It’s “freedom day” in Melbourne today – after something like four months in lockdown, we no longer are. From what I’ve seen, a lot of people actually held or attended midnight parties (of no more than 10 people indoors or 15 outdoors, as per the new rules, I hope 😜) to celebrate the milestone, but Viv and I are clearly old and we were asleep at the time 🤣
I have mixed …
It’s been a bit quiet here on the blogging front recently and part of that is that I’ve been playing a few different browser games, and finding some of my time consumed by that instead. I think browser games have definitely declined in popularity since their peak (probably related to the rise of smartphones, and people playing casual games on those instead) but I still like them, as …
Without question, one of my favourite genres of game is the humble turn-based RPG. In the main, it’s not a very fashionable genre these days,1 and I’ve even seen some people argue that the fact that it ever existed at all was only as a “compromise”. Early gaming consoles didn’t have good enough hardware for action RPGs to work – only by separating out all the battle …
I’m writing this post on September 12, but that’s accurate actually, because by the time the 9/11 attacks happened it was already September 12 here. I was a kid, home sick from school at the time, and so I had nothing to do all today but watch the looping news reports, the footage of those planes going into the towers again and again.
My first reaction, really, was that this was a …
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how I used Keybuild to set my phone’s keyboard layout to Dvorak left-hand. I wanted to make a follow-up post about how I’ve been trucking with keyboard layouts since then, because uhhh, it has consumed quite a bit of my time and thus feels like the kind of thing I should write up for a post.
The first thing is, I’ve been determinedly doing at …
Today I read a couple of blog posts that got me thinking about this question: How do the ways we “socialise” online compare to the ways we (used to) socialise IRL, and what does the rise of social media and other forms of online socialisation tell us about the modern world?
I’m not saying I have awesome answers to these questions. Just that I’m thinking about them.
One of …
Remember a couple of weeks ago, when I said sometimes I get an idea in my head and just cannot let it go? Well, my post yesterday on Dvorak left-hand had exactly that effect. I added it as an additional keyboard to my MacBook and am now struggling hard to “type blind” (what normies would probably call “touch-typing” 😂). I was actually astonished; in the first minute of my …
As you may or may not know, I was born with a disability that gives me only limited use of my right hand. As such, I do pretty much 100% of my typing with my left.1 These days I just use the standard QWERTY layout, but there was a period of a few years – between about 2008 and 2016 – that I instead used this beauty:
I …
Since I made the switch to a narrower main column and larger text, I’d been feeling like the “jagged right edge” of my posts had become much more noticeable. The fewer words there are on each line, the greater a proportion of a line each word occupies, you see, which means that when a long word was too long to fit on the end of a line and was forced to become the first word of …
So, this is not the ground-up overhaul I mentioned wanting to do in yesterday’s entry. (If it was, there wouldn’t be so much wasted horizontal space on desktop.) However, if there’s one thing that’s true about myself, it’s that sometimes my brain just won’t let go of an idea. Even if it was something I had no intention of doing any time soon, once my internal …
Jessica Smith is a left-wing feminist who loves animals, books, gaming, and cooking; she’s also very interested in linguistics, history, technology and society.