Geekery

Ashley, Heina and I talking about rape, comics and conventions

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , , , ,

Three disparate topics, not exactly light conversation to start off, but we got progressively less ragey at least. It was an interesting conversation tonight on the Ashley F. Miller Show. (The F stands for “Fuckin'”. [No it doesn’t. And you’d know that if you’d watched FtBCon!])

It was a relief to be on a panel I wasn’t running, with people who needed no prompting to set things up appropriately, after having done that all weekend long. Though I think I might be burned out on public appearances for a little bit. Let me restock on spoons for a bit, then we’ll see.

Also: I can’t believe I misattributed the nude revolutionary calendar to Taslima Nasreen. Now both she and Maryam Namazie are going to hate me. 🙁

Ashley, Heina and I talking about rape, comics and conventions
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#FtBCon: Video Games, Religion and Morality

Jason Thibeault, , , , , 1 Comment

Thanks to the tight timing between the Atheist Music panel and our panel, where we had many of the same participants, we ended up turning into a pretty raucous and jovial crowd at the top of the panel while killing time waiting for Ashley and Brianne to join in. That translated into a much looser panel than I was expecting, but I really enjoy those sorts of panels so I encouraged it gladly.

Best single moment for me: Ashley humming the Katamari Damacy theme.

#FtBCon: Video Games, Religion and Morality

CONvergence – Real World vs the Internet

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It’s a false dichotomy. End of panel. Thank you all for coming!

Actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that. You’ll want to listen to this one, especially where we draw significantly on our personal experiences and discuss how the lines are blurring, and how “meatspace” is not really all that distinguishable from the internet. In fact, the biggest and most important “internet-based” event in my life actually took me some time to recall, because I wasn’t mentally classifying it as internet-related, which is why you’ll hear me fumble for an experience at the start of the panel.

Panelists were Stephanie Zvan, Jason Thibeault, Lux Pickel, PZ Myers, and Jamie Bernstein.

[audio:http://cdn1.the-orbit.net/lousycanuck/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2013/07/cvg2013-skepchickcon-realworldvsinternet.mp3]

cvg2013-skepchickcon-realworldvsinternet.mp3

Sorry it’s taking so long to get these out. I basically came crashing back to reality hard after CONvergence, coming home to two gigantic work crises at once, creating a perfect storm that I’m still shovelling out. Fifteen hours yesterday, seven hours sleep, more work since I’ve been awake. Essentially, the only reason I’m posting this now is because I’m on an enforced break while my VPN access point is rebooting. Seriously, God must really hate me for being so dismissive of him over the weekend or something.

CONvergence – Real World vs the Internet

CONvergence – Gods of Geekdom panel audio

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I absolutely enjoyed this panel. It was thorough, informative, and hilarious. We discussed gods and god-concepts in various sci fi and fantasy fandoms, including comic books, novels and even video games.

Panelists were Nick Glover, Ryan Consell, Jason Thibeault and Fionnuala Murphy.

[audio:http://cdn1.the-orbit.net/lousycanuck/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2013/07/cvg2013-skepchickcon-godsofgeekdom.mp3]

cvg2013-skepchickcon-godsofgeekdom.mp3

CONvergence – Gods of Geekdom panel audio

CONvergence – Worldbusters!

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This one is the second made using the built-in sound app on my phone, and thus it’s also a crappy 8kHz, though I’ve passed it through a few filters to try to get it to a listenable state. It’s a little quiet, but I’ve managed to take out a good deal of noise and level the sounds somewhat. I may yet go back and do the same to the EvoPsych panel.

This panel was fun, though not nearly as popular or populated as the penis panel. In this one we took audience suggestions about specific sci-fi / fantasy tropes and disproved them, with heavy emphasis on the biology behind most of these alien biology scenarios. Sadly, no questions about tech that I could have fielded. Oh well!

[audio:http://cdn1.the-orbit.net/lousycanuck/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2013/07/cvg2013-skepchickcon-worldbusters.mp3]
cvg2013-skepchickcon-worldbusters

Panelists were Jason Thibeault, Siouxsie Wiles, PZ Myers and Laura Okagaki.

CONvergence – Worldbusters!

I have a full schedule!

Jason Thibeault, , , , , 4 Comments

I have a busy bunch of days ahead of me! Sorry if the blog goes slightly quieter for a bit.

Tomorrow I’ll be starting the set-up for CONvergence’s Freethought Blogs room (and I might even pitch in on the Skepchick room too… perhaps, if they ask nicely enough). The full convention schedule is ridiculously jam-packed with geekery and science. The Skepchickcon track is where all the skepticism and sciencey goodness is located, and it’s where I’ll be spending most of my weekend.

