An Australian town is being overrun with tumbleweeds. They’re complaining.
This is exactly wrong. You treat tumbleweeds laconically. You gaze at them all flinty-eyed, and at most you might shift your toothpick from one side of your mouth to the other. Bonus points if you do that while listening to an Ennio Morricone soundtrack.
There. Problem solved.
The “About FtB” link at the top left corner of every FtB page now actually says something about Freethoughtblogs, and also includes the instructions for how to apply for a blog here, so you don’t have to remember where my post about that is.
I can tell this may be my weekend for fussing with administrative stuff, in addition to the usual grading and prep work for classes.
We’ve been shaking things up a bit behind the scenes here at FtB. One of our enduring annoyances has been recruiting new bloggers — the way we set it up here (again, behind the scenes) was to appoint a committee and tell them to do all the work. Then, every once in a while, someone would write to me or someone else and ask how to be considered for FtB, and I’d blithely pass their name along to the committee.
That didn’t work. We don’t have a staff. No one signed up here to do administrative work, we were here to write, so passing a name to the committee was more like casting it away into the eternal void.
So we’re trying something different. No committee. Instead, we have an email link, and you’ll write to us with your qualifications. It then gets passed into a private application channel, and we all have an opportunity to look you over and vote yay or nay.
So if you want to blog here, here’s what you do: send an email to ftbapplications@googlegroups.com, in which you give us this information:
Name
Contact email
Do you want your email public?
Twitter account, if any
Link for donations, if any
Links to your current blog, any biographical material, or best examples of your writing in comments or forums or other media
Why do you want to write for us?
It’s that easy. This is a private communication to the bloggers here; none of this information will be made public without your permission. So if you’re interested in trolling us, it won’t be very rewarding, since your application will vanish into our application channel, never to emerge into the public, and we’ll snigger at it before deleting it.
Serious applications will be examined for their suitability. Our requirements are simple: we want godless Social Justice Warriors. If that’s you, why aren’t you writing for us already? (Oh, because applicants vanished into the darkness of the eternal void of the committee).
We really want to encourage diversity, too, and we also want to see some sort of track record of your writing. Anything will do; if you don’t have a blog of your own, give us links to your substantive comments, or your participation in an online forum, anything to show that you’re actually able to write coherently, and that your views align with our intent. If you don’t have a history of regular blog-like writing, that’s OK — we’re creating a guest blog, and will give you keys to that so you can try it for a few months and see if you take to it.
Group blogs are fine. You can be pseudonymous, too, we’ll just need to have a way to contact you.
What are the rewards, you ask?
You get space for a blog of your very own!
You get to join a group of supportive people!
You get paid! OK, not much. We take the profits from each months advertising and divide it among all bloggers by their proportion of traffic. So you get a free cup of coffee every month!
Fame and glory!
You’ll be able to shape the future membership of FtB! Review the next set of applicants, if you want!
Trolls galore! We’ve got a crop of dedicated assholes who will plague you until you block them. We’ll show you how!
If this sounds fun, send us an application. We’re also planning on quarterly review of new applications, so we’re going to possibly invite new bloggers to join us in mid-March. If anyone applies. If anyone makes the cut. Remember, godless SJWs only, please.
If you think later that you’d like to join, these instructions will be available at the “About FtB” link in the top left corner of this window, at some time in the next few days.
The president of Mount St Mary’s University was in the news a short while back because of his cavalier attitude towards students: his grand plan for improving student retention scores was to drive away students earlier, before they counted in the statistics, with the comment that This is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t. You just have to drown the bunnies…put a Glock to their heads.
The faculty who criticized President Simon Newman, and who supported the students who reported the Glock comment, have been abruptly fired. One of them was tenured. Newman’s explanation?
As an employee of Mount St. Mary’s University, you owe a duty of loyalty to this university and to act in a manner consistent with that duty. However, your recent actions, in my opinion and that of others, have violated that duty and clearly justify your termination,said the letter.Further, the letter said that Naberhaus’s actions
have caused considerable damageto the university and that the university might sue him. In addition, the letter told Naberhaus he wasdesignated persona non grataand banned from the campus.
Wow. Not only does Newman hold a Glock to everyone’s heads, he’s willing to pull the trigger.
I saw this latest comic and started feeling paranoid and checking the ceiling for lenses. It’s been a depressing couple of weeks, and…we’re hosting more cats. My son’s house got flooded by a water main break, he’s sleeping on couches at friends’ places, his gear is stored in various places, including our car, and we had to take in his two cats, temporarily.
It does not ease the situation. Our existing cat is a minion of the devil who hates strangers and strange cats, so we’ve had to wall off the two groups in separate rooms. I still come home to find our satanic beast snarling and hissing at a closed door. We are the only two other creatures on the planet she trusts at all, so far, and it’s a little uncomfortable to be the patrons of the bestial anti-christ.
So don’t do it, PeeJee! Not unless, of course, we can figure out how to translate real creatures into a two-dimensional cartoon world, and you really want a cat that will attack all your patrons on sight.
We have, of course, more than enough material to construct a metaphor useful to analyzing gender. But just for fun, let’s take a genderless gander at another puzzle. This one:
You now have all the information you need to get the top-right square into the following state:
Don’t move forward with any other aspect of the puzzle until you’ve gotten the top-right square to this position. The 8 gained in box C:A (the top-left square) is a consequence of filling in the top-right square to this point. The 1 & 8 gained in the bottom-middle square are not relevant, though they follow easily from our starting position because of the 8 in box A:F.
As ever, Online Sudoku Workshop is brought to you by your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke.
As billions of eidetic readers will no doubt remember, we last left our sudoku in this position:
Our genders were, as yet, unaffected by this configuration.
As ever, even though it’s the very first in the series, Online Sudoku Workshop is brought to you by your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke.
This is a strange turn, I’m sure. Gender and sudoku? Well, yes. But not yet. Mostly I’m doing this because it’s fun to talk logic and sudoku and just how exciting it is to learn new things, but I will use this as a metaphor in discussing gender later. Come for the sudoku, stay for the sudoku. Come back again later for the gender. If you’re only in it for the gender metaphor, this will certainly be too long for you. In fact, it’s too long for a single post. I’ll start my puzzle-solving with some of the puzzle already done, and still I have to break this up into 3 posts. [Don’t worry, though. If the merchandizing revenues are good enough, I’ll go back and do the prequels so you can see how we arrived at the point we’ll begin our exciting puzzle-solving together.]
This thread is for talking about whatever doesn’t fit into the other categories. Caine is your curator.
Whoa, somebody in Minneapolis really gets into their snow sculptures. Here’s a description of how it was done.
