9:01pm 3/03/2022 TAFE was exausting, researching was frustraiting and my brain hurts.

By the time this is posted it will be sometime between 9:01pm - 10:00pm.

Today is thursday.

What did I do today? I had my TAFE class, it was on zoom and went overtime. We usually only go from 9:30am - 12pm then cut for lunch till 1pm-3:30pm. Today my teacher decided to go from 9:30am - 12:30pm then lunch and back to class from 1:30pm - 3:30pm. It wasn't torture but I was starving and we where in the middle of a group activity so I couldn't just go walk away to eat. I hadn't eaten this morning because I was working on an assessment and just forgot to eat. Eventually I had some rice bubbles which was nice and got me through the next 2 and a half hours of "group work" on my assessment. 2 members of my group where away which was fine because they had important stuff going on IRL. The two other members in my group got pulled out into a breakout room with the teacher, the first student was gone for 15-20 mins, the second was gone for almost an hour! It meant that we got almost 0 progress done on our major assessment because we arn't allowed to make decisions without the majority of the group being present (our group is 5 members, meaning we had to have at least 3 people to make a decision on what area we wanted to make our project on). I spent the entire 2.5 hours researching the region that our mock project was going to be, trying to figure out why the statistics where so screwed for 2016 and realising that the local council had 80,000+ residents registered but the cencus data for the council area showed only just over 12,000+ which dosn't make sense since the specific "town/suburb" we where researching has its own internal population of OVER 16,000+ people. Each council has a number of suburbs within it ant the total of these is supposed to make up the total population of the council region on each cencus, but there are aparently a missing 4000+ people in the cencus for the entire council area just when you look into one of the 9 suburbs.

So anyway, the cencus made 0 sense.

We then looked at what programs and services are already being run in the area, so far they have Sports, Arts, Music and Dance covered really well but nothing is really working. There are very limited programs available in relation to covid which played a major role in what we are learning at the moment in regards to how to build a youth work program since it is supposed to be relevent to the current world situation.

So anyway that assessment is a nightmare, but it isn't due for another 4 weeks which is great.

I am now working on my Youth Subculture assessment... which I decided to do on... Furrys.
As a member of the furry community this is something I just felt like doing, a lot of the questions are hard to answer since the history of the furry community in my country is not doccument (exept for conventions), this also means its impossible to track growth and the proprtion of impact that this has on young people. I did have one great study that has been pretty helpful in explaining on an international level the proportion of youth in the furry community, granted this is on a small scale and was limited to those who are considered adults (so no minors included in the study). The study in question is a 5 year study by Plante, Courtney N.; Reysen, Stephen; Roberts, Sharon E.; Gerbasi, Kathleen C. (2016). FurScience! A summary of five years of research from the International Anthropomorphic Research Project, and they found that within their participants“75% of furries reporting being 25 years of age or younger”. They had a sample size of more than 10,000 international participants.

I think the ice cream I had for dinner has given me a headache, too much sugar and not enough of anything else (or water). I am going to take a 2 minute water break and maybe write something else to add as another post, maybe poetry or another ramble? <3

Thank you for putting up with my weird ramblings.

- Live long and prosper.

Catstiel.