I made the cut on these panels:

Worldbusters!
Worldbuilders, you think you have a crackerjack rationale for how zombies work, or how the entire galaxy is populated with humanoids, or how your spaceships can travel faster than light…bounce those ideas off our critical panel of scientists. Panelists: Laura Okagaki, Siouxsie Wiles, PZ Myers, Jason Thibeault (mod)
Thursday July 4, 2013 10:00pm – 11:00pm

The Gods of Geekdom
The Avengers movie had several gods, atheists, agnostics, and Christians all mingled together- we comfortably mix up multiple pantheons and a hard-nosed scientific attitudes in comics and SF literature. How do nerds do that without their heads exploding? Panelists: Jason Thibeault, Ryan Consell, Fionnuala Murphy, Nick Glover
Saturday July 6, 2013 12:30pm – 1:30pm

The Real World vs. the Internet
A line is a blurring and a distinction is fading: social networking and online communities are becoming just as real as face-to-face engagements. Panelists: Jason Thibeault, PZ Myers, Lux Pickel, Stephanie Zvan (mod), Jamie Bernstein
Saturday July 6, 2013 8:30pm – 9:30pm

There were two other panels I was on in the first draft, that I guess got overbooked, and I’m not particularly fighting to get back onto. I’m more than happy with these ones, especially Gods of Geekdom. Though I do sort of wish I could have made Fight the Trolls, I would have been moderator on that — and Stephanie’s therefore a far better choice for that particular panel for two reasons.

I also look forward to having a terrible cold after this weekend as is tradition, and then the week after, I’ll be doing FtBCONscience! The full schedule is not yet finalized, and I expect there will be some fluidity to the panels (as there will be with when you folks decide to watch them), but I’m at least doing a panel on Saturday morning at 9am CT (subject to change), with Desiree Schell, Debbie Goddard, James Croft, and I’m wrangling a fourth guest. The panel is called Atheism Is Not Enough (named after my post), and we’re going to talk about atheism as a gateway into the wider world of social justice activism.

My organizer line is pretty packed, in fact, so it looks like I’ll be getting my fill of moderating panels (read: herding cats) after all.

Look forward to seeing you all! Both in person, and virtually.

I have a full schedule!

Math or maths?

Jason Thibeault, , , , 24 Comments

A linguist American living in the UK explains the difference. Apparently there’s a folk etymology built up that “math” is plural because “mathematics” ends with an S. But that’s not the only reason something might end with an S — there’s also the collective noun, like “linguistics”.

Interestingly, she’s gone native, saying “maths” despite knowing better, just to avoid the fight. I’m thinking now about other language patterns or other “in-group signals” that people might evince just to avoid a fight despite knowing better.

Math or maths?

Mock The Movie: Expect No Mercy transcript

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Again, I managed to forget to start my scrape bot to pull tweets from Mentions directly. CA7746 bailed me out of a bit of a jam by reparsing the raw HTML of Twitter, a trick I’ve done once already but have evidently lost the code for. I was going to rewrite that parser tonight, but CA7746 has evidently spared me the difficulty.

My usual scrape bot, which pulls from @-mentions from the account proper, could only grab the last 200 statuses — a limitation of the API, it seems. Either I haven’t figured out how to paginate through the results properly, or it simply won’t let me do so the same way as paginating through a direct search for @MockTM would. I might rebuild the engine to grab transcripts from @MockTM searches, though that would mean we wouldn’t be able to limit the tweets pulled to only those people @MockTM has followed. That would mean letting potential spam in.

In case there’s anything spammy above the double-dash (haven’t had time to reread it all), let me know and I’ll pull it out.

Continue reading “Mock The Movie: Expect No Mercy transcript” →

Mock The Movie: Expect No Mercy transcript

Geeks Without God: Crappy Religious Board Game Edition!

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , 12 Comments

Two weekends ago, I went to OmegaCon in Siren, Wisconsin. And by “went”, I mean “was kidnapped and made to go”. There, I played some board games with a whole lot of local board game nerds who frequent the local convention nerdery circuit. Many of these games were fun. The one that Molly and Nick Glover and Tim Wick forced Stephanie, Brianne and I play, though… um… well, that was significantly less so. It was loosely based on the “hit” movie based on the “hit” Christian novel series, Left Behind. “Loose” is definitely the operative word when describing this board game, because it barely qualified as a board game. I shit you not — we played Left Behind: The Movie: The Board Game.

Click the thumbnail below for a fuller experience of the pain we endured for your entertainment. Screen reader users: it’s a picture of the board game. Sorry that you’ll have to make do with the audio descriptions — though really, you’re the lucky ones, with limited exposure to its whargarbl.

leftbehindboardgame

In a desperate effort to make the podcast fun — because the game’s mechanics are unbelievably boring even to someone with a vested interest in proving themselves the best Tribulation Forces fighters and redeeming themselves in the eyes of Yahweh, you know, like me — the Geeks Without God crew helpfully included the following drinking game to accompany the podcast. I need to disclaimer this, though. Unless you’re a bull elephant, you’ll have to drink something piss weak to survive.

Here are the rules (feel free to add your own rules in the comments):

Take a drink every time moonshine soaked cherries are passed out or someone mentions consuming one

Take a drink whenever we make a Ghostbusters reference

Take a drink every time someone mentions game theory

Take a drink every time someone says the game sucks

Take a drink every time someone lands on a Carpathia square

Take a drink every time someone says “Flightplan.”

Take a drink every time we get a question about the bible correct

Take a drink any time someone mentions Omegacon

Seriously, just don’t do it. You’ll die.

Go listen. We played so you never, ever, ever have to.

Though if you really must, it’s fairly cheap.

Geeks Without God: Crappy Religious Board Game Edition!