I’m Jessica Smith (she/her), and this is my personal website. I’m a 90s kid, born and raised in Melbourne, Australia. I’ve always kind of been radically humanist, which naturally led me to revolutionary socialism, or the struggle for a radically democratic, egalitarian (stateless, classless) society with a sustainable economy organised around human need, not profit. I write here about an eclectic mix of things, from history and politics to languages, technology, and more.
In addition to politics, I’m a big ol’ languages geek. At uni I dual-majored in Spanish and history (writing an honours thesis on the Spanish Civil War), and did a minor and a half in linguistics. I’ve studied a few languages in my time, and I have a quaint interest in international auxiliary languages, which I’d attribute to that same sense of internationalism that ended up making me a socialist. My pet IALs are Ido and Occidental. I also like the phonetic Shavian alphabet for English, because if you’re going to be an idealist, why not go all out, right?
I’ve had an interest in web design since I was a kid on Neopets in the early to mid-2000s. From there I branched out into making my own personal hobby sites with HTML, CSS and basic PHP, and after that I blogged for a few years, mostly using Wordpress. Covid lockdowns prompted me to get back into the hobby, and I’ve been playing around with having my own presence in the Small Web ever since! This iteration of the site is designed to be a digital garden, which is to say, a “living, breathing” set of pages which I’ll tend to over time, refining what’s there, adding new things, and pruning away old things if I don’t like them any more. We’ll see how it goes.
To this day I still live in Melbourne, in a beachside suburb with my partner Viv (he/him), our infant daughter Indie, and our tabby cat Gidget.
Did You Know…?
- I have a novel I’ve been working on, off and on, for years, and really should finish one of these days
- I have thick wavy hair that I tame with the Curly Girl Method
- I don’t eat red meat, or Brassica oleracea
- my preferred keyboard layout is left-handed Dvorak
Want to find me elsewhere on the internet?
- Mastodon
- Main account: @jayeless@toot.cat
- Politics-centric alt: @jayeless@todon.nl
- Auxlanging alt: @jayeless@polyglot.city
- Bluesky: @jayeless.net
- Backloggd: jayeless
- Last.fm: jayeless
Those are my (at least somewhat) actively-used and public profiles. That I remembered at the time of writing.