Portland, Oregon is having a humanist film festival!

I wish I could be there. The Humanist Film Festival is happening on 26-28 October, and they’re looking for submissions. If you’ve got anything that fits their categories, send them in soon. They’re looking for films that speak to humanist themes, including:

  • Reason, Critical Thinking and Skepticism (such as claims of the paranormal, critical thinking education, rational living, etc.)

  • Ethics and Human Wellbeing (including human rights, women’s rights, gay rights, rational ethics, challenging scriptural ethics, sex education and attitudes about sex, etc.)

  • Science and the Natural World (e.g. science appreciation, science education, evolution, global warming, pseudo-science and pseudo-medicine etc.)

  • Freedom of Thought, Speech and Critical Inquiry

  • Challenging the Claims and Value of Religion (e.g. anti-apologetics, education about atheism and atheists, uncovering problems with religion, etc.)

  • Separation of Church and State

  • Joie de vivre and human thriving (art and aesthetics, living the good life, human progress etc.)

And here’s their mission:

The Portland Humanist Film Festival is an outreach event designed to broaden the understanding and acceptance of a secular, humanist world view. It specifically addresses audiences who are friendly to our views but who are not necessarily familiar with atheism or humanistic ethics, or why we value reason and scientific thinking. The Film Festival presents these themes through an accessible, entertaining medium.

Got any suggestions? If you’re a godless filmmaker, think about sending them something!

The wages of pseudoscience

I completely missed the disgraceful hokum the Animal Planet channel aired last week, Mermaids: The Body Found, a completely fictional pseudodocumentary dressed up as reality that claims mermaids exist. You can watch it now, though, until Animal Planet takes it down.

It’s genuinely awful. Total nonsense, gussied up with more nonsense: would you believe it justifies the story with the Aquatic Ape gobbledygook? Brian Switek has torn into it, and of course Deep Sea News is disgusted. How could the channel have so disgraced themselves with such cheap fiction?

Here’s the answer:

ANIMAL PLANET SLAYS WITH BEST-EVER MAY IN NETWORK HISTORY

— Monster Week’s MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND Made Mighty Splash with More Than 3.4 Million Viewers —

(May 30, 2012, Silver Spring, Md.) – Animal Planet devoured the month with its best May ever, earning its strongest performances in both prime and total delivery among all key demos, including prime deliveries of 681K P2+ (+7%), 508K HH (+7%), 330K P25-54 (+21%), 301K P18-49 (+12%) and 193K M25-54 (+30%), and total day deliveries of 456K P2+ (+13%), 355K HH (+10%), 215K P25-54 (+26%), 203K P18-49 (+13%) and 120K M25-54 (+32%).

Animal Planet’s May victory was propelled its first-ever Monster Week (the week of May 21), featuring MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND, which made a huge splash at the “tail” end of the week. MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND delivered nearly 2 million viewers (1.96M P2+) for its premiere, making it the most-watched telecast since the Steve Irwin memorial special in September 2006. The two-hour premiere scored a 1.3 HH rating and helped rank Animal Planet #2 in the timeslot, including 960K P25-54 (0.9), 482K M25-54 (1.0) and 477K W25-54 (0.9). The subsequent late-night airing of MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND earned the title of Animal Planet’s most-watched late-night telecast ever, delivering nearly 1.5M viewers (1.46M P2+), bringing the combined viewership to more than 3.4 million viewers. MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND encores Thursday, May 31, from 8-10 PM ET/PT.

Brace yourselves. More of this will be coming…unless more of us protest by turning off the Animal Planet channel altogether. They’ve just been rewarded for epic dishonesty with peak traffic; what lesson do you think they’ll learn from this?

It’s almost always Muscle Man and Buxom Chick, isn’t it?

Here’s a kickstarter project to look at sexism in video games.

This is a project by a woman, Anita Sarkeesian, who likes video games and wants to see them improve, but as she says, “many games tend to reinforce sexist and downright misogynist ideas about women.”

Some of you will say that is an outrageous claim! Cite evidence! No, it can’t be true!

OK, evidence: she’s made a screen cap of youtube comments on her video. CASE CLOSED. It’s not just raging misogyny, it’s also screaming racism and stark raving idiocy.

I think we all better contribute to her kickstarter. The problem is worse than she made it out to be, and I think she needs a few million dollars. (Oh, and her blog is very good, you ought to read it.)

(via Lousy Canuck)

P.S. The definitive reply to asshole commenters has been created.

I don’t even know what this movie is about anymore, but I still want to see it

They keep teasing me with these little trailers that are all completely different in tone from one to the other…and you can’t even tell that they’re from the same movie.

