About
About Me
I’m a 90s kid, born and raised in Melbourne, Australia. I speak English (natively), Spanish (to a B1–B2 level), and the IAL Ido. At uni, I dual-majored in Spanish Studies and History, and did a minor and a half in Linguistics. I have a physical disability called Klippel-Feil Syndrome that you should not look up on Wikipedia because its article is not very good. I’ve worked as a primary school teacher, and in a few other jobs over time.
I’ve always been something of a humanist, which is to say I believe in the ability and the moral obligation of human beings to be kind to one another. This naturally led me to socialism, or the support for a radically democratic, egalitarian (stateless, classless) society with a sustainable economy organised around human need, not profit. I’m an internationalist too, as in I reject artificial divisions between people on the bases of borders or ethnicity. As well as socialism, this is what led me to take an interest in IALs like Ido.
I like languages, as you can probably tell. I love stories, in all kinds of different forms – books, film, TV, computer games – and I especially love speculative fiction for the extra light its innovative settings and ideas can shed on the human condition. I have a novel I’ve been working on for 15 years and one day will refine to a point where I’m happy with it. (Well, maybe not, as a hardcore perfectionist, but at least to a point I can publish it.) I love animals, and technology (I went out of my way to make a personal website, after all!) and I spend a lot of my free time reading, cooking, going on walks and playing computer games. (That is not an exhaustive list.)
I currently still live in Melbourne, in a beachside suburb with my partner Vivian and our tabby cat Gidget. Below you can see a few photos of the three of us.
About the Site
I had an interest in web design starting from when I was a kid on Neopets in the early to mid-2000s. From there I branched out into making my own personal hobby sites with HTML, CSS and basic PHP, and after that I blogged for a few years using Wordpress, then Chyrp.
This latest incarnation of my site is powered by the static site generator Hugo, and currently hosted on Vercel. The templates and the stylesheet are creations of my own, although I’ll have borrowed some code snippets here and there. The colour scheme used, both in light and dark modes, is the wonderful Nord theme. The favicon was created with Avataaars. The social media icons, pen/tag/comment icons (in post footers) and the “external link” icon come from FontAwesome, under their Creative Commons BY 4.0 licence. I'm using the Littlefoot Javascript snippet to inline footnotes and the Spoiler Alert! script to hide spoilers until clicked on in my book reviews.
To the best of my ability, this is an IndieWeb-enabled website. You may leave comments here through Webmentions, and I’m also using Bridgy to “backfeed” likes and replies from social media, so they’ll show up here just like native comments! What this means is that if you don’t know how to leave Webmentions, you can find a place where I’ve syndicated my post to social media (look in the footer under each post for direct links), leave a comment there and it’ll show up here just like magic. Because of the way Bridgy works it might not show up on the blog immediately, but unless I hate your comment so much I delete it it will eventually show up 🙂 A grateful shout out to Webmention.io, Webmention.js, Webmention.app and of course Bridgy for making this all possible.
This site does also have an Ido-language edition! Check it out if you have an interest in that international language.
This website does not set any cookies in your browser, and neither do I use any other technique to track you or collect personal data on you. I used to use Plausible Analytics to help me understand visitor trends in aggregate (e.g. what proportion of my visitors browse with which screen resolution or browser, or where are people clicking links to my website from). Currently I’m not even doing that 🙂