There are certain activities which present an inconvenience, and others that should disqualify you from engaging with civil society. Here are but a few examples:
We had a particularly special neighbour in Earlwood in Sydney’s inner west who took it upon himself to start his powertools at 06:00 every Sunday.
Our current place in North Sydney has two-stroke hedge trimmers going every few weeks at 07:00. It’s not the best way to spend your shower or breakfast.
What about early morning jackhammering for utility works that weren’t deemed sufficiently urgent to do the day before at civilised hours, but is enough to do it before people have woken up, or did a late shift the day before!
In Malaysia, we had pile-drivers going at 07:00 outside our windows each morning for weeks. It sounded as though they were pushing through our skulls.
In Singapore, we had people who’d… wait, we never had a single problem in apartment buildings there for a decade.
I feel stranding those people or their bosses on a remote island with nothing but Kayne [sic] West audio ought to be sufficient to reform their ways.
The first in alphabetical order was The 80586 Pentium from 2018, and the last was The Zip Insider from 2017, also on electronic nostalgia. I may have a problem.
There are many concerns when moving house; chief among them is ensuring all one’s anime waifus figs are packed properly in their inscrutable tombs of moulded plastic, sheets of film, and implausibly large boxes.
Above is the Mashu Clara and I bought in Osaka being packed away in her gigantic rectangular prism. One down, a few million more to go before dinner.
The latest design is the simplest I could make it, partly in protest of what the modern web has become. There’s no JavaScript, downloading fonts, embeds, hamburger icons, looping background videos, popups, newsletter signup prompts, sticky navbars, autoplaying videos, iframes, or design sense. Wait, I needed that last one, whoops.
But credit where credit’s due, the web has made a bit of progress since the mid-2000s by phasing out a particularly pernicious phrase. Here’s Drew McLellan way back in 2005:
An alarming trend is spreading across the web and infecting content like a virus. Yes people, I’m talking about The Jump, and more specifically, its cursed accompanying phase More after the jump. Just. Stop. It.
And speaking of things that no longer exist, I picked a random post of my own from 2005, and it was about Technorati.
We had a family picnic at Milsons Point today. The afternoon breeze was a beautiful, welcome change from the heat from this morning. The view was also rather fabulous, as too were the company and food!
I’m also finally recovering from my latest medical adventure too; most importantly I can breathe again without sounding like a wheezing chain-smoker. Granted it’s with puffers every couple of hours, but baby steps.
I was lying in bed late last week, listening to our portable air conditioner struggle gallantly against the relentless tide of hot air trying to make its way into our apartment. And the whole time I was thinking to myself: what if my website isn’t ranking well for certain keyword phrases?
As if through divine divination, my inbox was flooded not with cool air, but with these emails the following day:
A few days ago I came across your website and I noticed that you were not ranking well for certain keyword phrases. I would like to send you an absolutely free report showing you 3 or 4 things you can easily do on your own (without hiring me or anyone else) to help improve your Google rankings dramatically. Would that be okay? I would send it to you sometime next week.
Again, this is a completely free service. Please let me know.
I’m tempted to reply and ask to what website they’re referring, what keyword phrases I should use, and what SEO plugins to my non-existent WordPress install I should use.
But then, to whom would I respond? My spam folder has had this email from Maria Bell, Hannah Anderson, Velita Lynn, Victoria Miller, Alice White, Anna Johnson, Ashley Powell, Suzi Williams, Rebecca Brown, Lisa Brown, Lila Brown, Carlia Smith, Christina Jover, Emily Newman, Emma Bell, Kaylee Williams, Jane Ava, Kathy Bella, Nina Martin, Monica Botha, and as the lone male bot in the group, James Parker.
The Browns look as though their whole family are on board, so maybe I should ask one of them. Though as I started writing this, Debbie Willis emailed back asking if I’d received her last email.
Tumblr made headlines last month for clamping down on all adult material. Their application had been de-listed from the Apple App Store, and presumably they felt their existing filter lists were insufficient. It’s easier and cheaper to ban everything than do reviews.
The blanket ban was regrettable; Tumblr had long been seen as a sex-positive space where people could explore aspects of themselves that had been shunned on other social networks. Fears that Yahoo would clamp down after buying the site were realised.
Their automatic filters were also—predictably—fraught with problems. In the infamous words of American Justice Potter Stewart I don’t know what pornography is, but I know it when I see it. Shannon Liao summarised the absurdity in The Verge:
One person saw a vase and photos of tights get flagged as explicit. The user noted that photos of dildos had flown under the algorithm’s radar, however. Another artist’s illustration of a witch floating among kelp was also incorrectly flagged. Yet another artist saw their illustrations of people running around and swimming get flagged.
I’d assume this would get better as the algorithms are trained against a larger and larger set of images. But right now it borders on absurdity. There’s a joke about naïvety in there somewhere.
So which of my posts were affected?
I bring this up because I logged into my Tumblr back in December, and sure enough I saw this:
You have posts that contain adult content which violate our Community Guidelines.
This was going to be good. I clicked the review link and saw three posts, either on my original Annexe Tumblr, or on Clara’s and my shared one. Evidently Tumblr’s filters don’t like Tohsaka Rin from the Fate universe, because she featured in all three.
The first was by a Pixiv user who’s since deleted the original, and I’d argue is the only one in the set that comes even close to being risqué:
Has anime or the Internet desensitised me to such an extent that I don’t consider any of these images obscene or offensive? Or more to the point, do any of these constitute adult content? Either way, I’ve deleted these posts rather than go through their shenanigans.
I had already begun to import stuff from Tumblr after using it for a decade, but now I’ll be finishing the process off and shutting down my accounts. Which is a shame, because it was a great secondary site for one-off image sharing or quotes.
I just want to put it out there that it’s been a whole month since Yuketide festivities, and we’re almost an entire month into 2019. Expressed as a fraction, it’d be a number over another one.
Clara and I are moving to Chatswood. The rent is cheaper than North Sydney, and we spend most of our time there anyway, so we’ll save on train fares. More stuff is open late and on weekends, and there are so many great Asian restaurants and supermarkets which feel like home.
So since we’ve been back in Sydney from Singapore we’ve lived in Earlwood, Hornsby, Mascot, North Sydney, and Chatswood. More than most cities I’ve lived in, I’m intrigued by how distinctive suburbs are here. And there aren’t clear winners either, they’re all good for different reasons. Except Earlwood.
I was looking it up on Wikipedia, and there’s a spectacular aerial photo of the commercial area around Chatswood it looking south towards Sydney:
If you look towards the top, you can make out St Leonards in the foreground, North Sydney to the west, and Sydney and the Harbour Bridge behind it. The clarity and sharpness is incredible considering it’s ten kilometres away.
Thanks to Mark Merton for taking this and sharing on Wikimedia Commons.
