Category: Everything Else

The absolute trash fire that is Facebook

I remember first hearing about Facebook. I was in secondary school at the time. I think at that time it was still exclusive – you could only create an account if you were at a certain educational institution.

Making it exclusive in that way certainly worked to make the site enticing. When finally we could create accounts, me and everyone I knew did so. We’d all already had accounts on Bebo and MySpace, of course – a story almost every millennial will tell you – but that’d never really gone anywhere.

Facebook was so different in the early years. It seems bizarre, looking back to 2009-2010, that it did mostly consist of talking – in a very indirect way – with your friends – that was mostly who and what you saw on there. And it was such a simple website too. (At least, that’s how I remember it. I think there were groups and direct messages at the time, but for the most part what you saw when you went to the site was your ‘wall’.)

Having a Facebook account wasn’t an essential part of life at the time, but nor was it an irritant.

Jump forwards in time to now. My goodness is Facebook an absolute trash fire now. The site is barely useable. I mean that in two senses – firstly in the sense that the site breaks – A LOT – and secondly in the sense that the site is filled with a blistering concoction of useless, unrelated, and inconvenient features.

I mean, let me go to the main page (I can’t remember what they’re calling it nowadays – the ‘news feed’? – I don’t know). I am immediately presented with about a thousand different things, absolutely none of which I want. The first thing I see is a post from a page that I don’t follow and have never followed and which none of my friends are following. The reason I don’t follow it is because I’m not interested in it and this post is shit. This post is the most generic piece of ‘content’ I’ve ever seen – derivative, banal – it’s not even formatted correctly. Why are you pushing this shit, Facebook?

I scroll down, and the next thing I see is – oh – another post from a page I don’t follow – no, wait – it’s from a group I’m not in. For some reason Facebook has both ‘pages’ and ‘groups’, even though they seem to do the exact same fucking things. This utterly demented post is showing me what is quite obviously an American McMansion, but describing it as some kind of architectural gem. What the fuck is this, Facebook? Is this rage-bait? Are you showing this to people because you know they’ll comment about how ugly the house is? Why are you even showing me this in the first place – neither I nor any of my friends are in this Facebook group, and I have never shown any interest in being in this group.

I scroll down again. What’s next? Oh, it’s some shorts videos. Fantastic, Facebook – because I haven’t been bombarded with those enough from every other website. One of the videos is about cutting a fish. Look, one of those is interesting, Facebook – two is excessive. Another seems to be about making boiled sweets. Again, Facebook, one is interesting, two is excessive.

The next item? Another post from a page I don’t follow. The one after that? An advert from a clothing brand. And it goes on, and on, and on. More posts from things I don’t follow; more shorts videos (or whatever stupid name they call them on Facebook); more covert adverts.

And what if I divert my gaze away from the endless diarrhœa? On the left there is a list of … things? ‘Memories’ is one of them. I’ve never clicked that. I don’t need to, Facebook, I have memories in my head. ‘Saved’ – I’ve never clicked that, either – I don’t think I’ve ever ‘saved’ anything on here. ‘Video’ – what even is that? All video? Or just short videos? If I want videos, Facebook, I’ll go to YouTube. Obviously. ‘Feeds’ – isn’t that what I’m already on, Facebook? If I click on ‘See More’, the list becomes even more bewildering. ‘Climate Science Centre’ – why the fuck does Facebook have a ‘Climate Science Centre’? What even is that? ‘Meta Quest 3S’ – I don’t know what that is, Facebook – why is it there? ‘Ray-Ban Meta’. What?! I just – I don’t even know what I’m looking at, and why is any of this stuff here? Why is any of this stuff considered to be important enough to have on the main page?

Below all of that is a list of ‘shortcuts’ – possibly the only useful thing on the page. On the opposite side is a list of ‘contacts’ – don’t you mean my actual friends, Facebook? Or have we given up on that word? It would be nice if the list were ordered in a way that wasn’t entirely random. There’s also a message button in the top right – with a lightning bolt through it. It’s not entirely clear how this is different from the list of contacts – they seem to do the same things.

That’s just the main page. The experience of it is like pouring battery acid in my eyes and then going on a guided tour of the Museum of Fresh Turds – with a tactile exhibit. What is any of this for, Facebook? Why would I want any of this? WHO is it for?! Is anyone actually using this?

