oznl

I was beginning to think I was the only one who saw that visual pun 🤣

We should write "The 84 Month Diaper Training Program" 🤣

Depending on how you want to account for a one month sabbatical in March 2019 I’m either approaching my 7th anniversary of my life in nappies or, I sailed through that milestone months ago. For all of that time I’ve had a free-range bladder. Even after I’d decided I’d be ok with any loss of urinary control it didn’t completely happen. It turned out that for me at least, the “Twelve Month Diaper-Training Program” was a bit of a fairy story: a cartoon-speed riot of exaggerated clichés that didn’t reflect my much more mundane and pedestrian regressions. There HAVE been regressions however they were slow to occur and sometimes hard to see. Even the few tectonic shifts (such as developing bedwetting) were hard to conclusively spot until they’d already established themselves. When you use your nappies deliberately all the time it’s hard to notice accidents. So, I’ll put this report out there as a kind of bread crumb trail that might help me figure out when and how something happened IF I realise, some months later that something DID happen. It’s to do with situational awareness. When I started this journey it was all about the nappies. The nappies were the point of the exercise: that icon of infancy that for some reason got welded into my grown up brain as preferred, comfortable and even comforting to wear and use. Swiftly I got pretty used to wetting my nappies. I’d got plenty of practice in. I stopped noticing being wet within a few months. So long as I wasn’t leaking and my nappy was securely in place, the sense of it being wet on me sank below my awareness. Presumably my brain started to screen out this haptic background noise so that other, potentially more important messages would not be missed: such as a the leak running down my inner thigh. Generally now I’d only be reminded of my nappy’s wetness due to its weight and warmth when moving about or if for some reason I paused to think about it. This seems a lot like the socially dangerous phenomenon of “nose blindness” where the pervasive stench of a dirty adult nappy gets cancelled out by its wearer’s brain to the point where they delude themselves that they don’t stink, oblivious to the fact that bystanders may be gagging. Still, for most of my nappied history, it’s been all about the nappies. I thought about them a lot and that I was wearing one was always in my mental field of view. In the early days, decisions to USE my nappy loomed large in my mind. Wettings were notable events including psychological ticker tape parades and mariachi band escorts. There was even a bit of a mental pre-flight checklist thing: Am I securely wearing a nappy? Check! Will this nappy be ok for what is to come? Check! Am I positioned appropriately to minimise the chance of leaking? Check! Ok, clear to wet yourself. Wetting! Proceed to leak check. Outerwear is Dry! Waddle on, have a nice day! This careful consideration also faded over time. Wetting my pants shran to a small decision. Then it was a micro-decision. Then it got to the point that whilst STILL a decision, it’s not one I’d necessarily bothered committing to memory. That’s when I’d start finding myself in wet nappies that I couldn’t quite recall wetting. I can pee my pants without pausing whatever it is that I happen to be doing at the time and the thought of trying to remain dry seems strange and bothersome. But at all times, consciousness of my nappy-clad state remained. At least during the day. The most recent “development” (if you could call it that) is that sometimes, just sometimes I’m only remembering I’m in a nappy after I feel myself wetting it. I’ve lost that “situational awareness” of my protection and yet I reflexively pee anyway. I found myself sitting at my desk earlier this week, making sure that the internet was working when a spreading heat at my crotch told me that I’d started to pee. I’d almost certainly deliberately relaxed to permit this although I couldn’t specifically recall doing so. It was probably a micro-decision, maybe even a nano-decision. I don’t know. The unusual thing here was that it occurred completely outside of any “ooh! I’m in a nappy!” context. I was just sitting there and for a fraction of a second the creeping warmth startled me. Then I realised that my crotch was getting a warm bath but my shorts and chair remained dry and that was because I had a nappy on. I couldn’t even immediately recall what KIND of nappy I was wearing or how wet it already may have been but by the time I’d retrieved memories to reassure myself that I was “dressed for success” I’d finished anyway. I was left with the unshakeable and odd feeling that If for some reason I had NOT been in a nappy, I would have soaked my clothing and chair. It was a weird daytime echo of the shock and awe I sometimes experienced when I was developing bedwetting. Sleep, pee-dreams and general befuddlement would de-couple my habit of semi-automatic urination from awareness that I was nappy-clad. The sensation of getting warm and wet downstairs would sometimes wake me mid-stream and I’d be startled until I remembered that I was in nappies and everything was “ok”. Thanks to 7 years in nappies I already have a bit of a toddler bladder during the day: I need to pee frequently, my ability to hold is limited and for the benefit of everybody else, it’s far, far better that I wear a nappy on a car trip. Having said all that, my daytime nappies are preferential, not mandatory whereas my night time nappies are by now necessary. If what happened at my desk becomes an established pattern, that might change. It felt like my bedwetting except I was awake. I wonder if this new fleeting phenomenon might be a glimpse into an even-earlier version of “toddler bladder”: the one that existed before potty training. All of the “continence” build is largely complete and usable (within the aforementioned constraints) but the toddler brain isn’t yet configured to use it. We keep them in nappies to keep the furniture nice. It’s the way of these “un-developments” that any attempt on my part to isolate, probe, study or otherwise intervene in the name of science will send this rare new modality of brain operation screaming into remission. But, if I could just come up with some strategy to NOT think further on this but allow it to progress, it seems to be a glimpse (or maybe just a trick of the eye) into a future where I might find myself if not technically incontinent then un-potty-trained. I suspect that would have a much more boring clinical name: functional incontinence.

