Foisting the burden of fresh content off onto someone else is a temptation that always exists on the internet. It’s why people pass along memes and take personality quizzes rather than buckle down and share something interesting. So I do not write this “here! links!” post lightly.
I’ve read thousands of websites. Some I have felt the need or desire to go back and re-read. Sometimes the content of a site just resonates with me in such a unique way that I feel I must experience it again from time to time. They’re like old friends, much in the same way as your favorite book or video game.
These six websites are ones that I have read, re-read and re-re-read almost to the point of memorization. I don’t mean in the sense that they are bookmarked and I check them frequently for new content. No, this is old content. Static content. It doesn’t change. These six sites have affected me in some way. You might say they are the vertebrae of my internet existence.
If this all sounds melodramatic, well, I guess it’s just because I want to make it perfectly clear that this isn’t a flippant post about this cool website I found lol and pass it around to all your FaceSpace friends. These are quality sites written with a great amount of passion and dedication that I feel are worth going back to over and over again.
#1: God Ate My Balls (http://www.normalbobsmith.com/godatemyballs/)
Normal Bob Smith’s website didn’t have anything to do with how I ended up an atheist, but boy did it help me get through some rough waters. It’s tricky being a teenager and suddenly realizing you don’t believe the same thing that every adult in your life does. I actually had it pretty easy I guess; my parents never supported my lack of belief but they never condemned me for it either. (Though I’m convinced my mom still thinks it’s some weird phase I’ll grow out of.) This guy Bob, he had it even harder. See, he was dealing with all the same baggage and hashing out a premature mid-life crisis at the same time. He had every right to be angry and destructive, like so many newfangled atheists are, but instead he chose to be funny and constructive. Yes the site has been construed as offensive, but that’s all a matter of perspective isn’t it? From my point of view it was like someone had given me permission to exhale. The message to take away from Bob’s site, and the Ate My Balls section in particular, isn’t “it’s okay to laugh at Christians” but rather “it’s okay to laugh at the situation of being a nonbeliever in a world full of believers”.
#2: How to Destroy the Earth (http://qntm.org/destroy)
I love when someone takes a completely ridiculous premise and then applies absolutely unhealthy amounts of rational thought to it. This is a site that lists a whole bunch of honest, truthful, scientifically-accurate methods of destroying the planet we call home, given the care and attention to detail only a mathematician could muster. It details all the science-fiction-y methods that won’t work, too, but those are ghettoized into their own section. You can read this document and come away feeling like you might actually one day destroy the Earth yourself.
#3: Ted’s Caving Page (http://www.freewebs.com/huclan/caver/)
I’m actually bending the rules a bit on this one; I don’t actually go and read it very often… at least not of my own accord. But every so often someone will discover it and be so enthralled by it that they pass the link to everyone they know, and as a result said link drops in my lap. And when that happens I read the whole thing, start to finish, all over again. Hell, I can’t even tell if this is where the story was originally hosted. This is a fictional journal of a spelunker who finds a mysterious cave, and the strange things that occur there. What fascinates so many people about this story is the sense of dread you start to feel while reading it. The language is too dry and lifeless to be fiction, after all. And nothing overtly insane happens in the story. It… it could be real. Couldn’t it? Ted’s not telling.
#4: Work from Home (http://cockeyed.com/workfromhome/workfromhome_s.html)
Every syllable on cockeyed.com is worth reading, but this story in particular is a gem. This is one man’s journey through the seedy world of the Herbalife scam, starting with a deluge of illegally-posted signs and ending with a pretty striking exposé on multi-level marketing. I remember having only a vague idea of what pyramid schemes were before reading this article, but having read it, I can now spot them from a mile away. All of the articles on this site have a great voice behind them; they get their message across in plain English without ever talking down to you. This article has been online for a long time and has probably saved a lot of people a lot of grief. And it has lots of pictures!
#5: Reviews of Commercial Games (http://www.eblong.com/zarf/gamerev/index.html)
Andrew Plotkin’s list of reviews of adventure games is more than just… a list of reviews; it’s a series of essays on game design. This is a dude who has very clear ideas about what he does and doesn’t like in games, and why, and this shines through in every review he writes. It’s more than just “the graphics were good, the story was bad, C-.” He lays out very plainly all the parts of the game that worked, and why they worked, and why it was important that they work. This site really shaped my own opinions about game design, not in the sense that it told me what opinions to have, but in the sense that it taught me how to determine what my opinions were and how to apply them both to games I play and games I design. (I do so happen to agree with about 90% of Plotkin’s opinions, but I’m sure that’s just coincidence.)
