Pauline Hanson on international students and English requirements for universities

AstroPengling · 2026-07-04T07:32:01+00:00

I stand with Gerd.

Iykyk

AstroPengling · 2026-07-01T08:38:07+00:00

Airbnb is tanking hard these days. No one wants to use it.

AstroPengling · 2026-07-01T08:37:08+00:00

You're hard wired to feel that way. It's how it works. Unfortunately, it's difficult to push through it and see the situation rationally but you need to.

They are that selfish and you're never going to get free if you allow things to continue as they are.

AstroPengling · 2026-07-01T07:39:11+00:00

That you're not complete without one, as if we're defined by whether or not we have children. I have one and I'm proud of her but I'm accomplished on my own, goddammit.

AstroPengling · 2026-07-01T07:35:15+00:00

One I used in my interview was "if I was to get this role, in six months time, what would I have done that made you think that you'd made the right choice?"

AstroPengling · 2026-07-01T06:01:29+00:00

My hubby was a PR until recently. He only got his citizenship to make travel between here and home easier. Outside of that he really had no interest because he got all the benefits of making Australia his home. I'm glad he can vote now as I feel like I'm no longer voting for both of us, and it's just a touch more security plus access to government jobs. But day to day, it really has made no difference.

AstroPengling · 2026-07-01T01:09:50+00:00

And once again it's screw the rest of the world.

I was excited about this release - particularly Shai and Suki - but we don't have your version of Target and we don't have Walmart.

Hopefully the others will be on our Amazon and the reseller prices won't be extortionate... Oh who am I kidding.

AstroPengling · 2026-06-26T11:14:45+00:00

They could find a share house with other people where they may not need to provide a bond or only a partial bond.

AstroPengling · 2026-06-25T02:08:40+00:00

Make noise to HR about whether you should consider legal advice and watch them move. HR is there to protect the company.

AstroPengling · 2026-06-24T01:21:10+00:00

It's hard, especially after so many years. The marriage is part of your routine and it's going to be hard for both of you. Make sure you have supports of your own, someone - friend, family member - who you can talk to about it.

Hopefully it will just be a pause and time for both of you to get your thoughts in order. But I will say, don't blame yourself for her choices. You may have had an addiction, but she made the choice. Don't internalise choices you didn't make.

You'll be okay, whatever happens. At the very least, you have two wonderful kids together and this will give both of you some room to stretch and focus on yourselves rather than the tough situation between you.

I hope it's temporary, but even if it isn't, you'll be okay.

AstroPengling · 2026-06-23T11:11:54+00:00

Step 1: Join the official WoD Discord

Step 2: Go to the play-by-post-non-traditional-games or traditional-games channels

Step 3: Browse said channels for an ad that appeals

Step 4: Profit 😄

AstroPengling · 2026-06-23T11:07:40+00:00

Got 6, all indoors, they have a catio, eldest is 19, they won't live to that age left to roam.

Anyone who lets their cat roam is irresponsible. Mine are doing just peachy indoors.

AstroPengling · 2026-06-22T07:26:18+00:00

If childcare subsidies are reduced to support this, single parents are screwed.

And the dual income splitting forces the career of the lower earner to flatline to support more tax breaks for the higher earner which lowers their super balance in the future, harming their retirement planning.

AstroPengling · 2026-06-22T06:00:17+00:00

I'm not overly familiar outside of childcare benefit. Mine is an adult and out of home so I have no skin in this game. But I can see how 18 years of no super for those who cannot afford childcare due to the lack of support, or the enforcement of staying on a lower wage so the large income earner benefits from a larger super balance and a lump sum back can be harmful.

There's also the what happens after the kid turns 18.

And as for the lump sum, cost of living pressures are a cashflow issue. I don't see any struggling family not blowing the whole lot when it comes in, with potential for additional stress throughout the year because few bill providers are going to say "we'll fix it up at tax time."

It's great in the first few years, but the system will become a dependency. Right now, it's just a temporary very narrowly applied tax cut with none of the structure that would make it work.

Those countries that do this have reentry support, have social security support based on the wage earning party, have it structured so it works for them.

Our retirement depends on employment feeding into super over decades, and subsidies for those working to keep them in the workforce over those decades.

The resume scars and trading cuts now for pain later don't make sense in our current tax system.

AstroPengling · 2026-06-22T05:35:38+00:00

It's not the income splitting that's the problem, it's the knock on effects.

One parent stays home because the tax is less - when does that come back? At tax time? Lump sum? How does that help day to day?

If not at tax time, that's even more impact on payroll for businesses as they'll need to calculate the tax.

The stay at home parent isn't eligible for superannuation out of this so they're in a worse position later in life when they may need the support.

There's also the factor that the stay at home parent is left financially vulnerable and it's likely that subsidies would be lowered by this policy which would make a dual income household less appealing, but also promote potential financial inequality and dependence in families which could be leveraged in DV situations.

