Facebook Frustration

A popular meme on Facebook at the moment is the 'dislike button' - the oft wished for counterpoint to the 'like' button that has accompanied every status update for the past few months.


Like most things that are popular for no good reason - I'm strongly opposed to the idea of the dislike button, as to me, as it would serve to provide yet another outlet for people to bitch online.

When Facebook introduced the News Feed feature, the entire experience changed - rather than the tried-and-true system in which you're only presented with information you pulled down about the people you care to look up, you're now accosted at login with every twitch and snort from each of the many acquaintances you've acquired over your Facebooking career. Since most people tend to have more acquaintances than close friends, it means that a lot of the information onscreen is of little interest.

Thanks to Facebook, I now know that people I know:

... enjoy pleasant weather

... like eating pizza

... are fans of smiling

... enjoy the beach
... don't like cigarette. Just one. Unsure as to how they feel about multiple cigarettes though
... love their MOM. It might be an anagram for something cool that the kids are into
... are fans of summer (which dovetails nicely with the warm weather, I suppose)

... don't feel at all ashamed to share with the world that a quiz that confuses simple homonyms considers them a genius
... appreciate hugs
... are patriotic

... will happily take quizzes with the absurd premise of "What female superstar mom / wife are you?" and not hastily take the results down when the utterly insipid fruits of their fifteen minutes of box ticking steps forward onto the friend feed for scrutiny. "You are beautiful but not flamboyant or glamorous"? How the #@¢$ would any quiz on Facebook be able to tell you that? Shame on every party involved in bringing this quiz into the world and propagating its use.

Those are just a few of the dumb entries that pertain to apps and the 'fan' feature - I've decided not to go copying and pasting the status entries that consist of people bitching about work, bitching about friends, bitching about school, bitching about big dirty bitches, or worse, exposing their cretinous misunderstanding of politics / economics / the world in general.

Granted, the only thing worse than people engaging in such mindless tomfoolery is the guy who catalogues it and whinges about it later, but when I haven't talked to a person in months and these are the snippets of their personality that I'm being bombarded with, it makes me think less of that person. The appearance of some brain-pain-inducingly banal update on the friend feed lends it a sense of urgency that it doesn't deserve, and it only makes it more difficult to find the updates that are worthwhile.

This whole thing could be resolved in a few ways. For one, I could learn to ignore the nonsense (which isn't very likely). Secondly - I could set up parameters for my friend feed so that it ignores certain apps / people - I'm grateful to the Facebook people for providing these small mercies, and have used it to dispose of the more cognitively deficient people on my friend-list.

Third - and this is the one I like best - people could subscribe to the same etiquette I do:
Sign up for a dumb app? Don't let it post to your feed!
Want to update people to your status every four minutes? Get on twitter and let people follow you instead!
Feel like bitching about your day? Shut the fuck up!

Remember folks - chances are that you're an idiot, and the more often you pop up in someone's news feed, the more regularly you'll present an opportunity for them to reaffirm that opinion of you.

Ich bin der verdammte Ubersully!

Here's a true story. I had an annoying girlfriend once. She nagged me to sign up for MSN so I could join a group chat with her annoying friends, so to annoy her back, I signed up with the handle "ubersully". Chagrin abounded. Words were had. Unhealthy relationship limped on with the same dynamic of lazy abuse and general lack of mutual respect for far longer than it ought to have.

Anyhow - six (Really? Only six?) years later, I've embraced the Ubersully.

Playstation Network, Xbox Live, Twitter, random dodgy forums around the internet - I am ubersully. I own ubersully. The only time that a website has refused me signing up as ubersully is when I've already signed up to that website as ubersully.

See that? It's all me.

Sadly friends, my six-year hot-streak came to an end today. Whilst signing up for my second YouTube account (gluttonous bastard!), I entered ubersully, and believing it to be a mere formality, hit 'Check Availability'.


Hmmm... That's weird, I don't remember signing up to YouTube as 'ubersully' - let's investigate that profile...


You damn dirty Mexians! Is nothing sacred?

In times like this, I turn to my dear readers, and even dearer commenters for solace - I ask you fine people: do you have a 'go-to' moniker online that you feel attached to? Or are you going to lecture me on changing up my online handles so employers / stalkers / Big Brother can't see what fetish category I gravitate towards online?

