2007.03.08
It was... interesting, and kind of fun. At the moment it's a bit stressful, I figure that most of the people didn't rush back home that night to the website to enter their "dates" they'd be potentially interested in seeing again... or... everyone I thought I might have hit it off with didn't feel likewise.
It reminds me that, at heart, I might be a bit of "serial monogamist". I don't think there's been a time in my life when I was doing a lot of casually dating, during high school and college the pattern was flirt a bit, kind of start thinking of yourself "as a couple", then go on dates. So I think the stakes feel higher for everything than they really are. (Though, come to think of it, cutting your losses after a date or two that really made it clear you're nohow "meant for each other" likely takes a good deal of candor and bravery.)
I don't know if the women there have that same issue, and so won't go on a date unless they're pretty certain of a positive result. And in this hopefully brief period of uncertainty for me (no interest? or just not yet returned to the site?) I'm reminded of how long it took, say, Mo to view me as a potential romance rather than as a friendly goofball. Of course, the Mo situation is hardly parallel to a bout of 8-minute-dating, but still.
One thing I didn't read beforehand is: the 8 minutes go by really quickly. You barely have enough time to mutually establish stories before the bell rings and it's time to move on. I suppose it could be argued you should be more focused and goal-oriented in your spiel and the questions you ask, hopefully not to maximize the chance of getting another date, but of quickly sussing out the potential there, and any glaring incompatibilities. Or maybe that's now how these things should work, that the spontaneous rambling is part of the charm.
Another detail is the M/F breakdown. I'm sure this would be potential fodder for a budding sociologist, but according the organizer, for the younger generations, you get about a 2:1 ratio of men to women signing up. By my age, it has evened out, and that trend continues so that the ratio is flipped for the older demographics.
Art of the Moment
A while back I posted about Magic Pengel. In some recent surfing I heard about that game connected with a Gamecube game
Amazing Island, which also has you drawing monsters and stuff, so I grabbed a copy from half.com. ("Graffiti Kingdom" was the actual sequel to Pengel, but I think they made the drawing system much more engineer-y and less charming.)
I'm not sure about Graffiti Kingdom but much of this is related to the work of Takeo Igarashi...I posted his SmoothTeddy stuff before, haven't yet had time to try out his other stuff. But I took the flower above from his 3D gallery.