[Alice]

Living in the Newcastle area, I can’t find too many places or events that are not CD friendly.

The two largest shopping centres, Charlestown Square and Westfield Kotara are never a problem. Even if there was someone who wanted to be a problem, security would boot them out quite quickly.

Being currently into the 1950s pinup style, I’ve found that events such as the Kurri Kurri Nostalgia Festival, and almost every car related event that involves cars from the ’50s or older is fine. Virtually every shop I’ve ever been in has been fine, and some have even gone out of their way to offer special late afternoon/evening openings for me or for CDs in general.

I guess that the lack of pointers on specific places to go is because you’d have to list just about everywhere. It would probably be more meaningful to produce a list of places to avoid, but I’m not sure that we really want the negativity that such a list would imply.

[Alice]

I believe that social attitudes have changed significantly over the past few decades. Back in the 1950s and earlier, the wife beater would have been generally more acceptable but today, a husband who beats his wife is acceptable only within limited cultural groups (largely because some religions condone it), while the vast majority of people would emphatically reject such behaviour.

Crossdressing, on the other hand, has become considerably more acceptable over the decades, except in some religious groups. I have found that the more comfortable you are in letting others see this aspect of yourself, the more accepting others are of you.

I’m finding that a lot of teenagers and young adults today consider crossdressers “cool”, regardless of age.

So, in today’s Australian society, I believe that a husband who crossdresses is far more acceptable than a husband who beats up his wife.

[Alice]

I find that the free software package, The Gimp is very useful for editing images. Being software on your own computer means that, unlike web based applications, there’s no risk of someone else ending up with a copy of the images you edit.

http://www.gimp.org/

[Alice]

From experience, I’d suggest that in any discussion with political content, you will need to clearly define the scope of the discussion in writing in advance, and you will need to make extra effort to maintain control of the direction that the discussion takes.

Inevitably, within our community we have a range of political views that reflect almost the entire spectrum of the wider community, and it’s inevitable that, given the opportunity, someone will drag the discussion towards their own political opinion. If that’s allowed to happen, it’s then inevitable that others with opposing views will either try to respond, or will be offended by the direction that the discussion has taken or the fact that they didn’t get a opportunity to respond.

Undesirable and offensive political discussion does damage our community. If someone is badgered with a political opinion that conflicts with their own, they are likely to avoid the person doing the badgering, which may lead them to cease attending events where that person is likely to be present. For example, that’s why I no longer attend Newcastle cafe nights.

[Alice]

Facebook uses many different methods of connecting accounts and suggesting people you might know.

One of these is that if someone uses “friend finder” to check their email contact list (yahoo, etc) for friends on facebook, facebook keeps the list of email addresses as people that that person may know, even if the email addresses don’t exist on any facebook profiles. They may also collect the name associated with that email address in the address book.

Similarly, it is possible to type (or paste) an email address into the facebook search box in the top bar and if there is a profile connected to that email address, find that profile. I’ve done this numerous times to find people I know. If there is no match, facebook retains the fact that a user searched for that email address as a possible person that they might know.

It was also possible to send an email facebook friend request to someone who wasn’t on facebook and invite them to join. I’m not sure if that’s still possible or not, but I think that it is.

If you later create a facebook profile using an email address, or add an extra email address to an existing profile, facebook will look for any existing connections to that email address. This can literally take a few days of database trawling on facebook’s part.

It will automatically send you friend requests from any previous emailed requests unless the sender withdrew the request, and there doesn’t appear to be any time limit on that. I added a yahoo email address to my facebook profile a while ago and it generated a friend request from someone I had added and subsequently been unfriended by during the 2 years between getting the email friend request and adding that email address to my profile!

Similarly, all the possible connections to your email address translate into friend suggestions.

Also, if you view another person’s profile that increases the chance that you will be shown to them as someone they may know.

There are rumours (including from some former facebook staff) that there are “shadow profiles” of people who have not created facebook profiles but are connected to other people by their email address being extracted from multiple address books, the name being cross-referenced from multiple address books to increase the likelihood that it is accurate, data matching such as being referred to in facebook posts, family connections, text associated with photos, etc. Once that shadow profile has several people that they are likely to know, facebook then considers it likely that people who know the shadowed person might know each other. If a shadowed person joins facebook, they will never know that they were shadowed but all of the friend suggestions etc will fall into line very quickly.

It has been suggested that facebook would like to enable facial recognition for photo tagging, and the initial implementation would be to suggest tags for photos. With shadow profiles, those suggestions could already exist and joining facebook could trigger an avalanche of tag suggestions, particularly if you add a profile photo that is a good clear face shot.

Having said all of that, I’m comfortable that my identical twin brother and I are both on facebook and have around 67 friends in common including neighbours, friends, family, work clients, etc. I’m really not hiding any more, particularly with having long brightly painted nails all the time since early last year.

