oznl

As a social species, we do a pretty good job of pretending we don’t have less glamorous bodily functions, or at least, keeping them well hidden away and ignoring them as far as possible: like a kind of Cousin Hugo in the attic. Output from our nether regions is received out-of-sight by gleaming white porcelain and whisked away to far-away places ineffable as they are unspeakable. When you use your pants as your toilet however it’s much harder to ignore what’s going on downstairs. I probably spend 80% of my day to some extent marinating in pee. I feel it, I see it, I smell it (albeit with those last two, hopefully only during a nappy change). In touch (both metaphorically and literally) with pee, I’ve noticed previously that there is a strong co-efficient between weather and the amount I produce. Throughout this summer, I’ve been largely wearing Air Actives that have effortlessly dealt with the days. Half as often as not, I’ve taken them off to exchange for my night nappies to discover that they are little more than damp. I’d never considered risking one overnight just saying but in my (largely un-air-conditioned) life, they’ve effortlessly dealt with whatever I’ve put in them from dawn until dusk. It’s a design mystery as to why they get soggy on the outside but that’s obiter dictum here. Summer is drawing to a close now. Whilst we are unlikely to experience anything resembling “cool” weather until May, we’ve had a few days that were merely warm to mild as opposed to hot. Last week as I’d mentioned, a monsoonal rain systems came down from the tropics to visit: triggering 4 days of ceaseless rain, high humidity and cooler temperatures (we’ve had days that have only managed 25C!). In addition to not sweating very much, there was a noticeable uptick in my involuntary sedentarianism (that’s a word I made up just for you: you’re welcome) as rain stopped most kinds of play. This was immediately reflected in much wetter day nappies. Almost immediately, I began to encounter occasional, minor Air Active leakage towards the end of one’s shift. This was the usual Rearz failure modality: minor leaks around a rear thigh, usually my right one. Where there was the odd day with an expected social engagement (and associated downside to wearing shorts with damp crescents on their bum), I actually upgraded my day-nappy to a full BeDry day-weight and at changing time, there was ample evidence that was a good idea. It may well yet prove that the Air Active is a “summer” nappy and for cooler weather, like warmer cloths, thicker nappies are called for. The other learning of the week is that my bedwetting remains infuriatingly unpredictable despite it being a part of my life for literally years now. In what is probably a “Stranger Things” inversion of normality, I find myself all-too-often annoyed by experiencing “dry” nights. In reality, there’s really no such thing as a “dry” night for me anymore. My bladder has long since lost the capacity to hold a night’s worth of pee production. For me, a “dry” night is one where I wake up at around 1am and realise that my pee is in my bladder and NOT in my nappy and then choose to wet myself as opposed to getting out of bed to visit a bathroom. Whilst still convenient, at some deeply submerged unconscious level, I consider this to be a kind of “failure”. A “failure” to keep my bed wet. Generally speaking, if I’m going to bed-wet, it will happen during the first, deep phase of sleep early in the night. On a “good” night, subsequent wetting events will either occur with me oblivious to them or manifest as jumbled “pee dreams”. I’ve noticed some runs of sustained “dry” nights lately and for some reason this bothers me. The only thing that could be said in their favour is they are inevitably terminated by wet nights. Saturday night was a great example of bedwetting salvation. After too much red wine, I clambered into bed pinned into a kite-folded 60” x 60” terry nappy under plastic pants, soothed by the gentle hum of the AC. I woke at around 2am for some reason. My bladder was empty (so it wasn’t that) and I could feel laying there that my right hip felt wet. The bed was dry. It seemed I’d peed abundantly in my sleep whilst laying on my side. It was good that I was in pinned cloth. With nothing to do, I swiftly fell back asleep. Then it was morning and I awoke realising that by now, I was completely soaked down there. I could feel bum was laying in wet towelling and as I shifted in bed, I realised how heavy my nappy was on me. Cautiously dabbing around my hips, I was relieved to find the marital bed to be perfectly dry. My nappy had held. As I lay there, I recalled discovering my wet hip at 2am but even then, I wasn’t soaked. Reflecting further, I could remember jumbled fragments of at least one pee-dream but sometimes remembering dreams is like trying to grasp smoke. The mere effort of capturing it hastens its dissipation. It was still obvious to me that I’d wet the bed more than once overnight. Once again, that attitudinal inversion kicked in and I was inordinately privately pleased that I’d again demonstrated to myself the unequivocal necessity of my night nappies. Last night was “even better”. I slept right through, woke up at 5am, didn’t need to pee at all and realised my pinned terry was again, sopping wet. Still, there will be more dry nights it seems. I really thought they would have been completely a thing of the past by now though as my first bedwetting incidents occurred nearly 5 years ago.

