Jas N's Guide to Hotornot.com

Am I hot or not? Isn't that the eternal question? I mean I've always felt that I wasn't ugly, but that doesn't really translate into hot, does it? If we go on my track record with girls, well then that doesn't give much hope for my hottie status. I've always attributed that to my lack of girl skills rather than looks. I am shy with girls. Every once in a while I'll accidentally make something work, but most times I'm a bit more Jerry Lewis than I am Dean Martin.

So anyway, I've spent many wasted hours at hotornot.com lately. It's a site where people rate your picture from 1 (not) to 10 (hot). They get no info about you at all. Just a picture and a numeric scale. You want honest? This, my friend, is more honest than any best friend you ever had. No apologies, no excuses. Either you are or you aren't. With a single mouse click I can boost or trash someone's ego.

Eventually I had to come up with a ranking system, so that I could be fair to all the girls I rated. It goes like this:

• 1 - too mean to actually use.
• 2 - only for people acting dumb in the picture
• 3 - not attractive
• 4 - ok, but I wouldn't turn my head as I drove by
• 5 - base standard, not ugly, but not real cute
• 6 - attractive
• 7 - really cute
• 8 - worth marrying
• 9 - intimidating beauty
• 10 - impossible fantasy girl

Everybody has their own thing, but this is what works for me. Anyway, after spending so much time declaring people Greeks and geeks I decided to stick my picture on hotornot.com.

I gotta admit I was a little hesitant at first. I mean this could SUCK. I've seen plenty of people on there with 1's and 2's. I do not want to hear any of that. What would that do to your ego? *gulp* Do I really want to know if it's bad news? I mean wouldn't it be better to wonder? Nah, that's boring. I just wanna see. I mean, I can take it, right?

Ok, first I have to ante up and pick a picture. The choosing of the photo is VERY important. I know from hours of declaring judgment on the opposite sex that a bad picture will destroy your rating. I see girls all the time that I can tell are pretty in real life, but they got a bad pic up and they end up with an undeserved 3.4. I am not gonna let that happen. The picture is crucial. I am gonna use the best pic I have.

I don't have a web cam, but if I did I think I would steer clear of using a pic from that. They so rarely look good. I've seen a couple that look great, but the majority look like crap. I mean why not put up a picture of you throwing up? That would probably get you a better rating because at least its unusual! With a web cam you are just shooting yourself in the foot.

Problem - I don't have that many pics of myself and even fewer that would be candidates for "good." After I found a couple that I felt I looked good in it was time to choose. Which one? How do I pick? Red pill or the green pill, Alice? So many pics, so many ways to go wrong.

Anyway, so it comes down to two pics. A picture of me and my Dad where I am doing my best Goldberg or a picture of me from the Greer wedding where I am talking in a bar. The one in the bar looks more like me, but something tells me the other picture will get a better rating. Is that cheating? They are both pictures of me, but one looks less like me than the other. Hmm...I don't want to get a rating that isn't really a rating for me, but they are both me...screw it! I put up the Goldberg picture.

When you stick your picture up, they ask you to rate yourself. My first instinct was to put a 10, but then I thought this too might taint the results. If I get a 10 I want it to be legit, either out of lust or pity, but from someone else. So I gave myself a 7. I felt that was fairly neutral, without being too low. I mean I don't wanna start off with a handicap.

But then, you have to wait. The moderators at hotornot have to review your picture before it actually goes up. I guess they wanna make sure I have pants on. Since it was around 2 a.m. when I put it up (why does all this stuff seem more important at 2 a.m.?) I had to wait until the next day to check out my rating. For the first 30 minutes, this was an excruciating wait...then I forgot about it. I got off on another internet tangent and left hotornot.com far behind.

I woke the next morning (ok, afternoon) and checked my e-mail. There in my box is a note from hotornot.com telling me my picture had been accepted and was up on the site being graded! Oh crap! Why had I done that? Was I stupid?! Now that I had some sleep and could think clearly I knew that I was in for it. That pic might get a 3 or 4 and that was the GOOD one! Oh man, don't look at it! But I did. I went to the site right away. Of course it took me a few tries to remember the password I had come up with the night before. Why must I try to be so clever? I only trick myself.

I click my rating and hold my breath...8...an 8?...I got an 8! Hell yeah! I got an 8! YEE-HAW! I rock!! That's just short of "intimidating beauty" and two below "impossible fantasy"! Of course I only had 17 votes total at the time, so a couple high ratings can skew the result, but still it was encouraging.

The way they set it up, you get a full statistical break down of how people voted. They use a bar graph to show how many of each number you got. I had a solid number of 7's and a couple 8's pushed it over. There were a couple of 1's, 2's and 3's but I know a chunk of those are just other guys trying to help their own ratings. It actually says: You rank higher than 77% of men on this site. Well, how about that. I do, don't I?

After basking in the glow of my 8 for a while I decided that I would go away and come back later in the afternoon, see if more votes affected my rating. My friend Ashley put her picture up for a couple of hours then promptly took it down. She got a 9.4 after a couple of hundred votes (girls get way more votes that guys) and decided that was enough! Ha. She said she was quitting while she was ahead. Not me, I'm riding this train to the station!

So then, this afternoon I went back. After 32 votes it was a 7.5, which is down half a point, BUT quite a few more 9's this time around. Of course there were more lower numbers, but still some 9's...that's "intimidating beauty!" So now it's up and it will probably remain so for years or until the site closes down. Who knows what the rating will be in a month? It will probably hover around 7 or so, but it very well might go down. I'm going to see if I can go a week without checking it...yeah, right.

My pic at hotornot.com.

So, what have I learned? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, skin deep, and blah blah blah. Of course this entire set-up is almost random, I know that sometimes when I am rating people I will just click whatever so I can skip to the next picture, but in a way that doesn't matter. I mean a compliment is still a compliment, and for a while I was an 8! Hell yeah! Now then, time to go give 1's to all the other guys again.