ornaments of rhyme

our to-days and yesterdays / are the blocks with which we build

[whirligig-girl]

I had noticed these strange little occurrences all my life. A bird would fly past my window and it'd sorta look like it was half there, half not. I'd glance up at a clock and for a moment, the second hand would be in two places at once. Never really thought much about it. I thought it was just normal. Someone told me once about the clock hand illusion where you flick your eyes and it looks like time stops for a half second or so, I figured it was something weird like that.

But one day, I think it was August 2021, I flipped a coin. Thinking back, I think it might have been the first time in my life I'd ever flipped a coin. But we were deciding where to eat, me and my friends.

And then it happened. The coin landed on the table, heads... and also on the floor, tails. I tracked the coin with my eyes, but suddenly realized I was looking at two things at the same time. It was like crossing your eyes, and seeing things kinda overlaid on top of eachother, kinda mixing and fading in and out, but with four eyes instead of two.

It was such a weird experience. At first I just stood there kinda motionless, trying to figure out what was going on. Then my friend bent down and picked up the coin off the floor, and said "Hah! Tails! Pizza!" and also she just stood there and said "Damnit. Heads. Guess we're gonna get burgers after all."

And I looked down at her and up at her at the same time.

That's really when the desynch started. I reached for the coin on the table and held a fuzzy, half-there, transparent coin in my hand.

I began to feel kinda sick. We got in the car and things got more and more confusing. Thank goodness I wasn't driving that day. My friends were having two increasingly different conversations and I just sat there kinda dissociating. By the time we got to the two different restaurants I was nauseated and I had a bad headache. I stayed in the car in the parking lot at the pizza place for a few minutes until the other car going to the burger place parked. One of my friends was worried and stayed with me, so that was nice. But when I tried getting out of the car, everything went wrong.

One of my bodies walked right into another car and fell down on the ground, while the other stopped and froze in place. The completely different sense of proprioception completely broke me.

I was basically bedridden for a week. Slowly I relearned how to move, and walk, and talk. I had two bodies, in two timelines, connected by a single consciousness. My brain(s?) had to learn how to control two bodies at the same time.

It's like, pretty weird, but I'm used to it these days. My two sets of eyes no longer overlay on top of one another, they're kinda separate. It's hard to describe. I think my brain got better at multitasking too, I can walk in one timeline and draw in the other, for example.

Things kept getting more and more different, as much as I tried to enforce keeping things the same. Finally I started seeing my therapist again.

I had to convince her that what I was experiencing was real. So I asked her to think of her favorite food and her favorite color. Then in the "Burger" timeline I asked her to tell me her favorite food, and in the "Pizza" timelines I asked her to tell me her favorite color. And I told her her favorite color in the burger timeline and her favorite food in the pizza timeline (Spaghetti and Red, btw.)

She quizzed me on a few other things and sometimes her answers differed between the two timelines which was pretty frustrating, and I don't think she really believed me at first, but she was nice enough to play along at least. And like, not have me committed.

I ended up scheduling my therapy so that I have meetings on pizza tuesday and burger friday, so they're kinda spaced out more evenly. It also just makes the meetings a little less confusing. Ironically doing the same thing in both timelines is actually more distracting than doing different things.

In late 2022 I transitioned. I decided to come out in the burger timeline and stay in the closet in the pizza timeline, so if everything fell apart I'd still have one normal timeline. And like, my parents did not support me. Most of my friends did, but some of them drifted away. And I found that just made me resentful of my parents and those friends in the pizza timeline. And the dysphoria of being a guy in the pizza timeline while living as a woman in the burger timeline was killing me. So when I got on HRT in early 2023 I decided I couldn't take it anymore, I had to transition in both timelines. So I did. Ironically things went a little smoother in the pizza timeline, probably because I was already more confident about presenting female.

I ended up making some transfem friends in the burger timeline, and I sought them out in the pizza timeline too.

