beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

I turned on the beta test for inbox and posting. It's a lot different but I think it works so far.
I especially like that, having been told Change Is Happening, I could pick the day and change one bit at a time. That's a lot nicer than when everything is just different all at once.

I can't imagine how difficult it is to keep things working on ye ancient code, so I appreciate how much work goes in, and hope their updates work for them.

I have been thinking about how and why people use computers, livejournal, dreamwidth.

There was a short story I read from ages before the internet was a Thing that was about a student learning computers, and one of the assignments was to go through old old data and sort it. Don't remember where the story was or many details or I'd reference it better. But. The student saw that in the early days of computing it was all numbers, accounts, business, science, practical stuff you'd need a computer to get done.

Then humans started being human with computers.

And eventually it was all kinds of EVERYthing in there, like recordings of your partner to prove they snore that turned out to get used every night they were away.

So I was thinking, the internet very swiftly has been for all kinds of EVERYthing
but
lately I have been seeing less of it.
( Read more... )

I dont think we use online quite the way we used to. Not just we here dreamwidth, we here humans. The way the computers are set up focuses attention for you, will you nil you, and I think we started going quiet in several ways, not being focused on.



But I also personally went quiet for ordinary reasons of doomscrolling, falling out of fandoms, and not really having new opinions.

... sometimes I disagree with earlier me, sometimes a show developed in directions that dumped me right out of it, but the baseline stuff about gender and sexuality and disability feels rather like having the same grumble for twenty five years, because whatever progress we make, there's still grumble to be had. And it hasnt got any more interesting to say it.

All the reasons I fell out with my degree topic, cultural studies, also get in the way of interacting with media texts.

Tricky.



So I take this thought for a wander for a whole bunch of minutes, and then at the end I get the impulse to friends lock it, because anxious.


I kind of miss posting multiple times a day and having a little chat going in the background.

Hello humans, we are human, let's be human!

Let friendship thrive.



I'm going to have to find new ways to try that.

something odd happened to my Dreamwidth journal background just now. I think I fixed it but want to check other people can see it too. Is the gold stars on blue wallpaper there when y'all look?

Linked from the last DW update was a stats page that says how many people joined each day. So here's the last week:

newbyday 2010-08-26 133
newbyday 2010-08-27 198
newbyday 2010-08-28 269
newbyday 2010-08-29 210
newbyday 2010-08-30 181
newbyday 2010-08-31 124
newbyday 2010-09-01 9350

Sudden popularity! Gee I wonder why...

If anyone wants an invite code I have a bunch around here somewhere.



ETA days later:

newbyday 2010-09-01 9350
newbyday 2010-09-02 12619
newbyday 2010-09-03 8794
newbyday 2010-09-04 13473
newbyday 2010-09-05 6494
newbyday 2010-09-06 3582

So it has been in the low three figures a day for months now, but suddenly it's four or even *five* figures in a sustained way? That's not a one off jump ship, that's a tipping point for serious numbers of people.

My Dreamwidth journal now has all my LJ posts in it. Coolness!

Of course the odds of me remembering to xpost everything is very low. But as a backup it's pretty cool.

... now I'm wondering if I really want two copies of my daily babble cluttering up the internets. I could have hid it all on the way over. Can I still hide it all? I could unhide interesting stuff and have a much tidier DW. Er, I should have thought of that first. The idea of manually hiding all these years of babble... oops... deleting would be an overreaction, right? ...

So I've been trying to find my f-list on this new place.
... there's a lot of people. like, a lot.
I found the big page of rss feeds today and was all 'yaays! can has neil gaiman!' or at least his blog. And then I saw a bunch of others I recognised and hover clicked my way down the list. Only by the end I realised that the hover phase frequently turned into the next name down before I clicked, and so my feeds were turning rather random. I decided I'd just leave them that way, see what the internet gods provided... but then I realised one was fandom wank, and, well, no.

this is my very exciting day so far.

next I will read even more about Hamlet. Only three books to go before Thursday.