There are few activities that make me want to claw my eyes out with a spork, but a couple immediately come to mind:
1. Having to explain the special theory of relativity to Sarah Palin.
2. Having Sarah Palin explain the special theory of relativity to me.
3. The natural desire that most people have to claw their eyes out with a spork that comes naturally any way.
4. Having to search for a literary agent to represent my novels.
As much fun as the first three might be to explore, I’m going to talk about number 4 right now because, well, that’s really the one I wanted to talk about when I started writing this post. Now, that can be a problem for me whenever I start a post, because I might start with a desire to talk about literary agents, and next thing you know, I’m discussing cute fuzzy bunnies. You know, the cute little ones that are always jumping around, stealing your wallet and…wait, I wanted to talk about literary agents. That’s right. Back to my original subject.
You see, I’ve been looking for a literary agent for about as long as I’ve been able to write. I’ve had one of those weird writing careers that most other writers can’t relate to because they’ve either a) Already got a successful writing career and really don’t care one iota what I have to say about anything, or b) they just don’t seem to understand how everything went so bad.
Years ago, and I’m talking back in the prehistoric days, when you had to actually use your telephone to connect to the Internet. No, let’s go all out on this one. I’m talking about the days when you hooked up your modem to your telephone and there was no Internet because Al Gore hadn’t invented it yet. Yes, that long ago. Anyway, back then, when we were still using stone tools to build Deloreans that would travel back in time, I had a somewhat growing writing career where I wrote lots of interesting stuff and these strange people called “editors” would accidentally mail me checks after publishing those stories in their magazines. Some of my stories actually became series of short stories where people would get out pen and paper, write me nice little letters about how my character was obviously being handled incorrectly because in Issue #17, the hero had used the Quantum Destabilizer Unit on him, which meant that in Issue #43, there was no way that he could have phased into the neutramatter universe to chase after the Viscuous Ant Man, one of his mortal enemies. And then they would put a stamp on that letter and go back to reading their next issue of Peter Parker the Spectactular Spiderman, which was “so much more superior than that crappy story you keep publishing in that magazine that must be run by some deranged lunatic.”
Anyway, my point is, at one point I had a bit of a writing career. And then I contacted an agent, who read one of my science fiction novels and LOVED IT, saying she wanted to represent me and was planning to use my writing to make herself us rich. And then she got into some kind of accident involving a head injury (this isn’t a joke here), disappeared for a couple of years, and then came back and no longer recognized my name. So when I contacted her, after realizing she was looking for clients again, she asked me to send her a current copy of whatever I had recently written. So I did. And then she contacted me again, asking me to send her a copy of whatever I had recently written. So I wrote her and told her I already did. So she contacted me again, asking me to send her a copy of whatever I had recently written. After about the fourth time, I got the hint. I probably wasn’t going to be represented by her because I was in some kind of Twilight Zone of continuous emails about sending a manuscript that was getting tired of being sent through the ether.
So, I’ve been looking for an agent ever since. And for some reason, even though I’ve written 12 or 13 novels (depends on if we count the erotic novel, involving the midget, the monkey and the same sex trees that were in love with each other), I can’t seem to get past the query letter stage with any of these agents. It’s like the whole world moved on without me, and I don’t seem to live in it any more. I send out my stuff, but it’s not even making a dent these days. Some of my latest writing is phenomenal (just ask my mommy), but I can’t even get an agent to read any of it.
So, Oprah, please tell me what to do? Oh wait, this isn’t that show, is it? So, um, imaginary reader who I keep writing these blog posts imagining you exist, please tell me what to do? Should I give up writing? Join the Army? Marry Peggy Sue? Return all of those diet Dr Pepper cans to the supermarket for their redeemable values?
The post isn't about the movie, but the picture definitely works
As I know I’m the one everyone turns to for on topic news reporting, I thought I’d give some opinions on what’s currently happening. Okay, no one reads me, so I’m ranting to the wind, but it’s my blog, so I’m going to do it anyway.
