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)

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”.

Okay, you do you.

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

No one said that we’re buying processed garbage instead of vegetables.

If vegetables, beans and rice is the core foundation of your diet, then any money you spend on processed snacks is a splurge, because it’s not necessary but you enjoy it.

Depending on the time of year, produce is what I splurge on.

In winter, I get sick of apples and satsumas, I could spend $4 on a highly processed snack that is tasty but doesn’t offer much else, I could $8 on a relatively “healthy” sweet snack (compared to the cheap snack), or I could spend $8 on small scale greenhouse grown strawberries.

Given my options, if I’ve got money, I’m going to buy the strawberries, which is a splurge considering apples were $3 and there’s nothing wrong with apples other than “I’m bored of them”

I do understand your point, but as a layperson there is no real way to single out your protest impact to only effect those directly responsible, especially when, in most cases, those directly responsible are removed from the community to a degree that there is little you could do to impact them without also impacting their innocent underpaid intern who’s just trying to do their job.

Yes, protesting impacts a bunch of people that can’t individually do anything and are therefore being inconvenienced (mildly or substantially, depending on the individual) for something they have no control over that is someone else’s fault.

But I think part of the reason you see it this way is due to a general a lack of solidarity. If I’m inconvenienced because my bus is stuck behind a protest, that sucks, but I’m not going to blame the protesters (unless I genuinely disagree with their requests/what they’re protesting) I’m going to blame the very same people the protesters are trying to reach, because they are the reason that petitions, inquires, public outcry and lobbying hasn’t worked and now we’re at a stage of protest.

It might push a few of us to get off the bus and join the protest because what else can we do. It might prompt someone to write into their local representatives to push them to hurry up and sign negotiations so the protest can end because they’re sick of the slow bus.

There’s no such thing as someone that has “nothing to do with the issue” when the issue impacts us as a society. If you feel like a social issue has nothing to do with you, but the protests around it are impacting you, you have to ask yourself what you’re gaining from the current system, and what stands to be gained from the changes demanded by the protesters. If you genuinely think you have nothing to do with it, you might be a true hermit.

But what if your message is “can we all get along together please?” the other persons message is litteraly “you don’t deserve a vote, you don’t deserve equal rights, you don’t even deserve to drink the same water as me, you are not even legally a person, this is the law, get out of my face nigge* before the lynch mob arrives, because I won’t stop them”

How are you supposed to remove yourself from that situation when that situation is brought onto you, and there’s no way to simply negotiate or compromise because the two “opinions” are diametrically opposed.

If someone’s boot is on another person’s throat, I honestly don’t care if I sound like an asshole as I tell them to move their fucking boot. I’d rather be an asshole on the right side of history than a coward who was just following orders.

Without interruption what incentive does protest have to make change?

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.

It was 1am and I couldn’t sleep so I was sneaking out trying to make it excuses to my parents about needing a glass of water or something.

My mum was trying to push me out of the kitchen because she was wrapping a present and icing a cake for my birthday as a suprise.

She ushered me into the living room, but instead of going back to the kitchen she got distracted by the telly and sat down.

I thought my dad was watching some weird straight to VHS movie on the community channel. I didn’t initially think it was the international news. I sat down and watched for a good 20 minutes, wondering why my parents were so hooked. I was thinking it was like a modern retelling of war of the worlds or something because the whole “movie” so far was just a news broadcast about planes crashing into buildings… Then I realised this was live news.

I should have caught on sooner, when my dad didn’t immediately send me back to bed, he let me stay and watch which he would never do for a movie. I was just old enough to comprehend what was happening, that lives were being lost and thousands of people in America were left hopeless and in crises. But not old enough to imagine what this could mean for the world going forward, and not really old enough to understand that it was a planned terror attack. I remember asking mum if I should cancel my birthday party, and my dad asked why, then my mum and dad argued over it because mum agreed it wasn’t a day for celebrating, but dad argued that it shouldn’t matter, America was on the other side of the planet and we didn’t personally know anyone. I went to bed while they were yelling and I guess mum won because we rescheduled the party for a week later.

If she loves organisation, “A Little to the Left” and “Unpacking” are cute.

