Prompted by a post on Micro.blog , I did a bit of a deep dive into what genuinely small phones are available on the market now. By “genuinely small”, I mean preferably the size of the original iPhone SE, or smaller. Personally I’m OK with the size of the iPhone mini range, even though anything at the top of the screen is still a pain to reach one-handed. …
I saw an article and brief discussion today on the use of person-first (e.g. “people with disabilities”) vs descriptor-first (e.g. “disabled people”) language. As someone with a physical disability myself, I have a lot of thoughts on this topic. Originally I was going to comment on the discussion, but then my comment got pretty long, so I thought I’d type it up as a …
Last week, I spent a few hours going down the rabbit-hole that is experimenting with interactive fiction. This is a rabbit-hole that I do go down every once in a while, because I catch myself longing for a game to play that has a specific set of features (turn-based/not action, “quality” stemming not from difficulty but from story or general fun vibe, builds up complexity over time …
Seasonal depression has been kicking my butt lately. And by “lately”, I mean the last two months, I guess, but it’s especially kicking my butt now.
Winter for me often feels like a thick bog, an obstacle that I have to cross to continue on my journey (through life). To start, I’ll tell myself that it’s very manageable, just a minor inconvenience. “Look, the …
For the last few days I have been dabbling in the Shavian alphabet. If you haven’t heard of Shavian before, it’s a phonetic alphabet designed in the 1960s specifically to represent …
Spent a chunk of this morning reading about a new social media site that I guess has launched in some kind of public beta over the last 48 hours: Cohost .
I guess I had some mixed feelings about it, because on the one hand, new shiny thing that says many of the right things (no ads, no algorithmic timeline, worker co-op, here’s a business model, etc.). On the other, …
So I read this article, How San Francisco Became a Failed City . I was going to save it as a link post, but then the text of my link post got so long that I thought I should post it as an actual post. It’s about how “leftist” city officials in San Francisco have presided over escalating social problems in the city, and how the school board has reportedly …
I saw a little discussion about content warnings on Micro.blog today, and it reminded me that I have my own thoughts about content warnings – so many thoughts that I thought it’d be better to spin them out into their own post 🙂 So, here we are.
Mastodon, in case you don’t know, has quite a heavily-used content warning (CW) feature. In other Fediverse software I …
So, I wanted to share a little experience I had on the Internet last weekend.
As I’ve mentioned, I have an interest in the auxiliary language Ido. It has a pretty small community (I’d guesstimate it has about 0.1% the speakers of Esperanto, which it’s very similar to) and while I’ve been learning it for some time and can actually write it without feeling like it’s …
A few days ago I saw this astounding Mastodon post which says that the average item of clothing is worn only seven times, and that if we could just double the number of times we wear an item before discarding it, we could lessen the environmental impact of that piece by 49%.
It’s really been living rent-free in my mind for days because I just can’t get over it. I …
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.