OK Cupid Trends Article – Best Questions for a First Date: The Beach Sloth Response

                Ah yes, it has been a while since I’ve gone over the dating site OK Cupid, a site of which I’m a member. Remembering what Groucho Marx said:

                “I don’t want to belong to any dating site that will accept people like me as a member.”

                I think about why I’m even there. Thus far, I haven’t even met any fellow sloth-lovers. But I’m not terribly worried; I’m not fully accepted anyway. According to an advanced algorithm, I’m not even attractive enough to get a special email message telling me how I’m too sexy for my shirt. Oh well, their loss. I’m great.

                This installment of their stab at snarky blog humor is a bit better than their usual flaccid attempt at humor. Parts of this elicited a response from me besides pity for the pathetic person trying to get laughs. Some of the questions they explored really went ‘in depth’ into the real meat and potatoes of why people date. 

                 First they explored the question of: Do they have a drug problem? Honestly, that’s a big one. Call me a traditionalist, but having someone who does cocaine off of a toilet seat is usually a turn off. Personally, I’ve been lucky enough where those addicted to drugs told me on the first date. I’m not talking about minor drugs; they tend to be heavy things. Having someone tell you in the first ten minutes of the date ‘Heroin isn’t so bad’ is surprisingly a good thing. You kind of know where the date is going to go from there, and will involve lengthy discussions about how they want to live with the Crust Punks in abandoned buildings. Man, they pay way less rent than I do those lucky dogs.  

                Defining the importance of some of these questions takes up a lot of time. Personally, I would’ve avoided using verbatim questions. If you’re trying to attract people to use your website, it isn’t a good idea to show off glaring misspellings about cannibalism, dildos, and employment.

                But they have a graphic which explains all their big ideas about dating.  The blue box, the saddest box you’ll ever do, represents those questions innocent questions which lead to more interesting, meaningful results. Here’s the part where OK Cupid subtly suggests “Hey, maybe you might want to get in on this, maybe answering a few of our 18,000 questions”.

Important Questions to ask your ‘potential’ significant other

                “Do you like the taste of beer? Yes” equals “Will I have sex on my first date?”

                If you’re on OK Cupid for hookups, I guess that’s cool. Personally, I haven’t had such things happen yet. Though I will say, the people on OK Cupid tend to be really nice people, better than such sites as “PlentlyOfFish” which I think is ultra-creepy. So this is a fairly important question to a vast majority of twenty and thirty-somethings looking for their artistic other (OK Cupid does cater to a certain level of artsy-ness. Just saying)

                Some other questions which predict the likelihood of having sex on the first date (Yes answer only)

                “In a certain light, wouldn’t nuclear war be exciting” (83% chance, those are better odds than an actual nuclear war happening)

                “Could you imagine yourself killing someone?” (82% chance, maybe this has to do with that vague emotion known as ‘passion’. It proves they are passionate I guess, though I’m a bit worried about the dating world now)

                “Assuming you were in the position to do so, would you launch nuclear weapons under any circumstances?” (82% chance again. I guess radiation really turns people on).

Next Question:

Do my date and I have long-term potential? Equals the following three questions:

“Do you like horror movies?”  Personally I’m not a horror buff. 

“Have you ever traveled to another country alone?” Actually, I like this question a lot. Traveling with other people gets very annoying, I enjoy traveling alone. When you’re traveling with someone else, there’s all that compromise which is a pain.

“Wouldn’t it be fun to chuck it all and go live on a sailboat?” I want to do this once I become a successful human being. Right now I’m a sloth. As much as a sloth can ‘work on’ something, I’m working on it. 

For their politics question, I guess that doesn’t apply in New York. New York has a wide variety of people with similar political beliefs, from liberal liberal, moderate liberal, conservative liberal, liberal moderate, and the most far right one, moderate moderate. I’m not sure if Republicans live in New York, or, if they do, they keep an extremely low profile and have secret handshakes to discover one another. 

I found their “Is my date religious?” question interesting. Spelling and grammar mistakes apparently are more acceptable by religious types. ‘Next to intelligent design, what’s a couple of typos’ is how OK Cupid phrased it. Bits and pieces like that are what motivate me to want to write for one of these sites. That’s a little weak, not going to lie. Despite that, seeing the writing and reading levels of various religions was somewhat interesting.

