Sidney Wong

Red background with pohutukawa like holly across the top of the square. Text in white reads #SecretSantaAoNZ Coming to AoNZ Bluesky & Mastodon Sign ups open November 10th at secretsanta.nz Find all the info on how to play at secretsanta.nz Across the bottom are 6 cartoon versions of the Secret Santa team

The story you are about to see has been told before. A lot. And now we are going to tell it again. But different.
This time we're bringing Mastodon in for the fun.

Sign-ups open on November 10th.
Check out secretsanta.nz for more information

It's been a hot minute. What have I missed folks?

Top tip, if you're going to organise a Zoom meeting make sure to include them in the calender invite. I'm going to blame it on thesis brain.

Photo of stormy trees

Photo of kinda blue sky

Weatherwise, the Midwest is terrifying - one minute it's sunny, nek minit a thunderstorm out of nowhere. Photo 1 is the view outside the apartment, and Photo 2 is the other side of the apartment 20 metres away (you can still see the blue skies).

I've been away from home for nearly a year and I still appreciate the monthly welfare check texts from Spotlight.

Who wouldn't appreciate a 30% sale storewide, in this economy!?!

The abstract deadline for the 2025 Annual Conference is slowly hurtling towards us!

Photo of the St Louis Gateway Arch

St. Louis ⚜️

Oddly specific question, what is the "current" paradigm in sociolinguistics research? Interested to hear your thoughts especially those outside the Anglo/North American perspective.

I just got back to Champaign-Urbana and I couldn't believe my luck I saw a "lightning bug" (firefly). What a treat!

Thank you for your suggestions! I made it up the Arch and even managed to fit in a Mississippi River cruise. It's such a lovely city, I need to put aside some time to explore more of St Louis!

I've made it to St Louis! What are some must do's for a day trip in the city centre?

I'm pleasantly surprised by the number of cowboy hats at Denver International Airport 🤠

It's criminal that it's 16°C (61°F) while we're dealing with the corn sweat 🌽💦 in the Midwest.

I've made it to 舊金山 ('Old Gold Mountain') en route to my desto for the long weekend. A much needed change of scenery as I work on the final write up of my thesis.

Happy Midpoint of the Half Century folks! We're now closer to 2050 than we are to 2000.

I had one of two missions while in Chicago and I failed one miserably. It's been over 11 months since I've had a meat pie, and the one pie shop wasn't open when it was meant to be. Pure sadness as I take the 'L' to the airport.

Back briefly in Chicago and so far two people have asked me for directions. Either the busses need better signage, or I'm starting to look like a local.

Experimentology cover: title and curves for distributions.

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

I can tell it's not Pride Month anymore 😆

Latex isn't a choice, it's a way of life.

Zotero!

Just hit another milestone as I prepare to head home, one final trip to Costco as I let my membership lapse. I'm gonna miss the reasonably priced hotdog combo and single slice of pizza.

How interesting! I looked into the SYD-LAX flights and it looks like Qantas carries out routine maintenance for their Boeings at LAX, so it makes sense that AirNZ might do something similar. That's my theory anyway!

Do we have any AvGeeks on here? Does anyone know why the daily flights ANZ3/ANZ5 route LAX-AKL are only less than one hour apart?

This also goes for the ANZ4/ANZ5 AKL-LAX (only 35 minutes apart). I'm curious. Did this have something to do with the old AKL-LAX-LHR route?

Photo of painted owl and penguin

This has been my attempt to be artistic. Not bad considering my colourblindness. The derpy penguin feels like a physical manifestation of me.

Credit to the Pottery Place for making the ornaments for me to paint.

Once at an undergraduate event, I managed to woof down 2.5 pizzas 🍕

I peaked early.

This is me wrapping up my time in the US and my research on hate speech detection with my latest paper in the Proceedings of the LSA - Stronger together: Unleashing the social impact of hate speech research
journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/...

Percentage Change (Period = 3) for New Zealand with the time periods of interest highlighted in red where (a) was the period following the Mosque attack, (b) was the period following the introduction of the nationwide lockdown, (c) was the period following the anti-mandate and anti-vaccine protests, and (d) was the period following the speaking tour of anti-transgender activist Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull.

Here's my attempt to link recent events back home and monitoring speech and offensive language online on X (Twitter). We've still go a long way to go before we can use AI and language models to support the needs of our most vulnerable communities.

What are some must do activities in Central Illinois/Chicago before I leave!?

Photo of squirrels chilling on a tree branch.

Outside of all the memories I've made with the better half, what I'm going to miss the most will be the squirrels and the big (oak?) tree from my writing desk.