1. Obama Takes Credit for Lame Duck Victories. Um, okay. It seems that our current president seems to think that he has done great things by using the lame duck Congress to get a lot of legislation pushed forward before the end of the year. A couple of thoughts: First, Obama didn’t really do anything. The lame duck members of Congress did. So it was really them that succeeded in doing what they did. Second, while it’s wonderful that a lot of gridlocked legislation got pushed through (DADT, Bush Tax Cuts, START treaty, Adoption of Stickman as Ambassador to Iceland [okay, the last one didn’t happen, but it really should have]), when the new year starts up, we’re back to where we were before, except now we’re going to have a lot of pissed off Republicans who still think they have some kind of mandate to provide gridlock to the presidential agenda. Basically, the Democrats rammed through a whole bunch of legislation that required them to use their majority that is going to disappear at the start of the new year. That can’t lead to positive relations in Congress for the next year. Expect a lot of political partisanship to get much worse in the very near future, all of it blamed on the lame duck stuff. Lesson: You really don’t get a free ride when the odds are stacked against you for the future. Even the Bush Tax Cuts, which the Republicans are all happy about being passed, are going to be seen as Obama’s lame duck stuff that will cause immediately cause Republicans to blame Obama and the Democrats for anything that comes out negative, even as Republicans use the money to fuel their own desires.
2. Rahm Emanuel is Cleared to Run for Emperor of Chicago. Or Mayor, or whatever it is he’s running for. Basically, an Obama Administration guy is running on that name connection alone, even though everyone who had anything to do with Obama was thrown out of office during the last election. Supposedly, this might work in Chicago, which is Obama’s former backyard. But how does this affect the rest of us? It doesn’t. It means absolutely nothing to us. For all I know, he’s probably going to lose because he’s not actually Obama. The people of Chicago aren’t voting for Obama; they’re voting for some guy who once worked for Obama. He has to run on that. No one outside of people who might gain from any connections to this guy really cares in any way, shape or form. So, everytime I see an article about this, which is practically every day even though I don’t subscribe to any papers that have anything to do with Chicago, I want to claw out my eyes with a rusty spork. Please make him and his personal desire to be god of Chicago go away. Please, even if it’s just for the children.
3. Steven Spielberg is not going to advise Democrats on how to win over the voters. Thank God. It’s not that I don’t like Steven Spieldberg. His movies are great. But they’re movies. And as we learned from World War II, when a movie director like Kapra is making movies for the country, they’re not movies; they’re propaganda. Having a famous filmmaker try to change the perception of Americans about the Democrat Party is a disaster just waiting to happen. What’s wrong with the Democrats right now is that they’re constantly running on a platform of being for the people when they’ve been so out of touch of what the people want and need that they need education, not propaganda. But they’re not going to get that education because they don’t seem to realize what’s wrong. People are pissed at the Democrats right now because they came in with a plan to give the people what they wanted and then and went and did things that politicians have been doing for decades (filling their own pockets). We saw Rangel and Conyers and all sorts of shenanigans that benefited none of the people, but only the people in power. THAT is what they need to fix, and trying to get a famous movie director to advise them to change their public image is never going to work because it’s not their public image that needs fixing. It’s their actions they conduct in the name of the public interest. But I doubt they’re going to figure that out because the people who advise them are the same people who have been advising them while they were holding $1000 a plate fund-raisers to get elected.
4. Facebook is a networking program, not a lifestyle. Recently, Mark Zuckerberg was voted as Time’s person of the year. I really don’t care. He’s a rich, elitist, misogynist who happened to be at the right place at the right time to steal the right idea at the right time. Ever since then, he’s been trying to become important, but he heralded the creation of a platform for people to find their old friends and keep touch with their current friends in ways bordering on stalking, but only if the victim was sending texts to her stalker to announce where she’d be going next. Yes, I have a Facebook account. But it’s not my only means of oxygen or survival. It’s an interesting tool. And that’s it. For me, the person of the year would have been Julian whatever his name is who was running Wikileaks. That person really made an impact last year. Facebook didn’t. Neither did that rich billionaire, irrelevant sack of shit owner of Facebook either. It’s almost as if Time went out of their way to create the easiest winner of the award, realizing that if they chose the guy who should have got it, the government would have actually shut down Time Magazine as a threat to the country. I honestly don’t think it’s that much of a stretch to realize that this had to have been part of their discussion the night before they made their decision.
5. 2010 Kindle Sales will reach 8 billion. So what? Oh wait, I mean 8 million. Whatever. I mean, it’s kind of cool that Kindle will sell that many, but as expected, this kind of announcement fails to mention what’s really important: How many books are being sold, and how many are available? You see, it’s one thing to sell a bunch of devices, like Barnes & Noble is doing with the Nook Color, but when they don’t tell you how much information is available for the device, it’s really doing a disservice to the buying public. An example: I bought a Color Nook from B&N, and I’ve been nothing but pissed about my purchase ever since. I bought it, expecting the market to be represented in books, magazines and newspapers, but so far the selection has been abysmal at best. I have yet to see a justification for the color device because the magazine selection for the device is horrid. I have yet to see any new magazines sign up, other than really crappy ones that I would never flip through at the bookstore for free. When they start getting the marketplace to respond to their product, I’ll be happy. And don’t get me started on prices. The price for practically every book I’ve seen with the Nook has been either exactly the same price as the Kindle or much higher. Computer books are ridiculous in that they’re sometimes more expensive for the Nook version than they would be if I bought it in a physical copy. Not a good sign if they’re trying to capture a market. Or even tap into one.
