oznl

I wonder if importers will itemize the tariff impost as a separate line item on their price list (similar to sales taxes - which this effectively is). I know Amazon floated this idea but then walked it back when somebody in Washington DC threw a tantrum. I actually thought it was a good idea. This would at least ensure some transparency around where that money is going and how much prices should drop back by for consumers when this policy next gets reversed. I wouldn't like to see those dollars just get "baked in" but my cynical commercial mind suspects that is what might happen. I feel for you folks over there. I'll probably feel it more when prices get jacked up down here too. We don't have those tariffs but world trade is being disrupted and it doesn't seem like there is any kind of disruption that doesn't boil down to price increases down here...

I don’t think we’ve ever talked about farting so it’s about time. My resolve with this chronicle was that I would pull no punches. Farting: everybody does it. Well nearly everybody. I’m told that the pope has them miraculously transubstantiated into angel aria celebrating infallibility somewhere between the papal arse and the second or third layers of vestments. Presumably this power is conferred during one of the lesser known secret rituals that takes place in the papal conclave which is all well and good but the rest of us are stuck with them. In the household Judaeo-Christian zeitgeist that most of us inhabit, we navigate these inconvenient facts of biology by pretending as far as is possible that they don’t happen. In polite company, this pretence is collectivised. Entire roomfuls of people will, on the face of it, make valiant attempts to ignore the fanfare that heralds a sudden elevation of sulphurous compounds in the available atmosphere and the imminent preferment of ventilation, or at worst, blame any available dog in the vicinity. One of our lesser known fine motor skills is our capacity to muffle, stifle, obscure or otherwise acoustically mitigate or conceal the sound of an unavoidable fart. One of the lesser known side effects of abandoning our toilet training in favour of nappies for years and years is that this skill also deteriorates. On my strange voyage I’ve already documented and described the (albeit only moderate) decline in my general ability to keep my pants dry and the co-incident, unintentional but mercifully lesser decline in my ability to control things in the #2 department. I’ve been less forthcoming on how this relates to farts. Allow me to correct this omission. The inconvenient truth here is that fart control does get caught up in the general atrophy of things in the underwear department with prolonged nappy usage. Farts cannot be trusted. Any fart may well cause material nappy damage. It probably won’t. But it might and you won’t know until changing time. Farts may not be stifled. Once the metaphorical Elvis has left the building, any attempt to stop a fart is futile. Any attempts to modulate volume or note are similarly ineffective. The timbre and melody will be a surprise to all. A pee event may well include a complimentary fart event that you can do nothing to stop and vice versa. The best that can be hoped for is that a nappy will muffle the noise somewhat, which it usually does, somewhat. These lessons were writ large for me earlier this week as I awoke with birdsong, comfortably afloat in a bloated-but-secure Rearz Incontrol BeDry Night Premium (aka: “Collin”). Collin was a warm and comforting embrace. The bed was warm and just as importantly dry. I was comfortable, sleepy and in no immediate mood to leap from it and carpe the diem. Although there was no obvious signal from my bladder, I relaxed my pelvic floor. There’s usually a dribble or three to be had. “PARP!” wasn’t the result I was expecting. Despite the thick wall of padding, it had a deeply resonant note with a startling volume that effortlessly eclipsed the birdsong from outside. Slightly horrified, I reflexively I attempted a clench. This of course did nothing to stop the dribble of pee that was on its way (that mechanism having long sense corroded for me). If anything, it squeezed it out quicker but also, as a kind of bonus, produced three more staccato bottom barks in quick succession. Relaxing the clench produced a series of further loud retorts from deep within my nappy. Like lemmings of a cliff, they were numerous, unstoppable and unconcerned by my thoughts, desires or marital status. I lay there in awe of what might lurk beneath the bedcovers. At least my beloved was asleep. At least that’s what I thought until I heard her sigh. It wasn’t the sigh of a star-crossed lover. No angel sighed thusly in contemplation of the divine. There was nothing beatific about it. It was the kind of sigh that felt like a bad start to a day, the harbinger of a cold change to the weather, the possibility of rat poison in my dinner. I prayed silently that the goat-ishly named “Whiff-X” technology allegedly incorporated in my Collin-Nappy was a real thing rather than a marketing confection spun from confusion and deceit. The farts continued until they were done, presumably when the pressure in my lower intestine had equalised with atmospheric pressure. There was little I could do to stop or modulate them. This is another embarrassing thing that happens when you do this to yourself. You have been warned.

