River Glitchy Ransom

When I was a kid, River City Ransom was probably my favorite game on the NES. I had picked it up at a yard sale, and still have the instruction manual kicking around someplace — in tatters, with notes on where to get some items and how to do some sweet (and crazy) moves. Easily the best $5 spent during my entire adolescence. Check this video out — this is a demo video “speedrun” aimed more at showing off how diverse the engine was, than in beating the game at all quickly. Aside from some of the more crazy “disappear and warp all over the area in a hundred pieces” type glitches, every one of these moves is not only possible but likely to be seen in a real session.

Oh, to be a kid again. Hey, wait… they make these things called “emulators” now… hmm…

River Glitchy Ransom
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Just have sex, people, and enjoy it.

Written by my wife, Jodi. The account she posted under didn’t get migrated.

Men, you don’t need to have a porn star penis. There, now that that’s done we can all just move on right?

I wish.

I had a great conversation today with a friend that started by me relating a story about once having sex with a guy whose penis was large enough that he hit my cervix. It was a painful experience and has always stuck in my mind as a counter point to ‘bigger is better’. My friend and I agreed that society’s obsession with men needing to have larger penises than they have (right up to gigantically huge don’t-you-dare-stick-that-in-me size) is both frustrating and a little sickening.

First of all, there is just no need for it. Penises of all shapes and sizes can satisfy, particularly if both participants know what they’re doing. People shouldn’t make assumptions about whether a man and his equipment can satisfy based solely on the measurement of said equipment. It’s like assuming you’ll enjoy how that new car handles based on the width of the door. Seriously, stupid. Secondly, this crazy giant penis ideal has severely damaged many men who are perfectly well endowed enough to give any woman immense pleasure. It has made these men think themselves inadequate and kept them from being sexually healthy members of society. In case you got lost there, that’s bad.

A point was made that the case is similar to women obsessing about breast size, which is a good point. Except it sort of isn’t. There has been much push-back in recent years to let women know that it doesn’t matter what size or shape their breasts are. In fact there is endless movement to embrace women as they are, and for them to embrace themselves no matter their over all body size or shape. We have tried really hard to save ourselves from this nightmare of self esteem issues and yet men are still being told they need to live up to this ridiculous image of a giant penis. Why is no one talking about this and trying to fix it? Men need to be happy and healthy psychologically in order to be good sexual partners, why are we making this so hard for them?

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At the back of my mind there is always a little voice which is usually very unhelpful and I often ignore it but in this case I will address its concerns.

Soo … what about the people who really do prefer an 8 inch penis? What about the people who really do prefer a playboy figured woman? What about the people who actually have/are these things? Well, I don’t know.

Actually I do know. They should have sex the way they like, with whom they like and be happy about it. They just shouldn’t be held as the ‘standard’ or ‘ideal’ in society. In fact, I guess what I’m trying to say is that we should all just have sex the way we want with the types of people we want and *enjoy* it, because enjoying it makes it awesome.

Just have sex, people, and enjoy it.

Suicide Prevention Day

Folks, you might like to know that today is World Suicide Prevention Day. As part of the activity, you’re encouraged to light a candle at 8pm and put it in a window in memory of survivors and those we’ve lost. That kind of token awareness-raising is well and good, but I’d personally strongly encourage you to support your local suicide prevention hotlines, do whatever you can to limit access to the more common means of suicide, or even just pass the word along on your blogs.

Most suicides can be prevented. It’s not always a matter of needing to “see the signs”, as none of us are trained psychologists; however, knowing that the best mitigating practices involve public health measures and evidence-based prevention initiatives, we can make inroads. The ways to make such inroads, is through both science, and politics. If you can raise political awareness that this needs addressing, wonderful. And if you can produce studies and increase the body of human knowledge with regard to how and why suicides occur, and how to prevent them, so much the better. Knowledge is power; forewarned is forearmed.

As George Hrab says, “everything alive will die someday”. But why seek to hasten it? This life is the only one you get. Suck the marrow out of it.

