Meta

The Big Reveal

Jason Thibeault, , , , , 11 Comments

Okay, so, it’s the day after April Fool’s, so naturally the jig is up. My custom style from yesterday is not, in fact, a preview of the new theme, but rather a Pony-fication of our current. I am assured that our new theme is coming soon, and when it does, my custom CSS will very likely break. So, for posterity, here’s a screenshot of what the front page (and all subsequent pages in fact!) would have looked like if you weren’t one of the 97 that were brave enough to try it.

Screenshot of the Pony-fied theme - sorry, visually impaired folks, I have no idea how to prank you with ponies as well.

I have it installed myself, and I’m pretty sure I’m not going to change it for a while yet.

I had also changed my Gravatar to a pony made with General Zoi’s My Little Pony Creator (I have a news item I’d like to post about her a little later in fact!). I didn’t, however, post it to the blog then the way Dana did, but I did manage to inculcate some pony-on-pony warfare in the comments on my other prank post. Anyway, here’s the pony I built. Probably the most over-encumbered member of its species ever built.

Of course, ponies weren’t the only prank that happened around these parts yesterday — the biggest prank, the one that attracted the most of our bloggers, involved casting aspersions and recriminations about one another in one gigantic circular firing squad. Which was also fun.

So, what’d you think?

The Big Reveal
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Sneak preview of FtB’s new theme. Yes, really.

Jason Thibeault, , , , , 15 Comments

So, this is an unfortunate day to pick to finally drop the hammer and make things happen around these parts, but what can you do. I suppose you could consider this a kind of reverse April Fool’s prank, since you’re not the one being pranked here.

The tech ghetto of the Freethought Blogs participants, including webmaster Matt and the guy Ed hired to build our new theme, have been tossing around ideas and CSS code on our back channel over the past two months. They’ve been quibbling over minor details and the whole blog has been through four separate and distinct redesigns, including several that were built off our present theme.

Things were getting a bit heated, and the process has stalled out completely, so I have taken it upon myself to take the most recent revision, convert it to a Stylish script and let you folks preview it without having to alter the server-side itself. The Stylish plugin allows you to override specific websites’ default behaviour, making them look or act differently.

It’s still a work in progress, and I strongly suspect I might even irritate some of the tech folks over this stunt. But hey, they’re the ones getting pranked!

Below the fold are detailed instructions for Firefox and Chrome users, and instructions for IE and Safari users that involve downloading Firefox or Chrome. Yeah, sorry.
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Sneak preview of FtB’s new theme. Yes, really.

Freethought, and freedom to express yourself on someone else’s private property

Jason Thibeault, , , , , 44 Comments

Freethought Blogs was founded by our Glorious Leader Ed Brayton on the principle that many great voices in the community (meaning, at the time, himself and PZ Myers) were being actively squelched in some fields of interest and needed a place where they could blog about atheism, skepticism, humanism, politics, et cetera, without being curtailed on one or any of these topics by their blog overlords. It has since expanded to include more, and better, writers than I, but I am privileged to also call this blog my home, and the compatriots and friends I have made here mean the world to me. Not to mention the total autonomy I have in what I get to talk about and how I get to do it — there is, basically, no hive mind, no dogmatic demand of adherence to any principles in specific. We disagree with one another quite frequently, in fact, but we are comrades where and when it counts. All in all, Freethought Blogs is generally a damn good place to be.

And then some assholes come along and demand the right to piss on your rug. All in the name of “freethought”.
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Freethought, and freedom to express yourself on someone else’s private property

Agitation And The Long Game

Jason Thibeault, , , 1 Comment

I don’t have a good post queued up for today, and not a lot of time to write one, but here’s a few links you’ll probably enjoy (if you haven’t already).

My post from June about Rick Santorm’s wife’s abortion, proving him a total hypocrite with his anti-abortion stance, suddenly exploded overnight. People are passing it about on Facebook like crazy and there are a bunch of people joining in on the comments. By all means, keep the momentum rolling!

Stephanie Zvan is taking one of the skeptic community’s leaders to task for their cognitive biases. Guess which one, why, and what the evidence is!

And Christina over at WWJTD takes on Mallorie Nasrallah’s post declaring that men shouldn’t listen to women who decry sexist comments in our community. And she does it without raising Mallorie’s “you’re strawmanning me!” defense, which she’s offered in every single rebuttal to her own huge strawman argument.

PZ has blow-by-blow in-depth coverage of the Iowa caucus as well if you’re interested in seeing who surged ahead, who was merely turgid, and who flagged at the poles. I mean polls.

The blog-fights we engage in are part of a long game. That’s a lesson I just learned with having an old post go viral so long after it was written. This image, posted by a commenter in an earlier post, is therefore appropriate.

Keep fighting, noble Keyboard Warriors.

Agitation And The Long Game

The 2011 Lousy Year in Review

Jason Thibeault, 2 Comments

Happy new year, everyone! Hope 2012, the Year Of Doom, finds you hale and hardy. Remember, rinse your mouth out with water and wait fifteen minutes before brushing your teeth after you’ve vomited, or you’ll wreck the enamel on your teeth. Of course, the same advice goes for after eating an orange, so there’s that.

This is my first time trying something like this. I’ve been blogging since May 2008, and yet I don’t think I’ve ever once gone through my previous posts and highlighted a few things per month like most other bloggers have a habit of doing. This lack of introspection is inexcusable, of course. So, I’ll try right now.
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The 2011 Lousy Year in Review

Feeding the troll yet again

Jason Thibeault, , , , , 25 Comments

Franc Hoggle wants nothing more than for people at FtB to be talking about him. He gets off on it. PZ just outed him as Victor Ivanoff, according to Ophelia’s source who knows him in real life, after Hoggle’s latest round of personal and directed threats. So now we are all left with the image that he is probably furiously masturbating to the thought that people are talking about him on FtB again.

