Bill Cammack

Bill & Spencer, originally uploaded by Bill Cammack.

Bill Cammack & Spencer Striker of gamezombie.tv

It’s a typical rap move to “buy a girl a drink”. You see a gal you’d like to kick it with, but you don’t have the nerve to walk up to her, introduce yourself and start talking. So, somehow, it’s been passed down through the ages that buying her a drink is a good way to get your foot in the door. Well, encyclopedia salesmen get their feet in doors as well. Let’s examine how you look when your opener is to give away stuff to chicks for free that you had to spend your hard-earned money to get.

First of all, let’s talk about your money. Unless you have the hookup at the bar (or happen to own it), you have to spend money to buy her that drink. Let’s say your ass works for minimum wage (whatever THAT is these days)… I’ll guess that minimum wage is $10/hour, and depending where you are, it could run you $7 plus tip for a pint of beer. Let’s not even talk about those colorful mixed drinks chicks like to lamp with! :D So… Essentially… By buying her a drink, that means you just worked about 45 minutes for her. Even if we boost your ducats so that you’re only working 20 minutes for her… is that what you *really* want to do? :D If you walked up to a chick and she said you could talk to her after you mowed her lawn and raked her leaves, would you do it? :D

Now, you might be thinking “stop being cheap… it’s only either $10 or 20 minutes’ worth of manual labor, and I might get on tonight”. While I understand that professional prostitutes cost much more than that… Since, by definition, you’re approaching her for the first time in life… There’s NO WAY that she’s done anything FOR YOU that warrants you buying her something. Does that make sense? Get it? She’s done NOTHING, and you’re giving her SOMETHING… ANYTHING… ‘Doesn’t matter what it is. The only thing worse than rewarding her for NO behavior is rewarding her for BAD behavior. That’s a completely different topic, though.

By giving her stuff right off the bat, you’re letting her know that regardless of what she does, you’re willing to shell out. What if she thanks you for the drink and walks away from you as soon as you hand it to her? HAHAHAHA What if she doesn’t *even* say “Thank You”? What’reyagonnado? Take your drink back? Drink the Apple Martini for her? :D No. You’re gonna “take a short”, is what you’re gonna do. :D Are you aware that there are chicks that go out to clubs DELIBERATELY with no money, because they know there are so many guys just.like.you that will pay for them to drink all night for the potential opportunity to smack it up, flip it, rub it down, OH NOOOOO! :D

That’s another thing. When you kick game, you want to seem UNIQUE… not TYPICAL. Try your best not to make yourself indistinguishable from the other 30 guys that stepped to her with the exact same line and the exact same offer of free stuff that she doesn’t even deserve yet. Not getting it? Let’s look at the flip side. Let’s say YOU were in the club, and a chick walked up to you out of the blue wanting to go home with you….. Now, there are some guys that can graciously accept that and go get their groove on. :) There are A LOT OF GUYS that will see that chick as loose, easy, a ho, desperate, whatever it is, they’re going to low-rate her for giving them something for nothing. Am I right? Have you seen this happen or heard of it from your boys or your girls? Uh-huh…

OTOH, if you actually KNOW someone and want to buy them a drink to show them that you enjoy their company or value them as a friend, by all means, that’s a great gesture that people appreciate. :) Similarly, if you met her just now and had a nice conversation and you’re *NOW* feeling goodwill towards her, offering to get her something as you excuse yourself to go to the bar is a classy and chivalrous gesture. You’re rewarding GOOD behavior. You’re letting her know that you appreciate her for her personality and the way she carries herself.

I mean, it’s not like you’re slick. Everybody knows what you’re doing. Everybody knows why you offered HER a drink and ignored her busted homegirl. Everybody knows you’re trying to bribe her with $7 worth of alcohol. :) Everybody knows you’re hoping that drink “loosens her morals”. :D

Maybe next time, get yourself together, step to her honorably and let her know why you came over there. Maybe she’ll find you refreshing instead of redundant. Maybe if you represent yourself properly, she’ll buy YOU a drink! :D

DatingGenius

Reader SlightlyScared writes:

SlightlyScared: “I recently met a woman online through Twitter that I think might be a worthy woman for me to hang my long-time bachelor status for. We’ve been talking via instant messenger and she seems read and incredible. There are pictures of her online, she seems to be open about herself, has a web site, etc. We haven’t talked on the phone or really talked about anything personal and I can’t think of a way to move to the phone without giving away I like her more than a chat buddy. There isn’t a reason for us to talk on the phone and I don’t want to scare her off. I can walk up to a woman anywhere but this woman I am anxious about the things I do. DatingGenius, do you have any advice? Tyme, would you push a man away if he wanted to talk on the phone? It would mean giving up her phone number and some women hesitate on that. Thanks in advance.”

I meant to write about that directly, but there’s a more general issue that needs to be addressed.

For all the talk of “women’s intuition”, women are ABSOLUTELY CLUELESS about when a guy likes them. Completely. :D … This works to you advantage and also to your disadvantage.

It works to your advantage because you get to avoid the path of redundant self-desctruction which is turning a perfectly good female friend into an ex-girlfriend. See… Chicks can’t take it that you just plain think they’re hawt and you like hanging out with them and messing with them. They have to get *GREEDY*! :D They start envisioning dating you, then being engaged to you then being married to you then having kids with you blah blah blah blah blah….. This is why it’s ALWAYS chicks that want to “have the talk”… “Where is this relationship going? :(” … “What are we to each other? :(” … “Are we ‘serious’?” HAHAHAHAHAHA :D

You can avoid all this by just not kicking it to them in the first place and remaining their friend. You get MUCH more utility out of a chick as a friend than you would as a girlfriend. She will MIND HER BUSINESS when some other chick wants to kick it to you. It’s no big deal to her if you don’t call her for a week or two. You can go out with her all you want and survive multiple iterations of boyfriends.

