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.

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.

Oooh, I’m not sure if it’s available in Canada, I’m in Australia. This is what it looks like

if you do find it.

I’m glad I looked it up just now because it’s “on sale” so I might go stock up 😂

It says “for women” but the scent is just musky and coconuty so it’s unisex as far as I’m concerned.

I love the bamboo Mitchum, it smells so good and I’ve been lucky that it hasn’t stained anything.

But it’s $8 here, and it’s also sold barely half filled, and it doesn’t stretch very far. I ask for it for my birthday because it feels luxurious to me. But the rest of the year, I use the crystal deodorant and a drop of tea tree oil.

The crystal stuff helps me to sweat less, but it did very little for the odour (which is surprising because it’s the opposite of what it claims to do)

My routine now is to use the crystal, then put a drop of diluted (skin safe) tea tree oil on a cloth and rub that on my pits.

At first the tea tree oil was just to disguises the odour, but after a few weeks even if I forgot the tea tree one day the odour was much improved. My theory is that the antimicrobial properties of tea tree combined with the crystal have worked together to prevent the bacteria and yeasts that make odour worse.

I like the crystal because I have circulation issues and it causes hyperhidrosis in my peripheries, so I’ve been able to use it on my hands and feet too. I don’t want my hands to smell like deodorant but I do want them to be less wet. It doesn’t help the numbness, coldness and blue skin, but it’s less embarrassing to just have zombie hands than to have soggy zombie hands.

The sauce packet is usually kecap manis, it’s an Indonesian sweet soy, so your guess was pretty accurate.

I also hate cooking, but I’m broke and vegetarian.

1lbs of dried chick peas goes in my housemates pressure cooker on Sunday, and 12 servings of chickpeas gets scooped into ziplock bags and thrown in the fridge and freezer for the rest of the week.

On top of rice with a bag of microwave steam veg, stirred into a premade curry, blended and served on top of pasta like a weird hummus alfredo, thrown into a Quesadilla (side note, what’s a Quesadilla without cheese called?), smashed on top of toast and covered in whatever condiment I have. Or more realistically, I toss some salt in the zip lock bag and just eat out of the bag with a spoon while staring into the fridge wondering what I’m going to make for dinner, before grabbing a slightly limp carrot and an almost empty jar of peanut butter I left out instead of throwing away and telling myself “this is a balanced choice, protein, carbs, fats, a vegetable…”

Rice gets a similar treatment to the chickpeas, a big batch in the rice cooker on Sunday, divvied up and frozen for quick and cheap rice during the week without having to cook it from scratch after work. We don’t have “minute rice” or parboiled rice in my country, and the “microwave pouch” rice doesn’t fit in my budget.

“body type” has always been a general term to express the entire shape, size and proportions of a person, including excess weight and obesity.

When I was obese I couldn’t pull off crop tops because of my body size, it was incredibly unflattering, and now that I’m a healthy weight I still can’t pull off crop tops because of my body proportions, I have a short torso.

Body type encompasses both scenarios, so it’s often thought of as a polite way to tell someone something is unflattering without singling out specific “flaws” in their body.

Oh definitely, he knows, but I also know and understand his perspective. For him, masking and unmasking when texting his boss then texting his family is exhausting and incredibly emotionally taxing. While I don’t meet the clinical criteria for an autism diagnosis, I do struggle with a few of the same things my brother and dad struggle with, particularly around processing, emotional regulation, and burn out, so I’ve been in his shoes where I know I’m doing something the hard way, or I know we’d all be happier with another method, but changing the task or changing the routine or process is even harder, even though the process I’d be changing to would be easier and better, initiating that change feels like an insurmountable climb.

Besides, my dad had to try and put up with my hyperlexia when I was growing up - before I had the emotional maturity to understand my dad’s needs, I can’t even imagine how much he suffered from my frustrating communication style being imposed on him. Now he’s older, it’s my turn to suffer 😂 (that is, it’s my turn to let him explore the ways he wants to communicate, even if it’s not what I want.)

My dad now uses AI to write all his texts to me.

He’s autistic and dyslexic and texting was always a massive struggle for him, so he’d leave voice messages, or just call me, and they’d be rambling and non linear, but it was my dad and his voice, his personality.