This is the same problem, I have with the Kindle. The prices for books just don’t seem to justify the device itself. When books are $9.99, it might be worth it, but there’s a mindgame being played here that they don’t want to own up to. A lot of these books are now out in paperback and available from some retailers for much cheaper than $9.99. Yet, the price for these books doesn’t go down. They remain at $9.99 or recently, $12.99, which seems to be some bizarre sweet spot the book companies think they can get. In other words, they’re making the market reliant on the hardbook, brand new price model when most people haven’t even really been reliant on that model in the real bookstore of the past. I bought a few books that were “discounted” at the $7.00 range, and I realized while buying them that I could probably get these books for less than $5.00 because they’ve been out in paperback forever. Kindle is trying to take the Apple approach of “people are suckers who will pay anything for something digital, and if we capture that market, they’ll always pay us full price”. Kindle started out well with their price model, but then they caved in against the book publishers, and that bit of working together has managed to screw the average customer who is now faced with paying stupid prices or going back to the old model of waiting for physical books to go down in price. Without even trying, the e-reader market is doing a good job of killing its own future marketplace.
6. The iPad. The hype over this product has completely overwhelmed me. Not enough to buy one, but enough to cause me to wonder if people really are that daft. I mean, it’s not like the technology was really all that new. We’ve had tablets on the market for a few years now, but they never sold because people didn’t see a need for them. And then Steve Jobs announced the iPad during his yearly announcement meeting, and suddenly everyone had to have one. I’ve looked at it, and almost even bought one, because I’m a stupid Internet geek who buys stupid things like the Nook Color. But I waited a day and then realized I didn’t want OR NEED one. It didn’t do anything I couldn’t already do with devices I already had. I mean, it’s got a bookstore so I can read e-books. They’re more expensive than any other store, because it’s Apple, and I already have a Kindle and an Amazon Nook. Not worth it. It does some word processing. So does my laptop. Much better, too. It looks like a Star Trek datapad. That’s cool. But that’s about as useful as it gets. It doesn’t actually do anything my iPhone doesn’t do. It’s just that my iPhone is smaller.
7. Which brings me to my iPhone. I bought an iPhone when they were first released. And it rocked. Back then, I had a crappy cell phone that was not very smart, and the move to a phone that did everything was great. But it’s been some years since I first bought that phone, and the marketplace has finally caught up to it. You see, there are some things that the iPhone won’t do, mainly because of Apple and because of AT&T. I have been getting a lot of phone calls from telemarketers lately, including one that calls me every day. I can’t block their calls because AT&T won’t let me do it without paying for a special service that does just that. Apple won’t let me get an App to block calls because for some reason Apple just doesn’t seem to think that’s a good App. So I’m left having to be innovative and work around my phone in order to get my phone to do what I want it to do. So a few days ago, I bought an Android phone that lets me do all of the things an Apple phone won’t let me do. And I’ve been really happy with it since. I had to move to Sprint PCS instead, and well, it’s working out like a first date with a supermodel who only orders off the children’s menu to watch her weight. Apple managed to push itself out of my market when I used to say nothing but wonderful things about them and their phone.
8. The Spiderman Musical. Now, as much as I love a train wreck like everyone else, I’ve kind of hit my saturation point with this story. Okay, they tried to make a musical that was too innovative to actually be done successfully. Fix it or move on. It doesn’t really matter to me.
10. South Korea is trying to rile up North Korea with live fire exercises. Um, poking a tiger is not always the best way to entertain the kids. But what do I know?
That’s all for now. Have fun and avoid eating the yellow snow. Just cause it looks like lemon flavoring doesn’t mean it’s going to work out that way.
Years ago, when the World Wide Web was still a few years away, one of the hottest communication tools available was a thing called Usenet. Sadly, some people may not know much about it, know it only from its current, sorry state, or had experienced it and fondly think of all of the potential that was destroyed. It was the forerunner of message boards, in that everyone connected to the Internet was able to go to a non-graphical environment and communicate messages with each other on various topics. There were different boards set up that ranged from soc.tennis (social networking about tennis) to alt.sex.bondage (alternative sex about bondage). Yeah, at one point there was a message board for practically everything out there. And it was showing us that the future of the Internet was going to be place where everyone could discuss things, and the alienation of one’s own desires and habits was no longer going to be a problem in the future.
