Token Skeptic - Bending Misconceptions With Her Mind

What Happens When You Turn Air Conditioning “Down”? Talk the Talk Podcast Investigates

April 5, 2018 By Kylie Sturgess

This is a segment from the podcast Talk the Talk – something that we ended up doing some research into via social media. What does changing the settings on air conditioning really involve? Do you turn the machine up to make it colder, or down? What happens if it’s too cold? Different perspectives on the matter changes our use of language, and this is what our data showed us, in helpful video format! Read more

Australia’s Ruddock Review into Religious Freedom Extended

April 1, 2018 By Kylie Sturgess

Over the past few months, there’s been a number of groups (the Atheist Foundation of Australia or AFA, is just one of many) who have been sending in feedback to the Ruddock Review into Religious Freedom. Many representatives (like the AFA) spoke to the review panel in person too. Back in 2017, after parliamentary debate over the same sex marriage legislation [which became law on December 9th, with Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove signing off on the Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms)… Read more

Into March And… Marching Off Facebook? #deletefacebook

March 23, 2018 By Kylie Sturgess

There’s a lot going on right now in “real life”, which is kind of a problem in itself – the age-old “where does real life and online intersect?” Yep, I’m talking about leaving Facebook, good guess. Firstly, if you haven’t checked out a couple of interviews I nodded towards with the previous blogpost (in regards to starting off 2018 with some skeptic-supportive reading), there’s Let’s Be Reasonable, an interview with Rebecca Fox, who is the author of How to Be Reasonable (By… Read more

Token Skeptic Week Two at #FringeWorld 2018 And The Curiouser And Curiouser Bookclub!

February 7, 2018 By Kylie Sturgess

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Just a quick round-up on what’s been going on – firstly, there’s a new short episode of some of the running about I’ve been doing for Fringeworld 2018 over on the SoundCloud page: Some of the recommendations / heard good things about that I have for the #FringeWorld week-or-so to come (and check listings, as some of these may end very soon!) include: Séance | An Immersive Experience Ray Bradshaw: Deaf Comedy Fam Djuki Mala Zoe Coombs Marr Simon Taylor… Read more

Token Skeptic Week One At Perth’s #FringeWorld 2018

January 30, 2018 By Kylie Sturgess

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Kinda-sorta transcript: Everyone’s making recommendations and seeing shows around Perth, and I’m no exception. For my first week I took part in Seeking Basic Needs And Other Tales Of Excess, an audio tour involving stories of migration, notions of need and simple acts of transcendence – and honestly? A little long, and I was reminded of a Perth Festival show I took part in back in 2016 called A Mile in My Shoes. Great audio, fascinating monologues, but yes, a… Read more

Token Skeptic At The 2018 #FringeWorld Media Launch

January 27, 2018 By Kylie Sturgess

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Kinda-sorta transcript below: As you can hear by the sounds of the Media Launch behind me, it’s the start of the Fringe World Festival here in Perth, found at the fringeworld.com.au site, with the hashtags for this year being #FringeWorld, #Let’sFringe (no apostrophe included) and the occasional #PerthFringe popping up as well. This year I arrived at the Pleasure Gardens and immediately stepped into a pile of chewing gum, walked in front of of a forklift carrying half the Speigeltent across the… Read more

Nineteen Lies and One Truth

January 22, 2018 By Kylie Sturgess

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I promised myself that I’d keep at least one blogpost every week this year and due to my studies have fallen behind already. So, here’s a game for you and feel free to join in on the comments. I tried learning French during my first year of teaching full-time, and only managed to give myself a headache at the thought of understanding the numbering system. It might have been better if I studied something useful like business studies, since at least… Read more

Please Let Us Not Forget… Oprah Winfrey And That 2020 Bid

January 9, 2018 By Kylie Sturgess

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Like everyone else in Australia who should be gearing up for a busy 2018, the lure of Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff got me out of piles of research yesterday morning and down to the bookstore, only to learn that physical copies of the book are arriving next week and not this week as reported. Bugger. So, I take to the online version (NOT the Wikileaked edition), which is available everywhere, with an occasional typo. So far, I’m up… Read more

Hello New Year! Top Podcasts of 2017 And Podcasting In 2018

January 4, 2018 By Kylie Sturgess

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Hello to the blog again! Here’s a look at top podcasts from last year and my predictions for this year. One of the new commitments I have this year is a segment on Australia’s ABC radio, talking about podcasting to the South West radio station, which is occasionally broadcast digitally to the Perth station too. I’ve got an interview today in fact, discussing some of the things we can look forward to in 2018, but first, here’s a few great… Read more

On Transcribing (aka Support The Podcast, Save The World…)

May 14, 2017 By Kylie Sturgess

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Back in the early days of teaching, I attended two weekend introductory language courses at the city technical college – one was in Australian sign language and culture, the other was Japanese 101. These days I can only sign ‘thank you’ and ‘lion’ [makes big curly mane shape around head] and follow along a little bit with the subtitles on Cowboy Bebop. However, as a result of being completely out of my depth with two languages, when I started doing… Read more