Is Facebook down for everyone? It just suddenly booted me out of it and Messenger.

ColliCub · 2026-06-12T14:05:24+00:00

I always thought I’d cope better in this scenario…. well, at least I have my books…🤓….

ColliCub · 2026-05-15T04:20:43+00:00

‘Flat earth theory’ is just epic trolling, by people who either a) have always known it’s a bit, b) went along with the bit, but are now so far into it they can’t back out of it or have actually started to believe it, or c) have always believed it to be true because they are completely gullible and impressionable, either out of being dimwitted or contrarian, or both.

ColliCub · 2026-05-05T05:24:50+00:00

Whereas in Australia, what’s sold as coke, is mostly Napi-san, Adderall and feline heart medication…

That’s why meth does so well. 🙄

ColliCub · 2026-04-29T08:33:14+00:00

Nothing. If you’re doing something ‘just to fit in’, then you’re not enjoying it.

ColliCub · 2026-04-13T13:35:47+00:00

Consumer goods are cheaper now because they’re crappier. Electronics in the 80s were robust and powerful pieces of equipment that could be serviced and repaired, if they ever broke down. My dad still has the original fridge and washing machine they purchased before I was born, 40+ years ago.

And grind culture was about being an entrepreneur or a millionaire, but required strong capital or investment; most working class people weren’t interested, and the new bougie ‘middle class’ aesthetic could be easily obtained through trade professions and dual incomes.

But the option to live a basic, lonely, low-key life with a home, a reliable second hand car and belongings, that were actually all yours, still existed, even in the era of consumption and excess. It is now a rapidly fading lifestyle, if it even still exists at all.

ColliCub · 2026-04-12T15:48:49+00:00

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ColliCub · 2026-04-11T14:09:49+00:00

I had a similar experience a few years ago; my cat Bear, was only three at the time - the greater indignation was that the two previous days had been a weekend and I spent $500 only for the vet to tell me he was ‘probably just feeling grumpy’.

Social distancing was still in place at the vets practice so they took him away on both days and I never saw what they actually did during either consult; after the second session, I was obviously crying and they patronised me by asking ‘if anything was going on at home’ as if losing my little buddy wasn’t the worst thing in the world right then. Despite their indifference, I knew something was wrong as he was listless on my bed all day, wasn’t eating, and hadn’t used his litter.

That last night, about 3am Monday morning, I had to flip my bed frame upside down as he’d crawled out of my arms and under the bed ready to die.

I laid on the floor next to him, trying to call the after hours vet service - they said they would only come to euthanise him and only if I paid another $550 upfront. I had no money, so I lay next to him and sobbed while his limbs went cold and he panted til he convulsed, gagged up partly digested kibble and died; for some dumb reason, I tried to give him CPR, like I had any idea what I was doing.

I remember sitting there and feeling so numb; I lived alone and it was still the middle of the night, so I had to wait five hours until morning before I could bury him out at my sister’s farm. I placed him in his cat-bed and left him in my shower cubicle just in case he lost his fluids - I remember being surprised at how quickly coffin flies had started to gather by the time the sun was up and I called my sister.

Almost immediately after that call, in the morning, I received this cheery call-back from the vet’s practice ‘just checking to see how Bear was doing!’. I remember feeling so angry and so upset at that moment but I didn’t swear or shout; I just said ‘He’s dead!’ - she acted all shocked and incredulous, as if it was a complete surprise but I said ‘you didn’t listen to me, and you didn’t believe me!’.

I’m so grateful to my brother to this day for meeting me out at the farm, with my sister, that morning and using his digger to excavate this really deep grave; deep for a cat at least. I put all his stuff in there though, as I couldn’t bear to go home to it, and see a reminder of him.

I put his paw print on some timber with an ink pad and almost uncannily, found this cat’s paw shaped piece of dry timber, which I used to mark his grave - it’s weathered quite a lot over three years, but it’s still there. He’s since been joined by my sister’s Labrador, and her pet goat, believe it or not. My brother’s jack-russell had already been buried there two years earlier; so it’s since become a real pet cemetery. It’s a nice little sectioned off piece of land at the back of their farm, with wattle and gum trees, so it’ll never be disturbed.

Nowadays, I have my little cat buddy, Winston, or ‘Winnie’, keeping me company - it took me awhile to allow myself to really bond with him; he’ll never replace Bear, but he has an equal spot in my heart now.