This is very much something I experience. The easiest way for me to stay dry at night is to plan, or otherwise contemplate, wetting the bed. I wet the bed when I don't think about it. That's easier said than done of course but the flip side of this is that I can't plan NOT to wet the bed: that trick doesn't work.

I have a similar sleeping cadence and I'm a dreadful sleeper. I've noticed that wetting events most commonly occur in the first few hours of sleep. I'm more likely to wake up later.

I didn't realise you were of the year 6 cohort 🤣 I have to draw one distinction: Unlike yourself, I can't stay dry at night by choice. I don't wet in my sleep every night but when it happens, it happens. I don't get to choose. I know from direct experience that if "it" happens and I am NOT wearing a nappy, I will be woken by cold wet bedding.

After 6 years of permanent nappies I will frequently wet the bed now. It's not every night but it's often enough that I should never go to bed without my nappy on. I find these bedwetting events to be strangely comforting. During the day I pee in small dribbles every 10 - 30 minutes. I believe I have control of this although like @Little Sherri, once I've started to pee I can't stop. It has to finish on its own account. I believe myself to be still daytime-continent but a few times I've found myself to be wet unexpectedly. I suspect this is because going in my nappy has become so normalised that I sometimes don't think about it and forget I'm doing it. I've noticed times where it seems VERY hard and VERY uncomfortable to stay dry if I wanted to. It's as though NOT wetting myself is no longer the default state and I have to concentrate to do that.

The outcome here is depressing but was predicted. The IT industry is notoriously ageist and to be frank, thanks to the black swan event of the pandemic, I’ve been OUT of a full IT role for 4 years so I’d be very unlikely to slide back into one. Most of my immediate cohort also lost their careers to the pandemic. In a capital city, I had (and found) another option but here in a regional/tourist location, that kind of opportunity doesn’t exist: they want (experienced) hotel cleaners and (young) baristas. I knew this to be the case but accepted the risk as a price of upholding a commitment to my beloved to relocate here. The unconscious bias problem was well illustrated by my last employer who, despite my repeated protestations to the contrary, put on a big "retirement" party for me when I left (which was utterly well intentioned but poignantly reflected the prevailing mindset): I was 59. It’s a raw nerve. I have TOTALLY built the solid fiscal foundations upon which we rest. We own our own home outright, have zero debt and a portfolio of investments (that the Whitehouse is currently using in a demolition-derby). I do suspect however, there is still, a (minor) undercurrent of resentment from my beloved that she is still working and I am not. She found it VERY hard to take over some of the routine bills. I think she expected to be traveling the world for leisure and that it would be me that worked to the grave. I do think at some level, we are as good as our last pay cheque but I also accept the possibility that this conclusion is me judging myself and through that lens, I am mis-judging her. .Yep. The bed-wetting thing remains unreliable. I certainly bed-wet enough to make any decision to forego a night nappy a dangerous one but there are still plenty of nights (even runs of nights) where wetting is set to “manual”. I really thought it would be an every-night thing by now and we’d be done, especially after Christmas where I suspect I wet the bed consistently for weeks.