Suicide Prevention Day

Phil Plait’s “Don’t Be a Dick” speech

Phil Plait’s posted the infamous Don’t Be a Dick speech from TAM 8 over at his blog (though hopefully the cross-posting won’t bother everyone’s favorite Bad Astronomer). I’m amused that people watched this and thought he’s talking about PZ specifically. He talks a lot of sense. I do take issue with a few quibbling points, but as I’ve gotten a chance to preview an upcoming blog post by Our Lady, I wouldn’t want to step on her toes.

Phil Plait – Don’t Be A Dick from JREF on Vimeo.

So what do you think? And more importantly, are my tactics in the never-ending astrology thread dickish at all?

Update: Stephanie’s posted the above-teased piece right here.

What’s the difference between someone who engages in an argument in bad faith in an attempt to spread their views and someone who has internalized the views of such a person but is willing to find out what might be wrong with them? What’s the difference between the willfully ignorant and the miseducated? What’s the difference between someone who is out to demolish our credibility and someone who doesn’t know yet whether they can trust us? What’s the difference between someone who’s setting out to obfuscate and someone who hasn’t been trained to argue through a proposition to find the truth?

There are a few clear answers to that, but none of them are going to be clear to me in the course of an online discussion with someone I haven’t encountered before. They all involve motives and history that I’m not privy to. If I’m playing to an audience, that audience isn’t privy either.

Phil Plait’s “Don’t Be a Dick” speech

Why “your mom” jokes don’t really work on me

I’ve been putting off writing about this incident for a long time, not the least reason being that it’s — even now, over ten years after the fact — a giant, raw wound on my psyche. While it’s healed enough to allow me to go on living day-to-day without being reduced to a gibbering mess when something reminds me of it, it’s obviously still raw enough that certain people can bring it to the forefront. You see, my mother left my father in the summer of 1998, which in and of itself was probably a good thing, considering they’d fought on and off for years. The damage came in how she did it, why she did it, the lies she wove in doing it, and the way she metaphorically slammed the door on the way out hard enough to destroy the metaphorical china on the walls.

If you don’t like long introspectives about past butt-hurts, skip this post.
Continue reading “Why “your mom” jokes don’t really work on me”

Why “your mom” jokes don’t really work on me

Straight from my childhood, Thexder Neo

Long ago in days of yore, I was given as a birthday gift my first computer — a DOS-based Tandy 1000 EX from Radio Shack, with 256kb of RAM and a blazing 8088 processor. It was one of the first computers to support EGA, though it used the proprietary Tandy graphics adapter protocol. And it was my introduction to the world of gaming. In short order, I owned every Sierra adventure game that came out and could run on 256kb of RAM: Kings Quest 1, 2 and 3, Space Quest 1 and 2, Gold Rush, Mixed Up Mother Goose (yes, seriously), and Thexder.

I played Thexder most of all. It was the brutally punishing sixteen-level shooter game I kept going back to after my adventure games ceased to provide any amusement. One life, shooting drained your energy meter, and the only way to regain energy was to kill enemies that are busy trying to kill you. Plus, you’re a big clunky robot with automatic laser targeting, that can turn into a nimble plane form that can only fire straight. Even though it was unforgiving and difficult to control, I still loved it. This is pretty much the original gaming experience.

Don’t you love the tinny three-channel beeper speaker soundtrack? I know I did. So when I was browsing the Playstation Store for demos, imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon a remake called Thexder Neo.

Sadly, the reworked game only has ten levels — nine from the original game, and an all-new boss battle. The punishing difficulty and the original layout of the nine ported levels are intact, though there’s an easy mode that lets you continue if you die and doesn’t sic infinitely spawned enemies on you if you’re taking too long. But most importantly, for purists like me who enjoyed the original despite the graphics and sound, you can play “classic mode” and see the game as it was originally meant to be played. I’m pretty sure the ported version isn’t the one from DOS, judging by the speed and the semitone lines — more likely the Amiga.

Yeah, I totally bought it. Nostalgia gaming rules.