A few years ago he’d use dictation to send texts, and it was pretty funny because he hadn’t no way of proof reading them and dictation is never great for people with accents or speech problems… but now he will just use the microphone to ask whatever AI assistant is built into his phone the same rambling question he would have previously just voice messaged me.

And Copilot re-writes his rambling question and spits out a message that sounds like some formal business email. So now there’s an extra level of misinterpretation, an extra level of being removed from communicating with the human being.

I’ve asked my dad if he finds AI easier than just leaving a voice message (because I personally think sending a voice memo is easier) and he says he likes it because it makes him feel like he’s “normal” and can do the things everyone else has always been able to do with ease, even though he knows its not perfect.

I can definitely see the value in AI as an accommodation tool, and it has helped my dad a lot in his professional life where previous accommodation tools haven’t been adequate to “keep up”.

But I do miss hearing my dad, or reading his personality come through in the poorly dictated texts. My brother has gotten really annoyed at dad for this because my brother it’s also autistic and it’s actually harder for him to communicate with dad with an AI middle man, they’ve lived together for almost 30 years and they basically have their own language, so the AI texts my brother gets from my dad drive him nuts, when he and my dad have never had issues communicating.

I’m also worried that it’s effecting the limited literacy skills he does have, he’s getting rusty because he no longer has to try at all most days.

Better than the system being used by the department of human services in Australia. If the servers and service centres are overloaded, you basically just get told “tough shit, try again later, hope you’re not desperately trying to get out of a DV situation or protect an elder from abuse, cause we’re not paying for more servers”

At least with a digital queue system there’s a sliver of hope that you might get through.

The title of this article really confused me because I’ve never hard of this company before.

I thought ol’ mate migaloo (the albino Humpback whale) was swimming around fucking up super superyachts.

We had party lines in regional Australia in the mid 90’s. The selective ringing had been phased out long before I was born, it either wasn’t available or rather as a kid I was never taught how to alert specific houses on the line. So it sort of operated more like a community chat room.

It was mostly only used for emergencies, if you saw smoke you’d pick up the handset for the party line and others would do the same and you’d try to figure out who’s back paddock was on fire and coordinate to all go down and snuff it out. Or if you didn’t recognise the livestock that wandered onto your block you’d jump on to see if anyone was asking where their sheep went.

But we also had private lines by then, so no one was really hanging out and gossiping on the party line. Occasionally the party line would be used for organised social programs like book clubs if no one could be bothered hosting at their home. We used the personal line for dialing out for calls, and kept the party line free for emergencies.

I never realised it was a party line, or a thing in other places or times in history. I thought it was a cool thing the community just installed themselves using a closed phone loop. Growing up I assumed that since the invention of affordable home phone lines, we’d just always had two phones. One for actually phoning people, and one for town meetings.

I have a step through frame that you sit upright on. 20-25km/h is my average commuting speed for getting to work and going to the shops. I regularly have to push to 30km/h+ because of motor traffic trying to ride up my ass even though I’m in the designated bike lane. (cars in Australia like driving fast in the bike lanes to avoid the chicanes on the road designed to slow motor traffic for cyclist safety)

If ebikes are disproportionately represented in cycling accidents, then I would argue it’s not the speed, it’s the barrier to entry. People who have never ridden before, people who aren’t physically able to ride a standard bike, these groups make up a significant portion of ebike riders because ebikes are accessible.

Yes, speed will contribute to this, people with limited riding experience being able to ride fast, possibly without the physical fitness required to control a bike at high speed.

The issue then isn’t the speed itself, but rider education and training.

Not too far off, $1AUD (0.60 euros) would be a cheap can of beans (which is often mostly water, even if it’s a 400g can, once you drain the beans, your millage varies by brand) $3 a can is average for name brands that fill the can to the brim.

But when you can buy 500g of dried beans for $3.99, and that will make the equivalent of 8-10 cans of beans, as someone who doesn’t eat meat (and has allergies so can’t eat commercial “mock meats”), I eat at least 2 serves of legumes every single day. Buying cans adds up at that scale even though I’m just one person. So I always buy dry legumes when I can.

I definitely have some cans in the pantry for emergencies though, because they are very convenient.

But I also have some pre-cooked, unseasoned beans and chick peas in the freezer, when I cook up a big pot I always throw a few portions in the freezer. They defrost in less than a minute in the microwave, so I’ll use them before I crack open a can of beans.