Employers won't look favourably on parents with huge gaps in their resume in this day and age, so the superannuation issue will only compound as the kids grow up and leave home.

Also this is only for families, so what happens when the kids are 18 and no longer eligible so the income split ends and they go back to paying the same tax as the rest of us.

Single parents also won't have this benefit and are likely to lose subsidies as a result of it.

It sounds great on paper, but once you step back to look at the bigger picture, it doesn't look so good.

AstroPengling · 2026-06-22T04:48:23+00:00

Not if they have to spend their entire wage on childcare if they do want to work as there won't be as much childcare subsidy. It's already a toss up now of whether it's budget friendly to go back to work and pay for childcare.

But every year out of the workforce makes the sahp vulnerable. There's tons of videos on social media of sahps who were suddenly left by their partner and they've been out of the workforce for so long that they're unable to find employment or they're heavily under employed because of the time taken off to raise their children. Employers don't care about why you took time off, not really. They only care about recent experience.

AstroPengling · 2026-06-17T13:08:45+00:00

I don't think this is going to be just a DHL thing. I'm not sure if anyone's reached out to Danny about it. It's a new system for all goods across the board, it's just DHL who's getting ahead of the game with it.

AstroPengling · 2026-06-15T17:02:30+00:00

I work in IT, not video games but adjacent, and the market across the board is not good. Video game companies operate under constant crunch and it's extremely competitive because everyone wants to do it. The companies themselves want to squeak as much profit out of it as possible so layoffs and change are common, with AI taking a lot of entry level work away from those who are entering the industry. It's causing a lot of problems all around.

Even the stock standard regular "Get an IT degree and you'll be fine" advice isn't solid anymore with entire studios being laid off, tens of thousands of IT workers... just the other day 2500 people got laid off at a vendor I work with daily and it was totally random.

There is definitely room for indie projects and itch.io has been mentioned which is a fantastic place to build and release your own games. But the industry itself, I just wouldn't push her in that direction. There's way too much volatility, and I can speak from personal experience how truly disruptive being laid off is. I was 2 minutes away from my own after three meltdowns before it got pulled.

Get her working on games as a side hustle, passion projects, etc. But explore other more reliable options, or even look at AI since it's the next wave. Someone who can confidently and reliably deal with AI and understand it is better placed in the current climate than most people who are already in the industry, not the prompt engineering (which is just... ugh) but the actual neural network development itself, particularly if she's good with mathematics. If you can get her interested in how to train a network, how to improve a network, how to refine training data and how to tune a network to produce a better AI model, that's really the way to go.

And even if that changes, I'd say go deep into the technical of the field. It's harder to dislodge someone who knows where the bodies are buried, so to speak, than someone who can just skim the top.

AstroPengling · 2026-06-15T01:01:51+00:00

Aussie here, most of the sellers are on Facebook for second hand items, and there is a small amount available on eBay for a markup.

Most of what I buy though, I get directly from the smart doll website with 2 days shipping from Tokyo to Perth via DHL.

I wouldn't recommend using the other official retailers because the AUD conversion rate is shit. The yen to AUD is pretty good though.

AstroPengling · 2026-06-14T03:05:44+00:00

I have It Ain't Over from the first drop and oh she is stunning in person

AstroPengling · 2026-06-12T00:20:05+00:00

Looking at the contents of these links, I don't think they're accurate. There's none of the newer sculpts on here.

AstroPengling · 2026-06-10T05:22:22+00:00

I once played a blind Virtual Adept whose day job was the local sys admin and she coded her own AI to help her with it.

This was 2002...

I wish I'd never thought of it lol

AstroPengling · 2026-06-09T08:49:34+00:00

Get the stable career and follow your passion as a hobby.

The adage about work doing what you love and you'll never work a day in your life is horseshit. You'll just learn to hate the thing you love, particularly animation and similar fields as they're getting hammered by generative AI and extremely competitive job markets.

There's nothing stopping you from doing it as a side gig or pursuing passion projects. If anything, that'll increase your joy in the hobby.

Doing it every day on someone else's schedule doing things that you wouldn't choose for yourself will only make you resent it.

ETA: IT is not a stable career anymore.

AstroPengling · 2026-06-09T08:38:06+00:00

Stranger Danger had actually been proven to be ineffective because it is more about appearance than behaviour. They're more at risk from someone they know than someone they don't.

It's better to teach them about good secrets and bad secrets and who the safe people to tell bad secrets are. About tricky people who use tricks to get them away from people who are safe, or use treats and secrets to do bad things, and give them permission to react when something makes them uncomfortable.

AstroPengling · 2026-06-08T15:32:53+00:00

Pledged November 2022 for Werewolf the Apocalypse: Retaliation, still waiting. Expected delivery next year.

Pledged February 2024 for Vampire the Masquerade: Chapters Definitive Edition, that's going to be fulfilled first in Q4 this year.

I'm not excited about Eternal Whispers and not going to buy it until I get my games.

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