ah fb

 

I have previously pinpointed the exact moment I first heard about facebook. It was when I was a contributor to Laura's excellent assemblog Sarsaparilla and one of the contributors explained the recent lack of content there... read my memory of that here if you wanna, it's coming up to 20 years I've been on it which is, like, a third of my life ffs. Speaking of my life, in many ways it remade my life. No doubt yours too, even if you have never been a member which, btw, makes you a bit of an outsider in western society, but it's OK.

I deleted fb off my phone about six months ago (but not my laptop... yet) and it made a big difference with my engagement, and the Meta bullshit re: Trump etc has made me want to completely leave (being on bluesky admittedly under Perry's name makes me appreciate how hard it is to build up a community afresh) and I'm still using it for various connections at the moment so it's going to be hard (a version of my strong resentment of the three main telephone companies here in Australia - which one do I hate the least so I can still have a telephone account? Probably Telstra, all they did was take money out of my account when I wasn't a customer and make it impossible to talk to anyone there to get it back). And then there's things like the above.

I have always had a soft spot for Jimmy Somerville. His single with June Miles-Kingston, a cover of 'Comment de dire adieu', is an absolute gem, a record I sincerely love.* I also of course could do with never hearing those Bronski Beat singles he made again because of overexposure but I fully admire him for them. Other things he's done have also really made an impact on me. But he just seems like a straight-up great guy. I tried to imagine him being rude to his PA or sullen in his manager's office or slapping a fan's autograph book to the floor or smashing a glass because someone confused him with Jimi the Human or Jimmy Hannan,** and I couldn't. So I like him. 

...And here he is, in my fb feed, uninvited but welcome, proudly showing me some ratshit thing like Brighton Beach, not the real one but the English one, where they have a beach made of kittylitter and fishtank pebbles, and I just think... fb can be so great when it connects me to a celebrity I have fond feelings for. 

I'm not going to follow him, just because I don't want to engage with fb any more than I already am, but I am going to feel a little bit better because somewhere, the algorithm thought hey, this 60 year old Australian man with a longstanding interest in pop music who likes Soft Cell and the Human League will probably want to see this post, and fuck it, I did. 

* In the old days I had a kind of pre-going out ceremony, sometimes, which by the way was semi-ironic but also semi-real, of playing some records I really liked that I thought of as my 'party records'. 'Comment te dire adieu' was one of them. Alongside 'Epic Merriment' by the Craven Fops, 'Roxy Roller' by Nick Gilder (or the Sweeney Todd version), 'All You Want to Do Is Dance' by Trevor White, 'Cool' by Pylon, 'Love by Numbers' by Ash Wednesday... I'm sure there were plenty of others but I can't recall them atm. All singles. My 'Comment tda' is a 12". 

** Or Jimmy Savile. I bet he gets that a lot, not because he's anything like Savile, but because the names sound so similar. 

fb is fucked up

I am so sick of these 60s rock band page suggestions which keep getting inserted into my feed. This morning it was Pink Floyd (a band I genuinely hate) and now it's the GD, a band i am essentially indifferent to. It bugs me particularly because I'm pretty sure these articles are made by AI as well, and also of course that I'm being singled out as man of a certain age (whether all men of a certain age get these or just ones with an interest in pop music, I dunno). 

Whatever, fb doesn't care if I keep deleting these, it just throws more up. Case in point below, wt actual fuck?!!

(To be entirely clear, I have so little interest in lost football grounds of anywhere I found it hard to even articulate how deep and personal my lack of interest is). 

'we hope you enjoy looking back and sharing your memories on facebook...'

 I do, thanks facebook. So this is one of my classic 'English, you are a stupid language' posts. Tres clevs:

Obviously this just struck me as odd. I clearly photographed it with my phone from a microfiche scanner screen. No idea what it's from. It possibly relates obliquely to the next thing:

by which I mean, the 'what about you':

So this is an early birthday party of mine, I don't know how old I was but I do know that the women are L-R Pat Knox, Mavis Nichols (ie my grandmother), Judy Hogg and Eleanor Curtain. I am pretty sure it's our house in East Kew which was demolished a scant few years later:

I liked to pretend, when living in Albion, that Leo next door had a romantic interest in Nancy, but actually what he wanted to do was come in the house, pester me for food then hiss at me when I tried to make him leave:

This is funny-ish, I have no recollection what it was from:

I guess interesting:

This was a fine day:

I miss A+. Last I heard they still kind of existed but with a different line up and are recording an album. In fits and starts I assume:

facebook one of the many banes of everyone's lives

I remember the first time I heard of fb (I may have mentioned it here). It was when I was part of the Sarsaparilla cblogllective (link to its briefly lived postscript, the actual blog has disappeared in the mists of time I think) and there hadn't been much activity and then someone said, 'we'll be back soon we're all just playing with facebook'. I didn't know what it was, but I found out soon enough, and had one of those slight awarenesses that leaping in was going to change my life, but I couldn't figure out how - the way people probably felt when they got a phone in 1905.

This morning on fb I noticed I had a friend in my Contacts down the right hand side who I had never heard of before. I clicked on them and realised I had last (and first?) had contact with them ten years ago, when we were trying to arrange something about a cross-faculty talk to students. This person, whoever they may be (someone in academe) has been my fb friend ever since, and I don't remember that exchange or anything else about them. 

