Why (And How) I Still Like Facebook

Hi, friends!

A pretty common sentiment these days is that Facebook is garbage. People complain that all they ever see is arguments about politics, oversharing about mundane things, and requests for help with a virtual farm. A lot of teenagers never bother making an account because it's "uncool" now that their parents and other "old people" use it (or because they're concerned about said old people not understanding Facebook etiquette and causing embarrassment).

I can't offer much advice for the teenagers here because A) I don't mind my parents seeing the things I post, B) I've taught my parents how Facebook works, and C) it's honestly cute to see comments like "SUSAN YOU LOOK BEAUTIFUL. LOVE GRANNY" on a picture Susan gets tagged in. Granny is doing her best and just wants to keep up with her family online! Yay for Granny!

As for the other problems people have with Facebook, I have a ton of suggestions for improving your experience and getting rid of the clutter.

Don't be afraid to unfollow people.
If you have a friend who only ever posts about political things, unfollow them! I've definitely unfollowed people in the past when I didn't want to completely unfriend them but also didn't care about any of the things they were sharing. Every once in a while, I'll go to the list of people I've unfollowed and check out their profiles to see if they're worth refollowing. If their posts will just clutter my timeline with things I don't want to see, I leave them as they are. (This sounds super rude of me, I know. I promise the unfollowed list is pretty short.)
Related: There's a snooze button.
Someone you know just got a new dog and won't stop posting hourly pictures of them? Snooze their posts and maybe they'll calm down in a while. If not, there's always the above option.

Snooze if you think things will improve in a month. If there's no hope, you can unfollow instead.

You can block pages to avoid seeing their posts when friends share them.
I recently recommended this technique to a friend who was bummed about seeing recipe videos all over Facebook while she was trying to stick to a diet. If you block the pages that the videos come from (Tasty, BuzzFeed Food, etc.), you won't see their posts being shared. Most of the pages I've blocked are for LuLaRoe saleswomen because I had friends who would share their posts to enter giveaways and I wanted to still see my friends' posts without seeing videos about paper-thin leggings. I've also blocked a lot of Facebook games because I really don't care if someone reached level 8,032 on Candy Crush.
You can stop seeing posts from a certain person that your friend is tagged in by clicking "hide all from [person]" or something to that effect. Like if your friend has a relative that decides to tag their entire family in every update about their baby or something, you can hide everything from that person and quit seeing posts about people you don't know. (Why do people do that??)

Don't care about sports but have a friend who excitedly shares every update from their favorite team for some awful reason? Block those posts without blocking your friend.

Turn off autoplay for videos.
Videos starting automatically makes me angry, even when they're muted. In fact, muted autoplay is almost as frustrating as autoplaying with sound because if I actually do want to see the video, now I have to rewind it and turn the sound on so I can hear what I missed while deciding whether or not to watch.

Curse you, autoplay. No one asked for this.

You can turn notifications for a post on and off.
If you've ever seen a post requesting recommendations or advice and wanted to see the results, chances are someone else had that same idea and commented "." or "following" on that post. There is absolutely no reason to ever do that. Just turn the notifications on and you'll see future comments. Or, if you were the first to comment "Congrats!" on a post about exciting news and get a ding every few minutes from other people congratulating that person, you can turn off those notifications just as easily.

I don't often run into the problem of a post being annoyingly popular, but this is how I'd handle it if I did.

Set your news feed to most recent.
One of the biggest complaints I have about Instagram (and a large part of why I never bothered to install it on my current phone or the previous one) is that the posts aren't shown chronologically. Why?! I don't care what an algorithm thinks I want to see. What I want to see is *all* of the things my friends are sharing *in the order* that they're being shared. Clearly, algorithms aren't smart enough to realize that some people need things to be in the right order or else they'll go nuts.

Of course, Facebook is playing around with "most recent" meaning "most recently commented on" or something now, but my news feed is in the proper order most of the time.

Get rid of unwanted groups and group notifications.
I really wish Facebook wouldn't let people add you into groups without your permission. If someone adds you into a group you don't want to be part of (or if you decide you're done being in a certain group), you can leave and also check a box to make people unable to add you back in. If you want to remain in a group but get too many notifications from it, you can adjust those settings to bring the number down to a more desirable level.

