Her mom is using Facebook as a RPG. And she rolled a natural 20 on piety during character creation.
Wait, people who are blocked can still see your profile pics? I thought you were totally invisible to them.
I'm glad Heebie likes me just the way I am, too.
Or wait, maybe I'm thinking of Mr. Rogers. Well, whatever.
A company that creates a convincing online footprint for your child that you can use as bragging fodder with your friends. I see $$ potential here.
Dude, those sisters are awful. But this is pretty standard immigrant stuff, I think. Did I mention the friend's brother who got an acceptance from Hopkins despite not having applied there? His dad thought he should go there and sent in an application in his name.
I like Stuart Smalley just the way he is.
The ones who take money from their mom to sell out their sister.
I tried to join fb once because the mock trialers have a page where they coordinate and former members stay in touch but even for my beloved high schoolers I just couldn't do it. So complicated and intrusive. Yuck.
I think I'd be relieved at the cessation of manipulation. Correction, I was and am relieved my immediate family has backed off way beyond the giving up trying to change me point. I've used the leverage of having the only grandchild very very sparingly but I didn't hesitate when I did and have never felt guilty about it.
I was just confused by the plural - I thought you were including the author.
"Top 10 Signs You're Living In A Magical Realist Novel..."
I have heard the story in 6 but don't recall if it was via ogged.
"Top 10 Signs You're Living In A Magical Realist Novel..."
Just wait until the imaginary daughter appears and decides to bump off the real one and replace her.
The best thing about Facebook is following people whom you don't actually know in real life. My favorite FB "friends" are this 22 year old Latino metalhead who friended me by accident and is into black metal, drugs, and getting mad at big game hunters, and this local cheese vendor guy from France whom I mistakenly became personal friends with when I meant to like his business to get updates about cheeses. He's into motorcycles, a weird mix of left-in-the-US, Front National in France politics, and arranging dubious seeming bikini model pictorials with other French expats. I like knowing what those guys are up to.
What I'm saying is, I would totally be friends with FakeDaughter if ManipuloMom would let me.
My quality of life has improved by keeping FB off all my mobile devices and blocking it on my work computer. Now I check it maybe a few times a week. I'm thinking of making a post to the effect of "Be aware I'm basically gone from here, I'll come if tagged and may occasionally share job postings."
I've never had a Facebook and never will. Fuck them. But I did just install Whatsapp on my Android and feel a little dirty having done so.
I know I've said this here before, but I am completely delighted with the woman using my unique name on Facebook. She appears to be a professional dominatrix. My only complaint is that she won't Friend my boyfriend.
There's a guy who showed up on my Facebook suggested friends list that I think might be ogged.
I'm repelled at the idea of being on FB, even though everyone else in my family is. But I need to be familiar with it, as legal discovery more-and-more includes tweets, ims and fb posts. I'm confident that I'm reasonably current by proxy, but am concerned.
I think might be ogged
I'm not on the Facebooks.
Maybe it's Ogged's Mom's Ogged Decoy who wants to friend you.
The mock trial fact pattern this season (murder) includes hazing, alleged police brutality and imprudent tweeting. Ripped from the headlines!
I also enjoy the semi-randomness of twitter and instagram, for example when the Muslim cake decorator in south London and Gary Shteyngart posts show up right after one another and are about the same thing. Also there's an account that occasionally sends out Frank O'Hara poems and that always improves my day.
Great. Now I know or know somebody who knows four people who look Middle Eastern. I'll get on TSA's list now.
I have a suspiciously pious friend on FB who appears to have done a 180 from her party girl days in HS. Maybe she's being impersonated. Fortunately since she's Bahai'i her religious ramblings are for the most part either benign or incomprehensible, which seems to be the way of her people.
I knew a couple who got married in a Bahai'i ceremony, apparently because that's among the easier ways for two formerly-Catholic agnostics to get married.
