This, when I’ve got a new program or a program has updated I take my time to familiarise myself with it, it takes me more than five minutes because I’m visually impaired and have a learning disability, but it doesn’t take that long and I have fun exploring the program without pressure.

But when a program updates the UI the morning I start work and I realise I’ve got 5 minutes to figure out where everything has moved? It’s overwhelming and unfortunately I have a “freeze” response to stress and it took me years of therapy to push through that gut instinct to freeze up and just stare at it feeling like it’s too much and I can’t.

That said, I do still really struggle to find the button mid-meeting. I can vamp, but I can’t vamp while properly searching my screen because with my visual impairment that takes too much concentration, so the result is “okay I’m going to share my screen, but my UI has updated so everyone go refresh your coffees while I hunt down the screen share button” and some helpful person will try to explain where the button is, not understanding that my screen doesn’t look like there’s because I have adaptive software making things larger.

Though a few times I’ve logged a ticket to IT saying “I’m sorry, I know the issues exists between keyboard and chair on this one, I can’t for the life of me find the print button” and they’ll remote into my machine and say “oh, that’s because you’re enlarged font has pushed half your toolbar off the screen entirely. You’re missing a bunch of features” and suddenly it made sense why I felt like my co-workers were more efficient in these programs. Unfortunately they couldn’t fix it so I still have to work around only being able to see half the screen of this program they suggested “returning everything to the original aspect ratio and getting better glasses”

My boss seems to think our little 2 man IT department can fix Adobe’s bad adaptive UI.

I teach community IT.

They really can’t.

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!)

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.

Pretty sure I still catch myself smiling over the girl in highschool 18 years ago that said she was jealous because I had really long and pretty eyelashes.

I mean, yes, but a 3.5mm to usb-c adapter is like $10, so that’s still not really an excuse.

Most people use wireless headphones these days, and usb-c headphones are getting more common. (I’m hearing impaired, all headphones sound the same to me, but maybe an audiophile will tell me why usbc headphones suck compared to 3.5mm)

When I bought my new pixel I went to the gym that afternoon and immediately realised I couldn’t use my headphones because I hadn’t been mindful of my missing headphone jack. Worked out in silence, and bought an adapter on the way home for my headphones. Problem solved.

There’s tons of quiet things you can do on your phone if you’re bored and don’t have headphones.

The only people who are allowed to have their phones on full volume plasting noises without headphones are visually impaired people, because otherwise they’d need to put their headphones in just to check what time it is on their phone.

I forget my own fucking birthday but let me wax poetically about extinct Australian megafauna for a few hours.

Though it’s episodic memory, if you ask me to give you a fun fact, let alone name a species just off the cuff, my mind goes blank. I don’t know anything about anything.

But give me a minute to set myself the mental stage and start rambling about how as a kid I was obsessed with this old faux taxidermy at the Melbourne museum because it was like a derpy wombat horse. One time my mum took me to a kids activity workshop where we got to pretend we were digging up fossils and analysing them… did you know Australias geologic layering contains every single rock type that exists in on earth. Lots of Australian fossils are found in soft limestone. Hang on, dippy don! That’s what I named the derpy wombat at the museum. It was a Diprotodon, a herbivorous marsupial who died out about 40,000 years ago. The cave in NSW where they found a bunch of specimens was 400 million year old limestone but Dippy only entered the record ~2 million years ago, so it suggests they burrowed, which makes sense when you look at their closest living relative, the wombat, though Diprotodon and the family it belongs to is a dead end on the evolutionary tree.

But yeah, you can’t always rely on where you find the bones to date the specimens which is why carbon and uranium dating really changed our understanding of Australian history.

Speaking of locations of fossils, diprotodon is one of the only known Australian marsupials to seasonally migrate, so their range was huge! So were they! 2m tall, 3m long and easily 2500kg heavy, and have two giant protruding teeth (hence their name Diprotodon, Greek for “two protruding teeth”, Di=two, pro to/protrude, don/dontics like orthodontics …I also like etymology) and lived in the marshlands. European archaeologists thought they were originally skeletons of some kind of hippopotamus, but several mobs of indigenous Australians had/have oral histories around diprotodon. the last living dipro’s died out after the first Australian peoples inhabited the land. Which is why there is an association between dippy and bunyip (an Australian cryptid/aboriginal mythology) a giant melevolent monster who haunts billabongs.

They indigenous Australians are often blamed for the extinction of a lot of megafauna, there was a theory of overhunting for the many years, but to date no diprotodon fossils have been found with evidence of human butchery, but we do have evidence that people would move bones around for some reason.