Begone, MLM groups!

Turn off excessive notifications from events.
This usually becomes handy when I get invited to an event that's designed to collect addresses for wedding invitations. Even if the couple has a Google Doc or website for people to use to submit their addresses, there are always people who post their addresses in the group discussion area anyway. The ability to receive notifications for only host updates makes that problem go away.

I promise the original picture looked much nicer than my stick figure version.

If you don't block ads entirely, you can hide ads about certain subjects.

The only options right now are alcohol, parenting, and pets, but more topics might be added eventually. It's surprisingly thoughtful of Facebook to let people opt out of seeing ads about these things. I've known people who have had infertility issues or miscarriages and cried over seeing ads about babies and pregnancy. I can imagine that a recovering alcoholic or someone with a fear of certain animals would also prefer to not see ads that would cause an emotional response. Personally, I turned all three of these topics off simply because they aren't relevant to my life and I'd rather see ads for Ulta or Nintendo or something else I may actually care about. (Of course, since I block all ads indiscriminately, it doesn't actually matter. I mostly wanted to show Facebook that I appreciate the ability to do this.)

Way to go, Facebook! I hope they include a way to avoid ads about engagement/marriage someday. That's another subject that can be pretty touchy and painful.

Best of all: Install Fluff Busting Purity and customize to your heart's content.
You may have noticed that my screenshots don't look exactly like what your Facebook looks like. This glorious extension is the reason why. The improvements it makes to my news feed are so great that I never use Facebook on my phone anymore. I'll check notifications there but any and all browsing happens on my computer because that's where FBP can fix everything. Thanks to FBP, I don't see "Bob liked this post" or "Marie commented on this post" anymore. No game or app requests to deny. No garbage cluttering the left side of the screen. Most recent is the default sort option for the news feed. I can even filter out pictures of babies (though doing that would make about half of my news feed disappear).

Browser extensions can be so dang handy. I've been using FBP for years and love it!

FBP may or may not get rid of sponsored posts and ads. I'm not actually sure how effective it is, because I also have an adblocker extension installed. Browsing the internet ad-free is such a wonderful thing.

If I had to only use Facebook on my phone and/or didn't know about all the tips I shared in this post, I'd probably hate it, too. A lot of that still depends on who your friends are and what they post, obviously; if you're friends with a bunch of annoying people, any social media platform would be awful. However, I find that Facebook is the most effective and overall most pleasant way of seeing what my friends and relatives are up to. It's great to still know what's going on with people from my hometown even though I haven't been there in two years. I would feel insanely isolated if I didn't have Facebook to let me see how people are doing. I want to see where your son is going on his mission, your cute selfie, your cat inconveniencing you by sitting on something, the cool cake you made, your flushed face after you ran a marathon, your recreation of an old picture, your fun holiday decorations, your family photos, your blog posts, your ramblings about something you have passion for, your movie recommendations... I want to still feel like part of my friends' lives even though I'm so very far away from most of you.

Facebook definitely isn't perfect, but with a decent amount of tweaking, it's still a great place to share.

Love,
Lizzie

A Digital Christmas Letter

Hi, friends!

I always love reading the summaries of families' years that sometimes come with Christmas cards, so I thought I'd attempt to do a version of that for our family's 2018!

Jared-specific:

• Jared had his second and third IKEA experiences when we needed to buy some bookshelves and dressers.
• He let his hair and beard grow out so we could dress as Hagrid and a glittery dragon for Halloween.

Jared has been continuing to teach Gospel Principles, though now that the class isn't going to exist anymore, he'll probably be getting a new calling soon. He also made appearances at mutual a couple of times to be fake Steve Harvey when the girls played Family Feud and also host our General Conference version of Fibbage. He's the unofficial assistant to the Beehive adviser. :)

He's been enjoying his work and seems to be decently friendly with his coworkers. He didn't get nearly as many travel opportunities as he did in 2017, unfortunately. As part of a seminar thing, he programmed a little gadget to play a few variations of Simon, which I think is pretty neat. We're still loving him getting every other Friday off.