It’s the best thing in the world to be friends with hot chicks, because they have no shelf-life. No expiration date. You get to keep them forever, and their boyfriends only have them for a few months or years at a time, and then they disappear like dust in the wind. Never to be mentioned again. Never to be seen again. Like some effing GHOSTS. Gone. Nobody. Nothing. Meanwhile, you’re still meeting up with her for drinks like you did before THIS boyfriend and like you did before the boyfriend before HIM……

Now, the DISADVANTAGE IS that while you’re “being her friend”, if your actual goal was to be her BOYFRIEND, she’s completely oblivious to your intentions. Most chicks in this United States society are pair-bonders. They’re looking to hook up with ONE guy and stick with him until they croak. By playing the friend role, you’re actually getting FURTHER from being her boyfriend instead of closer. She’s spending time with you, but keeping her eye out for guys that are ABOUT SOMETHING. She’s envisioning two-car garages and kids and dogs and cats and grass you have to mow and mortgages you have to pay and getting together at her grandparents’ house on Sundays. The more you play that “friend” game, the LESS she thinks of you as a boyfriend.

Think about it… If you were serious about dating her, you would have said so, right? It’s completely erroneous to believe that friendship -> dating. It *CAN*, but most of the time, chicks are pretty quick. They play it off like they don’t like you, but they can feel it deep down inside. They know if they want to get with you practically immediately. If she decides that you’re boyfriend material, and you’re busy playing the friend role, you know what’s going to happen? She’s going to shut down.

As much as GUYS hate rejection, chicks hate it way more. If she’s into you and you’re not clearly into her, she may suck it up…. suppress it. I mean, if she believes in “the one” (which is an entirely different topic :/), HOW can you be “the one” when you’re right there in her face and you’re only interested in her as a friend? If you were “the one”, wouldn’t YOU feel what SHE’S feeling? Does that make sense? By playing the friend role, when you really mean to date her, you’re actually negating yourself as her “knight in shining armor” that’s going to scoop her up and take her away from the dating scene.

So… Getting to SlightlyScared‘s question…

When are you going to pull the trigger? When are you going to turn the corner? You’re asking how to get from IM to phone without “giving away that you like her more than a chat buddy”. What’s the future of that? Think about it? “How do I get her to video chat with me without giving away that I like her as more than a chat buddy?” … “How do I invite her out to dinner without giving away that I like her as more than a chat buddy?” … “How do I take her to the movies without giving away that I like her as more than a chat buddy?” … “How do I get her to come to the crib without giving away that I like her as more than a chat buddy?” … “How do I get her to cook for me without giving away that I like her as more than a chat buddy?” … “How do I make out with her without giving away that I like her as more than a chat buddy?” … “How do I have sex with her without giving away that I like her as more than a chat buddy?” ………

See what I mean? It has to end somewhere. Sooner or later, you’re going to do something that makes her go “hey….. I think this guy’s attracted to me like that…” What happens then? What’s your plan after that? It’s a really good idea to assume that she’s completely CLUELESS that you’re romantically interested in her. As a matter of fact, keep it up with this “friends” tactic, and when you finally drop it, she MAY NOT EVEN BELIEVE YOU! :D How about that? How would you like that?

The trick here is that as poor judges of character as women are, they THINK they’re excellent judges of character. By the time you jump out of the cake like “SURPRISE!!! I LIKE YOU!!! :D”, she’s already used her superior intuition to determine that you DON’T like her, or else you would have tried something by now. So now you’re stuck. She thinks you’re kidding, because in order to believe you, she’d have to admit that she ISN’T a good judge of character, and that you wanted her, BADLY, all this time, and she never noticed it. This leads her into a state of Cognitive Dissonance. Click that link and read about it. It’s very useful, if you know what to do with it, but if you don’t, it could be a rap-destroyer… AND a potential friend-destroyer.

So… My answer to the question is to forget about keeping the wool pulled over her eyes. :D Think about how you’re going to get from your current “friendship” to the relationship you *ACTUALLY* want. And think about it SOON, before the next man steps up and scoops your chick.

DatingGenius

Reader Helene writes (in response to Tip for the ladies: He doesn’t care!)

Let’s talk about this, from DatingGenius:

——
Yadda Yadda Yadda Blah Blah Blah EVERY.SINGLE.EFFIN’.DAY, some chick is confused about why a guy keeps trying to kick it to her. It’s very simple. He’s kicking it to you because HE.WANTS.TO.GET.WITH.YOU, *PERIOD*! He’s not interested in what you think about it. He’s not interested in what you have to say about it.
——-

I feel that. He doesn’t care if he wants sex. I’m going to look on DatingGenius to see if there is a guide on how to tell if a man wants sex or a relationship. I think the man that wants a relationship cares what the woman thinks, right?

There are a lot of interesting points here, Helene…. First of all, that post was written specifically to address the situation of women being clueless as to why a guy doesn’t stop kicking it to them when she indicates disinterest or even disgust. :D The fact of the matter is that he’s not approaching you to get your opinion on things or to discuss politics. He finds you physically attractive or there’s something else about you that he likes (you have money, good child-bearing hips, whatever…) that he’s approaching you for. What you think about it is of no consequence whatsoever. The bottom line is desire-fulfillment… HIS, not YOURS. :)

As an example, I was walking with a blabbermouth friend of mine the other week, and in the process of making a point to her, I mentioned that her homegirl was attractive. I wasn’t telling her that so she could go blab it to her girl like she BLABS everything else. I was trying to make a general point based on a specific situation my friend was privy to. Before I got to say what I really wanted to say, she goes “Oh… She wouldn’t hook up with you. You’re not her type.” :D Now…. First of all, I didn’t ask my friend what she thought about my ‘chances’ of hooking up with her girl. Second, all she knows about her girl’s “type” is what her girl is willing to TELL HER, so her idea of what her girl’s going to do and what she’s not going to do is completely irrelevant. Third, people are functions of combinations, meaning that how a chick reacts to me has *nothing* to do with how she reacts to anyone else on the planet, so until I kick my game and get on or not, speculation is worthless.

