We had a late night staying up to see as many of the results roll in as we could, and so today my mind is all ajumble with everything I noticed. Forgive me for the dot point-style post! For context, if you haven’t heard, it’s pretty clear that the Liberal/National government has been defeated and that Labor will lead the next one, but it’s still not clear whether they have a …
The other day I discovered that according to the AEC, you’re still supposed to have a valid reason for voting early (whether in person or via postal vote) and not just voting on election day. Officially you’re allowed to vote early if you:1
In just under two weeks, Australia will be holding a federal election. We’ve had a right-wing Liberal/National coalition government for the past nine years, despite their general malice, dodginess and incompetence. If they lose government, which the polling suggests they will (but the polling also suggested that last time and it was wrong so…), it’ll be to the Labor Party, which has …
Just before I went to bed last night, the news broke that notoriously obnoxious billionaire Elon Musk had clinched a deal to buy Twitter.1 He trotted out those trite lines about Twitter being a “public square” that needs to accept “free speech” (by which presumably he means bigoted incitement and harassment, like when he used doxxed info to harass a blogger critical of …
I watched a couple of interesting YouTube videos last night: this one, demonstrating how London accents have evolved from the 1300s to today and this one by the same guy, on northeast American accents from the 1700s on . He had this nifty conceit whereby each successive “speaker” was the grandson of the one before, so each accent was 60 …
When my folks visited on the weekend, we channel-surfed a bit and ended up watching portions of two movies that were adaptions of older, much-loved TV shows: the last 70% or so of Get Smart (2008) and the first half-hour of Star Trek Beyond (2016). It got us talking about the nature of movie adaptions in general, which I feel like are usually a bit disappointing.
The whole reason most of us …
On Saturday, Vivian and I completed a goal that at one point he didn’t think we’d ever achieve: we have now watched every single Harry Potter movie together. (The eight original ones, that is.) I’ve mentioned before that the Harry Potter book series was a huuuuge part of my childhood, but Vivian could hardly be more opposite in that regard. He’s a few years older than me …
A couple of months ago, I wrote about how Vivian had ordered these AncestryDNA kits, along with some thoughts on how “family history” and heritage is based on far more important things than DNA, anyway. Nonetheless, we completed the kits and sent them off, and today we got our results back. If you want to skip all the ancestry stuff and just read about my quirky genetic traits, …
So I woke up this morning to the news that, after 11 days of legal conflict and confusing news reports, male tennis no. 1 Novak Djokovic has been deported. In my opinion, this whole issue has been a bit of a shit-show, and I feel like I still don’t fully understand quite how this has all gone down.
I will admit, like many Australians I was pissed off when Djokovic was gloating on social …
I know for the sake of their mental health, a lot of people are choosing to avoid reading any more than necessary about Covid-19 or the news in general, and if that applies to you then I promise there are no hard feelings if you just close this window and don’t read the rest of this post 😅 I myself think my stress is being exacerbated by how much I have read on social media about this …
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.