The Atheist Experience is going away

I’ve emailed the president of ACA, the vice president, and the board, and have received no response. We’ve discussed the matter on the FtB backchannel, and the comments there so far have been unanimous: the ACA is now incompatible with the mission of Freethoughtblogs. Therefore, and regretfully, I have disabled comments on the AXP blog and demoted all of their administrators. Nothing is irreversible yet, but I can’t imagine what kind of defense they could put up that would reverse our decision.

Ideally, they’ll contact me soon and we can make arrangements to transfer all of their blog content elsewhere. If the silence continues, I’ll simply archive everything and remove references to them from our main page by the end of this week.

There are many things we will not tolerate on any of the blogs here: racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia are all grounds for ejection from the network. The ACA is guilty of the last.

Farrell’s is no more

The last restaurant in that ice cream chain has closed. It was popular on the west coast when I was growing up, and was best known for the dishes of legendary size they would serve.

I can’t say that I went there very often, but I do remember that my friends took me there on my 21st birthday, because although I was now old enough, I couldn’t drink, since I had a biochemistry final the next day. Damn, but I was stodgy and responsible. Also, damn biochemistry, that was a tough course.

Angels in the sky!

We have arrived in Duluth a few days before a big air show, and the Blue Angels are practicing all around our hotel. It would be terrible if we were trying to sleep, but right now the frequent “whooooshes” are entertaining.

Unfortunately, I only brought my macro lens kit with me, none of my long lenses, so this was the best I could do, even when they were doing low altitude flyovers of the hotel parking lot.

Pulp artists needed cephalopod anatomy lessons

I am OFFENDED. There’s this collection of pulp magazine covers featuring cephalopods, and they’re terrible.

Look at this one: I have a thousand questions. Why are they exploring an alien planet in skimpy clothes? Why is the man wearing a space helmet, but the woman apparently doesn’t need one? Why does the cephalopod have its mouth in the wrong place, and why does it have teeth?

Nice headlights, octopus-man. Also, why is his human face a couple of stories tall? Does the artist know nothing of perspective?

This is the worst one of them all. It’s asymmetric, with some arms on the left improbably long, while the ones on the right looking different. It’s got this hunchbacked, bug-like look with appendages coming off the mantle. This was drawn by a person who apparently never saw a cephalopod.

I swear, I’m going to stop this time-machine and turn it back 70 years just so I can slap a couple of bad artists.

You missed Convergence?

OK, here’s a cosplay gallery from last weekend.

I recognized a few of the costumes, but that wasn’t what I was into. You know, there’s a heck of a lot going on during a con like this. There was the costume pageantry, the mainstage stuff. I wasn’t into that. There were the musical performances; not my thing. There was board gaming. No, pass. There was video gaming. Completely missed it. There were SF & horror movies playing nonstop. Tempted, but I didn’t feel like sitting down for a few hours. There were anime sessions, which again, I am not into. There were interactive kid demos. Nah, I’m too old. I missed 90% of the con.

I did get into a whole lot of panel discussions, though. That alone kept me busy for four days.

It’s a diverse bunch there — you might find something to entertain you there next year.