It's kind of a mixed bag, this phenomenon. You know like, pain is a lot worse. One week I had a bad tummy ache in the pizza timeline and a bad toothache in the burger timeline. Or like, if I have back pain in one timeline, not having back pain in the other timeline doesn't relieve the feeling at all.

It's such a cool thing, like. When I first started out I had all these conflicting signals in my limbs and body and stuff. But now it's just like. Yeah I have a pizza arm and a burger arm, just like I have a left arm and a right arm. They're the same, but different.

When I make a drawing in one timeline, I don't have access to it in the other timeline, which is really annoying because I keep wanting to show people art I made in the other timeline. One day I'll figure out some kind of interdimensional data transfer protocol. I mean I guess I could like, convert the file into hexadecimal text, and then manually type it out and hope I don't make any mistakes. I'd have to compress the hell out of the file though. Maybe I'll try that one of these days when I don't have anything to do in either timeline.

But I get to spend more time with my friends, because I can schedule hanging out on different days of the same week. Does get kinda confusing when I confuse things that happened in one timeline for another.

Because like, ever since that coin flip, the timelines have been steadily moving further apart. You'd be surprised how little the weather has changed. Like, sometimes there's a little rain shower in one timeline a few minutes earlier than in the other, but all the big storms and hurricanes and stuff are basically the same. I guess it's harder to influence these continent-scale systems than the butterfly effect predicts.

I get to see almost twice as much meteors during meteor showers because I can look in two directions at once. Meteors hit the atmosphere in exactly the same way at exactly the same time.

But it does affect a lot of other little things. Even when you don't realize it, you affect the lives of everyone you come into contact with in little ways, and that spreads. I know people with different jobs in each timeline, people who have different relationships. Even people I don't know that well.

I wasn't quick enough in the pizza timeline to keep my friend from. Well. To save my friend's life. But I rushed over to her house in the burger timeline and talked her down. It's so weird, grieving a person you still talk to every week. Because it ended up being this kind of abstract pain. Everyone else is missing her and you're standing there like. Yeah. I have plans to see a movie with her on burger tuesday. I went to her funeral just to make sure that I saw the dead body so I could really internalize that she was gone. And I still didn't cry. It made me feel like a terrible person.

My friends never really take me all that seriously when I talk about being split like this. They kinda play along but I can tell they think it's a joke. It's whatever. But my friend's girlfriend came into my DMs one night sobbing and cry-typing and begging me to let her talk to her gf one last time. I wasn't sure it was a good idea. But I relented, and made plans to have a sort of interdimensional seance.

I could tell my friend--we'll call her Elsie, and we'll call her girlfriend Robin. I could tell Elsie was pretty awkward about it. I think she felt guilty on behalf of her other, dead self. Robin kept saying stuff like "how could you kill yourself, how could you do this to me," and I would have to say that, and Elsie was just like "I'm sorry." And it was really hard to get Robin to understand that we weren't talking to Elsie's dead spirit, we were talking to her in another timeline. I told her she didn't have to apologize, and I told Robin that guilt tripping the dead was kind of rude.

After that things went a little more smoothly, Robin asked about how Elsie's life had gone, how their relationship had progressed you know like if they were still together, things like that. Elsie said some stuff that I wouldn't have known, and Robin was like. Wow you really are talking to Elsie aren't you?

And I was just like :| yep.

Ever since then my friends keep trying to get my help with stuff. Like they'll ask me what their other self is doing, like, ok, for instance, my friend, we'll call her Jane, she wanted to ask out her crush, and she was like ok. Can you ask the burger version of my crush if she likes me back. Which kinda throws the burger version of her under the bus doesn't it!

And another of my friends wanted to know if she'd regret quitting her job, so she told me to ask the other her to quit her job, and then if it went well she'd do the same. I did ask, and she said no, obviously.

The kinda scary thing is, every once in a while I'll see some of those artifacts that I used to see, like, little tiny desynchs within each timeline. I only recently got used to being in two timelines at the same time, I don't think I can handle being in three or four. My brain's already better at handling the desynch, like, one time I managed to move my finger in two directions at once all in the pizza timeline. But I'm really scared of the desynch multiplying over time. Maybe it's inevitable, but my main strategy is just to not flip any coins for the rest of my life.

