Hello, stonefire! Happy new year to you too!
I’ve seen your name in the chatroom, but didn’t say ‘cause I was just popping in and couldn’t stay, so, hello!

Hi stonefire Happy New Year to you too. I see you've made one post in the forum. I hope to see you around here more often.

It's great to see you pop by, Stonefire, hope to see more of you. (KoN, Stonefire is an old member from a long time ago - I think perhaps before the great site crash of 2012, hence no surviving posts till now).

Well I'm testing out the new Forum interface and like what I see so far. Hopefully this will encourage me to get more active on the forum again. (Social media these days is so full of adverts and other messy stuff, and you don't see half the things you actually want to see; its making miss the simpler days of of the Internet in the 00s)

I miss forum-culture sometimes too... I can get closer with Discord chats than with most social media but that still misses easily-navigable threads in my opinion. Anyway. It would be delightful if this place had some good life in it.

This quote from Screwtape Letters appeared in my Facebook memories today - which is ironic given I feel like it describes Social Media (and especially Facebook) even better now than it did 12 years ago when I shared it. It fits kinda well with what I've been feeling lately:

As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations....You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods...As one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, "I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked".

~The demon Screwtape advising his nephew Wormwood on how to tempt a man, The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis.

@ajnos There's a uh. Term I keep running into which is unfortunately too crude for these environs, but which becomes relevant in that there is starting to be a popular recognition with words for it and everything of a Process social media tends to go through, where a given platform becomes worse and worse over time as it stops providing the services the users desire and starts maximizing its own ability to advertise and make a profit. In other words, it isn't just a tendency of humanity at play: it is that the metaphorical temptors behind the platforms are intentionally worsening the human experience to improve their own. Which also seems very Screwtape.

Okay this forum should come a bit more to life I hope. I had difficulties with it this morning.

@knightofnarnia I'm definitely on board with resuscitating it, it's good to see you joining us in here. 🙂

What kind of activity would you like to see??

More people commenting mostly. But maybe they have but in subjects I don't follow (such as Narnia Art)

It's mostly been me, Ajnos, and Kristi in most recent posts. But I figure we have to start somewhere.

...Are you still writing much?

Glad you sorted out your login problems, KoN. Been wanting to play around more on the forum but I returned from my extended summer break with my parents and it appears my internet is "broken". I had problems with internet access at work today too, though I think that was related to a power cut. I hope I'll get more chance tomorrow.

Lilly who is writting much? Do you mean me? If so I could give you a link to my stories on fanfiction dot net.

@knightofnarnia Yes I did mean you.

I'd be ok with getting that link but I'm honestly kinda swamped with the amount of stuff I'm reading currently, so it could take me awhile to reach it... I was more curious if you've kept up with the hobby and to know whether there are projects that have you excited currently, than anxious to see it now.

Oh okay. No right now I've kind of hit a wall as far as writting is concerned 😕 . I usually write fictional stories. Like a planet far away. Or something little is known about (like I wrote a story of a female Christian slave in Rome). But on fanfiction it's mostly Star Wars fanfiction.