Tag Archives: social media

On Facebook’s “On this Day” and Nostalgia

Dear Mark Z, congratulations on the new baby. And kudos for knowing Chinese. I’ve just added you to the list of “See? These people can learn to speak Chinese. Why can’t you?” to show my kids. Oh, don’t worry. I am not asking you for money like Kanye West just did. To be fair though, he’s also asked Larry Page for help.

I know you don’t use Twitter. Aww. How quaint. But Kanye’s Tweet is the best parody account there is. He’s a parody of himself, a mirror reflecting back on a mirage, a meme of a meme. This somehow makes him the realest paradoxically.

Is your birthday really on Valentine’s Day? That’s a pretty cool thing to include as “The three things about myself that most people don’t know” when you have to do one of those awkward get-to-know-you self introductions.

I am rambling. You are so easy to talk to.

All I set out to write is this: STOP FUCKING SHOWING ME MY “FACEBOOK MEMORIES”!

Seeing pictures from a year ago does not make me happy. The more years it has transpired, the more depressing they are. I have peaked a long time ago. My life has since been going downhill. Those memories mock me for having wasted another year of my life with nothing to show for. (You’ll have to agree that Facebook posts do not amount to “things to show for”).

They are signposts, marking my march downward.

When I see “On this day,” I inadvertently think to myself, “Yup. And ON THIS VERY DAY, I am crying for all the wasted breath I’ve taken and what have I done and I should go jump off a bridge.” Pass the donuts.

Did you know that in the 17th to 19th century, nostalgia was considered a psychopathological disorder? I bet you don’t. I bet you are not a very nostalgic person either. Most winners of life aren’t. So thank you for pushing to cause a global pandemic of nostalgia with this fancy Facebook feature while you yourself has nothing but the future to look forward to.

In Greek nostalgia literally means “the pain from an old wound.” It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards… it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the carousel. It let’s us travel the way a child travels – around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved. — Don Draper

And we all know what that place is.

Facebook.

Nice try.

An Homage to Twinkies (now that it’s up for sale)

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Not that Twinkie is on its death bed. If anything, the Twinkie brand is probably the winner in this sad story of labor struggle, failed business and the eventual undoing of the 18,500 underpaid, overworked factory workers.

In the past week Twinkies have been the center of the public reminiscence because Hostess was said to file bankruptcy. I held my breath as the good news that Hostess and its workers were to start earnest negotiations came and then went. Sadly, it was announced an hour ago that Hostess has won the court approval to start selling its assets and more importantly, to start laying off its 18,500 workers.

We have all joked about how “Twinkies are forever”. Well, in this case, because of the sudden surge of attentions being paid to Twinkies, esp. in the social media sphere – now the arbitrator of brand marketability, I do believe that some VC will quickly swoop in and pick up the venerable Twinkie Brand. In contrast, the workers will be left jobless and most likely fall into the life style of sustaining on cheap, unhealthy food such as Twinkies. The irony is alarming.

I was not going to jump on the wagon and eulogizing Twinkies exactly because I do not believe in its imminent demise. It will live. However, I came across this video posted by my good friend Ry…

And it reminded me that I have written about the cultural obsession with Twinkies before. The following is from my 2009 post “Twinkies got a bad rep ’cause we find the name irresistible”.

In the American Pop culture conscious, there is this curious obsession with Twinkies. One of the new exhibits at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago is about Twinkies. Putting our obsession with this oddity on view.

For once, let’s scientifically study the myth that Twinkies will never die. Observe and report. (I will visit MSI later again to check on the Twinkie that is on view there).

Of course, Twinkies are not the only food that are believed to be evil-incarnate. Why such revilement?

My theory is that half of that ill-begotten fame came from the name, Twinkie. What’s in a name? If it were called “Hostess Cream-filled Yellow Cake”, or, let’s say, Snow Puff, it would not have become such a legend, warts and all. Kudos to the marketing team that came up with this name that is now a major part of American pop culture.

Upon further investigation, I learned that the name Twinkie came from a chance encounter with a billboard:

In 1933, James Dewar, a baker at Continental Baking Company in Indiana, was inspired and came up with this name when driving by a billboard advertising shoes from the “Twinkle Toe Shoe Company”.

This is serendipity! In our collective consciousness for food, Twinkies share a significant space with the shoe in Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush… Ok. Maybe it is proven once again that I am easily amused. TOO easily.

Ode to Twinkies

‘Tis but thy name that makes thou irresistible;

Thou art thyself, though not a Twinkie.

What’s Twinkie? it is nor Monoglycerides nor diglycerides

Nor Polysorbate 60, nor Hydrogenated shortening, nor any other part

Belonging to proper CAKE. O, be some other name!

What’s in a name? that which we call a Twinkie

By any other name would induce as much grimace??