This worked for several years, and it was a lot of fun talking, arguing, flaming and networking with so many people across the planet that you would never get a chance to meet any other way. The global community was finally upon us.
And then something ugly happened. People trying to sell things, mainly scams, realized that this was a far better (and cheaper) process than sending out letters to people at 23 cents a pop (the price of a letter back then, or at least somewhere back then in the past). Quickly, they started sending out hundreds, and then thousands, of messages to these message boards on Usenet to the point of where people could no longer read the actual messages because there was nothing but spam. The more popular boards were destroyed almost overnight. No one could write there anymore because it was nothing but spam.
So people started moving to moderated boards. But they found ways to start spamming those as well.
This was during the time that the Internet was making its transition from word text to a World Wide Web, and unfortunately we didn’t do anything about the spammers during this period, so they moved along with us. Realizing they could do the same thing with email, they practically have destroyed the very concept of email today, much like they did with Usenet.
Spam is starting to destroy the next frontier of the net as well. I have a blog on my own web site that I maintain. Every day, it receives hundreds of spam comments on every post that I write. I have to catch every message that comes through by a spam filter that makes it really hard for me to even try to read through messages for approving. I do it, and it takes time, but the spammers don’t care that they’re sending fake message in hopes of getting me to advertise their crap for free through my posts and messages. Oh, they think they’re intelligent by writing little comments like: “I really loved your post about a generic topic that I care a lot about, but perhaps your readers should check out my pictures of girls with tits for more information” and they’ll include a link to, yes, pictures of girls with tits (which will most likely lead anyone stupid enough to go there to a site that is designed to try to take over your computer).
Recently, I started posting a lot of my writing on several different mainstream sites that allow you to maintain blogs. A good example is Open Salon (where I’ll probably be posting this as well). Unfortunately, you can’t post a story or article on the site without being innundated with spammers trying to sell crap. The moderators try to do something about it, but they’re overwhelmed, much like the Usenet people were, so the spammers are probably going to win. Eventually, the site will either do something seriously draconian to cut down on spam, or the site will become overwhelmed and people will stop visiting there, causing Open Salon to eventually just close up shop cause it won’t be worth the effort for the eventual non-payoff.
So, what can we do? It doesn’t seem that there’s any way to stem this tide of shit that comes from some really sinister people who don’t care that they’re doing everything to destroy the potential marketplace of ideas by turning it into the marketplace of crap. What’s even of more concern to me is that I don’t think anyone even has the problem in their cross hairs, thinking that eventually the problem will go away, or something better will come along that makes it no longer a problem.
That’s the problem. That’s what we did in Usenet. Those of us trying to fight it were ignored, and then everyone eventually just left, thinking that it wasn’t worth their time. Instead of fighting back, they cave in and lose the very foundation of what brought them there in the first place.
Is that what’s going to continue to happen? Are we going to lose every great thing on the net because some really stupid thinking people feel it is their right to destroy whatever comes along? Why isn’t this a much bigger issue for people? It affects so many people, yet no one seems to give it any real attention. And those that do are completely ignored.
What more must we give up before people finally say enough is enough?
Craigslist recently announced that it is going to be suppressing its listings for sex ads. Instead of the adult listing, it now shows up as “censored” on their site. Public interest groups are now high-fiving themselves because they seem to have won some sort of Quixotic victory that they believe has somehow made things better. Others, of course, still say that it’s not enough and want pretty much the universe when it comes to compliance. I thought it would be interesting to examine this and see what’s really going on.
First off, let’s look at the original problem. Craig Newmark started Craigslist back in 1995 in San Francisco. The idea was to give people a one stop marketplace where they could take care of their every need. You could find an apartment, get a job, sell that old TV you could never get rid of, and yes, even hook up with a potential partner, if that should be your current desire. Not surprisingly, that latter option has opened up all sorts of controversial issues with the online distributor of trade.
In 2002, according to Wikipedia, because of complaints, Craigslist started adding warnings to some of their personal ad areas, such as “men seeking men”, “casual encounters”, “rants and raves”, and “erotic services”. Already, these areas were causing problems with the mainstream segments of the population.
From this point forward, Craigslist has been on the attentions of quite a few public interst groups, and not surprisingly, law enforcement officials.
