The Hangouts I'm facilitating at #FtBCon 2

I’ve got the Google+ Events that I’ll be facilitating all set up for the convention this weekend! Check it out:

FtBCon2: Welcome / Orientation

FtBCon2: Evidence-Based Feminism

FtBCon2: When You Need a Hand, Not a Prayer: The State of the Secular Support Movement

FtBCon2: Between A Rock And…: Non-Binary Gender in Atheism

FtBCon2: Racism and the Zombie Apocalypse

FtBCon2: Women in STEM

FtBCon2: Trans* Representation in Video Games

FtBCon2: Godless Perverts Story Hour

FtBCon2: Secular Asian Community discussion

FtBCon2: Bible Study (or Taking the Bible Seriously as Fiction: A Read-Along)

FtBCon2: Curtain Call

Okay, I’ll admit it, I made this post mostly as a to-do list for my own purposes. Why do something that only has one purpose, when it can have two by simply posting it at my blog as well?

The Hangouts I'm facilitating at #FtBCon 2
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FtBConscience 2 – schedule and speakers #ftbcon

So I’ve been really busy over the past two weeks wrangling as much tech as I can to facilitate Freethought Blogs’ second online Google Hangouts conference. Sorry it’s been so silent around these parts, but I felt that the con was slightly more important!

The full schedule is now available at Lanyrd. If you want to subscribe to the schedule in the calendar of your choice, go here and choose the appropriate calendar.

It should be in the correct time zone, though I’ve tried the Google one and it displays as though relative to UTC+0. I think that might just be a caching thing, but if not, you can always copy the events to your own calendar and move them all appropriately, though that’s not really easy. I did so myself, though that’s not going to be in sync with the final schedule. I’ll embed it below the fold.

The official con page is here: FtBCon.org.
Continue reading “FtBConscience 2 – schedule and speakers #ftbcon”

FtBConscience 2 – schedule and speakers #ftbcon

My current project-time black hole: I'm building a video game!

I generally have only a limited amount of time each day to devote to projects that don’t directly relate to life-maintenance or my job. Lately, my job has been eating up a slightly higher than usual amount of time, and I’ve developed a new goal for the new year: to create and release a video game.

Yeah. I know.

However, even if I fail at it, I’m building this game in Java, which I’ve never programmed in before. So, regardless of anything else, I’m learning a good deal, at least.

I figured I would start writing a bit about my experience designing and programming a game, and describe my roadmap and to-do list, so as to keep the blog active and still feel like I’m doing something toward the end of completing this game. Join me below the fold, if you’re interested!
Continue reading “My current project-time black hole: I'm building a video game!”

My current project-time black hole: I'm building a video game!

You can take our gun columnists, but you'll never take our freedom!

Here’s an interesting little situation that’s come up recently. Apparently, a gun columnist by the name of Dick Metcalf questioned the wisdom of gun rights advocates demanding there be absolutely no limits to the “Right to Bear Arms” by arguing that a sixteen hour course for a concealed carry permit was reasonable. As a result, he was fired from his column with Guns And Ammo, and now his career of 40 years has evaporated.

Just days after the column appeared, Mr. Metcalf said, his editor called to tell him that two major gun manufacturers had said “in no uncertain terms” that they could no longer do business with InterMedia Outdoors, the company that publishes Guns & Ammo and co-produces his TV show, if he continued to work there. He was let go immediately.

“I’ve been vanished, disappeared,” Mr. Metcalf, 67, said in an interview last month on his gun range here, about 100 miles north of St. Louis, surrounded by snow-blanketed fields and towering grain elevators. “Now you see him. Now you don’t.”

This is almost identical to what happened with that Duck Dynasty jackass being suspended by A&E for saying stupid homophobic bullshit, only that story had a “happy” ending — right-wingers successfully rallied to demand that A&E reinstate Duck Dynasty because HOW DARE THEY TAKE AWAY HIS FREEDOM OF SPEECH by… exercising their own freedom to choose what gets aired on their network. And A&E caved, mistaking the conservative outcry for something actually approaching a morally justifiable standpoint.

I anxiously await the protest by Sarah Palin, Brian Brown, and the whole host of conservative loonies to demand that Metcalf’s column be reinstated. I further await the people running interference on the Duck Dynasty issue as being a matter of freedom of speech to say something, anything, about this guy’s column about guns.

You can take our gun columnists, but you'll never take our freedom!

Mock The Movie: Slugs: The Movie transcript

I’ll admit it — I can’t resist a movie with “Colon The Movie” in the title. This was a “quality” schlocky horror film from the late 80s, and it sure tasted like it. Moving to the monthly cycle seems to have reinvigorated our participation base, too — seems once every two weeks was too much for even our hardiest stalwarts. Watch this especially for the SCIENCE!!! that happens involving some sorta science goo that can explode on moisture, taken into the sewers for no particular reason.

February 5th, we mock Road House. We’ll see how well the stalwarts do while getting roundhouse-kicked repeatedly.
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Mock The Movie: Slugs: The Movie transcript

The lost Mock The Movie transcript: Atom Age Vampire

Holy crap, look what we found. This is our second-ever Mock The Movie, which, counting the do-over of Sands of Oblivion, means we have every single Mock The Movie transcript! Thanks again to CA7746 for reparsing the original logs into something useable for the web and for subtitle files. They’ll be added to the main page shortly.
Continue reading “The lost Mock The Movie transcript: Atom Age Vampire”

The lost Mock The Movie transcript: Atom Age Vampire