I read a fiction in high school about like the afterlife, and it mentioned the best English playwright wasn’t Shakespeare. It was some nobody who only showed his writing to his neighbor, but the neighbor was an asshole and told him it was trash. Don’t remember anything else about it but that stuck with me.

That’s good but there’s a lot of room between creepy and effective

I never paid for it out of stubbornness.

Are you writing good messages to potential matches?

What part of the world are you in?

In my experience, tinder is pretty bad. I don’t use facebook so I can’t vouch for that one, but I assume it’s also bad. I never got a single match on Bumble.

Hinge, I got pretty good results on. Even though they’re all owned by the same Match Group, hinge seemed to work better. I could get about a date a week on hinge, as an average guy.

I think it worked better for me because you can send a note when you see someone you like, so if you can write complete sentences you’re already a cut above the average guy.

I’ve been buying mostly mostly from Bandcamp. It’s worked out well. I have a big library, and the people making music got paid.

Tell us more about your current usage. What are you doing and where is it failing?

Some of the other posts already hit the highlights. Have a variety of well lit photos. Your profile should be short, but with some unique-ish hooks for people to talk about (eg: “reading ‘such and such’ for my book club!” - several things for someone to ask about there).

When you do match with people, don’t send generic messages. Don’t just send “hey”. Go read https://nohello.net/en/ for a post about that in other contexts.

After you’ve had one or two successful exchanges, clear any deal breakers you might have (eg: “really enjoying this conversation but wanted to make sure you saw on my profile I have a toddler. Are you okay with that?”). If that succeeds, ask them out.

Don’t provide too many choices. People get overwhelmed easily. “I’d love to talk more about (whatever we we were talking about). Do you want to go on a date? I like (local bar), but (other bar) in your neighborhood looks fun, too!”. Two choices. They’ll probably pick one.

More specific advice may be available if you tell us more about your specific experience

Conservatives are wrong about pretty much everything. I don’t know of a single problem where they have a sensible policy. They’re worse than toddlers.

Usually people talk about the pre tax cost.

I have a tinfoil hat theory that the taxes are kept like that to give people a recurring, low grade, anti-tax sentiment. There are a lot of crazy idiots that don’t want government to exist here, so by making people feel bad about paying taxes (instead of obscuring that by baking it into the listed price) they can win sympathy.

Did you independently reinvent https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings_System or did you know about the history?

I don’t think adult content should be stigmatized and quarantined. Why is a game about cutting terrified victims open with a handsaw cool, but a game about licking a clit needs to be isolated?

I don’t want to share my location nor have anyone else’s shared with me.

Friends and partners can text “I’ll be there in 5”

My friend shares her location with her mother. Her mother then nags her with like “Are you seeing someone new? You’re spending a lot of time in north brooklyn now.” Like, who needs that, or even the temptation of that?

A tech solution is not going to fix a social/mental problem like fear of cheating.

If I was going to make something like this, it would have to incorporate trust chains. I don’t care if some maga-hat says this lady is horrible. I care if my good friend Alex says she’s horrible. One person’s “this person won’t shut up about communism” is a big red flag (no pun intended) but for someone else that’s the dream.

When you sign up, you’d need to be referred to someone or be a root node. Anyone connected to you can be weighted differently. If some section of the tree is misbehaving, prune it.

But that’s a lot of work

Google probably wants to keep you on google.com, where they have ads. By doing the AI stuff, you never click through to someone else’s page. They get 100% of the interactions and can sell all the clicks.

It’s monopoly stuff. They should be stopped, with whatever box of liberty is needed.

Last book: “Last Call” by Tim Powers. It’s great. Poker and archetypes. Big inspiration for Unknown Armies, which I loved.

Current: Medusa’s web, also by Powers. Not sure if I’m into it yet but it’s got some of his signature weirdness

If they know, and it’s not vital, and they don’t care, then I think less of them.

Some people have less self control than a toddler

Do they vet the people? Could someone hypothetically sign up for the app, case the rich person’s situation, and then do crimes? Sounds like a good way to find rich assholes.

How is Nigel still alive and just walking around? Oh wait, he’s only 61? Fuck he’s going to be shitting in the pool for like 40 more years at this rate.

Ds2 is worth playing if you like the franchise/genre. It tries some stuff different from the previous game, and some of it works.

It think it’s also easier than ds1, and maybe DS3. I almost cleared it without dying, just using a normal build. Because of the weird “lose max health on death” mechanic, if you die a lot it can snowball, but if you stay alive your max health is pretty generous.

Sometimes people are my old job post AI stuff and I just tell them “stop using the lie machine”