A church friend has organized a Dungeons and Dragons group and Jared gets to spend time adventuring around as a paladin every few weeks. He beat Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey this year and got back into Skyrim again. His options for games to play will be expanding soon because he customized a powerful desktop computer for us as our Christmas present to ourselves. Non-gaming laptops can only handle so much, after all.

Lizzie-specific:

• I got a keyboard and started trying to get used to playing the piano again so that I could get some use out of all the books of music we have.
• I was a leader at YW camp and survived spending a few days away from Jared, the internet, and cleanliness.
• I started this blog!
• My hair finally returned to a naturalish color.

I've now been a Young Women leader for two years and I'm still loving it! Between lessons, activities, meetings, camp, and miscellaneous happenings, there's always something to keep me busy. This year, some of my favorite tasks were helping the girls learn about skincare and makeup basics, coming up with a whole bunch of mini-games for them to play (personalized Taboo about the girls and leaders, Family Feud with questions about church and our town, Fibbage with questions from General Conference, non-digital Quiplash, sphinx-ish riddles, and a page of idiom phrases rewritten with synonyms), and having everyone come to my house to play games and watch Spider-Man. It's also been a lot of fun to chaperone a few stake dances!

My church "job" can take up a surprisingly large amount of time, but when I'm not doing anything for that, I try to make my days productive in other ways. I do basically all of the standard chores to make our home a pleasant place: laundry, dishes, vacuuming, sweeping, organizing, and the like. I can also spend time on hobbies, which is awesome. I get to read, write, work on jigsaw puzzles, play piano, attempt nail art, bake delicious things, and (of course) play video games. Lately, I've been making paper snowflakes to help our living room be even more festive. I'm never bored! There's always something to be done. Some people would probably hate being home all day like this, but I love our lifestyle and feel so fortunate that this is something we can do. (Yay, low cost of living!)

I haven't finished making enough to go along the edges of the cabinet yet, but here's what I've got so far! I have plans for a snowman and the Skyrim logo to also be put onto snowflakes. :)
Top row: Avengers, Zelda, Harry Potter, Pinkie Pie, Mario, Thor
Bottom row: a generic tree and heart (my test snowflake), Zelda, Iron Man, cats, Mario

Now that we're living in our very own house, I love having guests over. We had missionaries over for dinner a couple of times in the house we were renting, but I was never really proud of how it was, if that makes sense. It was functional and as clean as I could get it to be. There was nothing to be ashamed of, I just didn't love the house. This one feels more like a home. The layout is more conducive to a fun gathering, the floors aren't permanently dirty, and everything looks brighter and more inviting. I've hosted a couple of movie nights, Jared had his D&D group meet here once, and we've been having the missionaries come for dinner about once a month. This house has helped me feel much happier about living where we do. (Still not a fan of the town's weather, location, or size, but my home is my happy place.) Oh, and our new neighborhood has at least four adorable cats that occasionally wander outside.

Family happenings:

• We went to Disneyland with my parents, which was a lot of fun!
• We bought a house! That was a huge deal. We also bought some grown-up furnishings (picture frames, a TV stand, a TV to go on said stand) for the new house.
• Our third wedding anniversary happened and was celebrated with pizza and Pokemon.
• We went to Disneyland again and also to Las Vegas to see an Avengers exhibit.
• We got a $300 gift card to Fandango from a Dunkin Donuts cup! (We still haven't actually used any of it because the only theater in town doesn't use Fandango, but we're working on that.)
• My parents came to visit us and got to experience the, uh, loveliness of town.
• We were asked to be Mary and Joseph in a live nativity and got to wear outfits with much more fabric than we normally deal with.

Everything is going pretty well! We love each other, we love our church friends, we love our house, and we love our life overall. From our family to yours, have a very merry Christmas, a sparkling new year, and a lovely time relaxing with your loved ones!

Love,
Lizzie and Jared

Friendship Is Magic And Age Is Weird

Hi, friends!

