Posts from 2023

2023-01-02: ✴️ Status messages: Watched ‘New Earth’ and ‘Tooth and Claw’
2023-01-04: 🇹🇼 Link: “Taiwanese Workers Have Shown Us How to Gain Ground in the Neoliberal Era”
2023-01-04: ✴️ Status messages: Thinking about, and outlining, my novel
2023-01-06: 💬 Link: “Lexical Sets for Actors”
2023-01-06: 🇺🇸 Link: “The Failure of Reconstruction Is to Blame for the Weakness of American Democracy”
2023-01-06: 🔍 Link: “The Last Wild Lions of Europe”
2023-01-07: 🔍 Link: “The science of why you have great ideas in the shower”
2023-01-07: 🇮🇱 Link: “Decoding Israeli ‘Extremism’”
2023-01-07: 🐱 Photo post: I know it’s been really quiet on this blog lately, and I haven’t done a Caturday post in like a month, so …
2023-01-09: 🐶 Photo post: Yesterday when we were taking Gizmo on his weekly beach walk, we encountered this ADORABLE puppy! It may have been …
2023-01-09: 💬 Link: “Do accents disappear?”
2023-01-09: 💬 Link: “How many competing writing systems can one language have? …” by Michael Cannings (@formosaphile)
2023-01-09: 💬 Link: “Unearthing a Long Ignored African Writing System, One Researcher Finds African History, by Africans”
2023-01-11: 🐶 Photo post: Had a really productive writing day yesterday, and then we were charged with babysitting Viv’s nephew, which meant …
2023-01-11: ❤️ Like of: “The Year of the Personal Website” by Matthias Ott
2023-01-11: 🖥 Link: “Building a website like it’s 1999… in 2022” by Sophie Koonin
2023-01-11: ✴️ Status messages: Watched Doctor Who episode ‘The Age of Steel’
2023-01-12: 🇧🇷 Link: “What happened in Brazil was not a repeat of Jan 6 in the US”
2023-01-12: 🇮🇷 Link: “Iran Says Face Recognition Will ID Women Breaking Hijab Laws”
2023-01-12: 🇨🇳 Link: “Today’s Protests in China Have Been Years in the Making”
2023-01-12: 💨 Link: “Air pollution is much worse than we thought”
2023-01-12: ✴️ Status messages: Finished off a 5kg bag of rice I’ve been working through for months
2023-01-13: 📰 Link: “Intellectual property is theft” by Dominique Cyprès
2023-01-13: ✴️ Status messages: Went on a beach walk and watched the sun set
2023-01-14: ✴️ Status messages: Deleted Tweetbot off my phone, thinking about changing things in my novel
2023-01-16: ✴️ Status messages: Productive editing/outlining day with my novel
2023-01-17: 🔍 Link: “I’m going to tell you the story of the man who solved a crime. …” by Rose Bailey
2023-01-18: ✴️ Status messages: Watched Doctor Who (‘The Impossible Planet’), added 600 words to my novel (which finished a scene!)
2023-01-19: 🍱 Micro post: Sometimes I go through phases where I’m really excited to cook different things and seek out new recipes to try, …
2023-01-19: ✴️ Status messages: Watched Doctor Who episode ‘The Satan Pit’
2023-01-20: ✴️ Status messages: Gidget was on my lap almost aaaaaall morning
2023-01-21: 🇬🇧 Link: “‘Dirty wee torturers’: Northern Irish man tells of British army abuse during Troubles”
2023-01-21: 🐱 Photo post: It’s Caturday! Here’s a pic of Gidget from earlier today, after she successfully convinced Viv to let her …
2023-01-21: ✴️ Status messages: Wrote a few hundred words, walked on the beach at sunset
2023-01-22: 💬 Link: “How the Discovery of a Unique Sign Language Reconnected a Linguist With Her Past”
2023-01-23: 🖥 Micro post: We’re having an unscheduled internet outage today. Every time I see posts about “internet of things” …
2023-01-28: 📺 Romance? In MY Doctor Who?!: Since the start of December, I’ve been doing a rewatch of post-2005 Doctor Who. Today, I watched the finale of …
2023-01-28: 🎬 Link: “Here’s Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand (And Three Ways To Fix It)”
2023-01-29: 🔬 Link: “An Oral History Of The Time Six Doctors Swallowed Lego Heads To See How Long They’d Take To Poo”
