Category Archives: Facebook on This Date

January 17 in Facebook Memories

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As part of transitioning away from Facebook and archiving my content, I’m going to save select “on this date” Facebook memories to here. I’ve done something similar to this on a couple occasions before, but not as part of an organized attempt to transfer all of it.

2021
After nearly four hours of alternating picks of songs we wanted to hear and having drinks, Sally and I have decided to go to bed. The last song we listened to was David Bowie’s “Helden” — his German version of “Heroes.” I started tearing up long before it was over. Hell, I’m doing it again as I type this (no doubt due to the alcohol currently in my system.)

If you don’t understand why, you either didn’t see Jojo Rabbit, or you didn’t get/appreciate the subtext of the film.

2020
Why the hell did I not learn about Chiune Sugihara until the most recent episode of The Good Place. Where’s his movie, Mr. Spielberg?

2017
I left this as a comment on a friend’s post. Saving here for my own ease of reference:

For the past eight years, I have heard people go on about the possibility of exercising a 2nd Amendment solution, call those like me “libtards,” state that citizens living on the coasts aren’t real Americans, deride those with college educations as out-of-touch elitists, and ignorantly somehow conflate American liberalism with communism, socialism, fascism and whatever other evil -ism that can be conceived.

Now, after an election in which their guy lost the popular vote by 2.8 million and became President on a technicality, I’m supposed to take the time to understand their grievances when they haven’t bothered at all to listen to me or to even acknowledge that I am just as much an American as them. Fuck that. Fuck all of them — especially those who say, without a slightest hint of self-awareness or irony, that I should leave if I don’t like Trump. Sorry, but I’m going to man the ramparts of the loyal opposition. Deal with it.

What I’ll Never Forget

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(Five years ago, today, on Facebook)

It’s been 12 years. During that time, I have seen my country manufacture evidence to start a war with a country that had nothing to do with 9/11; I have seen common people who spoke up against the war denounced as traitors and un-American; I saw what happened to the Dixie Chicks for merely stating they were ashamed of our President; I have seen many of my fellow countrymen passively and unquestioning accept a slew of government surveillance programs that infringed upon our supposedly Constitutionally-protected liberties; I have seen our court system give a stamp of approval to those programs; I have seen the excessive militarization of our police force.

Think about we led our lives before those attacks and how we lead them now. Now, ask yourself if we really are any safer as a result of all this. If you accept the argument that Osama Bin Laden masterminded these attacks because he hated America, then he succeeded in ways he probably couldn’t imagine because America has changed significantly for the worse.

To rephrase something my friend Kate stated, forgive me if I don’t share images of the Two Towers bearing messages about how we’ll never forget or images of crying eagles. I haven’t forgotten. The window just outside my work desk on 9/11 had a clear line-of-sight to the Pentagon, and I saw the smoke and flames first-hand. I went home that day with the smoke plume towering over my head. When I went to work the following day, I could smell from the Metro station I used to commute to work the smoke emanating from the Pentagon a couple miles away.

Don’t you dare tell me I am being un-American for stating some simple truths, and don’t you dare tell me I shouldn’t be angry about what I’ve seen America become.

(Political trolling will be deleted with extreme prejudice.)

Facebook’s Memory Hole

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I have a few ongoing beefs with Facebook and they all revolve around the same basic issue: it’s a nightmare in terms of attempting to review and find older posts and status updates. There’s no easy-to-use archive feature, such as the calendar on this blog, and its search function frequently doesn’t return all the results match your request. On top of all that, for whatever malevolent ungodly reason, it’s On This Day feature has never become available to me. Because Facebook cares about my user experience roughly the same amount as Jeff Sessions supports the Black Lives Matter movement, there’s no real customer service that will help me with any of this.

Thanks to the myriad of issues caused by Facebook ‘s memory hole issue, I have to rely on my iPhone’s Timehop app to serve in place of the One This Day feature. Unfortunately, it too isn’t perfect — I know this from Sally showing me things on her One This Day Facebook page that some of the posts I’ve tagger her don’t appear in my daily Timehop feed. But, a an imperfect something is better than nothing, so I’ll keep using Timehop until Facebook addresses all the aforementioned issues, which in of itself likely qualifies as an Apocalypse-heralding event.

Anyway, while looking at Timehop earlier this afternoon, I got the notion to start archiving some of my favorite “On This Day” Facebook posts, statuses, and updates over here. Most of them are fairly short and easy to transcribe, and it might be fun to have my favorites in a place where I can find them again much more readily. So, with no guarantees that this will be a regular feature, here are my favorite “On This Day” Facebook posts for today.

2016

This September, for the first time ever, I’ll be seeing Springsteen in concert. Once I get over the sticker shock, I’ll be in a more celebratory mood.

2014

My bizarre moment of zen for the morning: would I rather be on a highway to hell, have someone take me to Funkytown, or rock on down to Electric Avenue?

I believe could have linked to the actual posts, but most of my stuff is locked-down as Friends-only, and given my level of animosity towards the platform, I just don’t want to waste any more time than necessary with archiving. Moving forward, I will attempt to cross-post Facebook posts I feel are worthy of migration, but in the past I made nearly identical declarations on my old LJ page. So, everyone should take that previous determination with the appropriate giant grains of salt.