Yes and no, if you scambait hard enough your number can eventually be added to a blacklist for larger scam organisations that bought your data for use in multiple scam attempts.

In my experience that has really cut down on the calls.

In 2020 the department of human services accidentally posted my personal phone number on a list of support services for people experiencing housing or food insecurity. This number was then circulated by every major news source in my state. I couldn’t change my number at the time because I had no legal ID (still don’t… Can’t figure out how to get ID without ID, but I have a new number now at least) at first I didn’t really notice the ratio of spam calls to genuine calls for the wrong number (ie, people calling my number because they needed housing/food) . I just remember getting 40+ calls a day at many stages.

But as the actual number for the food relief service was circulated, I eventually stopped getting genuine calls and I was getting 3-5 scam calls every single day.

After a year of scam baiting, I was getting 2 a week.

Now, I’ll do something online that requires sharing my current number, within a few hours I get a scam call because my data has been sold, but I bait the heck out of that first call and I usually don’t receive any further calls which suggest my number was blacklisted by a larger scam organisation, and I won’t be hassled until my data is sold again as a new item.

It’s hard to avoid getting your number on scam lists when the largest health insurance company, and the second largest telecommunications company in my country both had major data breaches where millions of customers identifying information was accessed and sold to scammers…

Nah, I’m just a person with leaky tits.

You do anyway without piercings.

The nipple isn’t technically one hole, it’s kind of like a porous sponge. After all, mammary glands are just mutated sweat glands, it’s a series of holes connected to a series of ducts.

So a lot of people find when lactating that it can spurt in crazy directions from unexpected parts of the nipple.

The number of times I find myself plugging the iron in behind the TV and then holding an old Amazon box against the wall and juggling my pants while I iron because I’m in a rush and that’s the available outlet plug and space.

The first pride was pretty wrathful.

The female condom has two rigid rings, one in the sealed end that sits under the cervix, and one at the open end.

The ring at the open end is designed to hold the condom open and give the penetrating partner a nice big safe target to make sure the penis/toy/whatever goes inside the condom and not accidentally between the condom and the vaginal wall. This ring also provides some minor protection to parts of the vulva due to its size.

The internal ring is much smaller by comparison, and is not that much larger than a diva cup. The internal ring of a female condom is a similar size to a “soft cup” menstrual cup, it’s a little bit smaller than a contraceptive diaphragm.

Dogs aren’t cops, dogs are brainwashed by cops. Dogs are essentially trafficked victims of police. The dog just wants to be a good boy, it’s not the dog’s fault the pigs have been teaching it to nark on bullshit.

Exactly! I have a genetic illness that caused congenital deformities and injuries and disability later in life, starting around my teens thanks to puberty.

From an early age my relationship with work was distorted because I found myself trapped in the gap between two pathways. I was obviously capable of work, with the right treatment and support I had a lot of potential. But I was disabled, and I required expensive supports and medical intervention, and under the public healthcare system there reaches a point of disability and limitations in capacity that you are written off by the system. Shoved in a residential group home, given a pension below the poverty line, and expected not to try. (genuinely, we’re expected not to try, if someone on a disability pension works a job, they can loose their pension, which is many cases is also tied to housing and access to medical services)

I’d flip between the two systems, I’d have a great few months with regular access to treatment, I’d get a job plan from the dole office, I’d sit through work readiness courses, I’d be getting healthier and looking forward to working and being a good little contributor to society. Then I’d hit a waiting list for my medical care, my health would slip, I’d be re-assessed by the welfare department and deemed too disabled to work, my job plan would be shredded and I’d get a pension support plan. Then I’d get to the top of the wait list, resume treatment, and get back to getting to work.

I didn’t start a “real job” until I was 24, it was a call centre gig and I near killed myself trying to do it.

It wasn’t even hard. It was a true 9-5 (no overtime, no bullshit) and you mentally didn’t need to bring any of it home with you. It was easy for me, but my body decided it was too much. My health suffered and it took years to fully recover, with me barely pulling myself together here and there for gig work in between being bounced on and off the disability pension system.

The whole endeavour was far more expensive to tax payers than a system like UBI. Processing my case 70 times because the disability support, and employment support eligibility requirements are so strict and the lines between streams so black and white took a lot of administrative resources.

I’ve been in my current industry for 10 years this November. I work part time, 12-20 hours a week depending on my health. I’m highly successful in my field because I’m working within my body and mind’s means and playing to my strengths. I’m a whole person with a life outside work and I bring that range of experiences to my job, enriching what I bring to my organisation - which is good, because my job is a mutual exchange between me and my employer, it’s not exploitive towards me the worker, which further prevents burn out for me.