Anyway…

It’s like a trance, and it’s really hard to stop once you start, but you can’t just pick up into it, something has to trigger the memory to surface, like seeing a certain train go past to remember specific train facts, or in my case thinking about where you I was and who I was with when I first learned some of the best facts about my thing.

Though I have AuDHD so not sure if the episodic memory is my autism or my ADHD, it feels like ADHD because the thoughts are so bouncy when they come, but it also feels like like autism because it’s anxiously obsessive in a fun way inside my brain once they journey starts.

Also maybe remembering cool megafauna facts is why I forget things I should remember like what house number I live at or what year I was born (genuinely forgot these things, had to go to the front of my house to check, and do maths because I could remember my mums birthday and how old she was when she had me, but not my own birthday or age … Autism and memory is fucking weird)

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.

You should see some shops in Australia, they decide to put up a small display for “Christmas in July” then the next thing you know there’s no other holidays to protect that display from just becoming a growing Christmas display… in August!

And it’s so lazy because it’s still the Christmas in July display at the core, with the actual December Christmas merch expanding out from the it, so there’s ugly Christmas sweaters, roasts, and snow men decorations in the the middle, and board shorts, barbecues, thongs* and white boomers* after that.

(thongs are flip flops/sandals, white boomers are albino kangaroos, it’s what Santa uses to pull the rusted out ute across the sand because he leaves the reindeer and sleigh for the northern hemisphere…Australian Christmas is weird)

I think it’s “don’t think about getting around plane carry on limits with this”

Depending on the media and its importance to me, at a minimum I just ensure the problematic creator is financially dead to me.

Often the media will be ruined by the reveal of the creators nature, I’ll see subtext in it I didn’t see before. So that fixes itself.

But if I enjoy the media, I’ll continue to enjoy the media privately, in my own mind, from my own hard drive, in my own art. I’ll keep online engagement to a minimum (don’t want the creator getting any benefits from analytic trends) and I’ll make sure the creator doesn’t directly see a cent from me.

Basically, if I gave them money before I “cancelled” them, I’m going to get that money back in a round about way, they don’t deserve it 🏴‍☠️

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.

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.

Generally millennials born after 1989 would fall into the “younger millennial” catagory.

The difference between old millennial and young millennial is how much of the 90s you actually remember because you were old enough to form memories, and not just the kind of made up memories you invent from looking back on old photos and trying to imagine the stories your parents told you about your childhood.

Three words. Edward scissors hands.

Okay, you do you.

In Australia, most larger chemist’s sell peri bottles in the antenatal section, near the breast pumps and maternity pads.

They also sometimes sell cheaper, less pink, peri bottles in the OT/home aid section, or in the ailse with the laxatives and enemas.

You can definitely get them on Amazon. I also find them occasionally in the toiletries section of Muslim grocery stores, and occasionally Asian stores, near the buckets, stools, and tabo cups.

I don’t have any fancy suggestions, because much like you, I often went DIY. Because of my skin condition I’ve always needed a bidet, so convenience and utility was my draw, the fact I had to carry it with me everywhere my whole life since adolescence.

Pretty sure when I was first taught to do it by my chronic care nurse I was just using hospital peri-bottles. For a while I just carried a 50ml syringe in my bag and a bottle to draw water from.

But at some point (probably around 12 when I joined Scouts) I found these “bidet bottlecaps” at hiking stores, and I remember a time when I just had these bottle caps everywhere and would have plastic bottles with hair ties on them in random purses (I’d put a hair tie around the bottle to remind me it was not drinking water anymore) the brand name I’m seeing pop up is CuloClean, but I mostly see cheap screw on no-brand ones near the register at camping stores.

Now days I mostly DIY them with a lighter, a q tip and a pin.

Just take any plastic bottle lid, heat it up with the lighter to soften the plastic, use the q-tip to push the soft plastic to make a “nipple”, you’re basically trying to make the bottle lid resemble a baby bottle. Then take the pin and make a ~1-2mm hole in the side of the nipple. It’s a good idea to sit down and hold the bottle and see how you’re planning to aim the stream so you can plan where you want to angle the hole you’re making in the lid.

I’m glad I found this method, because I like the little 250ml bottles of Quench Juice, they squeeze easy, hold just the right amount of water, and fit really neatly in all my purses (and the juice is nice too, lol). But the lid was never compatible with the bidet bottle caps, so now I DIY the existing cap of whatever bottle I prefer.

But in either case, you need to have a second, unaltered bottle cap to swap out after use, so the bottle is water tight for storage again. (though, you can always leave it empty and just refill immediately before use, then empty it completely afterwards)

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