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”

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)

As someone chronically Ill, I feel this so hard.

Every minute that I’m not at work I’m dedicating to making sure I’m likely to be well enough for work tomorrow.

I don’t do anything after work without asking “how will this impact my health tomorrow?” and that includes things like not being able to sweep my own floor because I know I need to sweep at work and the nerve damage in my arms won’t let me sweep twice in one day without keeping me up all night in pain, and if I don’t get enough sleep, I’ll get a migraine and won’t be able to physically see anything.

Most of my days off are spent in agony trying to restore myself and desperately trying to reset my house and home life so I can keep up with work, without overdoing it on Sunday and making myself sick for Monday.

So yeah, on the one day a month where I wake up for work and I don’t throw up or almost shit myself, and my heart rate is doing what it’s supposed to do, and I can see and hear and feel my feet… The temptation to “call in healthy”, so I can actually have a day off to enjoy myself for the first time in over a month is really hard to ignore.

I actually did that this week because Wednesday was my birthday, I went to work, it was a “bad workable day” (vs a “good workable day” or a “bad unworkable day”) and Thursday I woke up feeling really good, I only had a 2 hour shift and it was just admin so I took my first sick day in 6 months and used it to do all my linens and towel laundry. It felt like a proper day off because I was healthy enough to get stuff done for myself, without being in pain or having to stop to run to the bathroom or let my heart calm down, or give up on folding because I can’t feel my arms.

I can’t do that every time I want or even need to though. My bank account is really good at forcing me to go to work, healthy, half dead, or heaving. Chronic illness is expensive, and some days trying to keep up with work feels like it costs my health more than not working. but sadly not working is not an option for me, because I’m capable of work, so I must. (and continue to push my gov for universal basic income)

For context as to how working while disabled messes you up. I got hit by a truck on the way to work last year, I got to the office and used their first aid kit to patch myself up. Booked a doctors appointment, told my boss I’d be leaving early, then kept working until my appointment.

My boss was fine with this, and then someone on reddit posted a photo of the crash and my boss saw, they realised when I said “I was hit by a truck” what I meant was “I was hit by a truck”

When asked how I was feeling, and reporting “no different to usual” my boss sent me to the ER because they thought I had a concussion and was acting confused. ER checked me out, dislocated shoulder and wrist, soft tissue damage here and there, but otherwise nothing major or serious or nothing I don’t already deal with on a daily basis. I went back to finish my shift and my boss asked what I was doing working after I’d been hit by a truck.

I feel exactly the same level of pain today as I do every other day. If I take today off because this level of pain is apparently unworkable, it’s a slippery slope, eventually I’m going to have to come back to work despite being in this exact same level of pain. This is my baseline, now I can truly compare it to being hit by a truck.

I used to be on a pension, I wanted to work because I wanted purpose in the neo-liberal hell scape of my society. but my mental health was too shot because of this deep rooted idea that I deserved rest just for being in any level of pain that was out of the ordinary, and subconsciously I would talk myself out of doing anything because I deeply believed I shouldn’t have to.

But I don’t have that luxury, my ordinary will always be “hit by a truck” level, so right now I either learn how to consistently work through it, or drop dead broke and homeless.

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.

Accessibility.

We will never get rid of the analogue clocks from our school, we’re an adult education and alternative model highschool qualifications centre.

We primarily teach adults with no to low English, adults and teens with disabilities, and adults and teens refered via corrections services.

There is a significant level of illiteracy within numeracy, and for some of our students, it’s not a failing of the education system, it’s just a fact of life given their specific circumstances (eg, acquired brain injuries are common among our students)

Some students can learn to tell time on an analogue clock even if they didn’t know before.

But even my students who will never in their life be able to fully and independently remember and recall their numbers can tell the time with an analogue clock.

I tell my students “we will take lunch at 12pm, so if you look at the clock and the arms look like this /imitates a clock/ we will go to lunch”

And now I avoid 40 questions of “when’s lunch?” because you don’t need to tell time to see time with an analogue clock, they can physically watch the hands move, getting closer to the shape they recognise as lunch time.

And my other students can just read the time, from the clock, and not feel infantalised by having a disability friendly task clock like they’ve done at other centres I work at - they’ve had a digital clock for students who can tell time, and a task clock as the accessible clock. But a well designed face on an analogue clock can do both.

