Since the start of December, I’ve been doing a rewatch of post-2005 Doctor Who. Today, I watched the finale of Series 2, the one where Rose is finally written out of the show (…but only temporarily, as it turned out).
When this season first aired, I was 13 years old and a huge Doctor Who fan. I read lots of fanfic, and even wrote some (having never been a really big fanfic person …
As you’re quite likely aware, there’s currently a massive explosion going on in the number of active Mastodon users, driven largely by Twitter users looking to escape Elon Musk’s disastrous mismanagement of that site. What this has meant for me is that I’ve found myself following (and being followed by!) perhaps double the number of people as I was one month ago, and I …
A couple of times in recent weeks I’ve seen some discussion about Newspeak in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and whether it was influenced by, or how it could be translated into, Esperanto. After all, Newspeak infamously uses words like “ungood” for “bad”, which is unironically parallel to Esperanto’s standard word for bad, malbona.
It seems like …
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 …
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.