“Wild hoses couldn’t drain my bidet.”
– spam

My fascination with craigslist continues apace.

Exhibit A: The hilarious erotic services forum.

The forum is pretty blatent prostitution. I’m not sure how it’s legal. Most posts coyly suggest “donation” amounts for services rendered. I guess they are personal performance artists?

Anyway, it’s an entertaining read.

Exhibit B: The missed connection craigslist forum is also weird. The steps that would have to occur for it to work are mind-boggling.

If you don’t know it, the MC forum is for people that saw each other, liked the cut of the other’s gib, but proceeded to not do anything about it. One of you posts, looking for the other. Hopefully they’ll get your message in a bottle and reply.

But in order to reach your target, both of you would have to check the forum (within a few days probably) and wade around the posts looking for one describing yourselves. That’s crazy talk.

So either you are chronically checking for MCs (seems bad) or you both felt just intrigued enough to later post about it on an arbitrary forum but not intrigued enough to say something at the time. Seems like a narrow window of feasibility.

So I like making shirts. I have a new idea for one, but ideally it would take up the whole shirt, not just the 8″x10″ square to which most websites limit you. Does anyone know a good service that will accept full-size designs or someway I could do it myself (but not so it looks crappy)?

I only really want to do text, just wrapped around my body. Doesn’t need to be complicated.

I recently signed up for a dodgeball account. You know, ’cause I’m such a social butterfly. One neat feature is the ability to secretly disable friends.

Not that I have more friends than I can handle or fall out with the ones I do have, but I can imagine the convenience. In the rough and tumble world of personal relationships, sometimes you’d rather not say no nor broadcast a new-found hatred.

Flickr could use this. Like, what if you added a mass murderer to your contacts. Unfortunately, he won’t stop posting photos of victims, and you’re all like, “Gross.” But you don’t dare remove him as a buddy, because then he’ll come after you.

From bash.org comes this tale of a rogue shitbuster:

> so I was with my friend bryan the other night in a bar
> well he got really drunk and said he was gonna puke
> so i helped him walk to the toilet
> all the stalls were occupied
> bryan is a rugby player… so a big guy
> so he fucking KICKS one of the stall doors open
> and there’s this guy in there taking a shit
> and bryan throws up ALL OVER HIM
> then (this is genius) bryan thinks ‘oh shit… if i were taking a shit and someone came in and was sick all over me, i’d want to fuck him up… so i’d better hit him first’
> so he fucking SMACKS this guy in the face
> and runs away
> imagine being that guy… WORST NIGHT OUT EVER

Busted!

The Wind-Up

Following my own advice and a friend’s good experience, I took to the Internet for my Lady Quest. I figured there are plenty of untapped shy computer girls out there.

I still couldn’t shake a misgiving about personal ad sites like match.com or whatever that leave a static ad up for people to peruse. I felt like that was exposing too much, putting myself out too far. But craigslist‘s personals were much more temporary affairs that aimed more to be clever and grab a reader’s attention than to be a laundry list of oneself. I felt a little more in my element there. Plus, the competition isn’t very stiff. Mostly people looking for 420 or waving dick pics around.

I was curious about the relative merits of posting vs. replying. Where are the ladies looking? Do ladies post their own rather than bother wading in m4w or do they not feel the need to come up with their own ads when men outpost women by, like, 10 to 1?

I first replied to some ads, both reading them as they came and searching for things like ‘geeky’ or whatever. I ended up replying to four ads, one of which ended in a date, but didn’t go anywhere.

So, I resolved to post my own.

The Pitch

To avoid self-aggrandizement and embarrassment, I will not repost the ad here. Needless to say, it was very cute. I requested a geeky lady and had a series of photos of me doing stuff with an invisible friend. A suggestion was planted that what was missing from them was the reader.

I posted the ad in Boston’s m4w section at around 8:30PM on a Sunday.

The Swing

I got a decent response — 25 total. The days in the above graph are 24-hour blocks of time since the post went up, not physical days.

One interesting thing is the surfeit of “Cute ad! I don’t want to date you, but cute ad” responses. I wonder if that is common, to have people reply to ads that tickle them. There must be a large population of bored-at-work craigslist surfers.

Also note the two replies that were from men. One said “What a dork” and the other suggested that what was missing from the photos was a hot dude like him. It’s not clear if he was coming onto me or making fun of me. I was really surprised that anyone would bother mocking fellow posters.

Women, if you reply to a craigslist ad and don’t include a pic, it’s a big waste of time. I did reply to some of them, for sure, but the threshold for doing so was higher. Especially since I included pictures of me.

My usual tactic was to reply to the ones that interested me and point them to this blog (hi, ladies). Very few responded after that. Oh well, if nothing else, it was good guerilla marketing.

Conclusions

I went on a few dates, but I wasn’t pumped about the experience. The girls were cool, and hopefully I’ve made a friend or two, but… Dates with an online acquaintance seemed a little too forced. I think I should have tried talking to people on instant messanger a lot more before going on a date.

Something about being thrown together without the chance for the whole ramp-up in sexual tension. No flirting. I dunno… Something was missing that made it hard for me to make a connection. Of course, I don’t make connections very well anyway, so maybe it wasn’t the Internet’s fault.

In other news, I don’t pursue well. I think I need more romantic comedy in my life. Meet someone, don’t make much of each other, keep coincidentally bumping into each other, discover that we are soul mates, sell the rights to Nora Ephron.

I finally signed up for Gmail. I had been resisting it because of the vague feeling that Google was becoming too much of a superpower or something like that. I dunno. Didn’t want to feed into their crazy momentum. But whatever, 2.6 gigs of storage is my tipping point.

I won’t change my email address, since mike@mterry.name just redirects to wherever I want, so I didn’t need to bother with finding a wicked username. But I did anyway. And no, it doesn’t have anything to do with wanting to change my name to Michael B. Arthur.

Well, maybe it does.