I’m back in Brooklyn, but I left both my DVD of Harry Potter 1 and my Circle of Friends paperback with Harold in Chapel Hill. At the time, I thought it was symbolic of my commitment to the relationship, in spite of the stupid distance thing. But now all my favorite coping mechanisms are in North Carolina! What am I going to do?
Relationships are very hard.
So Facebook has started making relationship pages for users in relationships. This is a typical Facebook move, because it magically turned up, there’s no way to opt-out, and there’s already the predictable backlash of privacy concerns. By now we all know that the best way to keep information private is NOT by sharing it on Facebook, right? Because I was writing about Facebook introducing new features that use shared users’ info in unexpected ways back in 2006.
The Facebook relationship page falls short … for two reasons. First, the Facebook relationship page is public, although why anyone wants to view it is still beyond me, and second, users can’t curate the content in any way, whether by highlighting wedding photos or hiding that lame post about losing one’s cellphone. This creates a generic, automatic page, listing the movies both parties mutually enjoy, and all the links they’ve tagged each other in. Oh, and you can’t turn off your relationship page.
Who’s going to be even a little bit interested in looking at a relationship page? The couple probably knows more shared favorite movies than happen to be mutually listed on Facebook, and probably has better photos, too. I can’t imagine that anyone outside the relationship would care.
Perhaps the point is to encourage users to add more likes, adding their shared movies, books, and interests, to fill out a bare relationship page. Facebook adverts are big business, and the more information a user shares, the better advertisers can target their ads. With one’s age, gender, location, relationship status, employer, and all of one’s hobbies listed, Facebook is a data mine for behavior patterns, shopping trends, and targeted ads. Could the purpose behind Facebook’s relationship pages be not a benefit for users in relationships, but a benefit for advertisers interested in better targeted ads?
Via Facebook’s New Relationship Pages – Tapscape
I haven’t actually updated my relationship status, and I get a lot of enjoyment from the goofy dating adverts that are sent to single women of a certain age.
(Hmm… I also got one from a dating psychic promising to get my ex back in a certain number of days, but I can’t seem to find that one.)
I’ve been avoiding the bridal bombardment that’s sure to come when I update my relationship status to engaged (Whoa, I am getting married!). Who wouldn’t take wacky adverts over the pre-wedding nerves I seem to get whenever I see puffy white dresses? And now, being engaged will also set up a relationship page, where anyone on Facebook (who is really, really desperately bored, and behind some kind of of reverse productivity firewall where they can only see Facebook, not the rest of the internet… ) could see a generated list of what my FB page has in common with my fiance’s. Harold’s pretty serious about his privacy and has been known to call shopper loyalty cards “some kind of Orwellian bullshit”. I wonder if I could Like that too.
People sure talk a lot in the south. I’ve been helping Harold get set up, which is kind of a special hell because my rage starts building when I have to wait for simple things. I’ve been trying to be less high strung New Yorker about it, but it’s very hard not to oh get out of the way, I can not take this any longer, I’ll just get behind the counter and ring myself up.
I got my hair cut today at the haircutting school in Chapel Hill. I love Hair Metal in Greenpoint the best, but it’s in Brooklyn like everything else awesome. (Wait, actually my best haircut and color ever was in Austin, Texas, in some place Allison found for me, but that’s even further away. Also, this is irrelevant information. Would you like to hear about the weather next, or shall we just get on with the blog post?) But cosmetology schools are awesome for inexpensive trims and coloring.
So my hairdresser just got engaged, right when Harold and I did. And her fiance proposed under a waterfall with a Princess Diana-style ring, and then we talked about friends’ engagement stories and upcoming wedding plans.
I feel strange whenever I say I’m getting married. Some of it is being, ahem, an older bride. My best girlfriend from college, Allison, got engaged nine years before I did, and that was after she’d finished school.