Funnily, this observation had come just after I thought about how it would be great if there was an app that, for instance, every morning showed you two fb friends and said you had to jettison one of them. Presumably the two would be randomly generated, so sometimes you'd keep both of them but roll the dice again until you'd got rid of one. Every day. 

I have tended to de-friend friends who have died (even people I actually know), but otherwise I have very rarely snipped people out and of course you accumulate them for all kinds of stupid reasons. I think this is a great app idea, I have a lot of them actually, but I have no capacity to make them work. 

mid to late jan 2011

25 Jan 2011: I am trying to start the habit of blogging into the future. If I keep this up I will NEVER REALLY DIE, at least not in blogworld, except of course my blog posts into the future will eventually run out and then I WILL REALLY DIE. I wonder what blogger actually 'is' and whether it will outlive me.

I am in the final throes (I hope) of finishing my short book currently known as The Bogan Delusion. I am at the point where I am 4/5 finished but feeling a crisis of confidence, now being so immersed in what I have to say that I feel like it's not worth saying and uncertain whether I believe it or not. I am at the point where I have railed against class hatred, but then go on to talk about why I have every reason to feel class hatred if anyone does. I'm glad I wrote that down, it now seems a lot more easy to deal with.

I am also over where I would expect to be word count wise at this point in the book, so I can start pruning and culling a bit, which is a relief and a pleasure. This morning I have taken Barry and Charlie out, put some washing on the line, put some clothes away, thrown some mouldy things out that were in the fridge, and fussed around on the internet putting up pictures of Barry etc - time wasting.

I wonder what it will be like in 10 years' time and whether every second conversation will be about Facebook. Annabel last week said she was fed up with facebook and it was a great relief to not have it in her life and I thought about this for a couple of days and then emailed her saying however much you hate/blame the messenger you are cut out of people's lives if you don't get involved in things like that. Hopefully in 10 years we won't be talking about it constantly however.

outrage

Poor Nancy! The double indignity/outrage of having your flea treatment (she h-a-t-e-s that) and then the flat got vacuumed. Otherwise she would not have retreated to the bedroom, indeed, the farthest corner of the flat possible aside from behind-the-washing machine (Helmi's retreat of choice). With the flea treatment, she was lying in her bed and when I grabbed her and applied it on the back of the neck, as one does, she lay there in paralysed shock for a while. I figured in for a penny... and I did the vacuuming as well. I don't know how she's going to get over this... except I know it usually takes about an hour and she'll be back with a 'what's up?' bounce in her step. 

I gave Helmi her flea treatment as well, she was in bed, she flinched but didn't flee. 

Today is going to be a hot day.

Yesterday was an interesting day because for the first time in fuck knows how long I barely looked at fb. I made a conscious effort not to look at it (mainly by just having messenger open in a tab on my computer). I'd like to say I didn't look at it at all, but there were a few accidental strayings in that direction, where I'd be like - oh, what am I doing (I often use it as a palate cleanser or reset). But every time I thought 'I'll just check on the peeps' I then though 'no! they don't need you any more than you need them.' It's true too. 

80s

I remember reading about one of the Futurama festivals, possibly the first, which I think had the Human League and Soft Cell at it, breaking out as it were. It might have been assumed by the Futurama organisers that the brand was the main thing and that the acts they presented would go on naturally to be the next new, um, wave. My lame comment on the above post by, I gather, the person who used to edit, run or own the magazine Flexipop was that I'd only want to see Dislocation Dance and the Icicle Works and then I'd be home by late evening (never miss a chance to give a backhander to New Order, etc)* although I would also be interested to see the Stockholm Monsters the next day. But when it comes down to it - my main thought here as always is - this is not about 'things were great then' but 'I was young then'. I see it all the time, people on fb (obviously I choose to be in these groups) lauding music of 30+  years ago when all they're really saying is, 'I was just out of short pants and what a time that is to be alive', whether it's 1210BC or 1983. 

I thought about this because I was playing the Summer Flake album that came out last year and thinking how not one track on it misses the mark. I saw Summer Flake, or at least Stephanie solo, last year and it was amazing. I wouldn't swap that for any of this bullshit. 

Incidentally I'm surprised that the Futurama festival doesn't have a wikipedia entry because it was quite a thing in its day but maybe it's better this way. 

* I have integrity on this, kind of. I saw New Order when they came to Australia for their first tour in 1983 or whenever. When they played G-Mex in 1986 for that 10 years of punk festival I left before they came on. 

I don't know what my problem is with New Order actually and it's petty because they had some pretty great songs, and were really innovative in lots of ways, and I admire many things about them, but I just can't. I guess I feel that deep in my heart they feel the same. It could have been so much better. 

facebook is fascinating

So there was an ad in the left hand column to stop 'Labor's mateship levy' which I clicked the x on - then you get a little questionnaire asking why you didn't want that ad, and I clicked the option of 'misleading' (as there wasn't the option 'conga line of suckholes'). I was then told that they appreciated my feedback, and then I got this ad:
...which is kind of the same idea but with a different approach. I exited facebook and came back and the ad was now for a hiatus hernia surgeon.