The Horrors of Internet Dating, Volume 8

When you're looking for someone to date, one of the most important things is having something in common. Luckily, OkCupid has advanced algorithms that can scour profiles and identify common interests.

Thanks. That really helps this person stand out from everyone else. Although some people need more help standing out than others.

Pro tip: if you have friends who look exactly the same as you, identify which one is you. Better yet, take pictures with friends who look different so it's clear which one is y-

AHHH FUCK! Never mind, I take it back. Just take normal pictures. Goddamn. I remember when The Shining was just a movie.

But it's words that matter more than horrific pictures.

No, random internet person, you shouldn't have to preface that. If thinking deep conversation and communication are important is "weird" to most people, then I'm screwed. Let's see who else agrees with me:

Nope. This may sound weird, but I use a spacebar and shift key when communicating with a keyboard.

Although, "Ballcrosswordsex" does sound like my kind of sport.

Hey I like intelligence! I like learning! I even like happiness! Unfortunately, I also like the letter N. :(

Falling apart at the.

But you know, despite being a snobby grammar nazi (which is obvious in my profile), sometimes people actually do send me messages. Let's see who loves me today:

ok. yw. loljk.

I am flattered, truly, that someone thinks I am Q.T. Cutie? I am cutie? Wait what?

YOU ARE CUTIE. ME LIKE LONG WALKS ON BEACH.

Sometimes I figure these people must be getting by on their looks, but then I click and they either don't have a picture or aren't that good looking. So then I just feel sorry for them because they're not very good at communicating over the internet. Either that or they just don't put any effort in because they figure I'm so desperate I'll go for anything. Which is 100% true.¹

At least some people appreciate language.

This assassin lover does like animals. And poem. I wonder if there is someone else who's into the same things.

Well, her life is suck, but she does like dog! And pomes! Close enough.

This may sound weird, but maybe I should go back to trying to find thuth love in real life.

I leave you with this:

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¹ Not really. Actually my pickiness only allows me to go anywhere with the cream of the crop. Then I get all emotionally invested because the cream of the crop is so very rare, and that makes me all serious and not-myself which sabotages everything, and I go back to stockpiling the crop of my cream.

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See also: Volume 7.

On the BBC

Hey look at that, I'm quoted in a feature on the front page of the BBC: Do Typefaces Really Matter? (near the end)

If you're visiting from the article, you may wish to see the post that inspired the reporter to give me a call: Fonts Don't Matter.

I wrote it to be a bit provocative, and I am by no means an expert in any aspect of design. However, I stand by my opinion that in the vast majority of situations where text's primary purpose is to be read (versus, say, recognized, like a brand's logo, or the sign to the right), typeface matters very little.

Some pro-fonters in the BBC article posit subliminal emotional reactions to fonts. That is a testable claim, and its veracity is an empirical question. Show me actual evidence for substantial differences in emotional reactions to fonts and I'll gladly rescind my assholery. Until then, I highly doubt there is a tapestry of font-inspired emotions comparable to Baskin-Robbins' 31 flavours of ice cream.

If this is your first visit to Phronk.com, welcome. I usually don't talk about design, but you might wanna come back anyway, since I'm kinda awesome. I also don't usually write boring posts about my dreams. Hence why I had to put this one up to, you know, make up for that last one. So y'all come back. Or else.

In other 15 minutes (maybe 16 now) of fame news, I am currently the featured blogger at Studio 30+ (also: I'm old). Plus there was being in Macleans and other publications etc etc talk to my publicist.

Hammy Potter

Trying to sleep in sticky heat with a fan blasting in my face tends to give me the best dreams. I won't bore you with the details, but last night I dreamed that I went to see the latest Harry Potter movie. The dream seemed to go on for hours; every detail of the plot was there, and I even remember picking apart little differences from the book.

The thing was, it had nothing at all to do with the plot of any of the real-life books. No, my mind dreamed up an alternate Harry Potter involving alternate dimensions and even sadder angsty teen romance.

The best part, though, was my brain's replacement for Quidditch. There were still brooms and goals, but it was played indoors. Also, every kid played with a hamster strapped to their wand. In one scene, Harry realized that someone had sabotaged his hamster, because it belched a deadly fireball that singed a hole in the wall, almost killing Ron. I'm not sure what the hamsters strapped to wands were supposed to belch, buy not fireballs I guess.

It was at this point that I realized this wasn't really Harry Potter, and began to wake up. Damn. I hope I get to see what happens tonight.

Updates

Oh internet, I know I haven't been there for you lately, and for that I am sorry.

It's just that there has been so much going on. See, when Willow died that got me pretty down, and when I'm down I feel like I'm this personality-free bag of flesh. That's not very conducive to blogging. Oh, me? Yeah, I'm doing better thanks, but, you know, it still hits me pretty hard once in a while.