[animentality]

[sinni-ok-sessi]

I do think the ability to emoji-react is a net win for human communication. not only does it give you an outlet for 'I see and acknowledge this but don't have a verbal response' but it also adds a pleasing alethiometer element to things

my coworker announces that he's off to the dentist. someone reacts with a tooth emoji. is this a statement of dentist solidarity? a wish for my coworker to return with more (or fewer?) teeth than he set out with? simple word association? who can say

[clearlightwired]

i am on a totally dead server of people i mostly never speak to anymore but every year on any user's birthday the bot posts something to #announcements about it

[wildgifthorses]

Squirrels fucking directly at eye level outside my window

[max1461]

Disgust has absolutely no ethical weight. If you are basing your ethical positions on the emotion of disgust you should stop, it is entirely unjustified and leads to a huge amount of harm.

[word-for-today]

Word for today: wisdom of repugnance

The logical fallacy that because something disgusts you it must be bad

[obscenicon-deactivated20231123]

this is probably the funniest example of a tumblr user simply not reading the post theyre reblogging at all

[steelblue8]

Reblog if you are a freak who is justifying their gross actions

[pixelartpeach]

Reblog to give a trans person a fresh and perfectly ripe mango wait huh

It's the wikipedia image??? How big could it be

What

Huh???

[bonesbeetle]

can see the pores on that thang

[crow-with-a-pencil]

Reblog to give a trans person a shockingly high resolution mango

[talos-stims]

trying to groom her brother | source

[sky665]

[redhatmeg]

Trio of "Humanity is flawed but can be great, actually" franichises:

Star Trek

Discworld

The Talos Principle

[yayculture]

[cosmic-navel-gazin]

@holoprisms

[phaeton-flier]

Bear religion probably fucking rocks. You're a fucking bear, you're the deadliest thing on earth, once a year an endless supply of salmon just flings itself up the river to gorge on and then you nap for 3 months.

[phaeton-flier]

The most delicious food in the world is protected by tiny demons who can defend it from everyone except you. Your natural armor is thick enough that you can just eat the damn hive while they buzz around you. God's chosen animals right there

[theaudientvoid]

[centrally-unplanned]

Regular bears tell stories of angel bears sent by the Bear God, pure white and twice as strong as any normal bear could be, who rule the summit of the Earth and kill all who stand in their path.

And they are right, those bears exist and totally do that. Humans just have fake angels as a cope.

[northshorewave]

The only species that can regularly kill you also regularly ventures into your territory with boxes full of delicious food and falls asleep without securing them. Some of them might use their loud-death-sticks on you but odds are good if you show up at night they'll just run away screaming and you get all their food.

[crazykuroneko]

In response to Slate's article on the possibility having non-heteromative team in figure skating (particularly, ice dance and pairs), Oniceperspective shared a glimpse of Gabriella Papadakis (FRA) and Madison Hubbell (USA) working on their same-sex program. You can see how they switch the leading figure between them.

You can see them trying out lifts in this video.

The rest is on Instagram here:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by On Ice Perspectives ❄️🎥 (@oniceperspectives)

[a-la-orilla-del-rio]

[damnfool-of-a-took]

@hockpock

[k-simplex]

Heraclitus knew about Wet Claude

[luminousalicorn]

Why Can't Medics Read?

It may come as a shock, but it turns out that we are graduating people from medical and nursing schools, and seeing them hired for office jobs, in droves, without making sure that they are able to read.

I myself, though you'd think I'd be inured to the phenomenon after having experienced it for years, maintain a certain level of incredulity about it.  Every time I contact some kind of medical provider, insurance company, or similar organization by their secure HIPAA-compliant email portal and receive a reply, I have some shred of hope within me that their answer will reveal that they are capable of communicating through text, both in that they will have absorbed whatever I wrote to them and that they will be equipped to respond in kind.  But in practice, this beautiful dream is the exception, not the rule.

