I’m on deadline tonight with a major deliverable (ahhrrrrr! I just used the word deliverable!) so here I am careening into another week with major blogging operations on hold.
Well, maybe after tomorrow I can rev the OcPot up again. In the meantime, I will say this: Now that I’ve been on Facebook a little while and have built up my Friends list, the thing that’s really weirding me out is that I’m starting to learn about major news events from other people’s status lines.
In fact, that’s how I found out about Heath Ledger’s death last week — I logged on to Facebook and two or three different people were expressing sorrow and/or flippancy about the event in their status updates. And I’m all, “Whuh?” and then over to Google News.
On a vastly cheerier note, that’s also how I found out just yesterday that The Kids in the Hall will be touring in March. Which is certainly a bit of news worth having.
Finally, since I’m on the subject, I should cop to the fact that shortly after registering at Facebook, and then swearing loudly and long that I would continue to resist the MySpace borg unto my last breath, I then promptly threw in that towel too and set up a MySpace page. Yes, I’m an absurd little person. I did it mainly because there was an old friend of mine whom I wanted to connect with, and he was on MySpace but not Facebook, and there was no other way to reach him. (Well, and then The Waterboys went and offered a free download of an unreleased song only through their MySpace page, and it became a twofer.)
So, now that I’m on both the Space and the Face, I can compare the two and say that Facebook is tons more fun than MySpace and much easier to use, in my opinion. And with about 500% less spam. Not to mention the video hussies on the MySpace homepage, don’t even get me started on the video spam hussies, lolling on their beds and flipping their spam hussy hair around while you’re trying to focus on what your actual friends are up to. And it’s all so wasted on me! I mean, if I have to be distracted by stupid video ads, the least MySpace could do is serve me up some square-jawed muscley spam himbos or something.
There is, however, one immediate and overwhelming benefit to having a MySpace login: You can set a preference so that when you visit some other person’s MySpace page, the extremely annoying and unpleasant death-metal ditty they’ve chosen to inflict on all visitors doesn’t automatically start playing without your permission. That’s right, MySpace members get to choose whether they have to listen to that shazbot or not. If anyone had told me that, I would have caved in and registered years ago.
How do you use that preference? I have a comment that “Uke-Lady” left for me that starts playing automatically when my profile opens, and another comment that has one of those jukebox player things that I can’t shut off or delete. With the Joans song I put on my page, it’s all a big cluster-copulation…
Oh, and I should point out that MySpace DOES, in fact, have spam himbos (whom I like to call “spimbos”) when you open your homepage. Those chatroom, webcam things have started offering fake footage of twinks prancing around in their shorts, singing into markers as though they were microphones and generally doing other fey things that are apparently supposed to be endearing but which, in fact, are tragic, silly, foolish and embarrassing to the onlooker.
I just wish I’d stop getting friend requests from those hoochie-mamas who always call themselves “Harmony,” “Taryn,” “Hope,” or “Pussycakes.” As soon as I see their picture spilling out of a bikini, I mark it as spam. But, like roaches, there are a million more waiting under the fridge…
Yeah, unfortunately the preference I’m talking about is only about 90% effective. It only works on the main music player that most people have on their pages — but there are some different kinds of players and apps that I run into occasionally, and those do start playing automatically, at which I point I have to open a can of my old friend Command-W.
That said, to set the preference in question, go to Home > Settings > Miscellaneous, and under Music Players, UNCHECK the box that says “Auto-start profile and band music players.”
It’s not a perfect solution, but it has definitely improved my quality of life.