Up until this time, erotic services were pretty much an entity you had to search through some pretty creative methods, often involving a lot of bait and switch circumstances that one had to navigate solely on the hope that the next time would be better than the last time. Massage parlours were often a place men would go to seek prostitution, and after a lot of false leads and deception, it was not unusual for a man to pay hundreds of dollars to receive absolutely no desired experiences. Some got lucky, but most didn’t, and it was quite often a very discouraging experience.
The Internet was supposed to change all of that. At one’s fingertips was now immediate access to all sorts of information. Craigslist jumped into the game, and people were now following want ads for what they were seeking, and in conjunction with a lot of other erotic services on the Internet, people were actually finding what they were seeking. It was not unusual to see someone’s want ad on Craigslist, then check out the profile on one of the other erotic feedback sites, and then decide whether or not to book a session with that person. Very hard to find erotic services were now being much easier to find because they could now be found on Craigslist. Many people may not realize it, but there are a lot of people out there looking for some very specific types of encounters, and having everything in one place made it much easier for these people to connect.
Well, this didn’t bode well for the industy when there were people who would do everything possible to make sure that such people could never make any such connection. But this probably wouldn’t have been that much of a problem if another entity did not show up, which made things even worse. I’m talking about the scammer.
People may not realize it, but the entity of the scammer has pretty much destroyed every good thing that has ever come across on the Internet. Porn didn’t hurt the Internet, as the fuddy duddies would like you think it did (it actually served to fuel the Internet in its infancy, which is somewhat ironic if you think about it). Scammers did. Most of your email is now pretty much worthless because scammers found out they could profit off of naive people. You are required to buy special software to protect your computer because scammers discovered they could infect your computer just by hosting evil programs on sites where you wouldn’t expect them to be. Ebay used to be a great place to buy things; scammers and thieves put a wrench in the trust factor of that entity. So it is not that much of a surprise that scammers showed up and pretty much destroyed Craigslist.
Some of the biggest crimes that have rallied people against Craigslist have been people who have been cheating other people on the Internet. Call them scammers. Call them thieves. Call them the mob. Or whatever, but it’s this group of people who have caused all of the problems that have made Craigslist the cesspool that it can often be.
Because face it. Women being prostitutes has never caused all that much of a problem, unless you’re Tiger Woods. But people forcing women into prostitution has. Child predators looking for children for sex causes problems. Again, those same people are the ones that make this sort of thing available. These people are criminals who care little for the activity but everything for exploitation and making a quick buck. Unfortunately, they serve to diminish an activity that others might be providing in a more positive way, and unfortunately, there’s often very little way to separate the two.
There are a lot of honest people who are into the sex business who aren’t trying to steal from other people or to hurt other people. They easily get pushed aside whenever the bad class of people show up, and unfortunately that bad class shows up way too quickly and way too often.
All of the issues that have caused public interest against Craigslist have come from these bad elements of our societies. No one rallies around a leader seeking to stop prostitution. But everyone rallies around anyone seeking to stop child exploitation and people who wish to develop nonconsensual slavery circumstances.
This is the problem that Craigslist has fallen into because the owners of that site really didn’t care who was posting on the site. They were more interested in developing a site that brought in money. I can’t see that I blame them, but because of this, they have become the victim of their own success. With great success comes great responsibility, to steal and destroy a great line from Spiderman, and unfortunately Craigslist hasn’t really come up to the plate for the responsibility thing. It played a lot of shell games in hopes of getting people to think it was on the right side of morality, but when it came down to it, it was really only thinking of itself. When the public finally started to become a hammer to be used against them, they censored themselves and then tried to act all First Amendmentish and posted “censored” where they censored themselves.
The fact is: They could have dealt with this a lot easier by actually policing their ads in the beginning to see how much exploitation was going on. Instead, they dropped the ball and lost the whole game. But for lack of stupid analogies, I’ll take this one step further and say that they haven’t lost the whole season yet. They can still do something about cleaning up their site without destroying what they set out to do in the first place.
There are a lot of sex workers who do rely on Craigslist, and unfortunately because of this action, they are forced to start using more exploitive sites out there that are much worse, and that’s sad. Craigslist could step back up to the plate and decide where it wants to be in this debate. It can kowtow to the Bible thumpers and give in completely, like it’s doing right now, or it can bite back and work hand in hand with the communities that have grown up with them, making sure that the evil ones are ostracized, but the ones who are there for the right reasons still have a forum in which to do what they do best.
Unfortunately, it looks like Craigslist may take the easier road because it is filled with fewer obstacles. In the end, it may be a road that leads nowhere.