Evolutionarily innate revulsion toward human waste: understandable with respect to poop. That’s a bio-hazard and we are hardwired to avoid disease. Pee is technically “clean” (assuming a healthy person producing it) but it gets caught up in the same net. There's other reasons why ABDL is "shocking" to people who don't understand it. Deviance-shunning as a psychological prop to group stability: humans are a social species. A part of the social cohesion involves sanction against unconventional behaviours. This may or may not be related to our hard-wired disease avoidance biases. Irrational conflation with pedophilia: Yes, this old chestnut. Anyone who is ABDL knows that ABDL isn’t correlated with pedophilia any more than say, a career in accountancy but the “at a glance” optics show emulation of childlike behaviours adjacent to sexual practice and given the understandable truck-load of solid reasons and taboos there (again, evolutionary), some transference can easily happen. ABDL just pushes so many of the wrong primal buttons it is very easy to misunderstand. Social media enables this negative psychological engagement to be exaggerated, broadcast and monetised... At least that's my take on it.

I spent most of my life floating somewhere between the R&D engineers and the salesforce and/or support teams for IT manufacturers doing advanced support and/or product training but finished up in engineering management for that same sector. I wore nappies for my last couple of years of work, travelling a LOT before COVID ended the party and we all got laid off. I then wore nappies at work for a couple more years doing basic tech work in the disability sector part time. These days I’m basically retired. I waste money on electronic junk from Ali-Express and poke hairs down the sink. Still in nappies.

Interesting. I thought the copper would eventually fatigue and fracture somewhere. I always seem to be pulling out our fridge for something. Also with that setup, the system is exposed to town water pressure. There also seemed to be no filter. Here I just added a threaded "t" tap to the existing threaded connections to the sink mixer under the sink. There was already a take-off for the dishwasher there. Now there are two. I should just put a zigbee water sensor under the cabinets somewhere

That poly line freaks me out. When we moved, the fridge (with ice-maker and chilled, filtered water dispenser) finished up on a concrete slab floor on the opposite side of the room to the water service. I ended up running no less than 10 meters of the stuff through the back of the kitchen cabinetry right around the kitchen. A year later and it still worries me. 10 meters of blue line filled with pressurised water in cabinetry where I can't see it. There's a pressure reducer just out of the take off from the kitchen mixer feed and I did put in a quarter-turn isolating tap there. I can remember a plumber telling me that those taps almost always fail when you need them because they never get used over a decade and seize up. I make a habit of using the isolator tap when I change the filter cartridge which is every 6 months or so.

Well that's annoying. I need to re-qualify and say you can't by them in OUR region (Asia Pacific). Hartmann no longer offer them downunder and to add insult to this injury, you have to tell their website that you're a medical practitioner before they'll even show you their range.

