not. It is, therefore, a purely statistical phenomenon. We are being told to ignore the evidence before our very faces, in favor of the pictures on the screen.
Oh, and Cavuto: everybody hates you.
Tags news, whining | 1 comment
Posted by Daniel Lyons
Thu, 10 Aug 2006 04:51:33 GMT
Jarrod said about 13 hours later:
That’s a really accurate description. It assumes you pass the personality test. I took it a few years ago and they said that I was in the 20% of the population they couldn’t let become members because we had unusual personalities. I took it again a few months ago and they let me become a member. I don’t know if they or I changed enough to become a member.
Everytime you take a personality test, you get slightly different results. I would be surprised if you tested that differently though. I bet they just turned enough people away that they started seeing it in dollar signs.
Now, I’m weird, but I’m not that weird.
My pet theory is this: money. Every other personals service on the internet makes it free to post and pay to respond. That system strongly prefers women, who are a lot more likely to fire ‘n forget and who have less disposable income. Men respond to (i.e. get obsessed over) pictures to a greater extent than women do, and with more income and a predilection for looking at pictures of women online (cough), the money flies out of our wallets.
Now, eHarmony is a lot more gender-agnostic. Both players have to pay to communicate, because the system aggressively matches you against other people. It’s not relying on the users to do the work. Unfortunately, due to real genetic differences and annoying cultural gender inequalities, it’s less satisfying in the short-term to men than ordinary relationship sites.
There should be a way on eHarmony for men to pay a small fee for their matches to respond to them, or something.
Tags whining | no comments
Posted by Daniel Lyons
Wed, 09 Aug 2006 02:44:56 GMT
I realize some of you may find this post lame. That’s because it is.
eHarmony is an interesting thing. You see, with a normal online dating site, you upload your best picture, or a picture of your cat, or nothing. Then you type in your biography, or some witty humor, or something generic. Then after a few months, you have a superficial long-distance relationship with somebody’s photograph. And that’s basically the transaction.
eHarmony is totally different. You take a big personality test. You upload your best picture, or a picture of your cat, or nothing. Then eHarmony kicks out a first name of the opposite gender every week or two, you send them your “first questions.” According to eHarmony, they then read these questions and respond to them, and it goes from there. What actually happens is that they never respond, or “close communication” right there.
It’s so innovative! It completely bypasses the whole superficial long-distance relationship part.
<sigh>
Tags whining | no comments
