Has Covid-19 revitalized Dreamwidth?

[hrj]

 There sure are a lot more people posting regularly in the last week! (Myself included.) My work day started with me being rather snappish in some email responses to my "we can't agree on a corrective action--we can't even agree whether to have a corrective action" group. Nobody got very huffy with me in response, although one person did say that he agreed with everything I'd said *except* for characterizing his position as "I'm fine with the status quo and having other people do pointless make-work because of it." On the other hand, I officially submitted two investigations for final review today, which are my two oldest.

Today's promised rain started just when I opened up the garage door to take my bike out at lunch. I never, ever complain about the rain. (Not even in Spain or on the plain.) But I'm glad I was 15 minutes late in taking lunch and didn't get hit with it halfway out on my loop. It was solidly drenching by the time my work day was done, so no yard work, but no needing to water the new plants either. I got some LHMP reading done over lunch instead. In theory I'm going to do some more as soon as I finish posting this, but I may read the new Decameron Project story instead.

Breakfast was the last English muffin with bacon-quince jam*, a slice of bacon, and a tomato-cheese omelette with some of the lamb drippings to temper the egg. Lunch was salad with surimi, tomatoes, dill pickles*, and a sprinkling of shredded orange peel*. Dinner was lentils cooked in chicken broth, with the Estates requirement being fulfilled by the herbs* in the broth. I also baked a couple of ready-to-bake chocolate chip cookies as an afternoon snack, but had the usual problem with temperature regulation in my toaster oven and the result was only passable. I guess if I want afternoon cookies I need to do a full batch in the regular oven and simply be self-controled about consuming them. (Ha!) I also carved the rest of the lamb off the bone for later use and set the bones simmering with onions and herbs* to make more broth. I have an atavistic fondness for making soup from scratch that way.

*Produce of My Estates

The mail included my recent impulse buy of Nimatnama (15th c recipes from India), which for some unaccountable reason had been wrapped in 5 separate layers of bubble-mailing-envelope. Well, at least it arrived in perfect condition!

Helped a friend track down connections in relation to a recording made at an early Darkovercon over the course of a couple fb conversations, once again proving the power of the internet. (Though he also pointed out that the chain of logic I used for identifying the most likely information source sounded a lot like my description of what I do for a living. He's not wrong.)

I've been watching all my planned trips and events for the next couple months disappear from the calendar and thinking, "When I said I wanted to take some vacation this year that didn't involve going anywhere or doing anything, this wasn't exactly what I had in mind." But I'm thinking that when the end of May rolls around, I should take some vacation time even if I am just staying home. Who knows what we'll all be doing at the end of May.

I've been thinking about Sunday's chat with the DISTAFF crew and thinking it would be nice to set up some more online video chats, just to avoid stewing in my own juices too much. Online life tends to be unsynchronized, so it's hard to know where to start.

Comments

[hrj]

SDD13: temperature = 97.4. I see three possibilities: either my cheap CVS electronic thermometer is crapping out already, getting up an hour and a half earlier is catching a lower basal temperature, or I am slowly sliding into an estivation state.

Didn't leave the property at all today (because of rain). Nothing even resembling proximity to other people except mediated by the mail.

[lferion]

I’ve been reading your posts with interest, and enjoying all the DW activity. Haven’t quite gotten it together to actually post myself, though I’m trying to comment.

[hrj]

I'd be interested to read about what you've been doing with yourself lately.

[threadwalker]

I had your marmalade today. Yum.

[hrj]

Yay! At this point, I have no idea whether I'll be able to hold my planned June "exchange of produce" party. So I'm glad it's going out into the world.

[katerit]

It's pouring here, and while I love rain and always want more, I wish it had waited until tomorrow when the roof is supposed to have been fixed.

[hrj]

Having read the update, at least it's fixed now!

[kareina]

My trick for not eating too much at once off whatever I bake is to promptly put it in the freezer. Works for me, and I also remember to go back and eat it in a reasonable amount of time.

I haven't been posting due to working an extra half time job this month, and, more recently, helping to draft the guidelines for Drachenwald's online meetings and courts.

[hrj]

I'm not sure how well today's lemon shortbread will freeze. But I've kept myself down to only eating a quarter of the batch so far.

[kareina]

I have had good experiance freezing shortbread.
You could try freezing one or two servings, for science. Then if there was a serious loss in quality you wouldn't be out much.

[jreynoldsward]

I'm starting to post more myself and hey! My reading page is now going past one page.

I do miss the old days of LiveJournal when there was a lot more posting going on. Before COVID-19 hit I was starting to see people on Facebook talk about trying to blog more. Now, well...yeah.

Meanwhile, the independent writers group I belong to, Northwest Independent Writers Association, is launching a spring blog tour with posts about writing by six of NIWA's more experienced members (including yours truly). It starts next week and goes through May. But I'm also slowly working myself up to doing more than just horseback riding logs (they do get tedious after a while unless I think of something to write about while riding). The work in progress is triggering some very interesting thoughts, especially since it decided to become a trilogy....

[hrj]

The way that LJ failed to reproduce itself on DW is interesting, given how easy it was to migrate. I've added it to my catalog of evidence for "the internet is an ecosystem that behaves in systematic but not always predictable ways and is easily disrupted."

[jreynoldsward]

I'm kind of thinking that the timing had something to do with that. Facebook started exploding, various prolific LJ posters stopped posting even on DW because the Sad Puppy BS was exploding all over the place, people were getting Patreons, Tumblrs, and Instagrams going...instead of one clear place to go, the energy got diffused. Plus some people just stopped blogging.

I would be quite happy if DW woke up even more.

[hrj]

Yeah, it's my ecosystem model. It wasn't *just* about the functionality of LJ (which DW replicates). It wasn't *just* the difficulty of lifting up entire communities and resettling them in a new application. It was also that in the same timeframe there were several major disruptions to several LJ ecosystems that might have destroyed "LJ as we know it" even without the Russian thing. I have this image of social media as ecological successions, where nothing is ever truly in stasis, and the "golden age" of every social media community was always a dynamic snapshot that was inherently unstable and unsustainable. It was the specific arc of change and expansion that made it a golden age. Once that arc began to lose momentum, the experience would never be the same.