They want me to call them on the phone.

They want me to do this even if I inform them that I am hard of hearing (it's meant to be an illiterate-person-friendly rendering of "audio processing impaired") and cannot have a telephone conversation unless it's actually important enough that I am having it with an emergency services dispatcher or maybe Poison Control (under which circumstance I will go into debt with myself and ask for things to be repeated seven times and cry if I have to but I'm not going to do that for anything else).  They want me to do this even if I am writing to the same presumable office, literal or distributed, that houses the phones.  It is somehow impossible for the same people who normally man the phone bank to have some of their attention allocated to answering written messages, or at least answering them in a way that involves reading them, i.e. with any content other than copy-pasted Help Center text which shares one point four keywords with my original message, followed by "please call us at the following number during these hours with any further questions."

Sometimes I run into someone who can read!  I got a letter in the postal mails not too long ago, which said: "I understand that you advised calling is not an option for you, but I am required to share the phone number with you."  That one even referred to a text chat option I could try, but didn't include directions to get there.  I guess because the directions wouldn't be a string of 7-12 digits with optional hyphens and parentheses?  So I didn't find this helpful at all, but they weren't required (by law? by corporate diktat?) to be helpful, they were only required to provide me with a phone number.

AIs are now good at many things some of the time, but they are apparently not so good and so efficient at phone calls that I can get one to make phone calls for me at a lower price than I can get a human being to do it, most especially because when I get another human being to make a phone call for me in a medical capacity, whoever they manage to raise on the other end of the line usually wants me to hop on the call and take over for them, no matter how beseechingly I ask, in person at the doctor's office, to please allow my spouse to be my phone proxy.

Once my spouse asked a provider, "What would you do if she were deaf?"  And, demonstrating that we also do not reliably graduate people for these workplaces with a firm command of spoken language, the reply was: "Good news, we found you a doctor who knows sign language!" - for, of course, future in-person appointments, which I handle in the usual way as long as nobody has too thick an accent, not for the immediate phone-related issue.  I think what actually deaf people actually do is use an interpreter service.  But while I took a sign language class once I retain very little of the content and would not benefit from it.

This is not a personal health information security issue.  I have gotten HIPAA certified - twice, actually, funny story, my employer at the time changed which certification they wanted me to get at just the right moment! - and HIPAA is there to protect patients, not providers.  Providers may of course reasonably respond to the threat of being sued for failing to meet their obligations to patients with conservatism.  (Though I wish they'd be equally skittish about my empty threats to invoke the ADA.)  I do not sincerely expect them to offer me a tickbox that says "CLICK HERE to have your medical information released to the public internet and live national television BUT you never have to fill out another form and we will stop asking you to call us" even though I'd click that with great abandon.  But this is why they have the compliant email portals.  I get opaque alerts that Someone Said Something in my normal Gmail inbox, I go click through and sign in, everything's sewn up tight and they can put all kinds of fun facts about my organs in there worry-free, and the Something that Someone Said is:

We can't read.  Call us on the phone.

[life-in-a-monospace-typeface]

Everyone Should Know How To Do Taguchi Experiments

Empiricism is an important virtue; it's great to try things and find what works for you, and there's a noble tradition of people doing that and blogging about it. We should be doing this more.

The problem is that experimenting on yourself can be pretty slow and tricky and inconvenient.

This post is about Taguchi arrays, which fix that by allowing you to get much more useful information from far fewer experiments. The method is commonly used in industry for process optimisation, but it isn’t complicated and is very easy to apply to DIY experiments. (Thanks to NightHawkInLight for making me aware of this!)

The default way kind of sucks

Suppose you're wondering what will work best to improve your sleep. You've got one of those sleep tracker devices that gives you an integrated Sleep Quality Score, so you've got a clear metric to optimise. Let's do some empiricism!

