organization

Pinterest, We Need to Talk

(I promise you, a real post is coming.  It’s sitting in drafts waiting for pictures.  Soon.)

Dear Pinterest,

We’ve been friends for a really long time.  I joined not long after you first launched, and I talked a ludicrous number of friends into jumping on board.  This was the tool I’d been looking for.  Something that allowed me to catalog things by pictures I’d seen on websites, and group them together so that I could skim through each visual folder to find what I was looking for, instead of having to have endless folders in my bookmarks, and then figure out what to call each thing so that I could distinguish one meatball recipe from another.  It seems absurd to say “Pinterest changed my life,” but in some ways, it’s true.  We’ll come back to that later, but for now, I’ll only say this about how you’ve changed my internet life – I have 3.1k pins on 53 boards.  That is a lot of pins.

You’ve made a lot of changes since I joined.  Some of those changes have been pretty awesome.  You launched an app, which has made it easier to add inspiration I spot randomly “in the wild.”  You launched secret boards, which I have used for gifts, surprise parties, and so much more.  Other changes, I’ve been pretty neutral about.  The addition of “promoted pins,” has been kind of irritating, but I get that you’ve got to make money somewhere, so ads are a necessary evil.  There are a few changes, however, that have seriously killed my use of your tool, and I want to talk about those.

Let’s start with these godforsaken “picked for you” pins, and the introduction of “News”.  One of the things that I have loved for so long about Pinterest is that my “home feed” was a place to go to see what my friends and family were pinning.  What is interesting/funny/pick an adjective to them?  I repinned a lot of these things.  It was quick and easy to jump on, scroll through what people I chose to follow were pinning, and then go find what I really wanted by either searching or popping the board I needed up to find my pins.  Since the release of these “picked for you” pins, I spend about 20 minutes looking at crap I didn’t sign up for and don’t particularly care to see.  Why do I spend so long on this?  Because I’m having to go into each of these pins, click the x,  and then “hide all pins related to x.”  I set my settings to tell you not to use personalization on my feed, and yet, here we are.  I want to be able to tell you, Pinterest, that I do not care what you think I’m interested in.  I don’t care that you see everything I pin, I don’t care that you’re trying to give me things that I could also be interested in based on what I pin.  If I want recommendations based on a specific pin, I will click on it and then scroll all the way down to see “related pins.”  And damnit, I want you to listen to that.  I also want you to stop deciding that when I tell you I don’t want pins related to a board, it means you can pick things related to a pin.  STOP IT.

On that same note, if you get rid of these “picked for you pins,” you can ALSO get rid of the “News.”  The fact that Jen pinned 30 pins to her baby board is absolutely not news.  I should be able to scroll down my home feed and see that she pinned all these pins.  I don’t need another notification about it.  Notifications used to be “hey, someone repinned your pin!” or “hey, your pin got 15 likes!”  They were fun.  They were a way to track how other people were viewing the things I was pinning, which is pretty cool when you’re signed up for a business account based on your little blog.  Fix the home feed, lose the fake news, and then I will probably come back more.  I say probably because we still have a pretty big issue.

Can we please also talk about your categorization issues?  Maybe this isn’t completely a Pinterest problem, maybe this is also a Pinterest-User problem, but if that’s the case, we need a way to fix it.  You see, one of my favorite things to do when I’m having a crappy day is to open Pinterest, click on “Humor,” and scroll.  It mostly fixes things.  But pretty often, I’ll come across something that terrifies me.  Like the fact that pins with study tips for the NCLEX are often categorized as humor.  If you’re going to let this happen, Pinterest, I need the ability to click the pin and tell you that this pin is in the wrong spot.

This is so not okay.

This is so not okay.

And as long as we’re talking about pins being categorized incorrectly, I’m going to pop back to that little thing where I said I was mostly neutral on “promoted pins.”  Please stop putting ads for shoes and clothes and whatever into the middle of a recipe search.  When you launched “promoted pins,” you promised that they would be relevant, and that we would see promoted pins that related back to the searches we were doing (in case you’ve forgotten that bit, here’s the link).  In your update earlier this year, you reiterated that that was the intention when your product manager stated that she was looking for ideas to redecorate, and found a rug that was a promoted pin from Target – that was what these pins should be.  These pins are not that.  I’ve got pins about engagement rings showing up in recipe and humor searches, pins on weight loss in craft searches, and my favorite from just now has to be “how to help your best friend through breast cancer,” promoted by HealthLine in the middle of “Quotes.”  You’re better than this, Pinterest.

I want to love you again, Pinterest.  I really, really do.  But for some reason, you are hell bent on driving me away.  You used to be comprised of like-minded people who genuinely cared about making your site a place to be inspired, a place to carefully store things until they were needed. A place to laugh, a place to cry, a place to be consoled.  You held words, art, and food to bring people together.  Dreams were tucked away on pins.   Now, that orderly little place is gone.  It’s a mess of ads and things I didn’t sign up to see, poor algorithms including irrelevant things in my searches.  Please, Pinterest, be better.  It’s time to look back at the intentions that drove your founders to spend all that time creating you, and figure out what went wrong.