Straight from my childhood, Thexder Neo

The Skeptic’s Uphill Battle

Something’s been kicking around in my head through pretty well through every panel on the skeptic track, forming sort of an overarching theme, about the uphill battle against which the skeptical “movement” (if there is such a beast) faces. And that centers around the old quote: “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can get out of bed”.

It’s undeniable that there is an objective truth of the universe. This universe works a certain way, period, and though that way may be mysterious, it is internally self-consistent. Even if the “rules” by which the universe plays, happens to differ under certain circumstances, it works how it works. There is no evidence that these rules are being rewritten on the fly, there is no evidence that there is some kind of supernatural force affecting the natural world, and there is no evidence that one can intrinsically manipulate this unevidenced supernatural force to rewrite the rules of the universe the way we want. Those of us with an interest in discovering the way the world truly works — so-named “rationalists” or “skeptics” — place the truth value of descriptive statements about the universe above all else. As such, it is fundamentally important to us to evaluate and rewrite our core epistemology when better evidence, better data, comes to light.

This does not appear to be the default case for the rest of humankind. Whether by environment or by genetics, the default mode is to accept pat answers that free up brain share for going about your daily life without having to worry about why we don’t fall up, why the sun shines, and why we even exist at all. We accept authority as pushed on us by our parents or spiritual leaders, and we learn that questioning these authorities is just a way of sowing doubt in your own mind. Once you start to doubt the “authorities”, you have to devote mental energies to determining the truth value of each of their statements thereafter. So, it’s far easier to simply accept the first-to-market idea that happens to catch your attention and provides a plausible-enough case for its truth value, than it is to actively research every claim that you come across.

It is this phenomenon against which skeptics fight. When someone makes the claim that quantum physics implies that one can modify reality in order to make it bend to your will, simply by “thinking happy” as in The Secret or through chakra manipulation, that has parsimony with pre-existing biases toward so-called magical thinking. It is therefore more likely to be accepted at face value by someone that believes there is a supernatural component to reality.

Compounding the situation we already have, wherein people make wholly unsubstantiated claims about reality, there is also a tendency for the news media to make wild leaps far beyond the probabilistic findings of real science. What is nominally a new, fuzzy bit of information that is interesting but means very little on its own, becomes “life on Mars” or “may some day cure cancer”. The news media appears to be invested in making each article about scientific progress stand on its own, and therefore strip every shred of context that might give you insight into the long chain of events that makes up science’s history. With each advance forced to stand on its own, the scientific method seems like divine inspiration when it is decidedly not. For instance, the theory of evolution stands not on a wholly unfounded “guess” by Darwin, but rather on the shoulders of every advance that came before it in geology, archaeology and biology. Over the 150 years that followed, every new line of evidence corroborated the hypothesis of common descent, including radiometric dating, and what could essentially be considered the ultimate creationist-killer field: genetics.

The evolution of the body of humankind’s scientific knowledge is as cumulative as the biological improvements over time in humankind, and the whole story deserves being told. Once people recognize that our current state of knowledge is predicated on every other advance that came before it, I suspect many of the abovementioned problems we face in adoption of the scientific worldview will pretty much evaporate.

The Skeptic’s Uphill Battle

Why prayer is nonsense – part 5

4 – Even if it IS useless, what’s the harm?

This is the final part in a five-part series. Please see the Master Post if you haven’t already read the previous parts, because this part relies heavily on definitions and arguments that have been set down in those previous sections.

so why pray?

The conclusion to this series is, admittedly, the most difficult to write, as it entails tying together the disparate threads I’ve left in the previous posts in such a way that the tapestry can be viewed from high altitude to get a sense for how well thought-out each argument is, and how the overarching thesis is correct. This is, arguably, the goal of all persuasive writing on abstract concepts, however I feel that simply reiterating or retreading the ground we’ve already covered is insufficient for these purposes.

Therefore, I will employ a visual instead. Below is a matrix of all the types of deity-properties, and the complications presented for each type of prayer. I have touched on many of these contradictions and issues already in the previous parts, so it is important that you are at least passingly familiar with the specific terms and definitions I’ve used.