Now, what interventions to test? A lot of people say melatonin is good. Apparently 0.3mg is the ideal, but maybe 1mg works better, and it's more commonly available. Other people swear by magnesium. You can get magnesium glycinate easily, but some say magnesium l-threonate is better, although it's more expensive. You've heard exercising helps, but is cardio or strength better? And you've got some of those blue light blocking glasses, but they look kind of goofy. There’s a ton of things to test.

One thing at a time

The big piece of accepted wisdom here is to only change one thing at a time. If you change more than one thing and your sleep gets better, you won't know which thing did it. Or, one thing you change might help and the other might make things worse, so they cancel each other out and you learn nothing.

Changing one thing at a time, we need at least 8 experiments:

Baseline

0.3mg Melatonin

1mg Melatonin

Magnesium glycinate

Magnesium l-threonate

Cardio

Strength

Goofy glasses

In principle we could do this in 8 days, just trying each thing once.

But that's going to be really noisy. Just one measurement per item is hardly going to tell us anything; we should try each thing on more than one night to get more signal. Maybe do each one for two or three days? That's 16 or 24 days, which is kind of a lot. Give each thing a week and that’s 2 months of experimentation.

And also, we care about finding a good overall setup, not just which individual things work. Probably there are some interactions here, like, what if magnesium works really well, but only if you also exercise? We'd never find out using this experiment.

Test everything?

To really know, we'd want to try every combination. So, 3 levels of melatonin (none, 0.3mg, 1mg), times 3 options for magnesium (none, glycinate, l-threonate), times 3 exercise options (none, cardio, strength), times 2 for red glasses (yes or no), means... 54 days, to try each thing once. That's not great.

There's got to be a better way!

This is where Taguchi Arrays, aka Orthogonal Arrays come in!

You go to an online Taguchi array generator like this one, add in your factors and their levels, and it spits out something like this:

Before you start, it’s a good idea to randomly shuffle the order of the rows, so secular changes or cumulative effects don’t bias things.

Then you go through the rows one night at a time. Each night you follow the protocol listed, and each morning you record your Sleep Score for that protocol.

Now to analyse the results. The genius of orthogonal arrays is that for any pair of factors, every possible combination of their levels appears the same number of times. This means that you can safely compare averages.

So if for example we want to know how magnesium glycinate compares with magnesium l-threonate, we can take the average of the sleep scores of nights we took glycinate, and the average of nights where we took l-threonate, and just see which is better. This is safe to do, because all the other variables are equally represented in those sets, so they won't bias things. You can go through and check - the 3 glycinate nights have one of each of the melatonin levels, and one of each of the exercise levels, and two have glasses and one doesn't, and the exact same is true of the L-threonate nights, and of the "no magnesium" nights. And this nice property is also true for all of the possible values of all other pairs of factors.

So using just 9 nights of experiments (just one more than the original 8 night experiment which told us very little), we get at least three nights of data to average together for each level of each factor, rather than just one! And we're testing all possible combinations of levels for each pair of factors at least once. With just these 9 experiments, we can find out a huge amount of information, almost as much as we'd get from the full 54-day factorial experiment!

Limitations

Now, this works best for situations where you expect the result to be approximately a linear combination of the factors, with only simple interactions between pairs of factors. For example, if there were some major interaction between three factors, like if melatonin worked wonderfully but only if you do cardio and also don't wear light-blocking glasses, this wouldn't catch that. But real life experiments tend not to have much of that kind of thing.

And of course if you have a situation like, magnesium only starts to help with sleep on the third night in a row you take it, this won’t detect that. But that’s a problem with using ‘sleep score on the same night’ as the metric, not an issue with Taguchi methods.

I hope that this easy to use experimental design method gets widespread adoption. It really lowers the bar for getting useful information from DIY experiments. Try it for yourself!

[life-in-a-monospace-typeface]

As It Was

"A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit" - Proverb

I want to share with you my blurry memory of an experience I had more than a decade ago, that changed how I see the world.

