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@todon.nl, 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

Noisy day today. The construction site next door seems to be digging out all the earth where their underground carpark is going to go. Currently they have a massive embankment of dirt visible over our shared fence. Gidget is unimpressed.

Took a little selfie with Gidget this morning… and at the same time I get to show off this neat new jumper I bought, featuring Chilean "riot dog" Negro Matapacos! 😄 Gonna wear it out tonight to our little Election Night party.

Gidget's week has been full of ups and downs. Some days she's felt starved (Monday when she nagged Viv to give her ⅔ of her daily food before 6am was a bad one) but as the week's gone on she's seemed better and better about the diet. She's weighed in at 7kg a couple of days, which suggests it's doing what it's supposed to! The biggest down has been the poo-stravaganza she launched when I was in the shower yesterday, but I suppose her human servants’ dedication must be tested occasionally… (she's NEVER done anything like it before, so idk, I hope it's a one-off).

Today I discovered that the English word country is in fact cognate to Latin (and descendents’) contra; apparently it comes (via Old French) from a Vulgar Latin phrase terra contrata “land lying opposite”. Wouldn’t have guessed that! 😲 The Anglo-Saxon word is land.

Link: Building a Digital Homestead, Bit by Brick by Tom Critchlow

I appreciated this blog post about the nature of building a personal website, crafting it into a space that feels like home. It quotes/links to a few other good blog posts on the topic, too.

Gizmo decided to be a real bro to his best friend Gidget when he visited last night. He nagged and nagged Vivian to feed him cat food until Vivian finally caved in. Then the second the food hit the bowl, he ducked out and let Gidget violate her diet by eating everything 🤣

Gidget today has been so desperate to show me the malign impact of this diet the vet has her on that a) she grabbed a bit of (clean) kitty litter off the floor and pretended to eat it; and b) she actually had to eat the bit of meat-for-humans that had fallen on the floor so I put it in her bowl (usually she rejects all human food as an insult to cats).

On the bright side, her desperation means she’s apparently willing to eat wet food again, haha. I think it’ll be good for her if she goes back to eating it, because a serving size of wet food is waaay bigger than one of dry so she might not scoff them down as quickly 😑

New, ranty, blog post: Time for a Not-So-Fun Hugo Fact!

tl;dr: Even if you only want to add a single category/tag to a post, add it as a single-item list, not in a way Hugo can interpret as a string 😥

Link: Please don’t let anyone Americanise it!

Seems like even Douglas Adams’ letters are fun to read! This one is from 1992, when he wrote to an American comic book publisher with some objections to one of their adaptions of his work.

As you might remember, Gidget has been on a vet-ordered diet for the last 10 days. She is very unimpressed with it. Look at this face she gave me when I only topped up her water before going to bed last night, rather than giving her another serve of kibble 🙀