All these things ran through my mind in a split second, and I replied just about right when she finished speaking, “That doesn’t matter”. She looked at me surprised, and tried to protest, but I covered that up with another “That doesn’t matter”. We then went off on the tangent of how “what her girl wants” doesn’t factor in AT ALL to my initial attraction to her. Forget about the fact that she IS NOT her girl, so she has NO IDEA what her girl does behind closed doors. Even if she knew for sure that her girl didn’t like me for whatever reason, it’s of no consequence, because I’m talking about what motivates *ME*. I’m talking about what propels me to focus on HER and interact with HER instead of someone else.

This is why chicks would be better off if they recognized WHY a guy is talking to them in the first place. Without that knowledge, you’re grasping at straws when you try to figure out anything else about your relationship to that guy.

As another example, I was waiting for a bus with a crowd of people. This girl walks past at least eight other breathing, standing human beings to come up to me and ask me if I knew what time it was. I told her that I didn’t, and showed her that I don’t wear a watch, which I don’t, because I don’t *care* what time it is. :D The next thing that happened was…… She stayed right there and continued talking to me. Now… What happened to her desire to find out what time it was? *POOF* Gone, into thin air. Had she actually been interested in the time, she would have A) stopped at the FIRST person she saw to ask what time it was, and then made her way down the line, or B) if she DID walk all the way past them to ask me, she would have asked someone else right after I demonstrated the inability to tell her what time it was. She did neither, so the obvious inference is that she wanted to talk to me and used “Do you know what time it is” as the ice-breaker.

Now, let’s apply this to the club! :D When that guy buys you that drink, what do you think he’s trying to do? Do you think he thought you looked thirsty? Do you think he thought you looked *BROKE*, and he likes to hand out charity by buying drinks for destitute women? Did he buy any GUYS a drink? How about any UNATTRACTIVE WOMEN? ‘:) There are two reasons he’s offering to buy you a drink. He wants you to get more drunk than you already are, AND (drumroll) he’s trying to get on.

You can THINK whatever you want… He’s a nice guy. He’s generous. He respects you. He’s interested in what you have to say or what you think. He likes the same music you do… He doesn’t like the same music you do, he dresses poorly, he’s a creep, he can’t spell, he doesn’t pronounce consonants when he speaks, he’s a Cro-Mag……… NONE of that matters, pro or con. It matters as far as how tough or easy it is for him to get on, but your opinion of him is irrelevant and worthless when it comes to what he’s trying to do at that point.

As a matter of fact, a good rule of thumb is “If he didn’t ask you, he doesn’t care.”

Which brings us to your actual question, “Does the man who wants a relationship care what you think?”

The simple answer is YES, which is basically addressed in Only Date People Better Than YOU!. See the section on “Dummies”.

The guy who wants a relationship had better care what his woman thinks. However, first of all, he’d better care that she thinks AT ALL. There are lots of guys and gals running around this planet with ZERO common sense, or at least little enough common sense to land them on the Maury Povich show having paternity tests done on several guys. Considering that there are only about 10 days in a month when you can actually get a girl pregnant, and you can count backwards to the month she became pregnant, that means that every single guy she has on stage with her tapped it within a 10-day period. Considering some chicks’ in-da-club behaviors, if those 10 days spanned two weekends, we could expect four guys to be sitting on the stage, Friday Night (day 1), Saturday Night (day 2), Friday Night (day 8 ) and Saturday Night (day 9). Now, that’s bad enough, but if there are more than four guys on the stage…. smh.

This is why the guy who wants a relationship is hoping that his potential girlfrend/wife’s brain works at all. There’s *NOTHING* wrong with a chick getting her groove on as much as she wants to with whomever she wants to. :) However, if you’re going to be in a ‘committed’ relationship with her, you would like to believe that any kids that appear during that relationship are in fact… yours.

You also want to be able to take her places. When they have those couples get-togethers or business dinners, you want to be able to walk in with her on your arm and have people as impressed with her personality and mental faculties as with her looks. If you accept her without intelligence, you could be sabotaging your own career advancement while she talks some ignant ghetto ish to your COO. :/ Your girl is a reflection of YOU, so if you’re going for a relationship, aim as HIGH (mentally) as you possibly CAN! :D

Also, in a relationship situation, a guy needs to know what his girl thinks so he can strive to make HER happy while he makes HIMSELF happy. You would hope that’s a goal of his in hooking up with her long-term.

Having said that… Like I said above, if he doesn’t ask you, he doesn’t care. If he’s minding his business, like he loves to do, and watching the game or something, and you come in blabbing about gossip from the job, he might listen to you as a FAVOR to you or to make sure he can get on later this evening, but no, he doesn’t CARE about that. :D If he did, he would have said “How was work today, dear? Was that chick still gossiping?” This is a totally different issue, so I won’t get into it here, but basically, you should get a checklist of the things he actually CARES about so that if you want to talk to him about something and have him actually interested and ENGAGED in the conversation, you know the parameters. :)

How To Tell if he wants sex or a relationship? Well… First of all, it’s not *OR*. It’s *AND*. He either wants sex and for you to break north… or he wants sex and for you to stay around and hang out with him. The SEX part is a given, otherwise, similar to the girl that asked me for the time, he’d be kicking it with someone OTHER THAN YOU! :D

Think about it. The way relationships in the USA are set up, being BF/GF / Engaged / Married implies that you’re not having sex with anyone except your SO. Why in the world would someone attach themselves to someone they didn’t intend to have sex with? On top of that, lots of guys want to have kids. Sure they could go the test tube or adoption route, but MOST OF THE TIME, they’re going to want to have their kids the old fashioned way…
By mistake.

Anyway…

If it’s possible at all, I would say the way to tell that he wants a relationship is by how much he focuses on your PERSONALITY. How interested is he in getting to know YOU? What you’re about… What makes you tick… What makes you happy… What you don’t like… The intelligent guy is going to want to know A LOT about a chick he intends to make his S.O.

