Monthly Archives: March 2020

On Getting Into Dating

31/03
2020

“Enhance!“, I bark at the screen, having identified a low-resolution image which may contain the critical identifying data that I need to make my decision. The computer swiftly fills in the otherwise missing data using artificial intelligence, neural networks using advanced algorithms turning a grainy, poorly-taken photo into a vast bank of information, by extrapolating missing pixels, refracted light, data about the sensor that took the image, metadata, everything. And there it is. A high resolution image, billions of pixels. The make of the car, the year of the car, the trim level, the likely state of the car and how well it was maintained. I have what I need to know. I swipe left: ‘Butterfly364‘, who is admittedly attractive and likes travel, long walks and ‘the bantz’, has a decent car but doesn’t clean it with the correct agent for soft-touch interior surfaces. Also, she hasn’t upgraded her phone in a while, who even does that? Definitely a ‘No’. My marriage decisively unravelled in October of 2015, in tandem with my increasing unwillingness to spend the last of the savings on expensive but impractical shelving for the house that ‘we’ had bought and moved into not six months earlier, […]

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11/03
2020

I’m one of the people who put Spenser Confidential on top of Netflix’s most watched list. Me. If you’re wondering what’s wrong with the world today, you could do worse than with considering that I’m out there, enabling shit like this. I’m pushing the bad numbers. Me. Like Jeff Bezos, but somehow worse, in a very banal way that’s not decisively terrible, but probably should held to account in a public forum.

I didn’t even set out to watch it, I just needed wallpaper while figuring out what to do next with, I don’t know, anything. I was probably looking at my dating apps, wrestling with the dichotomy of hating them and yet wanting dearly top be loved, to be held, to get liked on those terrible virtual meat markets, where I somehow imagine that my image is being poked and prodded and tested for longevity, stamina, faithfulness and tallness by an array of women who probably felt with some justification that their standards weren’t being met. Or, I was eating.

The only saving grace from this generic ‘Mark Wahlberg is a sound guy from Boston (Bawst’n) with violent anger issues, mixed up in some criminal enterprise’ caper is the actor Winston Duke who is very watchable (quietly amiable and charismatic) and the whole thing made me laugh, twice. Here’s the Polygon review of it: https://www.polygon.com/reviews/2020/3/6/21168378/spenser-confidential-review-netflix-mark-wahlberg-winston-duke-alan-arkin-peter-berg

I’m not going to be flying anyone to Mars any time soon, but that doesn’t make me a good person when we’re adding up the numbers. Remember that.