Sydney Fringe Festival 2026 - Back at Marrickville Town Hall for this year’s volunteer induction! Lots of amazing events on the program this year. There’s a couple cabaret and theatre events I’m hoping to help out with…
🚴♀️ Ride: Coffee with a friend! - Distance: 2.91km
Time: 15min
Update: my shoulder really hurts.
Shingles vax - That’s #1 done and dusted. My friend Meredith warned me that it was a painful one, and I see what she means. Instant arm ache during the injection itself. Right now I feel fine though. Let’s hope I’m one of the lucky ones without significant side effects!
Hilariously, none of the people in Anytime Fitness even bothered to get off the treadmills. We’re all milling about outside watching them up there.
This is the second time we’ve been at Central Park shopping center in recent weeks with the fire curtains activated. Is there a problem with false alarms?
hi all 👋 this is a #Canberra-based post about a kids in #STEM programme, apologies for the wall of text if that’s not relevant to you 😬 but pls #boost4reach 🙏
does anyone know any Canberra (or surrounds) kids in grades 7-10 who are interested in STEM & would like to join a #LEGO #robotics team? I’m volunteering with a Canberra team participating in the FIRST LEGO League Challenge (FIRST = “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology”, it’s not the first one 🤪)
the various programmes are broken out into age ranges – info about this particular one (the “challenge” level) is on their website at https://www.firstaustralia.org/first-lego-league-challenge, although their website is super confusing & unhelpful unless you already know exactly what you’re looking for
this team meets on Sundays in Acton from 11:00-14:00 with the skills building running through until mid-November & then there’s a regional competition in Wollongong on 14th November
so if you know anyone who has kids in the right age range that might find this interesting, pls pass on the info & DM me if anyone wants to join or have a chat (pls no personal details, we’ll switch to Signal after an initial DM). I’d especially love to get some more girls & enby folks involved, but the team welcomes all genders
I’ve been asked to make it super-duper clear that this is not LEGO Masters – apparently they’ve had a couple of kids come along in previous years only to bail after a few weeks when they didn’t get to build LEGO Masters style stuff 🙃
anyone who’s interested in learning some coding (#Python using #PyBricks), engineering, & problem-solving while learning about #biodiversity (this year’s theme), teamwork, & planning might be a good fit
thx all, pls share with anyone who might have or know kids in or near Canberra who would be interested & pls #boost4reach 🙏
Kickass - Rodd: Guy plays “Sultans of Swing” on the recorder? Ok, whatever. No, it’s the insane guitar solo outro (https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/1vd5ik7/even_the_flute_didnt_know_it_could_do_that/) to the extended version!
Me: Whaaaaat. [watches video] This is peak non-toxic masculinity.
This is a post about AI. - I’m on a re-read of Pride and Prejudice and had to stop for a second at this little bon mot of Darcy’s:
> “The power of doing any thing with quickness is always much prized by the possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance.”
Quite.
A dark day for human rights.
🚶♀️ Walk: Greenway and Cooks River - Took the Snook on a long Sunday walk!
Distance: 9.63km
Time: 120min
@web_goddess when you're retired it's not day drinking, it's l e i s u r e
Birthday lunch at Darling Glebe - Day drinking is classy when you’re retired, right?
Of maps and castles and albatrosses - I recently sent the Snook a link to this very snazzy James Bond locations map (https://department-m.agency/map/), and I had to chuckle when comparing it to the beloved Patrick O’Brian Mapping Project (https://www.cannonade.net). I think the differences in website presentation are definitely appropriate for the characters and stories they represent!
And relatedly, I sent him this map of the world’s castles (https://thecastlemap.com) and asked him to try to guess what the one dot (https://thecastlemap.com/castles/fort-denison/) in Australia refers to. He got it wrong, as did I. (There have since been two more (https://thecastlemap.com/countries/australia/) added, none of which are what I would call actual castles of course.)
It was only five years ago that I was literally riding my bike to castles (https://www.web-goddess.org/archive/22221) in Munich. I miss that.
