I think the radio panel this morning went well, which is a big relief 😅 If you want to hear me working hard to make socialist arguments despite some not-very-good framing of the questions, the ABC has uploaded the program I appeared in to their website. My segment starts at 45:23!

774 ABC Radio Melbourne is holding a candidate panel in Brighton today and, as the Victorian Socialists candidate for the area, I will be there! Tune in, I guess, if you like 😊

Indie came to the park, tripped over, and faceplanted straight into the dirt 😢 She’s unbothered, and in fact has spent much of the rest of her time at the park throwing dirt over herself on purpose, but she looks like a little chimneysweep!

Alright, I did it, I cut over to the new site 😄 If you’ve been following me long enough you’ll recognise the layout as the one from my old Hugo blog, but the underlying platform is Weblog.lol now. I even kicked things off by writing a page about Weblog.lol and why I switched to it.

I’m really keen to cut over to the new version of my site, even though I still have a ton of pages I haven't imported and there’s more tinkering I could do first. I just feel like I’ve imported enough pages, and it’d be nice if my domain name wasn’t pointing at a site I don’t update any more. So, I think I’ll make the change soon.

Getting pretty ticked off with Apple right now. I dug through the settings menus to find the completely arbitrary place under SCREEN TIME where Apple put the "disable Writing Assistance" setting, and it is still trying to pressure me into sending AI-generated responses to people when I only ever want to write my own. If "disable Writing Assistance" doesn't cover this, what does?! I just want it to stop putting words in my mouth, omfg

Had to take Gidget to the vet today because she's been suffering some gastrointestinal issues and serious crankiness. They ran some blood tests and apparently she has hyperthyroidism 😔 But at least it means her symptoms have a specific cause that's been pinpointed, and there's a cheap and effective treatment (even if it means giving her tablets every day for the rest of her life). Just hoping she feels better soon 🤞

Bro, how is the new Interpol album so good?

I have been sick for almost a week now (less than a month after I was last sick!) and I am so fed up with it. What I would give to be able to breathe through my nose again 🤧

Dunno if anyone here remembers, but for a few years I’ve been using an iOS app called Keybuild to be able to use a custom keyboard layout on my phone (I even wrote a blog post about it). Well, it still basically works, but it hasn’t been updated for current iOS versions and keeps crashing such that the default iOS keyboard loads instead.

Today I decided to see if any similar apps have come out more recently. And behold! I came across Mister Keyboard. It seems just about as configurable (albeit some features took me some hunting), but it also supports swipe-to-type, predictive text, and autocorrect! All of which seem to work better than last time I made use of any of these features 😲 And the swipe works even though I created my custom Dvorak left-hand layout! It's more expensive than Keybuild (AUD$27 a year instead of AUD$6 as a once off) but offers a two-week free trial which I’m making good use of now. It might just be worth it.

So proud of my 22-month-old, who today said a THREE-word sentence: "Bit food more!"

She and I have shared FOUR slices of toast this morning. I eat the crusts, she gets the soft middle bit 😂 Imagine telling my kindergartener self (who also hated crusts) that she would one day voluntarily eat all of them to make another person happy 🥹

Migrated my almost 10,000 accumulated bookmarks from Raindrop.io to a Linkding instance (omg.lol's later.place). It has all the same features that I actually use and is so much faster! Much more "Small Web"!

My only issue is that none of the "link descriptions" made it into the export file (as opposed to link notes, which did get imported... as link descriptions). Seems like the only way to fix this will be individually editing all 10,000 links. This is not going to happen but I guess I can delude myself. (Edit: At least I can just edit the link and click "Refresh from website", I don't actually have to visit the website or copy-paste anything! I still won't do this 10,000 times but now I can delude myself harder.)

@lxak Just wanted to say, I checked out your website and I really like the setup! It looks nice and it's neat how you proxy most of your pages from Gemini :) I hope you don't mind me throwing that out there!

Indie's new favourite thing, as of today, is to walk around chanting, "Happy! Happy!" whenever she is, you know, happy. Let me tell you, it is such a pick-me-up to get a constant stream of positive feedback

Finished Ann Leckie's "Ancillary Justice" today. I found the story a bit confusing (it didn't help that I put the book down for three weeks halfway through), and the ending wasn't very satisfying as it just set up book 2, but I did enjoy reading it.

It was like, the book felt unputdownable when I was reading it, but convoluted enough that I was a bit reticent to pick it up again when I did. The setting was interesting and I like a good science fiction political conspiracy thriller. I do think the whole "main character has had twenty years to figure out gendered pronouns and still calls everyone 'she'" thing was an unnecessary gimmick though.

Not sure if I'll get around to reading book 2. Part of me wants to know how the story ends, but another part thinks I'll forget the relevant details of the story before getting around to reading it anyway, haha!

So this is what "toddlers scribbling in books" looks like in the modern era

Hello world! I'm Jess (or Jessica), and I just made an account on this instance after having been an omg.lol subscriber for four years or something already, haha. My pre-existing Mastodon account is at @jayeless@toot.cat. Since social.lol switched to the Glitch flavour of Mastodon, I'm highly tempted to move over here for my primary Fedi home, but I'm just sussing it out a little first 😅