#6: Dear Amanda (http://www.ecentral.com/members/skeller/)
This is very likely the most frightening webpage I’ve ever read. This is a very detailed account of how a man lost both of his children to the cult of Scientology. Forget the anecdotes and litigation and Tom Cruise jumping up and down on a couch; this is the heart and soul of why that particular “religion” is so dangerous. One spot of the document describes young children growing up in the cult whose parents were very clearly neglecting in favor of church duties. They are described as kids from a third-world country. I remember first reading that and having the wind knocked out of me because he was talking about a place in Clearwater, Florida. Literally ten minutes from where I lived. The cruelty and heartache on display here are very genuine and very real… and it was going on (at least in part) right down the street. Spellbinding and terrifying.
So now that I’ve dropped a few weeks’ worth of content into your lap that I didn’t have to write myself, I’m off to do… whatever bloggers do when they don’t have to write content. I hope these pages captivate you the same way they captivate me, time and again.
From 2005 to 2008 I maintained a blog about my experiences working in the drug test industry. Every Sunday I revive one of those experiences here. The following was originally posted July 16, 2007.
It’s a bit nipply in here.
I think every office across America has that one room which is always twice as cold as any other room in the building. In our building, that room is my office. So here I sit, middle of July, wearing a jacket and rubbing my hands together so as not to lose feeling in the tips of my fingers.
I am reminded of a particularly cold day a few years ago, back in my old office. It was a windy November morning (or maybe December), and having just biked through a light drizzle I arrived at work absolutely freezing. Fortunately, back in those days I kept a spare change of clothes in the office for just this occasion. I changed into a clean, dry pair of jeans and threw on some new socks, but couldn’t find a shirt. I did, however, have my nice warm heavy sweater draped across the desk, so I stripped out of my wet one and just threw on the sweater. I then killed the A/C to get things a little toasty and watched the grey morning pass by outside.
Several hours later a young lady walks in wearing a tight white shirt and a cute little pink vest. She’s clutching her arms to her chest and shivering and, of course, is here to take a drug test.
The collection passes uneventfully, but just as I’m getting everything packed and sealed she points out, “You know, I can tell you aren’t wearing a shirt under your sweater.”
“That’s okay,” I reply, “I can tell you aren’t wearing a bra under your shirt.”
She turns beet red and leaves as swiftly as possible.
I guess nobody ever taught her it was rude to point.
Well, last week’s Nomic was the last Nomic. I had a conversation with the artist last weekend to see about picking it back up, but… here we are. Oh well.
Nomic was more experimental than anything (which, if you’ve read it, you already knew). One of the things my artist pal wanted to do was a fantasy-themed comic, but he never got it off the ground for whatever reason. I liked the idea of taking two of the characters from his fantasy comic and putting them in our wacky universe-being-built setting just to see what happened. The canonical explanation was the was reorganizing his hard drive and accidentally copy/pasted old sketches from that comic into c:\comics\nomic.
So we had this generic fantasy swordsman Al, and his temperamental dark elf sorceress companion Em, and Em’s familiar Veewah. The gag from here was going to be that Al would struggle with the idea that he wasn’t going to be the archetypal “hero saving the world” he was originally meant to be, whereas Em was going to feel relieved about escaping what she felt was a dead-end storyline. And of course they would have played the game along with us and taken their turns making rules as we went.
Veewah spoke in an alien language with an alphabet that Davin designed. The idea here was that it looked like gibberish but could actually be deciphered if you had the key. We weren’t sure whether we were going to eventually release the key or just let people figure it out for themselves.
Looking back over the comic now I kind of don’t like the narrator voices. I’m not sure how I’d do it differently, with a single narrator voice that eventually gets phased out, or just having Dot pop into existence and going from there. It’s a moot point I guess.
Anyway, that’s the end of Nomic, or at least the end of that run of it. Thanks for coming along!
Sorry about the heavy-handed opinion/rant yesterday. Here’s some amusing nonsense to make up for it!
Taco Bell decided to celebrate the death of its founder in the most hilarious way possible:
 I like to think the man’s tombstone is actually a gigantic hot sauce packet. You stay classy, TB!
In other news, they’re making Sonic the Hedgehog 4. But it’s going to suck, so no point talking about it. It’s Sega’s way of saying “People bought Mega Man 9 and New Super Mario Bros.! They’ll buy this for sure!” You stay classy too, Sega!
There’s a giant billboard up on Ulmerton Rd. that simply reads: “Are you good without God? Millions are.” over a field of clouds. No other information except a web address: www.TampaBayCoR.com.
Right away alarm klaxons are going off. Here’s a group with something important enough to say they put up a billboard, but who are too terrified of how they’ll be perceived that they hide who they are behind a provocative slogan and a vague abbreviation. Still, I’m pretty “good without God” and have been for this past decade so I was intrigued enough to check it out.
(…from my home computer, because I certainly didn’t need any pagan, wiccan or scientologist propaganda popping up in my search history at the office.)
