MySpace Eats Brains for Breakfast

Yes, I’ve been busy and sick since my last post, but mostly I’ve been lazy. And busy. But also lazy. This is my problem. I lack long-term focus and am easily side-tracked. I was diagnosed with ADD ages ago, but I hate taking medication unless I absolutely need it to, say, keep me living or from ripping my own skull off.

Anyway, I’ve been trying to condense the multitude of reasons I hate MySpace so much (and yet use it anyway) and managed to limit it to four. This is amazing since I generally lack the ability to condense anything into under a 200 item list.

1. The shit that people do to their pages. If you think hot pink text on a sparkling green background is readable, you should be sent to aesthetics hell.

2. A lot of my offline friends are idiots on the internet. My friends can’t type, don’t understand about spam, and are emo on the internet. It’s embarrassing to be associated with these people.

Why do you care if you’re not in my Top 4?

Oh, yes. I do not have a Top 8. I don’t like my friends enough when they’re online to keep most of them on there. In fact, I have Barack Obama and Dexter Morgan in my Top 4 because MySpace wouldn’t allow me to have a Top 2.

3. MySpace is now a verb. The first time a friend said “I’ll MySpace you later”, I nearly wept. It sounds dirty, but not in a happy way. :(

4. Now I use MySpace as a verb with certain friends who need to contact me. It’s terrible, really.

And yet I have a MySpace purely to keep up with people I might not have otherwise. I’ve found people I’ve not talked to for five to twelve years. I’ve found a girl I went to high school with only to find out he’s not a girl anymore which was handy to know up front the next time I saw him.

Months ago I had a dream about a girl I knew in primary school. She was a cool kid so I figured she may have grown up to be awesome. And, as a sidenote, I was sure she was gay.

Oh, how gaydar and cool-kid-detector failed me.

I decided to look her up on MySpace only to find out she’s now stupid, skanky, greasy, blonde¹, alcoholic, and the kind of straight girl that makes out with other girls just so she can post pictures on the internet.

What are other problems with MySpace? And are any other social networking sites necessarily better? Or are there other aspects that make them just as annoying?

1. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. ;) ↩

Muera, Por Favor

One of the things I’ve learnt in my pursuit of a BA in Spanish and French is that people tend to say stupid things in regards to my educational plans. Because, you know, a degree in anything besides IT or medicine or whatever is a waste of time. Clearly.

Below are examples of idiotic things said to me on a weekly basis as well as either the response I give or the response I wish I could give depending on who is doing the commenting.

“Oh. A useless degree.”

First of all, kindly fuck off.

Is there such thing as a useless degree, honestly? I don’t believe so. Least of all a degree in languages. Many people in English-speaking countries are monolingual; being multilingual is a sought-after skill in today’s job market. There are tons of things you can do with a BA in Spanish and French. Many people are unwilling to learn a second language. For some reason, this seems to be more rampant in countries where the predominant language is English.

Mostly, I’m getting a BA because I love languages and I like to learn, not because of the job I’m seeking.

“Nobody speaks French.”

I think the people of the 29 countries of which French is an official language would disagree with you. About 300 million people on the planet speak French. There is a French speaking country on every continent aside from Antarctica–as far as I know, emperor penguins don’t speak French. Or at least they didn’t in March of the Penguins which is clearly a vital source of penguin language information. It’s also an official language of both the United Nations and the European Union.

“French is useless.”

See above.

“Can you get a job with that? What are you going to do with that degree?”

I’m not getting a BA in Spanish and French to get a job; I’m getting a BA to learn more about something I love. I love to learn. I’ve always been that girl who’s constantly reading up about random things. When I was a kid, sometimes it was animals or dinosaurs or space or Sweden. Sometimes it’s still animals or dinosaurs or space or Sweden. I’m filled with tons of random bits of information about everything.

And, as I said earlier, multilingualism is a sought after skill even in non-interpretation or translation fields.

Three Annoying Things Bloggers Do

1. Hiding your blog’s RSS feed(s).

Why in the hell do some blogs make it so impossible to subscribe to their feed? Do you not want readers to be able to keep track of your updates? A couple times recently I’ve just given up. I had even tried random URLs such as http://evilfeedwithholder.com/feed/ and http://evilfeedwithholder.com/index.xml

It’s bad enough to remove the <link href="http://evilfeedwithholder.com/feed" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="The Forbidden RSS 2.0 Feed" /> bit as it is, but then not have a link anywhere on your website? Not in the sidebar, footer, site page, or anywhere else? Evil.

Don’t make me work for it! Make it simple! I’m likely to never return to your site again no matter how much I liked it.

2. Mixing trackbacks & pingbacks with your comments.

Often it’s difficult to tell where the trackbacks end and the comments start again, particularly when there’s just one or two comments nestled between seemingly endless trackbacks. I generally skip over all trackbacks or anything that looks like one. I might be missing something integral to the flow of conversation in the comments because that one important comment was stuck amongst the trackbacks.

3. Lack of context in your posts.

Sometimes I’ll find a new blog that could be interesting…if I knew what the hell they were babbling about.

I hate the feeling that I’m coming into a conversation late or that I’ve just walked into a room and everyone else has just started laughing, but I’m stuck in the dark.

When you’re referring to something that’s happened in the past, particularly a specific past entry, it’s generally a good idea to link to those entries that give it context for your new or occasional readers. If it’s not in the posts displayed on your main page, chances are, I’m not going to find it and I’m not going to waste my time finding it.

Contact. RSS Feed.