The other thing is that I'm finally finishing up this school business. The deadline for my PhD dissertation is looming—I'm talking in two days here—so I've been spending, literally, almost every waking moment writing and rewriting and realizing there is no such thing as a fully functional word processor. Have I ever told you about my PhD research? It's pretty cool; I study horror movies. I'll be giving a very brief talk (like, 5 minutes) about the psychology of horror at Ignite London if you're interested. I'm going last, and you know what that means: I'M THE HEADLINER. And/or got chosen last in a hat draw. Whatevs.

So there's been all that stress, on top of other stress (mostly the good kind, but anything that gets my heart a-thump is still adding fuel to the fire), and although I've got enough mental resources to deal with it, it leaves me with few left to devote to you, dear internet. Don't worry, I will return to you soon. Then never leave you.

NE. VER. LEAVE. YOU.

Book Review: Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card

You could describe Ender's Game as Harry Potter in space. It'd be a pretty shitty way of describing it, since Ender came long before Harry , but the similarities are there. We've got a school full of kids who are special, an upcoming war, a sport that involves flying around and reaching a goal, and one really special angsty kid who's destined to save the world.

The similarities "end" there, though. Ender's Game is not fantasy, but hard science fiction. For a geek like me, it was a delight to read the intricate details of how to maneuver in zero gravity; not only how it affects people physically, but mentally as well ("the enemy's gate is down").

The sci-fi doesn't come at the expense of character development, however. Ender is a flawed, rounded out character. Flawed in a Jack Bauer kind of way though; you always know he'll figure out a way to deal with any obstacle. Often violently.

I was amazed at the prescience of Card's vision of the future. The short story the book is based on was written in 1977, yet many of the technologies described are just coming to maturity in 2010. The Internet plays a large role (especially in the interesting but ultimately rather pointless side plot about Ender's sister), taking over media and political influence in a way we are sure to see soon. He even threw in a line about kitchen appliances being online; in the 80s, the idea of a human being able to type something up then post it for the entire world to see (hi) would have been mind-blowing, but somehow Card was already imagining Twittering fridges.

Part of his genius was keeping descriptions just vague enough that your mind fills in the details with plausible technology. For example, the students' "desk" computers are described as fitting on a lap and having a screen, but the exact control mechanism is never specified. Of course, I imagined them as iPads.

Speaking of which...I got an iPad. This is my first post written on it. My typing is slower and I can't figure out a way to include a picture, but I still feel like I've arrived in the friggin future. Full impressions coming up later.

"Not great, to be honest," I said to the cab driver when he asked how I was. He proceeded to tell me about how bad his day was going—flat tire or something—but all London's beautiful women made it better, he said as he almost ran one over. I grunted and nodded, but even as it was happening it felt like a dream.

Willow was dead when I arrived at the animal hospital. Hit by a car. She looked so ... normal lying there, like she was just resting. Except she wasn't excited to see me, snorting and waving her little white-booted paws in the air. Sometimes when I came home and she did that, I'd try not to react, because books say spoiling them when you arrive home just makes them miss you more when you're gone. But ...  oh God ... I wish I spoiled her every time I saw her, which already wasn't enough ... I wish I fully appreciated every single minute I got to spend with her, whether it was relaxing on the couch or cleaning up her puke. And I am going to miss her so much now that she is gone.

In my few hours of sleep that night I dreamed about taking Willow for a walk in this beautiful weather. Just another ordinary day with her.  I was thankful to my subconscious for that. I also dreamed that the shrivelling little plants I keep on my windowsill had grown giant green leaves, reaching their full potential. I think the two dreams were related.

Even when I'm awake, my brain keeps trying to make sense of it. When my thoughts briefly wander from the topic, the grief will snap back to me in some new and horrible way. Sometimes it comes back fuzzy, like it really was a bad dream. A bad dream, or just a flight of dark hypotheticals that I mentally test-drove, as I'm prone to do when an idea for a horror story comes to me. Another minute, my mind acknowledges the reality, but tries to fit it into a puzzle, like this was supposed to happen; some natural endpoint to a series of events that preceded it. Or it's just a temporary challenge to be overcome if I can fit the pieces together.

It really happened, it can't be undone, and there is no reason to it. It was random and it was terrible. I guess that sums up life, for those of us still living it.

At least I have memories that will, one day, bring me happiness. I love you so much, Willow.

Puaj! More PWTIC Publicity

Oh hey, I forgot to mention that my other blog, Putting Weird Things in Coffee (which is about putting weird things in coffee) has gotten some more publicity.

This brief article appeared in an actual physical newspaper in Argentina called Clarin. Er, Clarín. I guess this is a big deal, because according to Wikipedia, it's Argentina's largest newspaper.

