Graeme

For those who want to keep using Google (or any search engine, actually) to see if the story has been hosted somewhere new, take a phrase from the story and search for that phrase. For example: "We walked straight down Sunset like we owned it." That's taken from the opening paragraph of chapter 88 of the story. Do the search using that exact string, including the double quotes. If it can find a page that contains that exact string, it'll tell you (currently it only returns the now defunct wordpress page). When that shows up a new entry, you'll know it's been hosted somewhere new. You might want to try it with a phrase from chapter 1, as that should appear at a new site before chapter 88 If the author has to repost all the chapters manually, it may take a while

Also, the Wayback machine archived the story in April 2009 when it was at 88 chapters. Not perfect, but it means you can read a bit further until someone tracks down a new site for the story.

This post highlights a point that's not always obvious. As KC Grim said, most actual publications are printed in a similar font. The problem is that the eye likes things different between the screen and a printed page. Times New Roman is great if you're printing out the stories to read, but is not as good for reading on a screen. Other fonts, such as Arial, Tahoma, Verdana are more appropriate to be viewed on a screen. I remember doing a course on presentations, and the instructor made it very clear that using Times New Roman for power point presentations (for example) makes it harder for someone to read what's there. Their recommendation was Arial, as the reader will be able to absorb what's written easier. So, what do you want? A font that's easy to read on a printed page, or a font that's easy to read on a screen? Unfortunately, the best choices in either category do not appear to be the best choice for the other category....

Thanks, Mark. What I left off was that I was in England at the time of the EastEnders Tony and Simon storyline. I remember distinctly the episode where Tony snuck off to a gay bar and picked up a guy, but chickened out before they got to the guys room. Just for those who didn't see it, Tony was going out with Simon's sister at the time that he started going out with Simon.... And, getting back on topic, EastEnders had another gay couple at the time - a couple of black guys: definitely not flamboyant, white or upper class (they were male, though )

Kevin! Thank you, and I hope everything is going well with you, too!

While there are many memorable flamboyant white male characters, there are also many examples that are not. Tony Hills, Eastenders (BBC): Tony and Simon's first kiss Part 1 Part 2 Vito Spatafore, Sopranos I'm not a Glee fan, but I caught part of an episode the other day where Kurt was talking to someone who was definitely not flamboyant, but was questioning his sexuality. Dave Karofsky? Syed Masood, EastEnders (BBC) - Muslim gay character. There are several gay characters from Australian TV shows that I can remember, but I can't remember the shows to allow me to list (there have been a number over the years). However, I found a list of dramatic TV shows containing LGBT characters on Wikipedia. Some of these are definitely not flamboyant upper class white males (especially the females ) A wikipedia article with links to lists of LGBT characters. Comedies are more likely to use a stereotyped character, but even there there are exceptions. One of my favourites it the soap opera satire Soap. Billy Crystal plays a flamboyant gay character, but his boyfriend is not (closest gay footballer - another stereotype). One episode the boyfriend says he'll come out if Billy Crystal comes back to him (they'd broken up). At the end, a black actor (the scene was on a TV set) asks if he can date the boyfriend if Billy doesn't want to. Okay, minor parts, but they're there. Onto movies (Australian, of course): Head On, the story of a masculine greek young man coming to terms with his sexuality, featuring the very, very dream Alex Dimitriades. Also, The Sum of Us, a comedy about a dad's efforts to help his son find "Mr. Right", featuring a young Russell Crowe as the son. Yes, most of the gay characters are white males, but then that's true in general - most males in movies and TV shows are white. But there are certainly many examples of non-flamboyant, and a reasonable number of non-white male examples in TV shows and movies. It's just that the flamboyant ones tend to stand out

My personal view is that, in general, children should help their parents when their parents need that help (generally old age, but there are exceptions that), just like parents should help their children when their children need that help. That's in general, but there are always exceptions. Tipdin gave a good example of such an exception with his personal story. So I see it as a guiding principle, not a strait-jacket to be blindly followed. That makes the second option in the poll the closest to how I feel, but I don't think parent frugality is the criteria to be used as to when to deny help - it's one criteria, but it's not the only one or even the major one, and maybe insufficient by itself to make the judgement call.

