Indulge me in your special interest.

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I know I'm not the first to have a thread dedicated to special interest thread, but this one is a little different than the last one.

You know how we're not supposed to talk about our special interest so much because we might bore people to tears? Well this place is different. Blab to your heart's content. I promise I will read it, and respond to it.

Have fun people.

As we head for the countryside, notice how the road we're walking up seems to cut such a straight line through the plan of the old village streets. The area has a lot of roads like this, dating back to the days when there were tramlines along them. At one time, there was a tram every 2-3 minutes from here to the town centre, not one bus an hour like it is now! After the trams were retired, trolleybuses took over; this was the first town in the country to install trolleybuses on this scale, and the last to retire them. Just here, the inconspicuous little alleyway (a "snicket" in the local dialect) used to be the entrance to the local railway station. The whole of the housing estate here used to be a huge goods yard, and that little bit of wall just there is the last remnant of the once impressive Victorian railway architecture.

As we get into the countryside, observant eyes will notice that this isn't the pristine wilderness that it might appear at first glance. Looking from above the now bricked up mouth of the old railway tunnel, we can see the contours of the three former cuttings leading off from the corners of the huge triangle that once contained a railway station complete with six platforms; two of which were precariously attached to the sides of viaduct spanning the steep, narrow valley. The village which was served by this station is over a mile away and up a 400ft tall hill, and the driveway was never lit because the railway companies and local corporation couldn't decide who should pay for it. A short tramway between station and village was also suggested but never got built, partly because the route was needed for the output of a coal mine a little further down the valley.

Now overgrown with beautiful flowers and birch trees, and making a perfect high-rise hotel for rabbits, the many small mine tippings look almost like prehistoric burial mounds, and the quarries make it look like huge giants once feasted on the scenery. The local town was once known as the "wool capital of the world" because of its importance as a centre for wool trading, weaving and dyeing. But the landscape here tells of the industries which preceded that. Finding frogs, toads and newts is easy because almost every beck contains the remains of several mill ponds. The many streams appropriately named "Red Beck" make it clear that there is plenty of iron ore around, and rooting around in the plunge pools in the becks soon turns up a few small lumps of coal. The retreating glaciers at the end of the last ice age also provided plenty of good clay. The local stone is of such quality that is was used in the construction of the Houses of Parliament.

Quarrying, ironmaking and obtaining the resources for it reshaped these valleys. And what hard work it was. Each local mine would have been a family business. Dad at the coal-face, Mum at the pit-head, and the children dragging the ore between the two. The coal seams are so shallow that only the small children could move swiftly along the cuttings, and Dad would have spent all day laid on his side. Miners could be spotted by their "row of buttons" - thick scabs over each vertebra of their spines from scraping their backs on the low ceilings. The earliest records kept of accidents and injuries make horrifying reading, for the casual acceptance of the risks as much as for the suffering of the victims.

The workers for the many quarries that were opened built the many small hamlets; each often just a single row of cottages. Right here in Yorkshire we can visit such place as Moscow, Egypt, The Walls of Jericho (rather appropriately now tumbled down), World's End, and, my favourite, Who'd've Thought It? I love the punning on the biblical references; the more foreign ones are references to victories in the wars being fought against Napoleon. The iron industry at the time was growing its reputation for producing the best iron for making cannon; it was so famed that not having access to it was even mentioned by the military men of the Continental Army at the time of the American War of Independence.

The quarrymen's cottages look different to those in the bigger villages. That was where the woolcombers and weavers lived. Before the advent of steam power, these people would have worked at home, their distinctive three storey cottages would have had one floor dedicated to their work area - often the top floor where the light was best. If being employed at a craft in your own home seems like a good way to work, well, they thought so too. When the switch to huge powered mills in the town happened, many local people joined the Luddites in their rebellion against industrialisation. This non-conformist streak seems to be part of the local character, as the area was early to adopt Baptism and Methodism despite severe penalties for doing so, and industrial unrest at the local mills was pivotal in the formation of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), a forerunner of the modern Labour Party.

That's enough local history. I'm boring myself now!

it begun with drawing. then the drawing intersected with anime, cartoons, manga and books. My world filled with imaginary characters and I used to imagine their every move and draw it out. My friends inhabited some of these characters - i assigned one for each. I was a character too. Draw during the day, read in the evening, watch anime in the morning and the afternoon. School got in the way a bit but my dream was to move to Japan and become a mangaka. I was so dedicated to my dream back then. Then life also got in the way and I was forbidden to draw because my grades were bad. I had to study and I used to read manga in secret. Drawing in secret - idiotic parents. I went on to study Arabic and Politics and Sociology and other things I am not so passionate about and even though i never stopped drawing i feel this huge void that I've lost a lot of time on things I am less keen on. I feel an obsession to return to drawing and manga and that world. I want to go to Japan and make illustration, comics, maybe write a book... i don't want to forget who i am.

