Posts by Joshua Drummond
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Hard News: I Am: An authentic autism…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I don't have ASD but I can definitely talk to the anxiety, and it can be weird all right. Really glad your boys are doing well, with jobs and such. I know people with ASD and/or severe anxiety who are doing way better than anyone ever expected, and have even outstripped their more neurotypical peers in a lot of ways. Like you say, it gets better.
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a threshold of constant stress and anxiety. I remember that: I’d touch my son’s skin and it would be hot. Hour after hour, day after day, stimuli he couldn’t cope with had him in constant fight or flight mode. Can you imagine living that way?
I can. That was me as a kid, and also for a really big bit of my adult life. Learned a few coping strategies since then, but I still remember the surprise I felt only a couple of years ago when a professional confirmed that it’s not normal to feel like there’s a network of permanently live wires under your skin. And it’s only now that I have longer periods of time of not feeling like that that I can appreciate how savagely taxing it is to be that anxious all the time.
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A couple of Maori columnists coming in from this post being shared around on Twitter:
The excellent Lizzie Marvelly is Te Arawa (Ngati Whakaue) and she counts as an MSM columnist over at the Herald.
And there's Tommy Wilson over at the Bay of Plenty Times.
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Speaker: Blinded by the white, in reply to Carol Stewart,
I miss Tapu Misa's columns in the Herald.
Shit yes. They were really good.
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Also, re. my last post - I forgot to add a hefty trigger warning (rape, mutilation) for The Sparrow. It's a fantastic book but there are some harrowing bits in there.
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Up Front: Well, Read Women, in reply to Brodie Davis,
does anyone have recomendations for woman writers doing hardish sci/fi similar
Mary Russell comes to mind, she's written some fantastic hard SF. The Sparrow (and its sequel) are the most moving SF I've ever read. Basically: Jesuits go into space to meet aliens. It doesn't go well.
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Speaker: Sex, monsters and outrage, in reply to Greville Whittle,
I think the next question to ask is "How much did the school pay for the pamphlets?
I can field that one: they were free (this kind of material usually is.) In this case - as one of the stories points out - the teacher of the class found them tucked under a windscreen wiper of the car. I doubt a school would ever need to pay for this sort of stuff, even if they were inclined to.
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Speaker: Sex, monsters and outrage, in reply to Dylan Reeve,
Smith says this was just a case of one student not having a clear understanding of the material."
I feel like he misspoke. It's far from an ideal response, but when journalists are crawling over your every statement and you're perhaps not used to fronting media pressure this is going to happen. What I suspect is happening is that Smith is going in to bat for his school and his staff under media pressure. When it comes to statements, surely the one that matters is
"Papanui High School is an inclusive school and proud of its diversity and we, in no way, hold these opinions."
The school assembly being run by Equippers is a bit of a different matter, although I don't like that SEN poster's attempt to conflate that with what happened with the sex ed - they're clearly very different animals. Schools are under a lot of pressure to host this sort of stuff, as a.) they tend to be portrayed as educational and free, and b.) they get stung for religious intolerance when they don't allow them. When I was at primary school we had a bunch of life-skills classes that were actually run by the Baha'i. My wife Louise is a relief teacher and sees a lot of that sort of thing. It's interesting hearing teacher perspectives on it; hopefully some will show up here.
Bottom line is that I don't like the way that people with a proselytizing agenda worm their way into schools either - the sooner the Bible In Schools loophole gets shut down the better - but to conflate that real problem with what happened in that sex-ed class seems like a pretty wrongheaded approach to the problem. -
I feel like I perhaps didn't make the point strongly enough that (as Craig points out) that the viewpoint of those flyers isn't really the preserve of nutcases. It's incredibly prevalent, particularly in relatively vanilla religious circles, not to mention in society at large. The nutcases behind the pamphlets just articulate it a bit more bluntly and honestly than many do.
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So that was the first full game of cricket I've ever watched. I took breaks - had lots of work to do - and towards the end I set myself up with my drawing tablet in the lounge. Fuck all drawing got done. With about 100 runs to go my wife (watching it since she got home from work) scolded me for yelling at the TV. I started a demented alternative commentary on Twitter for non-cricket people to enjoy but I was too into the actual game to make a decent hash of it. Then the last 20 balls or so... I don't know if I've ever been as tense watching anything.
Then Vettori's four, and shortly afterwards, Elliot's six to finish.We both yelled at the telly.
What an amazing game. Drama even someone who's never followed cricket could completely appreciate.