I myself have time blindness due to a neurological/CRD issue, so analogue clocks, and analogue timers are an accessibility tool for me as well, as the teacher.

That’s alright, there will only be a handful of gen alpha even eligible to vote in a 2029 election, since they were born 2010-not even born yet

Yup, thyroid, adrenals, and gonads have been checked, both with blood work and untrasound.

I have dysautonomia due to a brain stem herniation, and temperature regulation is effected by that, but it’s just been so weird that the way this symptom effects me was decades of not feeling the cold, then suddenly now I’m not feeling the heat.

I know which one I’d choose if I got to pick… and it’s the one where I don’t need to go to a wound nurse for frost nip in February.

I was a year round shorts guy, genuinely didn’t feel the cold. Last year I suddenly became a year round thermal stockings, skivee, thermal gloves, jumper and woollen pants guy.

I can’t get warm. It’s like I’m catching up on 30+ years of never feeling the cold by feeling the cold all the time.

I never really understood at what point a language evolves enough to be an entirely new language.

Old English feels so far removed from even middle English, let alone modern English.

We have “new” and “old” to differentiate them, but with how many Latin words alone entered English between Old English and Modern English, It’s something I’ve never found a comprehensive answer to.

I guess, what is it about proto-indo European that we acknowledge as a distinct language from the hundreds of thousands of languages that evolved from it, other than time scale and global impact.

A “barn door attitude” is a idiom. I’ve only ever heard it to mean that you can’t keep your opinions together and they’re an open and paradoxical mess. Not sure what it means in other contexts.

Yes and no, if you scambait hard enough your number can eventually be added to a blacklist for larger scam organisations that bought your data for use in multiple scam attempts.

In my experience that has really cut down on the calls.

In 2020 the department of human services accidentally posted my personal phone number on a list of support services for people experiencing housing or food insecurity. This number was then circulated by every major news source in my state. I couldn’t change my number at the time because I had no legal ID (still don’t… Can’t figure out how to get ID without ID, but I have a new number now at least) at first I didn’t really notice the ratio of spam calls to genuine calls for the wrong number (ie, people calling my number because they needed housing/food) . I just remember getting 40+ calls a day at many stages.

But as the actual number for the food relief service was circulated, I eventually stopped getting genuine calls and I was getting 3-5 scam calls every single day.

After a year of scam baiting, I was getting 2 a week.

Now, I’ll do something online that requires sharing my current number, within a few hours I get a scam call because my data has been sold, but I bait the heck out of that first call and I usually don’t receive any further calls which suggest my number was blacklisted by a larger scam organisation, and I won’t be hassled until my data is sold again as a new item.

It’s hard to avoid getting your number on scam lists when the largest health insurance company, and the second largest telecommunications company in my country both had major data breaches where millions of customers identifying information was accessed and sold to scammers…

“body type” has always been a general term to express the entire shape, size and proportions of a person, including excess weight and obesity.

When I was obese I couldn’t pull off crop tops because of my body size, it was incredibly unflattering, and now that I’m a healthy weight I still can’t pull off crop tops because of my body proportions, I have a short torso.

Body type encompasses both scenarios, so it’s often thought of as a polite way to tell someone something is unflattering without singling out specific “flaws” in their body.

This is a case where the brand name actually unites understanding of a drug whose chemical name differs by location.

Except we don’t have Tylenol in most countries where it’s called paracetamol.

We have Panadol, Panamax, Calpol, Herron and Hedanol.

If it wasn’t for ER, Scrubs, Greys Anatomy and a bunch of other American media, I’d have no idea that Tylenol and acetaminophen are the same thing as Panadol and paracetamol.

Standard Tylenol and standard Panadol are different dosages too. Regular strength Tylenol is 325mg, standard Panadol (and every other paracetamol brand I’ve seen for adults) is 500mg, which is the “extra strength” of Tylenol.

Meanwhile in our house, every pot needs to be precariously balanced in a stack in order to fit in the cupboard.

How precarious? This will blow your mind!

We have 3 pots/pans, A big one, a medium one, and a little one.

Now, and bear with me because I know this is an unorthodox way to stack things, but I think the little pan should go inside the medium pan, and those two should go inside the big pan. It’s crazy, but it just might work.