A lot of you probably know this already, but I'm the youngest of six kids. There's a pretty sizeable gap between my siblings and me. My oldest brother was nearly seventeen when I was born and my youngest brother was eight. (And when I was eight, my first niece was born. There was actually slightly less time between my birth and my niece's birth.)
I have a theory that this unusual timing might be part of why I've never felt strange about befriending people who aren't exactly close to my age. If it doesn't feel weird to talk to my siblings, why would it feel weird to talk to other people who were in high school when I was born?

How old you are is such a huge deal when you're young. I remember being really excited that a friend's older sibling would talk to us during recess in elementary school because we were two grades lower and therefore automatically much less cool. In eighth grade, some people thought it was strange that I would eat lunch with my two friends who were in seventh grade. Age started to matter less in high school and wasn't really very important in college. By now, it's just something that I occasionally have to think about when I'm filling out a form or telling someone how old I am. (I legitimately had to pause for a few seconds the other day before remembering that I'm 24.) It went from basically being a social class to just a fun piece of trivia.

While I obviously made friends around my age while I was in school, I also befriended several teachers. I was one of those awkward kids who would eat lunch in a teacher's room and hang out by their desk to chat when class was nearly over instead of, y'know, socializing with people my own age like a normal person.

A big reason why I have so many Facebook friends with grandchildren is that I quickly got used to interacting with adults through church. I would talk to my teachers and my parents' friends like they were regular people instead of treating them like aliens who were super different from me. I got to know my piano teacher, my clogging teacher, my Young Women leaders, my Sunday School teachers, my seminary teachers, and a lot of other big, scary grown-ups who, as it turns out, aren't scary at all. (Even my really tall Sunday School teacher with the bushy mustache isn't nearly as frightening as he may look to a child.) Transitioning into Relief Society when I turned eighteen was super easy because I was already familiar with most of the women there.

Now that I'm a big, scary smallish, not-at-all-intimidating grown-up, the ages of my friends range from about thirteen to grandparent-of-people-my-age years old. Working with the YW has been a huge blessing in my life for a lot of reasons, but my favorite part is that I've formed genuine friendships with these girls like my leaders did with me a decade ago. They'll tell me about what's going on in their life, send me cat memes, and even come talk to me when they don't have any obligation to do so!

Since we're all children of God, we're really just a huge family. That means we shouldn't hesitate to get to know someone half our age, twice our age, or however old they may be.

I'd already planned for this to be the weekly post before today's news of the adjustments to how youth will age up in the church. (If you haven't heard or aren't LDS, the teenagers will move up to the next class at the beginning of the year they turn twelve, fourteen, and sixteen instead of waiting until their actual birthday.) That timing means that I now have some extra stuff to add to this post.

The YW group in my ward is a bit wonky. We have about nine girls that regularly come to things: two Laurels, five Mia Maids, and two Beehives. With this announcement, we won't have any Beehives starting in January because the two current (active) ones are thirteen and the next girl won't be turning twelve until 2020. My "job" in our organization is being the Beehive adviser. You can see why I may have some questions in this situation.

I don't know what our YW group will look like next year. I'm really hoping to still be part of the leadership in some capacity, even though I won't have any Beehives to work with. Whatever decision gets made, I'm so grateful for the past two years I've had to spend time with these beautiful weirdos every Sunday and Wednesday. I've watched them gain confidence, teach lessons, organize activities, have hysterical giggle fits, and share their testimonies. It's been such an honor to learn from them and grow to love them as if they're my younger sisters. I adore these girls and I'm glad they're willing to be my friends even though I sometimes reference movies older than they are.

Love,
Lizzie

Making My Teenage Self Jealous

Hi, friends!

The other day, I was thinking about how annoying it is to still be dealing with acne even though I've been done with high school for five years. I always assumed that my skin would quit being rude once I wasn't a teenager anymore, but I'm still waiting. These days, I have fewer ~blemishes~ and also better tools for dealing with them, which prompted me to think about the products and useful things that I would've loved having ten years ago.

Skin stuff:

I wish I'd had hydrocolloid patches and the e.l.f. rollerball acne treatment gel. I'm not sure if either of these things were even available when I was younger, but I sure love them now!
The gel is good for run-of-the-mill acne spots. I use it before bed on any areas of my face that aren't cooperating. It is a little drying, which isn't great for someone with eczema who also lives in the desert, but it doesn't usually cause any major problems. I've noticed that acne seems to clear up faster when I use it. Things don't disappear overnight or anything, but this does help.

