Intellect Connect:
I like the layout. It is very much like another Facebook (yes, down to the free account part), except shinier and more up to date in terms of applets and css than Sweet On Geeks. However, it does suffer from the same issue: that a lot of people there, when you do an initial scan, have profiles that haven't been touched in ages. The users don't even seem have logged on for a while, and while it may be just me, but the average age of the population there seems to be about 10 years higher than Geek 2 Geek. It does have one feature that I like, should I be the sort who's interested in constantly actively searching for people, and that is that Intellect Connect saves your past searches. The searches have more criteria than Sweet On Geeks and Intellect Connect saves the exact criteria that you've chosen, but presumably when you use those criteria again at a later date you'll get to see any new people who'd fit the bill. Other than that, there's not much that's notable. I'll keep it for another two weeks to see if anything interesting reveals itself to me. Otherwise? I have a Facebook account, thanks very much, moving on now.
Intelligent People:
Another site that's free...provided you pass their IQ test (18 questions this time). The site design is on par with Intellect Connect in terms of scripts, except it is way more sparse. In fact, the sparseness can be applied to describe the members as well, in the sense that there aren't that many. This is possibly due to the fact that it make people take tests to join and not many sane people want to take tests when they don't have to. The site structure is like Intellect Connect and Sweet On Geeks in that it's a social networking site mostly that allows you to actively search for people, but doesn't match you with anyone. I do like how international it is, because there're people there from all over the place. Case in point: the first message I received there is from someone in Russia (Moscow, to be exact, and for someone who's never been in Russia I seem to have a lot of Russian speaking people in my life) who wrote something along the lines of "We're too far apart, I'm having trouble finding someone near me too, but good luck!". It was the nicest message ever. With questionable grammar, but still nice. (I don't think I've ever been cheered on by someone from another country who's not related to me, either, come to think of it.)Aside from possibilities of finding international pen pals, I'm not so certain about keeping this account, either. I think I will also apply the two weeks-long rule here.
Soul Geek:
This is my favorite site, so far, out of all the ones that I've seen. Sure the site design is tacky and a bit passe, but aside from that? Just...wow. My favorite thing about it is definitely its sense of humor (it's of the same caliber as ThinkGeek). For instance, in the area where you tick off boxes for your physical description, there's an area under "Extras" that lists: tatoo, glasses, evil minions. Evil minions was inexplicably appealing at the time when I was filling this out but alas, I didn't check it. Then there's the part with word verification where they said something along the lines of "We know this is stupid, but our lawyers said that we have to do this or else zombies will break out and eat all our customers". I lol'ed at that one. ("Aaaallll we want to do is eat your brains!") Free account gives me profile, messaging, and winking/glance/hail whatever the flagging operator is for this site. I think it's "hail". They are very big on the Star Trek theme. Paid account should give me access to chats and forums and ability to share fanart and fanfic AND it's about a third of the price of Geek 2 Geek.(It's not like they're being unreasonable...okay I will stop referencing the zombie song now.) My only issue is that the site is more fanboy fangirl based than geek based (though a giant fraction of the fans are geeks, yes), which means lower percentage of nerds. Oh also they are still trying to solve issues with yahoo, so I can't use the same email account as the other sites. (But they say they're working with yahoo techs to solve this. In giant fonts. Flashing across the top of the page. When they want you to know something they are not shy about it.) This account is a definite keeper.
Other news? People have figured out that I can't send message on Geek 2 Geek so I have received email giving their none G2G email address, which I greatly appreciate and think is much better than randomly giving out my own address by posting it in my profile (I think I'm definitely more the sort of girl who asks for numbers than gives them out). I got flagged down as "hot" by one person, which cracked me up because guys, this is the Facebook photo. With the birds. I felt bad at first, considered briefly whether or not I should try to get a more flattering photo of myself, then went to investigate the person who did the flagging and it turned out that significant amount of alcohol was involved (they were very honest about it). After that I didn't feel bad anymore, but instead thought about the saying I've read somewhere about how the attractiveness of the person next to you is directly proportional to the amount of alcohol you've imbibed. Is this why people go to bars? Then again, considering that alcohol negatively affects a person's sexual drive and the fraction of bar-going people who are looking for hookups, isn't this a self-defeating endeavor? I suppose it depends on whether or not the rate of increase is greater than the rate of decrease but thinking too much about it only reminds me of those relative rate problems from calculus. As much as I appreciate the fact that this may be the only chance where what I learned from that will come in handy in real life, I think I'll pass.
I think I may be acquiring pen pals, in the sense that we have established already that dating is probably not going to work out but we'd like to have more geeky friends. There was bonding. Over the many uses of xylitol, among other things, but there was bonding.
