T w e n t y S i d e d

I’m sure most people have seen those ads for dating sites that proclaim, “Meet singles in your area now!” The ads always show a half dozen pictures of hot women purportedly from whatever town you live in, but the lie is so clumsy and halfhearted that I doubt many men are even able to imagine it to be true. I’ll see the girls supposedly from my little town near Pittsburgh, sitting next to a cactus or a palm tree or at the ocean. More absurd is that the ads always show women. How are these dating sites so chock full of gorgeous girls if they never even bother advertising to them?

The dating sites seem to be in a war of escalating lies. Whoever tells the most brazen fib to the most people, wins. They have been selling the fiction that your town is packed with hot, lonely women who are comfortable uploading pictures of themselves in provocative underwear, and who want to meet “you”. The next step seems to be in telling men that not only do they have women who are hot, young, lonely, and minimally attired, the women in question are precisely of the type you’re looking for! Goths, Republicans, Democrats, Jews, African-Americans, Left-handed Redhead Vegans who enjoy wakeboarding. It doesn’t matter how esoteric your tastes run, they want to assure you that they have an entire database of exactly your sort of woman.

I submit that this has now gone too far:

This was an actual ad my wife saw yesterday.

Pentecostal women, you say? And they want to chat? Sounds good, but what kind of pentecostal girls are we talking, here? Are they Trinitarian, Oneness, or Evangelicals? Are any of them Restorationists? These are things I need to know before I go jumping into live chat with a chick in her underwear. I don’t want to get half an hour into things and suddenly realize I’m dealing with a girl who likes to “experiment” with Calvanism once in a while. I have standards, you know.

The internet is a veritable fountain of silly. It makes me happy.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

While reading a news story on this news site, I noticed this at the bottom of the article:

Now, I realize this isn’t a complete contradiction, but it is amusing to see this notice telling you not to spread the article around over a panel of icons encouraging you to do exactly that. Even the text which warns that the article is not to “broadcast” or “distributed” is at odds with the fact that this is exactly what is going on here: Their webserver is sending their articles all over the planet, where each reader reproduces a local copy for themselves.

I don’t think this is insidious or anything. It’s obvious they just want to make sure you don’t swipe their stuff and pass it off as your own content. It’s just amusing to see old-school print and media outfits trying to adapt their copyright-driven media to the world where you live and die by sharing. A copyright forbidding reprints next to an icon which will send the article to a friend. You are not allowed to share this article and please do so.

Maybe it’s just me, but I got a laugh out of it.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.