Facebeg or Twithelp?

so i mini ranted on Facebook the other day a complete pot-kettle-black question about whether social networking has made many of us a lot more beggy…

and i do mean ‘us’ because the other day a carefully subtle form of ‘advertising’ on someone’s status led to the complete surprise gift of two bottles of my favourite chocolate liquer, ‘Nachtmusiek’ [which reminds me, we are still working through those].

but i see people do it all the time – “Working home alone tonite and wouldn’t complain if someone brought a T-Bone steak dinner over” or “Ah the new iPhone 5 is happening – be fun if someone didn’t need their old iPhone 5 any more.”

it is a pretty safe practice, because at the very worst you end up with exactly what you had before [or some jerk writes a blog post about you!] but at the very best, you might just get lucky and find two bottles of… um i mean find that someone has been completely gracious and kind and totally surprises you with what you want.

i guess as a once off or an every-now-and-then it might be more harmless, but when people start using that space regularly for personal wish fulfilment advertising then i guess it feels a little needy… here’s looking at you brett fish anderson…

BUT then, looking at it from a different perspective, i absolutely LOVE the potential of the social networks when it comes to meeting legitimate needs and connecting resources and need.

one of my friends [well more friend of a friend] won a trip overseas with his band [including my friend Dreadlocked Mike] because of using Facebook as a voting platform.

just today i had a friend of mine working with underprivileged youth in an area reach out to me for help and i was able to connect him with another friend of mine working in the same area with the hope that between them there will be someone in the network who will be able to help out with the necessary mentoring.

Val and i have been given use of vehicles on so many occasions [back in South Africa and here in Oakland] when we needed them through people who had a spare one, or were able to give us theirs for a time, so generously jumping in and helping out.

same with cellphones  we had one phone and two sim cards and made an appeal online and now we have something like 5 phones and it became an embarrassment of riches.

help with removing a stain or a recipe? jump online and pose the question and call on the collective wisdom of your friends and their friends [if Uncle Google doesn’t sort you out first] but a tried and tested solution often beats something you randomly look up online and hope will work.

this is where, for me, social networking becomes so useful and exciting as a tool – raising prayer and support for issues like with what just happened in the Philippines – suddenly via Val’s dad who was going to be there and Eugene Cho who was Twittering about One Day’s Wages as one possible organisation that could help and a whole bunch of other avenues of how to get involved.

as with any tool, i guess it’s success and value lies in how well you use it – and so the challenge is up to us to use it for far more of the latter [helping people out in need and joining available resources to areas of lack]

i would LOVE to hear your opinion and thoughts on this and maybe even more importantly hear your stories… missing people being found, old friends being reunited, mass encouragement for someone who is struggling a bit, positive flash mobbing – these are all amazing ideas and ways of using the social networks for good, rather than me-vil.

In the meantime, as you ponder upon these things, if you could follow this link and go and vote for my super hardcore design for a Christmas sweater [complete with dinosaurs, abominable snowmen, dolphins and ninjas] the top 100 that get voted for will actually be made and that would be a lot of fun.

 

Extending the connection.

I have about 300 subscribers to my blog at present and about 300 likes on my blog page on Facebook and am figuring they are not all the same, so if you follow me on here and feel up to it, it would be great if you could take a moment and go and like my Facebook group page which will give other people a better chance of finding it… if you want to go one better and SHARE it on your wall that would be most appreciated: https://www.facebook.com/IrresistiblyFish

I am on The Twitter as i like to call it because let’s be honest there is only one – and you call follow me there @brettfisha if you want to and again if you generally like the stuff here why not give a shout out for @irresistibleFsh [no i] because there is no ‘i’ in Fish, especially when your name becomes to long for The Twitter to handle] which is my official blog The Twitter account. Thank you.