2023-01-29: 🐱 Photo post: I forgot about Caturday until the next day again 🙈 At any rate, here’s Gidget, incensed that the magpies are …
2023-01-29: 🇺🇸 Link: “Why Mickey Mouse’s 1998 copyright extension probably won’t happen again”
2023-01-29: ✴️ Status messages: Magpie Junior came for walnuts
2023-02-02: ✍🏻 Micro post: Isn’t this always the way? Best way to get ideas for a section of my novel I’ve been struggling with = try …
2023-02-03: 🖥 Micro post: This morning I came across a new-to-me web client for Mastodon called Phanpy: https://phanpy.social/ (external …
2023-02-03: ✴️ Status messages: Watched Doctor Who 3x01 ‘Smith and Jones’, went to see some movies
2023-02-04: 🖥 Link: “The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok”
2023-02-04: ✴️ Status messages: Watched Doctor Who 3x02 ‘The Shakespeare Code’
2023-02-04: 🐱 Photo post: Caturday is upon us again! This week, apparently the best cat photo I’ve taken is this one of Gidget on …
2023-02-06: ✍🏻 I rediscovered my novel’s 2009 draft: The other night, I came across a mostly-complete 90,000-word draft of my novel that I’d written when I was 16 …
2023-02-07: 🇷🇺 Link: “The Kremlin Has Entered the Chat”
2023-02-08: 💬 Micro post: Imagine if there was a linguist (or just linguistics geek) companion in Doctor Who. The Doctor: With my TARDIS, we can …
2023-02-12: 🖥 Link: “ChatGPT is a Blurry JPEG of the Web”
2023-02-12: 🕷️ Micro post: I’m very familiar with “shower thoughts”, but thanks to a couple of spiders engaged in a suspiciously …
2023-02-13: 💻 Site update: This morning I found out that webmentions.app, the utility I’ve been using to send out webmentions from this site, …
2023-02-13: ✴️ Status messages: Had a frustrating day trying to get Indiekit working again
2023-02-14: ✴️ Status messages: Struggled some more with Indiekit
2023-02-15: 🖥 Link: “10 rules of productive online communication - gen Z edition” by Tuan Mon
2023-02-15: 🌏 Link: “Why 50% of the World’s Population Lives in This Circle?” by Tomas Pueyo
2023-02-15: ❤️ Link: “Join the Resistance: Fall in Love”
2023-02-16: 🤖 Link: “Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”” by Simon Willison
2023-02-16: 🏙 Link: “In praise of the ‘15-minute city’ – the mundane planning theory terrifying conspiracists”
2023-02-17: 💻 Site update: After spending pretty much my whole day working on it, I can finally sit back and feel satisfied with things that …
2023-02-18: 🇺🇸 Link: “Trump Plans to Bring Back Firing Squads, Group Executions if He Retakes White House”
2023-02-18: 🐱 Photo post: Happy Caturday, everyone! 😸 This week I have a photo of Gidget determinedly sitting on this spot next to the TV (not …
2023-02-18: 🖥 Link: “iOS Shortcut Actions for Micropub posting” by Chuck Grimmett
2023-02-19: 🖥 Link: “God Did the World a Favor By Destroying Twitter”
2023-02-19: 📷 Photo post: I was pretty amused yesterday when I saw what “buying $1 of stamps” got you in the mid-1980s… three …
2023-02-19: 🗣 Reply to Leon Paternoster: Yeah, I’m having a day trying to get outbound webmentions working on my site, too 😭 Also need to work out what my …
2023-02-20: 💻 Site update: In my testing yesterday to make sure I had outbound webmentions working, I noticed that when they did send, they usually …
2023-02-20: 🗣 Reply to Leon Paternoster: Yeah, I found IndieWebify.me’s parsing to be very finnicky (as in: it missed things that were right there!) but …
2023-02-21: 🗣 Reply to Leon Paternoster: Yes! It might feel fragile, but they are working 😄 Truth be told I never worked out why h-card was supposed to be used …
2023-02-21: ❤️ Like of: “What do Places give us?” by Tracy Durnell
2023-02-22: 💬 Link: “What I learned about languages just by looking at a Turkish typewriter”
2023-02-22: 🇱🇰 Link: “75 years of Tamil oppression in Sri Lanka”
2023-02-22: 🇺🇸 Link: “A short and dirty history of US imperialism”
