I don’t read words in any voice other than the naturally subvocalisation that occurs when I’m reading, which is always in my voice.

Even when I read a quote myself Morgan Freeman, I’m hearing my voice, doing a Morgan freeman impression.

But in terms of who I picture? Nothing, people online are not even corporal beings to me until details are revealed. They are still human and have whole lives offline so that’s not an excuse to be needlessly rude, but I know nothing of them so why would I randomly invent details unless I’m doing so as a “put myself in their shoes” thought experiment.

But then I have a degree of aphantasia so I’m not “picturing” anything, all I have is words anyway, so it’s easy not to add in extra words that change my assumptions about a person.

I just wish Americans would have a little self awareness when engaging in foreign content.

I was in a comment thread for a video on a report by the ABC about ADEs. Now I will give Americans the benefit of the doubt, we both have ABC networks, but ours clearly says “Australia”, the news presenter has a Australian accent, and was talking about the Australian minimum wage, there were references to Centrelink and the Australian government repeatedly. If you watched the video and couldn’t tell me what country the video was about, you need to go back to primary school, your media comprehension level is dysfunctional .

I mentioned a clarifying point in the the comments about ADE being different from DES and giving numbers for each (you don’t need to know anything about these acronyms), and someone starts arguing with me that when they were in the disability program they got xyz and they didn’t have to do any of this. I replied saying that these processes have been unchanged for 20 years, I don’t know how they’re getting what they’re getting, they have a unique case. They come back telling me everyone gets that, that’s how it is, I need to do my research before I make stuff up. I explain that I work in the sector, I’m looking at the cases software, if they are indeed getting those services through that program, they are the only one of 40,000 people in the program getting that, because that’s not how the service works. They tell me 15 million people people use the program. I finally realise what’s happening. “there are only 25 million people people in Australia…you’re a lost American aren’t you?” and sure enough ,they politely reply with “oh yeah, I’m not Australian so I don’t know, maybe it’s different over there”.

And I just can’t with that level of American stupidity.

You can came into an Australian forum and assumed I wasn’t Australian, assumed I wasn’t talking about Australia, then came to the conclusion that “maybe it’s different over there” when I had explicitly just informed you that ,yes, the law is different here.

Now many times could I have used the acronym DES before the American thought to themselves “maybe this person isn’t talking about SSDI”.

And this is just the example from the last hour. I end up in a lot of international PD sessions for my work, and something like this is a daily occurrence, only with the Americans.

Canada, you are sadly not excused from this, nor sure why but it’s always "okay, where are we all from? “Australia” “Belgium” “Brazil” “Indonesia” “Fort Freedom” “Edmonton”

Those are cities and provinces, clearly the rest of us are doing countries, some of us are big enough that we could name states if we wanted to, but we’re being polite, you’ve got 50 (10+3 🇨🇦 ) of them and we didn’t memorise a silly song in school to learn your states.

The fact that I know how many states the US has and how many provinces and tertories Canada has, but an American would be stabbing in the dark to guess how many states and territories Australia has, even though our biggest state is 3x bigger than Texas and Australia as a whole is a comparable landmass to the contiguous 48.

I felt the same thing watching my partner working this morning. I’ve been with him 10 years and I still can’t explain his job beyond its title because as far as I understand he oversees people as well as works on software that’s developed, deployed and managed by another company, but they don’t manage software or services or develop anything but they deploy it, but that’s not not his team, and it’s this one specific program, but it’s actually 12 integrated programs, and he’s working on one that’s in development but he’s not a developer, but is not part of anything they’re actually doing yet, and that’s not his main role.

Everytime he explains it, I get more lost…

What is this job? It’s obviously stressful, a lot of other companies rely on on whatever this service is, and my partner, as of this year, makes 8x my income, so it must be important… Right!?

Right!? He’s not making 8x my income pushing pencils…right!?

I teach General Education at a community centre for people who missed out on formal schooling.

My job is 3 words “I teach SOSE”, and you know almost exactly what I do you can picture the main tasks and also picture my output (educated graduates)

His job did not exist 15 years ago, the concept of a job like his in software for the masses did not exist 50 years ago, a desk job to this degree of pencil pushing did not exist 100 years ago.

Sometimes I think about how my job is technically one of the oldest in the world, but never a well paid one.

Sometimes I consider a pencil pushing job for a few years, to just get my retirement fund sorted, but if I don’t even understand what the job is how can I expect myself to do it?

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.

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)

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, 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 sorry 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.

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.

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

In my country, a fanny is a cunt, so hearing Americans call bum-bags “fanny packs” was, and still is, hilarious to me.

But I will be exclusively referring to my bum bag as my “strap on” from now on. Thank you, groucho’s mom.

Some people think cilantro tastes awful, and I don’t understand those people on that point either.

You don’t understand that some people have a genetic mutation that causes their taste buds to be more sensitive to the flavour compounds in cilantro, including Aldehyde?

What is hard to understand?

Aldehydes are a flavour compound in cilantro that in small doses gives a fresh, light and vibrant taste. Aldehydes are also present in the soap making process, various other cleaning agents, as well as being released by certain insects.

If you taste a lot of these specific Aldehydes, you will taste soap. But cilantro doesn’t contain enough Aldehyde for most people to notice any fowl tastes.

That is, unless you are an X-man with mutant taste buds.

Their taste buds pick up on the Aldehydes, and therefore cilantrotastes like soapy stink bugs.

It doesn’t mean I don’t accept them for who they are.

[…]

looks gross.

You don’t get to claim you accept people for who they are, then call them or aspects of their appearance “gross”.

If you truly believed that people can have preferences we don’t agree with, then you would keep your mouth shut when you see a piercing you don’t like, but that clearly they like having.

Accepting people starts with learning that if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.

You should probably get that shiny, silver snot looked at by a doctor.

There are 7.9 billion people in this world, you can’t be expected to try and look hot for all of them. I don’t want to be attractive to the masses, that’s exhausting.

I want to attract the type of people I’m attracted to.

That includes unusual piercings and body mods. I can’t explain why I find them attractive, but I don’t have to explain. We can just like different things and not yuck each other’s yum.

It’s been years since I’ve seen them movie but I recall having a third interpretation of the joke.

I thought Austin has assumed the communists won because prior to being frozen he felt that USSR had a stronger standing in the cold war and would be the more likely victor, regardless of Austin’s personal opinions on communism and capitalism.

To expand on this, you could also imply that Austin assumed the capitalists lost because he was frozen. He knows he’s a great spy, what chance did capitalism stand without him fighting for it?.

I don’t intend to rewatch the movie because my life experiences since then have made it impossible to enjoy media that uses homophobia and transphobia as common punch lines, but I can still agree that it’s a great joke, a great movie for it’s time, and cleverly written.

Well not if you strip it from all context and the nuance of OPs specific word choice.

Because I could tell a story about my Turkish co-worker that ends like:

“my co-worker of specific race is doing dodgy shit and it’s so harmful for the whole community that he’s doing this, especially with how much anti-ethnic group hate is going around, he’s giving everyone a bad name and I’m worried his behaviour as an individual aashole who happens to be race is going to start a spree of hate crimes against others who aren’t doing anything wrong, because most people aren’t, my co-worker is”

And I would argue that this story is fundamentally different from just leaving it as “my Turkish co-worker is doing dodgy stuff”.