Back when I lived in Nottingham for my PhD, I was lead singer of a little string band. We called ourselves the Nottinghack Time Band, and we mostly sang covers of random folk music. Songs about love and ships and mining (well... about heartbreak, shipwrecks and cave-ins). This was mostly for our own amusement - making music with friends is extremely fun. We only went on tour within walking distance of the Nottingham Hackspace, and that was it. But we had a decent repertoire of songs we could play from memory, we had some nice harmonies worked out, and at our best we sounded fairly good!

I don't know how we came to the attention of the Cider Club, but that's the experience I wanted to talk about.

The Nottingham Cider Club is an interesting organisation. Old-school socialist vibes - it's a long running non-profit organisation, which for a very long time has operated the same plot of communal land, on which they grow apple trees, the oldest of which were planted by the grandfathers or great grandfathers of people currently in the club. Throughout the year, they work together to tend to the trees. They prune them and cut off the dead branches and pile them up, and when the autumn comes around and it's time to harvest, they all come together to gather the apples, clean them, and press them in home-built contraptions. They ferment the juice in the way their predecessors taught them, and they end up with a large amount of home-made cider. At which point, what else? They have a party. And someone there must have heard we had a little acoustic string folk band, so we were invited.

The sun was low in the sky when we arrived to the orchard - of course the party's held in the orchard, where better? The leaves were beautiful in the golden evening light as we wandered between the trees, planted not in neat rows, but freeform like a forest. We hung out under their branches and chatted, learning about the club and the equipment and the process. I love to listen when people feel happy to pour out every detail of their obsessive expertise. And they were experts - they've been at this a long time. I'm not much of a cider drinker, but this was good stuff, and deceptively powerful. We were soon in a state where it wasn't too scary to be playing music in front of people who until recently were strangers. So we played. As the sun went down, the people collected the dead branches together and made a bonfire, which we sat around as we sang our songs. And as the cider went down, the people got up and danced to our music.

I remember, towards the end of a song, feeling a great joy about the music I was making with my friends, and how well it was being appreciated. I looked up at the stars in the cold night sky, and at the branches of these beautiful trees, lit by the light of the warming fire. I saw the same light on the joyful faces of the dancers, the grandchildren and great grandchildren of the people who planted these trees. These noble trees, that warmed us from without by the fire made from their branches, and from within by the cider made from their fruit. We were celebrating the trees, and perhaps we were celebrating simply being alive.

As the last notes of the song died away, I sensed something within me that felt incredibly old. I thought "Oh. This scene would have made perfect sense to every one of my ancestors, back to pre-history. This is what music is about. This is simply what it means to have a good time, as a human being on earth. This is what it's always been about".

I love modernity. I love having every song ever recorded available to play in high quality at any time for free. I love that we have access to more than one party's worth of cider per year. But this is a strange way to live, and it is worthwhile to sometimes connect with something more like the way things were for almost the entirety of history, when every experience of listening to music was paired with a simultaneous experience of making music. There are pockets of it still to be found, and some may yet be created.

[life-in-a-monospace-typeface]

Dating App Idea: The Council

Consensus seems to be that the dating apps are not ok.

Interactions are shallow, atomised, impersonal. People ghost and flake, conversations die. Bots and scams and spam. People put in the minimum possible effort, and when you try to put in effort yourself, people make you wish you hadn't.

Perhaps a better designed app might help. So here's my (sadly extremely heteronormative) idea:

When a man matches with a woman, he can be put into a chat, not with her, but with a Council of 3 to 5 of her most trusted advisors. If he can impress them enough that they vote to let him talk to her, he’s in.

Why is this good for women?

I expect women’s experience of using this app would be much better than with most dating apps.

Much less harassment, for one thing. Most harassing or abusive messages would never be sent in the first place, because why would you send that kind of thing to a group-chat of gatekeepers? And if it does happen, facing it as a group makes it much easier to deal with.

The general standard of one on one conversation you experience on the app would be much higher, because you’re never one-on-one with a random guy, you only talk to people who your Council has voted to send on to you. You don't have to deal with a deluge of losers and time wasters, they’re filtered out for you by your Council. In fact I expect most of them would be filtered out even before then, by being unwilling to use this app in the first place.