I mean, let’s face it. I haven’t done all that well with human girls/women. The few I’ve dated have either been completely nuts, strippers, professional dominatrices, or hell-bent Asian martial artists who have been bred with the sole purpose of destroying both my physical and immortal souls. And I’ll even admit that I’ve dated a few women who fit ALL of those categories. (the sad thing is, I’m not kidding)
So, I started thinking that perhaps I might do better if I just started dating fake women. You know, computer generated women who are designed to be what a real person might actually be looking for.
And then I started to realize that I’m not a normal person either. I have no idea what it is I’m looking for. To be honest, I was looking for exactly those crazy women I already mentioned previously when I found them, so I’m not sure I’m really the best judge of what’s best for me. Because they were pretty damn hot when I hooked up with them. You would have thought the ominous Satan music always playing in the background (when there was no actual music playing) should have been a dead give-away each time I was on a date with them, but when you’re out with a woman who looks a lot like a supermodel, you sort of overlook little things like cute animals keeling over dead whenever she comes near. I mean, a relationship is a compromise, right?
But a virtual woman seems like she’d be that much easier to handle. Okay, having seen movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, I should probably know better, but it sounds like such a fool-proof plan, kind of like that big ocean-liner they made in the early 20th century, or that awesome plan to get into Afghanistan and Iraq overnight, but I’m not really one who learns from earlier mistakes. I mean, I went back to a woman three times after she dumped me twice for “something better that just happened to come along”.
So, I’ve decided I’m going to move to Japan, buy a gaming device that they use to court this imaginary girlfriend. I mean, what can possibly go wrong with this plan?
Eventually it had to happen. A company becomes so powerful that it decides it pretty much owns the world. Just the other day, a teaching company attempted to file a trademark for the name Teachbook, which pointed to its online identity as a company that provides lesson plans and other teaching related materials to teachers. Well, of course, this was obviously a ploy designed to steal the identity of Facebook, because they turned around and sued them, stating that
“If others could freely use ‘generic plus BOOK’ marks for online networking services targeted to that particular generic category of individuals, the suffix BOOK could become a generic term for ‘online community/networking services’ or ‘social networking services.”
This can loosely be translated to: “We use the word book in our name, so we own it forever and ever, and we’ll sue the crap out of you if you think otherwise.”
Not surprisingly, we visited this topic a short time ago with the brilliant mind of Paris Hilton, when she trademarked the phrase: “That’s so hot” or something as stupid as that, indicating that the phrase was never popular until she came along. As if.
But Facebook is doing something much more dangerous because it’s attempting to pretty much shut down the use or specific words that have any similarity to the one they use in their title. But the process of trademarking also involves the concept of “intent” and I seriously doubt that Teachbook was really planning to steal market share away from Facebook. I’m waiting for the inventor of the netbook to sue Facebook and stop them from using their name. Not going to happen because most other people, aside from Facebook, AREN’T STUPID enough to do so.
Well, the sad part of this is that because Facebook has gazillions of dollars to spend and Teachbook is a small launch with two employees, Facebook may just use its corporate clout to completely clobber them in legalese, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it because no one really backs the underdog except to cheer and say “attaboy”. So, if they go down in this fight, that just means that we’ve made the demon that much stronger.
It’s only a matter of time before Facebook turns around and says that everyone must stop using the word “.com” in their titles, because Facebook uses it and Facebook is much bigger than they are. It’s not that much different than forcing people to not use the word “book”. Think about it because soon that may be all you can do.
Surprisingly, privacy is not one of the things that actually bothers me about Facebook. Sure, it concerns me at times, but I understand Facebook is a business that really wants to make money. That people, including me, are stupid enough to give them all of the information to profit of our identities should really be the concern of those “concerned” about privacy. But I digress.
No, here are some of the things that cause me to use Facebook so little these days, almost to the point of where I sign on just to check to make sure my friends are still alive, and then I go do something else.
1. Annoying Games. These Facebook games bother me the most. Sure, I can avoid playing them, and that’s what I do, but they’ve managed to become equally annoying by incorporating themselves into every friend update that occurs within Facebook. I don’t care that someone adopted a virtual pig and it’s hungry. I really don’t care. Let it starve. Or become bacon. Or whatever virtual pieces of shit do when they die. Stop bothering me with that crap. The problem has gotten to the point where I’m seriously thinking of dumping friends that spam me more than once with this nonsense. I haven’t done it yet, but it’s on my dashboard of things I’m about to do because it’s practically made Facebook’s ONLY redeeming feature completely useless. By redeeming feature, I mean the ability to see what’s going on with my friends. It makes it so that on some days any useful information has been relegated to cyber oblivion because so many updates have come across from people about their new farm, their new virtual make up store concession, or latest mob hit. I don’t care. And if that’s all Facebook ends up being good for, then it’s not good for anything further.