Some of it is that being with Harold means having good company, a peaceful, laughing and affectionate relationship, from which he encourages me to try, to take risks, to pursue interesting things, to explore. Not just lets me, actively encourages and supports, and it’s awesome. But I’m better at being snarky than being amazed.
And now there’s this post-election commentary on single women voting overwhelmingly for Obama, although married women voters skewed Republican. Even ignoring the rhetoric about us single slutty-sluts wanting our free birth control and legal abortions, it’s not hard to see some major ideological shifts between singles and wives. I don’t think I’m changing anything except liking Harold a whole lot, and having a lovely new ring, but what if I am?
Also, hey, I don’t know if you all know this, but once you get engaged, a lot of people suddenly have a lot of advice for your relationship.
I mentioned that to my hairdresser — the well-meaning nosiness part, not the aging bride bit, the crazy about Harold bit, or the part where I think too much about exit polls — and she agreed wholeheartedly. She says it goes double for young brides, and since she’s eighteen, she gets it more than a post-college bride like me.
I admitted that, actually, more of my friends are married than single, and the bridal advice usually comes from friends in very happy marriages who want me to have the same joy they’ve found, which is a charming hazard of being an over-thirty bride.
“Oh, you look really good for your thirties. My mom’s 36 and you look way younger than she does!”
I made the sound that someone who’s still adjusting to her peer group having babies might make as she realizes that she’s practically a grandmother. I’m still kind of adjusting to saying my fiance and actually meaning a man that I’m involved with and planning to marry, but I’m sure I’ll have a lot more chances to say it. Because people in the South really do a talk a lot.
This TapScape piece is about 519 Games’ Campaign Story and trends in how players choose to play in the election narrative. I’m don’t think I fully buy into the idea that the game trends predicted the actual election, even if Campaign Story did call it for Obama a few weeks ago, but the I think analytics raise interesting points about how we engage games and the roles we take on in games.
While it’s not hard to look at election news coverage and find pundits pointing to tiny blips in the statistics to prove pet theories, some interesting stats are revealed.
First, in Campaign Story, Conservative player-candidates are outspending their Liberal counterparts by near three times as much. Really interesting observation, although it’s hard to know whether this means that these players are offline conservatives as well, or that players indulging in escapist, game-playing fantasy, tend towards the narrative of a well-funded, high-rolling conservative campaign. After all, a scrappy, always-broke, grassroots campaign isn’t necessarily the escapist narrative players are looking for in a workday break.
This piece on Yahoo! is actual Election Day coverage, as much as noticing campaign signs in a battleground state in hotly contested election can really be considered reporting. I did get shooed away from taking further pictures at a polling place, which made me feel like a tough investigative journalist. Using my phone camera, with my readership spiraling upwards into the dozens…
It’s very odd to see Meg Stivison – Chapel Hill, NC as the byline. North Carolina didn’t actually support Obama (although the county in which I found these signs and wrote the story did), which isn’t entirely bad for me, because in a fit of election night nerves, I’d rashly promised to stop saying awful things about the state if it went blue. And you know how hard that would be?
Allison: [pullquote]Achilles Foot and Ankle Specialists. Is a real place that exists. [/pullquote]
Meg: Don’t cry to your mama, come see us.
“What are you thinking about?” Harold asks.
“I was thinking about Weaver Dairy Road,” I said “and what kind of animals you’d need to have weaving and a dairy, then I thought maybe it was a goat farm. You can have goat cheese and goat’s wool, right? Then I thought about llamas! And I thought how cool it would be if it were a llama farm! Llamas are cool. And then llamas would be the mascot of Chapel Hill, and instead of everyone wearing pastel blue with the dirty-foot icon, they would all wear llamas. And there would be a llama team mascot, just like in the Sims! Wouldn’t that be awesome?”
Sometimes, I should just say “Oh, nothing.”
Happy Story
Hello! Did you know that I am a nicer person when I do not begin the day with careless commuters creating near-death situations on the highway? Well, I am!
This is probably not terribly surprising to anyone, just part of trying to be more honest about what I hate in NC.