If you want to go one more step ridiculously further, then I have a You Tube account where I make both silly Brad Fish videos like this Dangerous Things You Can Least Expect series over here as well as this Walking through the Gospel of Mark in the Bible series over here but i think the You Tube account, if you are wanting to subscribe to the whole thing, resides over here. For some reason I had to go with Mr Brettfish as my username [perhaps the lead singer of Suede in the UK has a You Tube page]

That’s pretty much it – the only other way I have for you to follow me is a lot more stalkery and I’d quite rather you didn’t. I am at least three years away from ‘rummaging through my trash’ status unless of course I manage to finally stumble upon a comedy video format that someone actually watches, likes and passes on to their 12, 000, 000 friends but my aversion to working with kittens and small children makes this unlikely.

I leave you with this quote – ” ”

Sorry that should read “with these quotation marks” although they are probably called something different in Americaland.

So for passing on sake I will close with a picture of a kitten and a small child.

Thankx for journeying with me, those of you who do. Comment more. Share more. And send more melted chocolate…

Dances with bikes.

i don’t normally click on clips like this on the Book of Facings, but for some reason i did this time.

watching it made me feel slightly sad about the fact that i can juggle pretty well with three balls and do a decent high-leveled Sudoku [without needing to make the small numbers in the blocks]

alternatively i can just sit back and applaud with everyone else cos this guy has got some skills – Danny MacAskill who seems to have a few ok tricks of his own:

Back to my three balls then. Now if that’s a seven, then that must be  a… three?

Pokes before Swine [a true story]

RaiSINs, in any shape or form.

Cellphone screens emitting light in movie cinemas…

Actually just cellphones in general being used in places of people being together and phones meant to be being kept away.

Litter. The guy sitting next to me at the but stop litter-ally throwing litter on the ground when the bin/trash can was litter-ally just round the corner of the bus stop.

These are a few of my unfavourite things.

But the POKE function on Facebook is up there [and I’m not sure I like the fact that #hashtags are now being stolen across to Facebook, they belong to the Twitter Mark!!!] – I have never understood it and it is a little bit creepy and a year or two ago I deleted all the POKEs i had [I am pretty sure I have never poked anyone, not even as a joke. Please tell me I’m not wrong on this memory] and they all came back somehow [now i am too scared to go and look]

It was time something did something, and who else but Pearls before Swine creator, Stephan Pastis, presumably with me in mind, when he created this gem [he has a similar diamond of rat beating someone up in the cinema for cellphone usage – it’s like he knows me!]

If you agree with this cartoon, email Stephan at pearlscomic@gmail.com and politely suggest to him that he write a strip that introduces a new character called No_bob, a yellow-and-white stuffed dolphin who is not real and can’t speak. I think he will take that as you liking this strip in the best possible way.

If you disagree with this cartoon, email Stephan at pearlscomic@gmail.com and politely suggest to him that he write a strip that introduces a new character called No_bob, a yellow-and-white stuffed dolphin who is not real and can’t speak. I think he will take that as you disliking this strip in the best possible way. Try and make sure he gets that it is an underscore and a small ‘b’ because more people mess that up than you might think.

[For more brilliant Pearls before Swine, follow the trail of breadcrumbs starting here]

Plants vs Zombies too!

Braaaaaaaaaains…

You do not have to be a big zombie fan to appreciate the delightful Popcap ‘Plants vs Zombies’ tower defence game which is one of the most fun and addictive games i have ever played.

To be absolutely honest it was one of the activities both the beautiful Val [tbV] and myself spent a huge amount of time on our honeymoon doing together and gave us immense times of laughter and appreciation and moment of mutual challenge.

The basic premise is that zombies are attacking your house [to eat your brains, of course] and you have to stop them armed with a bunch of garden plants.  As much as that premise sounds like the most useless and unfun of activities to ever find yourself doing, by using humour and great sounds and easy playability, this quickly became something that we [and since then a HUGE amount of our friends] got caught up in and thoroughly enjoyed. [Ask tbV about her greenhouse of plants though, which is a side activity within the game and which you will no doubt get a response like “Urgh. They just wanted me to feed them the whole time. They were so demanding. Stupid plants” from, but she will sound just that little bit too ‘taking-this-thing-seriously’ on.]