Thanks, everyone! And since someone asked, here's the recipe for the Lemon Cheesecake I made:

Thanks everyone! I had a great day. Since the axe I got for Christmas a few years ago has been well an truly murdered, I'm looking forward to massacring the chainsaw I got for my birthday It gets it first tryout next weekend when the boys and I are off camping. As for cake... I spoilt myself and made what I think is the yummiest cheesecake ever. I was given the recipe about twenty years ago and I've made sure it's never been lost It's too rich to have very often, but once every two or three years is fine

Thanks, everyone, including those that left messages on my profile! Just for the record, I've turned 24 for the 2nd time....

Not quite. I think we agreed on something last year, or maybe the year before... I never said that anyone could change anything. I indicated that there are times that a person has an opportunity to change something, but I never said that they would be able to change anything I person's emotions can be changed in some situations. In particular, they can choose to use drugs to alter their emotions. Some people can also suppress their emotions for a period of time. They are still who they are, but their display and feeling of emotions has changed. However, in general, I agree that there are some characteristics that it is difficult, if not impossible, for someone to choose to change.

John, I think you hit the nail on the head when you commented on having a long running argument where the real issue turned out to be the people involved had different definitions of the same thing. That's something that's I've experienced myself many times and it's why a lot of debates in The Soapbox start with an attempt to define what we're talking about. You have your definition of 'free will' and I believe everyone understands where you're coming from. But that doesn't mean we have to accept your definition as being the correct one Yang Bang indicated this with the second post in this thread - it all gets down to definitions. Personally, I believe we all have the 'illusion' of free will. We make choices all the time. Those choices are influenced by many things but that doesn't mean we don't have free will. If your definition means that those influences means we don't have free will, then I would say the problem lies with your definition - it's too restrictive. Having choices doesn't mean having unlimited choices. If that's viewed as meaning we don't have free will then only someone or something that is omnipotent has free will, because only for them would there be unlimited choices. I disagree with that interpretation. The non-banal act of free will I can think of is whether to be like our parents or to be the opposite. I've met people who have made a deliberate choice to be different to their parents in some aspects. There was something about their parents they didn't like and they decided not to do the same. A very simple and trivial example is that both my wife and I have chosen not to be disciplinarians to our children to the extent that our parents were to us. We have learnt from the experience and used that to guide our choices on how we raise our boys. I know of people who are more extreme examples. Yes, we're all influenced, but does that mean we don't have a choice? It's whether those influences control us or whether they guide us. In the first case, we don't have free will. In the second we do. I'm in the second camp. Our experiences influence us, but they don't control us. We're all open to change - generally through new external influences - and I accept that not everyone takes the opportunity to change when it's presented, but the opportunity is there and some people do take it, which is part of the reason why I believe we have 'free will'.

There are records of homosexual individuals in many different societies around the world. I don't have any references handy, but I'm sure that there were such people amongst the American Indians, and these people often became shamans. As such, they were in positions of respect in their communities and I would expect that they had relationships. Jean Auel, in her 'Clan of the Cave Bear' series included homosexual characters and homosexual relationships. She's done an incredible amount of research on her novels, so I'm going to take from that that there is evidence for the possibility of homosexual relations in pre-historic times. I don't see her including that sort of detail for the sake of the story, especially as they don't appear to have added anything significant to the stories - just local 'colouring'.

From today's Column 8 in the Sydney Morning Herald (always a good read, though the topics can drift over a number of days so reading regularly is a good idea. One ongoing topic at the moment is school report comments, such as "Ian is completely out to sea and seems to be thoroughly enjoying the voyage.")

I'd also like to thank C James for designing the banner logo for the anthology Thanks, everyone!

I'll just comment that on a practical notes, asking someone to write a story of at least three chapters in a month and a half is a big ask I would suggest that they post the first chapter in that timeframe, because otherwise you're only going to get the speed demons. Now, as for stories, I remember reading a short story a long time ago where the lead character was mute. I can't remember if he was also deaf (from memory he was, and he 'heard' dialogue through lip reading). It was a really sweet story, but I can't remember the name and I can't find it with a quite search on Nifty. Sorry

Not Like Us by C James Sometimes, strange is in the eye of the beholder. :nuke: :nuke: Spoilers Below!!! :nuke: :nuke:

