In recent days, I’ve been making good progress on the novel I’ve been working on, off and on, for years. Back in 2017, I “completed” a first draft (the third quarter was still much too rushed, but at least there were no outright missing bits) and since then I’ve been trying to refine it into something actually presentable. One complication I found was that, while …
In just over two weeks, it’ll be Census night in Australia – that time every five years when every household is asked (in a “let us make you an offer you literally can’t refuse” kind of way) to sit down and fill out a detailed questionnaire about anyone who’s staying there that night. Now to be clear, while it’s easy to snark about the draconian penalties levied …
I read an interesting discussion on Reddit yesterday morning. It started with an article suggesting that most men are really reluctant to read female authors. The article’s author commissioned a poll comparing the readers of the top 10 bestselling male literary authors, and the top 10 bestselling female literary authors. The men’s readership was close to evenly divided – 55% men and …
The other night, Viv and I finished watching Rake (IMDB link). If you’re not familiar, it’s an Australian comedy-drama about a randy barrister, Cleaver Greene, whose life is a neverending trainwreck. And before I get too deep into the rest of this post, I can confirm that it is a seriously funny, though densely-plotted, absurdist kind of show. They made five seasons of it, each with …
A couple of years ago, I think, I put out a tweet that went along the lines of, “So sick of hanging out the same washing day after day and it still NEVER DRIES. How are you supposed to line-dry clothes in the winter?”
This got retweeted by a mutual with tens of thousands of followers, and then I got inundated with snarky replies like “TIL they don’t have dryers in Australia …
Earlier today I read a Reddit thread about book localisations for the US market, and while it’s not like it was all new information for me, I did come away somewhat annoyed. I just don’t think it’s necessary to change terminology all over the place, not even in children’s books.
There were people in the discussion arguing that “torch” had to be changed to …
A bit over a week ago, I stumbled across the concept of the “Curly Girl Method”, a hair care routine which is supposed to be better for curly and wavy hair. Uncharacteristically for me, because I’m not usually a “hair and beauty” hobbyist kind of person, I quickly became intrigued. I may not have curly hair, but I definitely have wavy hair, and (while this might …
It is a truth universally acknowledged that an individual in possession of a Hugo blog must feel compelled to make loads of posts about every aspect of their Hugo setup, and I must admit that this instinct has not totally escaped me 😅 At least I write enough about other things to not be in the bottom-right corner of shame on this scatterplot. Today’s post is on something I’ve seen a …
For those who are unaware, today (Sunday, 25 April) is the public holiday of Anzac Day, which commemorates a campaign whereby Australian and NZ soldiers tried to invade part of modern-day Turkey at the behest of the British, who had put together their plan so haphazardly that it was pretty much doomed from the start, and got solidly trounced. Now, even when I was a kid I didn’t really like …
Like many people, I think, I have an instinctive contempt for property developers.
It’s not that I object to new apartment buildings, per se. There do seem to be a lot of people in Melbourne who think that three million was the perfect population size for our city, and since as far as they’re concerned we were “full” at that point, we should continue to have a housing …
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.