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)

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.

Okay, you do you.

Buy physical media from independent production companies. Pirate whatever Disney, Netflix and Amazon are cranking out.

Having had a defecography this is very similar to the encouragement the radiologist gave me…

I’m hard of hearing and terrified of standing in the wrong place at an airport and missing the visual cues to board the flight. Once boarding starts and people start queueing up, I usually get in line because it’s helpful to see what everyone in front of me is doing - the order that they hand over paperwork or get carry on double checked. I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to hear the attendant if they ask me questions at the gate because it’s so noisy, so I like to at least feel like I’m prepared.

One time I was flying with crutches and qualified for early pre-boarding because I needed the plane wheelchair (skychair). I sat right next to the gate desk and waited, then I started seeing people queue up so I quickly joined the line, wondering how pre-boarding works when the whole plane of passengers are already vying to be at the front of the line.

I get to the front, the attendant looks at my ticket then after some awkward back and forward eventually I realised they were telling me I’ll have to wait till everyone has boarded to get the sky-chair on. I should have come to the desk when pre boarding was announced. I pointed that I was sitting right in front of them… Apparently they were called my name 3 times over the loudspeaker.

Apparently airports can only comprehend one disability at a time (if that!) they knew I was hard of hearing (it’s on my ticket) but still thought calling me over the PA was the best way to get the attention of the deaf person sitting 80cm from their desk.

So I sat back down and waited for the line to clear, then I got back up when there were 2 people in line, and after another back and forward I learned that they had tried calling my name again about halfway through boarding because they only had one skychair and it was now or never because the chair had told fly with the other passenger because their arrival airport didn’t have a chair, or something, I dunno, anyway I kind of had to crawl down the ailse to get to my chair because in the past I’ve just used the backs of chairs to swing myself along, but the plane was full so I couldn’t do that.

Addressed marketing is the reason my letterbox gets so full.

The previous 7 tenants of my unit haven’t updated their address (why would they? It’s just catalogues, newsletters and flyers, they’re not even enveloped, they just have an address label and stamp on the front page of the flyer) and they each get 3-4 “useless” letters per week. I’ve tried the “return to sender” and emailed the property agent asking if they can remind past tenants to update their addresses via email.

I’ve lived here for almost 4 years, so I’m at the point where everything goes into the recycling bin despite that being illegal, the post office was just as sick as I was, showing up once a week for 2 years straight with 20 undeliverable rain damaged letters that they themselves just immediately destroyed.

I always forget to check the mailbox because I’m not expecting any mail. Nothing in the box is ever for me, even when I got a new bank card delivered they hold it at the post office for me because that’s how I’ve got my mail set up. I get a text when I have mail to pick up. (and I’ll bring the stack of junk mail in my mailbox that aren’t for me to the post office when I go to get my mail, but if I don’t have a reason to go to the post office, sorry previous tenants, I’m sick of the 7 ALDI catalogues every week, they’re going in the shredder, and I’m willing to risk jail over it)

Oh definitely, he knows, but I also know and understand his perspective. For him, masking and unmasking when texting his boss then texting his family is exhausting and incredibly emotionally taxing. While I don’t meet the clinical criteria for an autism diagnosis, I do struggle with a few of the same things my brother and dad struggle with, particularly around processing, emotional regulation, and burn out, so I’ve been in his shoes where I know I’m doing something the hard way, or I know we’d all be happier with another method, but changing the task or changing the routine or process is even harder, even though the process I’d be changing to would be easier and better, initiating that change feels like an insurmountable climb.

Besides, my dad had to try and put up with my hyperlexia when I was growing up - before I had the emotional maturity to understand my dad’s needs, I can’t even imagine how much he suffered from my frustrating communication style being imposed on him. Now he’s older, it’s my turn to suffer 😂 (that is, it’s my turn to let him explore the ways he wants to communicate, even if it’s not what I want.)

My dad now uses AI to write all his texts to me.

He’s autistic and dyslexic and texting was always a massive struggle for him, so he’d leave voice messages, or just call me, and they’d be rambling and non linear, but it was my dad and his voice, his personality.