Loved the game. Finished the game. [Almost four years ago] And then nothing. No sequel. No add ons. No talk of a sequel. Just the fading memory of a really fun game and some good joint times playing it.

If you want to see what I am talking about you can download a free trial of an hour’s play of the game which will likely inspire you to buy the rest of it and quickly finish it, but be warned – don’t do this with any immediate deadlines for anything in your future.

I got marginally excited when Facebook announced they were going to be introducing a Plants vs Zombies type game and so I downloaded it and signed up and it had moments, but was a little too much of a Farmville-type game to warrant much excitement and the gameplay was a little formulaic and predictable [altho it did introduce some cool new zombie types] and so I quickly uninstalled it…

But then one day I was randomly trawling the net and saw a link to a video which looked a whole lot like this:

And suddenly things got a WHOLE lot more exciting…

With ‘Plants vs Zombies 2: It’s about time’ which must be about the greatest play on words title for a movie or game ever [the theme of the game looks like time travel and we have all been waiting too long!] and so licking my lips and anticipating the launch of the much-awaited braaaaaaaains, i mean game…

[With the game I originally bought you could  create your own Zombie avatar slash profile pic and have yourself attack your garden as a zombie… this really works a lot better in concept than explanation]

Have you played? What’s your favourite zombie or plant? How excited are you about the upcoming game on a scale from 1 to CRAAAAAZY DAVE?

 

 

Throwing stones at Joel Osteen after checking it’s okay with Uncle Google.

i have called Google ‘Uncle Google’ for a long time now – i’m not sure why i do that cos it’s very silly but it’s become my thing [which is probly why i do that]. i guess one reason is that when someone asks me something i don’t know i will either tell them to ask Uncle Google or i say that i will and it feels like bringing another person into the conversation.

i read on Facebook this morning that well-known christian speaker and writer Joel Osteen has resigned and quit the faith. i’ve not been a huge fan of his writing as even his book titles suggest that he belongs to a group of christian writers/speakers who have a very strong focus on you – it’s all about you and becoming the best you you can be and being comfortable and happy and loving life, and so a brand of feel-good christianity that i’m not sure Jesus would be very comfortable with.

so when i read on Facebook that he had resigned and even quit his faith, my initial reaction was a bit of relief and “phew for Christianity” but then quite quickly i had another far more sobering thought… something along the lines of “Is that a Christ following reaction to have?”

as i read the article the announcement was linked to and how a church member said something along the lines of, “we gave him all our money and now he’s doing this to us. no ways, we’re not going to let him get away with that” i thought to myself, ‘wait a second, am i standing in line with all the other people ready to throw rocks at Joel?’

so question one that is asked of me is what is my attitude and posture when someone else falls [especially if it’s someone i’m not a big fan of] – is that a reason to celebrate, to quietly feel relieved or happy that someone else is not in a good place? doesn’t sound very Jesusful

then for some reason, i decided to check in on Uncle Google and get his thoughts [yes, i get that he’s not a real person and with all the knowledge he has i should be referring to him as she, right?]

and so i do the customary search i do every time i see the words when i come across the maths problem:

[thing i would really like to have – money, computer, latest phone] + [Facebook]

which is to type [thing i would like to have] and the word [hoax] into Uncle Google…

and sure enough, there are links to the Joel Osteen thing being a hoax [to be honest, not as many as there normally are with a blatant Facebook hoax so i am not even sure yet whether it is or isn’t]

WHAT TO LEARN FROM THIS LITTLE LESSON:

#1 would be to always verify information received before acting on it – in the virtual world we have of hoaxes and misreporting and photoshop and so on, there is a lot of misleading information going around there.

#2 would be to question why am i sharing information – someone dies, someone falls from grace, celebrity scandal etc – why am i so quick to become part of the gossip chain of passing this on?