I will be including a very important property at the very bottom of this list that I have not discussed as of yet, and it will be hidden below the fold so as to avoid spoiling the surprise. To read this graph in reference to a particular deity, select all the properties that you ascribe to that deity and look at the type of prayer you want to examine, then look to see if any property of your deity happens to directly conflict or present significant obstacles for that type of prayer.

As I’ve stated in part 2, many of these properties conflict with one another for some pretty overwhelming reasons. However, even assuming that you can reconcile certain properties with one another, you should assume that a “no” in any category is a dealbreaker for that type of prayer for the reasons previously discussed.

Legend:

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    – This type of prayer will almost certainly have an effect (whether good, or neutral, to the person that prays) in the presence of a deity with this particular property
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    – It’s possible that this prayer may be answered, but may also be ignored. Will depend mostly on other properties of this deity. If no other properties contradict, there’s insufficient information as to whether a prayer would be worthwhile — it could depend on this deity’s mood.
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    – This type of prayer either directly conflicts with, or significant obstacles are posed by, this deity’s property. A prayer of this sort is either worthless and will be ignored, or could get you smote (an obviously detrimental effect).
Interventionary Imprecatory Guidance Sycophantic Redemptive
Omniscience
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Omnipotence
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Omnibenevolence
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red-x
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red-x
Omnipresence
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red-x
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Larger than the universe
red-x
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red-x
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Being pure good
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red-x
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Has a plan
red-x
red-x
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red-x
Requires active praise
red-x
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Alpha and omega
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red-x
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Reveals self unequivocally
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Continue reading “Why prayer is nonsense – part 5”

Why prayer is nonsense – part 5

Why prayer is nonsense – part 4

3 – But everyone knows prayer works!

This is part 4 in a series of posts on prayer. Please use the links at the top and bottom of each post to navigate through the parts. The master post is here.

even if it IS useless, what’s the harm?

Despite the evidence that most types of prayer do absolutely nothing, there are still large sections of society that employ and thus validate prayer as a worthwhile action, especially in times of desperation. Some employ it while in direct danger or out of utter helplessness, some employ it for shallow political purposes, and some genuinely believe that doing so intensely enough or in large enough quantities will actually convince their omniscient, all-powerful deity to change his course. As I’ve discussed earlier, the various qualities you apply to your deity, specifically, will flavour how you go about praying and under what circumstances. But what doesn’t appear to vary at all, is how people perceive this so-called “harmless” act. This section of my series on prayer will demonstrate that the baseline for the potential harm of prayer is anywhere on the scale but “wholly harmless”. Prayer is capable of real and tangible harm, as long as you understand that it’s not the praying itself that directly causes this harm.
Continue reading “Why prayer is nonsense – part 4”

Why prayer is nonsense – part 4

Why Prayer is Nonsense – part 3

2 – Know your deities

This is part 3 in a series of posts on prayer. Please use the links at the top and bottom of each post to navigate through the parts.

but everyone knows prayer works!

Everyone prays when your time comes or when you get into trouble, even atheists — or so the aphorists would have you believe. Belief in the power of prayer is seemingly omnipresent, with daily reinforcement of the concept from other people that believe likewise. You see the reports on the news of the one little boy that walked away from a horrific plane crash (who was saved by God — never mind that everyone else on the plane was *not*). You know the story of the hurricane that tore through a small town and left only the church standing. You’ve heard about the “light at the end of the tunnel” when a dying person’s neurons start misfiring and they gasp out their last coherent words immediately prior to oblivion. The media, populated in equal measure to the society at large with theists, use phrases like “miraculous” or “divine providence” or “act of God” in describing rare events.

In the presence of such widespread and self-reinforcing memes, it’s difficult to imagine how to shake the general populace’s belief that prayer does anything. The only way I can see, as with pretty much every other problem humankind faces, is through judicious use of science. Sound logic will, of course, only get you so far.
Continue reading “Why Prayer is Nonsense – part 3”

Why Prayer is Nonsense – part 3