The problem with this personality-based theory is that, like Omar says, “It’s all in the game”. Guys already know what women are looking out for as cues that they’re interested in more than sex. Knowing the cues makes it easy to “Fake it ’till you make it”. :D

So… the best thing women can hope for is to meet guys through trusted friends that are willing to vouch for their character and keep your fingers crossed! :D

DatingGenius

After the game 02, originally uploaded by Bill Cammack.

Frisbee 2.0 crew in Central Park

OK Fellaz, let’s get down to brass tacks here.

The way “dating” is set up in patriarchal society, it’s up to YOU, as the guy, to run the show. YOU kick it to the chick, she decides whether to give you some or not. You make the money. You make the decisions. You’re the “head of household”. No matter how much this society tries to make you into women, you’re *NOT*, so get over it and handle your business when it comes to chicks.

Having said that….. Since it’s YOUR responsibility to pull the chick, it’s YOUR responsiblity to be FLY! That’s a slang term meaning VERY GOOD in general, but in this case, we’re talking about your overall presentation. We’re talking about how you look, how you act, what shape you’re in, how ambitous you are in your career, how you handle your money… Top to Bottom, you have to be better than the next man if you think you’re going to get the rap to some chick.

LIFE. IS. NOT. FAIR.

You are not ENTITLED to a girlfriend.
You are not ENTITLED to have any female friends AT ALL.
You are not ENTITLED to have sex with a chick even if she likes hanging out with you.
You are not ENTITLED to have instant messenger text or video chats with chicks.
You are not ENTITLED to responses to your emails or direct messages.
You *ARE* entitled to….. *NOTHING*. :D

All men are NOT created equal. We may have been born through the same process, but some of us have distinct advantages over others. Go look up Alpha Males, Beta Males and Omega Males. If you’re a natural, chicks just like you and that’s that. You can do whatever you want, such as write blog posts that talk yang about males and females AT THE SAME TIME, and you will still have girls attracted to you just by walking in the door. Life Isn’t Fair. :D

The problem with Omega Males is that they refuse to correctly perceive themselves as the bottom of the barrel. They think to themselves “That good-looking, in-shape, well-educated, friendly, gregarious, charming, well-spoken guy over there can get girls…. so can I!” BUZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. Wrong.

The first thing Omega Males need to do is realize their position in life. It’s like going to Alcoholics Anonymous. Unless you admit you have a problem, you’ll never go for treatment. The first step is admitting that YOU’RE WACK! … Say it with me now… “I am wack”. See? Don’t you feel better now? :D NOW we can get to the part where you attempt to overcome your deficiencies. See, by thinking you’re the same as guys that women actually WANT to talk to them, you’re doing yourself a disservice because you’re not trying as hard as *YOU* need to in order to pull a decent female. Then, when the chick cuts off communications with you, you try to blame it on her. You want to say she’s fickle or a tease or she led you on. Let me let you in on a little secret…..

Chicks in general are non-confrontational. You would think that’s a good thing, but it isn’t… not for YOU. It’s good for guys that girls WANT, because you say “let’s get out of here ;)” and she says “ok” and it’s on and poppin’. The problem for YOU is that she never wanted to talk to you in the first place. She saw you come in the door. She saw you on the dance floor. She saw you post up in her area. She saw you looking out the corner of your eye to try to gauge if you’d be successful in rapping to her or not. She knew what you wanted when you asked her what time it is or if she’d like to dance. She knew you were going to try to get on. She knew you would ask her for her number…..

This is where the non-confrontational part comes in. She will do one of three things. She will inform you that she’s not going to give you her number, she will give you a fake number or she will give you a real number.

If she tells you “no” from the get, she’s going to have to listen to you whining and trying to change her mind.

If she gives you a fake number, she takes the risk that you will call her immediately and realize that you connected to Pizza Hut. More whining from you and trying to change her mind. On top of that, she looks like an IDIOT because she “doesn’t know her own telephone number”. Now, she has to either tell you “no” or give up the real number.

If she gives you the real number, it’s still a trap. :) There are only two ways you can call her. With or without Caller ID. If you call her with your number blocked, she’s going to let it go to the machine, because she DOESN’T know who’s calling her. If you call her with your number showing, she’s going to let it go to the machine because she DOES know who’s calling her… Or, to put it another way, she knows it’s not anybody calling whom she actually picks up the phone for.

All paths here lead to frustration. The only way around this is to realize that YOU’RE WACK and start on the road to self-improvement. Let’s look at what you can do to make yourself less loathsome to chicks. :D

Improve your vocabulary. Go research the difference between “their” and “there”, and “your” and “you’re”. If this chick accidentally has a kid with you, she’s going to want the kid to be SMART, not STUPID.

Stop using primitive tactics to try to pull her. By using the same AMATEUR skillz that get you on with short-bus girls at the club, you’re demeaning the woman you’re kicking it to. She can’t believe that YOU believe you’re going to get on with such garbage. She feels low-rated and is less likely to give it up, so figure out how to step up your game, playah.

Stop trying to hide your kids. This is the United States of America. It’s very easy to find out that you have kids…. and a wife too, for that matter. Stop faking the funk. If you’re trying to get some on the side, “man up” about it. You might get turned down off the bat, but at least she respects you for not trying to get over.

If you’re *BITTER* about everything, KEEP. IT. TO. YOURSELF! :D Nobody’s interested in what you think you’re entitled to or how mad you are that you don’t have what the next man has. Suck it up, put a SMILE on your face, and show the chick a good time.

Go. To. The. Gym. You want to be in GOOD shape so that she’s HOPING you take your clothes off instead of DREADING the concept. :( You don’t want her to start singing the Fat Albert theme song when you emerge from the bathroom in your boxers.

If you’re NOT going to get in shape, at least DRESS WELL! Buy one of those hip-hop graffiti shirts so you look like a wall or an old-school subway car.

Watch black and white movies. Guys don’t know how to treat the ladies anymore. You have to watch old movies to receive the essence of male elegance and character.