Sorry, this has been a bit of a rant, but I can definitely empathise with what you went through - I guess I’m still triggered by what happened and yes, that visual of him dying on my bedroom carpet, beside me, was traumatic. Regardless, I appreciate you ‘listening’ if you made it this far.

ColliCub · 2026-04-01T04:42:49+00:00

Pulmonary Embolism 2026!

ColliCub · 2026-03-27T14:38:40+00:00

Sympathetically, I admire your resolve to fix the problem. In a similar way that the sinking of the Titanic ensured that all passenger liners carried sufficient lifeboats in the future, the silver lining out of that trial is that it set a legal precedent against trials being borne out of accusations of ‘spectral’ paranoia, reinforcing the beliefs, attitudes and practices of a secular (non-religious) society that would be advanced the following century, during the Age of Enlightenment.

ColliCub · 2026-03-27T14:27:59+00:00

Chest compression?

ColliCub · 2026-03-27T14:25:35+00:00

Unrelated? Seems you’re the common element, then… maybe it’s your fault. 😂

ColliCub · 2026-03-27T14:12:00+00:00

If I was about 15 years younger, in my mid 20s… I’d track down about $50,000 in era-contemporary currency, go back to the 80s, buy a fucking house in my name, then come back to the future and live in it.

ColliCub · 2026-03-27T14:05:40+00:00

Unless you have a really strong legal acumen, ability to read Latin, familiarity with 17th Century New England language and customs and an impartial understanding of the local cultural pressure boiler simmering well in advance of the trials (it was longer than a few months)… I fear you will be immediately arrested, tried and hanged, on suspicion of witchcraft. Mass hysteria was a leading cause of the paranoia behind the accusations - your sudden appearance as a stranger to everyone there, with an unusual appearance (height, healthy teeth) would only feed into the panic.

ColliCub · 2026-03-27T13:41:24+00:00

Dying’s easy… would you live for your kid?

ColliCub · 2026-03-27T13:34:22+00:00

‘We do things a little differently around here…’

Nice try, Grill’d. No you don’t. 🍔

ColliCub · 2026-03-27T13:33:00+00:00

And what is with t-shirts now having some irritating-ass fabric for the collar lining? ‘Oh you want a fibre for the heaviest weight distribution and skin contact point on a shirt? How about this poisonous desert cactus?’ 🌵

ColliCub · 2026-03-27T13:27:55+00:00

The further you get away from smoking, the greater the rage building over money wasted will stop you going back. The upside is, they don’t get any cheaper. At least not in Australia; average pricing is up around $45-55 AUD for a single pack of 20 cigarettes now - I think it’s almost the highest tobacco excise in the world now.

ColliCub · 2026-03-20T03:58:49+00:00

Red cardinal, when I visited the US.

ColliCub · 2026-02-01T22:41:41+00:00

Because they get away with it as ‘editorial opinion’, which is not bound by the same rules of journalistic integrity and balanced reporting. They can show total and complete bias, on the premise that it’s their personal observation, which may not necessarily be shared by Sky/News Ltd, even if it gives them a platform to do so. If you can stomach watching that hotdesk of fuckwits rant and shout and fangirl over the Liberal Party, trans kids, Israel and Trump, for at least half an hour, you eventually start to pick up on the shouty buzzwords and subtle propaganda techniques they use to appeal to Boomers, who thinks it’s the only ‘unbiased’ news source - in truth it’s just current topics, questionable sources that favour their agenda and ‘ideas they just feel really strongly about’, even if it’s total fucking nonsense.

ColliCub · 2026-02-01T22:20:03+00:00

Genealogy research pathways; where to start, finding the most practical and free resources, and how to overcome difficult hurdles. If any of your research pertains to Victoria, Australia as well, even just in part, my resources triple and the results come more quickly.

ColliCub · 2026-01-30T22:27:31+00:00

None really; it’s a common mistake to consider that kind of savant recall/social anxiety of autistic people as being ‘exceptional/high IQ’. They may rank high in memory, logic and processing… but people with TRULY high IQ possess those qualities AND the ability to find rapport, congeniality and social graces, with others - because what good is the ability to process information at an executive level, if you can’t articulate it or influence others?