“TampaBayCoR” stands for “Tampa Bay Coalition of Reason”. They’re a group of atheists who are trying to… uh… I’m not really clear on that. The website is essentially a short essay talking about how it’s okay to be a nonbeliever followed by a page of links to other atheist groups in the area. And of course they want you to join.
I don’t understand the point of all this. Maybe someone can explain it to me. The site is clearly not trying to change anyone’s mind; a theist who stumbles upon it is going to have a reaction somewhere in between “oh, those crazy atheists” and “THEY ARE DESTROYING AMERICA HOW DARE THEY“, and then either close the browser or write their congressman accordingly. I can see how it all might be useful to a person who is having problems with their faith and may take comfort in knowing that a lack of belief is totally normal for some people and that many others have been where they are.
But that person shouldn’t join any atheist groups. Indeed, “atheist groups” probably shouldn’t even exist at all.
Atheism is not a religion. There’s no culture or defining trait behind it. Defining yourself by what you don’t believe is an extremely flimsy way to go through life. I’ve known atheists who were batshit left-wing loonies, and atheists who were gun-loving right-wing crackpots. I’ve known black and white atheists, atheists from every country and culture in the world, and indeed from every religious background. I’ve known atheists who were hard-case skeptics, downright cynics and “drank the Kool-Aid” gullible woo-woos. I’ve known people who were raised atheists, who became atheists after a years-long crisis of faith, who arrived at the atheism position scientifically, and who “converted” just to piss off their parents. I’ve known atheists who are too afraid to even use the label “atheist”.
One of the inside pages of TampaBayCoR.com shows some rather smug-looking college kids with bumper stickers that read “We have the fossils. We win.” But I’ve known atheists who didn’t agree with or accept the theory of evolution. Presumably those atheists would not be welcome in the Coalition of Reason.
The point is there is just no sense of community in the label. It is not a brand name or a marketing gimmick. There’s nothing to build a clubhouse around. Atheism has neither a positive nor negative structure to it; by definition it is a lack of structure. It is a vacuum. All the stuff the Coalition is trying to make atheism mean (such as the link to evolution), it doesn’t really mean. It’s exclusive, and for that reason it’s dangerous.
A lot of atheists out there disagree with me. They think it’s fun to get together and bash world religions and other silliness. Hey, I went through that phase myself. (I was 19, though, and I grew out of it eventually.) Maybe that’s the kind of club the Coalition is. Or maybe they’ve got a political agenda they’re trying to foist onto a large-and-growing American minority. Or maybe they’re just college kids grasping for a sense of identity. I can’t say.
I want “atheism” to mean only exactly what it means: a lack of belief in God or gods. That’s it. I want the term to stand on its own without all the baggage groups like the Coalition of Reason try to lash onto it. When I tell someone I am an atheist, I want that person to assume absolutely nothing about my history, background, or political beliefs. The word is a zero-state, and should be treated as such. Religious groups are already doing a good enough job making us into a “them”; it’s not an image we need to foster.
Sorry, Coalition of Reason. No dues from me. But best of luck to you in whatever your quest or purpose happens to be.
More than I knew, as it turns out.
I fired up Mass Effect 2 last night, and intend to fire it up again once this blog post is live, and was somewhat unprepared by the immediate effect it would have on me. Now, I enjoyed the original Mass Effect, but I did so despite disliking a lot of it. Combat, for example, was really clumsy. Inventory management was a chore. Heck, just changing the members of your active party was a chore. Exploration was relaxing, but also fairly tedious.
It was the story, cast and setting that held me so close when I played the game back in 2007. This is kind of strange, in retrospect, because Mass Effect is neither the type of game nor story I typically enjoy. And though I have spent these last two years praising the writing in the original, I didn’t actually remember much of it. That is, I remembered the feel of the setting more than I did any of the actual game events.
So going into Mass Effect 2 I could not have told you who Pressley was, or the names of half of Shepard’s crew, or who the Reapers were or why they were dangerous. By the time I was through the intro, though, I remembered. It was like all that information was already lurking there, ready to seep forth and be loved again.
My experience with the first three hours of Mass Effect 2 has therefore been various shades of “Cool! I remember this!” and “Cool! I remember loving this!” And that ain’t nothin’.
Now let’s talk about Shepard a bit.
The white dude on the Mass Effect box is not Shepard. I don’t know who that joker is. Captain Genericspacemarine, maybe. The Shepard I know and love is a badass Asian woman with red eyes and an eternal scowl. (And her first name is Penelope, which I had forgotten until booting up Mass Effect 2.) Her eyes are a little redder in the sequel, and her hair was scorched off in re-entry, and her skin is a shade darker, but it’s still her.
