my monthly newsletter
My newsletter is sent out on the first of every month.
- Pertherts
- The Boggle Files
- Introducing Showroom
- The Slow Train to Sydney
- Code
- Queer Media and You, and U
- Love and Coburg
- On 23
- The cheeky nation
- I have a confession
- New social media and the smug republic
- The most important new emoji and the All Purple Challenge
- Female Sexual Aggression Summer
- On LARPing and the magic of email
Pertherts
Drive-by editing and daily gaming
On 15 May 2024, Wikipedia user Mikesheen made an edit to the article "List of demonyms for cities". The entry for Perth previously listed Perthite, Perthian, Perthling, Perthonality, Pertho, and Perthie—to which Mikesheen added 'Perthert'.
This was a drive-by edit. Mikesheen's had only made one edit before this in 2014, creating the page for Jiwa Financials. Googling "Jiwa Financials Mikesheen" reveals a Linkedin account for Mike Sheen, the chief software engineer at Perth-based accounting software firm Jiwa Financials. The Wikipedia page for Jiwa was "speedy-deleted" for not meeting notability criteria and for the obvious conflict of interest.
I tell you this story because this past month I've been editing Wikipedia feverishly, and because I'm in Perth right now—hanging around a lot of Pertherts and enjoying the relative sunniness. The locals are complaining about the temperature of the water but 20 degree days and ice-cold water is like Melbourne in the summer. It's a very cute city. Certainly much more suburban than Melbourne. You can really feel the car culture and FIFO money with the huge number of vanity license plates I've seen. CHAOTIK, 0TRISH, BOXESOFTOYS (?). Someone's work ute had OFF2FISH, which was giving me mixed signals.
In August I wrote eight Wikipedia articles, all for buildings in Melbourne. When I told my friend that I created an article for Clifton Hill McDonald's—which is his local McDonald's—he told me he always assumed articles were written by god. Nope, just us mortals who are interested in local history and/or unemployed. You aren't meant to include your own opinion in the articles, which is obviously an impossible task, but I have tried to keep things impartial. When I called the McDonald's "quirky", I only did so because it was described that way by The Age.
My favourite article was the Gatwick Hotel in St Kilda. A run-down hotel with dirt-cheap accommodation that became home to Melbourne's most disenfranchised—before it was shutdown and used for a season of The Block. It's probably the closest I've come to violating the policy of unbiased, because the hotel was run by two identical twins for forty years and you can tell that the author of the article really liked them.
Ava Wiki
A problem I have is that my website's archive of my projects is not well maintained. I like to believe that most problems can be solved with better design, so I've tried to make maintaining it more fun. Enter, the Ava Wiki. Inspired by Wikipedia, this is a wiki of my work, with pages for projects, but also software I use, or essays. Check out the pages for "Music" or "Blender".
Boggle Updates
If you are a regular player of my word game Beat Me at Boggle, you might have noticed the past few days have had some BANGING entries. That's because I've silently swapped out the old board-generation algorithm with a new one. The way this one works is it picks a long word, lays it out on the board, and fills out the rest of the board around it. Now, with some regularity, you can play really long words like AFTERSHOCKS, which featured last week.
Also
My friend pointed out that websites are a kind of love language for me. I knew I wanted to make a website for my friend's birthday, and when I was brainstorming I came to a board game I know she loves, and I turned that into a website.
It's really only a prototype. It's not that fun right now, but as it's been online I've had a couple ideas to turn it into a full game. With that in mind, I wanted to share an article I read about the shuttering of another daily word game, Morphology. It's a kind of depressing read about the realities of this genre of word games. How sometimes what you put work into doesn't correlate with what's popular.
My other daily game, Suburble, took much longer to make than Beat Me at Boggle, and has been a much smaller success. I've been thinking about shutting it down for a while now, but it doesn't take that much effort to maintain, so I'll leave it up until I think of something better to do with it.
Brolly.sh
I'm sharing this plain-text weather website because It's giving me an idea for a weather app of my own (thinking emoji). Watch this space.
Crosswords
Two of my crosswords ran in Saturday Quiz Time this month, check them out:
*Note
I did the responsible thing and removed Perthert from Wikipedia. I'm sorry Mike.