Crap was probably gilding the lily a little. I'd rather go to a dentist than a party 🤣 Also I couldn't help noticing your use of nested parenthesis in text. That's a clue too 🤣 It's been beaten out of me by my beloved who is a grammar nazi. I was dragged through Myers Briggs by some employer somewhere: INTJ as I recall which is a bit of a weird one to have it seems. There were only two our whole country team which made standing in my "group" fairly awkward. But to @Fleetwoodmac32192 I say "Despair not. You are far from alone. There's loads of us parked on that spectrum somewhere and we're awesome!"

It would be easier if he was a moron. Unfortunately, he's something much worse: a powerful force in health science who is at his core, unscientific. Assuming we can't do anything to stop or deflect his clown-with-a-machine-gun antics, I agree that disregarding him would be therapeutic but if we CAN push back on his agenda-driven pseudo-science in favour of sound, data-driven decisions we should do so. It most certainly is not. Both of my kids got themselves diagnosed with ASD as young adults. Both of them (and my beloved) hold me responsible as the genetic source of this “problem”. Since both kids have university degrees, relationships, careers and nice things, I can’t quite see that “problem”. Curious, I took a number of on-line tests (realising the shortcomings of such crude tools) but they all showed distinctly positive results. Could be conformational bias. Maybe if I’d grown up 30 years later, I would have been diagnosed and I’d have a label for myself. I guess I could do it today but why? I worked most of my life in the IT industry where people like me were the norm anyway. I like the way my brain works. I *like* it that I can hyper-focus. I think my brain can get to places other brains can’t. Ok, so I'm crap at parties. I like the label "neurodiverse", not because I'm a fan of woke terminology but because I actually think it's a more accurate label. RFK is again spouting rubbish. Rather than wasting time on rebutting this rubbish (it doesn't need rebuttal, it will face-plant on its own), I'd be interested in WHY he is spouting it. Don't mention it to RFK but I've sometimes wondered if there's a link between dysphoria and ASD that might explain the diaper thing...

This one turned up on my vanilla news feed and it looks like we’ve got our first finalists for 2025 “parents of the year”: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14671139/Incredible-moment-children-sunlight-time-four-years-rescued-House-Horrors-US-mother-German-father-kept-self-imposed-Covid-lockdown.html I don’t know where the “compulsory nappies” thing comes from though but it’s not the first example I’ve seen in what seems like a pattern of rare-but-completely-unhinged covid pandemic responses. Those poor kids don’t look very “comfortable” in those photos at all. I hope that they can somehow get past this. And people think WE are mad...

Well here's the thing: how could you know for sure? In my case I know it *can* happen because I've gone to bed dry (which is rare) and woken wet or had pee dreams, or gotten woken by the feeling of getting wet but those are corner cases. They don't happen every night. Lately they haven't happened pretty much at all. Where I am now is that by most mornings, I wake to find myself thoroughly wet and I just can't remember any details about it. All I have are great slabs of memory-free time during which I have evidently wet my nappy. I can't say that I DID but nor can I say that I did NOT. Like @Little Sherri lately, I suspect, on the balance of probabilities, I'm full-time bedwetting now. It might just be a phase. These things seem to come and go.

I've noticed with my body that colds (even ones I might fend off without too many symptoms) can produce diuresis. It's a thing apparently (viral diuresis). Google agrees with me. I've had some of my best overnight nappy fails with colds. 100% support that pro tip @CuteFantasy Life gets a LOT simpler with proper nappies. It doesn't cancel out how much more complicated you made life by choosing to wear nappies in the first place but it helps. And pull-ups are NOT your friend. In real-world, 100% duty cycle conditions, they have very limited use.