We Were Warned (about a crap film)

True believers of this Mayan calendar nonsense annoy me a great deal, so it annoys me even more that a film about it is being made, which envisions all the cataclysmic events that the nuts propagating this impending Armageddon get a woody for.

In case you're wondering what set me off - this rigged poll on Facebook was to blame:

Quarter of a million people bothered with this drivel? Criminy. I voted, but only to get the results (not that I reckon too many people take these things seriously):




Over the course of this crummily edited trailer, it manages to tick all the boxes for a genre flick like this - the shots of random foreign cities and their inhabitants looking concerned and feeling tremors to push the 'globalness' of the catastrophe; the use of planes, trains, automobiles and ships to escape the inevitable destruction (represented as a big cloud of debris following them); the struggle of the few good men inside the governmental cover-up fighting to do the right thing, and of course, the demolition-porn of major monuments. This trailer alone shows the Washington Monument breaking apart, Rio de Janeiro's Christ the Redeemer Statue getting a powerful dose of leprosy, (what looks like) the DC Capitol building tumbling to the ground, and even the White House (which still has the lights on) being crushed under a great big freakin' tsunami carrying the USS John F Kennedy.

€5 says that either leading man John Cusack, or director / disaster-flick mogul Roland Emmerich will, in an interview about the film, enthuse about how the heart of the film is the family unit that acts as a 'microcosm' for humanity in the middle of such a global catastrophe.

I know that Roland Emmerich likes using CG to show things crumble, but did he really have to piggyback on the 2012 stupidity? Not only will the film age about as well as anything from the 90s named " 2000", but now we're going to see the same stupidity as when Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out, prompting the enlargement of the stupid fringe of alien abduction claims, leading to more 'open-minded' twats pulling on their goatees and 'discussing the possibilities' of such rubbish.

Gwaaaah.

(On a side note - if there's nothing else out on the weekend this releases, I may well go see it - darn my affinity for John Cusack's everymanness)

One soul saved?

As part of my undergraduate studies, I spent a few months on work placement in Belgium, doing absurdly menial work in a third-rate "cultural institute". I found it farcical that the university was providing ridiculously cheap labour to an entirely unethical organisation [to clarify, by 'unethical', I mean "they made us lie to the police about the accommodation they were providing for reasons I won't get into"], and thought that the tone of my required work-placement report would reflect the farce I was a participant in.

Being a homo-sapien with occasional respect for his fellow-man, I tried in earnest to prevent my fellow bipeds from being sent there, but the University were unperturbed by my histrionic outbursts of woe, so I took my fight to the internet, well, this blog at least.

It brings me great satisfaction to see that at least one person has stumbled across my urgent warnings:



The entirety of the posts on the topic are available here, for those curious to see exactly just how condescendingly one can write about getting dressed for work in the morning.

"Feed the world"

Holy crap! How did it take me 10 days to find this? Funnyish comedienne Sarah Silverman put together a video with a compelling central thesis. I won't ruin it for you, so have a watch:



I was mostly disappointed by the latter two minutes - I don't think that some hard facts would have hurt the video - but I still enjoy the point it makes, as anything that draws attention to the sheer opulence of the very organisation that declares living humbly a virtue is fine by me.

Thanks but no thanks

Ever get stuck talking to one of those people who insist on finishing your sentences, even though they keep getting it wrong? Try having that same conversation when that person bald-facedly assumes that you're as perverted as the previous million people they've talked to that day.

What's the deal with iTunes pricing?

Since I'm still tooling around with my iPod Touch, I've been delving deeper into iTunes. Despite subscribing to dozens of podcasts through iTunes, I've only spent money on it once, but I poked around in their video section to see if I could find anything cool.

I was pleased to see that they've a healthy supply of TV shows available, even if I thought that $1.99 for one episode of a (fantastic) TV show was more than I was willing to pay. Taking that into consideration, I couldn't believe what record labels were getting away with when it came to music videos:


3 minutes and 39 seconds of music video costs the very same as 30 minutes of quality TV entertainment! I can only assume that these prices are so high so as not to cannibalise the music prices (which are between $0.99 and $1.99), and not because the market sustains the selling of promotional music videos that are readily available for free streaming online.

The bands are making music videos anyhow - it only makes sense that they should be able to sell it for $2 a pop to the impressionable young fans whose shallow gamut of opinion consists of "that's naff" or "DIS IS THE BEST THING EVA!!!!!!"

Fools and their money are often accompanied with obnoxious punctuation.