2. The machinery of Facebook. For the longest time, one of the positive things about Facebook was that no matter how stupid the rest of the site got, contributed to by the stupid people who use the site (yes, including me), at least the site ran well. Recently, my blog posts have taken to showing up WEEKS after I post them because something in Facebook wants me to physically remove my blog posts and then reset them again, so that it will start pulling blog posts. That’s just stupid. That’s like buying a brand new cell phone so that you can walk to someone’s house and talk to them in person. Unfortunately, this is caused by the fact that Facebook is more interesting in trying to figure out how to make money off of its members than actually making the system work best for those members. If this doesn’t get fixed soon, anothe reason to dump the service.
3. Fake friends. This is one of my pet peeves that I’ve pretty much fixed by turning down practically all people who send me a friend request. Way too many people send me a friend request, and I’ve never heard of them before. I accept and then next thing I know I’m getting plastered with their friend messages that are designed to be continuous spam. Now, this is going to be a problem for me because my main reason for having a Facebook account is no longer to keep up with friends, but to promote my writing business should that career ever get jumpstarted. I’m going to have zero ability to stop this from happening in the future, so unless they set up some feature to only allow specific message to come through, Facebook will make itself irrelevant for known celebrities. And if that’s the case, I won’t close my account, but I’ll stop signing on forever.
4. Friends stop communicating. This is a footprint of the system itself that I see as being caused by the phenomenon of Facebook itself. A person starts posting stupid comments as status updates (“went to Chiptotle to eat. Yum yum” or something irrelevant of this nature), so they actually stop communicating with their real friends because they start to think that they ARE communicating with their friends. I have one friend who has stopped calling me completely, who used to talk to me on a weekly basis. I guess seeing a status update is supposed to be the replacement for that. What really happens is the friend stops being a friend, and it’s only a matter of time before we both unfriend each other because we don’t communicate any more. Sad, but that’s a footprint of how this sort of social media works.
5. Overall detachment syndrome. As people tend to recognize each other from only their Facebook postings and updates, they stop communicating with each other. But because they think they’re actually “communicating”, they don’t realize that they’re slowly eliminating their network of friends.
6. Groups you can’t get rid of. There’s a group I joined back when I was in grad school that was an organization that focused on a specific social issue. That issue was fought and lost in California. But for some reason, this group won’t die. It’s membership turned nutty, and I no longer care what they’re sponsoring these days. I even pulled myself from their membership. But that doesn’t stop them from continuing to send me messages. I don’t even know how they do it as I thought that once I was out of their group, I’d be off their list. Nope. Not the case. Happened with a couple of shows that I used to watch. With those, I”m still a fan of the show, like Monk, but the show ended. Yet, every now and then they want to tell me about something that’s going on concerning that show. But the show ENDED. So NOTHING is going on with that show. But the company that made it still thinks that they’re relevant, which they’re not. Yeah, I can probably remove myself from that list, but I’m still a fan of the show, so I always thought it was nostalgic by keeping my name on that list. Didn’t realize that I’d never stop hearing from them over really stupid pieces of information that aren’t important or interesting to anyone, even to people who used to be strong fans.
Part of the problem for me with Facebook is that it’s one of those social venues that wants to be a lot cooler than it really is. The thing that makes it cool is the people who inhabit it, but honestly I’m not that cool, so anything that has anything to do with me, really isn’t going to be all that cool. So Facebook serves to continue to remind me of that because it tries to treat my uncoolness as being somewhat cool. And that’s just depressing.
Years ago, I used to be a seriously addicted Ultima Online fan. I played it every day. I became a counselor in the game, which meant I officially worked for EA as one of the in-game special operators who helped other people who were having problems in the game. I ran community events that were quite popular. I mean, I lived and breathed the game.
Then EA decided to do something really stupid. The game population was having problems at the time due to a segment of the population that was preying on other players. The forum community was in an uproad, demanding something be done about it. There were all sorts of alternatives EA could have taken, including to continue to ignore the problem. But they decided to take the easiest route, which was to create a completely “safe” environment in the game by completely duplicating the entire world and then making that “new” area safe. Oh, sure, you could stay in the dangerous area, or you could go to the completely safe area and eat candy canes with the rest of the safe population. And that’s what everyone did. And the old lands died out because no one went there.
But something else happened, too. People stopped playing the game because it became too easy. You couldn’t be killed, and suddenly the game seemed like a joke of its previous existence. So people left in droves. And then new games appeared, like Everquest, so that became the new stomping ground. UO died out. Oh, sure, it’s still around, but it’s a shadow of its once great self.
