Oh I see your playing the legacy monopoly where house prices sort of match the money paid out by the bank…you need to index property and utilities to inflation but you don’t adjust any of the money paid out by the bank to the players.

Aka Millennial monopoly.

The game is over much faster, unless you introduce a gig economy payment system. Then it really drags on.

And that’s what we do IRL too, a bunch of people aren’t playing by the rules, creating false hope through windfall lotteries, so it’s taking longer to get to the part where we flip the board in frustration and destroy the bank… Behead the mega rich and seize the means of production.

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)

It helps that I work in community ed, there are 5 people on our entire faculty, so we litteraly all do a little bit of every job there is to do at an education centre.

My payslips look hilarious because I get paid 8 different rates per week depending on what I’m actually doing, admin, custodial, teaching, etc.

But this is the style of chaotic yet whole-ass-in education that drives me. I would quickly burn out at a more structured school-based workplace.

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.

Public trees already have a maintenance schedule and budget, public fruit trees don’t need to be about filling hungry people, they’re just as much about finding small moments of joy in your community.

Also trees that bear fruit usually don’t produce as much pollen in spring so it would cut down on hayfever, they do drop more seed which can be messier if planted along sidewalks. That’s the main reason decorative public trees are often male, 40 years ago civic planners decided pollen was easier to deal with than seed drop.

These posters are destined for the recycling bin (they’re the old ones from the main classroom) so if anything it might reduce damage to other things if people are defacing the poster instead.

though in saying that, we don’t have a tagging issue at our centre - I’ve rarely had to remove graffiti from toilets, it’s only the soap dispensers that keep getting messed with here, but ripping the posters is also fine, if it makes someone less tempted to rip the soap off the wall.

All the more reason why they can’t be used as valid and binding contracts in a court of law!

…those don’t even remotely work to serve all genders.

I still wouldn’t technically be able to pee anywhere if I was a student at that school (other than the single stall room…why not just have a bunch like that?)

I understand it now!

The window looks over the sink area where you would wash your hands after ensuring you are dressed and decent upon leaving the private stall.

The idea is by having the window in the wash area, students will be hyperconscious that this is not a private space, and they will be mindful to move into the truly private stall before starting their private business.

I think it’s purely to avoid the following example;

The number of times I’ve stepped into a public restroom because I needed to fix something privately - my stockings are rolling down, a bandaid on my upper thigh needs replacing, my bra strap is coming loose. These are things that are private but not as private as using the toilet, so often I’ll just fix these things up while I’m at the sink area, I don’t need a stall.

But if someone walks in while I’m fixing my stockings, well they didn’t consent to seeing so much of my upper thigh when they turned the corner, and while I personally don’t care that they saw me, I can see how a teenage girl might be deeply upset if this happened because she absent mindedly forgot that the sink area is not truly private.

Spooky I think it’s to constahtkt remind the students that onky the stalls are truly private.

It’s a misguided, and potentially harmful way to do this though…

The discourse around this is very confusing, especially as a non American who has never been in an American school bathroom.

What you’re describing sounds like a normal public toilet set up in my country

There’s a hallway or doorway into an open space with mirrors sinks and hand dryers, sometimes that hallway has a door to it, but often it’s just an open door frame. Sometimes they’ll put a 90 degree turn in the hall to obscure looking straight in, but not always.

Behind the sinks are private stalls. At more expensive locations they’ll have semiambulant stalls, some will even have their own sink inside the stall so that the full access toilet and wash room can be available to those who can’t ambulate.

(full access toilets and wash rooms are entirely seperate from the sink and stalls)

The sink area is often still segregated by gender at older establishments, but anyone walking past could glimpse in and see /shock fully dressed people washing their hands!

It only just occurred to me that bathroom stalls in the schools almost never have any marketing on them like they do at shopping centres, ours certainly don’t.

Which isn’t weird, (obviously don’t want corporate marketing into schools) but at home you hang stuff in your bathroom when you have kids- map of the world, vexology poster, dinosaur poster, etc, and I’m always trying to find a way to force my students to actually look at the term calendar in advance instead of being suprised that there’s a scheduled assessment today.

I’m replacing the soap in the bathrooms every day, how has it never occurred to me to slap a poster on the back of the door so the students have something to look at, I’ve got so many posters with no wall space too!

Yup, at my highschool by week 5 they’d be swapping all the gender signs on the bathrooms because the girls were wrecking the mirrors and the boys would bust the doors, and they only had the budget to fix each once so they’d rotate who used which bathrooms to even out the type of damage so even though boys were constantly smashing the doors the first door wouldn’t come off the hinge until the end of first term (versus within the first week, which was the damage rate before faculty started the sign swap system).

There was one year where in Term 4 we had a row of porta-pottys because some one’s dad owned a shitter company and that was cheaper than fixing the real bathrooms.

I don’t know why those degenerates were breaking the bathrooms knowing they’d be stuck pissing with the normal door… Why they couldn’t just set fire to the grass behind the woodshop like normal delinquents. Grass grows back for free.

I work at a community education centre now, and the soap dispensers appear to be what everyone likes destroying these days.

We can’t afford to replace them so we currently have bottles of hand soap tied to the taps with string that I replace every other day.

Also I’ve had to put signs up reminding teenagers that poo particles from flushing will land on every surface in a bathroom, so stop kissing the mirrors.

They so often did though, how many massive fires broke out in London before the great fire finally convinced them to stop building overlapping thatched rooves.

Even during The Plague of Justinian scholars wrote about what was essentially ancient social distancing practices, 2000 years ago later we still can’t do it properly.

How many times did they have to put up with rat plagues and stinking open cess pits, followed by a big town clean up, and then nothing change in infrastructure or waste management practices, only to do the whole clean up again …until the Great Stink got to close enough to the windows of parliament that those in power decided maybe they should address the root problem instead of applying bandaids every few years.

(I don’t have a history degree so I’m pulling these details out of the memory depths of my dusty documentary viewings, and I’m probably wrong.)

Goose is the female and sex neutral term for members of those bird species.

Just like “cow” is both the female (parous) and sex neutral term for domesticated bovine. (nuliparous/non breeding female cows are heifers, but they are also still cows in the sex neutral usage)

There are definitely some wars I’d much rather were just MMA death fights between the PM’s and presidents.

And others where I’m glad they aren’t, because the country whose victory would be best for the common good is led by someone who would not win a physical fight.

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.

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)