And, the *most* important thing is to step to her “on the humble”. Do *NOT* act like you’re entitled to have her talk to you, text with you, email with you, video chat with you, dance with you, go home with you… NONE OF THAT. Just let her know you appreciate how she looks and you’d like to get to know more about her, then cross your fingers! :D

DatingGenius

I spent the day on Seesmic yesterday and had a 90-post conversation involving several of the members. I’ll say first of all that Seesmic has made TONS of improvements since Andrew Lipson gave me an invite 3 months ago. They’re always making improvements to their site, so this post may very well be outdated relatively soon. :)

If you don’t know what Seesmic is, it’s basically like having a conversation with people on a bunch of stickies. In a way, it’s like Twitter, except it’s video and audio instead of text. You get to record a video which goes into the “public” timeline, and other people can watch it just about as soon as you post it. People who see your video can record their own video and make it a reply to your video if they so choose.

They relatively recently implemented threading as a one-dimensional, reverse chronological timeline. This was way better than no threading AT ALL :D but having held a several-hour-long conversation on it that was about actual intellectual concepts, not “what to name a dog” or “who’s going on a date tonight”, I got to experience the downsides of asynchronous video threading in Seesmic’s current format.

The reason I make a point of it being asynchronous is that it’s not a real-time conversation. It’s more like twitter or an email group than it is like Yahoo Live where several people speak to each other simultaneously, or even chat rooms, where everyone’s there at the same time and can jump in with their opinions if they feel like it.

Liz Burr made some excellent points that I hadn’t paid attention to as I was absorbing so many other things during a full day’s use of the app. Someone had made the point that because you record your own video and decide when to stop it, you get to say what you want in its entirety without being interrupted. Liz mentioned that since it’s asynchronous, you can be turned OFF at ANY point, or not listened to at all, as your screen name and icon are attached to your video in the thread. This means you have more of a chance of not.being.heard.at.all. if someone decides that what you have to say isn’t worth listening to based on your behaviors and what you had to say in previous videos. I “knew” this, but I hadn’t processed it until she mentioned it to me. I was already employing that behavior, for example, after listening to a post from someone that I determined was garbage, I would skip anything with their face on it after that.

At this point, I should mention how Seesmic is set up for people to become aware of people’s posts. It’s important to understand this to understand why one-dimensional threading is NOT optimal for an application like this. There’s a “public” timeline that catches everyone’s videos. This is world-wide, but you can set it to only pick up posts in your language. That’s still A LOT of people, and it’s not even open to the public yet. Your next option is a “friends” timeline. You get to choose to “follow” people, and only their videos will show up in this timeline. This is another way you can elect to bypass people whom you’ve determined have nothing valid or intelligent to say… don’t “follow” them. They’ll still show up if you’re looking at a thread that they’ve contributed videos to, but then you resort to visual parsing and skip them as usual.

These abilities to select people to follow and people to “allow to speak” by clicking on their videos and watching them all the way to the end absolutely alters each person’s perception of a thread they arrive to. Seesmic member Otir read a perfect analogy of the situation, telling the story of a bunch of blind people whom were all offered different sections of an elephant to feel and then to give their opinion of what an elephant is like. Each of them had their own perception of “an elephant”, and that perception colored what they had to say about elephants.

First of all, if you’re following certain people, their posts come up in your “friends” timeline. If you click on the member’s icon, you go straight to their opinion. That’s a good thing. However, you’re jumping in in the middle of the thread. You can click “conversation” and see the entire list of posts in that thread. This is where your personal bias comes into play. If you don’t have any respect for the people earlier in the timeline, you might skip their videos entirely, bypassing much of the context of the situation. If there are a whole lot of videos before the person you’re following, you might not be inclined to watch an hour’s worth of posts before you enjoy what you really came here to see… thus, bypassing much of the context of the situation. If you’ve determined that the person you’re following is more credible than others in the thread, you may be inclined to reply along the lines of that personal bias. This is where we get the blind people approaching the elephant from different sides and angles.

Another “problem” with this layout is that what you’re looking at is NOT actually linear other than chronologically. The posts are laid out by the TIME that they were posted to the site, but they are not differentiated by the TANGENT of the thread that that particular post followed. This leads to a circular, “telephone game” situation, because people show up to a thread hours after it started, read something a “friend” of theirs posted, which was dealt with hours ago, and respond to that person’s post without watching all of the surrounding material.

My thread was 90 posts long. Even if each person took only one minute to say what they had to say (and I’ve seen videos that were 5 minutes long, so if there’s a time limit on individual videos, it’s NOT shorter than that), that means that to absorb the entire thread, you’d have to sit there as long as a feature film. People aren’t going to wait that long to reply. As a matter of fact, people started showing up and making NEW threads asking for someone to summarize my thread because they didn’t want to go back and read it all. This is another way that posts get “lost in the sauce”. People show up and want to be involved, but don’t want to put in the work to go back and experience each post.

Another reason it becomes circular is let’s say you have three tangents in a thread. As the original thread participants scramble “left and right” (since it’s all appearing as a one-dimensional timeline) to deal with tangents, 20 posts down the line, someone reads something from a tangent that was already resolved, hits “reply” and now, your 21st post is actually a response to your 5th post. :/ Then, THEIR “friends” see what THEY posted and continue the previously resolved tangent, causing the original thread participants to scramble over there and put out THAT fire… AGAIN. :/ Meanwhile, the thread splinters more and more and is misinterpreted more and more but LOOKS like a single, chronologically-ordered discussion. The snowball rolls further downhill when someone shows up to post #60, which is really only three posts removed from post #5 and doesn’t want to read the rest of the material, so they assume that all 60 posts have been along the same tangent.

Like I said, this only comes into play if you’re trying to have an intelligent conversation. If you’re just socializing via video, you don’t need to worry about tangents and following thoughts and concepts. You just throw up a “me too” post and you’re good… you feel like you’re a part of the conversation, whether people are “following” you or not.

