Selling out?

Hey, gang! You may have seen a few hints that there will be some changes around here, semi-imminently. Any interruptions in service should be brief to non-existent, but I have some concerns that if the blog goes a-wandering or falls under new management, there will be some drop-off in traffic…and some drop-off in my revenues, which wouldn’t break me — I have a day job! — but might negatively impact my payments on the secret nuclear submarine and my remote island lair. I talked to a few people this past weekend about merchandising, you know, succumbing to capitalism and peddling branded geegaws that might help with a potential shortfall.

The only catch: I don’t have anything recognizably brandable. I dabble in walls of text, which doesn’t exactly lend itself to a catchy coffee mug design. I don’t have a unique logo. I’m not known for my fashion sense. I’m at a loss to know what I could put out here.

So I’m looking for suggestions. What would be amusing and interesting? What would you wear on a t-shirt? Are there entertaining catch phrases I could slap on a widget and make a profit from? Do you want t-shirts, action figures, exotic sex toys, Pharyngula rifle-range targets (wait, no, let’s not go there — we don’t want to encourage them), coffee cups, party favors, what? Designs and ideas would be nice, because I haven’t got any. Some idea of the one thing lots of people would like to have would be useful.

Leave comments here, or perhaps an even better place would be the Pharyngula wiki, which is a growing compendium of site-specific strangeness. It might even provide some inspiration.

Working blue

Stop writing to me about Mairson and Grossman. I have no respect for their opinions at all.

Grossman is the religion columnist at USA Today; Mairson is some disgruntled ex-employee of National Geographic who has appointed himself guardian of all propriety of anyone associated with NatGeo. Grossman is wondering “if the august Society would try to rein in Myers, just let him quietly bear the coveted NGS brand or whether Myers would high tail it out from under editorial control.” Mairson is concerned about my “profanity-laced diatribes and my lack of “civil discourse about religion”.

Bugger ’em.

My policy has been and always will be to write as I will, to say without reservation what I think, and to have a damn good time while doing it. I will not mute the way I express myself because a couple of delicate little flowers wilt when a blog does not have the same formal tone as a long-established magazine, and I will categorically reject the criticisms of idiots who look at what I say and see only shrill, rabid, militant, screaming, hysterical, obscenities — that is a slanderous mischaracterization that immediately calls into question their capacity for critical thought. It is also the very same clumsy character assassination that we atheists are entirely familiar with — every one of us seems to get accused of savagery and barbarous abuse of the mores of decorous civilization, when we’re not the ones bombing abortion clinics, raping children, or moronically believing in an invisible telepathic superman in the sky.

So to all of you who’ve been pestering me with Grossman and Mairson’s ginned-up non-controversies and bluenosed fussings, don’t worry. Nothing is changing for me. Web servers might change, blog software can shift, different paymasters might try to borrow my pages, but I am completely free: I write what I write because it is what I want to write, not because I am obligated to put myself in a straitjacket to please an advertiser. And I am especially not constrained by a pair of prissy, shallow whiners who have no association with me, no input into what I say, and absolutely no relevance.

I have a simpler solution for those two. Don’t read my blog. Is that so hard to comprehend?

All caught up on the Molly awards, at last

Greetings! This is MG Myers. PZ is safely landed in Dublin, but he’s going to be busy and jet-lagged for a while.

Pharyngula is known for its vibrant community of commenters, and April was no exception. The numerous nominations have been tabulated and the winners are <drum roll>

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Dhorvath and raven!

These two well-deserving and passionate commenters are hereby inducted in the distinguished Order of the Molly. Virtual champagne all around!

As you are celebrating with the new inductees, be sure to leave the names of your May Molly nominations and the reasons for their selection in the comments.

(The Molly page may not be updated right away until PZ gets reliable access to the net.)

March Molly Madness

Howdy all! This is MG Myers.

The competition for the March Mollies was mighty fierce with 23 great nominees. The votes have been tabulated and the winners are <drum roll>

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onion girl and CJO!

These two well-deserving commenters are hereby inducted in the distinguished Order of the Molly. Woohoo! Weehee! Congratulations to both!