I’m hoping to visit “New Zealand’s only castle” (https://thecastlemap.com/castles/larnach-castle/) when we visit later this year. It’s very close to the Royal Albatross breeding center (https://albatross.org.nz) too. (As Maturin might say, I am with child to see an albatross! See how I can bring it all back to POB?)
Celebrating the half-century - Today Mr. Snook received news that one of his entries into the recent home brewing Pro-Am competition was selected for commercial brewing! AND his pub trivia team, the Purls of Wisdom, won the night—in a TIEBREAKER, no less!—and now sit atop this year’s overall leaderboard!! So it was a pretty good birthday.
He’s just the best, and I couldn’t have survived the past year without him. I’m so lucky that he chooses me. He’s the best guy I know.
I’m reminded of a very non-technical manager who once told me my code “needed more div.”
From: @ariadne
https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/117006639197459460
By a Lady: Revealing Women’s Stories - Last night I headed over to Fisher Library at the University of Sydney for the opening of their new exhibition By a Lady: Revealing Women’s Stories. As you might imagine, it was full of women!
The exhibition’s title references the 18th–19th century practice of not crediting female authors by name, as this was considered improper or risky – instead crediting authorship as simply ‘by a lady’. One of the most famous occurrences of this was Jane Austen’s first novel Sense and Sensibility (1811), a first edition copy of which is held in the Library’s collection and is on display in the exhibition.
The exhibition features more than 150 other works, all by and about women. To be honest, I feel like that’s a really broad theme. It was like they just dug out anything and everything interesting that involved a woman. In addition to works by Austen and the Brontë sisters and other famous women authors, there were items related to First Nations women, Asian culture, needlecraft, cookery, witchcraft, science (Marie Curie), tarot cards, opera (Joan Sutherland), the first women who attended and matriculated from Sydney Uni, protest posters, Honi Soit covers, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie… just a bit of EVERYTHING. I reckon a tighter theme may have yielded a more consistent message than just “women have been involved in telling stories for a really long time.”
Still, it was cool to see this stuff! Some of the works I particularly noted:
An edition of the Young Ladies’ Journal from 1869, showing examples of lacemaking. The visual motif used on all the exhibition signage is drawn from needlework in this book, which is a nice touch.
And here’s Weldon’s Practical Needlework from a few years later. I couldn’t pass up those knitting patterns! But wow, how dense and concisely they are written. No charts back then. Not very user-friendly for knitters nowadays.
Here we have several Australian classics by women, including The Harp in the South by Ruth Park; Mary Poppins Opens the Door by P.L. Travers; Snugglepot and Cuddlepie by May Gibbs; The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough; and Seven Little Australians by Ethel Turner.
And here’s a bunch of works by Marie Curie. I didn’t really expect to see scientific works in this exhibition. I mean, that’s cool, I guess… but I’m not sure what message to draw from this next to Snugglepot and Cuddlepie.
A first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird. Again, very cool to see and a personal favourite of mine, but I did wonder about its pride of place in an Australian exhibition. I don’t think it’s considered part of the “canon” here the way it is in the US, is it?
Like I was really going to walk past a first edition of Pride and Prejudice…
These are some of the posters displayed from the Wendy Brady collection of the 1980’s and 1990’s. I liked the strong graphic design.
They had several very cool covers from Honi So https://www.web-goddess.org/archive/94466
UPDATE! The jerks at Reddit might be wrong. I posted about my fitting issues in the forum for the Closet Core Trousers online class, and the experts there think I actually need a bit *more* fabric, ie a longer back rise. Given that I care more about how the pants feel when moving and sitting, I'm going to try their advice first.
New Palia update has dropped, and it's already crashed on me 4 times. :(
Handy friends: Our Corten steel fire pit collects water when it rains, so we need to drill or cut a hole in it somehow. Our normal drill was not up to the task. What do we need? Relatedly - anyone in Sydney want to lend us an angle grinder? 😂