May 17 2013
Moderator: Desiree Schell
- Carrie Poppy of Oh No Ross & Carrie (Spent 5 months undercover in Raelian movement!)
- Sarah Moglia of Secular Student Alliance (has Crohn’s Disease and has pseudoscience foisted on her)
- Rebecca Watson of Skepchick (“Teen Skepchick is just like Skepchick without the profanity”)
- Amy Davis Roth of Skepchick, Mad Art Lab, aka Surly Amy (we’re all part of her art project if we have a Surly!)
May 17 2013
Update: Ron Lindsay posted a transcript of his remarks, which is good because this liveblog doesn’t do the actual words spoken justice. I need to emphasize that this man used his opening remarks to tell women to stop being so forceful about getting people to stop talking over them and listening to them for once. That may not have been his intent, but it was the undeniable effect of the words, on their face, not misinterpretable.
Ron Lindsay: as a conference organizer and public speaker, perhaps this might help. Have you considered that when someone says “shut up and listen”, maybe that’s someone telling you — possibly for the nth time — that you’re over your allotted time and are chewing into the next person’s chance to speak? Have you considered that perhaps “shut up and listen” is an admonition against dominating the dialogue and turning it into a monologue, and advice on how to begin the process of listening to others?
1:30: Lauren Becker opens the conference!
CFI and Lauren (the Benevolent Dictator and Time Overlord) are very happy we all had the guts to show up and profess our lack of belief.
Q&A is being done by card/pen, write our questions and raise hands to give to staff and Lauren will read the questions from the floor.
May 16 2013
The Availability Heuristic is a well-known cognitive bias that primes people to more readily believe something when they can easily come up with examples. Of the cognitive biases that I’ve encountered among rationalists in the skeptical and atheist communities, this bias is the one I’m most capable of coming up with examples. I am therefore primed to believe more readily that atheists and skeptics are not immune to this bias — myself included.
But there’s a little-discussed inverse to this bias, where examples are generally filtered out of one’s daily existence because they don’t impact on you directly, and thus, you are less ready to believe someone claiming to experience them. I call this the anti-availability heuristic, though I’m sure there are better names for it.
May 15 2013
I’m pretty inured by now to blatant religious proselytization, bad acting, campy premises, and contrived patriotism, what with Mock the Movie and all, but this video almost made me gag, it was simply so syrupy.
Yes. Because a DOUBLE X porno watched with friends, or being intoxicated in public, is the END OF AMERICA. There is no hyperbole there. Just by doing things that are enjoyable to you and do no damage to others, you will destroy the very fabric of your country, setting flags ablaze nationwide. Just a second, I’m going to go pour myself a drink so I can end America. I guess that makes me a foreign terrorist, being that I’m a Canadian citizen and having a beer, amirite?
Hat tip to Christian Nightmares.
Unrelated note: Blogging about news events et cetera will be on pause for a bit, as tomorrow I’ll be flying out to DC. Remember that one big conference that’s happening there this weekend? You know, Women In Secularism 2? Well, you should, because you helped send me there. And in return, I’ll be live-blogging the living crap outta it, along with Miri Mogilevski of Brute Reason, and Kate Donovan, co-blogger at… um… everywhere. Seriously. Including over at Ashley Miller’s.
Look for the posts starting tomorrow.
May 13 2013
May 12 2013
I’m several days behind on most of my news and blog feeds at the moment, but this post at TransGriot caught my eye.
Rohit Singh, a young trans woman, was browsing wedding dresses at a bridal shop in Saskatoon for her upcoming nuptials. When she asked to try one on, she was refused, being told, “I’m sorry, we don’t allow men to wear dresses here.”
May 10 2013
This movie was easily one of the best worst movies we’ve seen and targeted for Mock The Movie, and not just because of our tech-savvy participants. This movie took itself so seriously, and tried so hard, and yet it failed so miserably at everything it did. Every character was inept, even the supposedly hyper-adept evil hacker. Every action taken was ludicrous, and there were dozens and dozens of ways to short-circuit the evil hacker’s plans. It was ripe for the picking, and boy did we pick.
May 07 2013
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.
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.
May 06 2013
Here’s another of the myriad ways that patriarchy and rape culture hurts men. I know this is going to be counterintuitive to some of you mouth-breathers, but if your first reaction to this story is “that guy has all the luck” or “but he’s a rapper who raps a lot about sex” or anything other than “holy shit that’s rape”, then you’re part of the problem.
A rapper by the name of Danny Brown is on tour, and stopped in Minneapolis at the Triple Rock Social Club recently, and during his concert a female fan pulled down his pants and started sucking on his penis.
He backed up quickly, later tweeted jokingly with people who congratulated him on Twitter (saying things like “never missed a bar”), and generally tried to play it off like he’s perfectly fine and it was just a blowjob. Fans are talking about how he was given oral sex. Hell, the MEDIA is calling it oral sex. But his close friend and fellow rapper, Kitty Pryde, is framing things very differently.
May 05 2013
Michael Geist covers the Copyright Board of Canada admitting to having made a “palpable error” in accidentally super-inflating music company royalties well beyond the original decisions for reproduced music in movies intended for personal use:
The Canadian Association of Film Distributors and Exporters had proposed a tiered tariff approach of a maximum of 2 cents per copy containing 30 minutes of music or more (less music would result in a lower tariff). The Copyright Board mistakenly established a tariff of three cents per copy, mistakenly treating three tiers as three cents. As the Board now notes:
CAFDE was seeking a rate of 2 cents per DVD copy containing over 30 minutes of SODRAC music; the Board’s interpretation leads to royalties that are 15 times higher or even more.
:)
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