[Alice]

All of my wigs have fringes.

I found that with a wig that was significantly different to my natural hair colour, the hair on the sides of my forehead would often show through the fringe and be very noticeable. The hair in the middle of the top of the forehead wasn’t as bad when brushed back under the wig, but I’d occasionally catch it with my brush when brushing the fringe of the wig, pulling hair of a different colour into the fringe.

[Alice]

Oh, and if you add mimto in the middle of those, they become the type of transgender person that a person is attracted to, hence

gynemimtophilia is the sexual attraction to, or fantasies about, a person who identifies as or presents as female, but was assigned as male at birth. It doesn’t distinguish between drag queen, CD, pre-op, post-op, etc.

andromimtophilia is the sexual attraction to, or fantasies about, a person who identifies as or presents as male, but was assigned as female at birth.

[Alice]

I had a similar problem when I bought a new wig a few months ago. The wig is a very different colour to my own hair, and my hair was showing down the sides of my forehead. I also found that some of my hair was coming down below the front edge of the wig at the middle of my forehead, between my widows peaks.

Thanks in part to a comment from Jenny from the Central Coast, I solved the problem by using a pencil to mark the line of where the wig came to, then taking off the wig and shaving the hair off so that there was no hair there to show past the edges of the wig.

Doing so made my hairline more rounded to follow the outline of the wig, and as a side effect it made my widows peaks look less severe than they used to, which gave me the confidence to go out without a wig, which I’ve been doing regularly since.

[Alice]

I hadn’t looked at this thread for quite a while. Since I last looked at it, I’ve learned the word that defines my sexual orientation.

Gynephilia – sexual attraction to women.

When I’m presenting myself as a male, I’m deemed “straight”, but when I’m presenting myself as female, I’m deemed “lesbian”. By saying that I’m gynephilic, I avoid involving my own gender in the description of who I’m attracted to.

Conversely, the term Androphilia means sexual attraction to men.

[Alice]

With the move to tgr.net.au, will existing email addresses @trannyradio.com now cease to exist, or will the old domain continue to exist for mail redirection?

[Alice]

I have finally come up with the only effective way to use herbs to increase breast size. I’m not confident that Amanda will allow it to stay here, but here goes…

Firstly, start up an online business selling herbs for breast growth. Sell a cheap blend of herbs that are reputed to have some phyto-estrogen content, but make sure that the pills contain enough filler to ensure that the active ingredients aren’t concentrated enough to cause harm. Name the product “huge breasts” or some such, and use photos of naturally well endowed women to pretend that your product works.

If your web site looks convincing enough, and you spam enough forums, you’ll sell enough of your cheap garbage herbs at vastly inflated prices to pay for implants.

Yes, it’s tongue in cheek, but seriously, it’s the only way that herbs are going to give you bigger breasts.

[Alice]

I hadn’t looked at the stats in ages, and haven’t been on the forums here much due to work commitments, but I’m still showing as number 8 on the list.

That genuinely surprises me. I thought that I would have been well and truly overtaken and pushed off the top 10 by now!

[Alice]

I’m predominantly left handed but do a few things right handed.

[Alice]

I’m in the process of moving my belly dance classes to Thursdays, which means no dance classes en femme but clears Wednesday nights (unless my wife organises something else without asking).

I’m interested in coming along, but I am concerned about the set menu, price and minimum group size of 10.

I am making an effort to cut back on meals, in part because of my weight and in part for money reasons. I know that I have very poor self control when it comes to food. If I was served a 3 course set menu meal, I’d feel compelled to eat it, even though I’d break my diet and be sick for days afterwards.

I feel that it would be better to have a normal open menu to choose from, then divide the bill according to how much each person ate, as we do at the Newcastle cafe nights.

I agree with Peta on the group size being a problem. At our cafe nights, we have between 3 and 6 about half of the time. We have had weeks where there have only been 2 of us (twice so far this year), and have had 10 or more only twice in the 15 weeks so far this year.

While the Central Coast is closer to Sydney and might get more Sydney girls coming along than we do in Newcastle (particularly if it’s close to a railway station or easily accessible from the F3), I would be very concerned that you might struggle to get the numbers if you set a minimum of 10.

[Alice]

I’d also suggest a shopping centre but I’d strongly recommend somewhere that you know. Somewhere that you’re not going to draw attention by being lost.

Much as having your wife along might seem helpful, it actually increases the risk of being recognised. If someone who knows both of you recognises her, they’ll probably then look at you and recognise you too. If you are going to go out together, you want to be fairly sure that you’re not going to run into someone you know.

Personally, I go to the same shopping centres as I go to in boy mode, sometimes on the same day.