And another week rolled by in my strange twilight world of involuntary early retirement. I’ve noticed general apathy levels and fatigue seem to be increasing rapidly which I suspect mentally, is not a great sign. I’m also slightly bewildered at how quickly the weeks are starting to fly by. It’s been 5 months since I was working already. Yet more crappy tropical weather wandering down south (albeit less dramatic than a cyclone) has seen heavy grey cloud and near-constant light rainfall settle over our area. There is no hint of sunshine forecast until Sunday and even then, showers are still forecast. I’ve had to reluctantly cancel this week’s cloth nappy shifts as there’s no way I’d ever get them dry (the clothes dryer was a casualty of the house move and I’ve nowhere to put a new one). Of course, a diet of 100% throw-away nappies is seeing me ripping through stocks rapidly. Toying with the idea of replenishment, I went online only to discover our solitary local supplier for Rearz (yep, we have ONE) is out of stock for both the Air Active (plan “A”) AND Be-Dry “day” weight (plan “B”) in my size. This illustrates nicely the perils of a single-point-of-failure supply chain. It’s an open question of course whether these products WILL be re-stocked, or, he will continue on his present business trajectory of marketing high-margined, recreationally-printed “dips” to millennials. If I get desperate, I may have to drop back to the “all new unimproved” not-so-BetterDry. I’ve enough nappies to cruise through April to be honest but it’s a pointed reminder of the fragility of things in general. I’ve spent 6 years ducking and weaving through the shifting terrain of local adult nappy availability. All of this before we stop and consider the pincer-movement I may be in between declining investment returns and accelerating inflation (aka: “stag-flation”) as selected world leaders carry on taking their kindergarten economics global. At least he still has some stock of the BeDry Premium Night. If you’re inclined to indulge in some care-free bedwetting and don’t want to be washing sheets and trying to dry your mattress, this nappy is probably your best choice outside of cloth. It withstands even limited side-sleep wetting incidents. It occurred to me the other day that I might even get away without my terry-lined plastic pants insurance policy with these products but the fact is I find them very comfortable and since I’ve already paid for this insurance, why not use it? The underlying fact though is that for the last couple of weeks, I’ve washed those terry-lined waterproofs out of a sense of obligation rather than any pee-staining: the BeDry Premium Night has not leaked on me to date despite what I suspect to have been quite a few sub-optimally-positioned bedwetting incidents. Bedwetting disappeared for a while, as it sometimes does. For quite a few nights it seemed that I was waking up between 1am and 2am to find a reasonable quantity of pee in my bladder (although no sensation of fullness). Last night it came back (as it does) with the vaguest recollection of some kind of pee dream and I didn’t wake until 4. Presumably I’d peed myself at some point earlier. I was plenty wet. When not wasting entire days on the internet, I’ve also been (slowly) trying to consolidate the household nappy infrastructure at our new digs. At the high point, I had no less than 7 discrete (and not necessarily discreet) caches of nappy related stuff distributed around the house. Locational redundancy yields more risk than reward when it comes to nappy storage: it’s not like you can use them in an array and more places is simply more points of discovery-vulnerability. In what was probably an iconic decoration decision, I de-commissioned the bookshelf from my former-study, packed away the ageing programing text books that filled it before dragging that shelf into the walk-in-robe where I’ve re-purposed it to accommodate my cloth nappies. This freed further space to bring in a case or two of disposables out of the garage. I guess coding is “out” and nappies are “in” at this phase of life. I expect I’ll hear her eyes roll from the bedroom when she sees it. I’m down to 4 distributed household nappy caches now but still struggling with the new twin realities of LESS storage space and MORE time spent under my beloved’s gaze, I’m not sure how much further I can go. I wish it would stop raining.

I hear you and you've already identified why. The dilemma here is that a high degree of specificity can make demarcation lines quite clear but at the expense of verbosity and clarity (think of an insurance policy “terms and conditions”). That specificity means that many will simply not read it and for others, it opens up the possibility of exploiting definitional technicalities to “game” the rule. On the other hand, recourse to generalities (think of the legal barn-door that is the word “reasonable”), makes it easy cover a LOT of scenarios in a word but at the same time, introduces ambiguity and the latitude for disputation. I think the 3-tag system (non-AI, AI-augmented and AI-generated) is solid (with mandatory tagging at posting) but I accept that my wording is not necessarily optimal. I didn’t invest a lot of time. Do you have any wording-improvement suggestions? I tried to tweak it a little: Non-AI: 100% Human generated creative elements including theme, plot, setting, characters, point of view and style with no recourse to machine generated content. Machine generated spell, grammar and format checking are permissible. AI-Augmented: Human generated theme, plot and setting. Machine tools may be used to inspire minor or incidental supporting content but this content must have been selected, edited or otherwise substantially transformed by humans and not used in its direct, machine generated form. AI-Generated: Content where any of theme, plot, setting, characters, point of view and style were generated by machine. The idea would be that at the point of publishing, the publisher would need to select ONE of the tags. It's obviously a self-selected system and could be disregarded but I don't think we need to build the policing mechanism into the law that we need to police.