Kinda similar to the Macleans article, except it actually mentions the blog's URL.

By the way, that article is the result of like 3 pages of questions and answers.

For an article that actually used my brilliant Q&A skills, check out City Pages' article on Putting Carr Valley Cheese in Coffee. Monica, the reporter who interviewed yours truly, actually sent me the cheese to try, which I appreciate so much. The results of the cheese experiments are being rolled out on PWTIC itself.

Also, I'm trying to figure out how to pronounce PWTIC. Since it is spelled similar to "pwned", which is pronounced like "boned" with a P (or just "owned" if you're a snobby leetspeak purist), I figure PWTIC is said like "po-tick". "Pwuh-tick" is kinda funnier though. I dunno.

A Kinect by Any Other Name

One of my best friends just had a daughter. She went through her first few days of life without a name; just this generic mini-person with nothing to refer to her as. She now has a lovely name, but I can understand the difficulty in coming up with one that will serve her well for the rest of her life. One piece of advice I heard was that "she'll grow into her name."

This doesn't only apply to people.

Microsoft bizarrely unveiled the name of its new camera accessory: Kinect¹. HEY I GET IT. It's "connect" but also kinda-not-really looks like "kinetic." That probably sounded really good to a committee of Microsoft suits, on paper, but it comes out sounding like a spelling-impaired teenager's AOL username circa 1995.

But let's not forget the name of the system the Kinect was designed to compete against: the Wii. We laughed when that was announced, oh how we laughed (ok, I still laugh whenever someone says "play with my Wii"), but it's become accepted. Naming it the Wii wasn't the huge mistake that some people predicted it would be.

Similarly, #itampon was a trending topic on Twitter the day Apple announced the iPad. Now, it's lusted after without a second thought.

It's funny how arbitrary names really are. We give them a lot of thought before they're created, but after that, even the dumbest names are grown into. Then again, I may be biased, as a guy who goes by "Phronk."

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¹ BTW, I'm watching the Microsoft media briefing on the Kinect right now, and it looks pretty amazing. Controlling everything (not just games) with just your body and voice is pretty futuristic shit. Soon Minority Report will look quaint.

Er... "Kinect tracks your skeleton as you move." Maybe it'll be creepy HAL futuristic, too.

Ok this tiger fondling simulation is creepy too.

Enough live-blogging.

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Edit 3:24 pm: Oops I forgot that the whole reason I started posting this was to lead up to showing you this awesomely-named hot sauce my parents gifted to me yesterday:

OOPS SORRY I MEAN MY PARENTS AND WONDERFUL SISTER.

Halifax Reducks: Great Graves

Remember last time I was in Halifax and I witnessed the surreal scene of a girl in a prom dress torturing some freakish bird creature? Well, I caught up with said bird creature when I returned recently. This time we were with a dog¹, and apparently the thing learned to fight back. It must have felt threatened, seeing a less useless animal, and fucking came at our fucking faces, hissing. That's scary enough when you know what you're dealing with.

On the up side, the freak bird found itself an equally freakish mate.

But who cares about things that are alive? I find graveyards fascinating. A gravestone is the only semi-permanent visible relic that remains in proximity to these bodies we inhabit our whole lives. The textual messages on them have to be meaningful yet brief; they're like everyone's final Twitter update.

Despite dying so long ago, Smardon's grave is in perfect shape. I love the faux raw rock slab and the crooked cross. And his final message—"God alone understands"—is intriguingly cryptic. I see so many possibilities in that message and the dates that his family died.  I like to think he was a hitman.

Alexander Keith's original grave is nothing special:

But beside it is something a little more extravagant:

We take beer seriously around here.

Others keep it simple:

Although having them side by side gives them some meaning, no?

Just having a funny name can leave an impressive final message:

wheres mario lol

That's just unfortunate.

Some people put emphasis on the wrong words:

lawl

But aside from all the hilarity, there is heartbreak to be found in graveyards:

This creeped me out:

And this:

I found the graves of the survivors victims of the Titanic disaster to be particularly emotional. It was unsettling to see rows after rows of graves, all with the same date on them, most of them too young to die.

Many don't have names.

It's touching that someone cared enough to leave flowers here:

Unfortunately, disaster victims aren't immune to funny names:

Perhaps it's tactless to make fun of dead people. I mean no disrespect; if they were alive, I hope I could laugh with them, not at them. But they are dead, and thus unable to experience either joy or offense. If it's okay to find humour in living people with funny names, it's even more okay to do so with the dead.

RIP.

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¹ This dog:

Search Terms Used to Find Phronk.com, Volume 8

Here is how people got here:

• how to be interesting to talk to
• real pictures of zombies
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• freak trevor out

• i'm scared of internet dating
• various fucking types
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• western university devito porn

• i never used to fart but now
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