#3 would be to question if sharing the information is “me doing my bit” – this is definitely a different blog post but it is a valid question that came to me while i was giving us some stuff to think about – the whole thing with Kony2012, with articles on poverty and violence to women etc is that me feeling like i’ve done my bit so i don’t need to get involved or is that me trying to get some momentum for the action i am going to be doing?

#4 would be where do i stand when someone falls? [regardless of my feelings towards that person] – am i holding a rock and waiting for the signal, or am i on my knees praying for them and their family, crying out against injustice done, am i writing them a note of encouragement or offering to cook them a meal if they are someone i know? how would Jesus have me respond to crisis of any type?

these are important questions i need to ask myself. and i hope some of you will join me…

Manchester United beat Poverty by three goals to hunger.

So last night there was a game of football/soccer between Manchester United [soccer is one of my least supported sports but if i have ever supported a team it has been Manchester United… and then locally Kaizer Chiefs back in the day when Dr Khumalo played and i always back Bafana!] and Real Madrid in the Champion’s League. Real Madrid won 2-1 but of course there was “that red card incident” with Nani getting sent off…

i was out for the evening playing poker with some mates and so we missed the game, but it took me a minute on Facebook to find out what had happened – not that Real Madrid won or Manchester United lost but that there had been a “worst decision ever” and someone [or a really huge group of people from the sounds of it] “had been robbed” and so on…

i skimmed through one particular post with 30 plus comments in it and then wrote this Facebook status:

Imagine a world where people who cared that much about soccer/football cared that much about poor people…

i am still not quite sure why i did not cop more [or any, really] abuse for it – perhaps cos it was in the early hours of the morning when it was posted and most people missed it [maybe i should repost, hm?] because when i have posted questions about the absurd amounts of money soccer [or really most sports people] get paid, then people have come out blazing… i have never understood why so many of the people who have been so passionate about strongly disagreeing with me on my sports people salary opinion have been christians because i honestly cannot wrap my mind around how someone who reads and understands the Bible and following Jesus and the sheep and the goats story as one example can believe that it is okay for one person to receive $25 million while another person is allowed to die of malnutrition. i don’t think i’m judging anyone, i just cannot get my mind around that.

and not to say that people who are not christians should be okay with that, because i don’t think anyone should, but i do feel like Christ following people in particular [and yes, the distinction between christian and Christ following might be a first clue] should be outraged and upset at the completely ridiculous disparity between rich and poor [and yes, it is not confined to soccer – same with musicians, actors, politicians etc etc – soccer is just such an easy example]. to me it’s criminal. other people clearly think differently. i have just not ever had it adequately explained to me why.

the point with this particular quote though was not about people not being passionate about sport. the words “that much” are the key. i am simply expressing the desire to see people who are so passionate about sport [music, new year, latest Hollywood blockbuster movie] become that same amount of passionate about the poverty in our country, about treatment of women, about the insane levels of rape in our land [you would think something like “rape” merited more fervour than something like a sports match?]

and yes, it is a generalisation because there are definitely some people who are equally passionate about both, but i imagine if [just by browsing Facebook or Twitter after the game] every person who was above averagely passionate about the game last nite had the same amount of passion directed to even just one cause, person in need, situation… that our country would change overnight or within a month or year at least.

next year, there will be another Champion’s League trophy and quite probably a different team will win it. by then, this match will be forgotten. [Like Kony was within a week or two] Nobody will care any more. But they will care obsessively about the next match. And then the following year another Champion’s League will happen.

i find that sport and movies and books and music are amazing things to help me relax or get excited or spend time with mates or find a little escape in… and i think all of that is great. but get passionate, like i mean really passionate, foaming-at-the-mouth passionate about getting behind a cause, changing someone’s life, affecting the plight of the ‘least of these’, seeing someone rehabituated from prison, championing adoption or women’s rights, working towards reconciliation in the face of racism and so on… stuff to really put your life and energy and passion behind…

Imagine a world where people who cared that much about soccer/football cared that much about poor people…