Overall, I like the site. Unlike most sites, they do have a specific niche group of artsy types, which basically equal my type. I’ve met some seriously cool people on there. There’s even a website dedicated to OK Cupid, called “Ok Cupid Letters that never got responses” that I covered in a previous post. I’m happy to report Jon Roren’s back at it, and welcome him back into the blogging fold. 

Maybe we’ll all find our special someone. I hope for that. I wish you all luck on this and hope you find that someone willing to sleep for inordinately long periods of time with you, hanging upside in the trees and catching the breeze.

Is OK CUPID LETTERS THAT NEVER GOT RESPONSES marking the line between getting vulnerable and too much information?

He's a winner, I can feel it

Jake Elliot Roren embraces the prevailing attitude of sharing more. With his website “OkCupidLetters.com” he takes this to a logical place: online dating. Here, his vulnerable impulses take hold. You thought Carles from Hipster Runoff was “getting vulnerable with you”? Forget that well-adjusted put-on artist, this guy wears his heart on his sleeve; he might have been the original prototype for the Emo kid. Maybe that should be his next tattoo. Maybe it already is. 

                The site consists exclusively of messages that he sent to girls on OKCUPID and never received responses. Each message offers the reader a look into the dark, twisted and admittedly alternative soul. He’s 36 now, so he’s honed this vulnerability to an absolute art form.

                Now this would be unfair if he just showed us their responses, and stated “Wow, how could they not go for that.” Instead, he never received one, allowing the reader to make their own judgment on his wise or faltering attempts at online flirtation. Obviously his goal is to show off how shallow and superficial online dating is, but I don’t necessarily take his cynical point of view. Dating over the internet has just begun and it needs some time one can discount it.

                Having said that, OKCUPID does have a certain reputation for how it treats users. One of its famous messages was sent to the most attractive users on its site. Here I have the actual wording of that very post:

We are very pleased to report that you are in the top half of OkCupid’s most attractive users. The scales recently tipped in your favor, and we thought you’d like to know.
How can we say this with confidence? We’ve tracked click-thrus on your photo and analyzed other people’s reactions to you in QuickMatch and Quiver.
Your new elite status comes with one important privilege: You will now see more attractive people in your match results.
This new status won’t affect your actual match percentages, which are still based purely on your answers and desired match’s answers. But the people we recommend will be more attractive. Also! You’ll be shown to more attractive people in their match results.
Suddenly, the world is your oyster. Login now and reap the rewards. And, no, we didn’t just send this email to everyone on OkCupid. Go ask an ugly friend and see.

                Now, oddly Jake hasn’t yet written about this (yet). His site does appear to be updated fairly infrequently. But any dating site that sends such things to its users plays a cruel game, akin to Lacrosse, easily one of the meanest games ever. Those users who failed to receive this message, I’m sorry but random dating site algorithms thought you were unattractive.

                His modus operandi appears to be as a twee sort of adult. The one casually name-dropping bands and having more energy than he knows what to do with, hence all those messages he sent out. If you saw this guy in any record store, anywhere, he’d be the guy you’d tell what band you liked and he’d spit out an answer for what you’d like. And he’d be right; you’d adore him for it. He is a human, living breathing version of your last.fm account. 

                The online world isn’t as nice. His site seems to acknowledge this, though perhaps being rejected isn’t always a bad thing. I’ve known friends who kept job rejection letters and later looked at them and laughed. Maybe his site does a little of that too. When he’s met that certain someone and together they can bask in the glow of their computer monitor, reading and laughing at each post. Seeing his explanation for why he sent each and every message. How each analysis brought him a little closer to emotional nirvana? Perhaps they might even share some of that wisdom with their first child, Galaxie 500’s album “This is Our Music”. Then their next child “Slanted and Enchanted” can also appreciate his father’s bizarre sense of humor.

                But I digress. I enjoy the website a lot. I want Jake to continue with it, with all his trials and tribulations on the alternative dating site OKCUPID. His evisceration of the Ice Breaker feature is great, sometimes it just gives you random things you both like, such as “Carpets”.

 Live free and prosper Crazy Pablo.  

Is the movie “The Social Network” just copping a feel off of Generation Y?