Now we just need to catch up on the April awards. Who of your fellow commenters do you think is deserving of a Molly award for April and why?

Also, in the last Molly thread Mattir had a terrific idea of starting a monthly book club.

It would be good to have a monthly book club wherein commenters could discuss contentious issues like that raised by the Anatomy of an Epidemic/Emperor’s New Drugs books over the weekend. Hard to have a productive discussion between people armed with anecdata and googlescholar in one corner and the other side armed with the knowledge gained from the book under discussion.

What do you folks think about a Pharyngula book club? How about some suggestions for a worthwhile book to start us all off?

Molly…under new management

Hi, this is MG Myers. A few readers mentioned that Pharyngula is three months behind in awarding Mollies. Shame on PZ. Since PZ doesn’t have the job done, I thought maybe we should fire him help him out. Anyway, I’ll be taking over the Molly administration. If you have any community building ideas we could do to make Pharyngula an even stronger and better community, feel free to put your ideas in the comments.

For starters, let’s catch up on inducting some well-deserving commenters in the distinguished Order of the Molly. The votes for February have been tabulated and the winners are <drum roll>

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SallyStrange and llewelly!

Congratulations to both!

For your next assignment, you know the drill. We need to collect some nominee names for the distant month of March. Just leave your votes and nomination reasons in the comments.

I’m beginning to hate Yahoo

Just a warning: lately, there’ve been a lot of nasty, slagging, one-off comments coming in from Yahoo accounts — you know them, the usual unreadable smear of a name that we all call yahoomess. I’m considering cutting them off altogether. All it will take is one click and the yahoomesses will no longer be afflicting the site.

If there is anyone who objects, speak now. If there are a significant number of reasonable people who are logging in with those IDs, and have managed to successfully generate a readable name for themselves, I’ll reconsider.

Changes, one way or another

I have news. Scienceblogs is going to be folded into a new organization sometime soon — basically, we’ve been bought. I can’t discuss all of the details just yet, but let’s just say it is a prestigious national magazine with a healthy bottom line that will do us a lot of good. There are certainly some advantages: like I said, prestigious, and there’s also a commitment to up-to-date technology and migrating to better blogging software. There’s also an agreement that the range of topics I discuss here, including the strong dissent from religion and the atheism and the anti-creationism stuff, are acceptable subjects. So that’s the happy part of the story.

The worrisome bit: there are standards and practices to follow, which is not a bad thing in and of itself, but I do not want my peculiar voice to be compromised. That’s why I’m in this thing in the first place, to be able to express myself as I want when I want. So we’re in the delicate negotiation phase, trying to find agreements on form that don’t infringe on content, that will allow me to say any damn thing I want but maybe will require me to take an extra moment to review my articles with more cool deliberation before clicking that ‘submit’ button.

It is entirely possible that we won’t be able to find that position that is acceptable to both sides of our discussion, in which case I’ll cheerfully move on to an independent server and keep on keeping on right there. I’ll be thinking about the pluses and cons for a while.

I said “both sides,” but there are actually three sides: me, the hosting organization, and you the readers. How would you react if, for instance, profanity filters went up on the comments? Right now, it’s a real free-for-all in the comments, but I do clean up spam, ban certain elements that have demonstrated their trollishness, and will occasionally swoop in and erase comments that reveal personal information or contain nothing but bigoted raving. Would you leave if some automated software converted certain four-letter words to euphemisms, or if comments containing such words were held up until you edited them to meet the standards? What limits to expression would you accept?

These are trade-offs, so another interesting question is, what would persuade you that some limits to language are acceptable? Are there features that you think it would be worth demanding (say, user editing, or just faster performance, or free ponies with every comment) that you’d like to demand for the price of watching your potty-mouths a little more? We’re negotiating, you know — they make requests, we make requests — so tell me what’s most important to you.

I sure haven’t signed any contract with this organization yet, so it’s still entirely possible that I’ll just fly off my own way. Your input will be a factor, so speak up here, and I’ll listen. No matter what, though, things will not be the same, and there will be changes coming this summer.

