Monday afternoon things

 * I have a working dryer again! The repairman had called on Thursday and said the blower wheel had come in but he was still waiting on the knob. At that point all I really needed to wash were dresses and underwear, which can dry on a wooden rack, so I told him I'd wait on the knob for him to come out.

The knob came in early today so he came out shortly after lunch and did the fix; he demonstrated the dryer to me and it's noticeably quieter than it's been for over a year so I presume the blower wheel had slowly been failing over that time. 

He also removed a now-nonfunctional clothes-hanging bar that extended out of the top of the (stacked) dryer - another repair guy, I think when I had to have the hot water heater worked on, had broken it so the end kind of rattled around on the inside, and this guy just took it out in order to avoid any future problems (I had told him I didn't use it since it was broken, and that I didn't care if he removed it or not)

Less than 1/4 the price of a new unit so I feel like I got a fair deal on it.

* A gift from a Ravelry (and now Bluesky) friend that came (since it was from Amazon) yesterday:

JAZZ HANDS!

It's a tardigrade plush. With a realistic and so, slightly alarming face (I think that circular thing is the mouth). 

I dunno. I just think they're neat.

* Someone on bluesky was talking about "why is Google so cruddy now" and others were reminiscing about Lycos (and I remember Altavista, if i remember correctly that was my search engine of choice). 

Sadly, I think the "usefulness" of free search engines is done for,, between AI/LLM trying to take over the space (Clippy on steroids: "It looks like you're trying to write a screenplay, want me to put one together for you from stolen bits from other writers?") and just the SEO garbage that's been going on for years.

I vaguely wonder if there'd be a market for a *subscription service* search engine, where either you paid a penny (or a fraction of same) per search and were billed at the end of each quarter, or you paid a monthly fee for unlimited searches, and if that would be profitable enough for the company running it to avoid all the ad sludge and people gaming the system to get their results at the top of searches that aren't all that related to their results.

* And that made me think about the Old Web, and two websites I remember from my early days as a knitter (well, early days the second time around: I learned when I was 10 but never did much more than make a few garter-stitch scarves) around 1997 or so.

There was woolworks.org and knitting-and.com. Knitting-and still exists and I'm delighted to see that my "chilli pepper" (note Australian spelling) sock pattern is still on there - I knit that for my sister-in-law the first Christmas after she and my brother were married. I had forgotten about it and as I said, was delighted to see it still there. Ah, 1998/1999, that was a whole lifetime ago. 

Unfortunately, Woolworks (which really is the first knitting page I used) only exists on the wayback machine but many of the links still work. I did download and print a copy of the Leaves of Grass socks for posterity - years and years and years ago when I first was knitting socks I wanted to knit them but I chickened out at the lace and just knit them plain, using the guidelines for heel turning and such, and this time I would like to make them for "real"

(And ah, the halcyon days of Socka sockyarn. I'm not even sure Stahl company still exists, or if someone else bought them up). 

Back in those days knitting seemed smaller. There were fewer people doing it and writing about it online, the resurgence it enjoyed was *just* beginning (I side eye the people who claim "oh knitting took off after September 11, 2001, because people wanted something comforting - no, knitting was already getting big again, and the "comfort seeking" just gave it another boost). And then through they heyday of webrings and blogs (And oh, how I miss there being lots of knitting blogs! Most of the writers have quit doing it - their lives got too busy. Or a few passed away. Or a few found a way to "monetize" it and while, good for them, I don't have the ready cash to subscribe to fifteen Substacks or whatever. And yes, I know Dr. Johnson's advice about people who write for free, but I enjoyed those days of reading people's weekly or sometimes daily musings for free).

I don't know, in a way it felt almost more freewheeling - maybe almost "hippieish" in the way the Woodstock Craftsmans Manuals (which I have written about before) feel different from the slicker, more corporate craft guides I've seen more recently. Like it was amateurs doing it for fun, to be amateurs, and they didn't dream of making money off of it.

And no, I'm not going to go into a "money ruins everything it touches" rant (though sometimes it does) and I do think in some cases people regretted monetizing their knitting - I know I would hate it, and I have a 9-5 (and then some) gig that eats too much of my life already.

And during the "blog" era,  there was also quite a flowering of Interweave publications and even some Lark Books publications - lots of knitting books (I remember for a few years it was hard to even keep up) and additional magazines like KnitScene. And then, in the past couple years......it all started to go away. Part of it was Interweave being bought by F and W (which apparently is one of those firms like KKR that buys up companies, guts them, and then sells them for parts). KnitScene went away. Quilty, which I LOVED went away, came back, then went away again, apparently forever. Some of the oddball little Interweave publications like Jane Austen Knits stopped coming out as special issues.

(At least Interweave and Piecework live on - Piecework owned by Long Threads Media, which seems a company that actually values the topics they publish on, and I think Interweave Knits may actually still belong to Interweave? Though I did see news of an "Advisory Board" coming on which makes me slightly nervous as sometimes everything-by-committee means there's trouble, or it means things are going to change in a big way)

There seem to be far fewer knitting books coming out now. And there are regular reports on Demon Trolls at Ravelry (mostly a "buyer beware" discussion group warning people of unscrupulous sellers or "here's how to get your money back if Seller X defaulted on their promise to send out your order) of long-time yarn shops closing down. Part of this is the age group of the owners - a lot of them are older Boomers, and so, want to retire, and aren't able to find a buyer for their shop. Part of this is likely the fact that if the economy isn't *actually* "bad" according to the signals, it *feels* bad to a lot of us who are paying maybe $20-$30 more a week for the same groceries as a couple years ago. Part of it may be the rise of online shopping and while maybe  only KnitPicks even approaches being like Amazon in size - and a lot of online shops are actually small businesses, and also a lot of brick and mortar shops do online sales (my beloved almost-a-LYS, Quixotic Fibers, has an online storefront). 

Part of it may be some folks just gave up knitting. Or people like me look in horror at their stashes and go "I am never going to get this all knit up, I should never buy any more yarn" (Narrator voice: she will, in fact, buy more yarn). 

But I do worry about a contraction. Not just and not even primarily losing sources for supplies (that stash, as I mentioned, and I have probably every size of needle I would require, sometimes in multiple versions) but the loss of COMMUNITY - the nice thing about blogs was it was communication and a reminder that you weren't alone out there, even if you lived somewhere where not very many people knit. 

And I don't know what's coming. One thing the whole span of time from late 2019 (or maybe even early 2018 when my friend Steve died quite suddenly) to now has taught me it that change is unexpected and is often bad and so I tend to be a bit of a pessimist now. I would love to be proven wrong. I would love to see something good happen (And yes, I know: "you can make good things happen" except I lack the time and energy for, say, organizing a "campus knit group" and I also lack the desire to LEAD such a thing because then you wind up dealing with the drama such things can engender and no THANK you.)

But it is nice to see the old patterns out there still, in some quiet back corner of the internet....

("She knits a Joan's 2-strand sock, she knits a pumpkin hat, she knits a Dr. Who scarf, she knits a Knitlist hat, she knits the patterns that remind her of the good times; she knits the patterns that remind her of the best times")