I haven’t been posting a lot lately, but not because things haven’t been going on. Rather, a lot has been going on but I’ve been reluctant to mention anything because, yet again, everything seems to be in major flux. Hence, it’s hard for me to comment about things knowing that by the time I finish a post, they will have changed. And then, when I post an update, they have changed yet again. That tends to drag down my enthusiasm a bit.

Currently, the main news is the job. Things continue to be very difficult in terms of the administration side; nothing bad where people hate each other in the office, but just that all of the optimism and hope that was there when I first started is pretty much entirely gone. The real starting point of the spiral into suckiness is when a game project that we had lined up was “put on hold indefinitely,” and we never were able to recover from that. Now, we just have the one project, and it’s been nothing be an absolute nightmare in working with the client. The miscommunication is profound, and currently we are still owed 2 months worth of pay. We “should” have a paycheck next week, but beyond that, honestly, things don’t look good at all. After the Hell that was last year, it looks like I’m just going to be going through the whole thing yet again. Maybe this time I can work some of the contacts I made previously, but offhand, I fear that I’ll be starting from scratch all over again. What’s worse is that because of the lack of paychecks, I’ve already burned through any money that I had saved up from the first few months. The only good thing is that I might have made enough to get back on unemployed.

I have reached out to some of my former contacts with other companies, and will continue to do so. The trick is, as always, nothing is available right now, so I will need to wait for something to open up. I also will be looking at non game-design field jobs, again, in hopes that I can at least land something to pay the bills.

There were plans to move a couple of weeks ago — the idea was to move in with a couple of the guys from work, and the money that would be saved in rent, as well as the money that would be saved by selling the car, would have been substantial enough to make an instant difference in my budget. But, all of that is on hold (and apparently canceled), as the lack of the aforementioned paychecks makes it impossible for us to actually pay the cost of moving in the first place. Even though it would be far cheaper in the long run, nobody has the cash to make the initial move and cough up the money the first month rent, security deposit, moving costs, and possible realtor fee.

Now, technically, I could foot the bill of moving. I finally broke down and transferred money from my small CD to my checking account, so I would have enough to cover my share. The other guys, however, would not. Likewise, I could, theoretically, move into a place of my own, but the rent will then be much higher, and wash out most of the savings generated by selling the car. Still, I should look into it, I suppose, just to weigh my options, as it’s still better to be in the city than out of it.

On the dating front, I had the opportunity to date a lovely young girl who got along with me surprisingly well. Naturally, such happiness cannot be allowed to continue, so she’s going to Washington tomorrow for the entire month of August. Story of my life. Or, should I say, “SOML.” All the cool cats are doing the abbreviation thing. In any case, I am grateful for at least the dates that we have had; one should enjoy the sliver of sunshine that breaks through the overcast sky, not bemoan the brief existence of it.

Also, next week I shall be off for my annual pilgrimage to Wisconsin for the family bash. Ironically, however, on the actual day of the Bash, neither of my parents will be there. Mom will be taking TMG off to Michigan for a shin-dig her side of the family is having, and Dad is off on a canoe trip, which still totally blows my mind. Keep in mind that this is the man who never joined me on an Boy Scout camping trip, but a week-long canoe trip? No problem! I suspect that something else is at play, here, and my Dad is actually a top agent going on some classified mission to preserve peace and stability in the world. Makes perfect sense to me, anyway.

The bright spot in all this gloom is that I have a chance to really get back into one of my projects and start major work on it. I want to get some video work done, I have a number of game ideas, and even some drawings I want to tackle.

More later, I am sure.

I had neglected to mention a certain occurrence upon my return from the airport:

It was late, and surprisingly hot for the evening, especially since I had figured that ha left all of the heat back in Florida. As I unlocked the door to my humble bedroom apartment, I was greeted with the stretch of putrid poultry and rotting pork.

Cripes, I thought, I could have sworn that I had cleaned out the fridge, and emptied the trash. Where was that smell coming from–

“Hello,” said The Bearer of Bad News.

“Oh,” I replied, as I felt my stomach tighten and intestines cramp. “It’s you.”

