I teach community IT.

They really can’t.

Both the battery and the charger are old and broken in my brain.

If it’s too hot out the battery drains faster, if I’m playing music the battery drains faster. If I’m having to swap between conversations, bye bye battery.

Sometimes the charger works fine but sometimes it just doesn’t charge no matter what I try, and the battery stays low even if I leave it plugged in alone.

Some days there’s a process that’s absolutely and inexplicably guzzling power, but the next day that same process barely takes up any processing power.

Some days it just doesn’t turn on at all, and then on rare occasions I can’t get the damn thing to turn off, it’s just blasting notifications and I’m trying to sleep.

Related: personally I think “old phone battery” is a much better metaphor than the “chronically ill spoons” metaphor that is commonly used to explain the impact of chronic illness.

Every time I do a Bunnings BBQ for the community centre, it’s women run, we get the onions on ASAP because they need time to cook, and we’ll have people buying a plain onion sandwich in addition to a snag, because caramelised onions are so good!

Every time I volunteer to help my partners football club run a sausage sizzle, I’m saying “put the onions on, they take longer” and I’m told by the guys “I’m a man, I know how to BBQ, go away little girl, go hold the sign and be pretty”

Then everyone buying a snag is complaining about crunchy raw onions, and the guys are saying “why did we buy so many onions?” (because you were supposed to cook them down so they shrink!)

These same men will unironically say “women belong in the kitchen” then won’t take cooking advice from a woman.

(also, the footy guys always giving me flak for deglazing the BBQ plate with water to help the onions cook down faster. They’ll just keep adding oil, once saw a Rotary Club use 1L of canola oil to half cook 5kg of onions, when we’ve never needed more than 200ml to fully cook onions, because onions need water to cook down!)

No idea, he lives on the other side of the state and I only see him 3 times a year for his birthday, father’s day and Christmas. My brother used to live with him but he spends most of his time with mum now.

I’m certain my dad is getting this rhetoric from social media because he’s a lonely and isolated man in his late 60s with no friends outside of his male dominated blue collar job.

But it’s not my job to reform him, I don’t have the skill set or energy.

Jesus, now that its terrifying!

What would even be the point of a link that allows you that? Like, why was it designed to do that!?

Props to that person who PM’d you the warning.

I’ve been out as queer since I was 14. I’m in my 30, he still hasn’t come around.

Given his age and health, if he’s planning too come around he’d better get on it quick, at this rate he’s dying a bigot.

I’m not waiting any more, I put my whole life on hold waiting for him to come around so I could live my life safely. If I need to cut him out of my life I will.

I appreciate they kind words, but please keep in mind mind that it’s not always smart or safe to tell a trans person to be patient. The individual will know their level of safety, and advice to be patient and understanding can in some cases case be very, very harmful.

This is the thing. Musk and everything his company does in terms of labour and marketing, and just their whole ethos is unethical as fuck, and I can’t stand that as a society we are celebrating Tesla.

But self driving cars are not inherently bad or dangerous to persue as a technological advancement.

Self driving cars will kill people, they’ll will hit pedestrians and crash into things.

So do cars driven by humans.

Human driven cars kill a lot of people.

Self driving cars need to be safer than human driven cars to even consider letting them on the the road, but we can’t truly expect a 0% accident rate on self driving cars in the early days of the technology when we don’t expect that of the humanity driven cars.

Yuuuup, found out the hard way that tiktok shows you when someone watches a link you sent them.

My dad loves sending me cat videos on the tiktok, he sends me the links on Facebook.

I have two tiktok accounts because I knew there was a risk that my dad would be able to find me on tiktok through contacts. My dad is a transphobe, so in order to not poke the bear I maintain a cis persona when dealing with him.

But it took him 0.3 seconds to realise that he sent his daughter a link, and then an openly transmasc account user with a similar name opened that link, and then his daughter replied to his message reacting to the link…my ears are still bringing from the phone call he made to me.

So thats how my misunderstanding of tiktok trackers outted me to my transphobic father.

(fortunately I’m a fully grown adult and can cut him out of my life if he doesn’t calm down)

It feels a little dot com boom 2.0

Learning that the intensity of your hunger sensation is not related to how much you need to eat to satisfy the hunger, but rather, how soon you need to address the hunger, is what changed the game for me.

Instead of responding to feeling ravenous by getting in the kitchen cooking a big meal and sitting down to eat, 40 minutes after I felt hungry, eating easily 2-3 portions, and justifying it with “well I haven’t eaten all day”.