In which I reveal my secret identity and announce a radical change

Three and a half years is a pretty decent lifespan for a cuttlefish.

The Cuttlefish Poet started out as a joke. I had posted about Cephalopod
Awareness Days, including a cephalopod poetry contest, and just for
fun, added a handful. I have my reputation to think of, so a quick
nom de tentacle change was required. I honestly thought that would be
the end of it.

But then, Gary Aldridge made the news, and in the ensuing respectful,
solemn thread, I was struck with a rhyme. So… why not let
“Cuttlefish” make another appearance? So he did. This time, though,
the reaction was overwhelmingly positive, with just enough “that’s
inappropriate” to convince me to put it up as its own post.

I am strong, but I am not immune to public reaction. It was fun being
“Cuttlefish”, at least at first. The very first month commenting
“he/she” won a Molly! I had to start another blog for Cuttlefish,
just to keep my thoughts straight. I don’t update it nearly as often
as Pharyngula, so it’s not a great time-sink. And little or no
editing takes place—if I like a comment Cuttlefish makes on
Pharyngula, I post it on the Cuttle blog; if not, I can just let it
stay and get buried in other comments.

There were some close calls. A few people did guess, but their
guesses were either buried in comments, or on their own blogs with
very few readers. Sometimes “his” comments came altogether too
quickly after my blog post, and I worried that it would be too
obvious. After a while, though, I started toying with that, making
Cuttlefish appear nearly psychic. The biggest benefit to this, of
course, was seeing how this intimidated Truth Machine.

It has been fun, but now my own book is coming out, and well, three
and a half years is a good long life for a cuttlefish. And as you know, we’ve had a few problems here at Scienceblogs, which have led to a little dissatisfaction with the current digs…but hey! I’ve already got this other blog where I’m comfortable, so I’ve decided to just up and move wholesale from scienceblogs to digitalcuttlefish.blogspot.com. If I do any
more rhyming there, it will be under my own name, but otherwise, look for new material to appear at the Digital Cuttlefish from now on.

Spamming me doesn’t work, OK?

I know you’re out there, and I’m laughing at you. Something happens to me occasionally: some clever dick decides that they’ll torment me by signing me up for all kinds of internet newsletters and advertising, so that my in-box will get flooded, or they sign me up for magazine delivery and then presumably chuckle at my discomfiture at receiving unwanted mail.

What they don’t understand is that I live in spamville.

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I get several thousand emails a day right now. Putting me on an acupuncturist mailing list, or the newsletter of a chiropractic cult, simply throws a few more drops into the torrent. I click on it once, add it to my list of software sorting rules (all mail from this address→trash), and it’s gone and never reappears. I can do this far more quickly and easily than you can sign me up. I have skills honed in an incident with Catholics a few years ago.

So sure, you can get a company to send me something like this a thousand times, and I’ll see it once, and forevermore, that company is dead to me. Meanwhile, what I’ve got is blog fodder.

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Acupuncture loons are churning out software to calculate magic points to poke the gullible? That’s just hilarious.

As for those who burden my poor mailman with pulp, that goes in two directions. Most of it just gets recycled, like the church newsletters and letters telling me to pay for prayers on their magic prayer rug. Some of it I rather appreciate: the person(s) who signed me up for those gay men’s magazines, for instance. They actually had intelligent analyses of political issues, with fashion tips. I felt guilty about taking those in and depriving a quality company of revenue, and cancelled those, but any others, I just recycle their money into the big blue boxes.

Anyway, I just thought I’d mention to the delusional harasser that yes, I noticed your recent effort to make a dent in my mailbox…for about 30 seconds.

Word from On High

The latest information from management on the impairment of service:

We are still working to contain the ongoing DDoS attack, and to this end we have recently upgraded our service with Rackspace. This should restore access to our readers who have been blocked for the last week. However, some users may still be blocked, so please continue to send blocked IP addresses to webmaster@scienceblogs.com (or have them send us their IP addresses directly). As a preventative measure, please send your own IP addresses as well; we will add these addresses to Rackspace’s whitelist.

The problems should start easing up. If not, harass the admin at the address above.