My partner has other ideas when he stacks them though.

When I was 23 I moved into a sharehouse that had a dishwasher, I lived there over a year before I saw it, it had a false cabinet so it blended in. I’d always just washed my dishes in the sink and I keep all my dishes, cutlery and pans separate in a tub in the pantry because I have allergies. I’d never used a dishwasher before.

I googled how to use a dishwasher because I didn’t want to be the 20 year old that can’t do basic chores. I read the user manual and looked for the filters and catchment drains. They were filthy so I cleaned them, then followed the stacking guide in the user manual and ran it with a full load of my housemates dishes.

I was very impressed with how clean they came out.

I mentioned it to a housemate who found it very amusing I’d only just discovered the dishwasher, he warned me that it was old and broken and not a very good dishwasher so the few housemates that use it were actually talking about splitting the cost of a replacement if I wanted to get in on it.

Why? When the dishwasher was working perfectly.

All 7 of my housemates flooded into the kitchen to assess the cleanliness of the dishes because no one believed me that the dishwasher worked.

Turns out in the 7 years the house had been used for student housing since the landlords son took over as head tenant, not a single one of the rotating cast of 8 housemates had ever cleaned the secondary catchment filter, and only rarely did someone remember to clean the main filter.

Turns out the dishwasher works great when you remove the months worth of old rotten corn building up in the filter, and drain off the 7 years of muck that’s blocking the greywater outlet flow.

My housemates will still say I stack the dishwasher like a sociopath, but I learned from the user manual so I don’t care, the dishes are clean.

I’m an IT teacher at a community centre, I genuinely never thought I would see the day when a student younger than me enrolled. I wrongly assumed my role as a public educator would just fade out as younger generations required generally less training around computers.

Obviously courses in disability service centres would remain, and accredited training for people to kick off or retarget their careers would still exist.

But the person at the local library who meets twice a week and teaches grandma how to close the tabs on her phone felt like a job that was destined to die.

I’m in my 30s and this year I have a few teenagers in my class. The conversations are hilarious, they don’t know how to read a file location adreess or open a program that isn’t pinned to the taskbar, but at the same time, I don’t know how to access the notifications bar on an iPhone or quickly find the wifi settings without going through general settings…because I went from windows to 98, to a blackberry, to an Android, just like they went from an ipad toddler to an iPhone teen, and only now are they having Windows 11 thrown at them, and of all the computers to try and learn to use, this wouldn’t be my first recommendation (but it’s what our government funds us to teach 🤷‍♀️)

The skill divide is so hard to explain too. My elderly students just stare blankly at one screen, overwhelmed and confused, unsure how to recognise anything. Nothing stands out as a link, or a click able button, because the entire visual landscape is new to them. There is often a lot of hand holding which can be frustrating especially when you made a huge breakthrough in their confidence and independence only to have come in the next week feeling insecure about their skills because they’ve forgotten a little bit, or had a bad spam caller over the weekend who made them want to never touch a computer again.

Then the teens, who know what links look like and generally what they do will rush ahead, they may not know what it is exactly they’re trying to do, but they think they know what end result is expected and they generally know how to avoid catastrophic issues so they just barrel ahead, I’ll see them make 40 clicks a second for something that usually takes 2, because they’re throwing spaghetti at the wall.

I had a project last week. Dead simple. Save a linked file to a target location, import the file into another program through either drag and drop or browsing for the file, then change 1 thing, and export the final file into another target location, as specified on the activity sheet.

Barely 5 minutes in, I’m still helping Brenda get her mouse dongle plugged in, and one of the teens is finished. And yes, they have every file I asked for, and every edit I asked for, but both are just sitting in the downloads folder. And now we’re at the end looking back, the teen is confused because they have the edited file that is required to "finish*, how is it wrong, and I’m trying to explain why skipping the steps about target locations means they’ll have to start again because this activity is all about target locations and I don’t actually give two shits about this file I just need them to put things in and out of a folder until they can explain to me “a folder is a container” and not just stare into space because a folder is a black hole on their phone things they save go to until they need them again and just download them again.

Like how we can reCORD some music and release a a REcord

Or make some COMpost by putting those scraps in the comPOST