Exactly, so the idea that millennials the generation older than Gen Z are “too young for cassettes” is laughable.

People born in 1995, and early 1996 are millennials, and billions of cassettes existed around them as they grew up.

Wow, that was not made clear to me. Fortunately I’ve never needed to block anyone specifically from my profiles/content (it’s the other way around, I don’t want to see some other users stuff)

But good to know if I had a stalker or something, blocking them doesn’t mean they are blocked from my content, it means they’re blocked from contact.

I totally would have assumed blocking someone on various social media platform went both ways in terms of what’s visible to each other.

I’m hoping she doesn’t teach highschoolers. If her students cought wind of this post and worked out it was about their teacher, classroom management goes out the window.

My cousin is a coparent in a polycule of 3, but she is not the biological parent of their children, she is the default parent though, as she is a SAHM and the other parents work. They’ve been together for 23 years.

Half my family acts like she doesn’t have any children, and that she’s some sad single live in nanny. They will ask her how her “room mates and their kids” are going, even if the “room mate” is standing next to her with his hand on her arse and has just finished telling a story about how in love they are.

My dad is also thinks I have “no real bills” because I don’t have a mortgage. He says rent isn’t a real bill because it’s not like the bank will take my house if I don’t pay. History opinion on evictions is “that not the same, because you can get a new place to rent that night, you can’t buy a new house in a day”

My rent is 6x more than his mortgage and I don’t know anyone who could get approved for a rental the same day they get evicted for not paying rent, but sure dad, I’m rolling in expendable income over here.

Some families are weird about denying how their relatives live.

But it could also be that she calls her cat “her baby” and lives at home with only personal bills.

The only thing I’d need to make smart is my box fan, because once I fall asleep it would be better to turn it off, but I like falling asleep with it on, and I can’t turn it off if I’m already asleep.

So I could make that a smart device.

But I got those outlet power adaptors with a mechanical switch timer that just turns the power off when the timer dial rotates. It’s got a 24 hour dial and multiple pins, so I could put my fan on a schedule if I wanted.

Cost like $5, I’ve been using them since 1995. Easy to repair and replace.

If it ain’t broke.

Yes! Oh my God, I thought that was a uniquely Australian thing because my partner from the UK had no idea what I was on about. But there was like 2 years in highschool for me where everyone was obsessed with the fitting 3-4 songs on a minidisc.

Though it helped that you could get actual, good music in cereal box mini discs prizes. I got a Missy Higgins single and played it to death. I want to say it was Sugarcane, but the year doesn’t match so it had to have been Scar or Sound of White. (it exploded in our PC disc drive, mini discs were great at doing that) I don’t even remember the song.

I always heard people that I don’t know cassette tapes or vinyls or slide projectors when I was a kid.

Cassettes?

Sorry… Cassettes!?

There’s someone out there who is attempting to insult millennials by saying we’re too young for cassettes?

What the heck else would we be listening to music on, Brenda? We didn’t have discmans, sure they existed but we had kid money, and it wasn’t worth it until anti-skip came along in 1997, by which point at 10-15 we already had a cassette collection… so we had walkmans!

2 billion blank cassettes were sold in 1997, 2 billion the year before… those born in 1996 didn’t get born into a world where the 2 billion cassettes sold that year magically disappeared before the kid was old enough to form memories.

Cassettes were the best, though CD-R changed the game for custom mix “tapes”, I never went back to actual mix tapes after we got the tech to burn cds. Mix tapes were still going around all year levels in my first year of highschool, but it was mostly mix CDs going around when I graduated, and the rich kids were already just swapping usbs. By uni, we’d send each other mediafire links to a zip file full of mp3s.

I can still kind of imagine the sensation of sticking my pinkie finger in a cassettes to rewind when I couldn’t find a pen. Though weirdly, I can’t remember how I used to rewind VHS’s, I can’t picture that feeling. I’m guessing I probably used the rewind feature for video more often, and was find hand rewinding my music.

I think the older generations are forgetting how the passage of time works. Also, just how many of us millennials grew up poor with Gen X hand me downs 😂

That’s why in some ways I don’t mind that my country still pays for mobile data, because I just don’t even bother at restaurants anymore “oh, I’ve run out of data, I can’t scan that, here’s my money”

Because of how severely covid lock downs hit our state, every single restaurant I’ve been to in the last 5 years has used a QR code to order and pay.

I have allergies, so this means I mostly just order black coffee when it’s QR only.

I’m not giving you all of my personal details for an overpriced $5 black coffee. The result is that I sit there with my friends, fiddling my thumbs, not buying anything.

My partners boss took a lot of issues with multitasking and I can’t understand his logic.

I was getting fed up of my partners breakfast and lunch dishes piling up in the kitchen.

I’d come home from work to find the kitchen a disaster zone. I wouldn’t even have a clean spot of bench space to put my water bottle down.