With Love,
Brandi

 

If you got this far and use Pinterest, congratulations.  This next part is for you.

For the love of all that is good and holy in this world, check your links before you pin.  I swear to Jesus, if I click through on ONE MORE adorable pin and then have to google because you pinned off someone’s front page, and NOT off the permalinked post, I am going to lose my mind.  If you love something on someone’s blog so much that you have to pin it, do us all a favor and click through to the actual post before pinning.  Because, JFC, you’re going to kill me.

Sewing, Planning, and Running

I opted to skip the Freshly Pieced link-up this week.  I’ve been fairly horrible about taking pictures and not sharing them on instagram, so I didn’t see the point in re-documenting it here.

It’s been a kind of terrible week.  We got some news last weekend that I’m still trying to digest, and I’m definitely not okay with it.  But it seems that there’s nothing we can do.  It’s been killing me, and I took a day or so to sit around and feel sorry for myself, and I’ve been trying to turn the rest of the horrible feelings into sewjo, which has worked kind of well.  Usually, when bad things happen, I run.  I run out the anger and the frustration and the sadness and I get to go home without the ability to feel anything else.  Running usually helps give me some power back when I feel like everything is out of my control, but this is the one time it’s not going to work.  Everything that’s happened has honestly brought into focus the fact that we/I have no control, that we can do everything right and it still won’t matter, and there’s nothing that we can do to change it.  I want to run, I want to fight, but I feel so defeated.  And that will be the end of the vague-blogging.

That said, I decided to take the week off of running and just let myself exist and sew, which seems to be what I need.  It’s been unusually satisfying to create this week, and it seems that my soul is crying out to make beautiful things from little pieces.  Because I don’t have enough projects on my plate, I think I’m going to start working on a postage-stamp scrap vomit quilt.  We’ll see when that gets started, since I have a ton of other stuff that HAS to be done first.  You can see my WIPs on the WIP page by clicking on the pink menu button.

In the past week, I’ve finished the second handmade item for my SPD Fairy Tale Swap partner, made fantastic progress on the mini quilt for that, finished the Alison Glass Angel Mini and thread catcher, accomplished my June DCMQG Bee block, and added about 15 projects to my plate.  I need to do individual posts for the Alison Glass packages I sent, as well as for DCMQG, so those are coming.

I’m also on the hunt for my next planner.  For the past 6 months, I’ve been working out of a Kate Spade agenda (large, gold dots.)  I love it.  I love how it’s organized, I love the font, I love all the extra space for notes to keep track of my swaps, I love the paper, and I especially love that it’s spiral bound, but with a hard cover over the spiral.  Each month is color coded with the important stuff.  Last minute stuff tends to get tossed in in regular black ink when I’m sitting at my desk at work, but theoretically, each month is a different color.  What I don’t love about it is how the hard cover has worn.  My dots are faded, it looks dirty, and it’s not.  So, for the past few weeks, I’ve been researching hard.  And I’ve come to a few conclusions.  Some of these conclusions might insult some of you, and I’m sorry, but this is where I am.

1. I do not understand people who need 7 leatherbound planners.  If you need this many planners for your life, you are doing it wrong.

2. I do not understand the purpose of spending $60-75 on a planner and then using it as a scrapbook.  If you really want to scrapbook your life, there are gorgeous albums for that.

3. Why, why, WHY is it so hard to find a planner with a covered spiral at roughly the same size as the Kate Spade?

4. WHY does KS not make vinyl covers for her planners?  I mean, yeah, it’s $36 for the large one and that’s not breaking the bank, but I HATE that in 3 months I don’t want to show off my gorgeous KS planner because the dots have started to rub off.

5. WHY ARE DISPOSABLE PLANNERS SO EXPENSIVE?!

6. There are not enough real-people review blog posts about planners out there.  I actually also feel this way about fashion, but that’s another blog post entirely.

I’m honestly down to one of two options.  I’m either going to re-order a KS planner, although I’m incredibly sad that the fun quotes each month are gone for 2016, and then cover it with clear contact paper to prevent some of that wear and tear.  OR, I’m going to suck it the fuck up and order an Emily Ley Simplified Planner in Pineapple when they are available in September.  I’m not super okay with either option, but I feel like there’s not much choice.  Thanks, universe.

And, finally, I’m in the process of trying really hard to reorganize my sewing space.  I’ve been using these fantastic drawers for my fabric, but I’m having a hard time keeping everything folded when I’m constantly rifling through them to find what I need.  And my blue and neutral drawers are about to explode.  They are stuffed full.  In addition, my notions are a disaster and I can’t ever find anything, and I don’t have a good storage option for my UFQs/WiPs.  I’m getting really frustrated with the mess, and I don’t know how to make it better.  I’m also really tired of having to cut on the floor or move my sewing machine off to the side of my table, which usually involves moving eight million other things in order to get enough space to move my machine and cut.  Basically, my space is a mess and I can’t function anymore.  I need some serious help.  Suggestions would be much appreciated.  We don’t have a ton of space here – M and I share a small bedroom as his office/my sewing space.  So, adding a table in the middle of the room isn’t an option (although I feel like that’s where I might be.)  Help.  Someone help me.