“In the decomposing flesh,” TBoBN cheerfully replied. “How was your trip?”

“Since you weren’t there,” I noted, “you should guess that it was really quite good. More relaxing than I realized.”

“Glad to hear it,” it said with a nod. “Maybe it’ll soften the sting.”

I merely grumbled in response as I dropped my luggage off on my bed and starting opening windows before the odor melted the glass.

“First of all,” it continued, following me around like a hellhound puppy, “you recall those Disney Trading Pins that you bought? The ones that cost about $50? Yeah, they’re gone. Lost like a tourist trying to navigate the West Village.”

“Swell.” I didn’t mean it, of course, but you can’t encourage The Bearer of Bad News. Not that it needs encouraging, really.

“Also, you know your fear about losing your job over vacation, like last year?”

“Kinda hard to forget,” I answered.

“Well, you still have your job, so rest easy on that part. But there’s been a major foul-up happening, not by any fault of the company, mind you, and your paycheck won’t be coming in for a while yet.”

I grunted. That one hurt.

“And just to top it off and show why you should never, ever, ever go on a vacation again, that one girl that you had a few dates with – you remember, the cute one that was a huge World of Warcraft fan – has decided to stop seeing you because you don’t have a living room set.”

There was a pause.

“Seriously?” I asked.

“Yeah,” it replied in a voice of uncertainly. “Honestly, man, I don’t quite get it either. I think it has something to do with the fact that you, as the modern day adventurer, do not look like someone who has all that stable of a career. And I mean, hey, given what I just told you, can you blame her? People don’t get involved in games to get rich.”

“Well, that’s all just spiffy,” I said sardonically. “Are you done now? I have pictures to transfer over to the computer.”

“Yeah, my work here is done,” it said cheerfully. “Oh, and before I forget: don’t use the bathroom for a while. I sort of cut a hole in the ozone when I was in there, if you get my drift.”

“Unfortunately, I do,” I said, fighting my gag reflex.

A snap of thunder, flash of deep red light, and the ending notes to “It’s a Small World” echoed through the apartment as The Bearer of Bad News vanished.

As always though, it’s going to take more than a bottle of Pine-Sol to get the stink out of my nose.

To be honest, I haven’t really be spending as much time on the online dating sites as I planned. This isn’t exactly a bad thing, as the main reason is due to things like taking care of things around the house, playing outside, and otherwise spending a little more time away from the computer. That, and there are days when I just don’t feel like dealing with the amount of time and effort that it takes to write up proper emails. Oh sure, I could just use the good ol’ copy-and-paste method, but trust me, it’s like being enthused about making a girl’s parents: she can tell when you’re faking.

Still, my time back on the sites thus far has reminded me of a couple of issues I’ve had with them in the past; in this case, one each, that is unique to the particular site.

On OKCupid, the problem lies in the defaults they use when you search for matches. Even if you set the presets during a previous visit, the defaults snap back into place. Three of these are very noteworthy:

1. Distance: Set to “Within 100 miles.”
2. Last online: Set to “Within the last decade” (mind you, OKCupid has not been around for a decade yet, so this is really “Anyone who ever made an account that has not been erased.”
3. Age: Set to 24 to 56 (this, I assume, is based on your own age)

What bugs me about this is that it’s a pretty blatant attempt to pad their results as much as possible. It’s not going to be as noticeable for someone like me, who’s living in a major metro area. But, if I was been back in Dayton, then OKC would have had to pull this trick, as it’s far fewer pickings back there. You have to basically cast a very wide net in terms of miles if you hope to actually find someone that you’re interested in dating.

But even then, the Last Online setting is completely whacked. Why would I want to see a profile of someone who hasn’t been on in over a month? Let alone a year or more? The whole point of a dating site is to meet someone “today.” Writing to an abandoned profile is about as useful as a carpool lane for Segways.

Match does not have this problem; their search page remembers the last settings you entered; and to be frank, they do have many more users than OKCupid does, so padding isn’t that big as of a need (although I’m sure that they don’t mind when it happens). Also, when they display results, they always show the most recent users first, unless you’ve entered some strict criteria that severely limits the number of results.

