More Mad Howls: March 2010

News flash (not) - a lot of people are on Farcebook these days, for many hours a day. And from what I can tell it’s mostly designed for office workers and students. I mean, I’m unemployed but if I spent as much time on Farcebook as other folks do, I’d have died of starvation by now.

That’s not intended as criticism of people who spend a lot of time on the site. Actually, I kind of envy them. But I think I might not be envying much. Like my friend’s young daughter who saw the Snuggie ad on TV and envied those people their fun-inspiring blankets. Only to discover, when she finally got her Snuggie, that it wasn’t the blanket that was the agent of fun.

So even though I am on Farcebook, I’m still antisocial and cranky and would rather be looking at Victorian knitting patterns. I guess I need a site for the cranky and antisocial. Snarkbook, perhaps.

What I’m really trying to say about being on Farcebook is that I don’t belong there.

It’s not that I don’t like, or am not interested, in what my friends are doing. But Farcebook replaces meaningful conversations with something else, the equivalent of sound bites, and games instead of actually one-on-one meetups and hanging out. I miss seeing the people I worked with and chatting with them, and making them look at my knitting. Farcebook is no replacement for that.

Perhaps if validation by others was important to me, I wouldn’t notice the shortcomings of such a site. But I’m self-absorbed enough that I don’t care if everyone knows what I’ve read in the NY Times today. I have a few people who get that sort of spam from me all the time - I figure the rest of the world can live without it. So status updates aren’t something I’m driven to do. “Still unemployed” would cover it pretty much every day.

And then there’s the Farcebook activities. I suck at those.

When I first joined all my friends were inviting me to this thing and that - like Super Pets. Since I haven’t fed my pet dragon in something like 9 months to a year, I’m sure he’s now a specimen in the Museum of Natural History.

What's left of my SuperPet Khan

Or the farming games. I got invited to two of them by people whom I really like. But I simply don’t have what it takes to check on my crops. I tried, dear readers, I really tried. But my poor Farcebook friends who’ve invited me to be their neighbors have an absentee landlord. My farms, last time I visited, looked like the Dust Bowl.

My Farmville plot last year

I fixed them up… but haven’t been back in months, and my turnips were going to need harvesting within three days… I’m sure that once again I’m lording it over plantations of dried crops, starved livestock, and tumbleweeds blowing everywhere.

Trying to save the farm - yet again.

Getting the hell out of Farmville while we still can.

There are other games that I joined, find the monster egg, etc., and some of the gift things were fun, I thought. But no one seemed interested in getting pestilences from me, and I could find no one to give me 20th Century composers. Wimps - what, are y’all afraid of Xenakis or Takemitsu?

Xenakis & Takemitsu only look scary...

and sound scary...

but they were really nice guys.

Honest.

I do check the site once a day. And realized last week that, since they changed the setups recently, I hadn’t seen my wall in ages. When I finally discovered how to get there, I had several birthday wishes that were ignored. Not because I wasn’t looking for them, or hated the senders. It was because I couldn’t negotiate the damned site.

So I’m going to stay on Farcebook and check it once a day, and continue to suck at being a good citizen, and dream of the day when Snarkbook gets up and running.

{Oh yeah, Twister? I have a Twister account. I’ve participated in two Twister knit-alongs (KALs). Yes, I only joined for the knitting. I had a follower, some young lass, I had no idea who she was. I guess she eventually figured out she didn’t know me either, because she quit following me…}