Graeme

After years of denying it, apparently he's admitted being gay in an interview that's due to screen tonight. Ian Thorpe reportedly set to reveal homosexuality in tell-all interview with Sir Michael Parkinson This guy's been harassed for years on the subject. If he's actually gay, I feel sorry for the way he's been hounded. If he's not, I feel sorry for the constant questioning that's going to continue. Do I care if he's gay? Not really. I think it would be great as a major sporting role model, but I don't want him to come out because of that. I'm still waiting for the day when it doesn't matter.

Beautiful

That, I've heard of. I even used it in a short story, once. Ouch; if it's worse than Ross River Fever, I don't want to know about it.... Get well soon!

With Doug and Colin's anniversary coming up later this month, I couldn't help think of them when this came up on the news last night Marriage still strong, 80 years on Best wishes, Doug and Colin!

Referrals soar at Australia's only clinic for transgender youth as support programs get fresh funding

Impressive! Just goes to show how wrong stereotyping can be. That's a massive crowd for a gay pride march, especially for a nation that is reportedly 99% Muslim. It shows a lot of tolerance and acceptance for the LGBT members of the community.

If anyone wants some more options to consider, here's a set of photos of some of the Italian, Spanish, and German teams to consider.

I got upset by that decision, too, even though it won't directly affect me. It's got the potential to influence a lot of bad decisions in the future where discrimination on religious grounds could be allowed because of it. That's why I was able to guess what you were talking about. Hopefully, future cases will narrow the scope of that decision....

When Aaron and Rain from The Mail Crew were editing for me, I never, repeat never, got a story or chapter back without at least one correction on every page. I'm still kicking myself for the one time that I could've reached the milestone of a page without corrections if I'd just used a possessive apostrophe correctly.... So I'm used to getting lots of corrections. To me, every correction makes the final result that much better. It doesn't matter if it's punctuation, typos, or complete re-writing of sentences to make them clearer -- it all goes towards the production of a hopefully quality product in the end.

Er... which 'this' are you talking about? I'm guessing it's Burwell vs Hobby Lobby Stores Inc but as that's not what we're discussing here, it's unclear

I can see the merits of both cases. One thing I'm very conscious of, though, is that even if a story is posted serially, once it's completed it will be read sequentially. It has be able to be read both ways. My current preference is to read completed stories, mainly because if I had to wait too long between chapters of a serialised story, I can lose track of what's going on. On the other hand, having a break allows for more thought by the reader on what happened, possibly gaining more insight into the story than if the reader simply moved onto the next chapter. As an author, I made the decision awhile ago not to start posting a story unless I was sure I was going to finish it. That usually meant having several chapters written as well as a good understanding of where the story will end. I won't even start writing unless I've got that ending in mind. I don't think I could write something that was open-ended.

According to SCOTUSblog, the judge explicitly declined to rule that there's a fundamental right to same-sex marriage, but rules purely on equality grounds. That's good enough for me

Sounds like a great time for everyone (apart from the AC and those poor souls who had to wait for later trains)!

A nice article Thanks, Cynus! Even a real failure isn't bad. When I'm doing a computer training course, I learn more when the exercises go wrong than when they go right. They go right when I following the instructions properly. When they go wrong, I learn more about what the software can and can't do, and where it's vulnerable. With writing, if a story doesn't work, I learn more from what went wrong. I've got two concrete examples in mind. In my "Superhero" short story, I tried to write a story with an unreliable narrator. About half my readers got that, and about half didn't see the point in the story. If you don't realise that the narrator is unreliable, it's a nothing story. Obviously, I needed to give more hints to the reader so that they 'suspend' their 'suspension of disbelief' so that they question more about what they're being told without leaving the story itself. It turned out to be a lot trickier than I thought, and I didn't complete succeed. The other example was my first attempt to incorporate a minor mystery in one of my novels. When the story posted, I knew from the comments people made that a lot had worked it out within the first few chapters. I took the lessons learnt from that and the next time I tried a similar thing, I made it much more complex and difficult for the reader to work out. From the (minor) failure of my first attempt, I had a much more successful second try

Cynus, transgender issues are very important. Trying to educate people about the challenges involved and how to approach the issues with compassion and acceptance is important. That article, however, put me off side as soon as I worked out what they were trying to say...and I don't consider myself someone who has a lot of prejudices. The article was simply pointing the finger in what I consider to be an obscenely wrong direction. There's definitely a finger to be pointed, because society doesn't deal well with transgender individuals, but pointing the finger at the wrong group of people doesn't help. Now, as a way to start a discussion, it's fine I'm happy to have a discussion, because transgender youths are in a difficult position. Working out what can be done to help them is something I support. If that's what comes from that article, then that's great. If people start trying to stop doctors and nurses from recording the sex (not gender) of a patient, though, I'd be very concerned.