A few years ago he’d use dictation to send texts, and it was pretty funny because he hadn’t no way of proof reading them and dictation is never great for people with accents or speech problems… but now he will just use the microphone to ask whatever AI assistant is built into his phone the same rambling question he would have previously just voice messaged me.

And Copilot re-writes his rambling question and spits out a message that sounds like some formal business email. So now there’s an extra level of misinterpretation, an extra level of being removed from communicating with the human being.

I’ve asked my dad if he finds AI easier than just leaving a voice message (because I personally think sending a voice memo is easier) and he says he likes it because it makes him feel like he’s “normal” and can do the things everyone else has always been able to do with ease, even though he knows its not perfect.

I can definitely see the value in AI as an accommodation tool, and it has helped my dad a lot in his professional life where previous accommodation tools haven’t been adequate to “keep up”.

But I do miss hearing my dad, or reading his personality come through in the poorly dictated texts. My brother has gotten really annoyed at dad for this because my brother it’s also autistic and it’s actually harder for him to communicate with dad with an AI middle man, they’ve lived together for almost 30 years and they basically have their own language, so the AI texts my brother gets from my dad drive him nuts, when he and my dad have never had issues communicating.

I’m also worried that it’s effecting the limited literacy skills he does have, he’s getting rusty because he no longer has to try at all most days.

If you’ve been using weed pretty heavily for a while, I’d give it a month T break.

For me the first week is insomnia, muscle pain and brain fog worse than when I’m actually stoned, the second week is depressive symptoms and feeling “dopamine withdrawal” (ie: nothing is fun, nothing is motivating, everything is empty), hyperemesis/diarrhoea, and hypersomia.

It’s not until the third or fourth week of a T break that I feel human and begin to think “this is fine, I don’t need weed, it’s nice, but so is having some time off to be sober”

Better than the system being used by the department of human services in Australia. If the servers and service centres are overloaded, you basically just get told “tough shit, try again later, hope you’re not desperately trying to get out of a DV situation or protect an elder from abuse, cause we’re not paying for more servers”

At least with a digital queue system there’s a sliver of hope that you might get through.

Plus a bunch of stuff that was illegal when you were poor suddenly becomes perfectly legal if you’re rich enough to pay the associated fees.

I mean, sure the police call them “fines”…but still.

I literally like don’t even know what you’re like talking about. I literally can’t even.

(I’ve just read further down the various responses to this question, and I’m now seeing “literally” overused in literally every other comment, my generation will literally never escape!)

I heard rumours that the new Stanley cup everyone was obsessed with for a week contained lead (not in contact with the inside of the cup, but still, why is lead there at all in 2024)

Was that rumour ever substantiated?

I have a step through frame that you sit upright on. 20-25km/h is my average commuting speed for getting to work and going to the shops. I regularly have to push to 30km/h+ because of motor traffic trying to ride up my ass even though I’m in the designated bike lane. (cars in Australia like driving fast in the bike lanes to avoid the chicanes on the road designed to slow motor traffic for cyclist safety)

If ebikes are disproportionately represented in cycling accidents, then I would argue it’s not the speed, it’s the barrier to entry. People who have never ridden before, people who aren’t physically able to ride a standard bike, these groups make up a significant portion of ebike riders because ebikes are accessible.

Yes, speed will contribute to this, people with limited riding experience being able to ride fast, possibly without the physical fitness required to control a bike at high speed.

The issue then isn’t the speed itself, but rider education and training.

Not too far off, $1AUD (0.60 euros) would be a cheap can of beans (which is often mostly water, even if it’s a 400g can, once you drain the beans, your millage varies by brand) $3 a can is average for name brands that fill the can to the brim.

But when you can buy 500g of dried beans for $3.99, and that will make the equivalent of 8-10 cans of beans, as someone who doesn’t eat meat (and has allergies so can’t eat commercial “mock meats”), I eat at least 2 serves of legumes every single day. Buying cans adds up at that scale even though I’m just one person. So I always buy dry legumes when I can.

I definitely have some cans in the pantry for emergencies though, because they are very convenient.

But I also have some pre-cooked, unseasoned beans and chick peas in the freezer, when I cook up a big pot I always throw a few portions in the freezer. They defrost in less than a minute in the microwave, so I’ll use them before I crack open a can of beans.