Zuckonit - FaceBook's Ten Deadly Sins.

I was never as interested in FaceBook as I could've been until I saw The Social Network, which was amazing. I hate that some people didn't go see it because it was "a movie about FaceBook" and must therefore be as intellectually stimulating as John Tucker Must Die or I Love You Beth Cooper. Instead it was a mature story of greed, betrayal, friendship and business. Since then, I've held a strong respect for FaceBook, Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin.


So I love FaceBook. I love what it took for it to be made - all the insanity, the backstabbing, the three-day stretches in front of computers without sleep and the verbal contracts. God bless 'em. Having said that, besides nearly taking the place of casual e-mail and reuniting me with some favorite long-lost buddies, FaceBook is not without its unfortunate by-products.

What killed the Yahoo! chatrooms for me was the gradual and overwhelming rise of sexbots. In high school I'd get in a room to see if anyone wanted to talk about music and get barraged with "hi im a lonely 18yo in your area wanna cyber?" Of course the same thing happened to Yahoo! Messenger. MySpace soon followed suit, with fake profiles hosting spyware. FaceBook hasn't been completely aped yet, but the real viruses are spreading amongst its users, not malware.

1) Life: You're Doing it Wrong. I find myself fighting the urge to block my profile from old college buddies as I'm told more and more often, through their reposting of various links to opinion articles, how much of an awful person I am. In the last six months alone, no fewer than three of my friends have indirectly told me what a terrible mother my wife is because we had to switch to formula, and because we believe that the baby should sleep in a crib in her own room instead of in our bed with us...and that no father in America is a stay-at-home dad, nor do they spend time with their children.

This last one raises my point. A close family friend and excellent mother posted an article the day before Father's Day called "A Father's Day Wish: Dads, Wake the Hell Up!" which detailed, for no fewer than 1,500 words, the columnist's experience being the only father he knew who did more with his kids than the occasional ride to school. As a stay-at-home father who is frequently insulted for "making my wife work" and "doing nothing at home all day," since evidently raising a baby requires no effort, patience or time, I found "Wake the Hell Up" hard to ignore.

2) Hashtagging and Using Unfamiliar Acronyms. It used to be people could express their short opinions on FaceBook without rerouting them through Twitter and categorizing them with the pound sign at the end. My friend Jasen is worse than anyone about this. "Wow, nice fumble, Favre. #NFL #footballfail #superbowl" I don't know if hashtagging is like that fitness program where you earn points by walking and work towards rewards, or if it's just to make certain popular topics "trend" on Twitter, but I wish it could be kept off my news feed.

The other one in the same category is this regression in internet acronyms. I was sad that L died out for "Laugh," and that only "LOL" remained for "Laugh Out Loud," because now I worry my friends are really laughing that much. Greg Giraldo (rip) had a bit where he was making fun of Tweets and how insane people are if they're really laughing out loud that much. "It's like, 'in line at the supermarket HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!' What the fuck?!"

While we're talking about LOL, let's talk about LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!!!!! What in the hell happened here? I'm assuming the idea is to replicate laughing, like when people say "hahahahaha" and actually intend that they're saying "ha ha ha ha ha," with individual "ha"s, but if LOL is supposed to mean "laugh out loud," the only thing LOLOLOL means is "laugh out loud out loud out loud" or "laugh out laugh out laugh out loud," which sounds more like a sample in a drum and bass song than anything else. It's like "LMFAO," which meant "Laugh My Fucking Ass Off," devolving into "LMFAOOOOOOOO" which I can only assume means "Laugh My Fucking Ass Off Off Off Off Off..." Nor do I understand all these new acronyms that are popping up. It took me forever to realize that "TBH" meant "To Be Honest," and I was sad that /facepalm replaced BHIH (or "Buries Head in Hands"), but what can you do? I just gave up when I started seeing SMH and SMDH. I have no clue what they mean, and I hope I never do. Also WTAF.

3) Farm/Fish/Cafe/Mafiaville. Holy shit do I wish I'd invented Farmville. Games with no ending, with the exception of classics like Asteroids, remind me of soap operas. In the Farm/Fish/Cafe worlds, you just keep leveling up your little virtual zen garden of middle-class wage earning, and it just keeps going. I'm very glad that my family members' notifications have stopped showing up on my FaceBook, and in turn I've synced my account to my PlayStation Network account so I can return the favor and spam my friends and family with the fact that I just Platinumed Heavy Rain.

4) Dartboard Photo Tagging. I started to notice a year or two ago that people were downloading pictures on the internet of little 4x5 sets of text blocks. They'd say things like "Nerdy" and "Cute" and "Ambitious" and "Crazy" and the person would upload them to his/her profile and then tag 20 people, one per block, as they felt applicable. So I'd log into my account and see "____ ______ tagged you in a photo!" and I'd click the link and have to hover my mouse over 15 tags before finding out that one of my cousins thinks I'm smart. Then I'd get notified every time one of these 20 people commented on the photo, which (to return to an Office reference) is like being Wuphf'ed. Every 30 seconds I'd get a hit on my notifications that some teen I didn't know had commented on a photo I was in, and continually see a barrage of "LOL" and "WTF, you're so crazy! LOL!"

