Flirting with a French tourist girl on Tinder, which is interesting because:

1) I have to simplify my vocabulary and sentence structure a lot, and can’t use cultural allusions or twist turns of phrase, which if you’ve been reading you know is quite a distinction

2) the French flirting style is definitely distinct, it’s a cooperative rather than a competitive game that manages to be simultaneously more lightweight and playful and absolutely clear from the outset this is about sex

3) this is another new personality thing; I talked about Tinder before and the clever lines I came up with but honestly they didn’t work; I think a lot of it is I didn’t say anything to my matches, I would just look at their profiles and pictures and not think of anything to say and couldn’t just keysmash at them, when I did key off some aspect of their profile and work it into an ask I maybe came off as needy and tryhard?

Now I just instinctually do it, adjust on the fly to the point I can do it with, pace 1), all my rhetorical tricks disabled. It’s like I had been training Speech all this time and just got a few points of Charisma out of nowhere. This weekend alone, I hooked her and another girl, set up 2 dates, got a PSU student who matched with me at 5AM promise to send me nudes next time she wants attention ass early, and let off another match cause her nudes weren’t good enough.

4) related to that, pretty sure the Tinder algorithm is a virtuous spiral that keeps track of your desireability, as measured not only by left/right swipes on you but whether you respond to matches and whether they respond back, weighted by their desirability, and generally tries to satisfice by matching like to like. Upshot being once I matched with one or two cuties and carried a conversation, it kept offering (and thus matching) me to cute, outgoing girls