The Column
Motto: Rubber ducky, you’re the one..
This is my 47th column since its rebirth. I should emphasize again that this is not the 47th column I’ve ever written - it’s likely closer to the 300th (I had a lot of free time in high school). All those columns are gone now - lost to the grandeur of the greater internet. I’m archiving these posts however, so that won’t ever happen again. So this is the 47(+/-300)th column. The number 47 has a greater significance in my life. First off, it was my favorite number for a long time (the number 42 surpassed it after I read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but that’s another story - one I told 5 columns ago). The reason it was my favorite number is because of its relevance to one of my favorite video games series of all time: Hitman. Videogames are for children. Videogames are not for adults with problems to deal with and responsibilities to attend to. But, as I have often said, I’m only as mature as I have to be in any given situation. If I properly manhandled my responsibilities for the day, there isn’t much maturity warranted for that night. You can bet there’s a chance I’ll fire up the old PlayStation. In high school I played through the second, third, and forth Hitman games (the first was PC-only, and is widely viewed as not being the first GOOD one). 6 1/2 years went by until last week, Hitman: Absolution was released. I played through and beat it in a shamefully short amount of time. The only saving grace I have is that I didn’t do it entirely alone; I found a way to be sociable during said course. The premise of the games (and movie, don’t forget there was a movie) is simple: you are a clone that was made from the DNA of four bad guys. You have no proper name, but were given the moniker “47” because you were the 47th clone in the series. You are a hitman. You get paid to sneak around and kill people. The game takes patience, observational skills, foresight, precision, creativity, and general brain power. It is very serious in tone, but is also host to some tongue-in-cheek humor. My favorite such example is the reoccurance of a rubber ducky throughout the series. The duck even makes an appearance in the movie (when I saw it, I giggled like an idiot). 47 is the reason I had a rubber duckie on display in my room throughout college.
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In celebration of column 47
I have been thinking about other things lately, too. Hear me out. I don’t like Facebook. I have Facebook; but I don’t use Facebook. I have only kept a Facebook because it seemed ‘selfish’ of me to delete my Facebook. It is, as you know, the place that people I don’t get to talk to on a regular basis would check up on me and my life. It is how they would connect with me. The thing is, I DON’T USE Facebook. So, there isn’t REALLY a connection there. There are no updates about me and my life. I don’t see them or what’s new in theirs either. What’s worse is that it gives the illusion of a connection. It allows relationships to be held idly. You don’t have to put any work into being someone’s Facebook friend. You don’t have to maintain the friendship at all… they are just there. They are on Facebook. This is BAD. This not the way friendships were meant to be. Social media should AUGMENT social lives, but, for some people, it has almost completely replaced them. Being on Facebook, I get invited to dozens of events on any given month (not to brag). Out of these dozens of events, there’s maybe MAYBE 2 that I’m actually interested in. There are a few problems here: People assume that I’ve seen the invite to “whatever”, so they don’t tell me about “whatever”. Then when I find out and don’t go, people say “well it was on Facebook”. The second problem is this - even if I WAS on Facebook, I had become sign-blind to events. I saw so many of them, I started only seeing them as “events” instead of seeing what they actually were. The thing would say “You have 4 events” and I would go “Cool, I need to delete these 4 things to make that red number go away”. Then I would delete them. Without even looking. If I got, say, ONE or TWO event invites a month, I’d probably have paid more attention… but that’s not the case. I was getting friendship spammed. Then I realized, that’s what Facebook has become to me. Spam. It’s a hollowed-out husk of the fun thing it used to be years ago. It’s become an obligation. 80% of the posts on Facebook I don’t care about because I’m friends with every person I’ve ever met and they post everything they’ve ever done. My 7th grade teacher ate half a sandwich and dropped the other half on the floor! Awesome! It is for those reasons (and many others that I didn’t get into to save you all time), that I have decided to delete my Facebook account. It’s been hanging on like by a dead, lifeless thread for quite some time now. But I’m done with it. I’m also going to dial waaaay down the amount of my time that I dedicate to Reddit. I have free time now that I don’t have homework. I need to find things to do with it that are more conducive to a full life.
Top 5: Alternative sources for the things Facebook is supposed to provide
- Private investigators (I’m making a joke about Facebook creeping, if that’s not obvious)
- Google+ (if you call me hypocritical for thinking Google+ is okay but Facebook isn’t, I’ll retort with an hour long argument that you may or may not agree with… so let’s just… let’s not go there).
- Having a blog.
- Phone calls, emails, text messages, various chat protocols.
- Actually going to see and talk with people.
Quote:
“And yes, if we talk more, we will probably talk more” Joe