Jessica @jayeless@toot.cat

Hello all! I'm Jessica, and I've joined this instance because a) it looks nice and b) I've been curious about the Glitch-Soc variant of Mastodon and wanted to join an instance that had it running :) My old/other account is @jayeless, which I'll probably keep around for more political content.

Here, I'll probably post on a range of topics, including technology (I'm interested in #smallweb and adjacent topics, like the #indieweb and #gemini), #languages and #linguistics, #books I read, the occasional thing about #gameing or other forms of entertainment, pictures of #cats and #dogs, life in general, and stuff about the city I live in (Melbourne, Australia). As well as English I speak Spanish, and I've also studied Catalan (I did an honours thesis in #history, on the Spanish Civil War in Catalonia). Gonna leave you with a couple of pics of me and my beloved cat Gidget ❤️

#introduction

We've brought Gidget home after her x-rays. The news is pretty bad, but not catastrophic. She doesn't only have one luxating patella, but two, as well as bilateral hip dysplasia and arthritis. She's only 5½! So… she needs to go in for surgery in two Thursdays' time, and until then we've been given two pretty heavy duty medications (a pain killer and an anti-inflammatory) to give her every day. No more outside for her, either. Apparently the meds she's on will make her loopy and any further falls could completely fuck her knee 😿 (That's not the language the vet used but that's the impression I got.)

But from the sounds of things, it's not like the surgery will be some big fix-it either, although it'll help, and it'll stop things deteriorating further. It sounds like she'll need some degree of ongoing care to manage chronic pain issues. The vet who called us earlier today flagged potential bimonthly appointments for some kind of injection, for example, and the vet we talked to this afternoon sort of implied ongoing daily medication. That's OK with us, of course; it's our responsibility as cat owners to give her the best quality of life possible. But I just feel sad for her that things have already got this bad… and to think if she hadn't fallen out of that damn tree we might never have realised there was an issue. Anyway, one step at a time. We'll get her through to the surgery and then see what the vets say after that.

After many days in a row of somehow building up dozens of open tabs, I've caved in and installed the Tree Style Tabs extension for Firefox. A little scared that I'll now amass even more tabs, but at least I can see what I already have open now 😅

I took this photo last weekend when we went on our regular beach walk. It’s only when I looked back on it that I realised how stunning the light was! It had that real autumnal yellowy glow 😊 (https://www.jayeless.net/2021/05/beach-in-stunning-light.html)

We've dropped Gidget off for the x-rays she needs. To say she was unhappy would be a gross understatement. She had no dinner, Viv for some reason decided to bring the carry-case out yesterday evening so she was hiding in terror behind the couch all night, we didn't let her outside this morning, she didn't get breakfast, and then finally we wrenched her out of a cupboard to put her in her carry case and drop her off with strangers. How do you convince a cat that you're doing it for her own good 😢

This is an interesting Ars Technica piece: What cats’ love of boxes and squares can tell us about their visual perception #cats

I’ve run into more obstacles than I thought I would, but not only do I have an Indiekit Micropub endpoint up and running now (but not working for media uploads yet), but I’ve also set up continuous deployment with Github Actions, so my static Hugo site rebuilds after every new post. Read more…

Arkady Martine's new book, A Desolation Called Peace (the follow-up to A Memory Called Empire) has finally come out in Australia, just two months after seemingly the entire rest of the world! I've slacked off on reading so much lately, but for this I need to make an exception. 📚

Gidget had to go to the vet again today. She needed a vaccination booster shot, but we also wanted her leg checked over again, because she hasn’t recovered as well from last month’s fall as we initially thought. The vet agreed, so now she’s been booked for x-rays on Friday 😢 (https://www.jayeless.net/2021/05/gidget-went-to-the-vet-again.html)

Antipodes of the World: https://www.jayeless.net/2021/05/antipodes.html

This is a neat piece on the Signal blog: The Instagram Ads Facebook Won't Show You.

Last night I got started setting up NextDNS. I run µBlock Origin pretty religiously on all my computers, but I'm looking forward to having more reliable ad blocking on my iPhone, and I'm going to see if I can convince my partner to use it and leave the ad-watching lifestyle behind 😅 (Post continues…)

Some very dramatic skies about for our regular Sunday beach walk. (https://www.jayeless.net/2021/05/dramatic-skies.html)

Interesting article: We spent six years scouring billions of links, and found the web is both expanding and shrinking

A couple of tidbits I found particularly noteworthy:

• A decade ago, there was a much greater variety of domains within links posted by users of Reddit, with more than 20 different domains for every 100 random links users posted. Now there are only about five different domains for every 100 links posted.
• …while almost 40% of the domains created 2006 were active five years on, only a little more than 3% of those created in 2015 remain active today.