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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 30th, 2023

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  • Both the battery and the charger are old and broken in my brain.

    If it’s too hot out the battery drains faster, if I’m playing music the battery drains faster. If I’m having to swap between conversations, bye bye battery.

    Sometimes the charger works fine but sometimes it just doesn’t charge no matter what I try, and the battery stays low even if I leave it plugged in alone.

    Some days there’s a process that’s absolutely and inexplicably guzzling power, but the next day that same process barely takes up any processing power.

    Some days it just doesn’t turn on at all, and then on rare occasions I can’t get the damn thing to turn off, it’s just blasting notifications and I’m trying to sleep.

    Related: personally I think “old phone battery” is a much better metaphor than the “chronically ill spoons” metaphor that is commonly used to explain the impact of chronic illness.




  • I’ve been out as queer since I was 14. I’m in my 30, he still hasn’t come around.

    Given his age and health, if he’s planning too come around he’d better get on it quick, at this rate he’s dying a bigot.

    I’m not waiting any more, I put my whole life on hold waiting for him to come around so I could live my life safely. If I need to cut him out of my life I will.

    I appreciate they kind words, but please keep in mind mind that it’s not always smart or safe to tell a trans person to be patient. The individual will know their level of safety, and advice to be patient and understanding can in some cases case be very, very harmful.


  • This is a common misconception with “charity shops” in the UK and “opportunity (op) shops” in Australia.

    The assumption is that the charity/opportunity is for people doing it tough to be able to buy cheap clothes and home goods.

    But the “charity” is because many shops like this are partner retailers of larger charity organisations, eg: the “profit” from Salvos stores helps indirectly fund Salvation Army Housing and food relief programs.

    The opportunity comes from who they hire, if you’re disabled or elderly, these shops are more likely to hire you than other retail providers.

    But of course, a large number of charity and op shops abuse their staff as much as Amazon and Walmart do. Wage theft and unethical labour practices galore


  • Yuuuup, found out the hard way that tiktok shows you when someone watches a link you sent them.

    My dad loves sending me cat videos on the tiktok, he sends me the links on Facebook.

    I have two tiktok accounts because I knew there was a risk that my dad would be able to find me on tiktok through contacts. My dad is a transphobe, so in order to not poke the bear I maintain a cis persona when dealing with him.

    But it took him 0.3 seconds to realise that he sent his daughter a link, and then an openly transmasc account user with a similar name opened that link, and then his daughter replied to his message reacting to the link…my ears are still bringing from the phone call he made to me.

    So thats how my misunderstanding of tiktok trackers outted me to my transphobic father.

    (fortunately I’m a fully grown adult and can cut him out of my life if he doesn’t calm down)





  • Not quite, the parents created an Uber Ride and Uber Eats accounts several years ago, agreeing to the ToS at that time.

    Several months ago, uber updated the tos and pushed it out to users as a pop up agreement.

    The daughter was monitoring the phone to watch the driver and pizza on the map when the pop up blocked the app, the daughter, being a minority who wanted her to pizza just hit “accept” to go back to the app to watch get pizza.

    Several months later, the parents hooked an uber ride, where the driver crashes and injured the parent’s.

    Uber is claiming that because the daughter agreed to the ToS, the new ToS is valid.

    The parents only ever had the opportunity to read the original ToS, which also has a similar arbitration clause, which is why the lawyer is saying the daughters pizza situation was mooting. But the two ToS are different because one is an updated version of the other.


  • Heck half the time my screen reading software glitches out on ToS pages, so I just have to assume I’m selling my soul but hopefully not much else and click accept because it’s not like I’m going to find someone to sit and read it out to me, that would take hours!

    And yet for every other contract I have ever signed in my entire life, I have a legal right to ask for it in an accessible form before I sign it. As a visually impaired person, uber is present in my life.

    I hated it, it was the most inaccessible app for such a purpose, and the drivers really did not understand I can’t see what they see. I like just calling the depot, talking to a human, and booking a cab… But you can’t do that now either because when you call you wait on hold for 20 minutes while the automated message tells you about the taxi app.

    So now unfortunately, uber is easier to book than a taxi, I don’t know if the ToS in the taxi app has any harmful stuff about arbitration because again, I’ve never been able to get a screen reader to read out the ToS properly on any app!

    I feel like such a boomer, but I am really feeling more and more isolated as every service Abdi connection I’ve built my life around is moving online into a digital visual space faster than the affordable assustive technology can keep up with.

    I’m expected to read something on a screen when I physically can not, uber and similar apps, including the app my local state government brought in during covid that now holds much only transit ID to show transit staff I’m blind (to get l transport assistance at train stations) all do this.

    Once you open the wallet section of the app, for fraud prevention they disabled third party screen readers from reading anything on the app.

    I have to open my app, then ask the other person to look through my wallet for me to find the card because I can’t, it’s such a privacy violation.


  • That’s a windfall payment and one less mouth to feed in the long run. Morbid, Yes, it’s not the best long term solution but anything you can do to survive true poverty never is.

    What’s to say losing your job doesn’t have 3 of you dying from exposure in your car a week after you’re evicted?

    If you haven’t lived the trauma of life and death poverty, I’m glad, but I don’t think it’s something that can be fully explained.

    Trauma changes the way your brain processes risk, people living in chronic poverty don’t have the same risk assessment framework as you.


  • I’m wondering how many missed the chance to stand up for themselves, saw it coming, saw it pass, and knew it.

    Something similar happened to me in the 2019 Australian bushfires.

    All official advice when I left that morning was that we were safe to continue operating. I worked at a food bank so I considered my job essential. That afternoon, The wind changed, the humidity dropped, the official advice was updated, and my managers immediately shut the centre down. The immediate evacuationoffered me to order came in, it was now or never.

    People started leaving. I had 3 underage interns with me, who’s parents were on their way to come pick them up.

    I kept looking outside thinking to myself “how the fuck am I going to getting home? And then what? My house is at risk too, it’s too late for a real evacuation, I’m probably safer here with some water and wool blankets”.

    I had to an evacuation plan. I even had an evacuation plan assuming I was at work when the time to leave hit. Those plans hinged on me leaving as soon as the order can in, or preferably before.

    What I never had was a plan to leave if I had someone stuck in my duty of care and couldn’t take them with me. My conscience was not prepared to leave teenagers alone in a warehouse on fire, and in that moment I acknowledged I might die from this choice.

    When the final parent came up pick them up, I was lucky, they had an empty seat in their car so I explained my situation and got in.

    They offered to drop me at home, but again, what would I do differently at home other than burn in my own house instead of a warehouse. So we just kept driving.

    My manager was pissed when she heard I’d stayed back so late, she told me I should have started jogging as soon as everyone else got in their cars. Ah, hindsight. She asked if I was seriously willing to die for my job… Not my job, but the people I have a duty of care for, sure. my first job was a picu candystriper, we were taught how to fill our pockets with babies in case of a fire, you don’t leave the burning hospital alone. That’s hard to unwire to develop an every man for himself attitude.

    Edit: I think my screen reader and text to speech software is inserting random words in the sentences, I’ve been trying to edit them out but as I edit more keep appearing but I’m not sure if it’s visible in the text or if it’s an audio glitch, sorry.





  • 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)


  • 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.