You might be wondering, at this point, why I still have a Facebook account if I hate the site so much. I suppose it’s just out of the belief that, if I delete my account, it would be easier for a scammer to impersonate me on the site. I mean, that’s it – that’s why. How low Facebook has fallen for that to be the only reason left to keep an account on there open.

Sometimes I think that another reason to keep it open is so that I can contact old friends on there should I need to. But actually I think most of my friends on there have long since stopped using Facebook altogether.

(I also keep my Facebook account so that I can promote various things I do – books and videos and the like – on there. But I’ve never been very good at this – in large part because the site is so ungainly to use.)

I won’t go through every page of the website and examine all the ways in which it is shit – suffice to say that every other page of the site is filled with problems too. Over the years, I’ve tried using Facebook ads for various things. I have never persisted with them for very long – in large part because the ads manager system was just completely broken – I honestly don’t know how anyone used it. Pages would fail to load; links would lead in loops; nothing was where you’d expect it to be. This was a few years ago, but I honestly don’t know how Facebook has ever managed to make any money with such a broken ads platform.

I think that Facebook has suffered from a problem that many technology companies suffer from after a time. You see, everyone who works at a technology company wants to put their mark on the technology they create. They want to have their feature – the thing that they added – it was their idea or they implemented it. It’s a status thing – they can forever boast about how they were the person who added that thing to the technology. The result is, over time, such pieces of technology inflate with features that are not useful or necessary. Facebook reeks of this. Elon Musk takes plenty of flak for wanting to make Twitter some kind of ‘everything app’, but Facebook has already been trying to do this for years, it seems.

Oh you know what, to finish, I’ll roast another part of the site. Managing a Facebook page is an absolute fucking nightmare. Every time I try to do anything for my ‘Benjamin T. Milnes’ page on Facebook, I just give up. I am just presented with a bewildering selection of crap that I don’t want.

When I go to my page, I’m asked a question: ‘How healthy is your Page?’. I don’t care Facebook. Not least because one of the options in this box is to ‘Link your WhatsApp account’. Are you insane, Facebook? Why would I want to do that?!

There’s a link that will take me to my ‘Professional dashboard’, whatever that is. Let’s see. Ah, here’s a new page – never seen this one before (clearly the masterpiece of another demented ‘product manager’ at Facebook). The first box has the heading ‘Weekly challenges’. No other information is presented with it – just a progress bar saying ‘0%’. Fucking marvellous, Facebook.

On the left there are some options. Apparently there’s an ‘Inspiration hub’ – whatever the fuck that is. I can ‘Earn achievements for creating reels’. Oh really, Facebook? What are these ‘achievements’ you speak of? Unless it’s money, I don’t really give a shit. Under ‘Tools to try’, I can click ‘Stars’. Oh wow, Facebook, ‘Stars’?! How magical! How special!

I haven’t the faintest idea what this shit is, and I don’t care, but let’s click on it anyway. Clicking on it takes me to a page titled ‘Monetisation’ – right, Facebook, because it was obvious that that’s where the link would lead. I’m presented with a ‘Status’, where I’m told that I have ‘No monetisation breaches’. Well fan-bloody-tastic, Facebook.

Under that is, again, ‘Tools to try’, where it says ‘Stars’ again. This was the wrong page to take me to, Facebook – make your links work properly, you absolute morons. Here, at least, there is a brief description of what ‘Stars’ are. They are a kind of pretend currency that Facebook has made up. In a million years, Facebook, I would never have guessed that that’s what they were.

And by this point, I’m completely lost. I could not tell you what part of the Facebook website I have found myself on.

Meanwhile, I can’t even remember the last time I saw a post from an actual friend on this site.

The Rites of December

At the beginning of every year, I write a big list of the things I want to do that year. I’ve done this for the last few years now, and it’s a great way of keeping those things at the front of your mind throughout the year – I look back at it all the time.

Note that it is not a to-do list. These are not things that I have to do by the end of the year, and they don’t necessarily roll over into the next year if I don’t do them. It is simply a list of things I want to do – an intention list. (It’s a concept I want to explain more in another post or video.)

Inevitably, there are some things on the list each year that I don’t get round to – I’m just focusing on other things, and they get pushed to the back of the queue. What I want to do this year – and in subsequent years – is to make December the month of doing things that I haven’t gotten round to all year. All those things on the list for the year that I haven’t done yet I want to do in December.

