My Best Face Experiment!

[I'm trying out a new, simpler, less-gaudy layout - what do you think? Also, don't forget to let me know if you want to sign up for Thrift Store Pen Pals! I pick a new Pen Pal tomorrow!]

Online dating is getting a lot more popular these days. OkCupid is often ranked among the top free dating sites out there, and I can see why! This post isn't about online dating, but about a feature OkCupid offers, My Best Face. I promised that I'd post some of my Halloween costumes, so I decided to go a step further with My Best Face and have random people rank them. More on that later...

Whether or not you feel like doing any online dating, you can use the awesome My Best Face feature (although you do have to create an account). Basically, you submit a few pictures, the website puts your picture beside another person's picture, and random people around the world pick whether they'd rather date you or the other person. You have to be pretty confident to do this though, because if you are ugly you could be in for some harsh reality. 

Before you can receive your results you have to judge several pictures yourself. It is set up like this:

The title says "Your challenge: choose one for a date" and you get to choose one or the other. It's pretty simple. Not all the comparisons are of attractive people though; in fact, most of them are quite average, which makes perfect sense, statistically speaking. Anyway, I scoured through about 700 comparisons to could find some good ones to blog about, so here are a few examples (this is probably going to be really mean, by the way). 

A lot of these really ARE  a "challenge." I'm going to pretend that I HAVE to choose one and I will HAVE to date her in some life-or-death situation. 

Okay, I have to choose one for a date... life has presented me with only two possible options. I have to choose only one, and I better hope it's the right one. So let's see here. They're both total babes, so looks aren't a deciding factor. The one on the left looks like she's SUPER good at baking cookies, so that's a plus. The one on the right, however, clearly has a job, so she could just buy cookies. That lime green affair is not doing it for me though. I choose option 1. 

On the left we have what I can only assume is a picture taken from the back of a milk carton. Or maybe it's a mugshot from the paper, so that could mean she's fun and exciting. Either way, it's a weird picture of a picture. She's also like 70. The one on the right, although significantly younger, looks confused and senile. She has a sewing machine in the background, which means she could fix holes in my clothes. I think I'll choose option 1 for the excitement-factor. Plus I've never been with a woman with dentures.

On the left is what appears to be a goth girl. We could have seances together and play with a Ouija board at the graveyard or something, so that could be fun. The one on the right, however, appears to be the last remaining ancient Egyptian, judging by her age. I could learn a lot about history, so that's always fun. I'll choose option 2, the Sphinx.

Wow. This one is an epic challenge. So this is what life has thrown at me, and I must choose one for a date. You know what they say about life handing you lemons, and it looks like I just got two. Looks like both of these women will murder me, but the one on the left looks like she'll knit me up in a yarn-cocoon and have her cats lay eggs inside of me so their cat-larvae can feast upon me. The one on the right will just take me on a drug deal and, when she shows up without the goods, will use me as a human shield during the resulting shoot-out. I kind of like cats, so I'll choose option 1.

That was fun. My apologies to anyone who finds their picture on here - I'm sure you're a very nice person. 

Anyway, I put up a bunch of my Halloween pictures to be rated to see which one was the best. I also included a picture of me looking normal as the experiment control. When you get your report in a few days, it breaks down how everyone rated you, their age range, and their personalities, like this:

That's probably really hard to read, but if you click on the picture you can see how each type/age of person rated you. Since my normal picture got an 82, let's see how my Halloween costumes compare.

My hobo costume was rated the highest at a 66! I guess girls really go for the green beard and flannel look. This is also probably my most normal looking costume, so I'm sure that was a contributing factor in its popularity. Nerds and overachievers seemed to like the hobo the best. I guess opposites do attract.

Gold Man was a fairly close second, although as you can see from the graph, it wasn't very popular, overall. The upward facing bars are votes "for" and the downward facing bars are "against." Geeks, nerds, and stoners hate Gold Man, whereas introverts seem to like him. That makes sense, considering an introvert would like to be completely covered up. Although this suit leaves little to the imagination.

Hmm. Everyone seems to hate my girl costume, chief among them being divas and free spirits. Women over the age of 31 are also pretty dissuaded. It actually gives you a breakdown of everyone who's voted on which picture though, and predictably most of the girls who voted "for" this picture were bisexual. No surprises there.

I kind of expected Quail-Man to get more love, but he seems to be thoroughly disliked. He has one shining hope though: dorks. Some of his biggest haters are nerds and conservatives, and women over 31.

Last, and certainly least, is Dog Man with Shark Nose. This costume actually came to me in a dream and I made it a reality. I actually made it myself, as is painfully obvious. Dog Man is primarily hated by liberals, vegetarians, and girls aged 18-22. And everyone else.

