I would like to learn drawing.

I would like to be able to have fun expressing myself via art. How long does it takes to learn to draw from zero to good enough not to be embarrassed of oneself?

What techniques are useful? Is there any sense in e.g. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain?

Hmm, I'm not entirely sure. I can find old usenet comments - like my nethack YAFAP - from 2005 to 2008, but as far I can tell they were all made with Google Groups. I do vaguely recall using a newsreader, maybe trying to set up Thunderbird? It certainly would have been in character, "real men use newsreaders, and never top-post" kind of thing was a big part of the appeal. Possibly I could only get read-only access through whatever free provider I found.

At the time, the communities discussing interactive fiction and roguelike games were still centered on usenet (rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.roguelikes.* respectively) although iirc half the conversations were on the need to move on, to web forums or whatnot.

Fun, and practice, and there's always someone on github who could use help with their open source thing.

Source: myself, and everyone else on github who could use help with our open source things. ;-)

It's not obvious that attention is being diverted to obscuring information.

It makes it harder for me to build a mental image of the situation that he's describing. If it's harder than I will put less attention on the situation.

Here it's a subtle choice. But it points to a pattern. A common general piece of advice on telling stories which draw listeners attention is to provide a lot of adjectives to make it more easy for the audience to picture what you are describing.

The kind that most people don't put to practice when they hear it. Instead of describing the principle abstractly, I pointed to an example.

It takes effort to provide listeners with details. It's still one of the pure white hat strategies to getting peoples attention when you speak.

As far as the information being relevant, when I give someone recommendation about testosterone, the gender of the person I'm interacting with matters.

I have a good idea that more testosterone in males will help with given attention. I'm less certain, that trying to increase testosterone is a good strategy for females.

There are a variety of plausible explanation.

The first would be that it's just an issue of perception. There a plenty of people with low self esteem who hold inaccurate beliefs about how much attention other people pay to them.

A second would be generally proxies for low testosterone. If you have a louder and deeper voice people are more likely to listen to you. There are also body language changes and various other things that are hard to fake.

You're really not giving enough specific information. There are countless reasons why that might happen so any advice you take here could lead to erratic behavior.

In addition to what other people said, this sounds like you might be too verbose or bad at gauging which topics interest other people and to what extent. They might look at the other person because they wish them to interrupt you and move on.

I can't really offer anything more than a personal anecdotes, but here is what I usually do for when I try to grab attention of a group of my peers:

• If you are talking to several people gathered in circle, and it is my turn to say something important, I make a small step forward so that I physically place myself in the center of the group.
• When I am speaking, I try to mantain eye contact with all people gathered around, If I focus too much only on the person I am speaking to, everyone else turns their attention towards them as well.
• I rarely do it myself, as I suppose it is a technique more tailored for public speeches, but conservative use of hand gestures to signify what you are talking about, probably won't hurt.
• I probably sound like a self absorbed jerk writing this, but if I want the attention to focus on myself, and not my interlocutor I often use "me" language. Compare and contrast ["What you say about vegans is true, but you may conisder..." - now everybody looks at the person who said something about vegans] ["I think that I agree with what was said about vegans, but I also think..." - now everybody looks at me as I explain my position].

But those are all just little little tricks, when the surest way of attracting attention of the audience is simply to have something important and interesting to say.

Question about a low-level social thing:

I've noticed that I have low priority in at mid-large group conversations. What I mean is that in situations where I'm one of two people talking, I'm (generally) the one who stops and the attention of the "audience" (people-who-aren't-speaking) is predominantly on the other person even before I stop speaking.

This used to cause me considerable distress, but no longer. I've accepted it as a fact of the social universe. But I'm still curious and would like to change it, if possible.

I suspect that this is something that varies by social group, and more strongly suspect that some behavior of mine is key.

I'm interested in (being pointed to) discussion of this type of thing, especially if it contains actionable advice.

I watched 'Oz the Great and Powerful'. I really liked the pro-innovation / science-inventory / mind-over-might themes.