Stardew Valley is being mentioned a lot and with good reason, there are a lot of elements to that game and you can choose which activities you like most - farming, mining, fighting monsters, foraging, interacting with villagers.

From there you can get a really good idea of what other games could be even better. For example if she loves the social side of Stardew Valley a Japanese Social Sim game might be fun too.

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

Or make some COMpost by putting those scraps in the comPOST

Is it a dialect training class? Because otherwise that feels like boarderline racism to penalise someone for having a different an accent.

“Da ta” vs “date-ah” is regional. If you’re pronouncing it “wrong” move across the pond and suddenly you’ll be right.

Hmm, should I try getting it a fourth time? 😂

I managed to avoid it until Jan 2023 when I was hit the first time. Completely asymptomatic, I would have had no idea I was infected if it wasn’t for the fact I RAT/lat flow tested twice weekly because of my job.

Recovered fine, didn’t have any lingering symptoms.

Then in May I started getting a bit run down, my lymphnodes around my neck and jaw were really swollen and inflamed, and I was chronically congested, but not with any mucus or anything, just felt like my sinuses were swollen shut, and in the first week of June I had my second covid infection, still mostly asymptomatic, no cough or anything, just fatigue and headaches.

The headache never really went away. I’ve had chronic headaches my whole life due to arthritis in my neck, but this was different, more pressure and in a different location.

In September I got Covid again, and since then I have felt so crook. Migraines almost every week, moderate headaches every day from the moment I’ve wake up to the moment I pass out from exhaustion. The fatigue never went away but I can’t sleep anymore. I’ll lie in bed for hours but only get ~4 hours sleep a day, sometimes I’ll get 8 hours but in multiple naps. I’m thirsty all the time and can’t quench it, but I’m not really peeing at all, even less than usual despite drinking more water. Some days I can’t keep food down, some days food goes straight through me, there’s no middle ground. My lymphnodes are still swollen and now it’s all over my body, not just in my jaw and neck. I’ve had sinus bradycardia since September and dyspnoea (feeling like I need to yawn but can’t, like the air in my lungs isn’t getting in deep enough), and my nose bleeds every morning.

I’ve seen my doctor 8 times since June, basic tests have been run and all they can say is “it’s stress and long covid”

Im fucking sick of it. I’ve had to drastically reduce my hours (and pay) at work, and I miss my friends and all the fun active things I used to do.

I’m still managing to get by, but I wish I had a better understanding of why I feel the way I feel. “long covid” feels just as useless as no diagnosis at all.

I can’t drive because I’m visually impaired. I know I’m too visually impaired to drive because I can’t even grocery shop properly with my shit eyesight - with a basket, let alone pushing a trolley!

But I pass the eye exams they make you take before you get a license and ive double checked with my optometrist and yes, my vision score is within the legal limits to drive as long as I wear my glasses… It’s baffling, because I absolutely should not be driving! I can’t see shit!

So I don’t drive.

When I say “I’m too blind to drive” some people ask if I can just lie about my vision and fake my way through, because “you really need a licence” and when I explain I can legally get a licence I just don’t, for everyone’s safety, they act like I’m being a selfish child for not doing the adult thing and getting my licence. Just because it can doesn’t mean I should.

I do cycle, pedalling a 20kg frame of metal at 15km/h on a bike path feels a lot safer than driving a 1 tonne hunk of metal at 80km/h on a highway. Without my bike I’d be pretty fucked in terms of my independence and being able to do what needs to be done as an adult. Fortunately my vision isn’t degenerative.

But in the last 5 years, especially since 2020 covid locksdowns, I feel like there are more people on the road that shouldn’t be. There’s just a huge increase in the frequency of “silly mistakes” - people swerving into the bike lane without looking to avoid a speed bump, people running a red turn signal because they’re looking at the green straight signal, people merging lanes at dangerously low speeds, no one putting their headlights on in the rain, everyone forgetting to indicate, people stopping more abruptly instead of slowing and anticipating a stop sign, and my personal favourite, everyone cutting corners in residential areas like they’re a formula 1 driver, just turning into the oncoming traffic of the street they’re turning into.