Aside from this short post to tell you that this is happening and that the Global Atheist Convention folks are aware of his threats, and to make you aware of the conversation happening elsewhere and some terribly amusing photos making light of Hoggle’s intrinsic nature, so long as nobody at FtB or at any convention is in any actual physical danger, you’ll hear no more of him on this blog.

My official position on Victor Ivanoff is: I couldn’t give a rat’s ass. He is not worth our consideration, and we should deny him the attention he needs for his orgasms. Hopefully once his blue balls reach critical mass, he will simply find other targets for his hate, and take his slimy bootlickers with him.

Feeding the troll yet again

Passports and FtB meetups and waning vacation time, oh my

Jason Thibeault5 Comments

Right about now, I’m at the Canadian Consulate in Minneapolis, filing paperwork for a one-way passport back to Canada. My passport went through the wash here at the Zvan’s, and the front-and-back blue pages peeled away, and evidently that’s enough to invalidate the passport. I’ve pretty much had to fill out every scrap of paper I originally did doing my real passport, in duplicate, plus a third form (that had to be notarized all official-like) stating that I damaged the original passport and how — in every embarassing detail. Just got done taking, printing, picking up, slicing up and having passport photos signed, all done by none other than world famous photographer Ben Zvan. Luckily my wife Jodi has had a passport for more than five years, and can act as my guarantor. Hopefully I will get my exit papers in the requisite three day waiting period, and will manage to return home safely. I needed to renew my passport before CONvergence next year anyway, so it’s no huge loss. Well, a small loss — I did lose every visa stamp in the old passport when the washer scrubbed every bit of non-printed ink from the pages.

Whether I’m returning home properly on Sunday, or I’m shipped off to Gitmo for being an illegal immigrant or whatever, it appears you’ll have one last chance to see me in person in Minneapolis this Friday. Stephanie, Greg and I are, as of publication, going to Bar Abilene for supper… dinner… whatever you crazy Americans call that meal that happens around 5pm. More details at Stephanie’s, and if any plans change, that’s where you’ll find out.

Less than a week left in Jodi and my vacation. Best do as many epic things as possible! This may include hugs. EPIC HUGS.

Passports and FtB meetups and waning vacation time, oh my

Blog entering low-power mode now.

Jason Thibeault4 Comments

The big blog server migration went about as close to swimmingly for me as can be expected given the nature of the debacle. Two posts and a handful of comments gone, and that’s about it. Thankfully I don’t get nearly as much traffic as Ed or PZ, though I’m certainly getting a hell of a lot more comments and traffic here than at my old self-hosted domicile, so I’m not surprised I didn’t totally escape the fallout from that mess.

Jodi and I are making a trip out to Minnesota to spend the American Thanksgiving with our extended family, the Zvans. They are our extended family not by blood, but by choice. And I expect to get very very fat off the rampant gluttony attendant to this holiday, should my metabolism so allow. It doesn’t usually. Somehow despite eating like a pig and hardly exercising near as much as I should, I’m still an ectomorph. If I worked out, I’d end up looking like Spider-Man, not Batman. As it stands, I’m just Peter Parker pre-bite.

Additionally, I have to beta-read a novel for Kelly McCullough; the third book in a series whose first book (Broken Blade) is about to hit the bookshelves in time for the Christmas rush. So I expect I’m going to need to get very lost in that book this week, in between the pressures of getting work to a position where it can coast for the duration of my vacation.

Of course, Stephanie’s a blogger too, so I fully expect nobody will be offended if I sneak off now and again to throw stuff onto the blog. So during the next two weeks or so, I will try my damnedest to keep bringing you lots of little oddities that I find, but I don’t know how much meat I’ll be able to add to them. I want to keep putting up at least a post a day, though. Feel free to send me stuff to serve as extra content, whenever you find something cool or meme-worthy. The more I can crowd-source my blog content, the happier we’ll all be!

Blog entering low-power mode now.

Moderation, censorship, and The New Stasi at FtB

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , , 41 Comments

The latest imbroglio here at Freethought Blogs appears to be an ongoing systemic campaign of trolling and attempting to silence several voices via liberal application of a megaphone and a large and varied vocabulary of misogynist slurs and outright libel about certain individuals. One aspect of this campaign and one possible course of action that we’ve stumbled across, having had Franc Hoggle’s identity dropped into our laps by one of his real-life acquaintances, has repercussions that have drawn out a contingent of slimepit denizens to amp up the silencing campaign. I will refer herein to these crusaders collectively as “douchebags” or some variant thereupon.

So far, PZ Myers and Ophelia Benson have borne the brunt of the assault by the douchebags, though Stephanie Zvan is rapidly climbing the ranks of people being targeted. Greg Laden and I are thus far mere also-rans.

One of the things that I do around these parts is observe the larger knock-down drag-out fights, and pull out the side concerns — the little individual jabs and parries in conversations — and dissect them. During this ongoing fight, one of the largest bête noires raised by the douchetariat is the question of censorship. Specifically, that when one of them gets put into moderation for refusing to stay on topic or for outright flaming or spamming or otherwise disrupting conversation, they are being censored in violation of their freedom to douche publicly.
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Moderation, censorship, and The New Stasi at FtB