2023-02-22: 👮 Link: “Supreme Court rejects Ohio man’s bid to sue police over arrest for Facebook parody”
2023-02-23: 🔍 Micro post: Via Reddit (external link): This is apparently a genuine proposal from 1838 as to how Australia could’ve …
2023-02-23: ✴️ Status messages: Watched Doctor Who 3x11 ‘Utopia’
2023-02-25: 🐱 Photo post: Gidget: “Why you staring at me? Why taking photo of me in laundry basket??? I feel at home here. I am a …
2023-02-26: ✴️ Status messages: Wrote a long journal entry about a party I went to
2023-02-27: 📷 Photo post: Viv wanted us to buy the “plus cats” version of the firefighters calendar. Looking at it more closely now, …
2023-03-01: 🐱 Photo post: Having a go at participating in Micro.blog’s March photoblogging challenge (external link) 😅 Gidget …
2023-03-02: 🚀 Link: “No, Elon and Jack are not “competitors.” They’re collaborating.” by Dave Troy
2023-03-02: 🖥 Link: “I don’t want to log in to your website”
2023-03-02: 🖥 Link: “ChatGPT Is Nothing Like a Human, Says Linguist Emily Bender”
2023-03-02: 📷 Photo post: Thoroughly grey weather today as we wait for a tram at Windsor Station!
2023-03-02: 📷 Photo post: Tonight Viv and I went to some pub in Abbotsford where they were having a Mario Kart 64 championship 🎮 Unfortunately Viv …
2023-03-03: 👩🏻 Photo post: Enjoying some solitude at home tonight because Viv’s gone to the movies with his brother. Well… would …
2023-03-03: 🇪🇸 Link: “In Catalonia, Class Struggle and National Dispute Have Gone Hand in Hand”
2023-03-04: 😔 Making Myself Vulnerable: When I created this blog, back in November 2020, I had one clear guideline in mind: I was never going to post anything …
2023-03-04: 🇮🇷 Link: “Hundreds of Iranian Schoolgirls Have Been Hospitalized After String of Suspected Poison Attacks”
2023-03-04: 🐱 Photo post: It’s Caturday (still for another few minutes) and Gidget is NOT feeling it 😅 I think she wishes she could zip her …
2023-03-06: 🚩 Link: “The Tragic Life of a Polrugarian Minister”
2023-03-06: 🚊 Photo post: Missed yesterday, but here’s my entry for day 6 of the Micro.blog photo challenge 😅 This infamous engineering …
2023-03-08: 👪 Link: “The Heresy of Decline”
2023-03-08: ❤️ Like of: “Blogging Vulnerabilities” by Bix Frankonis
2023-03-09: 🤓 Micro post: I’m so used to my appearance with glasses now, that when I see old photos of myself without them I’m like, …
2023-03-09: 👮 Link: “The Anti-“Terrorist” Crackdown on Cop City Protesters Is the War on Terror Coming Home”
2023-03-10: 🐶 Photo post: My folks have gone away for the Labour Day long weekend, so we’re looking after Gizmo! So far today he’s: …
2023-03-11: 🐱 Photo post: It’s Caturday once again, so here’s a photo I took of a cat I saw on my walk to the supermarket the other …
2023-03-13: 💉 Micro post: After a weekend filled with MANY beach walks, we’ve returned Gizmo home. Tomorrow, I have a Covid booster shot booked – …
2023-03-15: 👮 Link: “How I got arrested for being a pedestrian.”
2023-03-15: 👮 Link: “Jail sentence overturned for climate change activist who blocked Sydney Harbour Bridge”
2023-03-16: 💉 Micro post: Guess I haven’t had much to say the last few days! My side effects from the Covid booster shot were pretty minor – …
2023-03-17: 🇺🇸 Link: “Texas judge is close to banning medication-induced abortion” by Kevin Drum
2023-03-19: 🧝‍♀️ Link: “Think women have never had it so good? You should take a look at medieval days”
2023-03-25: 🐱 Photo post: Seems like it’s been ages since I last posted anything to this blog (!) but I might as well break the drought with …
2023-03-28: 🐱 Photo post: Every time I take Gidget “out on a walk”, this is how it ends up – with her just chillin’ on this …

Jessica Smith is a socialist and a feminist who loves animals, books, gaming, and cooking; she’s also interested in linguistics, history, technology and society.