The problem that Match does have, however, is in their profile review service. Best I can tell, what happens is that it is sent to a computer program that scans through it for a variety of naughty words, email addresses, or other types of personal information. While this is faster than having to wait for some underpaid, overworked intern to read through a slog of submissions, this process is deeply annoying for two reasons:

First off, it limits your “voice” a bit, because a number of things can set off the filter triggers, some of which are so obscure that you might not even have thought about them as a “bad word.” This can include just a mention that you like a particular website, like hulu.com, because the filters seem to treat any use of the “.com” as some sort of attempt to get around the need to use the in-site mail system.

But it’s the second reason that is really, really grating, and I found this out the hard way:

I made a minor change in my profile a while back, noting that I was working as a Game Designer. One line was changed, and even then it was just a change from “have been working as” to “am now working as.” I sent it in for review, and was quite puzzled when it returned stating that it had been rejected because some “questionable content” was contained within. Questionable? Really? I changed, like, 4 words, all of which were prepositions. They gave a list of possible causes as part of this form letter, but did not say what the exact thing was in the profile that set off their rejection stamp. And that’s what snowballed things in an epic fail of customer service.

Since the only change I had made was one line about working as a Game Designer, I could not figure out for the life of me what was the problem. I surmised that they must have updated something in their filters that snagged on a part of my profile that had originally been deemed worthy. I tried a number of different takes on the profile (all minor, as I have gotten a number of compliments on it, even from those with no interest in dating me), but each time it got pushed back. I tried writing letters to their customer service email, explaining the problem: I couldn’t “fix” my profile because I had no idea what the problem was — the lack of any feedback meant that I was just firing my shotgun randomly in the dark, hoping to get a headshot on an approaching zombie. When their “official” customer service reply arrived, it was just another @%$# soulless form letter, with basically a direct copy and paste of the exact same rejection notice I had already been getting. It was starting to look like Kafka was the Director of Customer Service.

Finally, after some careful dissection on my own, I figured out what the issue was: in my profile, I make a reference that I felt all keyboards should come equipped with a “WTF key.” I re-spelled it as “W T F,” and sure enough, the profile was then approved. So, apparently, Match had updated their filters and determined that WTF was a bad, bad word. Or, acronym, anyway. Now I’m tempted to try and work in FUBAR and see if they catch that one or not.

Whatever the case, I never should have had to figure that on my own. Instead, what should have happened was that I should have gotten a rejection notice, explaining exactly which word or phrase was the one the tripped up the alarm. After all, if you can detect it, can’t you just make a note of what it is from the list and include that on the email?

Ironically, it could be worse — I remember back in Dayton I had a profile rejected because there actually was someone reading it, and did not get the concept of sarcasm, which I had peppered throughout the writing. I think I eventually convinced the person to let it through anyway, but still: this isn’t an English paper with only one proper form and structure. If I want to do it in iambic pentameter, well, then, I should be allowed. I’m paying for the site, after all.

For the record, OKCupid doesn’t even bother trying to police the profiles. Rather, they follow the web 2.0 approach and the the customers do it for them. Same with photos. Now, I do think that OKCupid has some filters of their own in place, but maybe not. What they do have is a button on every page and for every photo that allows the users to “flag” something that they find objectionable. When a user flags something, then OKC checks it out and determines if a deletion/removal is warranted.

Before I go out on a date, I put on some colonge, and usually wash my hair with a nice-smelling product so I, in turn, will give off a pleasing aroma for my date.

However, it means that this only works within the confines of my apartment, because as soon as I go outside, take the train into the city, and am actually on the date, no trace of the scent is to be found. Certainly, I have yet to hear a girl complement me on my scent. (I haven’t had any complain, either, so let’s be grateful for that, at least.)

But then, the second I come back into the house, I can again smell the pleasing whiffs from my earlier efforts. And no, it’s not that it’s just the apartment that smells nice, because I wasn’t using the cologne out in the kitchen or living room.