I'm fairly tortured by my relationship with Facebook. I hate all the obviously terrible things about it, but 1. it centralizes most of the improv scene here (otherwise you have to go to 10 different websites and be on another 10 e-mail lists to keep up with shows, auditions, workshops, parties, new troupes, etc., and you'll still miss some) and 2. it's the ideal platform for my (RL) friend who is the funniest g.d. person in the world.
I don't spend all that much time on it, though, so Zuckerberg hasn't won completely.
29 is me, too. I want to keep up with certain people, and the certain people use FB.
Plus this has been making me laugh all week.
Weren't the pizza-loving teenage mutant ninja turtles both sewer residents and also students of a master who was a rat? Did he feed them?
Those are difficult questions you're asking, young turtle.
Laugh now, but when culture has been destroyed by free social-media sharing, cities devastated by ecological catastrophe, and America too carb- and pizza-addicted to solve its problems, your world will consist of staring at endless videos of endless pizza rats crawling through the remnants of civilization, forever.
Or, more precisely, until you die.
I liked the jazz playing hedgehog.
I'm visiting my mom this week and helping her with Facebook as needed. She has a lot of trouble figuring it out for some reason.
LICHTMAN: So we can visualize, actually, like, an elephant-sized rat grazing somewhere on the savannah?
ZALASIEWICZ: Yes, of course. The whale rat, the seal rat, the walrus rat would be a very nice one. They're already pretty smart, so some might become really quite smart. And, you know, we may have the rat civilization.
Such bullshit. Corvids are next in line, indeed at some point my firm belief is that there will be a corvid v. futurehuman battle for world domination if we don't destroy the world or eliminate ourselves in some other way first.
My mom spends a lot of time telling me (usually via Facebook) how much she wishes I'd get a Pinterest account.
Rat? That's a human from the future. They can only get food by coming back in time.
Also Splinter is the adoptive dad/guru. Shredder is a bad guy. I know this for sure because Ace made me review the identities of every character on every page of the book over and over again last night until I nearly ran away from home.
Why can't we kill all the corvids first? Maybe DDT again or something.
||
As some of you may recall, I cut off communication with my (bipolar, narcissist, manipulative) mom three years ago. Haven't heard from her since until this week, when I got a birthday card saying that she misses me and wishes I would call, plus a check for $450 which is meant to repay us for keeping her cell phone on our family plan, plus a birthday gift. She doesn't know about my recent serious illness, or about my sister's soon-to-be-born second child.
So. Am I a horrible person for not calling her? If I don't call, I have to tear up the check, right? Am I going to regret all this when she's dead?
|>
You're absolutely allowed to do whatever feels right. Including not calling AND depositing the check.
Who knows what you'll regret later. Live for the now!
2: blocking only works if the blocker and the blocked identities are both known. Log out and you can see anyone's public info and Facebook eventually decided to make all profile pics public.
Actually, it's possible Facebook shows profiles even to blocked people; I'm only familiar with Twitter's blocking function.
I say don't call her, don't cash the check.
When she dies and you start to feel regret, trust your past self. You made a hard decision for good reasons.
Inclined to what Megan says in 51. I wouldn't cash the check. It's a form of emotional blackmail. Especially if that wasn't part of the initial agreement. But even then. It's worth giving up the money to not let her get her hooks in.
Also not cashing a check for a long time pisses people off because their checkbook never matches their statements.
Not familiar with the backstory, but I say that regardless of whether you call or not, you may as well cash the check if she owes you the money. (If it's not entirely clear that she owes you the money, then nvm.)
51 is right. No matter what you say to yourself/feel consciously about it/etc. cashing the check is going to make staying separate a lot harder. It's just another (though larger) version of when charities send you weird gifts along with a request for donations. If you create some kind of potentially reciprocal relationship people find it really, really hard psychologically not to engage.
I agree with E. Messily. The check is payment for services (phone). If you feel bad about the check, spend the money on a really nice baby gift for coming niece or nephew.
What do I need to do to get Facebook to stop e-mailing me every time someone updates their status or posts a picture. Also, I don't want pictures of me that other people post to be tagged with my name.