Unsurprisingly, my beloved felt that we should drive down to Brisbane and back (to collect the next tranche of house guests) on what was probably the busiest day of the holiday weekend to explore for ourselves, the chaos and carnage that is the Bruce Highway at peak vacation time. Learned as I am from previous scarring (and seat dampening) experiences, I wore an Inspire Mega+ and took a nappy bag (suitably concealed in the boot of my car). Whilst the Inspire Mega+ is probably only slightly less bulky than a pinned terry, its’ soft and capacious embrace allowed me to view with some degree of equanimity, the queues of tail lights and intermittent seas of flashing blue and red lights clustered around upside-down rental cars. The 90-minute-each-way trip took a little over two hours getting down and closer to three hours coming home (back towards a holiday destination at the start of a long weekend). The Inspire Mega+ held it all well and I arrived home with dry jeans taut over a somewhat-more swollen crotch and bum. I even sat down squishily in it after our return at the dinner table as we made a dinner out of take-away sushi and Shiraz. It was dark and I was fairly confident I didn’t smell so no harm was done. It did occur to me though that I was the only one in a party of four that never obviously took a bathroom break, at ANY time during that long day. Everybody asked for a bathroom time-out at some point except me. I do wonder if that ever gets noticed. My bathroom breaks were numerous, small and hopefully, completely unnoticeable to those close around me as I took them. They weren’t even breaks really. It’s not like I have to pause whatever it is I’m doing when they happen. They are barely noticeable by me to be honest. It’s difficult to describe just how NORMAL it is to pee in your pants after more than six years. There are some odd side effects from my strange “normal”. The whole, “Oh my GOD!!! I’m WETTING MY NAPPY!” internal talk-track has by now completely disappeared. Whilst I believe it to still be volitional (during the day at least), it’s more along the lines of a “fire at will” standing order as opposed to the traditional, event-based “ready, aim, fire!” I’m usually aware when I pee and whilst it (usually) isn’t surprising to me, neither is it precisely clear if and when I “decided” to do it. Mostly those pee events are nothing more than dribbles but occasionally, a more prolific event occurs and it’s at these points that I am reminded that I am powerless to stop these voids once they have started. I have to quite literally, go with the flow and hope my nappy holds. It almost always does. I hope I don’t smell. I don’t think I do, at least not in disposables. I remain quite bald in my nappy zone (which is important for odour control as hair is remarkably absorbent). I usually at least rinse my nappy zone upon changing (if not outright shower) and I trust my beloved’s demonstrated pattern of never holding back with respect to offering critique. There is of course the chance that she has become similarly habituated to nappy smells. She is certainly habituated to some things. We'd changed our sheets last Saturday (a brief half-day break between house guests). Gazing at the mattress protector ruefully, she said quietly “I’d REALLY like to give that a wash”. On cue, another subtropical thunderstorm rolled in and the capacity to line-dry any garment thicker than a handkerchief within a day rolled out. The reason for her opining thusly was that our cotton/polyester mattress protector was a sea of table-spoon-sized yellow stains in an accusatory zone around my bum. The precipitating events (did you see what I did there?) for those stains although rare, had accumulated over a number of months. This year’s wet season has been especially prolonged and vigorous making the drying of a heavy mattress protector something of an aspirational goal as opposed to a monthly task. Evidence of my misdemeanours had built up. Generally speaking I leak very little in bed but there have been a few very small damp patches, usually caused by rising leg elastics on plastic pants over cloth nappies. At this point of course there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m no longer dry at night and that’s that. In a way, it’s not my fault. The habituation at play here is that a few years ago, she would have gone into orbit and insisted that the entire room be immolated and rebuilt to cleanse it. This time she just put a clean sheet over the top of those little yellow stains and forgot about them. The guests have gone now. The house is back to just the two of us and the sun is shining. I’m back in cloth nappies, trying to right the wrongs of the previous fortnight and perhaps next week I will wash the mattress protector. I can’t remember what life was like before I went back into nappies.