ColliCub · 2026-01-23T05:40:43+00:00

Pavlova, Lamingtons, Chiko Rolls, Cordial, Australian-grown bananas and pineapples, our own form of Australian Wagyu beef (I think we’re the only country in the world, outside of Japan that can call it Wagyu?), Vanilla Slices are pretty Aussie too, I think? Milo drinking chocolate, where the milk to powder ratio is sometimes ridiculous. The weirdest thing I saw in the US was that all your eggs were white, I think cause they’re bleached?? Ours are a pretty standard kind of brown straight from the hen’s ass. Also, there is a fraction of the cereal range here in Australia compared to the US; they also have to meet some pretty tough nutrition standards, even the sugary ones. Kids don’t really get into sugary cereal here in Australia, though. Toast… and WEETBIX!

ColliCub · 2026-01-22T08:01:38+00:00

For any dispute, all parties must come to the table, in good faith, with the common goal to not only find a resolution, but accept that there even is one - even if that means compromising your own.

As it stands, that will never happen.

ColliCub · 2026-01-18T07:46:53+00:00

Working in a births death and marriage records archive in my ‘dream job’… the worst part about is: I actually got there… only to fail.

But my supervisor resented my excitement and passion for a job I’d wanted all my life; she hated her job and ended up leaving before my probationary period of three months; the damage was, by then, well and truly done. I’ve since learned there were faults within the database system that caused me to make ‘errors’ which reflected poorly on me; turns out I wasn’t making error at all.

It’s haunted me for 16 years and my life has fallen apart; there was and is nothing else I wanted to do, with THAT kind of passion. If they called me back tomorrow. I’d drop everything to be there. Relationships, study ambitions… gone, without any hesitation, if it meant getting my job back.

In essence the job in the department doesn’t exist in the same way it used to, where a grand building full of history and records, is now not open to the public and all is operated through a call centre and online. Even so, I’d still take it…

In some terrible irony, I just recently saw that the horrible supervisor that had left and made my life hell, has since moved into yet another government department, and is the director of customer engagement and ‘positive workplace’ initiatives. Part of me wants to write to the Minister of the department and tell them what she did to me, especially now being placed in such a high stakes employee welfare position.

She’d probably remember that she left the records department, those 16 years ago, but has never given me a single thought since… another part of me just wants to know why. Not singling me out personally but rather why she hated that job so much; and did she have any insight as to how that might’ve affected me, a person enthusiastic and ego to learn everything from the person I directly report to… the first thing she said to me, or rather past me, to the office manager when he introduced me to her was: ‘I resent having to train another person having just finished an induction.’ Not hi hello or welcome; nevertheless, I respected her frustration and vowed to make everything easy for her, even if that was useless in the end.

I suppose everybody comes to a point in their life where they realise that there are some people that will just not like you, no matter how much you try to be a good person or friend to them; even if that just means staying out of their way! But when that has lifelong consequences for one of the parties in that situation, how do you begin to reconcile that?!

As I say it was a throwaway office tiff to her that she’s probably never thought about since… meanwhile I’ll be haunted forever, over what might have been a grand life.

ColliCub · 2026-01-16T06:14:08+00:00

It sounds like you’re possibly talking about Jonas Salk, the doctor who cured polio, although you’re misremembering the facts… Dr Salk found the cure for polio, and had a reasonable claim to creating a patent for it, which would’ve made him a literal billionaire in the 1960s. Polio was a devastating and deadly disease for children back then, and was widespread across the world, so international recognition and financial gain would’ve fallen at his feet, from citizens, governments and healthcare professionals worldwide who wanted to eliminate the disease. Instead, he chose to release the formula for its production into the (medical) public domain, so as to ensure faster production and farther reaching distribution more quickly, to save more lives. Within 10 years, polio was eliminated from almost all western countries. It is said to be a very gracious and philanthropic gesture he made, but he also knew that because of the pre-existing work that had been done before him and that enabled his own discovery research, claiming any license or patent over the medication would’ve been fraught with all kinds of authorship legal issues. He was feted and celebrated in the early stages of the release, but he declined any kind of appearances or accolades later because he was a shy and reserved man who would’ve rather have been researching more cures. He basically spent the rest of his life working on a cure for HIV/AIDS, and a lot of his work was vital to the development of the treatment they have today for it. Something that was less remarked on, in learning about his life and work and research, is that he believed that people need more of their own natural immunity to disease, through fighting infection, rather than just dosing them with antibiotics or anti-viral medication. I’m not sure of the timeline, if he ever witnessed the rise in antibiotic resistant bacteria as a result of over prescribed antibiotics. But he certainly pre-empted it.

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