48: I personally wouldn't cash the check, but that's just my gut. Is it, however, the case that you were paying her phone bill the entire time?
58 I don't want that either but can you do anything about that?
58: Go to "Settings" on the drop-down menu at the top right of the page.
When I quit fb, I was surprised at how much I didn't miss it.
That was unclear. I meant "permanently deleted my account" not "quit" as if I worked there.
Somehow in the past couple days Facebook figured out how to send me popup notifications while I'm doing other things in the browser. This is almost, but not quite as bad as when it conspired with the Windows Calendar to alert me of everybody's birthday, precisely at noon on the day before. Facebook, I really don't care if its my former real-estate agent's birthday, fuck you very much. I have a hard time believing that I opted into this.
I have two distinct circles of FB friends which do not overlap at all:
1. snarky, irreverent, overeducated coastal elite liberals; and
2. female family members (cousins, aunts, etc.) who are Catholic (though not politically conservative); family-oriented (in a sincere and utterly unironic way); and highly susceptible to the uniquely awful appeal of "like-baiting" expressions of greeting-card sentiment ("Like if you have a daughter that you love with all your heart").
My Facebook experience is all about emotional and cognitive dissonance.
"Like if you have a daughter that you love with all your heart"
Apparently that's a thing this week. It's all over my FB.
I'm on team don't cash the check. If you feel up to re-engaging, with eyes open, fine. But unless you really need the money, I'd say leave it.
15: Check whether you were born on the eve of Operation Desert Storm ...
Go 51!
Seems to me facebook is harmless if you only friend/accept requests from people you know and like either IRL or on line. Maybe I'm just too hard hearted to live, but if I had a sociopathic relative who I thought would be a pain to interact with a lot, then they could just fuck off no matter how often they sent requests.
Installing FB Purity so I can customize what I see on Facebook has made the whole experience sooo much more pleasant.
I spend a lot of time on FB, partly for professional purposes: working freelance from home means that if I have a knotty problem I'd like to pick someone else's brains on, the only way is online, and the FB translators' group in my language pair can usually provide help and advice almost instantaneously. It also has the advantage of being google-proof, unlike the equivalent Google and Yahoo groups. If a potential client searches for me online, I don't really want the first page of hits to include my questions to an online forum.
I use FB a lot but I'm proud to say I had no trouble quitting Google+.
FB Purity is so great that you cannot post links to it on Facebook. It's on a blocked list that Facebook apparently has -a popup window shows up saying "The content you're trying to share includes a link that our security systems detected to be unsafe".
I'm guessing "unsafe" doesn't necessarily mean "unsafe to you" or "unsafe to users" though.
Facebook ludditry is so 2010. We're not on your lawn, ok?
Let me be the first to recommend the Yo La Tengo album that shares its title with the OP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjG3F9SV34Y
76 ... we can tell from the ten grass growth FB status updates in the last twenty minutees.
75: Besides which, I thought we were into a retro-ludditry phase of knowing all about Facebook, but deleting our accounts. Or is that more 2013?
Minutees are like manatees, but smaller.
I've reduced my Facebook usage mostly as a result of their changes to the "news" feed. It hasn't been a concsious "I don't like you anymore Facebook", which I never managed to sustain when I tried. I just got less and less interested in stale news being floated to the top ("relevant"!), posts from people I've never met and with whom I have only one mutual friend pushed to the top because that one friend liked or commented or was tagged, missing posts from genuine friends I've been friends with for years who Facebook has deemed not worthy of being included in my feed. Sometimes I go to a friends page to catch up on their posts and Facebook sets some aside as "posts you missed" and I want to tell them, no, you assholes, those are posts you didn't show me.
Wait, Facebook has no way to divide your list of friends and say "show me whatever these people post" and the rest I'll check manually, or show me whatever these people post and the ten most popular posts from the rest, or whatever?
They briefly did have a "show me anything from this person" but removed it. Or they moved it and I never found where I went. I got tired of trying to keep up with the settings.