So Twinkie would, were it not Twinkie call’d,

Retain that dear longevity which it owes

Without that title. Twinkie, doff thy name,

And for that name which is no part of thee

Take all the cream.

This March (March 2012), I did go back to check on the Twinkie at MSI, and surprise surprise, it has not aged one bit. Sigh. Perhaps we should start putting Twinkie on our faces?

Twinkie on display (since October 2009) at MSI Chicago as of March 2012

In which I talk about “National UnFriend Day” aka NUD but ask you not to Unfriend my sorry ass

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Ah Jimmy Kimmel. My favorite Late Night Show host. (Sorry darling Wicked Shawn. I know you have the super hots for the other Jimmy. Although it pangs me to disagree with you, I believe that THIS Jimmy is so much funnier as a talk show host… Well, now we won’t fight and each have our own Jimmy to jimmy with… )

My Jimmy decided to take on Facebook, the giant that just became a behemoth now that Facebook is offering a form of uber-email @Facebook.com that aims to keep all our young hooked on Facebook and never have any reason to go anywhere else. The thing with Facebook is that You and I and Jimmy are not Mark Zuckerberg’s target audience: he went straight to talk to high school students when they were designing Facebook email. This is where social media is like shopping on Rodeo Drive:

If you have to ask WHY, it is not meant for you.

Jimmy Kimmel is trying to save Friendship (as we know it) by urging folks to unfriend friends that are not really friends on their Facebook. He calls today, November 17, the National UnFriend Day, aka NUD.

NUD is the international day when all Facebook users shall protect the sacred nature of friendship by cutting out any ‘friend fat’ on their pages occupied by people who are not truly their friends.

[And more importantly] Without guilt or retribution.

In one of his tongue-in-cheek skit, Jimmy suggested this method to see who one’s real friends are: “Update your Facebook status to say, ‘I am moving this Friday and I need movers”; those who that show up are your real friends.”

The fact that I am undercover as far as this blog is concerned, that I have two Facebook accounts and I update one account a lot more often and with more candor, that I maintain two Twitter accounts and I clearly identity with the one where I am not using my real name, points to the other fact that I have a very different definition and interpretation of “friends” from what Jimmy is based on for his new holiday.

Nevertheless, hilarity (has) ensued and I have been enjoying the comedic aspect of it.

From William Shatner (of course!), Danny McBride, Dr. Oz, Lisa Kudrow (“I know friends. I used to be one.”), Wolf Blitzer,

And there is some truth to what Jimmy presented in one of his fake tirades:

All men were not created equal. Some of them are very annoying!

The most brilliant, most awesome thing, up until now, that came out of this fake NUD holdiday is the holiday theme song by WAR, called, you guessed it, “Why can’t we UNfriend?”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vl-kYbgCsI

I comment therefore I am not doing what I am supposed to be doing…

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November 30. Yeah baby!

I am finishing this NaBloMoFo with a special edition of “I Comment Therefore I Am”…

… because it is Monday. And Monday, especially Monday after the long Thanksgiving weekend, absolutely sucks ass, especially if you work in an office…

In this edition, I will share with you how I abuse my privilege as a reader and commenter of blogs…

Eat me

The Sky is Falling asked her readers this question:

So, if you were making a list of “Dat’s Some Funny Shit,Yo,” what movies/TV/books/blogs/etc. would you include? What has informed (or malformed) your particular brand of humor? What falls in the category of Sorry, I Just Don’t Get It? Any deal-breakers (for example, “If I found out you loved/hated __________, you would be dead to me.”)?

She had no idea what she had done: it’s like dangling fat dripping meat to a hungry cougar. I totally took the bait. So I commented at 8:14 PM:

Hey, the jokes made me cry and smile at the same time. {{{hugs}}} if hugs from strangers over the internet are not too creepy for ya. We are a family of cracking “inappropriate” jokes at “inappropriate” moments also. I eagerly clicked on all 4 YouTube links and realized: I need to spend some time watching them so I can test my love for you! So, I will be back. Also you left us a homework at the end. Maybe we (your loyal readers) need to write posts in response to this question. 🙂 Promise: I will be back.

p.s. You are making it very difficult for me to tend to my motherly duty. Your posts all make me think too much and I am now constantly distracted! LOL

An hour later… I wrote some more:

I’m back! Sorry it took so long since I have StumbledUpon almost all of them, and tweeted 2 of them! LOVE Eddie Izzard. (Confession: I only watched him on YouTube. We have no cable. And we don’t watch that much TV not because we are snobbish but because we have no time) I was also distracted because I found him pretty… That clip is funny as hell. “We stole countries with the cunning use of flags.” Bloody BRILLIANT! I want to go around and say “No flag. No country” now. I love the Strong Bad one too. (Confession: have never really watched the Homestar Runner show EXCEPT the Strong Bad email sections) I actually saw Louis CK when he was on Conan O’Brien. LOVED IT and then told everybody I know that travels frequently. Yes, we bitch about air travel all the time. I did curtail my bitching afterwards. Now I say to myself whenever my flight is delayed: “At least I am not travelling with my kids.” Being a parent does give you life-changing perspectives. LOL. I have to confess: I was not laughing at the Muppet Danny Boy clip. Sorry! BTW, I checked my StumbledUpon and saw that I had “favored” a Jackass clip. OH NO! But it’s the one where they dressed up as pandas and ran around in Tokyo. I liked it because they were clearly idiots, and the clip shows, at least the way I interpret it, that the Japanese have a great sense of humor and a great deal of tolerance for stupidity as exhibited by foreigners, i.e. they are our guests. We shall not laugh at them, but rather, laugh with them. I told you: I need to write an entire complete post to answer your question. Good one though!

In her other post, “If You Drink At Every Parenthetical in this Post, You Probably Should Not Drive” (by the way, isn’t this an awesome title? And of course I commented on it…), she asked her readers yet more questions. I think she has a death wish by Comment Hogs or something.

I haven’t told my sister about this blog. What do y’all do about the whole anonymity issue? Do you have a chosen circle? Are you totally incognito? Reasons for/against?

I absolutely rose to the occasion and commented THREE times.

NOVEMBER 25, 2009 5:21 PM

I love the title of this post. I need to stop by to say hi, but I need to go focus on Mr. Monk since it’s his birthday. BUT I will be back ’cause THIS topic hits right at home. From your loyal reader aka NOT Love Greg*

NOVEMBER 25, 2009 8:07 PM

Short answer for now because I need to clean up the house and put together a grocery list for Thanksgiving… Parents-in-law flight arrives tomorrow at 9 am! I am anonymous not because I am afraid of stalkers (Not that famous yet so no need. LOL) but because I am worried that someone from work may chance upon my blog and then the whole company would know. I don’t talk about work still since I am paranoid. I really want to complain about being the only woman in my office sometimes but I refrain from doing that now since well, just in case. A few of my very close friends who I can trust know about my blog. My husband knows but does not read it often. Sometimes I wish he didn’t since I wanted to complain about him really bad often… None of my family knows. Well, my side does not read English. My husband’s side… Well, let’s just say my MIL is a devout Catholic and my FIL thinks Fox News is the greatest (for which we have made fun of him and he’s ok with it…) They are really very nice and very kind and they treat me like their own daughter. We get along fine since we do NOT talk about politics or religions. Again though, I don’t complain about people in my life really JUST IN CASE. Any passing complaints directed towards people that you do care are best left unwritten. That’s my take. Because you never know when the written thing is going to come back and bite you…

If you do tell your sister about this blog, and if she does want to start her own blog, you two should think about hosting a blog together. This way it will definitely ease the burden of having to write a post every day (or even every other day). That being said: I don’t know how you would deal with “popularity contest”, “competition”, and “jealousy”. I am human, and I am bound to feel jealous if my sister’s posts are more popular than mine on the same blog… Think about WHAM! as an example… 😉

(Sorry for bad grammar and yet another long comment!)

p.s. Totally dig stream of consciousness writing.

NOVEMBER 25, 2009 9:55 PM

OK. What kind of SHORT answer was THAT?!

There you have it. Oink. Oink.

* The “Love Greg” joke requires the reading of this post Creepoid vs. Bitch for which I also left a long comment. Totally worth it, my imaginary friends.

“Raw information will become not just a commodity, it will be a nuisance”

Armageddon is here: Twitter is down and Fail Whale is not even there?!

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I can’t believe I am saying this, but I wish Fail Whale will come back soon!

We miss you, Fail Whale! We will never been mean to you and call you names again! Just come back!! You are so much better than a lot of other scenarios, we have now realized!

So… by now you have heard, or tweeted, oh, no, NOT tweeted, but left frantic comments on Mashable.com or Techcrunch.com or other websites where Social Media lovers hang out, after they have tweeted and Facebooked their hearts out, but still have something more to say.

Mashable is keeping a tab on the impending doom of humanity through this post:

Facebook Down. Twitter Down. Social Media Meltdown.

Thanks to our friend with the impossibly high cheekbones (I will need to write a blog about these cheekbones one day. I wonder whether it can cut through a piece of tissue? And what’s up with the oh-so-appropriate and I-wish-my-dad-had-the-same last name, CASHMORE? Luck of the draw, I guess. But isn’t illegal in the cosmic sense to be lucky in both the departments of Cheekbones and Family Names?), we have been kept abreast with the development of Armageddon in the making:

Twitter Down Due to Denial of Service Attack (DDoS)

Now, my friend, is the time to panic!!!!!!! The sky is falling. The sky is falling!!

