Speaking in the Third Person
Topics:Funnies Arb Thoughts
Now, I’m sure we’ve all experienced the wonderful phenomenon known as Facebook. You know, the devious little place where people link friends to their profile, where you join groups cause you think they are funny, then you start joining groups to see who else has the same weird(read: addictive) hobbies like you do, then you suddenly realise that you are replying to more messages on Facebook than you would in your inbox, you then add all these stupid apps which suck up so much time by answering quizzes to prove know what the difference between a bit and a byte and you are geekier than your friends (which you find out is only 66% true), although the flipside of that coin, you waste just as much time by virtue of ignoring the requests to join them, or by the fact that your friend’s have so many of them that 4 hours go by and the profile still hasn’t finished loading and you’ve used 90% of your capped (gotta love Telkom) bandwidth. And the poke-a-thon… I mean really. I think that’s the most useful feature. Hehehe…
RIGHT! Now that I’ve gotten that out the way, Facebook has a lovely thing called a status message. (Yes – I am writing for the benefit of those who are ignorant of what Facebook is and how it works.) This starts of with “<first name> is” so essentially you have to talk about yourself in the third person in the present tense… and as an example of this lot, here’s the last month’s status messages:
Yesterday
Bergen is wondering "Was It A Dream?". 7:20pm
November 27
Bergen is sleeping on half of his bed lately... 5:06pm
November 25
Bergen is lying on the floor. Lying on the floor... he's come undone.
11:09pm
November 23
Bergen is to sexy for his Facebook profile. 9:25am
November 22
Bergen is amused by his cats on catnip. 9:21pm
November 21
Bergen is listening to what his tapeworm tells him to do. 7:35pm
November 20
Bergen is building a mystery. 8:35pm
November 19
Bergen is running software version seven point oh. 2:22pm
Bergen is suffering from permanant NADD. 1:21pm
Bergen is rocking out... he's on the Radio! 7:17am
November 18
Bergen is pretending to be happy. 12:28am
November 17
Bergen is ... just that. Bergen. (true story). 11:53pm
Bergen is becoming a Sultan of Salsa. (true story). 2:22pm
November 15
Bergen is saying the world could be burning down. 7:42pm
November 14
Bergen is bam balam! 3:38pm
Bergen is le sore. PwN3D bai GyM. 8:52am
November 13
Bergen is comtemplating treasons old and new. 6:02pm
Bergen is making another confession. 9:09am
November 12
Bergen is breathing in the silence like never before. 4:24pm
November 10
Bergen is drowning in the self, this is not him. 6:37pm
November 9
Bergen is living a secret life of indescrete discretions. 9:27am
November 8
Bergen is giving no mercy to his fears. 10:21am
November 5
Bergen is a knight in shining whatever. 9:05pm
Bergen is gonna hit the highway like a battering ram, on a silver black phantom bike. 3:11pm
November 3
Bergen is the bass masta after finding his bass guitar again. 4:34pm
Bergen is learning to live again. 11:54am
November 2
Bergen is trying to hide himself. 2:36pm
October 31
Bergen is making plans to kill his own kind. 11:51am
Bergen is getting angry, day after day... 11:38am
October 30
Bergen is a pushly little child with a fully automatic, pushing the weak around. 2:48pm
October 29
Bergen is not sure all these people understand. 1:17pm
Bergen is unsure of what he's hungry for, and is unsure what he wants anymore. 11:38am
Collected from here, and selecting “status stories” – but obviously it’s only a month long that they stay so tomorrow, and new statuses are placed at the top. If you feel this need to subscribe to this in an rss/atom feed kinda way, follow this link to find out how, unless you saw the RSS icon on the page at the beginning of this paragraph.
So, as you can see, status messages can be fun. Me, I’ve used the theme of song lyrics. This has been a curse, since for the last 6 months I haven’t managed to listen to a song (unless it is in a foreign language that I don’t understand) without thinking: “How can I mangle that into a status message…?” And thus, bringing me to the point of why I was writing this post.
As usual I was reading an article my friend Jon gave me (msn, or email – wait. Details no one cares about).
Facebook To Tweak Status Updates
Compared to anything you’ll see coming from the BBC or CNN, this is admittedly a pretty minor piece of news. Yet it’s nonetheless nice to hear that Facebook plans to drop the word “is” from its users’ status updates.
So of course to me this was devastating. My daily (sometimes twice, thrice or …. Whatever) challenge to find song lyrics that appeal to me and (mostly) describe how I feel and mutate them into a Facebook status for myself. I’ve seen plenty of people join groups which moan and bitch about the “is” in the status message, I just thought that they’d ignore those as they usually do. I mean really. If its that important to you, sign up on twitter and put on the twitter app in Facebook. That’s the sole reason for twitter’s existence! Come now!!! Facebook status “is” - because it is supposed to be current, not a lifelong feed. Maybe I’m just wrong. And for CRYING OUT LOUD! Why can’t you speak in the 3rd person?!? Here with some examples (with names changed to protect those who have been silly):
November 25
Bob is never make somone a priority in your life..when you're only an option in theirs. 11:15pm
November 2
Jaibo is going to stay @ work tonight till I finish the mountain of work... 6:24pm
October 31
Jackie is relieved that I have managed to work through all the kindly offerings and invitations that my friends have sent me. Unfortunately I had to ignore all offers. 9:09pm
And for S&G, I’d like to invite you (dear readers) to step up to the challenge and identify those status messages that are songs. Yes – there are a few in there that strangely enough aren’t related to songs at all. Otherwise – feel free to comment on my rant in the usual fashion - all below.
Jonathan is able to find only a few that he can recognise offhand... three System of a Down songs, and umm.... *shrugs*.
Jonathan is still pretty sure that Bergen has too much time on his hands.