5) Fishbait Drama Club. You know this one. "God. Fuck My Life. I swear, I just can't take it anymore, that stupid people have to talk shit." Then there is at least one comment. "Oh, sweetie, what's wrong? Don't worry about the drama; you're amazing and you know it!" Yeah. I don't understand the circumlocution of making a vague distressed statement just so one's friends will ask one what's wrong, then you say what. I'd like it if my friends - mostly younger friends - would just update with, "Work sucks today; catching lots of attitude from co-workers" or something as direct instead of saying "Screw this," so some poor bastard has to ask what happened, then get in a whole big hullabaloo of feigned sympathy for someone because they stubbed their toe. It's the social networking equivalent of Marilyn Manson posting videos on his website promoting Eat Me Drink Me of people blaming him for Columbine around the release of Holy Wood, or Lady Gaga performing in a wheelchair. If you need attention so badly, just say so.

6) The Fake One. Every list of things I've ever read akin to this article has to have at least one bullshit fake thing I've never heard of. So this is that one thing - and originally, this was "The Seven Evils of FaceBook," but I thought of two more, so don't think I've run out of points. Man, screw that thing. Screw that one thing that's so ridiculous it makes me mad. Since this is fake, I'd like to direct it at my Best Man, Frodo, since he never does anything irritating on FaceBook.

7) Idiotic Likes/Reposts. I could've split this into two, but I'm going to keep them as one so I can make up some length I squandered on #2. When I see a "Repost this if you or someone you know has suffered from cancer/rape/abuse/poverty/deportation/etc, because 97% of people won't repost this and if you believe that cancer/rape/abuse/poverty/deportation/etc is terrible, you'll repost this." It reminds me of Andrew Dice Clay's thoughts about the red ribbon for AIDS. "Wearing the red ribbon for AIDS don't help nobody except the guy who owns the red ribbon factory." This applies the same for "Repost this if you're a true Christian" or "if you've never beaten your spouse" or whatever. The little parodies of it, like "Repost if you know someone who's ever been eaten by dragons," were cute the first month but now chap my caboose as much as the originals.

Neighboring this are all the terrible pages that people "Like." My list of likes on FaceBook is about 6 things long, and are devoted to people I really think need/deserve my free advertising: 12 Rounds (band, not movie), Eli's Dirty Jokes, Jhonen Vasquez, E.G. Gauger, Milagres, ACT, Defective Geeks, The Ocean Collective and jonny Lupsha (my writing page, not me). I own about 3,000 albums and 100 blu-rays (and 300 dvd's), but are people really not going to be aware of The Dark Knight without my support?

Anyway, nobody needs to be as restrictive as I do, because if you really aim to voice your support for the music, movies, tv, books you love (and the people who make them), God bless. What I don't get is when I log in and see "___ _____ likes 'That Moment When You See Someone and Go 'Uhhhh...' LOL!'" or "___ _____ likes ''Why Are You Staring At Me?' 'Because ur ugly LOL'' and 314 other pages." I imagine these people's news feeds are just incessant tickers of bullshit from their random pages. This is the real reason kids are social networking 6 hours a day; they're just trying to get caught up and sort through their own mess.

8) Checking In with Foursquare. Even if my wife had Foursquare, I'd make fun of her about it. Loudly. My friend Patrick works in Tysons Corner, so it's fun that he checks in at La Sandia and Gordon Biersch and I get to tell him how much I hate him since they're 130 miles from here. Failing that, I see no reason on Earth for Foursquare. No matter how much I love you, I don't care that you just got to Friendly's, or are grocery shopping at Wal-Mart, and I can only assume it's leading to a hike in local burglaries. "Oh, Kayla's at the movies seeing the 2.5-hour Harry Potter finale? Time to steal that XBox."

9) Ambiguously Song Lyrics. I regularly find myself halfway through a status update that is otherwise terrifying, only to realize it's some kind of song quote. "I killed my mother with a gun." Sweet Jesus! "...Now me and my Smith and Wesson are on the run." ...Oh. Please stop scaring me. Just put 'em in quotes.

