#skepticon

Can we talk about how good my hair looked Saturday night?

Skepticon 9 (@realskepticon) is November 11-13 in Springfield, Missouri. We recently visited with the founder of Skepticon, Lauren Lane, about this year's event. Read the interview at secularbynature.wordpress.com or www.secularbynature.com/interviews.html. #atheist #atheism #skeptic #Skepticon #Skepticon9 #secular #secularism #SecularByNature #Freethinker #humanist #godless #goodwithoutgod #hitchens #dawkins #god #logic #reason #LaurenLane #jesus

I skipped a day or two of updates. Saturday I went to Skepticon and actually had a fun time. After all the speakers there was a "skeptiprom" which was honestly more fun than high school prom.  I've never seen so many men in dresses in one room. After the dance, I was standing outside with a group talking and cooling off, when Jared,  the sign language translator for the event, stumbles up to us drunk. He asks do you guys smoke weed, and everyone in the group says yes. He then asks if we want to smoke, and someone sarcastically asks him if it's in his van, and he says yes. So the entire group goes to his van, which he lives in with his smoking hot girlfriend and everyone smokes except me. I pretended to smoke, but didn't actually inhale. The person who gave me a ride, Rikki, hadn't smoked in a long time so one hit of Jared's medical grade chronic and she's flying. So now she's slightly drunk and super high. I end up catching a ride from a guy named Simon. Didn't get back till 3AM. Awesome fucking day. Sunday I went exploring on my bike. I climbed on an abandoned grain elevator and found not one, not two, but three active homeless encampments. I spoke to, but didn't see a women at one of the encampments. She was polite. When I told my "homies" about the camps they said I shouldn't have done that in fear of getting murdered. Or, in their words, "that's just asking to get butt fucked by a hobo." I've officially made it 1 week without smoking weed. That ties the longest period of time since I started. If I make it to tomorrow, I break that record. Appetite is fine. I have trouble falling asleep. Crazy vivid and lucid dreams. The Damiana helps. Slightly.

So this weekend was Skepticon, a free atheist/skeptic/freethinker conference in Springfield MO. Lots of good talks.  I think they could have done a better job at describing what the talks would be about in advance, that might have drawn more of the people that did go into some of the emptier talks.  The talks themselves, I liked all the ones I was at.  Destin from Smarter Every Day probably didn’t have to mention he was Christian as often, though his call for more respect in internet arguments despite differing beliefs was a good one and did make mentioning it relevant.  Just, we heard you the first time.   The Fallon Fox Q&A was good.  Nice mix of MMA questions and trans questions and the intersection between the two.  This event had one of the two major drama instances of the weekend, and it made me very happy.  One audience member started off establishing his background to understand hormones and such, and then asked a really shitty question about that, implying it gave Fallon an advantage.  Lauren Lane, who was moderating the event, told the guy to shut up and sit down.   That shows something I love about this event.  In the first place, trans people tend to be treated well at Skepticon.  But there’s always a chance transphobes, of the ignorant or hateful stripe, will end up in the crowd, and the way Lauren dealt with this gave me a lot of confidence that if I do run into an issue in future Skepticons, it will be handled and they will make sure I’m taken care of. Fallon did end up answering the question anyways, but there was also something I liked with how she did that- she said she wanted to answer it, but the way she did so made it clear it was *her* choice to answer, not that Lauren was overreacting.  So it wasn’t Fallon saying that all trans people should handle it the way she did, which does happen sometimes.