So, …yeah. Not really sure what’s going on here, but seems like that there’s a warp in the space-time continuum or something.

I’ll have to see if a girl ever actually notices and comments on such matters. Another scientific investigation, perhaps?

Okay, so after my last post, I’ve been thinking, and have decided to get back into Online Dating, and in a big way. Part of this is because, well, being lonely pretty much sucks, but more to the point is that this also gives me a chance to keep track of my own success rate. Naturally, there are a lot of variables I can’t track (for example, I won’t really know which profiles are “active”), but, at the same time, I can mark down how many girls I’ve reached out to on different sites, how many replied, and how many of those have led to actual dates. After the first date, nothing really counts, because the real question here is how many attempts are actually leading to dates. Regardless if the date is fantastic or an absolute supermassive black hole in terms of suckage, getting to the actual date is the important thing.

I should note that it says something about me that I’m heading into this fully expecting to be sending a lot of emails without having a good success rate, as it’s safe to say that if I land a girlfriend, no more e-mails will be sent out. I like to think that it’s just being realistic, and I am speaking from previous experience, after all.

In any case, should be fun. Maybe I can turn it into a book at some point!

So, first off, if you didn’t know, I have been a member of the online dating world for quite some time. Starting during my time in Dayton, I have been on and off various sites as, well, it’s honestly a bit easier for me to meet people more my style that way. After all, that was where I met Bambi, and before then (through a rescue ranger fan site) met another lovely young lady that was quite spiffy. True, I did have an excellent relationship with a girl that I met while in Grad School, but alas, that is the exception and not the rule. So, as a result, I like to think that I can speak with some authority on the topic of online dating in general.

Well, I ran across an article posted on one of those dating sites, OKCupid, and, well, it’s really a bizarre thing for them to talk about:

Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating

Now, OKCupid is a free online dating site, that supports itself through ads, mainly, but — and here’s the kicker — they have “subscriber” level themselves. It’s about $5 a month, and called the A-List. And now here he is telling everyone who is paying that they are pretty much idoits for doing so. It’s like GM posting about how American Car Companies are untrustworthy and poorly run, and conveniently only use Ford and Chrysler as examples. And the guy never once makes any mention of this in the blog post, like OKCupid is still totally free. Sure, it is free, but if paying for a dating site is so horrible, why not cancel that aspect of the site and refund the subscribers money? I mean, it makes me very skeptical of his arguments when he labels a blog post something akin to “Paying for dating sites is wrong unless its for mine.”

At the beginning of the article, the writer — Christian — admits an important fact:

As a founder of OkCupid I’m of course motivated to point out our competitors’ flaws. So take what I have to say today with a grain of salt.

He then proceeds to crunch a bunch of numbers to try and show why paying for online dating is such a horrible idea, but in the end, all of his arguements can be applied to online dating in any form — free or pay. So, in effect, he makes an impassioned plea for people to give up online dating, which includes, well, his site.

Honestly, I still can’t figure out how on earth he missed this connection. Forget the paying aspect of it — a lot of his numbers are really much more about the difficulties of online dating for most people, and in fact could probably be used to convince some people to forget online dating altogether. After all, there’s nothing in his numbers that really makes a difference if people are paying or not. But, before I get too far, I’ll note some of my reactions to his comments, speaking as a veteran of online dating.

First, he points out a truism on all dating sites: women get too many messages from bad matches, and men get far too few replies. This is in general, mind you — I’m sure that there are some guys that get a large amount of replies, and first contacts, even. Also, I think it’s fair to say that guys, as well, probably get more messages from bad matches than from those that they are interested in. Speaking from personal experience, on OKCupid, I don’t get a lot of first contact, but when I do, it’s been about 99% from women that I have absolutely no interest in.

Then he goes through some numbers to show that it’s in Match.com’s and eHarmony.com’s best interests to lead their customers on with profiles that are either non-paying (and thus unable to respond to messages) or with profiles that are not even active any more. Now, this is something that is true — and, ironically, he doesn’t even take it as far as he could have. Because besides the fact that out of the 20 million or so subscribers on a site like eHarmony are inactive or non-paying, there are also a far more that are just not going to be worth the time to pursue, even if they are active and paying. For example, some people may live too far away, love cats while the other person has deathly allergies, or there just is no chemistry.

