I knew you were going to end up with 'robotfindslove', but I almost wanted to interpret it as 'robotfindsthesis' too.

In any case, the situation for dating is even worse: it's actually an MMO version of what you describe.

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oh my the robotdoesresearch interpretation is excellent, too.

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and I think the MMO aspect is nearly as bad there, too.

"no, I'm sorry, I already found this kitten. You can't possibly publish the same kitten twice!"

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That is an amazing hat.

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Isn't it? I am very fond of it.

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The NKIs claim that nobody in the grid can actually speak Robot, usually.

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The game would also be better if the robot was actually seeking to destroy the kittens, and if it had missiles. The boss battle should be harder too.

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Hmf. I have been trying the calm acceptance thing - "You can only find it if you aren't looking" - and I'm beginning to conclude it's a myth.
If you're feeling similarly, I recommend trying the furious-denial approach for a bit, see if that works any better.

Great analogy though.

Edited at 2008-01-16 05:41 pm (UTC)

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I think the truth is the even less helpful "you may or may not find it regardless of whether you are or aren't looking".

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(rage)NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!(/rage)

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LOL!

My own view is that any given person is statistically likely to find "it" or some approximation of it sooner or later because it's what we're biologically programmed to do... or at least to persistently look for/pursue "it" despite all frustrations. and persistence goes a long way.

I guess it's that "sooner or later" part that kills. Thus where patience/calm acceptance helps.

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i always thought the idea behind the "only if you aren't looking" advice was that when you're not actively trying to hook up with someone, you can actually be yourself, and girls are much more likely to be interested in someone who seems genuine. (this is as opposed to the literal interpretation, which just says you shouldn't look for girls at all.. somehow expecting that they should drop into existence from subspace highways or something..)

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oh yeah, the disinterest needs to be genuine (although hmm... maybe I can be coy, in the sense of flirting non-verbally, and letting them do the work of talking to me; but this disqualifies most women (especially the better ones), since they'll be too shy to make the first approach). Very tricky!

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I tend to think of it as a question of what you're looking for. If you're looking for a significant other just to fill this hole in your life where you feel like another person should be, then that translates very quickly to not really seeing potential dates as the people they are, but rather in terms of their potential to make you feel whole. Such an approach is both off-putting (unless you take pains to conceal it) and in some sense disrespectful.

I don't think it's a question of "not looking" or being disinterested. I think that instead the interest should be in the other person as they actually are, not as to how they might meet your needs.

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The character I was *certain* was a kitten, based on its cuteness, turned out to be seven screws.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

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...and a piece of plastic!

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I have stuff for class due today, and I'm getting sucked into the robotfindskitten void. Blast!

It sounds like in your extended version, the robots are also kittens.

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Oh, also, I recently unearthed the code for robotfindsmlton, including the NKO string descriptors, some of which are your contributions I believe.

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For reference:

