TZT

What is going on here? I provide an open thread for everyone all the time, and that isn’t good enough for some of you…noooooo, you have to go and commandeer another thread altogether and turn it into The Zombie Thread. And then fill it up with…stuff. Unsanctioned, unauthorized, unmonitored stuff.

Well, I know what to do with zombie threads: shoot it in the head. So I did. It’s dead. Now don’t you go resurrecting it, neither.

Episode CCCVII: Flamboyant emergence

I’ve been neglecting you, readers! This has been a killer meeting in Orlando, with the schmoozing starting at 8am and then non-stop talks and then everything dribbling away into exhaustion somewhere north of 11pm. And the wireless sucks. Ophelia has been posting brief dispatches, but I’ve been buried so far.

I give my talk today, and then fly off with a long long travel day…and my flights got juggled about so I’m not even sure when I’m leaving yet. So I figure I better leave you with something good, so here it is: a moment of awesome transcendent beauty.

Squee, sir; I must say with great reverence, squee.

(Episode CCCVI: Why Sean Bean gotta die?.)

Schwaaaaaaag!

I know exactly what you’re thinking right now. The Reason Rally is less than a month away, and you have nothing to wear. You want to be fashionable, and you also want to declare your allegiance, affiliations, and your weird obsessions publicly. Whatever can you do?

Go to the Pharyngula store. We have new stuff! It will be ready in time for the rally (although you might have to pick them up at the event).

First, look at this t-shirt. You must have it.

It’s like the emblem Batman should have chosen. It will inspire fear and curiosity and weird monkey-like happy thoughts in all who behold you wearing it.

And then, you know, you’re going to be hanging out on the Mall, listening to raucous music and ferocious firebrands, and you’re going to get thirsty. Do you have your travel mug with you? You need it! It will be awesome and thirst-quenching!

There are other options. If you favor a more subtle, muted look, you can still purchase the lovely octopus t-shirt, and if you’re on a budget and can’t afford the full glorious PZ regalia, you can always get the button.

There. Your apparel needs are all taken care of. Buy now. Even if you can’t attend the Reason Rally, you can wear these and hold the mug as you watch us vilified on Fox News from the boring safety of your home.

Hmmm. I think I need to buy one of those shirts for my mom.

Confession: Yes, FtB has been stacking the place with diversity

From the very beginning. Intentionally. It was my very first demand when Ed Brayton proposed building this network: that we make a special effort to bring in good bloggers who weren’t old white dudes like us. That wasn’t a handicap at all, because there is no dearth of diverse godless authors with all kinds of backgrounds, so we just had to pick the cream of the crop from a wide pool. So like Jason says, not one of us is a token.

It does create some amusing situations, though: like where this network is accused of being a hivemind and an echo chamber — sometimes simultaneously with being accused of making affirmative action hires. Yeah, ’cause Greta and Mano and Ian and Maryam and Sikivu are just talentless hacks we brought in to fill a quota, rather than great writers we were thrilled to bring on board (and we were also thrilled to get the other old white dudes, too, every one of them). One virtue of all that is that whenever someone accuses us of being an “echo chamber” I can roll my eyes and immediately recognize that I’m dealing with a moron.

Jason explains why we’re doing this at length, but I have a shorter answer, a single phrase that is appropriate for a militant atheist: combined arms. I pushed for people who aren’t like me on this network because I am fully aware of the obvious weakness of stacking our army with nothing but artillery: we need infantry and armor and sappers and engineers and cooks and air force and gunboats and communications experts and spies. We aim to conquer, you know.

We’re currently planning to slow down and consolidate the network for the near future (although there will be a few additions coming up soon), but we’re always on the lookout for new members to complement the ones we’ve got: if you know of a good godless blog that provides a different point of view and also has a record of sustained excellent writing, feel free to let us know. We may assimilate them someday.