Jan McLaughlin mentioned an addition that I think would work very well in these situations… the ability for the originator to moderate their thread. I suppose the ability to assign mods would be useful as well. A couple of days ago, I left a 32-post thread of mine for a few hours and when I returned, it was around 60. Thinking that there was much interesting material to sift through, I clicked on it, only to realize that two people had started online dating in my thread. :/ Instead of taking their chances in the “public” timeline, the best way to try to get each other’s attention was to click “reply” so that it would show up in their “replies” folder (an alternative timeline to “public” or “friends”. The unfortunate side-effect of this was that as they kept “reply”ing to each other, their posts were being added to my thread.

It would be lovely to have a way to separate irrelevant posts from your thread. It would be lovely to be able to remove videos posted to your thread by people that just showed up to act dumb. Not *delete* them, just remove them from YOUR thread so that new people arriving after the fact wouldn’t bail on your 70-post thread because there are 30 posts worth of online dating inside it that’s completely indistinguishable from on-point conversation in a one-dimensional reverse chronological timeline.

Seesmic’s making tons of improvements, so I’m sure features are coming down the line that will facilitate intelligent conversation, such as GROUPS. The ability to have a discussion only amongst the people that *you* choose would be a major development. There’s no need to block others from reading it. Just stop them from diluting the content and making the originators waste time running around putting out fires. Like I said, they’ve progressed in leaps and bounds in the three months that I’ve been on the service.

Personally, I’m a fan of synchronous interaction, whether we’re talking live video or text chat. Even IRL, I enjoy holding arguments against 5 people at a time. :D The upside of asynchronous conversation is that you only have to make your point ONCE, and everyone hears it and we can all move forward and explore greater depths of the conversation. The downside is that you have to actually BE THERE at the time it’s happening to be a part of it. If you show up hours later, all you can do is watch the archive, if there is one.

The upside of asynchronous conversation is that you can join in on work breaks, when you get out of class, whenever it’s convenient for you, you can add something to an ongoing discussion. The downside is that depending on how much time has elapsed between the beginning of the conversation and your arrival, you might not be willing to put in the work to absorb the entirety of the conversation anyway.

Bill Cammack • Cammack Media Group, LLC

Fellaz: It’s All Over! :O

The Game as we know it is about to be turned on its ear! It’s all over. Get ready for the big Going-Out-Of-Business sale. What’s on sale, you ask?

YOU! You’re going out of business! :D

Systematically, male leverage in the dating game has been eroding, or perhaps has been purposely erodED.

Back in the day, it was easy to pull chicks, because they couldn’t do anything on their own. I mean, they were always intelligent enough to, they just weren’t allowed to.

According to the Women’s Rights Movement in the U.S.
Timeline of Key Events in the A…, before August 26, 1920, women didn’t even have the right to vote. There was a bunch of other stuff women were dissuaded from, like having jobs, having their own money, owning land, starting a business…. Add that to the brainwashing girls receive to this very day when they receive baby dolls and toy ovens for Christmas to prepare them for their role as child-bearer, child-raiser, cook, maid, etc and it was a veritable buyer’s market. Oh… don’t forget the Scarlet Letter treatment women still receive to this day if they express themselves sexually and ‘get around’ in the same way that guys do. So… Basically, what you had was a bunch of chicks, sitting around with nothing to do, no money, probably no cars (? horses and buggies? hahaha) hoping that their lives would eventually *BEGIN* when some guy wanted to marry them.

Meanwhile, The Fellaz were living large because they were completely unrestricted in getting money, houses, land, voting, playing the field, etc. All you had to do was be better than the next man who comes a-knocking on a lady’s door as a suitor, and you were guaranteed to bag the chick. Of course, people like Fonzie had multiple chicks, either in parallel or serial, but that’s a different topic. :D

So anyway, in the 1920s, women got the vote. No big deal. However, around the 1940s, World War II kicked off, and all The Fellaz were sent to fight (read: die). In order to maintain American industry, there was no choice except to replace the guys with the chicks that had previously been sitting around at home. *THIS* was a big deal, :D because all of a sudden, “Sistahs were doin’ it for them-SELVES!!!”… Ya HEARD? :D Now, there’s no more sitting at home waiting for you to show up with your money and car, because she has HER money and HER car! :O No waiting for you to take her to Paris or Disney World, because she’s going to go if she wants to, AND hang out with her co-working female friends to boot! hahaha ROAD-TRIIIIP!!! :D

Guys’ leverage down the drain.

Fortunately, not all chicks took advantage of this opportunity to be prosperous. There were still a bunch of lazy chicks left over that wanted to get by on their looks and become “kept women”. There was also the mainstream media who recognized the problem of women doing EXACTLY what they wanted, when they wanted, and did their damnedest to keep images of how women are ‘supposed’ to act all over the newspapers, film reels and televisions.

At some point in the 1960s, “Women’s Lib” popped up to combat myriad injustices towards American females. This movement has done a lot of good for women, however, some chicks got completely carried away with it! :D

In 1968, Valerie Solanas wrote the SCUM Manifesto. I was lucky enough to have been handed a copy of this SCUM Manifesto by a good friend while we were in High School, and found it to be a rather interesting read. Quoting from the wikipedia entry:

“Sex is not part of a relationship: on the contrary, it is a solitary experience, non-creative, a gross waste of time. The female can easily — far more easily than she may think — condition away her sex drive, leaving her completely cool and cerebral and free to pursue truly worthy relationships and activities; but the male, who seems to dig women sexually and who seeks out constantly to arouse them, stimulates the highly sexed female to frenzies of lust, throwing her into a sex bag from which few women ever escape.”