Remember the Molicare Slip Maxi? Blue (so VERY blue), comfortable, not that capacious it was a ubiquitously-available medical adult nappy that faded from view five or so years ago and I used to wear them a lot. This week I found one hiding under some old t-shirts that smelled of mothballs this week: new old stock! Rather than throw it out, I thought I’d wear it and send it off in some style. It’s a strange definition of style I suppose, peeing in it but then again, I’m strange. A bit like the Molicare Slip Maxi. The appearance was interesting. Whilst typically nappy-shaped, it was strangely blue, sporting a series of thin, paired vertical black racing stripes. If Barbarella Queen Of The Galaxy wore a nappy, it might look like this. Each pair of stripes was interrupted at intervals on its north/south voyage across the expanse of nappy with a strange repeating logo: I studied this logo for some time. Retirement is like that. You have time to go deep. I decided that the logo MIGHT be a highly stylized man and woman embracing. Perhaps this was to signify the inherent gender neutrality of the product. Perhaps it was meant to graphically portray a girl named Moli getting some care but that seemed a little Epstein-creepy. It then occurred to me that perhaps it was designed to be viewed horizontally. This wouldn’t be unusual. I suspect many people clad in one of these are horizontal. This way it looks completely different. It might be a cartoon character: “Sogarssky The Smiley Seaplane” (he finishes every day with a wet bum). Or it might simply be an ancient Aramaic message warning about the unholy perils of nappy rash. We’ll never know. You can’t buy these anymore. The relentless grinding wheel of accountancy-driven, global en-shittification saw these noble beasts of burden replaced with the lamentable and dismal “Molicare Elastic”. Described as an “overnight” product for “very severe incontinence”, the Molicare Elastic “improvements” (I wouldn’t even call it “Verschlimmbesserung” because I doubt the manufacturer’s honourable intent) featured narrower padding, poorer fit and zero side protection guaranteeing uncomfortable wearing and wet bedding. Then, through a miracle of COVID-flation and Government intervention into the medical supply market, the en-shittified successor Molicare became more expensive than Rearz products that worked vastly better. Still, for a medical nappy, I’d forgotten how half-decent these obsolete PE-backed Molicare Slip Maxis actually were. Whilst their core was not as comfortable as the Abena L4, their tapes actually worked and the PE backing whilst not necessarily being of sufficient structural rigidity to hold everything together, at least kept everything in roughly the same place: a task that the Abena never quite managed. Their capacity was modest. Rated at roughly 3800ml, their real-world performance was probably closer to 800ml but this was generally adequate for a lightly-hydrated day. Back in those days I was on a “3 nappy per day” diet. I taped it on (the fit felt comfortable and modestly safe for the purposes of pants-wetting), pulled up some plastic pants and a compression pant before a final layer of shorts and t-shirt with which to start my day. I then proceeded to completely forget about what I was wearing which is a good sign. At no point was I fretting about it. This got the point where I didn’t have any clear recollections of using it. I actually ended up checking myself to find that I was indeed a bit wet. This is something I’m noticing now. I’ll find myself to be wet but not remember actually doing it. I’m fairly sure this is 100% psychological insofar as a decision to pee WAS most likely made but has become so inconsequential but I’ve stopped remembering it (as opposed to incontinence). Anyway it further evidences my comfort and faith in the product. It remained soft and comfortable both dry and wet. The day proceeded further in comfort and with zero leaks. It’s a shame I then had to ruin it by deciding (after 4 days of absolute sedentarism) to take it on a 13km bike ride. At least the sturdy PE backing kept all the wet fluff particles from its disintegrated core in my nappy zone. Vale Molicare Slip Maxi. Sure, newer (ABDL) products are better/stronger/cheaper but you were a decent product from your time and like your stablemate Abena L4, launched many 24/7 experiments.