10) The Open Letter to Random People or Organizations. Ah, the kicker. I have to end with this because it's the worst - and most frequently recurring - of all my FaceBook Pet Peeves. Nothing drives me up a wall more than "Dear Guy in Line in Front of Me at Wal-Mart: Please get off your cell phone. kthxbi." There are so many things wrong with that status update, I don't know where to start. From top to bottom: a) The Guy in Line in Front of You at Wal-Mart is not your friend on FaceBook, so he'll never read your little rant-and-rave column Tweet-length horse puckey. b) Just start a page with that status update and have people "like" it since you obviously learned the "Dear Random Person" trick from someone. c) You're updating (via FB for Android or FB for iPhone) for someone to get off his/her phone? Really? d) If you had the brass to ask the guy to get off his phone in real life (or IRL if you prefer the acronyms), you may end up on ABC's What Would You Do? and get some of that attention you're looking for. But you don't. e) Nothing says "I think I'm better than you" than "kthxbi," which - for those lucky enough not to have heard it - loosely translates to "Ok, thanks, buh-bye." Sadly, if one's main form of stress ventilation is rooted in mobile FaceBooking, which is essentially the new version of pushing a pen real hard in a diary (Composition Book wuuut? LOLOLOLOL), one mustn't believe in his/her own superiority.

Of course there are a lot of variations. "Dear Republicans - You're insane." "Dear life - please stop sucking." My wife and I laughed halfway to buying our Harry Potter tickets tonight (seeing HP & The Deathly Hallows pt. 2 at Regal Cinemas 20, Commonwealth Center Pkwy Midlothian VA with 239 others) when we were talking about the angsty anonymous letter and she came up with "Dear Upstairs Neighbors - You don't need to stomp around on the floor so hard at 3 a.m.."

If Mark Zuckerberg can find a way to stop these 10 (well, 9) flies from getting in my ointment, I'd probably vote for him for #president. Of course he'd have to supplement my friends list to compensate for my buds who will be offended by this and defriend me immediately, but I have faith in the guy - he invented FaceBook, for Christ's sake.

Spoiler Alert.

This longform thought contains plot details that could dampen your experience with The Sixth Sense, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. If you haven't seen any of those (or read the latter two books), stop here.

My first encounter with "spoilers" - or details that could ruin someone's enjoyment of a book, film, video game and so on - was in 2002. I'd read on a film website that The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers would open with Gandalf the Grey fighting the Balrog he encountered in the mines in Fellowship of the Ring. Excited, I started my next shift at Starbucks and told my shift manager about it.

And he looked at me like he wanted to punch me in the face.

It turns out he was the type to run out of the movie theater when a preview for a movie he wanted to see came on. He told me never to talk to him again about movies.

Later that year, my friend Walt told me he never saw Fight Club because someone had ruined the ending for him. This astonished me. It's not as though someone had told him "Oh, in the end of (insert romantic comedy here), the guy gets the girl and they live happily ever after." It was a real shocker. Fight Club, Fincher's finale of hat-trick 1990's surprise-ending movies, had one of the craziest climaxes of any film I'd seen up until that point. His previous dark mysteries, The Game and Seven, were just as jaw-dropping when their end credits rolled, and at the top of a short list of movies I wish I could see again for the first time - along with The Usual Suspects and The Prestige, Christopher Nolan's 1900s-based suspense drama about rivaling magicians.

I remember in 2005 going with an ex-girlfriend to the midnight release of the sixth Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Information had leaked the day before that a main character would be killed in the book. Further, what page the murder would appear. Even further, this information had been broadcast across major news networks the entire day. So we get to the bookstore hours early and I'm with a girl in her mid-20s and we're surrounded by teenagers dressed as residents of Gryffindor and Slytherin, a head shorter than us. Midnight rolls around and everyone gets their copies of the book. Half the readers, ex included, sit down on the floor to start reading, while I look around pretending to admire the front window setups in various stores in the mall. Then I notice that out of the camped bookworms, many of them - again, ex included - have decided to turn to the page where _______ is killed by _______ and just read that page repeatedly...which seemed strange.

There was an episode of The Office in which Steve Carell referenced The Sixth Sense, and Dwight (Rainn Wilson) nods knowingly and says "I see dead people," one of the most recognizable movie quotes of the 1990s. As soon as he says it, Steve Carell scoffs and says "Thanks spoiler alert!" and tries to divert the cameraman's attention away from Dwight, who then blurts out "He was dead the whole time!" What makes it funny is that probably everyone watching The Office has seen The Sixth Sense, especially considering it came out 10 years before the episode in question.

With next July's release of the third Christopher Nolan / Christian Bale Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, the anticipation has reached a fever pitch. I thought long and hard about what to look at and avoid and came to the decision that the details and media released on purpose will suit me just fine, so I've already downloaded the teaser poster (which is amazing) and looked at the picture of Tom Hardy as Bane that was released a month or two ago. When we go see the last Harry Potter movie this weekend, I won't run out of the theater when the teaser comes on. However, I'm avoiding the frequent headlines on movie sites like "How Badly Will Bane Hurt Batman? Info Leak!" I shouldn't have watched the fan-filmed youtube clip of one take being filmed of one shot outside a building with Christian Bale and another actor.

Ok, that's enough. Now for The Seven Evils of FaceBook.