It’s 10pm pacific time so I can say a connections spoiler now: Scratchies aren’t lottery tickets.

“12 day advent calendars” make no sense. Advent is a defined season, the 4 Sundays before Christmas til Christmas Eve. It makes sense to go to the 1st to start a calendar though. The 12 days of Christmas are after Christmas. Just say you’re making a shitty countdown calendar.

Almost got hit twice today by cars right on red-ing without looking for pedestrians. Different intersections but both time the light had just gone green for me and they were racing to beat the oncoming traffic. Any Australian who thinks we should have the equivalent hates pedestrians

Going back to Australia for Christmas means I don’t have to ration Vegemite for the rest of the year.

Wordle 1,603 1/6* 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Now I have to find a new starting word again.

Coming to one of the three brunch places in Seattle makes me miss Australia. This is diabolical. No one dishing out tables, zero sound proofing, every man for themselves

Melbournes SRL went to an election 2 years after ST3 and will have TBMs for section 1 in the ground by the end of year. Meanwhile Seattle still has no finalised plans and are setting up more advisory groups. FML

“Watching a podcast” do you hear yourself? Everything doesn’t need to be video. We used to be a society

I didn’t expect it to be more boring than tortured poets, and yet

Why have this as an AI response google? Like what is the fucking pint of framing this as an AI question except to boost your AI traffic numbers?

Not every website/app/service needs stories, DMs and short form vertical video. I do not need stories on the Premier League app. I do not need Reels on LinkedIn. I do not need Spotify DMs.

9 years since it was voted in and only 12% through the design phase. Melbournes suburban rail loop was announced in 2018 and the TBMs for stage 1 are set to be in the ground at the end of the year. At this rate I’ll ride the SRL trains before this design phase is done.

Remember when Apple was good and didn’t allow such bullshit? Between the dross on the AppStore and allowing all kinds of bullshit notifications, it sometimes feels like the epitome of enshitification

Reading this thread and the replies, and aside from the confidently incorrect thing, just how _cutesy_ GPT is now gives me the absolute ick.

Where did LLMs “learn” this style of social media posting? Because you never saw it on Reddit or Twitter before LLMs? And now it’s a huge slop giveaway

We’re going to be at 40 songs to go at 11pm. 10 songs an hour. 3am finish. I’m not sure I can make it #hottest100

The apps need to let me right click paste when I want to. Sometimes I only have one hand and it’s faster to do it with the mouse. Leave me alone google docs

I thought the hottest 100 might finish by midnight/1am my time. No way it’s done by 3am at this rate hahaha

You know what’s an interesting quirk? Americans use of the short hand “FIFA” for the world cup(s). Like people at my work at talking about “preparing for FIfA” and the signage around town was all for FIFA. I don’t think anywhere else in the world does that as short hand

Despise the fact people expect podcasts all to have video now. No. Get off the computer and go outside. Lie in the dark and listen to people yap. Just stop it.

This is my fifth northern hemisphere summer but for some reason this one is making me more aggressively feel like it’s Christmas time. I keep thinking “oh it’ll be holidays soon, almost new years”

Did my hottest 100 long list last weekend to work on paring it back to a short list this week and instead I’ve added several songs over the course of the week.

It’s funny that, currently, about 70% of my instagram ads are for migrating out of the US. I got ones from NZ, Canada and Denmark just today

I’m in the Reddit for the visa I’m on here and there’s been a massive uptick in questions where people have incorrect (and the same incorrect) info. Guess what? It’s chatGPT! Who could have seen that coming!

My least favourite Seattle public transport user habit is standing next to an open seat. Sit your arse down. From the front of the bus you make it look like there are no seats. Sit.

I keep getting these insta ads for “earrings you can sleep in” and I’m like. Guys. We have them. They’re called sleepers and I got them at Amcal Chemist in 2004 and they’re still going strong.

We had our first proper warmish (28°) day here in Seattle yesterday and I realise again how wrong the northern hemisphere is for having summer in the middle of the year. What do you mean Christmas is no where in sight? You have to just keep existing with no celebrations through the summer? WRONG

I don’t understand why end of day/5pm isn’t one of Teams default options for clearing status

Left a whole, unopened block of the trader joes Belgian whole hazelnut chocolate in the hotel fridge. There goes smashing the whole thing on the flight home. Hope the housekeeping team enjoys it

Me walking around Seattle today: All these people don’t even know that Peter Dutton lost his seat

Canva sheets is so funny. They’ve absolutely recognised that there’s that demo of people who want a pretty checklist or habit tracker but who don’t want to fuck around with Notion or try to make google sheets look pretty

Will never understand people who spend their leisure time consuming work-related content. What do you mean your most listened to podcast is about strategic vision and high performing leaders. Are they paying you to listen to that? Do you not have hobbies?

Sitting in an airport gate lounge surrounded by 3 different adults watching short form video without headphones. Removing the aux jack was a mistake

@watsoncomedian.bsky.social This is Mr Squiggle! he might be creepier than you are aiming for, but really all Australian kids shows are a bit odd. Glad we got to see you tonight! Have a good Australian run!

It finally happened. Wordle 1,360 1/6* 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

I think one of my most Australian traits is getting angry that a coffee shop isn’t open early enough when I’m overseas. What do you mean you don’t open til 9am on a Saturday.

Can we get rid of AUKUS but keep me being eligible for global entry at some point this year please and thanks.

It really feels like “DOGE” is doing robodebt but for jobs and man that turned out so well didn’t it

American ads, especially during the Super Bowl, are so goddamn cheesy

Travesty that I can’t get sausage rolls (“pastry pups” are vastly inferior) party pies or Kiev balls in the US

Garlic butter halloumi schnitzel

Interesting side effect of the way that American cities are governed is that something like the Seattle comp plan is absolutely detached from suburban sprawl because it’s not that jurisdiction. So these “pro tree” people can waffle on without ever having to deal with the tree removal of sprawl

Listened to Benson Boone for the first time after never hearing of him. He’s just a less interesting Lewis Capaldi

It’s tax time in the US. I received two paper forms (1095-c & 1099R) and am still waiting on my W2. Which will also be paper (it’s like a group certificate). This is the stuff that could be modernised in the US system. This and the application systems for like USCIS. But this is not the focus.

King County Metro need to do some serious public messaging (with demos! And some level of gentle prodding!) on how to ride a peak hour bus now there’s an uptick of riding post RTO. Never rode with such a clueless group of PT riders as I do daily in this city.

I know there’s other things happening right now but there are two huge blow ups in the online knitting space and I’m enjoying it immensely. One is a classic “ripping off a design” one, but with added huge ego of the person who absolutely stole/leaked the designs.

My current approach to TikTok is I scroll until the Australian pelvic floor physio makes me do my exercises and then we’re done for the day.

Studying for the equivalent of my L’s test (they don’t just transfer my full Aus licence over) and I keep getting practice questions wrong because I think the punishments should be harsher.

Rebranding office to copilot 365 is so dumb. Its like setting the brand recognition of their most well known brand on fire

I’ll be slightly disappointed if America gets TikTok back quickly, it would have been a nice experiment to see what would happen an established service without Americans