"Dr. MLTonlove, or, how I learned to stop worrying and love kitten."
"Robotfindsmlton 64", still in the original shrinkwrap.
A "Got MLTon?" T-shirt taunts you.
A DVD of "Close Encounters of the Dependent Kind."
A bowl of pudding, what you always wished for. Are the walls getting closer?
A card of type green.
A cliff. A summary of "Heart of Darkness" is written in the dirt.
A cute little hill-climbing algorithm, chugging its way up the gradient.
A failure continuation, mumbling neurotically.
A foreign function asks you about "cheeseburgers".
A foreign function asks you about getting a green card.
A foreign function looks around nervously for INS agents.
A foreign function tells you what it was like in old country.
A foreign function waits to be deported.
A function from unit to a function from unit to a statue of Haskell B. Curry.
A function from unit to alpha. You decide not to touch it.
A monad, wearing spotless white robes.
A pad with four arrows on it. Whatever could it be for?
A pair of adjoint functors dancing the tango.
A parsing combinator.
A pile of strict assumptions. Gotta use 'em all!
A piping hot bowl of NP soup.
A robot carrying an anti-wall placard.
A robot-evading machine is here. Or at least, it was.
A small domesticated feline. It looks up at you plaintively.
A small statuette commemorating excellence in concrete.
A stack of Visual Basic Pro 3.0 floppies.
A success continuation, smiling broadly.
A textbook entitled "ML for the Laid-Off Programmer".
A therapist's couch. Tell me about your parent process.
A time-travelling CVS repository. Now -that's- concurrency.
A type checker. Gosh, what's that doing here?
A typed intermediate language. You feel strangely safe in its presence.
A unifying substitution!
A window manager laid off in recent downsizing. "Will maximize for food."
AUTOMATH, the lost Transformer.
An illegal beta copy of ML 2000.
An infix operator is stuck between some expressions.
An irrelevant proof. It looks sort of blurry, but you don't care.
An old rogue addict. He grumbles, "...lousy new-fangled Nethack..."
An unsatisfied traveling salesman in a three-colored suit tries to solve the UFO puzzle.
Ewww. "Crafting a compiler in C."
Free pizza. You hear a stampeding horde of undergrads in the distance.
Gee whiz, an automatic filk-making machine!
Gross. Who forgot to clean out the bit-bucket?
Hey, Nick deBruijn! What's up?
It's Klaus Sutner, of `Am I Hot or Not?' fame.
K, the lonliest combinator.
Looks like a linear bounded turing machine.
Looks like someone is playing with the Unsafe structure.
Oh boy. A lowercase greek zeta.
Omigod! You found it! It's... no, wait, it's just smlnj.
POKEY THE PENGIN!!!! YES!!!1
Sarcasm drips from the ceiling, forming a puddle.
Some proof-carrying code. It complains that proofs are really heavy.
Some sort of treasure map. "X" marks the window system!
Someone going on and on about constructive mathematics.
Springer-Verlag Graduate Texts in Finding MLton, number 137.
The ever-inscrutable Unify Con.
The meaning of li--whup, no time for that. Get back to finding.
Three dependent kinds, two valid signatures, and a partridge in a pear tree.
Why, it's the dragon book!
You almost become distracted by a PhD thesis.
You try to grab it, but someone else holds the mutex. Try again later?
Your mother chides you for taking so long to find MLton.
robotfindsmlton.sml:987 Error: Sucky error message. You can do better.

I'm sure rjmccall contributed too, and the obscure bowl of pudding joke is probably nirav's doing.

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most excellent

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o/= K is the loneliest combinator that you'll ever β-reduce... o/=

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What is " o/= " ?

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It appears to be a vertically-squashed musical note.

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Wow, there's even a reference to my undergrad thesis topic. I feel special.

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looks great! a+++++++++++++ would read lj again.

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This is in retaliation for that horse pun, isn't it?

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It is not clear that I will ever be able to fully avenge that.

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Dude you are my official hero of the day for this post :D:D:D:D.

rfk <3.

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I played for a while, and then found the numbers option, so then I opened a really large xterm and set the number of objects to be the maximum (349).

I love the nethack references. I like how surreal the notion of ascending is with this game.

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Sometimes even after a character has revealed itself as an NKI, that character will, at a future date, instead be kitten

It took me a while to realize this was an analogy for "suddenly available" and not "suddenly a woman." Because our social circles overlap, but not that much.

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Well, the original intent was that you could be in a relationship for a while and not know if it will turn out to be ultimately satisfying for quite some time.

Edited at 2008-01-16 11:42 pm (UTC)

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Wouldn't that be "even after a character has revealed itself as kitten, it can suddenly become not kitten"?

I never expect anything to be ultimately satisfying. That's just setting yourself up for dissapointment.

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Dunno, the kitten in the original game is sort of the "and now you have won" thing. It's not a perfect analogy.

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Maybe I'm a weirdo, but that version sounds like even more fun... but maybe that's because I'm more interested in what isn't a kitten.

Hmm, I dislike the implication that finding love means the game is over, though. Everything before finding the kitten is the fun part. And maybe I'd be happier with a coat hanger hovering in midair, anyway. Who says I have to find a kitten?

I choose my own win-conditions, dammit!

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You have to be careful, though: sometimes upon the event of collapse the kittens, upon reveal, are bears. They are jolly, caper, wear small hats, and utter things such as "what, ho!"

Then they snarl, crash to earth with terrible gravity, and confuse the neighbors by parking themselves in a dank furry mass on the porch and gnawing on the mailbox.

The postal carriers hate that.

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Really you're quite right.

I find even when I play actual rfk, I am disappointed when I find kitten, because it means I didn't find some amusing piece of text. I think this is why it bills itself as "a zen simulation".

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brilliant.

also, disgustingly a propos to my own life right now.

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