You have two things to look forward to this weekend

It’ll be my last weekend before classes come crashing down on my head, so I’m going to take advantage of it.

Skepticon starts tomorrow! Tune in!

I’m looking forward to this as well: Lovecraft Country airs on Sunday!

It’s a great book, and it looks like HBO is doing right by it. There’s a write-up in the LA Times about that horrible racist, HP Lovecraft, and why he is surprisingly popular.

Lovecraft helped create a genre now known as “cosmic horror,” stories filled with dread and terror at the knowledge that humans are not the most important things in the universe.

“He was beginning to write at a time when science was making vast and profound discoveries,” says Klinger. “What he came to believe, I think deeply and honestly, was that human beings were insignificant little dust motes in this enormous universe and that eventually we would discover that we were not particularly significant.”

Science has been spending a few centuries working to move the center of the universe away from us, so it fits with an ongoing trend. Now we just have to dislodge that center from white people, which is proving to be the hardest step of them all. Lovecraft Country, though, does its part in the decentering. Don’t read Lovecraft, read the more recent authors that have been bringing us cosmic dread without the petty racism. (Another author I’d recommend: the work of Ruthanna Emrys, who takes on the perspective of the fish men of Innsmouth.)

Hey, can we pretend Skepticon is taking place in Lovecraft country?

I intensely dislike dishonest presentations of data

One could make the point that there’s an interesting and sort of natural experiment going on here: two adjacent countries with strong cultural similarities but different approaches to health care are addressing the pandemic, and spontaneously generating lots of data we could use to evaluate their methodologies. But this illustration isn’t it:

Oh, look. The US is a smear of red. Canada just has a few dots…but wait. Those dots look like they correspond to the approximate centers of Canadian provinces. Are we seriously supposed to compare a coarse province-level aggregation of data to what looks like a finer-grained county level visualization of US cases? That’s highly misleading. It may be that Canada has managed the pandemic better than the US, but you can’t assess that from such a bad map. For shame, whoever made that.

I have a cunning plan to get rich

I’m going to remind you all that I’ve really cut back on posting spider photos here on Pharyngula. It makes me sad, but it turns out that that subject seems to repel too many people. So, because I’m a super-duper galaxy brain, I’m posting all the spiders on my Patreon account, which brings in a little revenue that’s being used to pay off my legal debt, to drive away people…who might…contribute to my income? Oh, wait, I didn’t think this through. But anyway, it’s there, if you’re feeling generous, you can join at the $1 tier — that is, you tip me a grand total of $1 per month — or even the $5 tier, if you’re Elon Musk. For a short while now I’ve been posting Spider of the Day there, you should join while you can, because once winter hits here and the spiders all die, I may not be able to sustain that. Get the daily spider photos while you can!

Also, because I am clearly an economic genius, I also post those same photos on my Instagram account, so if you don’t want to pay $1 a month, you can get it for free.

You know, when I look at my brilliantly incompetent fund-raising scheme, I’m surprised that Donald Trump hasn’t hired me for his cabinet.

A sad announcement from Ed Brayton

Ed Brayton and I had some contentious disagreements back in the day, but we managed to put all that behind us and set up the Freethoughtblogs network with a mutual understanding that we needed something beyond the atheist movement, some kind of organization that would support diversity and social justice and not just tearing down religion. He named the network — we agreed that we didn’t want “atheist” anywhere in our label, even if we were effectively an atheist group, because even then the word was getting tainted — and he and I together made the initial investment in the site. We owe a lot to Ed.

Unfortunately, he’s also suffered from serious health problems over the years, and left the network he built to run a blog on Patheos. This was an amicable decision with zero drama behind the scenes or in front of it — he just decided that he couldn’t cope with the day-to-day chores of management, and just wanted a space where he could write with no pressure.

His health has worsened. He’s been in and out of hospitals for a while. People have been asking me how he’s doing, since his postings have become intermittent, and I don’t know either! Unfortunately, he just posted this to Facebook:

I’m giving up and calling in hospice. I just can’t do this anymore. To those who know me in real life I love you and I’m sorry. I did my best.

He always has done his best, and he will be missed.

Reminder: we’re playing Minecraft tomorrow at noon central time

I announced a group game on Sitosis the other day, and I have noticed a surge of enrollments on that server this week. Uh-oh. There might be a few problems.

  • There are rules for joining and playing on the server. Make sure you read them!
  • If you want to make a last-minute application to join, be kind to the admins, who have to individually approve each application. If you haven’t already joined, it’s probably too late to get in for tomorrow.
  • The server has a limit of 20 simultaneous log-ins. I didn’t think it possible we’d get that many users, but from the number of new users, we might. If we hit the limit, we’ll just have to do an additional session later this week.
  • If 20 people sign on before I do, well, the livestream will go on and it’ll just be me talking over a blank screen. Exciting!
  • We’ll use the Freethoughtblogs Discord server for voice chat. That might get interesting, with me trying to monitor that, the YouTube chat, and the game, all at the same time.

I have some trepidations that this might all disintegrate into total chaos. We’ll see how it goes. We like to experiment, right?

Playing games, again

The minecraft server, Sitosis, has generated a brand-spanking new map, and is accepting membership requests, so it’s time to play again this weekend, only this time with friends. Log in on Sunday, 9 August at noon Central time.

Let’s do a livestream while playing as a group on Sitosis! Follow the instructions here if you aren’t already signed up: http://mc.sitosis.com/#join.

We’ll just jump on the map, everyone meet at spawn, and we’ll figure out what to do next. Go exploring? Help someone build? Monster hunting? Sit around and eat cake? Talk about the science of Minecraft genetics and spiders?

We’ll all fumble about for the entertainment of any watchers!

People have asked about voice chat. Yes, Freethoughtblogs has a discord server! We can use that for voice chat during the session.

Siblings wrecked my sleep last night

I had an intense dream where I was at a family reunion, and everyone was there, including my dead father and dead sister, and weirdly, they’d aged an additional 20 or 30 years as if I’d been totally mistaken about attending their funerals, and they’d been just living their lives while I was oblivious and unaware. Then my baby sister Lisa, who died in her 30s but was now a gray-haired and healthy 52, took offense at my joy at seeing her again and started punching me, battered me to the ground, and was kicking me to death. My father, who was also looking strong, glanced my way and said, “You deserve it”, and then all my brothers and sisters joined in.

That’s when I woke up, totally bewildered by what is going on in my brain. I got to lie there for a few hours wondering what sick guilt was lurking deep in the rotting core of my mind, and what it was trying to tell me, and wondering why I was such a horrible person. Now I’ve got a lot of work to do today, and this worry is going to prey on me all day long. Is there an oneirologist in the house?

Oh boy, it’s a vertigo day!

This getting old thing sucks. I’ve got things to do in the lab, but when I stood up this morning to walk in, woo hoo, the world was wobbling and spinning and doing all those fun things that prove to my mind that the universe really does rotate around me, and it does so really fast and rather chaotically.

Fortunately, I have some pills from the last time this happened to me, so my plan for the day has changed to sitting motionless and not turning my head too fast. Exciting. Oh, and if the rest of you could all stop whirling around me, that would help too.

It all cleared up within a day last time, and the previous case was a lot more severe, so I’m planning to be stable again soon. Now if I could just get this computer screen to stop swimming off to the left for a little while…