dNLd

I walked past my television the other night, and there was a weird thing displayed on the cable box. I realized it was downloading something. That's fine. Back to sleep.

Yesterday I turn on the TV, and my guide has an all new interface. Well, technically, it's the same interface, but they changed the graphics. I don't like it.

It's like when they changed Facebook on me again last week. I'm in the minority camp in support of that one, but I haven't yet acclimated to it. Facebook finds itself in a strange situation where it has become, very rapidly, an integral part of an entire generation's (and then some) daily social activities. I'm sure a good portion of Facebook users check the site multiple times a day, sometimes without even thinking. It's almost second nature. So, when a change is made on the scale of the recent Twitterizing of Facebook, people take it personally. It's like you painted their bedroom a color of your own choosing while they were at work. And then the 'NEW FACEBOOK FUCKING SUCKS' groups pop-up, and everyone's status messages are all aflame with faux-but-not-so-faux outrage. People want the old feed back. Which is funny, because if you'll recall, there was the same kind of WHAT IS THIS NEW FUCKING BULLSHIT reaction when they made that change as well.

I remember that. When they added the 'feed' thing to the home screen, and all of a sudden you saw what everyone else was up to. Nobody liked it. I didn't like it. I didn't want to happen upon pictures of my ex-girlfriend drunk at some party making out with dudes, or catch douchebag guys posting on my ex-girlfriend's wall, or being reminded in any way that my ex-girlfriend was alive and doing anything other than hating herself for breaking up with me. Back in the halcyon days of my freshman year, the equivalent was compulsively checking your ex's away message on AIM. Back then, AIM was Facebook, basically. But now Facebook was putting that shit in your face. It may seem a small difference, but it was a big change.

But then I realized something after reading an interview with Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook wouldn't work without the feed. Before that change, the only way you knew what someone was up to would be to actively check out their profile page. You didn't check everyone's page every time you visited, nor would you want to. This made Facebook something only slightly more than a dynamically updated yearbook. The addition of the feed turned Facebook into a real social tool, poised to become an integral part of social interaction for the netgen. ('Netgen'--did I just make that up? Either way, it's a neologism, something I've been meaning to write a post about on its own.)

Anyway, the point is, I'm not totally on board with the new, Twittery Facebook. I had just perfected the art of the Josh is... status message, even though they no longer required the 'is' and even now you can still type in the 'is', but you're forcing it. But I'll get used to it, and everyone else will, and it's not your website, there's a reason for the change, if it really sucks that bad they'll change it to something else, so shut the fuck up.

This thing with my cable box turned into a weird Facebook rant. Getting back to that for a second: not only did the GUI change, but I swear to god that some of my old DVR'd recordings that I had deleted came back. Is that possible? Does that mean that there's some kind of record and/or back-up of my box's hard disk? What the fuck.