Sorry, I gave up partway through the article. It's so over the top and extreme, it makes having a sensible discussion impossible. The idea that it's the doctor's fault for determining the sex of the child is ridiculous. Working on the edges of the healthcare industry, I understand the medical difference between 'sex' and 'gender'. The doctor is assigning the 'sex' of the child, not the gender. Society assumes that the gender will be the same as the sex until shown otherwise -- which is what transgender is all about. You can't tell if a child is transgender at birth! If the objection is assuming gender is the same as sex, then blame society, not the doctors. In the medical field, a doctor needs to know if a person is male or female sexually, because there are some treatments that are contraindicated for one sex and not the other. As an aside, there's a medical condition for neo-natals where the sex of the child isn't identified until up to three weeks after birth. So much for the doctors doing this as 'routine'. There's also the XXY chromosome pattern that's a medical condition that can sometimes require additional medical intervention after birth. These are things that I didn't see mentioned in that over-hyped article. As for the stupid comment in the article about boys can be doctors and girls can be nurses, the author of the article is clearly ignorant. There are multiple counter examples, including one of the very popular Bernstein Bears kids books that emphasises repetitively that the only thing that the sex decides is who will be a father and who will be a mother. For everything else, the sex doesn't matter as to what occupation or interests the baby will have in later life. If the author thinks that society tells them otherwise, that's not the fault of the doctors and nurses -- that's the fault of society. Overall (and I didn't finish the article because there was too much rubbish in it), if you believe there's an issue then it's in society's implicit assumption that sex equals gender. Fix that assumption, not the medical staff that necessarily need to identify the sex of the child so appropriate medical treatments can be conducted in the future.

I'm glad (though a little surprised) to see the Australian movie "The Sum of Us" on the list near the end, but I didn't see Head On or The Object of My Affection. Head On is an Australian movie about a young Greek man struggling with being gay. It's a movie I wanted to see when it was in the cinema, but I was still deeply in the closet at the time and couldn't bring myself to go. It apparently has a very graphic masturbation scene involving the lead actor, a very dreamy looking Alex Dimitriades... (he's a lot older now, but still very good looking) The Object of My Affection is a romantic comedy about a woman who falls in love with a gay guy. This one I've seen, and I can still remember the scene where Jennifer Aniston's love interest tells her that he wants to be with the guy he's been seeing and not her....

Federal judge rules Indiana's ban on gay marriage unconstitutional This ruling has not been stayed (yet) so same-sex marriage licenses are being issues in Indiana. The quotes in the article from the judge's ruling are particular inspiring:

The decision is being appealed to the Supreme Court, so we'll have to wait to see what happens there. The Supreme Court has (I believe) only one more day to review potential new cases (26th June) before they take a break, and this one probably won't be discussed at that conference (not enough time for preparation). I'm not sure when they'll start considering new cases again.

Utah ban on same-sex marriage nullified The Tenth Circuit is the first at the appeals court level to rule on the current wave of federal court decisions to strke down same-sex marriage bans. They do so with a two-to-one decision. Unfortunately, the ruling doesn't take effect immediately:

There are rules? When did this happen?

One comment I received early on in my writing career was that the dialogue didn't have to be real. It only only had to feel real. As has been pointed out above, real speech is full of hesitations and filler words, but they're rarely needed for the author to convey the dialogue to the reader. Sometimes, yes they're needed, but most of the time they're not. In real life, we tend to filter out those hesitations and fillers, and it's the filtered dialogue that is generally what gets written into stories. As for run-on sentences, I've got no real preference. Colin's statement above is a good example, though, of the options: That's two sentences, but I suspect that if were spoken, it would sound like one run-on sentence and that's the way I initially read it. It's like the classic "could of" for "could've". What might sound like a run-on sentence can sometimes be written as multiple sentences. Not always, but sometimes. Whether the author writes it as multiple sentences or as a single run-on sentence is up to that author. It's partially a stylistic question, with the only reservation being whether it makes it difficult for the reader to read. If it doesn't, then I see no problem with a run-on sentence in dialogue.

I temporarily switched to OpenDNS to get the IP address I needed, but once the site came back up, I was able to switch back to my ISPs.

One of the regular online cartoons I read regularly is the Alex cartoon at the Telegraph. They're also posted at www.alexcartoon.com, but that tends to run a day behind (probably due to timezones -- the Telegraph website recognises I'm in Australia and shows me the new one early). For those not familiar with this cartoon, Alex works for Megabank in London, and the cartoon covers lots of financial, banking, and other issues. The characters tend to be cynical, status-aware, money-grabbers. It always has a twist in the last frame of the cartoon. It might be an acquired taste, but I like it. Anyway, there's a story thread going through the cartoon at the moment regarding a gay wedding. It started with the June 3 cartoon, and continued on June 4, June 5, and June 6. A few other cartoons intervened, and then the story continued from June 13 and through to the current date (June 19 for me). I suspect it'll go for a few more days before the story thread concludes.

Thank, Des. That's good to know. I was concerned if iiNet had removed GA from their DNS servers -- AD might've been next!