At the moment, if you see a post from someone you don't know because a mutual friend interacted with it on a minimal level and you try to hide it, Facebook gives you options to say:
Show me less from [person you don't know]
Show me less from [person you do know]
You can also completely unfollow the friend who, by no fault of their own, was the proximate cause of you seeing the post. That seems extreme.
What you can't do is say show me less stuff from people I don't know and aren't connected to in any meaningful way.
If it takes AI powerful enough to destroy humanity to get things like news feeds right, I'd take that trade-off.
I'm surprised because it wouldn't take AI at all: you'd just have to be able to mark people as "close" or not.
I joined a Facebook group and now I get alerts sometimes (not always) when somebody ads something to the group page. WTF? I don't want alerts from a group page, just integrate that shit into the feed.
I see my continuing Facebook ludditry remains well-founded. I shall continue on my present course.
84: It might take powerful AI to tell Facebook what to do. They seem to have made a conscious decision to not have users classify their friends' feeds, and I think it's a good idea to not require that, but they also don't give you the option to classify people's feeds. It's unrealistic to expect people with hundreds of friends to classify every feed, so some automatic filtering is useful, but the number of "show me everything" people is not likely to be that large for most people who would use that feature.
I guess you can currently set up a group of feeds (or whatever they call it, I don't mean an actual facebook group, more like an email account label/folder/filter) and I did that in the past, but then you have to remember to check that and it may be subject to the same Facebook-determined filtering the default feed is.
I used the close friends feature when they had it. I didn't know it went away because I get notifications when a close friend posts, so I guess they still use it but there's no longer an interface for it? We're reaching the Windows rot phase of Facebook features, there are millions of lines of code that no one knows what they do or whether they can be deleted.
82: They briefly did have a "show me anything from this person" but removed it. Or they moved it and I never found where I went. I got tired of trying to keep up with the settings.
I'm relieved to hear this: I thought I'd just been so lax at the place that FB didn't know what to do for me any more. Once upon a time, I'd marked certain people as "close", but somewhere along the line I stopped seeing their stuff in the feed. Figured maybe there was an expiration date on the closeness or something.
18: I'm thinking of making a post to the effect of "Be aware I'm basically gone from here, I'll come if tagged and may occasionally share job postings."
I see no dishonor in this. It's what I tell anyone who sends a friend request.
That said, Facebook is useful for corralling people who might care about you together to receive general announcements -- it's why I'm on there. When my mom died, I used it to issue an announcement, which was tremendously helpful. It serves as an address book.
81. Isn't that what Google+ "circles" were supposed to do? You can see how far that got them.
"Facebook is for people you know but don't care enough about to keep in touch with." -- I forget who said that but they were right.
Jesus Christ, people. Facebook's Calvinball approach to settings and notifications is definitely annoying and not paying attention to how to keep track of stuff is certainly understandable, but it is possible to change this stuff, and FB has actually been getting better about this lately. There's now even a "News Feed Preferences" option under the drop down menu at the top right, complete with colorful icons, that lets you prioritize which friends you see updates from and which friends you want to not see updates from at all ("unfollow").
Of course it wouldn't take AI. FB is pretending all these gimmicks will dupe people into spending more and more time on FB, because it's rigged so that you're never all caught up.
92: I assume any time you see a convenient feature like that, FB is testing it out on you and most other people may or may not have it.
That's definitely the case for a lot of features, but once they decide through that testing that they want to roll one out officially they announce it publicly and everyone has it. I think that's the case for the News Feed Preferences thing, in that I remember seeing articles about it and so forth, but I'm not 100% sure.
Anyway, my point is that you don't have to just accept whatever the FB algorithm shows you by default. Everyone has some level of control, even if it's not exactly the same for everyone. At a minimum, everyone can definitely unfollow specific people.
92: Do they actually apply those settings in a predictable way? Part of the reason I gave up following changes or changing settings is that if you think something should do "all posts" and it does "most posts, determined by criteria you neither know nor choose" then it's not worth paying attention to.
