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.

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 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.

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.

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)

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.

Yeah, boomers will just brute force their way through repeated “wrong password” attempts and inevitably make a new account every time and their take away from the experience is that “new fangled technology is so convoluted and never works”

Meanwhile the millennial experience is to have zero issues actually using the product because we’re technologically competent, we’re just going to complain the whole time that’s it’s taking unnecessary data, or find weird ad hoc ways to make burner accounts.

I will lecture my dad for having 14 different email accounts and he will retort with “you also have more than 10!”

Yes old man, and I use all 10 and know exactly how they differ and what each is used for. You think you have one account when you actually have 14, they all share one password which Is probably my name written backwards, and you’re sending mail to your old account address then getting mad when you can’t find it in the inbox of your new account, and you still refer to all mail platforms as “Windows mail” even though you’ve exclusively accessed your yahoo mail via the browser for the last 5 years, and have owned a Mac for 10 years… We are not the same.

When I was 8, my 4 year old brother, 40 year old father, and 35 year old uncle whom I lived with all went to get screened for autism after my brother’s pre-school recommended it.

3/4 of us walked out with autism diagnoses.

I was given the official psychiatric assessment that I had “learned and developed autistic traits and mannerisms due to growing up in a household with no neurotypical influence” and the advice was that I would grow out of it once I made enough “normal” friends at school.

My brother started occupational therapy and other programs, and at each one, the practitioner would recommend to my dad that I join too to “help her brother feel safe and comfortable” and I would litteraly participate in the Autism therapy programs with my autistic brother.

Over my years at school, I picked up official diagnoses for dyscalculia and dyspraxia and that explained a few of the struggles I was having. The autism OT I was already doing covered support for my learning disabilities so nothing except the paperwork changed.

And sure enough, I made neurotypical friends at school, and a lot of the autistic-like traits I exhibited as a kid were no longer apparent in my behaviour.

I had a lot of mental health issues as a teenager and young adult. But what millennial isn’t depressed and anxious? I was growing up with 3 autistic men as a teenage girl, I rationalised that my dysfunctional emotional state was justified by my life circumstances. I was a dramatic teen.

Hearing and visual impairment, and other physical health issues with muscle tone, and struggles to heal due to poor proprioception that got worse in my 30s somehow lead to a re-assesment for autism as an adult.

Big fucking suprise. I’m autistic. Always have been.

Sometimes health professionals don’t get the full picture. They’re human.

My presentation is drastically different from my male family members, and I was parentified by my fathers autism from a young age - I remember being as young as 10 and my dad saw my ability to blend and socialise, he’d send me into stores or get me to make phone calls for him if he was having anxiety over it. This was not something that was discussed at the time of my first assessment.

My special interest was, and still is, anthropology. I maintain that loving the study of humanity and human culture means I’ve been able to intellectualise my way through social situations that neurotypicals feel their way through on instinct. I suspect I’ve done this from a young age, and that this further muddied the waters for that psychiatrist who assessed me when I was 12.

If I’d gotten reassessed in my later teens, or early 20s, I’m certain the result of the assessment would have been different then to, even with the same psychiatrist. You get 4 hours with a perfect stranger,just on some random day, and they’re supposed to make an assessment on your entire life?

We trusted their assessment, which is why I fumbled through life for 20+ years under the assumption I could learn my way out of feeling autistic.

Trust your healthcare professionals, but remember that they’re human, and second opinions are important, especially if you’re struggling with the treatment plan, or lack thereof, from the first doctor.

I completely agree with that perspective.

Personally I would add to this that for individuals who are unable to mask, and who’s struggle to mask is so to speak, “visible” to others, while they are still subjected to all of the ableiem that comes with being neurodivergent, it’s almost like their inability to mask becomes a punchline for neurotypicals. I think some NTs use the joke as a way of trying to relieve the pressure to mask thinking they’re being accommodating, while still addressing the disabled elephant in the room. The end result is that the person’s lack of masking capacity is mistakenly correlated to their entire set of abilities - people assume they’re incapable of everything. It’s pretty dehumanising and infantalizing, and puts so many limitations on the opportunities available for folk who can’t mask.

And on the other side of that coin, people who have the ability to mask really well are expected to do it flawlessly 24/7, and failing to do so isn’t a sign that having ADHD can be disabling, no, for people who can mask, not masking 24/7 is apparently a moral failing. Which is not the kind of social expectation you want on someone who’s condition predisposes them to anxiety inducing perfectionism, and leads to this expectation also being internalised.

Which occurs for both types of people - internalising the expectations. if society treats you as useless, you start to feel useless, until you fall into a pit. if society expects you to always be performing at 110%, you begin to feel like a failure if you output anything less than 109% until you burn out and fall in the same pit.

(because I don’t think neurotypical people realise that masking is operating at >100%, it’s an additional request on our mind and body, it’s an additional labour, it’s not sustainable long term. There really is the misconception that we can choose to turn it on and off at no personal cost to us.)

No but you do say “I’m diabetic” which uses diabetes as sort of identity within the sentence structure.

Similarly “I’m a cancer survivor” and “I’m a cancer patient” are ways someone with cancer could structure a sentence to give weight to the way cancer and the experiences of cancer fundamentally change this person’s personality and identity.

While “I am ADHD” isn’t perfect, it’s a very new use of language to try and create an identity form, and it will continue to evolve and sound more natural.

Personally I still find myself saying “I’m autistic and I have ADHD” in most situations, but if I know I won’t have to explain the term too much, I do prefer “I’m AuDHD”, because it’s an identity first phrase, and it feels as natural as “I’m autistic” or “I’m diabetic”.

But the difference grammatically between “I’m autistic” and “I’m ADHD” is minimal, yet I agree one sounds fine and the other just sounds stupid. And other than exposure, I can’t place my finger on why.

At the end of the day, alcoholism, depression, and obesity, they are unhealthy states of being.

They are not something people choose, and while there are treatments, it’s not something everyone can control.

That doesn’t mean we should simply accept this state of being. People living with depression deserve better, people living with alcoholism deserve better than for us to say “it’s out of their control, they can’t help it, so we shouldn’t judge, let them be” when what they need is better support and better treatment options.

Likewise, obese people deserve better than “eat less, move more, fatty!” but they also deserve more than “all bodies are beautiful, just let us be”

I say this as someone who was a fat kid, and a fat teen, and a fat adult. I had a BMI of 50 for a most of my life. In my mid 30s, I got it down to 28, and still going.

So I say all of this is as someone else who was fat, obese, and morbidly obese. Obesity should be viewed the same way we view depression and anxiety, though depression and anxiety also need some better PR.

Being obese may not not always be a choice, but the the ultimate end goal of how we view obesity as a state of being is to find ways we can all manage our weight. Because obesity is not healthy, for those who can’t easily control their weight, life sucks, they are patients in need of treatment, not morally failing people, but also not “perfect plus sized activists who are healthy at every size”

Because while bodies and sizes vary and we can do healthy things at every size. Obesity is inherently unhealthy. Obviously being bullied won’t solve anything, but neither will society politely ignoring how hard it is to live a full life while suffering from obesity.

Being black isn’t an inherent health issue. It genuinely is just a different state of being. 99% of problems unique to black people are social issues, not medical issues… So the comparison between obesity and substance abuse issues is more helpful than trying to compare being obese to being BIPOC.

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