Of course, there’s a good chance I won’t be able to do all of them. Some of them are quite big projects – far too much to do in one twelfth of the year – but that’s fine. To complement my New Year’s Day Tradition, and to give the year a sense of completion, for me, December is about finishing things off.

New Term: Autolobotomite

‘Lobotomite’ is a great word. It refers to someone who is brainless, stupid – as though they have been lobotomised. It’s a great insult that I like to use to refer to Hollywood writers.

We are living through the Great Age of Stupidity, and the demand for insults for stupid people greatly exceeds the supply. Much of the idiocy we see in the world today seems to be self-inflicted – people who have achieved great antisagacity (there’s another new word) by choosing to believe quite obvious nonsense, by refusing debate and discussion, and by rejecting anything that has even the slightest whiff of their enemy’s benodorous scent. There are people who seem to adore their own un-knowledge – and then they also resent anyone who criticises their own adoration of their un-knowledge. Instead of turtles all the way down, it’s just wilful stupidity supported by even more and stronger wilful stupidity.

For these people I can only use the term ‘autolobotomite’ – a person whose intellectual injuries are self-inflicted – a person whose lack of intelligence or knowledge is a result of their own beliefs.

Also, ‘antisagacity’ = ‘the opposite of sagacity’, and ‘benodorous’ = ‘nice-smelling’ – i.e., the opposite of ‘malodorous’.

Ricocheting between iconic and farcical – Red, White, & Royal Blue Review

I had no idea about this film when it was actually released – didn’t know it existed. I’ve only found out about it from the images and GIFs shared prolifically on social media in the months since its release. This suggests a somewhat underfunded marketing operation – given that I am probably the film’s target audience (gay, a royalist, and a big comedy fan).

I’ve been meaning to watch this film for the last few weeks, and now that I have (or am – I’ve actually started writing this with about ten minutes of the film left to go), I find the experience is utterly bizarre. This film violently ricochets between moments that could be iconic, and moments of such bad dialogue, such cultural ignorance, such TV-obsessed Californian idiocy that I almost stopped watching then and there.

The flaws in this film appear right from the outset in the form of utterly dreadful dialogue. And it’s all of the usual stuff we tend to see in bad dialogue: sentences that no real human would ever say, characters expositing their own psycho-analysis as the first line of a conversation, the writers using the actors as conduits for their Twitter-informed political beliefs, and gross TikTok slang spoken unironically as though it won’t horribly date the film in just six months. The most egregious example of that last one is Rachel Hilson’s character (whose name I couldn’t even guess) saying at 1 minute 37 seconds into the film ‘you’ve been yucking my yum all day’ – a phrase so unpleasant I think it could actually give someone IBS.

The bad dialogue appears right throughout the film, but about half the time it is compensated for by the skill of the actors. I have long said that a great actor can take even the worst-written dialogue and make it sound amazing (although perhaps sometimes only with a few spontaneous edits to it). In this regard, Nicholas Galitzine (who plays Prince Henry) and Rachel Hilson shine. (Hilson has had many years of experience fighting with unwieldy dialogue on Love, Victor – a show that is the unproclaimed king of unnatural dialogue.)

In fact, this is a film carried by its core cast, not by its writing. In this regard it is similar to Heartstopper, Love, Victor, and Love, Simon. (Why do so many recent gay romance films and television shows have this problem?) This film is mainly carried by the charisma of its two leads: Nicholas Galitzine and Taylor Zakhar Perez – with the former giving a really stand-out performance. Of course, this is the main requirement for a romance film or show – the two leads must have chemistry. Everything else can be a disaster, but as long as the two leads are convincing, the story will still be enjoyable. (I’ve said this of Heartstopper too – a disastrous, wholly unconvincing plot, but wholly convincing leads.)

The charisma of the leads is enough to keep me watching (indeed, glued to the screen for their scenes together), but it isn’t enough to stop me recoiling in horror every two minutes at everything else. The film has a multitude of basic errors in how British royalty works that betray a distinctly American misunderstanding of the concept. Without wishing to insult my American friends, it’s not that Americans can’t understand royalty, it’s that there seems to be something about American culture that puts them at a unique disadvantage when it comes to understanding it – both the traditions of it and the reasoning behind it. Americans seem to have a much greater hill to climb in order to understand it, and they often stop half-way up. This film gives the strong impression that the writers have learned most of what they know about British royalty from other films and television dramas, rather than from watching actual royal events or even just reading about it – actually being interested in it. It is a parody of royalty – more alike to the show The Windsors than it is to the real thing. The royal family and their assistants are portrayed as stuck-up fuddy-duddies whose social attitudes and beliefs are still Victorian. They are the epitome of the ultra-conservative arch-nemesis that I think nowadays might only exist in the minds of internet commentators. The film is also laced with condescension – an attitude of ‘Oh you silly Brits with your royalty! The American way is much better! You should be like us!’. It’s an insular attitude that reveals someone as having not thought about the subject for very long.