On the plus side, ive developed a huge crush on music and it's been an immediate source of relief in the past 5 years

As an American I just couldn't resist quoting this part. I got a kick out it. But anyways that post was actually quite haunting, a feeling not so different from the one I get at seeing the ancient Egyptian pyramids, the temple of Ankor Wat. I suppose the equivalent where I live would be the remnants of stone walls and foundations around my property that hint of a history forgotten.

When you explore this history of your area, do you try to visualize the people that lived and worked there when they were alive?

i like things that go vroom.

I've never was much of an artist, but I do understand the drive to create. I tried very hard not to be an author, since it's not a very lucrative career, but every now and then I would be drawn text based RPGs or would just have a need to get my thoughts on paper. Now I finally accepted I want to be an author, and am working towards. I sure hope you become a Magaka. I promise I will be on of your first fans if you do

Also I am so happy to meet a fellow anime/manga fan. Hopefully we can talk about that someday.

Lol! tell me more.

definitely! let me know if you have/ need any anime/ manga suggestions ^^ always keen to share the otaku love ahah

honestly, i am also starting to draw more regularly. Ideally i would draw everyday but I have limited time atm as im completing my postgrad and also working part time. In September though I will only be working three days a week so I will have plenty of free time to draw! Even though I will be scraping financially I am hoping that having more time to hone my skills is going to get me in the right place. Also i have saved up a bit so if i run into problems i can survive.

My main problem at the moment is storylines. I am very much out of practice. I think i need to get back to reading fiction. I am amazed i used to be able to make up stories. I have some ideas but whenever i try to make a coherent plot my mind goes blank

what kind of things do you write? I am curious to hear your experiences of writing

Yes, very much so. I'm not sure if it's the autism or not, but I'm fascinated by the ways in which what is considered "normal" in every sphere of life has been so fluid over the centuries. I'm also in awe of the toil and craftsmanship that went into what many would think of as mundane or utilitarian works; you can see the pride that was put in my the stone masons on even the most remote railway bridge. I went down some of the more remote old mines and explored the railway tunnels years ago, back in my caving days, and I would get lost in imagining what it would have been like to have created those things. A mine trip long enough to leave me exhausted, just to go and have a look around, would have been just the commute to work for some of the original miners (whoa there, I can feel myself getting carried away again! )

There's also a certain delight in the irony that these places are now considered a natural playground for hikers and picnickers, full of beautiful wildlife, when only a few generations ago, they would have been considered worthless, despoiled by all that industry and only fit for some rough sheep grazing.

How about yourself, do you have a pet subject you'd like to enlighten us about?

Ditto. I dig Swedish, Japanese & German cars in no particular order.

^ My favourite car goes along with my local history interest. Yorkshire's own Le Mans winner (in its class), the Jowett Jupiter. I love the little roadsters of the British 50s/60s era, and it's technically unusual for its time too; it had a spaceframe chassis by one of the designers of the Auto Union "Silver Arrows" race cars from the 1930's. I also think they're very pretty!

JowettJupiter2 [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], by Nabokov (talk). Required citation is: "Photo by Tom Oates, 2010".., from Wikimedia Commons

I could really go for an original Boxster S, right now I have a lone turbo Volvo.

ahah true! i live in Edinburgh and even though today the old town is considered in high esteem [and rent prices are high] in the past it was poor and considered by the wealthy who relocated in new town an overpopulated slum to be avoided. To think the place where i work stood right where women were burnt at the stake is also a chilling thought.

My main interest is dissociation, especially traumatic dissociation and structural dissociation of the self. I'm very interested in dissociative, somatic, and posttraumatic disorders but also am interested in how trauma and dissociation might influence or manifest in other disorders such as borderline personality disorder. A secondary interest is autism spectrum disorders and other neurodevelopmental disorders, and I'm very interested in how ASD might make someone more vulnerable to dissociation or might interact with dissociation. Hence my study (see my thread) being about exactly that. I can talk at people about it for hours (and actually have a website dedicated to traumatic dissociation in particular), but I'm not sure how much background information I would have to give to a non-psych oriented crowd just to get to the fun stuff. I'll gladly expand if anyone is interested though!

Yes, "justice" has taken some frightening forms, and even some of the old houses that I've lived in have had me wondering how many people must have died there.

Not far from here is the Halifax Gibbet, which is actually a guillotine (pre-dating its famous use in France, and possibly one of the earliest.) A replica still stands there, copied from parts kept at a local museum. On execution days, the rope that pulled the pin out to release the blade was thrown into the crowd, for them to jointly be the executioner (or, if the crime was rustling, an animal of the same breed got to do it!) The strictness of the local laws and harsh penalties were so infamous that there was even a common saying about it, the Thieves Litany; "From Hell, Hull and Halifax, may the good Lord deliver us." Would I have been one of the guys keen to pull on the rope if I'd lived back then? Could I have ended up with my head chopped off for an autistic misunderstanding?

I'm interested, for sure, getting to know how my brain ticks has fascinated me for as long as I can remember, and has only gotten stronger since my autism was diagnosed just a few years ago. If we can demystify a few technical terms along the way, all the better.