So... dating has turned into a real shitshow in recent years. Just from my observation. Not that I participate anymore; honestly it already was kind of difficult a few years ago, and now it seems impossible to find a real connection.

Now it appears that people are actually giving up on dating apps en masse. Can we stop for a moment and appreciate how fascinating that development is, a few short years after Tinder, Bumble, Match.com etc. were all the rage?

Wanting to find a partner is such a core need for many people; and looking online to find the right match in a sea of ten-thousands or more seems such a logical approach. Yet it's not working.

Are the cause our increasingly fractioned society, people's expectations and attitudes, the apps themselves, or ...?

Anyway. Right now I don't have a proper job, and the way the IT job market is going, it might stay like that for a while. So I can't even appeal to the younger men who are "hagmaxxing" (a term I learned about the other day 😂), or the older men who are looking for a stable partner to cruise into a comfortable retirement down the road.

But I still enjoy watching YouTube videos about the dating scene, and how men and women relate.

I also enjoy hip-hop and danceable music, which led to me wanting to do a mash-up that combines an incredibly catchy tune (thanks to Suno.com) with observations about today's "love connections."

Anyway, I think this turned out real well. The scripts I wrote to retrieve songs, record bits and pieces etc. (all through Puppeteer) and the strategy of putting them together are pretty neat, so I will probably generate a few more mash-up videos.

If for no other reason than: listening to various music, re-discovering old songs, and then listening to a catchy upbeat tune over and over (while putting the final video together) is just a recipe for happiness. I had so much fun and towards the end of the day I was just dancing and laughing my a** off non-stop 😄.

It's also crazy how the song lyrics seemed to line up with some randomly-generated clips in a serendipitous way. This reminds me of something Milan Kundera wrote in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" -

If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders.

I feel that way about any creative endeavors, which are of course a kind of "love story" between mind and matter... Any software project I take on, the more I love what I'm doing, the more lucky coincidences seem to lead the way to lead to more and more unexpectedly wondrous, unexpected paths.