aesmael

How does a person go about meeting / befriending other, local persons?

I had a psychiatric appointment today. While driving I heard on the radio a news report expressing concern about the low uptake of biofuels in New South Wales. A survey was cited that 40% of drivers fear damage to their engines from fuel blended with ethanol.

Now, I may be leaping to conclusions, but perhaps this has something to do with the flurry of news reports several years back about 'those awful petrol stations blending in ethanol with fuel to stretch it out and make a bigger profit' and the accompanying scare campaign about how this would result in damaged and worn engines.

It is only a few years since the media were telling people how terrible this stuff is, so I am not surprised people are being slow to take it up.

Sometimes it strikes me that, apart from about an hour total over two visits to the Gender Centre in Sydney, I have not in my life knowingly met a person in person who is other than heterosexual and cisgendered/sexual.

( Video thingy )

Link.

1) Heard this before, oh yes
2) Still not played the game, oh no
3) With what was read to tonight plus other, broader context
4) Why is it so beautiful?
5) Oh goodness, perfect moment, the metafictional inspiration, it burns
6) Inspired where?
7) Jayde-Stacey-Last Speaker?
8) Jayde?
9)

Found via Ballastexistenz: I Am Joe's Functioning Label.

This post is about labelling people on the autism spectrum according to ability to function and the ways in which this can be harmful to the person so labelled. Specifically it is about people labelled as "high functioning" whose difficulties are dismissed or attributed to personal failings and considered not at all to do with autism.

It does not speak about people labelled "low functioning" but this comment succinctly summarises what I sought to add on that matter in this post:

"And then there's its equally evil twin, the "low functioning" label, which ensures that any and all abilities are ignored."

I would not attempt to speak any further on that matter because I do not know. It does seem to me that these labels are based mostly on ability to communicate via socially predominate channels.

There was more I intended to say, personally related, but that would get repetitive with another post I am trying to write. Hopefully it will suffice to say that, so far as labels and diagnoses go, I think they cease to be useful when adherence to them obscures the subject of the label.

    Found something interesting today playing around with Google Trends:

    I asked it to compare searches for catgirl, bunnygirl, foxgirl and, because I realised my list was focussing on girlcandy but not boycandy, catboy. Most of them did not show up. The blue line is catgirl. The green one is catboy. I wonder why the sudden surge in searches  over the past few months?
( Click for more, tangentially related )

    I thought people referring to Iain as being from Australia were jokes they were making, because he does not sound like anyone I ever met. I thought perhaps he was meant to be Irish, since his accent as shown in the comic seems most similar to other presumed-Irish characters but apparently not. I certainly cannot be certain about that since I do not personally know any Irish people to judge their accent (although his name actually seems Scottish to me probably because the only actual Iain I know of is Scottish).
    And I might even be wrong about his accent being inaccurate because I am not after all widely travelled even within this country and I certainly cannot know how we sound on the outside.

I believe the word sordid applies.

The story, near as I can make it out: Woman writes novel, attempts to get it published and along the way picks up notorious scam agent Christopher Hill. He does his thing, stringing her along with lies promising contracts. Meanwhile she is warned by a person who used to deal with him that he is no good. Hill persuades her otherwise, eventually tells her that her book has been rejected.
New deal: Hill will ghost-write for her a new novel to sell. In return she pays him $400 a month. This continues for two years until he claims to grow sick of her whining and gives her what he has produced, telling her she has all rights to it.
Woman picks up new agent, who she pays to find a publisher for this new book (agents pay writers, minus their cut, NOT the other way round). New agent secures her a deal with a vanity publisher - they will publish anyone who pays them to do so, so she pays again.
Finally, promotion. In the course of securing interviews to talk up this book it is discovered that, apart from the bits Hill wrote being reportedly atrocious, the first chapter is plagiarised from David Gemmell's novel Dark Prince.

More: Person who has paid someone to write a novel for her, then paid twice over to have it published claims on her website "I write because I feel each person has something unique to share with the world and writing is my gift to share".
Writer and agent, or people claiming to be same, then show up on the thread linked above to make legal threats and threats of magical retribution in retaliation for what they claim to be defamation. Christopher Hill is nowhere to be found and may be a nefarious figure in all this or may be a convenient scapegoat.

Edit: It gets worse. Seems the vanity publisher in question has only published one book and used lulu.com to do it. May as well go direct to lulu and cut out the agents and overcharging (if they want to make a profit) vanity publishers. Oh, and write your own novel.

    In Stephen Fry's latest post (that would be his second) he talks about fame. Here, have some quotes to persuade you it is worth reading:

Fame has this unusual property. It exists only in the mind of others. It is not an intrinsic characteristic, feature or achievement. Fame is wholly an exterior construct and yet, for all that it is defined by other people’s knowledge of a given person, they cannot dismantle or deactivate the fame that their knowledge engenders.

It is no good everyone repeating that tiresome cliché about x, y and z ‘only being famous for being famous’ – their fame exists in our heads and it is therefore our fault, not theirs, if fault there is. I can’t blame Jade Goody for the fact that I know her name.

    Go on, it is quite long and this is just a small repetitive sample I happened to especially like. He does illustrate among other things that fame is an even more dreadful experience than I imagined.
    Potentially I am left in the uncomfortable position of not knowing what to wish for. Ideally I mean to make my living as a writer and if I am good at that, some level of fame naturally attaches (on the assumption that fame and quality of work go together, where the post in question illustrates they do not). Quite frankly I want neither the problems nor the benefits, whatever they are that fame brings (although closer inspection may reveal that statement to be not entirely true) but the only way to be assured of avoiding that is to cut out the heart from my life.
    The truth is, though, that wishing does nothing and what happens, happens. Certainly I need not fear attaining the level of fame Stephen Fry has and of course my writing may never attract any notice at all. It is not up to me (see above) but the mere fact of having such worries may be a demonstration of what The Road to Mars' has to say about the insidious nature of fame.
    Indeed, why read Stephen Fry's blog at all, otherwise? The articles, all two of 'em so far, are quite good, but why take interest long enough to discover this without the pull of fame in the first place?
    I could try to talk about glamour here, but as I so often say, that is beyond my expertise. Besides, better than me have gone ahead.