[Side Note: Now you see how it's come to the point in 2008 when bookstore technique is a perfectly valid gameplan. Act like you've evolved as she has instead of "digging her sexually" and "constantly trying to arouse her", and you're "In like Flynn"! :D]
So, SCUM Manifesto advocated taking guys out of the loop, entirely. This brings us to February, 2008 and this article discussing British scientists trying to figure out how to turn women’s bone marrow into sperm. :O

What this means is that the last stronghold of The Fellaz is going down the tubes, and *YOU* are about to be OUT. OF. BUSINESS! :D

Once they figure this out, women will not need you for AN-NY*THING*! :D

Nothing.

This is partially what the movie “Fight Club” was about. Women do not need you to provide:

The only thing she needs *YOU* for is your MIT-graduate genes, complete with orangeish-brown complexion and naturally curly hair, and if they figure out how to extract that from the bone marrow of some chick that has those same features…

It’s A Wrap! :(

DatingGenius

I had this same conversation at least three times last week, so I may as well write it down so next time it comes up, I can save my breath and point the chick to this post. :)

Here is something very important that women need to know that could save you HOURS of wondering about why some guys do the things they do. This is a major stumbling block, and if you can get over it, you’ll be more effective in dealing with men…. especially men you aren’t interested in hooking up with. Ready? :D Pay attention, now………..

When it comes to ‘getting on’, Guys.Do.Not.Care.What.Chicks.Think.

That’s it. Period. That’s the tip that will save you HOURS of confusion and commiseration with your girlfriends over Haagen Dazs. Guys do *NOT* care AT.ALL what you think.

Now, let’s go over some typical and oft-repeated statements that women make:

“Didn’t he see my wedding ring?”
“I told him I only saw him as a friend”
“I wasn’t dressed sexy, but he still tried to get my number”
“Every time I talk to him, I only give short answers”
“I told him I wasn’t interested in him, romantically”
“I told him I was a lesbian and introduced him to my girlfriend”
“What makes him think I’ll date him after he dated my sister?”
“We can’t XYZ… We work together!”
“How dare he ask me out when I know he has a girlfriend?”

Yadda Yadda Yadda Blah Blah Blah EVERY.SINGLE.EFFIN’.DAY, some chick is confused about why a guy keeps trying to kick it to her. It’s very simple. He’s kicking it to you because HE.WANTS.TO.GET.WITH.YOU, *PERIOD*! He’s not interested in what you think about it. He’s not interested in what you have to say about it. Let’s look at what floats a lot of guy’s boats… pornography.

Pornography is ‘what?’ for the most part?….. Pictures & Videos. There may be audio content as well, but the audio pertains to the sex. These things are flying off the shelves. Pornography is BIG BUSINESS. Now, let’s think about how many of these publications (… I almost spelled pubications just now :/) and videos include chicks talking, or expressing their thoughts about something intelligent like the stock market or taxes or computer programming……. NONE. Why? Because when it comes to getting on, NOBODY CARES what you think. They care about what you look like and what you’re going to do. Period.

Now, let’s revisit some of our typical chick quandaries above, in relation to pornography:

“The porno chick had on a wedding ring?”
- So what?

“The porno chick wasn’t dressed sexy, but he still tried to get her number”
- The plan is to get her OUT of her clothes in the first place, so what difference would it make to a guy whether a chick has on pumps or sneakers? What difference does it make if she has on a leather mini or baggy sweats? None.

“The porno chick only gives him short answers to his questions”
- Short answers are better than NO answers. You’re still in the game if you’re getting ANY answers at all. That’s the whole point, to stay in the game until you can get on by hook or crook….. mostly, CROOK! :D

“The porno chick told him she wasn’t interested in him, romantically”
- He’s not interested in HER romantically, either. He just wants to hit it. Women tend to confuse a guy being physically interested in her for sex with liking her as a person. More on that in another post. Let’s just say that one has nothing to do with the other.

“The porno chick is a lesbian”
- Good. That way she’ll mind her own business when I meet other chicks, OR she’ll bring extra chicks, and I won’t have to do any work to hook up with them. Regardless of what she claims she’s into, a hot chick is a hot chick. Lesbianism is merely an accessory… a fringe benefit. :D

“What makes him think the porno chick will date him after he dated her sister?”
- See the lesbian section, above. The more, the merrier. Extra points if they’re related.

“How dare he ask the porno chick out when she knows he has a girlfriend?”
- There are enough chicks out there that will mess with “taken” guys or married guys or whatever. I mean, that’s NOTHING… If you take a look around the internet, you’d be SURPRISED at some of the stuff they can get chicks to do, like not even with PEOPLE! :O So, having it be known that you have a significant other doesn’t lessen your odds of getting on one iota. In some cases, it makes you MORE attractive to chicks for several reasons, including that it seems like a challenge to try to get “some other chick’s guy” to hook up with her.

So there you have it. Of course, some of y’all tuned out to the analogies because you don’t consider yourselves porno chicks. This is like the phenomenon where women will go out to a club and dance happily and sing along with “Bitches Ain’t ish But Hoes & Tricks”… because… say it with me, ladies!!! :D

“Oh… He’s Not Talking About *ME*!!! :D”

hahahahahaha

So that’s the trick that leads to your enlightenment about those guys that try to pick you up at the club or the gym or the supermarket or waiting for the bus or in the street in the middle of the night near Port Authority, when it’s time for the runaways to beat the clock for the last bus heading back to their part of Jersey….. um… what was I talking about?….

DatingGenius

Let’s Go, SteeLers!!! :D

2008 has arrived. 2007 was a complete TRIP, for real. The playing field changed right out from under us as we were playing the game. Every other week, there was some new technology that people flocked to and either disturbed or enhanced our interactions with each other and our friends, fans and clients.

As I mentioned in my Fast Company Expert blog, I realized that as quickly as I’ve been running to keep up with technology, just as quickly, I’ve been running ahead of, or, more importantly, AWAY FROM friends of mine that aren’t anywhere near the leading edge of technology and really couldn’t give a damn about it.

That’s not good enough for 2008. Nope. :/ This year, I’m taking my technological advancement in reverse and seeing how many of my friends I can recoup from the past. There’s no reason I should have 352 followers on http://twitter.com/BillCammack, and not one of them is a friend of mine from 5 years ago.

