Consu-totha-mating

Yo! Traffic spike. You gotta know, I seen a lotta people be comin’ here lately from old Consumating.com. Who’s gonna say why. I mean, I could. I could tell all y’all. I could if I wanted fosho.

And why don’t I? Mystery and subtlety aren’t my obsessions lately. I’ve better things to figure out. Makeouts. Masculine identity. Communal living. City living. Financial deterrents. Financial dependence. Desire. Purpose. Choice. Path. Consumating.

One of these things is not like the other…

Consumating.com is a website. The same as MySpace, but tucked away and with a better crowd. No hustlers or 15 year-olds trying to get in. These people don’t dig the scene but they love the music. They’re internet locals. They live there and they know the place. They’ll flirt with you at two o’clock in the morning same as they would at two in the afternoon. The games are good, and the kissing’s great. Conversation’s even better. It’s the bar I never had growing up.

But then again I never been to a bar with a point system. Up front, strait up, above the table, not by the way, point system. Here’s how it works (like you don’t know): two points each thumbs up, one less every thumb down. Gladiatorial life and death has never been so simple. Your profile is there for all to look at (and it looks like everyone’s—no HTML soup to serve your friends). It’s got pictures, it’s got space for a witty l’il quote. So far it’s MySpace without the ugly. But instead of general movies music television schools businesses boring boring you go ahead and outright LABEL yourself with some web2.0y tags. Me, I’m tagged memetics, dinosaurs, pixel_fonts, and abandoned_buildings. I like ’em, and that’s who I am. And the “About Me” section? Who you’d really like to meet? All bullcrap anyway. He who gets his whole personality across when asked those questions doesn’t deserve to be met. An ingenious solution: don’t ask dumb questions; try interesting ones. More opportunities to be clever than you can shake on a pogo stick… That a pogo stick bounces at… That you can bounce a pogo stick to shake… Well, it doesn’t come if you force it.

The point is points. You get ’em when people like you’re answers, when they like your photos, when they like you. You collect points and get ranked against everybody else. Life or death. Being clever is fun. Taking jiveass pictures is fun. Flirting, notepasssing, and rating strangers is fun. Getting more popular is a job—an addictive job.

I wanna be cool like all the other cool people. I don’t wanna play SEO and figure what attitudes provide the most ROI. I wanna kill time, not waste it. I wanna attend Secret Santa consu-meetings and meet worthy people from another world, give worthwhile presents and get worthwhile kisses. But you know what else? I wanna break the triple digits. In the past month I’ve doubled my points. I wanna break 1000th place.

So why couldn’t I just say that up front? I linked to my own page from Consumating. And I did it because it’d be fun, sure. But I did it for points too.

Subtlety can be good. You don’t just walk up and ask a fella for a beer, you say hi and give an interesting perspective and make friends, then you ask for a beer. If it’s a good bar, you might be lucky enough to get that far.