The sudden influx of Twitter refugees to Facebook site, wherelse are we going to post constant updates and complain about our frustrations that Twitter is DOWN, and also to strive to be the first ones to announce the DDoS attack on Twitter? has caused Facebook to go down as well.

The cyber terrorists could not have planned it better.

So now people, with their usual outlets having disappeared, have flocked to Mashable and Techcrunch to share their glib comments. On the one Techcrunch post, there are now more than 400 comments. And several Mashable posts dedicated to “Twitter Down!” have also received hundreds of comments. Most of them are like this:

“Yup. Still down.”

(Thank you very much. Otherwise I would not have been able to find out on my own!!!!)

It has also become a fun sport to ponder who the Cyber attacker(s) may be:

Hugo Chavez? Iran? The Vatican?

My bet is on The Birthers, who are mad as hell because we all made fun of them mercilessly on Twitter. (Even Ann Coulter made fun of them, which made me feel kind of sorry for Birthers…)

But without Twitter as the forum, AND without the appropriate HASHTAGS #TwitterDown #DOS #WHOISBEHINDTHIS #TWITTERDDOS, the “Who Done It” game is just NOT the same…

By now some of us have gotten a rude awakening: Just how much YOU ARE obsessed with Twitter. Like the required cup of morning coffee.

CAN’T — FUNCTION — WITHOUT — IT —

Speaking of coffee, I think I am heading downstairs to Starbucks so I can talk to random strangers about this new social phenomenon called “Life Without Twitter”… And also get myself a cup of coffee while I am at it.

p.s. F*ck it! I knew it! As soon as I clicked on “Publish Post”, Twitter came back. Great. Now I just seem more a dweeb than I actually already am by publishing this AFTER THE EFFECT. Stupid Twitter…

p.p.s. I take it back. I love you Twitter. Don’t ever leave me like that again, ok?

p.p.p.s. Ooops. No. Twitter is STILL down. Yes! … Oh. No. *sobs* Come back!

I GTalked my kid to ask him what he would like for breakfast today…

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As over-thinking, ironically introspective, neurotic, obsessively over-analytical as I am, this incident strikes me as seminal. SEMINAL. Mark it on the calendar.

We have all seen those cartoons, parodying the increasing importance of texting in the life of teens and even preteens, showing kids texting each other while sitting next to each other on the sofa, or kids and parents texting each other while in the car, or family members texting each other while around the table, TXT “Could you pass the salt please?”

We all laugh. Then we tsk tsk and exclaim, “What the world has come to?”, while simultaneously congratulating ourselves for not being like the characters as depicted in the cartoons. And then we worry that it may become a reality. It is in some way part of reality, we begrudgingly admit to ourselves.

It happened on a Saturday morning towards the end of a school year, the rare time when we did not have any place to rush to and my son was playing the ever popular Runescape on the computer in my study. Normally, it requires a lot of yelling back and forth, impatience, frustration, foot-stomping, indignation, accusations of ingratitude and false accusations for breakfast to be served. Since I had my laptop working in the kitchen, I thought, “Hey, why not Gtalk him?”

Ping. “What do you want for breakfast?”

Ping. “What the…” “Mom, is that you?”

Ping. “LOL. What do u want for bf?”

Ping. “Pancake pls.”

It soon evolved into a Q&A session where the 11 yo asked me some words he’d learned from his fellow game-players but instinctively knew were “bad words” that he should not use. First right up:

Ping. “What does Jizz mean?”

Ugh, Jesus. Why can’t his father be doing this? “You don’t want to know.”

Ping. “It is close to jazz.”

“Believe me. It is not.”

Ping. “tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me”

Fine. “Have you learned reproductive organs in your health education yet?”

“No. But 6th graders did. We didn’t go.”

I explained that he would learn about it when he has sex education in the 6th grade. Upon that, he said, “Yikes!” in spoken language which I could hear from the kitchen.

For good measure, I emphasized that it is NOT a shortened form for when you want to say “Jesus!”

Then we moved onto:

“Mom, what does f-g mean?” “It is banned from this other site.” “People would say this to me whenever I kill [their characters].”

Well, the usage originated from The World of Warcraft, I believe. “You know the word ‘gay’ and how we agreed that we would not use it to make fun of people?” “There’s this word that is even worse than ‘gay'”

“Oh. I know that word.”

Me. Thinking. “How the hack does he know? Where did he hear it? And who the F called my kid that word?!”

Somehow it does not seem as lecture-y through Gtalk to make him promise he would not use this word. No matter how common an expression it has become in this game or anywhere else. It is a principle thing.

Although I can only hope that he keeps his promise when I am not around, which will happen more and more often now that he’s 11 going on 30, I am glad that we had this chance to talk. So, so what it is through Gtalk?