True confession time: You know I actually worried about that for you a bit myself. I didn’t post that thought back at the time. There was a lot of unhelpful negativity flying around the room, it wasn’t like the thought hadn’t already been brought before you, I saw it as a possibility rather than an inevitability and I’m also aware that my brain tends to catastrophise things a bit. So I kept that thought to myself. I’m very pleased that it did NOT come to pass and upon reflection, I’m not sure why I ever thought it might when I consider some of my own “interventions”. Whilst a long way from your efforts, I’ve made myself a bedwetter as a direct consequence of a deliberate endeavour and, despite the occasional inconvenience and overall oddness, I don’t regret it at all. I’m not sure where I am on the daytime continence spectrum but I know it’s not normal and I have a degree of nappy-dependence now. I don’t regret that either. If anything, I just wish it was further developed. I’m not sure why. It’s not like I ever pee in a toilet anyway anymore. There’s a whole slew of barriers between that surgery and myself (mostly family ones) but I have a deep down conviction that if I *did* do it, I wouldn’t regret that either. As a professional obligatory bedwetter who shares a bed with a vanilla partner, I can assure you there are tips and techniques to avoid this 🤣

Welcome to your epiphany. Enjoy the ride!

LinkedIn. This has become the spam-king of my middle class inbox. I truly don’t care if Joe Schmuck was deeply moved and humbled by his recent attendance at a sales conference promoting a new cloud based turd counting solution. Really I don’t.

Since the topic that the OP posited was an AI generated "incontinence recipe" based on physiological interventions I would suggest that some response commentary around the competence of a large language model to do that would be VERY on topic. By its algorithmic nature, the LLM will at once sound highly credible and reinforcing of its user's preconceptions irrespective of its accuracy.

Please consider having a read of this: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/ I'm not saying if what you've gotten there is right or wrong (because I don't know) but my suggestion would be for you to get an insight into where your advice is coming from before applying it to yourself 🤣

They ARE bulky. You WILL look like a toddler from 1970 wearing them although as I only use them in bed, I don't weight their aesthetics that heavily. These days I just wear a Colin underneath a pair of these and a t-shirt to bed. If it's likely to be only a short haul night nappy, I might just wear a BeDry day weight underneath them but this DOES increase the chances of the Babykins pants seeing some action. I have 4 of these although that's probably overkill. In saying this, I hope that they have not been subjected to enshittification since I last purchased but the ones I have are tough to the point of indestructible. They are only worn in bed and even then, only over a nappy and thanks to my dysfunctional voiding, they don't see pee action frequently. I usually only wash them once a week or so out of a sense of general obligation rather than obvious need although any "incident" may alter this cadence. Their eventual failure mode is minor splitting of the PVC outer pant somewhere but I've only had one pair do this and frankly, since you're not peeing in them directly, even those are still usable.

I've also been seeing quite a bit of this lately. At least I think I see it. I suspect if I look too hard, it will stop but right now, I always seem to be greeting the dawn "quite wet" and there's been a consistent pattern of either not recalling wetting events during the night or if I can, recalling events insufficiently substantial or frequent to explain the morning state of my nappy. https://babykins.com/collections/adult-terry-lined-plastic-pants/products/kins-lined-6-mil-double-terry-vinyl-pant-20300dltv Having said the above, the Rearz InControl BeDry Night Premium (aka: "Collin") in my experience, will withstand limited side wetting having inadvertently tested it on a number of occasions. Yes, I'm seeing something similar going on and I'm not sure what it is, what it means or if it would withstand the kind of premature autopsy my brain would subject it to should I think to hard about it. My latest party trick is an all-to-frequent inability to stay completely dry for more than 30 seconds after a nappy change...