I don't give a fuck about unfollowing people I follow. I want to see everything from people I follow and nothing from people I don't follow. Unfollow someone you don't follow is useless when there's always someone new I don't follow for Facebook to shove in front of me who I haven't unfollowed yet because I don't remotely know they exist.
Those settings did let me know I apparently unfollowed two people two months ago. I blame touchscreens.
If scrolling back 36 hours is any indication, re-following previously unfollowed people works, but there's no guarantee that the chronological view will show all posts from people you've marked as "preferred", so I'll resume being shamefully ignorant of Facebook's settings.
Yeah, no, it's definitely still a black box in a lot of ways.
Wasn't Facebook infamous for changing the way the settings work without telling anyone? I seem to recall a big bruhaha about it a few years ago. Have they cleaned up their act?
Not really, no, but the current iteration of the settings does offer a little more control over what you see than previous iterations.
I have about 16 friends in (on?) Facebook. I see everything they post. Why do people have hundreds of 'friends'? Makes no sense to me.
I mean, my friends on Facebook are actual friends. Makes sense to me. It's a good way to stay in touch. Why add all these semi strangers to the feed?
Makes * sense is my phrase apparently.
There's now even a "News Feed Preferences" option under the drop down menu at the top right, complete with colorful icons, that lets you prioritize which friends you see updates from and which friends you want to not see updates from at all ("unfollow").
If I try to do this, there is no option to see all posts from a person. It's all about who do I want to prioritize.
Yes, that's correct. There's no way to see all posts from a person AFAIK.
That's what I find super annoying. Show me all the posts in chronological order, and none of the bullshit.
Which is why I'm pleased with this Purity thing.
I have about 100 FB friends and I've met all of them, with the possible exception of a few commenters here. I've kept off most things that make me easily discoverable, after learning pretty quickly that if I listed schools, etc. then people with similar profiles would find me more easily.
Oh, purity is great.
Why do people have hundreds of 'friends'?
I have 950 FB friends, which seems kind of ridiculous. A lot of it is people from the music scene I met over the years. I often don't even remember how I know someone, but I now know a lot about their cat and/or sandwich preferences.
I'm an aggressive unfollower. Anyone with a signal to noise ratio of less than 25-33% gets unfollowed without apology. (Higher cutoff for people whose signals aren't all that interesting or important. Maybe lower for people whose occasional signals are unusually interesting or important.) I used to hesitate because that seemed like an extreme solution--"what if this person posts something interesting or important?"--but then I realized the answer is that I just won't see it and it's not a big deal. (Especially considering that the alternative was that I was looking at Facebook much less because it was so boring and irrelevant, in which case I would still likely have missed whatever interesting or important thing this generally uninteresting and unimportant (to me) person happened to post.) I've unfollowed quite a few of my supposed "friends" (most of whom are people I realized I am not (anymore), and no longer have any interest in being, friends with IRL). My Facebook feed is now much less active, but it's practically all stuff I'm happy to read. It's great.
Looking through my friend list on the Settings--which I didn't realize was there, thanks, teo--I'm now feeling smug because pretty much everyone on there I'm happy to see their posts, and I'm feeling little or no need to prioritize. My unfollowed list is about a half dozen people, but I've always tried to be selective about whom to friend in the first place (yet still somehow have over 200, 1/4 of whom are from here), and it seems to have worked.
Taking a second look, I realize that what I want to prioritize are posts from people who hardly ever post, but I'm quite fond of; I don't want to miss anything from them (and maybe I don't; who knows with FB). Otherwise, I'm basically happy with my feed these days. Good job, FB!
Now I'm mostly creeped out about Amazon. Last night, I read a book at about midnight. This morning my Kindle is trying to get me to buy a book on insomnia. If that's happened before, I can't recall it.
I guess I usually sleep pretty well because of exhaustion and what not.
My Kindle is trying to get me to buy Super Mario Maker. It makes me happy that they don't know I already own it.
118: Yeah, that was my reaction too. The algorithm seems to work just fine for me.
I like Facebook. It allows me to socialize without having to clean the apartment or change my shirt.
