Bad Idea for a Dating Site

The problem with dating, right? Is that it all starts out like this really exciting thing where you suddenly know someone who's at least not openly repulsed by the idea of touching you and, like, maybe just maybe you've found a real human person who will be there to stroke your hair and, I don't know, coo at you while you're drunkenly sobbing yourself to sleep at night. So much so, actually, that you're willing to overlook the fact that this chick has a psychotic fixation with, e.g., trying to talk to you while you're on the fucking phone with someone else.

But like before long, it turns out that having someone ask you who you're talking to every single time you pick up the telephone is actually the single most annoying thing in the entire world; and on the flipside, she's actually not all that into the fact that you're this oddly defective human being who bursts into tears for no apparent reason, and she starts telling you to, like, why not just cheer up? Which somehow just makes it all so much fucking worse.

Right?

But so this dating site takes care of that problem from the beginning of the process. Through a comprehensive 42-question survey, we'll identify every insecurity, nervous tic, bad habit, fear, psychosis, or piece of questionable taste that you have, and assemble this accurate-as-shit composite of what you're really like, so we can pair you up with someone who's fucked up in similar ways.

So for instance, if you have this deep-seated anxiety about physical intimacy, we'll find a partner for you whose germophobia is so intense that s/he would never be able to touch you anyway without the aid of a powerful sedative and a pair of heavy-duty burlap gardening gloves. Or, right? If you're one of those people who just can't keep the difference between "your" and "you're" straight in your head, we'll find you a life-mate whose degenerative brain disorder is so severe that they'll never be able to fully comprehend just what a monumental fucktard they've been paired up with.

Also too, it's a network, right? So you can have friends write testimonials for you that will help fill in information that you may have been too modest to include. Like,

"If you can deal with the fact that Jack will always be more emotionally committed to his music collection than he is to you, then go for it."

"Diane will often have a dream that you did something fucked up and then actually hold it against you."

"Stephanie genuinely enjoys reality television."

And then the real bonus of this site is that when your partner leaves you because you're "not the person they thought you were," you can be like, "Well maybe you should have read my fucking profile."

Bad Idea for a Movie

Here's an idea for a Monster Movie. Everyone's trapped in an amusement park – no, a brothel. OK, no, everyone's trapped in an underfunded semi-annual conference for Social Media and Emerging Technologies. It's called "Harnessing the Social Web." And it's in Detroit. No, that's absurd – it's in an old space station orbiting a distant, sunless planet. OK, no, so it's in Jersey City. And the characters – what the characters don't know (there are five of them – old friends from high school, and they all look like they're out of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue, plus this talking snow-leopard attorney named Augustus, who provides comic relief.) So what the characters don't know is that the conference, which is called "E-Commerce: From Networks to Net Gains," is actually a front set up by this shadowy group of vampires or, like, zombies, or social conservatives or something, who want to trap them and eat their brains. Or, like, no, it's a cult, right? It's this cult of Satan-worshipping tech bloggers, who are fanatically obsessed with finding "the next Google" so they can use it to somehow summon a demon.

And the lawyer, right? The talking attorney who's their faithful companion. He's the only one who knows that something's fucked up about the conference, which is called "Is Facebook the New Google? How to Keep Up in a Web 2.1 World" – but he can't say anything about it because he has this pathological fear of expressing any sort of opinion, so the only thing he can do to warn them is, like, grunt and, like jump around in this agitated kind of way.

But yeah, so the climax of this movie comes when they're all at this panel discussion about, like, Social Media Marketing and the Occult, and they're all Twittering at each other that it's a trap, and the lawyer is freaking out and grunting and generally disrupting the panel discussion, which is actually getting pretty fucking interesting, and these mystical forces start converging and, like, it's fairly clear that this scary-ass demon is going to materialize right in the middle of the PowerPoint display, and all the electricity suddenly goes out, and the group has to work together to find a way to somehow stop the demon without using the Internet.

And then I haven't figured out how the ending works yet, but it turns out that the real monster is their own greed.