A gripe with dating sites

There are sometimes thoughts I have that are too long for Facebook, or can't be made into concise statements for people's attention span on Facebook, or can't be memed easily. Or, more likely, can't be neutralized and made devoid of emotional content such that it can gather neutral likes while at the same time not revealing anything shocking about yourself.

For instance, this thought I had about SawYouAtSinai. After reading part of The Second Sex, I've been able to redefine a lot of what I encounter, in life and Judaism, in terms of the psychoanalytic perspective of Simone de Beauvoir. After seeing a gushing report from a matchmaker about a prospective match, and realizing that the "About Her" section could easily have been generated by a bot trained on dating profiles, I tried to find easy ways to generate dating profiles online. The examples from a five minute search were sparse, other than a hilarious fill-in-the-blank sample that generated a profile with an odd fixation on skinny feet. Thus, if I'm to generate a dating profile creator, it would take some serious work.

My thoughts then drifted to how SawYouAtSinai, a dating site initially developed sometime around 2005 if not earlier, forces anyone completing the profile into a certain paradigm. Most, if not all, modern dating sites have you fill out some broad categories based on religion and sex, upload some pictures, where you went to school, and a personal paragraph. Nothing gendered here. Whereas SawYouAtSinai requests a series of multiple choice questions in addition, with no "Other" options, e.g. for Kosher the options are "Always", "At Home", and "At Home & I Eat Dairy in non-kosher restaurants" (says it all). These differ depending on gender and thus force the person answering them to conform to pre-defined, unchanging ideas.

Here are the female-specific questions that are visible on a public profile (as distinct from questions visible only to the matchmaker):

Head covering when married: Fully, Partially, etc.
Dress: Skirts, Skirts+Pants, etc.

And the male-specific ones:

Head covering: Kippa
Do you want to meet someone who will cover her hair (Required)
Frequency of Torah study (Required)


My beef was with head covering originally, but then I realized that maybe because this is a matchmaking site, meant for more religious people, it makes assumptions that religious people might find relevant. However I have a problem with head coverings - shouldn't that be for both genders? Why do you have to make the head covering question mandatory? Why can't I have a head covering question for after marriage as well? Resolved: Yosef will change from a small kippa to a bukharian kippa after marriage so that the women won't swoon at the sight of his beautiful hair. When you flip the tables on the whole shaitel thing it seems a lot weirder. But this can easily turn into yet another one of my gripes about shaitels in general, so let's not do that.

P.S. They should add a question just for the month of Adar where guys can list whether they will wear Skirts in addition to Pants.

Topics

Wifi + Graylog Analysis
Dreaming
Raspberry Pi 4 - Plex build out (again)
Enviro+ Pi input into Graylog
Minimizing ESXI datastores into one machine.
Thoughts on getting a new computer
Thoughts on "The Second Sex"
Thoughts on collapse (especially w/rt echo chambers)
     Especially thoughts on how it would play out on everything we do day to day.
     Law of unintended consequences
     What is dystopia? Can we look at the world from an outside viewpoint
That article about technical debt + Peter Zaihan + Collapse

Thoughts on Dating

Over the break I went on an Olami trip to Spain, Portugal, and Gibraltar, with a group of people 30+ strong from Houston, Chicago, and Detroit. I'd known some of the Houston group previously, some less than others. Among the many thoughts I had during the trip, several on the human relationship side have stood out. This was easily the best trip of my life. Going in I was apprehensive of traveling in a group this big and indeed the first time that Israeli music blared in a public square in Lisbon I noped out of the big group circle and sing-along in make-believe search for bathrooms. But I grew to really trust the people on the trip and especially the Houston crew, who early on claimed the rear of the bus and stuck around through the remainder of the trip's long bus rides. My laughter flowed free and it's safe to say that I haven't been this happy in a long time.