“Social” media is supposed to be just that… SOCIAL. If that’s true, I’ll be able to reconnect with friends and acquaintances from past phases of this long-ass life! :D Hopefully, I can find out who’s doing what and who’s working where and who has several kids and who moved to another country…

’07 was all about business. ’08 is about WE… The PEOPLE! :D

Bill C.
Cammack Media Group, LLC
ReelSolid.TV Season 03: Delusions of Grandeur

Are *you* a Tech Elitist? If so, how’s that workin’ for ya?

As it’s now Christmas, and we think of The Grinch sitting high on the hill, looking down on all the little people of the village with contempt… Let’s consider our own positions in our respective fields and how we’ve chosen social media sites & groups as well as whom we’ve chosen to affiliate ourselves with.

There was much change during 2007. More ways to communicate. More social sites to join. More video hosts with their own little gimmicks that made them slightly different from the rest. New video editing software. New storage solutions. New live streaming options….

As new opportunities arose, there was a lot of bandwagon-jumping. Sometimes it stuck, sometimes it didn’t. When Twitter was initially unreliable, OFTEN, eventually, Jaiku came along, and there was a mass exodus. The backup plan for when Twitter would go down was for people to immediately start posting on Jaiku until the problem was resolved. Eventually, Twitter became stable, and I didn’t hear a peep about Jaiku for months until they got bought by Google. All of a sudden, here come the Jaiku friend requests.

Even within Twitter, there was bandwagon-jumping. Apps were created so you didn’t have to use the twitter web page with your browser. Some people stuck with them. Some people bailed back to the web site when they realized how many twitter posts the apps weren’t picking up. Eventually, people found found satisfaction in how they received twitter posts. At some point during ’07, Pownce became a player as well.

There was much debate about which status update application was better between the three of them. I ended up sticking with Twitter, and once every so often, I copy/paste redundant posts to Pownce & Jaiku for people that primarily (if not exclusively) use those sites. I’m also biased towards Twitter because I have 341 contacts there vs. 117 on Pownce and 50 on Jaiku, many of which are redundant for the reason I stated earlier. So, for the sake of this post, I’ll say I made the ‘elitist’ decision that Twitter was better for my purposes and essentially neglect the other two services.

On the social site front, I used to have a regular MySpace presence. I had somewhere around 500 “friends” that were rather randomly acquired. What I mean by that is that I had probably 100 contacts that I knew from some other site or forum or that I actually knew IRL and then another 400 or so people/companies that sent me a friends request and then essentially never talked to me “again”. :D … “Again” has to be in quotes, because they never TALKED to me the first time. All they did was click a button that sent me a friends request, and I accepted it. I enjoyed interacting with my actual friends on MySpace, but the vast majority of it I found to be utterly worthless. MySpace is fantastic if you’re a musician or an artist, but I didn’t make many new relationships on MySpace that were worth anything.

Eventually, Facebook stepped its game up, and I migrated to “the better site”. Similar to my Twitter bias for status updates, my MySpace dealings dwindled to ZERO. In fact, if someone didn’t have a facebook account, I wouldn’t even bother to look them up on MySpace. :) “Everybody who was anybody” was on Facebook, so there wasn’t any need to ‘waste’ time on other mass social sites. Recently, someone mentioned MySpace to me, and I inadvertently laughed and said something like “You *still* use your MySpace account?” She replied that she interacts with the people that she knows because of business on Facebook, but her IRL friends are all still on MySpace. I hadn’t thought about it before, but as I sit here on my Facebook hill with contempt… I’m now wondering how many of my ACTUAL friends are still down in the MySpace village, having never made the jump to “the better site”.

The reason Facebook is better for me is that I deal with social media every day of the week. Now that I’m thinking about it, for the average joe, MySpace is more than enough, and there’s no reason for them to look for better connectivity to more REAL people. So now I have to consider whether it’s more beneficial to me to move some of my Facebook-time back to MySpace instead of concentrating solely on the site that’s clearly superior for my purposes.

Next, you have video hosts. I use blip.tv because the options and functionalities serve my purposes as I maintain my own video blogs using WordPress, Show-In-A-Box and vPiP. Meanwhile, other people talk into their webcams and post videos to YouTube. I’ve posted a few videos to YouTube for test purposes, but I wasn’t impressed with the video compression quality at the time, I wasn’t impressed with the Terms of Service and I *CERTAINLY* wasn’t impressed with the dimwitted remarks people love to leave in the comments sections.

For those reasons and others, I’ve left YouTube just about completely alone… However, you can’t argue with the numbers of views that people get, assuming they get “featured”. YouTube has become the go-to for people looking for any kind of video under the sun, so just by having your video there, you have more of a chance of it going viral than if you oh-so-elitely plan, film, edit, compress, upload, post, tag and advertise your own videos like I do. :)

The question, again, is “How’s that workin’ for ya?”. Fortunately, another 2007 development is TubeMogul which enables you to upload a video once and have it distributed to multiple video sharing sites. TubeMogul also tracks statistics for you across several sites. So now, there’s less incentive to keep “all your eggs in one basket”.

I’m sure we can look forward to lots more fantastic developments in 2008. :) Personally, I’ll be paying more attention than I was this year as far as whether I’d like to consolidate or expand in the areas of status updates, social sites and video hosting sites. I didn’t even get to talk about live streaming options, like how I think Operator11 is infinitely better than BlogTV….. except Operator11 went completely offline for more than a week, so people like Jonny Goldstein had to retreat to other live streaming sites to keep their shows going. Of course, there’s no way to add a BlogTV archive to your Operator11 show archive, so c’est la vie. :/

Anyway… I think it’s in all of our best interests to pay attention not only to which new app or site has cool features or the elite people flocking to it, but also to whether we’re trading away communications with our core viewers, friends, contacts and followers. Just like The Grinch found out… it’s lonely at the top.

Bill Cammack • Cammack Media Group, LLC