I’m sure you’ve seen the advertisements proclaiming this cinematic “manna from heaven” bestowed on us ignorant fools. The movie of a generation, one screams. Not to be missed, another one says. Citizen Kane remade for narcissistic types, raves another. 

According to my friends’ status updates, they are all going to see it. Some even “like” it, confirming this is an acceptable thing to post on Facebook, and that Mark Zuckerberg won’t get you for watching it. Instead he’ll just pour all of your personal information into various advertising algorithms, so the ads you see on the will be specifically targeted to your tastes. Man, I hope that you are able to avoid that cruel fate, of being a willing participant in a giant advertising scheme. Who knows, next you may be asked to water someone’s virtual crops. Shutter at the thought, maybe the movie isn’t worth it. 

The movie stars Jesse Eisenberg, who is basically Michael Cera if Michael Cera experienced human emotions. Perhaps I can’t exactly find fault with the cast; they’re just looking for work, but the whole premise of making a movie off of such a showy social website that’s been established for only a few years sounds a bit off. I mean, I don’t exactly see movies on OKCupid or Last.fm. A movie about Myspace would probably just focus on Tom crying in a small room surrounded by white erase boards filled with nonsensical gibberish. But Myspace did offer some easy ways to protect your privacy. Just try navigating Facebook's privacy settings and see if you don't go utterly mad.

Facebook works like most social networking sites do. What’s different about it is how much information it has and how many people use it. Recently it was discovered that people use Facebook even more than Google, which struck me as a wee bit upsetting. I mean, what happens when people are more willing to learn about their social networks than actually search out knowledge, whether or not it is particularly relevant. Sure, you can try to search out new things on Facebook, but they are only self-serving. There’s hardly anything new to be discovered on there, and lately it has been trying to cop even more information from Wikipedia, in the hopes that by merging that information into their format, you’ll never have a reason to leave.

Having a movie come out about this is probably the most blatant attempt of ripping off Generation Y for its nostalgia. I’m a little surprised that only a few years need to pass before things count as nostalgia, so that’s  disappointing. Aren’t we the generation who had an entire show dedicated to ripping off our childhood for cheap laughs (Robot Chicken, see that Transformers reference), or hell even Transformers. Think of it, there are Transformers 1, Transformers 2, all those Harry Potter movies, countless Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchises, Mortal Kombat, Spiderman 1, Spiderman 2, Spiderman 3, and countless others even more forgettable. Now we have a movie about a site we all frequent on a fairly regular hourly basis. Despite our best efforts, you’re in or you’re out.

Not being on Facebook gets you dirty looks. Each time somebody hears “I’m not on Facebook” a few thoughts pop into their head:

1.       Potential Luddite (impossible, Luddites are made up to scare web designers)

2.       Has “sketchy” past (like, horribly evil past)

3.       Wants privacy (completely foreign concept)

4.       Is Amish (depends on size of the beard)

5.       Doesn’t like you enough (most likely scenario)

So this movie just lets you watch your favorite website come to life, in all of its petty cruelty. It started out as a way for people to see who was single and who wasn’t. Mark apparently made enough enemies for someone to write a screenplay and get it successfully produced. Perhaps Mark might spend another hundred million (after that kind gift to Newark) to create another movie, a response to this one, where he singles out people he dislikes and dumps on them for roughly an hour and a half.

It annoys me to no end that this movie feels like a giant data-mining exercise. Yes, I know it was based on the book by Ben Mezrich, but the movie reeks of angst.  It feels like it is reliving the history of something that might have been a social movement, but then unreasonably adds a bunch of drama to keep you interested. Does there need to be that much angst for a website? This isn’t 4chan or something.

To give you some idea of the level of dramatic put-on and emotional unease, the soundtrack was done by Trent Reznor. If that doesn’t give you an idea of the level of angst at play here, perhaps the commercials might. Each one I see gives the feel that these people are off to destroy the world we love and hold dear.

By putting my thoughts into words, I’m certain I will be dragged against my will by my group of well-intentioned friends hoping to get me more “movie-savvy”. I just don’t dig the cruel humor so prevalent in movies; that’s the main reason I didn’t enjoy “Borat”. Maybe I should just learn to accept that nostalgia happens quickly, and that it can quickly be capitalized upon. But nonetheless, The Social Network shall find me somehow, someday whether in a theater or on a lazy, channel-surfing day.