Sometimes when someone pushes to be first on the subway, I say “That’s right, you’re the only one with somewhere to be. The rest of us are just riding the 6 train for fun!” I don’t say that kind of thing in North Carolina because it makes Harold sad. And also I would be saying it ALL THE TIME.
Today I was driving to Harold’s office, and happened to check the rearview mirror. The driver behind me had both her hands up in the air, and she was singing. And snapping her fingers, and tossing her head. Her earrings were flashing and her hair was bouncing on her shoulders, and she was singing and dancing like you do when you hear the best song ever and no one is around. It was awesome.
I kept sneaking glances back, and grinning, until I had to turn off to pick up Harold.
Sad Epilogue
I wrote the previous story outside Harold’s office, because I had gotten there early (Yes, really. Me. Early. I know, right?), and he was actually getting out a bit later. He works by the American Tobacco Campus, and there’s not really a good place to hover, so I drove around to the Durham Performing Arts Center side, and parallel parked on a small street between two other cars in a two-hour space.
While I was sitting in the car, blogging in my notebook, staff from DPAC set up orange traffic cones to block off the beginning and end of the one-block street where I (and about a dozen other cars) was parked.
I seriously do not understand anything about the roads and this place.
Lucky is Twist-EdGames.com’s new story-driven title for Droid OS and XBox Live Indie Games, exploring the narrative of an individual character, and the perceptions and expectations of personal success for all of us. In this game, players take on the role of William, a handsome, smart and self-absorbed hedge fund manager. After a one-night stand, William’s world is unsettled, and he needs to discover and confront the reality of his life so far. Has he really earned and worked for his successes? Is he really just lucky? He tries to uncover what the people around him are hiding from him, and it seems he might be hiding something from himself, too.
The game story is by Guy Galer, the developer behind Twist-EdGames.com’s previous XBLIG titles like Bureau – Agent Kendall, and Colonies: Neociv, and writer Jerry Bonner. Bonner’s work has appeared in IGN, Electronic Gaming Monthly, Ars Technica, 1UP, GamePro, and enough other outlets to make aspiring games journalists cry. I’m just saying.
So far, the game is, uh, very much meant for the male gaze, but I’m thinking that’s because William is kind of a womanizer.
Via Explore Success and Luck with Twist-EdGames.com’s ‘Lucky’ | The Indie Game Magazine.
Harold’s new apartment is a massive, sunny space in a lovely building just off the main road in downtown Chapel Hill. It would be one of those doorman buildings in Manhattan, not that I’ve ever lived in a doorman building, but I imagine it would be full of older professionals, mostly doctors and professors, who’ve lived there for years. Some of them introduced themselves to the young couple carrying boxes of comics and figurines through the stylishly maintained common halls, congratulated us on our engagement, and even chatted about the symphonies and museums they like when they visit New York. There are no students in the building, but the location is walking distance to lectures at the university, and the indie bookstops and coffeeshops on Franklin Street.
I came in from chatting with a neighbor one day and told Harold gleefully how it’s just like that novel, where the young couple lucks into a spacious, gorgeous apartment in a stylish pre-war building, where there’s never an opening, but they’re just lucky enough to find a space at the right moment, and… Suddenly, I realize I’m actually narrating the beginning of Rosemary’s Baby.
Guess I still have some unresolved issues with living in North Carolina.
“We’re getting on 15-501 now.” Harold says. He likes to point out landmarks to help me find my way around, which is very sweet. He also likes to ask me if I recognize where we are, but doesn’t seem to appreciate either North Carolina or on a highway even though they are factually accurate answers.
“Weren’t we already on 15-501?” I ask.
“Oh, that was the 15-501 business highway. This is the 15-501 express highway now.”
“Look, Harold, I was trying to overlook how odd it is to have one highway with two names. But having two highways with the same name seems needlessly awkward. And two highways with the same name that’s ACTUALLY TWO NAMES is just ridiculous.”
Look, I didn't make this shirt!