This really is a question for the age and gets super-complex, super-quick so I profess no special insight. I have no axe to grind on this as I haven't written any stories. I don't much even read them. I DO however think the discussion intellectually interesting and I *have* written policies before. Can I Lazarus out the suggestion I made on the old thread about a 3-speed shift here? I DO believe that there might need to be some middle ground given there and I think @randomanon has made an interesting point from a vantage point that is probably in our future. I agree that my "AI-Augmented" category MAY be a little blurry but I'm happy to circle back on that in the face of feedback and try harder, gratis 🤣 Non-AI: 100% Human generated creative elements including theme, plot, setting, characters, point of view and style with no recourse to machine generated content. Machine generated spell, grammar and format checking are permissible. AI-Augmented: Substantially human generated theme plot and setting. Machine tools may be used to propose and/or automate the creation of other creative elements but these must have been substantially edited and transformed by humans (ie: not used in their original form). AI-Generated: Content where any of theme, plot, setting, characters, point of view and style has been substantially generated by machine.

The tracking technologies are relentless and getting harder to duck. You might consider ditching Chrome for Firefox as Chrome's business model is aligned against you. I always poo-poohed that idea. I suppose back in the day, the amount of compute resource needed to pull that kind of trick would have been prohibitively ridiculous. I'm not 100% sure of that now. I've also seen what looks like cross-talk between spoken-word and web-browsing although it could be selective attention at play I suppose. I just don't now. It still seems like a tall order in terms of compute horsepower.

You’ve really asked two quite distinct questions: Scenario A: You NEED to wear In this case, you’re presumably going to be diapered 24/7 and as @Little Sherri has pointed out, it’s fairly unlikely that you can fly THAT under the radar for the required 20 years or so. Whilst I wouldn’t be advertising it to any kids, I’d be preparing to have “the conversation” at some point when you get asked, contextualising it correctly as a need and downplaying the magnitude of it whilst attempting to ensure that your kid understand that this is private family information that would be of neither your nor their interest to share. It can hurt you and it can hurt THEM. Kids can be cruel to one another and the sins of the parents CAN be visited upon the children. Scenario B: You WANT to wear Tougher. It may not be what you want to hear but you’re going to have to put this in a fairly small box for the best part of 20 years once that kid's infantile amnesia starts to clear (probably at around 2 – 3 years of age). I did. It’s not that you CAN’T wear but kids should not (and definitely don’t WANT) to know about their parents’ kink choices. It can also hurt them through the same vectors as Scenario A. My nappies became (infrequent) nights, business travel or other alone time things. Kids need to be shielded from this and that protection also extends to making sure that they are at least unlikely to stumble across your diaper stuff when they inevitably decide to unpack your wardrobe or drawers. I only had a small amount of stuff in a locked case, way up out of reach. These answers are my opinion and other people may have different ones. If it’s any consolation, around the time my last kid left home (around 6 years ago), I went “24/7” and stayed there ever since so it can be one hell of a rebound 🤣