As I say, though, this film veers wildly between moments dominated by these errors and moments that could have made this film great. The casting of Stephen Fry as the fictional King James III was inspired – he should play kings more often. Unfortunately, his performance was ruined almost immediately by overly-verbose dialogue that was contradictory from one line to the next. His character exists not as a person with a personality, but simply as a megaphone for the misapprehensions of the writers. The character’s best moments are when he’s not speaking.

It’s a shame – this film could have been great – iconic. Its basic structure is sound – all of the things that take it down are things that could have been fixed on the day of filming with just a few seconds of thought.

I don’t often do star ratings, but I would give this film a 5 out of 10.

New Project: A Dictionary of British Place Names

I have started a new project today. In short, it is a small web-app giving information on the etymology of British place names. I’ve made it a sub-site of my main website – you can view it here: http://benjamintmilnes.com/dictionary-of-british-place-names/#/.

I decided to do this project quite spontaneously this morning. The idea’s been floating around in my head for a few days or so. I’m normally quite reluctant to start new projects of this kind nowadays – I have a lot of projects – too many, really – and each new project takes time away from the others. However, this project is quite valuable for the world-building for On The Subject Of Trolls, and it is relatively simple to do, so I decided to start it.

Amazingly, I’ve managed to get it to a ‘finished’ state in just a few hours. Now, when I say ‘finished’ here, I don’t necessarily mean absolutely complete in all ways. I find it useful to distinguish between different kinds of ‘finished’. A part of this project is actually researching and writing out the etymology for all or lots of British place names. (I may not do absolutely all British place names – I may only do a few hundred or a few thousand in total.) This is something that is very difficult to do all in one go – this is something that’s better to do gradually over time, so I don’t include this in what I mean by ‘finished’. Similarly, with any web-app, there are often hundreds of features that you could program into it – I don’t include these in ‘finished’ either. With projects like this, I generally consider them finished when I have something that I can put online, that works (even if it only has a limited number of features), that looks polished, and that contains well-formed data (even if it’s only a small amount of data). In the case of this project, I have managed to create 11 data files for place names, create the compiler (which takes those data files and outputs a JSON file that the web-app effectively uses as its database), and create a polished front-end.

So the web-app is now online and available. It describes the etymology of various British place names. In future you will be able to search for place names that have a particular suffix or that have a particular element in them. There are other fun features that it could have too – like rendering a map of Britain using the names that places had in a given century. It only contains a few entries so far, but I will add to that over time.

This is a very fun project to do. I have liked etymology for a long time – I can’t remember when it was that I started looking things up on etymonline.com several times a day – probably about seven or eight years ago – but it has been a fascination of mine for a long time. Place names is an area of etymology that is somewhat lacking online – it’s fun being able to create something new that’s useful.

A New Year’s Day Tradition

Over the last five years or so I have gradually developed a number of my own traditions around Yule and the new year. One of these is that on New Year’s Day I try to do lots of the activities that I want to do throughout the year. If I want to do lots of writing that year, then I do some writing on New Year’s Day. If I want to make lots of videos for my YouTube channel that year, then I do something related to making videos on New Year’s Day (it doesn’t have to be actually recording a video – I could just do something that’s useful generally, like learning more about how to light videos).

Now this isn’t about New Year’s resolutions – I don’t do New Year’s resolutions (because I think if a resolution is worth making then it’s worth making at whatever time of year you happen to think about it). This tradition isn’t about getting a head-start on New Year’s resolutions. Instead it’s just about having a good start to the year. If I want to do lots of writing in a given year, then if I do lots of writing on the first day of the year, by the end of the first day the year’s going very well – 100% of it was spent doing the things that I wanted to do.

This tradition is about making the first day of the year the example day for the rest of the year. If all the days can be like the first day, then it will be a good year. My aim on this New Year’s Day is to do a lot of reading, and maybe go through a lot of my old writing notes and scan in anything that only exists in paper form.