But, you know, OKCupid is just as guilty of this. Remember, they make most of their money through ads. Ads only generate good revenues if the site owner can prove that a lot of eyeballs are looking at the pages. This means that the more people on the site, the more eyeballs. So, it’s in OKCupid’s interests to get and keep as many people on the site as possible. Now, this isn’t to say that they are leading people on with false profiles or whatnot. But a number of times when I’m looking to search for matches, it will default the search criteria to women aged 18-55, within 1000 miles, and online anytime in the past decade. The last one is particularly telling — Christian talks about the evils of leading people on with profiles that can’t reply, and yet his site will often show you “matches” that haven’t logged on since the Bush administration. Isn’t that basically the same thing?

Then he points out that eHarmony says right on their site that their user base is completly refreshed once every 6.5 months

The most charitable way to interpret this last sentence is to assume their average account life is 6.5 months.

Well, no. the most charitable way to interpret that sentence is that within 6.5 months, their users have found the love of their life through the site and are happily together. And besides, wouldn’t that also mean that every 6.5 months there’s a whole new batch of single people that are available to contact? Isn’t that a good thing?

Next he shows how having only 1 in 30 people to talk to due to a subscriber wall is a such a bad thing, by showing 30 “attractive, single OKCupid users” and then hiding all but one behind a “Can’t Reply” graphic. But that is making the incorrect assumption that such a ratio would be any better on a free dating site, such as OKCupid. For example, you’ll note that he said nothing about whether or not the users showed were currently active or not, nor where they were located, and he certainly can’t say that just because all 30 theoretically can reply, that they would. And more to the point, it’s not like these sites are actually offering only 30 people to choose from. Scale it up to where “only” 10,000 people can reply, and chance are that it doesn’t make as much of a difference whether or not there’s a subscriber wall.

Later on, he makes this point:

If you’re a subscriber to a pay dating site, you are an important (though unwitting) part of that site’s customer acquisition team. Of course, they don’t want to show you too many ghosts, because you’ll get frustrated and quit, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re relying on you your messages are their marketing materials to reach out to non-payers and convince them, by way of your charming, heartfelt messages, to pull out their credit cards. If only a tiny fraction of your message gets a response, hey, that’s okay, you’re working for free. Wait a second…you’re paying them.

Er… no, that’s not even close to being true for Match; I haven’t used eHarmony in a long time, but when I did try it, it worked completely differently, as well. In eHarmony, you actually started off with a set of simple yes/no questions to see about basic interest, then moved up through a few more steps before you started e-mailing each other. So, you couldn’t get past those first steps unless you were already paying. As for Match, you cannot read emails unless you are a paying member — you don’t even know who the e-mail is from without being a subscriber. This is crummy on a seperate level, but the assertion that you’re providing their marketing material is just flat-out wrong, and the lack of basic research into this is disturbing.

Here’s another fun fact:

There is a negative correlation between the number of messages a man sends per day to the reply rate he gets. The more messages you send, the worse response rate you get.

As far as I can tell, this is from OKCupid’s own data. So, again, I’m not sure how this is really helping their cause. It’s not saying, “You wasting your time on pay dating sites” so much as “You’re wasting your time on dating sites.”

Finally, he wraps up the post by pointing out how eHarmony fails over 90% of the time to get people married. Interestingly enough, however, he provides no data on how OKCupid does in that category. In fact, throughout the entire post, OKCupid’s own success rates in comparison to Match and eHarmony are blatantly absent. It’s like a comparison ad without the comparison. And, again, throughout the entire post Christian never once makes any attempt to justify the A-list pay level of OKCupid.

It’s just such a mind-bendingly bizarre article that I cannot wrap my mind around it. I looked through some comments, and most people are totally in favor of it; I will admit it was a bit disturbing to see that very, very few people actually made any mention of OKCupid’s own A-List service, or the stunning lack of data about OKCupid’s own profiles and “success rate.”