So far, what I’m seeing is something about aliens, space travel, scientific hubris, the nature of self, fear and danger, some tenuous connection to the Aliens franchise, and stupid alien astronauts crapola. Whoever came up with their viral marketing campaign really knows how to tantalize.

The Pirates! With Charles Darwin!

In the UK, they released an exciting new movie a while back, The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists. I have the book. It’s marvelous: it prominently features pirates, beards, scientists, and Charles Darwin, and is exactly the kind of story I like.

The good news! It’s just been released in the US. The peculiar news: it’s gotten a name change, to The Pirates! Band of Misfits, and they’re not mentioning Charles Darwin in the trailers. If you’ve read the book, though, you know that Darwin is rather central to the whole story.

Apparently, “science” and “Darwin” are box office penalties in the US. I’m going anyway, as soon as I can, because the content is presumably unchanged and I like science, beards, Darwin, pirates, and the funny, even if the marketing idiots are frightened.

“IT BELONGS IN A MUSEUM!”

There isn’t that much difference between a trained archaeologist and a professional wrestler, is there? Look at the new depradations encouraged by reality TV:

There’s nothing more exciting than digging for treasure, and that’s just what SPIKE TV’s new unscripted original series, American Digger is going to do when it premiers on March 20 at 10/9c. Former professional wrestler Ric Savage and the American Savage team have the tools, knowhow, and instincts, and are ready to show everyone what could just be hidden beneath your backyard if you give them the chance.

American Digger will showcase Ric Savage and his crew trekking across the country each week, from Chicago, IL to Jamestown, VA and everywhere in between. Once the team identifies an area they think is ripe with high-value artifacts and relics, they’ll have to convince the current homeowner to give them permission to dig up their backyard. If American Savage is persuasive enough, they’ll get a chance to dig up the tenant’s backyard using their state-of-the-art equipment, and divide the cash they get from selling the artifacts they find there with the tenant.

Savage and his crew definitely have an eye for artifact-rich areas, and will seek out historic sites as a result. These areas are home to great finds, as the team uncovers old relics in the show such as a 5 million year old Megalodon shark’s tooth. American Savage is the top artifact recovery company in the United States and is made up of Ric Savage’s wife Rita, who manages the business, battlefield historian Bob Buttafuso, recovery expert Rue Shumate, and Giuseppe, his 25-year old son.

Shark’s teeth aren’t a big deal, but having a team of hacks charge into a historical site to dig up and sell everything they find sounds like a horror story.

The Grammy Awards will be televised tonight

Do not watch them. Do something else. The Walking Dead season premieres tonight, and that stuff is going to be showing all day. You could read a good book. You could put on some good music and dance in your living room.

However, the Grammy Award organizers are apologizers for abuse. In fact, it sounds like the whole entertainment industry will look the other way when a thug like Chris Brown will batter a woman.

So I’m sure you could find something better to do.

Posin’

The latest edition of Randy Milholland’s Super Stupor mocks the ridiculous poses comic book artists contort their heroines into — you know the ones I’m talking about, the strange postures in which they simultanously thrust their breasts upwards and forwards, while thrusting their buttocks backwards and upwards, with their impossibly slender waists slung spinelessly between them (he also summarizes Liefeld Syndrome, a very scary disease).

But I questioned his accuracy. Panel 8 is freakishly bizarre; no one could possibly actually draw a woman in that pose, could they? And then, coincidentally, I was also sent a link to The 5 Most Ridiculously Sexist Superhero Costumes, and there, in the very first illustration for the article, is a super-heroine doing precisely the same weird spinal twist to face the reader and swivel her ass to face him, too, with one one leg splayed wildly in the air.

I’m sorry, Mr Milholland. I will never doubt you again. I guess there’s a reason I haven’t read any mainstream comics in 30 years, too.

(Jhonen Vasquez also has a marvelous send-up of the balloon-breasted, soda-straw waisted comic book stereotype, but I cannot show it here because it is totally obscene. Oh, all right, if you insist, I found a poor copy here.)

Why, Charlie Brown, Why?

Mondays are my long, long days — this is the day I get to spend 3 hours talking to students in small groups about cancer (they’re young and invincible, so so far it hasn’t been as depressing as I feared.) And they teach me stuff! Among the things I learned today is that there was a Peanuts special from the 1990s about cancer, titled “Why, Charlie Brown, Why“. I was incredulous — it doesn’t sound like the kind of thing I’d expect on Peanuts — but I looked it up, and there it was on YouTube. So I’ll share. It’s not bad.



The class is operating on a much higher level than this special — it doesn’t mention oncogenes even once! — but the session today was a conversation about everyone’s personal experiences with cancer, and yes, we did talk about television and movies and how they deal with the disease.

(Also on Sb)