Things are getting back to normal in the wake of Tropical Cyclone Alfred. Our rubbish-bin-from-hell has been emptied, pretty much everybody has electricity, the occasional fresh vegetable has been sighted in local supermarkets and the media has switched from imminent-death-by-weather to imminent-penury-through-leaping-insurance-premiums. Up in far north Queensland (which is literally, 1,000 miles away from the southern bit where I live) there is now monsoonal flooding so the climatic chocolate-wheel of disasters is spinning along nicely but they’re supposed to be used to that up there. Down here, my beloved has gone down to the big smoke for a few days for work related reasons and I find myself with 4 days and nights alone. Historically, these alone-times have been opportunities to indulge in nappy-related experimentation and testing. Freed from the stern eye of matrimonial critique, I’ve tested my continence, rolled the dice on bedwetting and experimented with interesting but doubtlessly controversial fashion choices. I just can’t be bothered this time. I know that going to bed nappy-free will, at least for the first night or two, involve nothing more than very limited, shallow sleep interspersed with frequent trips to the bathroom before eventually, a night will be disrupted by the nuclear force of a fully wet bed bringing on a frantic festival of 2am laundry requirements. I know that going nappy-free during the day will be kind of ok (albeit with damp patches on whatever I use for underwear) but also be kind of uncomfortable and kind of inconvenient. So screw it. I’ll just carry on in nappies as per usual. There’s a part of me that says that this apathy for adventure is reflecting another problem. Everything is “too hard” lately. The pace of domestic renovations has slowed to “glacial” and I find myself spending more days thinking about things than doing them. I’m amazed by the way entire days can just slip past me whilst I idly flick between news websites (if I find any good news I’ll let you know) whilst I vaguely cogitate on some minor domestic maintenance or renovation exercise that I’d originally planned to do. I live in a universe where (my) time doesn’t matter anymore. I now understand why my recently-retired neighbour sits on a plastic chair in his garage staring out at a largely empty street for hours at a time. It’s not EXACTLY business as usual in the household on my own though: that absence of a spousal mooring point has resulted in a certain drift in standards. There are rinsed wet cloth nappies in the shower. The vanity looks like it fell out of Hollywood but it’s just nappy rash powder. There are rinsed plastic pants hanging up in our bedroom (I’ve ditched disposables for the 4 days) Implausibly, there are nappy pins on the kitchen counter top (I’m not quite sure how things came to that). My night nappy gets changed when it leaks, not because it’s daytime. I’m a bit prone to just wearing a t-shirt, nappy, plastic pants and nothing else inside the house. A few nappies have gotten messy because, well because I can and they’re going to get washed anyway so why bother using a toilet? The cloth nappy pail in the garage is full and brewing strange new alien lifeforms within it. No walls have been painted in accordance with the vague plan I had to paint them. I feel like my home is turning into the “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” hotel room. Tomorrow is Friday, the day of miracles and I’ll get the place sorted before beloved returns. Just after I check the news, again…

As others have said, my experience with this is that it's just a question of habituation. I can remember when I was little more than a kid, experiencing that a night spent in a nappy would be one of little, poor sleep. Eventually, maybe just through a combination of familiarity and fatigue, this fades. When I went 24/7, this quickly shifted the other way: sleeping WITHOUT a nappy became strange and a bit difficult. Eventually, as 24/7 settled in, I developed bedwetting so now night diapers are absolutely compulsory anyway. So, I think it's just a barrier you have to push through.

Well THAT was easier said than done. I had a go. It ended up being specific to fictional writing which isn't ideal but it's a start: Non-AI: 100% Human generated creative elements including theme, plot, setting, characters, point of view and style with no recourse to machine generated content. Machine generated spell, grammar and format checking are permissible. AI-Augmented: Substantially human generated theme plot and setting. Machine tools may be used to propose and/or automate the creation of other creative elements but these must have been substantially edited and transformed by humans (ie: not used in their original form). AI-Generated: Content where any of theme, plot, setting, characters, point of view and style has been substantially generated by machine. Content classification: Non-AI 🤣

Probably outside the scope of this thread but whilst I will give you that it produces something that looks like the product of intelligence (indirectly, it is), it has no agency and is not of itself therefore, intelligent. Yep, I used "word" instead of "token" to avoid alienating the 5% of the readers of this thread that I haven't already alienated 🤣 I didn't want to drag in another concept. Interesting point. I guess I was aiming my commentary at those who feed in some initial data and press "play", waiting for fap-worthy material to spew forth 🤣 I accept that using an AI tool to in-fill the dumb stuff is a productivity booster and doesn't endanger the artistic merit of the venture: "Shrek" didn't happen by somebody painting 32 frames for every second. I'm not sure what the right answer is for "AI-augmented" content as opposed to "AI-generated". The purist in me still wants to see this tagged somehow.