My partner would explain he didn’t have long enough on his lunch break to wash the dishes, and his boss was cracking down on people doing personal chores during the work day.

I suggested if he can’t clean up like he’s at home, he needs to prepare food like he’s in the office. Ie, make a lunch box the night before so there aren’t 40 dishes on the day.

He explained that this is how he used to eat in the office, because they had a cleaner who worked while everyone was in, tidying up after them, they’d cook meals for each other and eat family style, and his boss still encourages family lunches via teams/zoom.

So his boss used to hire someone to clean while the pencil pushers were pushing pencils. Now there is no one who’s job is to clean, but his boss won’t let anyone clean up after themselves, but still expects them to generate mess for team building.

I told my partner he can either get a lunch box, or he can tell his boss “I’m doing the dishes during the work day, if you’d prefer I don’t, I won’t, but I’ll need a raise because divorce is expensive”

If it was any other boss, I’d tell my partner to suck it up and eat faster so he can wash up on his break, but it’s the fact the boss is still working in the office with the cleaner, so he’s got someone cleaning up as he works, but he won’t allow his staff to also work in a safe and clean environment.

My mum and I had a shared period calendar when I was a young teen and still getting used to tracking my cycle, she hung the calendar and pen in the bathroom to model how I could track my cycle in a diary as I got older.

We invented a key/symbol system so the calendar wasn’t intrusive for my brother and father to see, and one of the symbols we used for the luteal phase was a sort of hourglass ⏳, it was originally my mums poor doodle/sketch of a panty liner to indicate “you might spot a bit this week” but it looked like an hourglass so I joked that symbol meant I’m “just waiting for the storm to arrive”.

It was the perfect symbol for me, because when people ask about the tattoo, and I don’t want to go into the real reason I say “it’s a visual reminder” and if they ask more I can say “it’s an hourglass, because there’s only a little time LEFT, it’s on my left hand - I get my lefts and rights mixed up. Plus it reminds me to put my watch back on after I get dressed, so it helps remind me of a lot of different things”

Yuuuup, I ended up getting a tattoo on my wrist that is essentially a personal period joke.

At one stage it was crucial for my survival, it was a kind of grounding token to snap me out of hormonal suicidal insanity when my PMS was at its worst. Something I’d see that would bluntly remind me “it’s not you, it’s your hormones, you don’t actually want this”

When I say the urge came and went zero to sixty back to zero in 30 seconds flat, sometimes that was an understatement. I really struggled because in addition to suicidal ideation during PMS, I had undiagnosed and untreated ADHD, which often gets worse with PMS thanks to the way oestrogen and progesterone play off each other.

Guess who’s got major impulsively issues. Guess what two symptoms really shouldn’t be combined.

I have zero desire to kill myself.

But my hormones seemed desperate to try and make me do it every month, especially as a teen.

It didn’t help that I had endometriosis and at 17 developed a uterine prolapse, on top of a rectal prolapse I’d had since I was 12. I was in agony when I was on my period, so sometimes the desire to make the pain stop overlapped with the suicidal ideation. That sucked. Hard to reason your way out of physical pain.

I’ve had a hysterectomy (from 17-24 my uterus just kept trying to make its own escape anyway despite attempts to sew it in place) and no longer suffer menstrual dysphoria because it turns out that was gender dysphoria not true PMDD. But I still get suicidal ideation as part of PMS, fortunately my ADHD is much better managed so now my tattoo is less a suicide detterant and just a reminder that I still have ovaries (sometimes I genuinely forget, and it takes me a few days to work out why I’m bloated and irritable and why I’m anxious about my sore boobs)

I fear his mental state may not grant him the capacity for such self awareness, even in prison.

Schools, town halls, community centres, some libraries, some council buildings, certain community spaces like scout halls, basketball stadiums, rotary clubs etc.

Old churches that are now public halls are also opened as voting stations, and some actual churches while not open for voting due to conflicts of interest, do establish rapid housing programs so people can get legal addresses for electrotal enrolments in time for voting, and others will be open as census sites for homeless folk to record themselves on census night. I grew up in bum fuck nowhere and on election day if the weather was tolerance AEC would set up an open polling station on the local football oval just to move through the register faster than what the tiny local school could handle.

Since covid lock downs, eastern states especially have enhanced their postal and early voting processes.

For about 2 weeks before elections (local, state, federal) for the most part you can just walk into any of the above buildings, in litteraly any suburb town or city that’s participating in the election, and cast your vote.

If you do your research on best venues and times, you can knock out your vote in 10 minutes flat. No queue.

Some people are eligible for postal votes too, you can request the ballot be mailed to you, or pick one up from the post office and cast your vote without leaving your home block.