The idea that Governments are inherently wiser than the populace they govern and that social challenges should therefore be solved by prohibitions and sanctions is one that seems to be gaining traction in many countries. The UK, which now faces having its police arrest citizens for subjective insult is an extreme example. Regrettably, Australia follows closely behind. Playing judicial whack-a-mole to regulate against poor choices is a race with no finishing line. There’s always the next thing that needs fixing. Accordingly, Government controls metastasize like cancer, invading personal lives and civil liberties even where no threat of harm exists. I personally believe that by progressively marginalising personal responsibility and morality in favour of laws in an effort to create some kind of kindergarten Utopia, people generally cede their own judgements to authoritarianism. The populace “dumbs down” from adult to child: waiting for the all-knowing parent to fix everything. The irony that they would infantilise an entire population by banning its depiction is not lost on me. There will always be a need for limits and laws but we MUST treat people as adults (even if they are age-playing) and constrain heavy-handed measures to protecting the innocent. The scariest thing about all this is the degree to which the population seems to acquiesce to this governmental mission-creep. Do they not realise that although today it might be pictures of adults wearing nappies, tomorrow it might be stand-up comedy on the chopping block? Or are people just becoming dumber and more passive, gob-smacked by reality TV shows whilst waiting for the next Government hand-out to arrive?

Welcome to another land 😄 There are loads of people with similar inclinations to yours here and a bunch of life experience that you can draw upon. If something doesn't work, odds on somebody here has already found out the hard way 🤣

I'm glad to see that this insurance strategy has also now worked for you. They're certainly more substance than style but they DO work and whilst much of the time they prove unnecessary, for the other 3% of times they are amazingly necessary, silently mopping up spills that otherwise would have nowhere else to go but bedding and mattress. About once per fortnight my terry-lined plastic pants will see some minor action. Once or twice a year I'll wet them "properly" through some nappy mishap. The lurid-but-effective "Mermaid Tale" diaper is sadly gone forever down here but the few times I wore one, I took extremely prejudicial levels of care to ensure that my beloved never laid eyes upon it. She would have phoned the police. I've noticed similar experiences. I've woken, aware that I'm in a nappy but been confused about what kind of nappy it is and how "used" it is already. It's an interesting clue that supports my theory that at some level, we "deliberately" wet the bed because we know it's "ok" but don't wake up enough to remember that. The couple of times that I've truly "wet the bed" because I'd tested myself without a nappy (and failed) I suspect that some part of my sleeping brain was convinced I was wearing a nappy even though I wasn't.

I'd call it about "average". Neither a carbon-fibre speculum nor a couch. The bike is a mountain bike: an aluminium-frame GT Avalanche 2.0 that I bought new way back in 2005 and it turns out that most components on it are decent and known brands still around today. It wasn't a K-mart bike. I found the receipt whilst looking for the manual (which wasn't helpful anyway). I've subsequently made things a little better by adjusting both it's height and moving it slightly rearwards to change my seating angle. I'd like to raise the handlebars a little but it seem that on my bike I'll need spacers to do that. I think however yet another trip to "99 Bikes" will be in order.

Ah yes, I'm familiar with the glamour of fungal infections but I'm punting this is merely pee-potentiated chafing. Fungal infections imho simply remain in play until you hit them with anti-fungals. This issue gets better if I stop riding a mountain bike in wet terry nappies 🤣 It's pelting rain today (yay, we need it, our rainy-season has been more miss than hit this year) so no bike. Then it's the weekend and that means no-bike because my beloved doesn't ride and would not look well upon being left behind on an outing. We'll see what Monday bringeth.

I guess I could be surprised but I’d be VERY surprised if an ABDL gene was discovered. If it WAS, I’d be immediately looking for linkages between this, neurodiversity and transgenderism: those two latter cohorts I consider to be found with unusual commonality in the ABDL world. My money however remains on “nurture” although it seems likely that the formative time for such nurture (in my case at least) may have been before my developing brain was reliably painting recoverable memories. I’d postulate that this would make is seem like I’d always had such predilections. In my case I consider two possible vectors as candidates: The appearance of the first of a long series of siblings occurred before I was 2 years old sparking my mother to force my toilet training quite early to avoid the inconvenience of having multiple infants in nappies simultaneously. At the same time I lost my nappies and exclusive parental attention. In hindsight, it’s almost certain that my mother had psychological illnesses that rendered her affections capricious and conditional whilst my father was remote and occasionally brutal. There is ample evidence that we were all scared of our parents and did not fully trust them. There were clearly attachment disorders.