From personal experience and from comments from other authors, the more established you become as an author, the LESS feedback you get There are going to be exceptions to this, but since I've had a few authors mention it at various times, it seems fairly consistent. So, getting less feedback as time goes by is not necessarily an indication that there are less readers. As for the 'writing to please oneself', I do know that there are authors that do that. I'm not one of them myself, though I enjoy the job of writing when I can do it, but we're all different and there are legitimately authors who fit into that category. For the ones who write for others, there's quite a spectrum in what level of feedback they 'require'. Some authors are looking for a lot of feedback. Others are happy just to have a story out there to be read, without needing to know who is reading and how many (these tend to be more experienced authors - I think all first time authors want to know that people are reading what they wrote I know I did ). I have personally suggested to some authors that, from time to time, they explicitly ask the readers for feedback. You don't want to do that on every chapter of every story, but if they ask from time to time they'll generally get comments from the readers. They just have to word the request in such a way that it encourages the readers to respond. The interaction between authors and readers can be complex and there are a lot of permutations and combinations. There's no one pattern that fits all cases and all personalities. I don't have a problem with an author asking if anyone is reading there story, even if it's an experienced and well-respected author. Established authors are human too, with human frailties including anxiety about whether what they're writing is crap. I believe the more experienced an author is the less they have that anxiety, but I can assure you that most, if not all, of them will still have it.

Snopes take on Tips on Pumping Gas Anything that looks like a chain email is likely to be on Snopes already Overall, the article is that most of the items are in dispute - they may be valid but they may not be relevant, and the amount of impact they have is uncertain.

A long way to go, but it's progress Thanks, Agaith for the link and heads up! In Australia, Ian Roberts (rugby) was forced out of the closet by rumours, according to his autobiography. Daniel Kowalski (swimmer) waited until he had retired. Matt Mitcham (diver) went to the Olympic Games as an openly gay athlete and won a gold medal Otherwise, I'm struggling to think of any gay athletes who are close to being household names here. I'm leaving Ian Thorpe off the list - despite constant rumours, he has denied being gay and I'll take him at his word unless someone can show me evidence otherwise. There are a significant number of gay 'celebrities' outside of sports here in Australia (Bob Brown, Leader of the Federal Greens; Penny Wong, Minister for something or other; Michael Kirby, now retired High Court Judge; Kerryn Phelps, former Australian Medical Association president; plus numerous people in the entertainment industry), but not many sportsmen or sportswomen.

I prefer single stories OR a series that was written to be a series OR a series where each story is largely standalone. Unfortunately, I've had some bad experiences with some trilogies where the first two books were great, but the third (and supposedly the dramatic conclusion) were appalling. That's turned me off trilogies (and similar). I'm happy to read standalone stories in the same universe, though (such as Tom Clancy's Ryanverse mentioned earlier), even if they're not all the same quality. One example is Frank Herbert's Dune series, where I found every second book to be a dud, but the others were great and made the series worthwhile.

Some of the players would definitely be supportive. Some, however, I'm not sure of. One of the comments in the article in The Age newspaper: I think the younger generation is overall more confident in being out, and equally I think there is a lot more tangible support in that age group. That's why I think people like Steven Davies are going to be more common over the next decade. Matt Mitcham, and he's not a synchronised diver. One of the synchronised divers is reported as being gay on Wikipedia, but I'm taking that one with a huge grain of salt. Before that, the major Australian gay sportsman was Ian Roberts, the rugby player. Most definitely

England's Steven Davies has come out. One thing I like is the following quote from the article: He's only 24, so he's potentially got a long international career ahead of him.

Just a quick note to say that I've moved this topic to the Games and Humor forum. I didn't make a post in the thread to say that because I didn't want to mess up the story

I have no idea what that means. However, I can say that there will be no change here as it would be too resource intensive to track what people read and store for if/when they may return. It's not realistic to expect it. (See FanFiction.net which is a MUCH larger site than us. They don't do it either for the same reason) I'm guessing that this is more a browser issue, in that his browser isn't showing read links. Cookies (as someone else has suggested) are too unworkable, at least for now. LOL - I was going to quote some of the other posts, but I decided against it. I'll just say that what we have now is a lot easier for the site and site staff than what was there before, and has the potential to become absolutely brilliant. However, I don't see any enhancements being made for at least 12 months, simply because it'll take that long to bed all the existing features into place. One particular bug that was found recently requires Myr to go into the database and fix things there... happily that's not something that will occur often, but it's already occurred a couple of times. We have to wait until all those things get sorted out, since the idea was to REDUCE Myr's workload, not increase it As for some of the other things, they're teething issues because we're still in the process of bringing everything over from the old system into the new. We can't backdate story dates, so they're all appearing as if they were just published (which, in one sense, they are). So, while I thought Daffy has some good suggestions, we're all going to have to be patient. What we have now is, I think, good. When there's time to breath again, we can make it better, but let's not get ahead of ourselves