But we’re far from competent. While I love our preferential voting system, it’s not well understood by the public, our LGA’s are still subject to gerrymandering, and there are large swaths of our community that are legally prohibited from voting for various reasons that I personally feel is an unethical antidemocratic policy. There are also huge groups of indigenous peoples who do not have accessible electoral education, trustworthy polling processes, and are disenfranchised from the electrotal process, with little government support or funding for culturally appropriate programs for engagement. Despite our preferential voting, we have essentially devolved to a two party system with neither major party really being any better, do we want the party of bigots, or the party of other bigots?

For his sake I hope so.

But for humanities sake I want him to go to jail, get the same treatment as any other prisoner, and not suffer.

Because if I get to live in a fantasy world where he’s in jail, I also want a world where the prison system is for rehabilitation and safe containment, not punishment and suffering.

In Australia Google maps has issues with routing cyclists on 80km busy truck transit roads that have no bike lanes, footpaths or shoulders. You’ll regularly get stuck behind lost uber eats cyclists whose map took them through a motor vehicle only underpass.

The other day google maps decided to reroute me from a quiet, wide street with no bike lane that was otherwise perfectly safe, and tried to send me through a nightsoil alley, down a heritage stock run that was paved with cobblestones and crossed over a storm drain 4 times in a zig zag.

Yeah, “safer” because there’s no cars I guess, but not suitable for bikes at all.

Get tired? No, get a sense of sorrow in professional failure and apathy when someone’s level of ability is fundamentally misaligned to the class.m, hell yes.

I’m an adult educator, so while not a fitness instructor, I teach adults life skills, including health and nutrition.

We aren’t paid to be individual tutors, but the fact is that some learners need one on one training, or additional time, or a slower pace, or a totally customised syllabus and resource package for their needs.

There’s nothing tiring about this.

But there’s also nothing we can do. You learn quickly in this job to say “I recommend a more entry level class, or starting with a some home learning” or you burn out trying to juggle 25 different levels of need in a class of 25.

I have galactorrhea, pumping rooms aren’t a natural maternal family matter, for me, it’s a medical procedure.

Privacy is a lactating person’s choice, and right. public feeding is a choice that I agree needs to be destigmatised. Personally I’m not comfortable with public pumping, because I see my breast milk as medical not nutritional, so I choose privacy for myself.

It’s also difficult, it’s stressful, it’s uncomfortable. Having comfort, focus, peace and quiet, it’s important.

I don’t even have a uterus, so getting my leaky chest out in public is even further from being socially acceptable. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had mastitis because I have not been able to expell in a timely manner. Partly that was because I was embarrassed by my condition and didn’t stand up for myself and my need for access to a pumping room at work, and part of it was because my employers didn’t understand my need for a private room, they pointed out that it’s never been a problem for mothers in our office to whip a tit out when baby was hungry, and/or that my need was different because the reason I I had breast milk at all was different.

No one gets to expect me to be comfortable with nudity. My breast milk, my choice if I have privacy or not.

I used to do it in the bathroom because I didn’t have anywhere else, but that was a gamble, do I let myself get an infection because I’m letting my ducts clog, or do I risk an infection by pumping milk in the toilets.

I can never vet mine to balance, I can’t line up my phones centre of gravity because the wall is always in the way.

Send the email, then call me to say “hey I sent you an email that I really need you to read and respond to urgently, I’ll let you go so you can focus while reading, talk later”

For one of my 3 jobs, I don’t have regular work hours, I’m employed just 5 hours a week, on call, for IT support for a little non for profit.

My contract, my email signature, my numerous discussions with the team all state “if you require a response within the same business day, please phone me to alert me to the issue”

I check my email once a day, I don’t have time to be checking it several times a day when I’m only paid for 5 hours work, I need to conserve those hours for maintenance and support I’m not about wasting anybody’s time.

So if someone happens to email me after I’ve already checked my inbox for that day, I won’t see it until tomorrow. Hence, phone me, I want to work, I just need a way to alert myself that work is available for me, a text message will also suffice.

I realise this is asking someone to change the way they operate to make my job easier. But the number of times I check my email at 1pm, and there’s zero tickets, so I turn off my computer because I’m not going to sit and watch an empty inbox for my free time.

Then the next day I check my email and I have 20 emails all from the same person from about 3-5pm all saying “hey I have an issue” “hey following up this is kind of urgent” “hey, are you even checking your emails?”…no obviously I’m not, it would have saved you so much effort to send 1 text after 1 email as I requested than to send 20 emails, and I would have actually gotten the text in time.

Also half the time the issue needs to be fixed with a phone call anyway because it’s something simple like “Microsoft Word is missing”… because the program was unpinned from the taskbar and the staff member just needs help remembering the start menu exists. Most of my support resolutions are the equivalent of describing the buttons on the TV remote to your grandmother over the phone. (lots of older, less tech literate folk working in NFP sector)

Yeah, seems like an exciting way to kill myself. Better than my current life plans so why not? No one said I had to survive in the past, just visit.