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.

The way alot, aswell and noone are combining is expected given how many other words we don’t bat an eye at went the same way. “another” is the perfect example, it’s just “an other” combined.

It’s sort of the reverse of what happened to words like apron and newt.

The division and bracketing of phrases changes over time.

“An apron” is the modern usage of the word “napron”, and a newt was originally called an eute. The grammatical need for “a” and/or “an” resulted in the root word being rebracketed and changed.

orientated

Is this common in American English? I don’t think I’ve ever seen the word oriented double handled like that. Irregardless, it slew me

Some people think cilantro tastes awful, and I don’t understand those people on that point either.

You don’t understand that some people have a genetic mutation that causes their taste buds to be more sensitive to the flavour compounds in cilantro, including Aldehyde?

What is hard to understand?

Aldehydes are a flavour compound in cilantro that in small doses gives a fresh, light and vibrant taste. Aldehydes are also present in the soap making process, various other cleaning agents, as well as being released by certain insects.

If you taste a lot of these specific Aldehydes, you will taste soap. But cilantro doesn’t contain enough Aldehyde for most people to notice any fowl tastes.

That is, unless you are an X-man with mutant taste buds.

Their taste buds pick up on the Aldehydes, and therefore cilantrotastes like soapy stink bugs.

It doesn’t mean I don’t accept them for who they are.

[…]

looks gross.

You don’t get to claim you accept people for who they are, then call them or aspects of their appearance “gross”.

If you truly believed that people can have preferences we don’t agree with, then you would keep your mouth shut when you see a piercing you don’t like, but that clearly they like having.

Accepting people starts with learning that if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.

You should probably get that shiny, silver snot looked at by a doctor.

There are 7.9 billion people in this world, you can’t be expected to try and look hot for all of them. I don’t want to be attractive to the masses, that’s exhausting.

I want to attract the type of people I’m attracted to.

That includes unusual piercings and body mods. I can’t explain why I find them attractive, but I don’t have to explain. We can just like different things and not yuck each other’s yum.

In Australia the biggest brand, and therefore the name we all call them is “zooper dooper”.

Litteraly could not name another brand, I genuinely don’t think I’ve seen a competitor for zooper dooper in Australia (not counting black & gold because that’s not exactly a brand, or squelch, who do the fruit juice version, as it’s a different product).

It’s strange how zooper dooper are in an entirely unique class of frozen product here. Everything else could arguably be called “an icey pole” but zooper dooper is its own thing somehow. (same as sunny boy, that was its own thing, I miss sunny boy!)

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…

That’s fine, that’s what we want you to do.

We use the purely platonic conversation to get a sense of what level of compatibility there might be. Something physical, something more, what are we feeling.

Sometimes the companionship of a conversation is enough and we’re both happy to say “this was a lovely chat, bye, have a nice day”

But occasionally… “thanks for chatting to me, hey I don’t suppose you’d want to come over one day and check out the recreation prop kittyhawk my brother and I are building? I’m stuck in the shop alone on Saturday if you’d like to keep me company and tell me more about old airplanes.”

Okay, you do you.

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

Australian Magpies aren’t corvids, they’re butcherbirds, unrelated to the European magpie.

They’re cute, but they’re definitely dicks.

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

In Australia we call this “skimpflation” because they aren’t shrinking the final product, they’re skimping on ingredients to lower production costs.

It’s the bane of my existence because brands I know and love will change their ingredients without warning and without changing anything on the packaging (sometimes not even changing the ingredients list! If the ingredients list has always just said “starch” they don’t have to change anything going from arrowroot starch to cheaper potato starch)

I have allergies and I’ve bought two boxes of the same product at the same time, and had an allergic reaction to one, but not the other.

I used to always blame it on my housemates not washing the cooking utensils properly, but I now use separate cooking equipment and I clean down the kitchen before I start and cook at odd times so I’m the only one using the kitchen.

I’ve started emailing companies after my allergic reactions to determine if they have changed an ingredient, and 90% of the time they confirm they have changed the ingredients. Usually they put some PR spin on it about the new ingredient being more allergy friendly or sustainable (they don’t clarify “environmentally” so I assume they mean “financially sustainable for the profits of our company”)

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.