So, less hassle in the app, talking to higher quality guys, and thus having better dates.

But also, the dates themselves are probably better, even holding the guy constant, because your Council can ask all the questions you'd want answered early on, but which you'd find awkward to ask. You probably don’t get nearly as much information on a first date as you’d like, because, well, you want to go on a date, not conduct a job interview. But first dates often end up being kind of job-interview-y anyway. If your Council conducts the job interview for you ahead of time though, that part is mostly over with before you're even really involved, the guy has already passed the test, and the first date is free to just be a date.

“But I don’t have 3-5 people who I trust / who know me well enough!”

Honestly I would probably try to fix that before trying to date.

Why is this good for men?

Look, if you want to properly date a woman, you're going to have to win over her friends anyway, so you may as well get that out of the way at the start.

Facing down a group of judgemental gatekeepers can be intimidating, but this is easily dealt with by not being a fucking coward. Did you expect to achieve romantic success without risking social discomfort? Faint heart never won fair lady, get in there and prove yourself!

That said, I expect the experience of using the app would actually be more fun and interesting than the average dating app - certainly more exciting, and probably much less corrosive to the soul:

For one, there’s far less ambiguity and uncertainty. You won’t wait hours for a reply, not knowing if she’s ghosted you - there are like 5 people in this group chat, someone will talk to you. You’ll basically never get kinda-ambiguously-pseudo-rejected by The Council - if they vote you down, 3 to 2 or 4 to 1 or unanimously, you know where you stand.

Plus, you’ll get a lot more feedback! The Council has no reason to be afraid to tell you exactly why you didn’t make the cut. The feedback might be hard to hear, but I’d rather have uncomfortable honesty than a blank featureless wall and no guidance on how to improve.

The Council also keeps you from wasting a lot of time on women you’re not compatible with. If the relationship is going to fail, it should fail fast. And this way, it fails before you have a chance to get attached.

And it’s a two way street. There’s a lot of information you can get about a woman through her Council which would be much harder to infer from her dating app profile. If the Council’s questions are all about kids, that tells you something. If the questions are all about your income, that tells you something. If they’re all about your politics, that tells you something. If a woman is looking for something that I’m not, I want to know that as early as possible.

So being rejected by a Council on those kinds of grounds shouldn’t feel too personal. If it’s super important to a woman that you share her politics, and you really don’t, that’s just saved you both a lot of hassle.

"Jesus, I don't want to run a gauntlet and meet a girl's whole social group, I'm just trying to get laid!"

That's ok! This app is not for you.

Why is it good to be on a Council?

Aren’t you tired of your awesome friends, who deserve all the romantic success in the world, making bad choices and dating assholes and losers? Don't you wish you could help them find a suitable boy?

Does it not sound fun to have a group chat where you all judge guys who want to date your friends? Be real, do you not already kind of have one? But what if you could grill those guys yourself? And you don't have to be chill and polite, you can ask the hard questions and make sure your friend doesn't get her time wasted.

Talking to randos on dating apps is not fun. Judging randos with a group of your friends is fun as hell.

Ok, but another dating app? Would it even catch on?

The viral potential is high - each woman who signs up needs to get 3-5 other people to be on her Council. That’s extra friction of course, but it also means 3-5 people will make accounts and be using the app regularly. It's natural that some of them might then want to start using the app for themselves, and appoint their own Council, and so on.

I don’t think it will be at all difficult to persuade people to sign up to sit on a friend’s Council. I’ve been led to believe that friends tend to enjoy hearing about, and involving themselves in, one another’s love life decisions.

And a Council Seat is obviously a position of high esteem, a strong signifier of trust and closeness. People will want to be on their friends' Councils simply for the sake of having been deemed worthy of the role. I imagine there will be considerable interpersonal drama about Council Seat appointments. All of this is excellent for the app's mindshare.

Isn’t this whole idea kind of horrible?

In a way yes, but it’s importantly a very different kind of horrible than the existing dating apps.

Plus we can licence that Spice Girls song for the ads.