It's simply unfair to have wrinkles under my eyes and acne at the same time. Not much I can do to get the wrinkles to leave, but I'm doing my darndest to banish blemishes!

The patches are a more recent discovery and I use them for the more, erm, three-dimensional issues. They're honestly pretty gross if you think about it too much. They're designed to suck out the ickiness over several hours. I usually put them on as I'm getting ready for bed and peel them off in the morning, at which point the bump is much more flat and the patch has... thickened a bit. They may be sheer enough that you could wear them during the day if you wanted to, depending on what brand you get. (If they don't match your skin well enough, you can also put makeup on top of them without causing any issues!) As an added bonus, they prevent you from poking or contaminating your troubled skin.

I found this specific pack of patches at Walmart. They're magical, I tell you!

Along with things to help me make acne go away, I'm really thankful to have products that cover it while it's inconsiderately intruding on my skin. Concealer and foundation make me so much less self-conscious about my face! They also help out a lot with the darkness that I've had under my eyes for as long as I can remember.

That outfit and Barney shampoo are so very '90s. I found an eBay listing for that shampoo bottle and it says it's from 1994! I'm also from 1994, though, so I'm guessing this picture is from around 1997. I've had dark, sunken tear troughs for at least twenty years.

Makeup Revolution concealer in C1 and Colourpop concealer in Fair 02.

Fun things:

I never realized how much I love scented candles until earlier this year. I used to think they were kind of dumb, actually. They seemed expensive and I didn't like that the smell of the flame would mix with the smell of the wax. Soon after we bought our house, we went to the area in our Walmart where they have candles and I had way too much fun smelling them all. Since we use a warmer instead of actually lighting the candles, there's no fire smell!

Obviously, having a smartphone would've blown my mind back in the day. When I think about my first phone, my little red Samsung A737, I have to laugh. I remember being jealous of a friend's Juke phone because it seemed so fancy. And hoo boy, the famous Razr was super cool because you could take pictures of yourself without having to awkwardly hold your phone backwards or stand by a mirror! My new Galaxy S9 can shoot slo-mo video, scan my irises to unlock itself, broadcast its screen to our TV, and let me play Final Fantasy IX anywhere. How crazy is that?

Pros of A737: physical keyboard, easy to fit in a pocket, fun to slide
Pros of S9: has a headphone jack, has approximately a billion other nifty features

Another thing that came to mind while pondering this subject was the glorious software that is Steam. Steam, for those who don't know, is a platform for buying and playing computer games. I was super late to the game (ha) and didn't discover it until about four years ago. There are sales all the time and Steam will notify you when things on your wishlist are discounted. Basically, if you want to play games on a computer, this is something you need in your life.

I could go on and on about all the types of technology that would've made life better for young Lizzie (AKA Miriam), but I'll stop after just one more: Personal Progress online. The program was updated in early 2009, when I was a Mia Maid, and I think I'd already lost a Personal Progress book at that point. The ability to keep track of what you'd done online was added in late 2010. I didn't finish Personal Progress until 2012, but I had grown responsible enough to quit losing my book by the time I could've started checking things off online, so I don't think I ever bothered to use the online tracking. As a YW leader, though, I can appreciate that it's super helpful for the girls that need a little help with their organization.

This post would be incomplete if I didn't mention Oreo O's and Trix with shapes. Trix stopped having shapes in 2006 and Oreo O's became unavailable outside of South Korea in 2007. Oreo O's finally came back to life in 2017 and my beloved Trix have recently stopped being boring spheres.

"Real" Oreo O's didn't come back until there was already a fake version available. I think I might be partially responsible for the "high sales" that convinced Nabisco and Post to bring the real stuff back.

Of course, legitimate Oreo O's don't come in enormous bags, so I still buy the fake version.

The world may be getting progressively scarier as time goes on, but there are still a lot of things that are continuing to improve! It's important to look for things to be happy about, and writing this was a fun way of doing that. If you can think of other things I should've included, let me know!

Love,
Lizzie