Post pictures of your projects and patterns

1) My partner injured yet another finger playing baseball last weekend and had to go to the emergency room. Luckily it was not broken, just dislocated. Since then we have gotten 3 phone calls from the hospital group asking for a survey response.

This is particularly irritating because this group has been buying up hospitals, clinics and medical practices in the area, and is currently the only emergency room in town and provider of certain services.

So what is the point of the survey? What choice to we have? How will any response actually do anything to improve care?

2) I've been warming to High Potential, and recently Keith Carradine guest starred. I knew I recognized him as soon as he appeared, but I couldn't place him. Instead I kept wondering why he made me think of Joel Kinnaman in For All Mankind. For sure they could play relatives.

3) I have not been reading any fic for the better part of a year now. Some months back I read about 4 or 5 that had probably been downloaded over a year earlier, but I haven't been doing offline reading for the first time in a very long time. And when it happened before it was because I didn't have access to material, whereas now I have dozens of commercial books and even more fic.

(I say "nothing" though this doesn't count the random drabble or ficlet someone recs.) ( Read more... )

4) The thing that really stood out to me about Amazon announcing they're discontinuing service to 2012 and earlier Kindles was to think that there's not many electronics that are still running after 15 years. ( Read more... )

5) The Pillowfort Anniversary festivities have ended and it was fun. Many (not even all!) of the activities could be summed up with the bingo card. ( Read more... )

I'd love to see someone else take this on in a few years' time.

There's a party going on at Pillowfort from April 3-13 to celebrate its 10th anniversary. It's hard for me to believe I've been there for 8 of those years already.

Like Dreamwidth, Pillowfort is a small owner-run site with responsive staff that stays afloat via premium services. It functions like a combination of Tumblr and Dreamwidth. For those using Dreamwidth, two advantages I've found enormously helpful are the easy photo hosting/posts and the fact that improved reblogging exists, thus making it very easy to share content to communities. In practice, I find these two sites complement one another.

The atmosphere there is both welcoming and helpful. In my time I've had the occasional unpleasant encounter, but have found it quite chill. Apparently I'm not the only one, as this recent Tumblr refugee reported.: "Signed up yesterday. Decided this morning that I was gonna hang out on here and see what it was like. And... I've had the best time? (I don't mean to sound surprised; I'm just used to the normal horrible state of the modern internet.)..Where has this corner of the internet been for the last several years??? I'm so happy I've found y'all."

Given the "state of the modern internet", we definitely need more boutique social media site alternatives, not fewer. Pillowforter DoktorHobo has been tracking signups to Pillowfort for several years and noted that it has maintained a steady average of around 50 new people per week. I've never taken much notice of total accounts on a site because the vast majority are always inactive, and many more are sporadically active. But steady growth does tell a story.

For anyone interested in trying Pillowfort out, here are some starting points: ( Read more... )

If those don't answer your questions, feel free to ask away here about the site or its workings. There is also a community there for Dreamwidth users. It's been very inactive but I know that a number of people on Pillowfort do have DW accounts or have used it before. And if you just want to see what's going on with anniversary stuff there's a community collating it.