But we exist within the capitalist system of funding and our wages are set by the department of health and human services. I make $34,000AUD a year and it’s not enough to survive.

But if I work any harder my body will not survive.

I’m asking to do what I can do for my community, while living a safe existence… Not being forced to choose between litteraly breaking my back working for someone else’s greedy profit, or starving in a tent (though realistically, a lot of people are doing both)

Yeah, nah, Tamworth. We have our own branches of country music down here mate.

Blak Country is a seriously cool branch to explore if you’re curious about how Australia has interpreted US country music into a localised sub-genre. Swap your mouth organs for a gum leaf and add some yidaki riffs for extra bass.

Okay, you do you.

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

I remember during Covid lock downs extroverts were loosing their minds and blaming their extrovertism for their cabin fever.

First of all, true isolation is unhealthy and crazy inducing for everyone, that’s why they still use solitary confinement in prisons for further punishment, so no, extroverts, you’re not special for feeling depressed during a global pandemic. (but yes, it did suck extra for them)

But so many extroverts seemed to assume lock downs were an introverts wet dream. There was very little attempt to understand each other. I’d see introverts empathising with extroverts who were struggling, but the reverse rarely happened, extroverts just seemed to assume “you introverts must be loving this solitude” and when myself and others tried to open up about how we were struggling I would hear “yeah but you like being alone, you’re used to it” like that makes it easier.

At no point did I really see any of the extroverts I know, or anyone online posting about how “wow, being pushed this far out of my comfort zone by lockdowns sucks, is this how introverts feel when I force them to actively engage in crowded, highly social parties?”

Not that I expect the middle of a planet wide plague to be the time I’d suddenly expect people to show self reflection and emotional maturity, but it was still worth the observation.

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

Yes and no, live captioning software is common on phones and tablets, but we call them “craptions” for a reason.

If the speaker has a thick accent, isn’t always facing the same direction when speaking, uses lots of slang terms, industry terms, or numerical data, it can really trip up the captions and sometimes it leads to a more confusion than having nothing at all.

Where as if you were basically just using the PowerPoint to display your speech so others could read along, the written words will match the spoken words.

Live captions are definitely better than nothing if you rely on subtitles, I’m only HoH so I prefer just straight up lipreading, compared to trying to lip read in order to retroactively process inaccurate live captions that make no sense.

My entire understanding of skinheads was “skinheads are fascists” and I never delved any deeper into it. Until the other month when my barber told me I should consider getting a chelsea cut, my gut reaction being “why would I want to look like a neonazi?”

But one simple online search later, and I went back for the shave. The original sentiment of the skinhead culture is slowly being reclaimed, though there will always be two potential interpretations of what someone with that style stands for, I’ll happily rock my skinbird cut at union rallies and antifa protective counter-protests when actual nazis try to raid our local queer clubs.

IRL subtitles for deaf attendees feels like the only valid reason for this.

Maybe, I imagine it’s much harder to have an auto shut off timer when you also need to mechanically close the gas valves. But I think it could just be the price point, the one at my current unit is an electric built in, but it’s also just a reminder timer. Not sure what brand it is, all the paint on the front has long since worn away (it was installed in 1998 according to the REA) - so I also don’t quite know what temperature I’m cooking at. (when I moved in I put a probe thermometer in there and spent about 4 hours playing with the temperature dial and marking it with nail polish so I could at least have a vague idea of what temperature I was setting the oven to)

I’m awaiting assessment, but there’s a strong chance I have both autism and ADHD (my brother and father are both autistic, I was never assessed because it wasn’t as obvious growing up as a girl that I struggled with similar things, but it’s hard to know without an assessment because my ADHD was undiagnosed for so long so there’s a lot of overlapping symptoms from all the maladaptive coping mechanisms I’ve developed)

I know poor hunger signals are a big part of autism too, so maybe I’ve got a double whammy 🤷‍♀️

But it also sounds like your sensitive to hunger signals the same way I’m sensitive to fatigue/drowsiness signals, so it sounds like the same underlying interception issue, just two different outcomes of that attempt to listen to our bodies.

The last 3 places I’ve lived in have come with various models of this budget burner

https://www.chefappliances.com.au/freestanding/gas/cfg517wb/

The timer on my oven might as well just be glued on the front after the fact. It’s just a little clockwork twist timer with no connection to overall the mechanism of the oven at all.

I’ve never used an oven that automatically turns off after the timer buzzes. That sounds luxurious!

(and honestly, sounds like a super helpful OT tool/accommodation for me to be more independent/safe when cooking, so I know what to look for in a new oven… Not that I get a choice of oven as a renter, you get what you get)