Not that they could put her on the box either, because she isn’t your Shepard. Or Bill’s down the road. We each have our own Shepard, modeled by us in some well-formed image of what a good Shepard should be, honed and refined through our choices and experiences with the original game. Male or female, black or white, paragon or renegade, Shepard is at once a complete cipher and a fully-formed, well-realized character with an established personality and backstory.
I’ve played a lot of games with the “create your own character!” tagline: Morrowind and Oblivion, Fallout 3, a half-dozen MMOs. And I enjoyed those games! But I never had a sense that the character was anything more than a mute, animated statue. I had fun running my dark elf archer all over Cyrodiil, amassing riches and conquering guilds, but I don’t really have any sense of who she is or what her motives are. I spent years behind the knee-high eyeballs of my gnome warlock in World of Warcraft, a game which actively rejects any semblance of role-playing you try to add. I wanted my character to have a personality, but I had to do it on the side. I know who Crystalis is, and you do too if you’ve been reading my blog, but World of Warcraft doesn’t — and that’s where she spent most of her time.
The point I’m coming around to is that BioWare must have sorcerers working on their writing staff. They allowed me to build a character up from zero and then developed that character so convincingly in the game world that I had forgotten she had been created by me in the first place.
I think it would be fun to speculate on and discuss some of the tricks that were used to get the character to work so wonderfully, but this post is already long and rambling enough. And besides, I have more playing to get to.
From 2005 to 2008 I maintained a blog about my experiences working in the drug test industry. Every Sunday I revive one of those experiences here. The following was originally posted June 28, 2007.
No, it’s an egg in a frying pan.
Peemeistering has been a little on the quiet side lately, so I thought I’d share one of my favorite aspects of my new-ish job back in the shipping room: the propaganda posters.
Everyone remembers the good ol’ “this is your brain… on drugs” commercials. Egg, frying pan, yadda yadda. Good stuff. Later on they released a remastered edition with a skanky white lady who, instead of frying the egg, smashes it with the frying pan and proceeds to completely demolish her entire kitchen, thereby proving that you don’t need to be on drugs to be a certifiable nutball. Well, one of the materials I’m responsible for shipping out to clients are tacky “drug-free workplace” posters that make the fried egg commercials look like masterpieces.
Some are inoffensive enough, like the ones that just have our company logo and phone number. Actually, flipping through our brochure, that’s the only one. The rest are… well… let’s just say they aren’t oozing class.
Take, for example, our Taco Bell dog rip-off. It features a picture of the owner’s dog saying “Yo no quiero drogas!” Never mind the fact that the Taco Bell dog hasn’t even existed in like five years, and the fact that every person on the planet was completely annoyed with it even when it was relevant… is anyone really going to re-think their entire outlook on drug abuse because a Photoshopped dog head told them to — in Spanish?
Speaking of Photoshopped heads, I really like the one where they just went in and collapsed the top of Mona Lisa’s head to prove marijuana shrinks your brain. They forgot to paste a doobie hanging off her cryptic smiling lips, though.
Our most popular poster features a cartoon frog and the message “get a grip on life.” I don’t have any idea why people love the frog so much. Either he’s related to the Geico saleslizard, or it has something to do with the fact that it looks a few shades less tacky than our other offerings.
If I had to pick a favorite, I’m afraid it’d come down to a tie. On one hand we have the “circle of friends” poster, detailing all the wonderful friends your life of drugs will introduce you to by showing a picture of four or five fat, sweaty white guys standing in a jail cell with their eyes blacked out. On the other we have the one with the pot leaf surrounded by every euphemism for marijuana my boss could think of, including a few I’m sure he made up. Being a 20-something suburbanite, I’ve met a few people who partake of this particular substance, and none of them have ever used the terms “bone”, “sinsemilla” or “hog leg” before… although, I’m sure at least one does now that I’ve shown him the poster.
Mostly these posters are just harmless fun. They get a chuckle from employers who put them up in break rooms and office cubicles, and make them feel good because they’re doing something to curb drug use in the workplace. Some of the information is tenuous at best, but there’s only one poster I really think we should discontinue: the one with a giant picture of Osama bin Laden, along with the phrase “Osama says: buy more heroin!” I don’t think I’ve ever had an order for this poster. Aside from the offensive implication that all drug users are terrorists, people probably just don’t want a picture of the man himself hanging in the office. Except, maybe, as a dart board.
So that’s what the peemeister does when not peemeistering: he prints out hilarious anti-drug propaganda on thick card stock and ships it to trucking companies and landscaping services all over this great country. God bless America, etc… just remember to stay away from the hog leg.
Another one of the slang terms used on the pot leaf poster is “sh*t”, which I believe is pronounced “shasteriskt”.
Like everyone else on the internet, I once teamed up with an artist to make a webcomic. It didn’t get very far, but I’ll share one here each Saturday until there aren’t anymore. Enjoy.
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