Posts by Heather Gaye
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Wonder what the comments were on those blogs when HC's office was attacked with an axe... maybe that was pre-blogging days. I suspect the comments would have had a somewhat different flavour, or am I being uncharitable?
That was my first thought. They're actually not especially nutty at all. Only one of the "evil lefties were asking for it" ilk. Responses are marginally more typical when Selwyn was jailed, but more about the weirdness of a sedition charge.
It almost looks like there was a time that kiwiblog wasn't "that bad". A brighter, more innocent time...
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You can't go judging them by their online persona, which is often more a representation of their frustrations than their whole person.
...Of course you could make the point that perhaps our online selves are who really are, and we're just too shy to be complete arseholes face to face.
I find the whole internet communication thing eminently fascinating. I think people automatically assume that all communication is inherently similar, and I think that's a big mistake. Every time we discover a new medium, we have to learn how to "do" it - to manage its unique set of characteristics, and also address the assumptions we make about our audience and our own message.
I wager we're by far most able to communicate in an environment where we're responding in real time to a small number of people (say, 1-5) whose faces we can see, and whose first language is the same as ours. Whether we're less inclined to say stuff that makes us sound like arseholes is nothing to do with us being "shy" or "cowardly" and everything to do with finding an optimal way of making ourselves understood.
Adjust any of those characteristics and you have to adjust the way you parse all your communication - your own and others'. Some forms of media are relatively easy to negotiate, but often a change in a characteristic triggers a whole bunch of behavioural changes that the subject may not even notice.
On the internet, you have the ability to broadcast anonymously a crafted message to an unknown-but-probably-large number of people who are equally anonymous. On forums, it's sort of real-time, but you still get to think about what you're going to say. In some people this triggers a bunch of unhealthy assumptions about the one's own value in contrast to the rest of one's audience, and so they appear as trolls, or at the least, arseholes. Others assume their audience are as aware of their "human-ness" as the RL people they deal with, and tend to be more easily offended by abstract debate. Another common behaviour I've noticed is that many people tend to be a lot more open about their own lives on the net. Guaranteed anonymity - specifically facelessness - seems to lead to complacency about privacy that ends up having the opposite effect. It's all really interesting, I think.
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I went there straight off the plane and was seriously disappointed by the experience.
I've heard/read similar comments about Flat White as well. I guess no place is immune to trainee (or even sloppy) baristas; especially in a country that doesn't have much of an espresso culture. Actually, I quite like the places that you can tell what kind of coffee you'll get by who's manning the machine that day. Also, personal taste counts for a lot - the triple-shot in FW wasn't nearly as strong as I'd normally opt for, but the blend & the extraction was so clean that I didn't care. Started making me question whether I've inadvertently substituted "strong" for "good" all these years.
To be fair, on my 2000-01 stint in London I forsook Bar Italia after discovering Monmouth, but I only ever remember it to be good. Granted, standards drop when you're there for any length of time.
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I've never been to London and LMFAO hearing people bleat about how horrible it is to be there.
Outside of the coffee debate, two items are pertinent: 1) it's my favourite place in the world by a long shot. 2) living there is utter hell.
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Apropos of Fathers' groups: I reckon there's probably a place for such a support / lobby group, given they seem to arise from some quite heartbreaking-sounding stories.
However, I'm not sure if it's telling or just extremely unfortunate that they turn so militant. Either they're ruining their message by getting so aggro that people are scared of them, or they were *always* the kind of guys that former partners don't want near their kids.
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I usually favour flat whites, but I rapidly switched to double espresso while I was there.
..while I was in London, I mean. Obvs noone except Flat White knows what a flat white is, but generally anything with milk in it was way too milky & insufficiently coffee-y.
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to add to that I have yet to find anything approaching decent coffee.
Was in London for June. I can feel your pain.
If you're in London, you'll have to head into the west end. Monmouth and Bar Italia are still really good, but Flat White, on Berwick St, is not only the best coffee in London, but possibly the best coffee I've ever had.
I usually favour flat whites, but I rapidly switched to double espresso while I was there.
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re: direct link from Sam F
wow, reading that reminds me a whole lot of The Castle. "there is no one section... it's... just the vibe... of the thing".
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I love it how the left's answer to creating a thriving film industry is compulsion rather than creating decent films...
This reminds me of the musings of a young Act supporter on nzmusic.com some years back - he disapproved of NZ On Air funding because it should be up to the market to choose which music was sufficiently deserving of success. Then he ranted at length about how much he hated Brooke Fraser, Dave Dobbyn and Elemenop.
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Almost all of the females that I have been involved with talked about "having children one day" in a way that really meant "sometime in a decade perhaps".
Speaking from personal experience, I wonder how many of these young women mean "I don't really want children". It took me a divorce and my 34th birthday to finally admit that I don't want children (I like 'em, I just don't want my own). Before I was going to "have children one day".
Don't underestimate the massive social pressure just to have kids - a kind of underpinning expectation that all (normal) women want kids; I'd always just assumed that I wanted kids - just "not yet". It wasn't until I read blogs by women that described the pain of wanting children and not being able to have them that I realised they have a desire that I lack, wholly and completely.