These reports give me a good idea as to what costume I need to wear when I go out. As the numbers show, I should probably just stop showering, buy all my clothes from a dumpster, and grow a moldy beard. Or I could just be normal... But where's the fun in that?

Thrift Store Pen Pals - Sign Up!

Remember when you were a kid and you would save up box tops, send them in, and then get a crappy toy in the mail a few weeks later? I’m hoping to recreate that experience, but with more of a white-elephant-gift-exchange vibe. I asked what you guys thought about the idea and everyone seemed to be on board, so let's see what happens!

Basically, I will send you a random item (I'll pay shipping and all that) and you will then review it. We will then link to each other's blogs and we will all have some laughs and live happily ever after. I will choose a new Thrift Store Pen Pal every week assuming I remain motivated and can afford shipping. So read the information page below and sign up!

Thrift Store Pen Pals Info/Sign Up Sheet

Be sure to sign up by Thursday evening!

Idea - Thrift Store Pen Pals!?

So I have an idea, but I wanted to run it by you guys first to gauge interest/make sure I'm not retarded.

Basically, I'd like to send some bloggers a random item from the thrift store (picked out by me!) and have the blogger (possibly you!) talk about it or review it on his/her own site. We'd then link to each other's sites, hopefully giving each of us some fresh readers, making this project mutually beneficial. I'm thinking of calling it Thrift Store Pen Pals, or some other such thing.

The item would probably be like something you'd find on this site, so maybe a book, a piece of clothing, a weird toy, or something of the sort. Basically whatever I deem weird enough to send to a random person. I'd pay for shipping and item cost because I'm awesome like that. You'd just have to wait for it to get to your house, open it, laugh, and review/write something about it on your blog.

I would do this every week or couple weeks. The blogger would be chosen at random. Maybe with a contest of some sort, or just a random person who "likes" the Facebook page? I don't know, I'll figure out the mechanics later, but it sounds fun to me. What do you think? Would anyone be interested in such shenanigans?

If this idea sucks, just let me know. I just had the idea and I thought it sounded fun :)

Add Me - My Phone Takes Funny Pictures!

I got a new phone recently, the Samsung Galaxy S, which is the Samsung Fascinate for me. Soon after getting it I was taking pictures and was going through the options expecting the same old ho-hum features like sepia or negative art. To my pleasant surprise I found that my phone's camera has some exceptional modes: a panorama mode where it takes awesome wide pictures, a mode where it will only take the picture if everyone in the picture is smiling, and, my favorite, a feature called "Add Me." At first I was confused about what Add Me does. It certainly isn't very intuitive, so I started messing around with it, and realized it is meant to be used to add someone to the shot who was not originally there.

That's the INTENDED usage. Here's a picture of a kid using the Add Me feature to shoot his twin brother, and that's actually the only picture of Add Me I could find after scouring the internet for minutes. Pretty lackluster performance. But I have found a much better usage for this fine feature, as I will describe in this loving  article.

Instead of creating a virtual twin, or adding in people who were too late to the photo shoot, I much prefer to splice together people's faces. Instead of going through the lengthy process of oiling up the bone saw, The Add Me function does all that work for me! Here is an example:

Hubba hubba!

Can you guess who this fine fellow is composed of? That's right, it's the two most obvious celebrities, Gary Busey and Arnold Schwarzenegger! This picture, along with all the celebrity mashups in this article, are taken right off my computer monitor so the quality is slightly questionable. But just roll with it. 

Here's how to make your very own creeper face, sans Photoshop. First, simply select "Add me" from the options:

Whoa, a pic of a phone cam with a phone cam... That's so Inception, dude

Your phone's display will be split down the middle, where you will put half of a face on each side. I like to split the face right on the bridge of the nose. The key to getting the pictures right is matching the faces up right, and getting a very similar-looking background.

We see a transparent Busey in the top half. That is what you will use to match up the faces. Then just take the picture and the program will take care of the rest! Pretty simple, and way cooler than the intended usage. I've taken the pictures of other celebrity duos as well, as seen in the gallery below.

Gary Busey and Helen Hunt. 

Margaret Thatcher and Jim Carrey - yummy ;)

Emiril Lagasse and a guy named Jesus

You can also split the faces vertically (or "hotdog style," if you are in elementary school) but it is a bit tougher to make them match properly.

The best-of-friends, Keith Olbermann and Glenn Beck

Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. Together, they make Mad Eye Moody!

As an added bonus, I'm also providing some Face-Off pictures a friend and I did a couple weeks ago. As you can probably imagine, it is much easier to get the faces to match up when using real people and not pictures from the internet. Note: These may be more entertaining to people to actually know me and/or said friend.

That is one ugly family.

So there you have it. Hopefully this guide will be an inspiration to millions and I'll start seeing these Add Me pictures pop up. Which seems unlikely considering Photoshop is probably way easier.