Anyway — this was not a deeply-thought out response. Just something that struck me as so odd I wanted to jot down my random thoughts to it. I will say, however, that if that this did anything to my own take on online dating, it would to basically give it up. But, well, I doubt that will happen any time soon.

A friend of mine pointed out a site, www.myveryworstdate.com, which — as the name implies — is a collection of bad dating experiences submitted by the users.

First, the important news: I am not on there. Not yet, anyway. While I don’t think that I ever did anything that bad during a date, it’s not hard to see how a date that you might have thought as “disappointing” being considered by others to be “horrendous.” And, as I look over some of the things that girls have written on this site, it wouldn’t surprise me if one of my past dates is posted. Fortunately, I don’t think it would be very highly rating by the users given that:

• I never got smashed on a date
• I never threw up on a date
• I never asked a date to pay for the whole tab
• I never asked a date to marry me/said I was in love/etc. the first time we met
• I never overslept past the meeting time
• I never got arrested during the date
• And, perhaps most importantly, I have never lied about my height.

Some of the submissions say as much (if not more) about the person writing them than the date. In some cases, the people fully admit that they were the cause if the “bad” part of the date, and in still others, you get the sense that the person who is being written about was, in fact, the lucky one to escape. I recall one a guy wrote about trying to salvage his relationship with his girlfriend, but in the end, he inadvertently shows why he was such a loser to begin with: he drank too much, drove while drunk, and in general, took his girlfriend for granted. He thinks that she broke up with him because he threw up on her and accidentally set her on fire (which is a good enough reason by itself, really) but I think even if he had avoided both of those disasters, the relationship was doomed regardless.

The site also got me thinking again about the whole issue of a guy being expected to pick up the tab on the first date. I have long felt that this was a deeply flawed system (largely because I never seem to have the spare cash to do this on a regular basis), but it has also become a strong litmus test for me. Now, if it’s something like a coffee or just a drink, then it’s not a problem. But if it happens to be a full-fledged meal, then the question always arises for me: “Do I like this girl enough that I’m willing to spend xx for just the chance to see her?” Because, you see, this is the point: there’s no guarantee that she’s going to want a second date. It’s entirely possible she’s just looking for a free meal. So it’s not as if picking up the tab (i.e. spending money on her) will ensure a second date.

And, more to the core of me, if I really like a girl, I’m going to want to do things for her, regardless.

I was looking through my photos on Facebook for some inane reason, when I suddenly realized that one of the photos that was of me and Bambi was no longer there. This was a photo that she had up on her profile, and so, naturally, I was curious if she either de-tagged me, or (more likely) removed it. I was guessing the latter, as when we were dating, she deliberately kept some photos of us off her profile because she didn’t want to upset her ex too much (don’t say it; I already know).

However, doing a quick search for her came up empty.

Puzzled, I went back to my photo page – there are a couple of shots with her that one of her friends took, and I wanted to see if there was still a link to her profile from there.

No tags in those photos, either.

Finally, I did a quick search using her name to see if I got her Facebook page as a hit.

No dice.

This leads me to believe that she has erased her profile from Facebook.

True, she may have just adjusted her privacy settings so that I can’t see her, and neither can anyone else who is not on her Friend list (I am not, having removed myself the day she broke up with me, for obvious reasons). In all honesty, though, I doubt that this is the case. While things didn’t work out for us, she and I did trade some friendly e-mails shortly after the break-up, and while I may have a density that threatens to create a local event horizon, I don’t believe I have done anything that would cause her to suddenly decide to ban me.

Hence, I’m a bit worried; I’m hoping it’s just a result of being oversaturated with being constantly plugged into the world that caused her to decide to erase her account. Still, she was very media-savvy, and it just strikes me as surprising that she might suddenly decide that she no longer wanted/needed the account. Then again, I haven’t heard from her for a couple of years, so she may have embraced the Amish lifestyle for all I know.

Whatever the case, I just hope everything is all right with her. I know that I’m supposed to be still bitter and writing angst-ridden ballads that even Morrissey would say are too depressing, but that was never my style.