To me, the reason was that the owners of the game listened to the players, and then when it came time for really listening to the feedback, they decided to take the easier path and then stopped listening. The players, pissed, and practically screaming at the developers, kept begging them to listen to what was happening to the game. The developers not only didn’t listen, but they closed down the forums, figuring that as long as they didn’t have to listen to the complaints, then the problems didn’t exist.
So a LOT of people just dumped the game. I did as well. I realized they weren’t paying attention to the players any more, so I went and found another game.
Fast forward some years to Star Wars Galaxies, and wow, it’s like they didn’t learn a thing. What’s even funnier is that some of the same names were there making the same mistakes. When the game started going down hill, instead of listen to the player base, they went ahead and completely changed the game to one they thought players would want to play. Boy, were they wrong. The player base disappeared overnight. Realizing they made a mistake, but refusing to admit it, they made another abrupt change, causing the few remaining players to say “screw you” and leave. The game is less than a shadow of its former self. To this day, they refuse to admit they did anything wrong, but in all areas where they discuss how to screw up a game, Star Wars Galaxies is ALWAYS mentioned as the showcase of an example of what NOT TO DO EVER.
Well, fast forward to today, and we have the most popular game on the planet for MMORPGs: World of Warcraft. Yesterday, they made an announcement to do something that has me shaking my head because it’s like I’m reliving those two previous examples over again.
You see, some weeks ago, WoW decided that it was going to implement this new feature called REALID, which meant that in order to group with your friends, you had to present your real identification and play as yourself, not as a character name. If someone wanted to know who you were, they would know. This pissed people off, but Blizzard, the maker of WOW, said that you don’t have to use REALID if you don’t want to. Then they announced yesterday that in order to use the forums for WOW or their new game coming out called Starcraft 2, you have to use REALID. What they didn’t really mention is that as their parent company Activision is now partnered with Facebook, this is more about giving identification information to Facebook than it is in presenting a new way to socialize in the game. People are pissed. People don’t like having their ID out there when playing a game.
To prove how dangerous this is, one of the trash-talking employees for Blizzard stated it was no big deal and put his own information out there. In no time, all of his private information was out there, and suddenly his phone was ringing off the hook from angry players, and his Facebook account had to be shut down because of the onslaught of attacks. The problems he’s experiencing are still going on. Blizzard’s response wasn’t to realize they made a mistake but to unofficially announce that its employees wouldn’t have to comply with REALID, just the players would.
This has started a nightmare of bad publicity for Blizzard, which is treating it like the old ad business, thinking that as long as people are talking about Blizzard, it must mean good business.
I’m starting to hear A LOT of people talking about dumping WOW because of this. And that’s interesting because up until now I’ve always believed that the only thing that could ever destroy WOW would be WOW itself. I just didn’t think it would happen by allying itself with the scuz bucket that is Facebook.
This should play out to be a very interesting situation. I’ll be watching this closely.
There’s been a lot of recent talk lately about how Facebook has gone over the line concerning privacy. This talk has devolved (or evolved) into a lot of conversation about deleting Facebook accounts. May 31st is even supposed to be an “official” date to delete your Facebook account, if that’s your perogative. Yet, for some reason, Facebook doesn’t seem to be all that much concerned about what’s going on. You’d think with the way that people jump ship on the “in” thing, Facebook should be concerned. I mean, look what happened to Myspace, which is now extremely irrelevant in the face of pretty much everything else out there these days, although Myspace is trying really hard to become relevant again.
What’s probably important to realize is that there’s a simple impetus behind what Facebook is and isn’t doing, and that’s the realization that there’s nothing out there yet people are ready to jump to. There’s no huge “new” thing right now where everyone else is at, causing people to jump ship, so the power brokers within Facebook probably feel they have nothing to fear from any backlash. They’re probably thinking to themselves, “so what? Where are you going to go if you leave us?” And they’re probably right. If you delete your Facebook account, it is pretty difficult to keep in touch with a lot of people you magically found again after all of these years. Sure, you could go to email, but who really is going to keep that up as a communication process? I mean, it took Facebook to get back in touch again because nothing else seemed to do it before.
The fear for Facebook is if something else comes along. But until that does, they probably think they’re safe enough to do anything they want to you and your private information. Granted, some people will leave regardless, but unless they become a wave of lots of people, Facebook doesn’t care. It doesn’t see any of us as “customers”. It sees us as data, and there’s lots more if we disappear. When the masses start impacting their budget, they’ll care, but so far, nothing has really happened to threaten that.
