Unpacking Some of the Extreme Distress I Experienced Last Week – Some of you may have heard about the murder-suicide of Scott Smith, who was a podcaster for Recovering From Religion.  Well, here is an account from the cohost of the podcast.  I think this could be helpful if you knew Scott Smith, or if you just want to learn about trauma.

Cuphead: The Fake Outrage (video) – Anti-feminist gamergate-types have recently been outraged over people calling Cuphead (a video game) racist and ableist.  Except… nobody is saying that.  Amongst game critics, there has been discussion of the racist history behind the animation style used by Cuphead, and there has also been discussion about it’s high difficulty, and what that might mean for accessibility.  That really isn’t the same, and Shaun goes into depth about it.  I recommend Shaun’s YouTube channel if you need an antidote to anti-feminist and alt-right YouTubers.

Video game difficulty and accessibility is an interesting topic, maybe I will write about it in the future.

The Fine-Tuning Argument and Base Rate Fallacy – The author is not a physicist, but articulates very well some of the reasons why as a physicist I am very skeptical of fine-tuning arguments.  Predicting how the universe would look with different fundamental constants sounds like an incredibly difficult question!  And the more “fine-tuned” the universe is, the more difficult the question is.

BTW, the author mentions William Lane Craig’s claim that the gravitational constant is sensitive to a change of one part in 10^60.  I would not believe Craig’s claims without independent investigation.  I cannot stress this enough, William Lane Craig is an extremely unreliable source of information on math and physics, even on matters that are neutral with respect to his apologetic arguments.  Seriously, if you’re going to believe in God, you might be better off just believing in God rather than accepting Craig’s arguments, because then at least you will only be wrong about one thing.

Due Process Is Needed For Sexual Harassment Accusations–But For Whom? – Ijeoma Oluo points out that there hasn’t been enough due process for all the women who are forced out of their jobs due to sexual harassment.  There’s also a story in there about newspapers slanting stories in order to tell “both sides”.

How do we support survivors in a sea of triggers? – In an earlier post I mentioned that some people with PTSD can be triggered by the #metoo campaign–which doesn’t mean we should stop.  Benny talks about this from a first-person perspective.

MythCon Ain’t Over – Part Three – Title aside, this is really about how much money is made by secular feminist and anti-feminist YouTubers such as Steve Shives and Sargon of Akkad.  The anti-feminists make more money, surprise surprise.  Really at this point, my fear isn’t that the atheist movement is dead, it’s that the atheist movement is still living on through the likes of Sargon.

Board Games Were Indoctrination Tools for Christ, Then Capitalism – It’s a history of early commercial board games, from the 19th century and early 20th century.  Very fun to read about.  I would love to read more history about how board games later became about war, and are presently about colonialism.