After the trip, the sore throat that I'd contracted from someone else on the trip (which is how it goes, one person has something and pretty soon some other people do too) became bronchitis and I picked up pink eye in the airport (as I had to travel to and from San Francisco the week after my return). This has left me in a monastic state of silence, unable to speak for more than a few minutes without coughing and subsequent unmanageable strain on my vocal cords. At a time when I'm bursting to relate my thoughts and impressions to my parents who got all sorts of pictures on our shared WhatsApp group, I'm struck dumb by the inevitable post-international-travel sickness.

And so I turn to a blogpost instead, to note the following big change that has crystallized since the trip. Namely, I gained a lot of self-confidence from the trip. In addition to doing a few selfies with the Houston group, I also was able to ask other people on the group to take pictures of me in front of famous tourist landmarks, and some of the fear I'd long borne towards pictures of myself (and my fat-face-a stupenda) melted away. It's become easier for me to look at pictures of myself and not shy away and say I look like crap (although there's no denying that I look a whole a lot better without glasses).

Another thing is that I started reconsidering moving to NYC, as I'd suddenly realized that all my friends and social life are here in Houston. Why move to NYC if all the friends I'd just made on this trip are still staying in Houston? That leaves just one reason to move to NYC: dating. And here's the other thing. After a recent long-distance relationship, where both parties were putting effort into the long-distance deal, I suddenly realized that long distance is a lot harder than I thought and that I'm no longer willing to do long distance dating. Even without my travel to San Francisco, the realization that I can't just go over and visit someone I'm seeing and spend time with her, alone or in a group at an event, without making it a big deal, bothers me a lot, and I'm no longer willing to do that, for anyone really. Phone conversations seriously lack the human, in-person element and I personally can't substitute phone conversations for that. This is why I will start going to Jewston and Moishe House events, even if they are on Shabbos, because I've reached the point in my life where I'd rather compromise on my previously-held beliefs on Jewish observance than pass up on opportunities to meet Jewish women where they are, rather than trust that God will provide in a city that is not friendly to "observant" single young Jewish professionals.

Back from London

What a trip to London! Two weeks! And boy what jetlag I'm experiencing. After a nine-hour flight from Heathrow to Houston on Sunday afternoon, I flew out to San Francisco from Houston this morning for work.

Perhaps I'll do some research to figure out how best to host photos online, or maybe subscribe to flickr for a year and post the very best photos of London.

The only thing that keeps me sane during some of the work I"m doing is the chillwave/synthwave mixes on this youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwoTj-pZgZZ8DInOXSSLMmA

I simply downloaded everything via youtube-dl to listen to, when Youtube is filtered on a corporate policy. 

Learning about Music

The last few days I've been obsessed with a new discovery: everynoise.com.

From the description:

"Every Noise at Once is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 3,200 genres by Spotify as of 2019-06-24. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier.
 
Click anything to hear an example of what it sounds like.
 
Click the » on a genre to see a map of its artists.
 
Be calmly aware that this may periodically expand, contract or combust."

This just has me in a tizzy because there's so much music out there and it's so easy to hear snippets of music related to my favorite genres. And you can also discovery new artists of music you already know. In my case I discovered a whole world of children's music and also rominimal, which is a type of minimal techno specific to Romania / Bucharest's club scene. Apparently this music has been popular for 10 years now and just doesn't die. The sample on the page is here. Then I also found a nice article from 2017: https://www.electronicbeats.net/beyond-rominimal-guide/

In general it's just amazing how the site makes it incredibly easy to discover new music.

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I went to the Neue Gallerie in NYC yesterday with a friend with insights to every painting, many of which were part of an exhibition of self-portraits by German artists such as Oskar Kokoschka, Max Bekkman, and more between about 1900 to 1940. Afterwards I learned that eating pizza with knife and fork is absolutely not done, anywhere, and that New Yorkers eat while walking, including on the train, like in Europe. I also learned that country music, with its clean language and simple themes has more appeal to Jews than I'd known of, especially now that there is such a thing as country pop and country rock, genres that have become more popular in the past ten years.