Now I have an orange or something the second I start to feel that intense hunger, go distract myself, and then 20 minutes later I can think clearly, without food noise and intense hunger to cause me to pile crap onto my plate. So now I can plan a well portioned meal that fits within my goals.

But I think part of that is that I have poor interoception, I never felt hungry unless I was already ravenous. Learning to identify hunger before it turns into “eat everything in sight” is something I need to do. I’m still not very good at it, but I’m better. (for context with my interoception, I also can’t tell when I need to pee, or when I’m tired, or when I’m too hot or cold. I’ll just randomly feel shooting pain in my hand, look down and notice my fingers are turning blue, then remember to put a jacket on)

I don’t like feeling over-hungry because it gives me migraines and I get really nauseous and end up dry wretching when I know what I need is calories. Hence why in the past if I started to feel hungry I’d overeat to really try and nip that sensation in the bud. I failed at diets in the past because I assumed that you were supposed to be constantly hungry, and for me hungry is painful, so I’d give up on diets pretty quickly.

So I personally need to stay on top of my hunger to stay on track with my calorie intake.

I always think about it this way; I was a fat baby, fat toddler, fat kid, fat teen, and fat young adult, I spent 25 years learning how to be an obese fuck. I was a master at it.

Why should I expect myself to be even halfway competent at being a healthy person after just 1-2 years of practicing those skills.

The goal isn’t to be healthy tomorrow, it’s to take steps every day to learn to be a person who has naturally healthy habits, and grow into being that person for the rest of my life. If that takes 10 years to be able to say “this is who I am now, not a fat fuck” then it takes 10 years, and that’s still a faster learning curve than the 25 years I spent obese.

Though I will shout out “the paper towel effect”, the first 25-30kg I didn’t really see a difference, nor did anyone around me, but every other kilo since then has been a visible change to my appearance and that’s very motivating, especially as it gets harder to induce a calorie deficit because I’m getting closer to my goal and maintenance weight range, plateaus are more common. But at the same time it’s exciting to be slowly shifting gears into maintenance.

One of the most motivating things for me is going to the gym and grabbing weights equal to the weight I’ve lost, picking it up and just thinking “fuck, I used to carry this weight around with me 24/7”

My strength training is falling behind my weight loss, I can’t even bench the amount of weight I’ve lost, I can RDL it but that’s because I’ve still got the glutes of a fatty.

There’s actually a diverse opinion even within the indigenous community, Indian can be a uniting identifier, but it can also be representative of everything wrong with colonism.

While I’m not American, my understanding from my grandfather who was warded to a government school in Canada (though it’s never been clear if he is first nations, he was documented as such but his cultural experience once he joined the army and moved countries to has been white, and I am white, so I can not truly speak to any of this), whether an individual or a tribal group are more comfortable with the label Indian or Native American, or indigenous, or first nations, tends to depend on the relationship between the person/group and reservations and government programs that historically used the terminology of Indian.

My grandfather for example would use First Nation’s/Indigenous (though he used to say that he was “treated like first nations” rather than he “is” first nations, because even he had no idea if he actually was or not), he couldn’t bring himself to say “Indian” because that’s what he was labelled as while subjected to the abuse of the educational system at the time, it’s a traumatic term for him. Meanwhile some of the men he knew from that time united under the label “Indian” to claim it back from those that used it to oppress them, it’s a point of pride for them.

Somehow the bigotry of the old not-for-profit internet felt less harmful than the current model where corporatations fund bots to fuck everyone in the mental health for a grab at our empty wallets.

Amen, I just need IRL adblock now please.

It causes genuine harm, I’m visually impaired and I’ve wandered into construction zones because advertising billboards are mounted near and “road work ahead” signs and everything is all just bright and bold.

I don’t know what’s official, everything is competing for my attention but I have very little capacity to dedicate my full attention to a visual sign. The end result is incredibly fatiguing, seeing a bright sign and straining to ensure I read it because it’s colours look important, nope, it’s an ad, that was a waste of energy, oh look another one with the same blurry colours and type setting it’s probably the same ad… Nope that one actually needed my attention, and now I’m somewhere I shouldn’t be and I’m in danger.

I’m also hard of hearing, but fortunately audio adber in the public isn’t as bad, but anyone who’s hearing impaired knows how fatiguing it is to try and filter through noise. It’s the exact same for visual impairment.

There are definitely some wars I’d much rather were just MMA death fights between the PM’s and presidents.

And others where I’m glad they aren’t, because the country whose victory would be best for the common good is led by someone who would not win a physical fight.

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.

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 😂

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”