jayeless@dreamwidth

• This article was a great one on how the Left should prepare for deplatforming by Big Tech; I wrote a paragraph-length post about that.
• I found a neat online game: The Royal Game of Ur. The implementation is FOSS, but the game itself originates in Ancient Babylon, and was rediscovered in excavations about a century ago. Pretty cool 🙂
• I wrote a review of a short story called The Weight of the Sunrise, an alt-history where the Inca Empire recovered after an initial destructive wave of smallpox and continued into the 19th century, when a vaccine became available. I liked the story 🙂 And you can read it for free on the author's site.
• I wrote a long post about trying to improve my site's loading times with better image handling. I learned a lot of new stuff over the last few days! Native HTML lazy loading, responsive images through the srcset attribute, generating the different-sized images to put into that srcset attribute automatically through Hugo templates… I've put in so much work but I'm very proud of myself now 😊
• I also wrote a post about how "real name" policies are terrible ideas, following on from this great article on TechDirt.

And no I did not lie, there are also photos: Gidget in the rain, chicken tacos I made, a pretty orange flower, our neighbour's ginger cat, my morning beverage (coffee) and Gidget snoozing on the couch.

Sharing some links to some more recent posts 🥸

• Photo post - took Gizmo to the dog beach
• Me joke-wondering why they even allow reviews of LBW decisions in cricket
• Photo post - My cat Gidget shepherds me to bed
• Book review - Amnesty (The Amberlough Dossier #3) by Lara Elena Donnelly – in all seriousness if you are even remotely interested of accounts of living under fascism and you like speculative fiction with great queer representation YOU NEED TO READ THIS SERIES
• Long post - Political labels on the Left – basically I make the point that your actual ideas/principles are way more important than the exact label you use to describe them, and sadly much of the Left gets really really hung up on labels when they should not 😖
• Photo post - the beach, the new bottle shop, and the novelty lager

One of the reasons I started this blog is that I'd come across the concept of the IndieWeb and really liked it. I went into some detail about that in my first post here. The principle of the IndieWeb that appealed to me most of all was the one about owning your content, instead of "sharecropping" it across half a dozen more narrowly focused sites and giving them control over the sole copy of all my data.

So, I brushed off my domain name, which I'd kept paid up but not really used for years. ( Read more... )

Originally posted at micro.jayeless.net.

Usually when I do a linkpost I mostly link to the long posts, but if I do them more often, I figure I can afford to link to the short posts, too. So here you are:

• I linked to an interesting article by Usman Khawaja on the hostility of Australian cricket to players of immigrant backgrounds, and how this is sloooowly changing. (No real point linking to my post I guess, that just goes straight to the article.)
• A post about "all X is not Y" not meaning the same as "not all X is Y". Spawned some discussion in the comments, too. I want to clarify I don't usually complain about minor variations in the use of language, but this one annoys me because I always assume the other person meant what they literally wrote and I have to go back and read it again once I realise that can't be right.
• I finished R.F. Kuang's The Burning God (the last in her military fantasy trilogy) and I posted a review of it to my homepage. I liked it a lot better than the second book but it still was not perfect.
• Lastly, a post about cats' thermoneutral zone, which turns out to be much higher than humans', so I guess I should stop worrying when Gidget wants to go out on scorching hot days 😁

Hello! Remember how I said I was going to try linking to my micro.blog posts over here? Well I still intend to, but obviously it's not something I'm really great at. Anyway, since it's been so long (nearly a month 😬) I'm just going to link a few of the selected highlights. Feel free to go to my micro.blog's homepage and browse through all the posts if you want to see everything (including cat photos, some links to interesting articles/games/apps, some linguistics musings, some book reviews, you know the drill).

• Dec 12 - a titleless post about changing email addresses: I've been moving away from Gmail and Outlook to ProtonMail, for the better privacy implications, and I wrote a quick post about some of my experiences actually changing email addresses (some sites have better ways of dealing with this than others, and there are even some – like Spotify – that I don't think let me change at all)
• Dec 15 - Perfection isn't necessary, just try your best: a post about how in most circumstances you don't need to be perfect (with a new diet, fitness routine, moving away from privacy-violating online services, etc.) to experience the benefits
• Dec 24 - Upgrading my iPhone: a post about how long I'd had the old one (3½ years), what I was doing with it now I was no longer going to be using it (giving it to my sister, who was soldiering on with a barely-functional Galaxy S4), and what new phone I got (iPhone 12 Mini)
• Dec 29 - Thoughts on gender and (my) pronouns: some reflections on why I felt uncomfortable specifying pronouns on things like my Mastodon profile (my reasons are complicated so I'm not going to summarise them in a one-liner, please read the post if you want to know)
• Dec 31 - Reflecting on 2020: the obligatory end-of-year post talking about my experience of the pandemic, relatives' deaths and near-deaths, etc. (it was mostly not a happy year for me)
• Jan 7 - Stray thoughts on the storming of the US Capitol: mostly thoughts on US imperialism, the rise of the far-right globally
• Jan 8 - Experimenting with Gemini: if you haven't heard of Gemini, it's a super lightweight alternative to HTTPS optimised for text posts. I think it's a cool concept, and I'm hoping it becomes easier for non-ultra-technical people to participate in Gemini space

As per usual feel free to comment here if you find anything you'd like to make a comment on!