This was my third day at Convergence.
It’s a bit of a blur — I attended lots of panels, including Gods of Geekdom (how do the Avengers reconcile having both atheists and gods on the team?), a podcasting how-to, and various other skeptical sessions.
I recorded a live audio session with the Geeks Without God team. That will be available online in a couple of weeks; next one to be released will be the interview they recorded with Melissa Kaercher at this same event (and if you don’t know Melissa, she’s kind of the omnipresent ubergeek of Minneapolis).
I also joined the FtB and Skepchick teams on “The Real World vs. The Internet”, about this fading distinction about what part of our lives is “real”. Conclusion: the internet is just as real as the stuff we do with meat. The cleverest line is that now instead of saying “IRL” when meat-spacing, we should call it “AFK”.
Then, the party. Oy, the party. Saturday is always the most intense night of the weekend, and it also coincides with the masquerade…so everyone is showing up in their most elaborate costumes. And partying hard. I sort of passed out sometime around 1:30am-2am, and we staggered back to our hotel rooms at almost 3, all to the tune of the loudest sing-along I’ve ever heard. There were thousands of people singing Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” as I was going up in the elevator, and the whole hotel kind of trembled and moaned at the song.
A fragment of that colossal noise was recorded!
Today is cleanup and two more panels, then sushi for dinner, then home.
PZ,
You are a party animal!
What does “AFK” mean?
Ah, the rough life of the 5th Horseman…
“as I was going up in the elevator,” you were invited to someone’s room for a cup of coffee. :)
From the context, Away From the Keyboard.
“Away From Keyboard.” I had to Google it.
Oh, PZ. Beelzebub does have a devil put aside for you.
Captain America: Believes in One God. Personally knows two other gods.
A had to look up both AFK (I concur with the above guesses), and IRL, which apparently is IndyCar Racing in real life.
Well, yeah, you would be AFK if you were driving an IndyCar, but otherwise the implied relationship leaves me puzzled. As a description of being in real life, Incomprehensible Ridiculous Laughs would make more sense.
IRL=in real life, a phrase you used twice.
Kids these days, they’re getting so spoiled. When I were a lad we only had IRL and we were glad to have it.
I suppose you had to walk ten miles to school in the snow, uphill both ways too.
If you don’t know what AFK is, you’re obviously permanently ATK, even IRL.
Barefoot in the snow, in July!
How is “The Uprising” going? Have the walkouts reached single-figures yet?
Hyperdeath,
Well, whilst waiting for a reply from Teh Poopyhead, I shall predict that the walkouts have yet to reach…ohhh….mmmm….lemme think….
Integers.
Louis
Oh, the Avengers are easy. There are various levels of beings in the Marvel universes that have been worpshipped as gods by the cultures they contacted on various worlds, few of which would meet our standard of god. I mean, it’s easy to praise a god who occasionally acts from afar, but much harder to really worship one who keeps turning up drunk on your front lawn and losing to you at Poker. And while there is apparently a creator (with a suspicious resemblance to Jack Kirby), the only god any Marvel characters ever worship is the only one conspicuous by his absence.
The real question is, how are there still monotheists in the Avengers when they keep teeming up with/battling against gods from various global and alien pantheons?
IIRC, zero is an integer.
To be fair, Marvel Thor is a piss-poor imitation of Nordic Thor, and he’s an extra-dimensional alien, not really a god. He doesn’t even have a beard, and I’ve never seen his goat-drawn chariot in any movie or comic book. And while Nordic Loki is still a dick, he’s Thor’s best adventuring companion, not his mortal enemy.
Nerd,
IANAMathematician, nor do I play one on television, but I’d be surprised if it was….
{Googles}
….well bugger me! You learn something every day. Thanks Nerd!
I now revise my previous statement to: non-zero integers.*
Louis
*Which, thinking about it, I should have known because I’ve used that phrase before…silly Louis.
Gee, a contribution to mathematics from the Arab speaking world…Poor bigots, the knowledge of humanity comes from every where…
That whooshing sound you heard was the joke passing over your head…
I also snuck in “implied relationship leaves”, albeit without the emphasis, just to see what would happen.
The avengers have it pretty easy, because real world philosophy nominally exists in the marvelverse, as does most of real world history. There are a lot of conflicting definitions on what was and was not a god, and one can easily choose to discard them and choose to simply consider Thor and whatever else superpowered individuals. It’s where people start trying to pull atheism in bog-standard DnD settings that it gets irreconcilable (“I say gods don’t exist” “Not only can I call him on my proverbial astral telephone, the word ‘God’ has always meant ‘Someone who does shit exactly like this'”. One could easily do *Maltheism*, or Nontheism, but atheism simply has no place in said bog-standard settings)
sez artor:
You might want to pick up the Thor back issues that were written & drawn by Walt Simonson, who injected a whole lot of the ‘real’ Thor—as much as he could get away with, given that it is Marvel Comics—into the book.
CONvergence is over, I’m finally home, no walkouts at all at any time.
Although this one woman came up to confront me with “You can’t know for sure…” — “The big bang might be proved wrong someday…” — “You scientists claim to know everything…” — “It’s just a theory!” and when I told her she was pretty damned ignorant, she stomped off in a huff.
So…maybe #TheRising consisted of one obtuse religious apologist who didn’t like me telling her she was wrong?
Sounds like the typical “One Million Moms” protest.
Nerd@21:
Well, that’s Louis told, all right.