BenPaddon.co.uk

I’m reading Andrew’s latest blog entry, in which he does a spEak You’re bRanes on the comments left on this Times Online article about Richard Dawkins. Mostly he’s having a pop at some of the more stupefying comments left by the Intelligent Design crowd as well as various stupid people who believe in some kind of Big Beard in the Sky* who feel that Dawkins’ unwavering belief in the non-existence of God is somehow wrong and that he should be cast out of human society, possibly even beaten and/or hanged in the process. It strikes me as particularly ironic that these are usually (and evidently) the same people who harp on about respecting the beliefs of others.

One commonly occurring argument that seems to be popping up there, however, basically boils down to this: Believe in God and Heaven and Angels and so on, because we don’t know if there is or there isn’t so you might as well just in case. Besides, how will children react when you tell them that there’s no Heaven? Where will all the calculators go? Best not to have to worry about that sort of question - tell them about Heaven and God and everything will be alright.

That’s a bit of a shitty argument, really.

The fact is, regardless of whether or not there is an afterlife of any description, these people are pretty much choosing to believe in an afterlife purely because the alternative - that when we punch out at the end of our shift we’re not coming back - isn’t pleasant enough for them. It’s like choosing to watch The Care Bears Movie instead of The Empire Strikes Back or The Dark Knight because it has a more upbeat, pleasant ending despite being a crock of shit.

---

*Not to imply that all religious people are stupid, of course, but rather that there is a small subset of religious people who are incredibly thick. You all know the sort of person I’m referring to, here. I feel it’s probably fair to point out that Atheists can be stupid too - I’m a prime example of this.

With ficlets.com seemingly suffering technical woes, I’m unable to actually post what I’ve just written. It was largely inspired by this new story that Andrew shared via Google Reader. I found it difficult not to turn it into some kind of story.

Detective Merope stepped out of the rain into the smoke-filled bar lit by neon signs promoting various brands of beer. He’d never been much of a beer man. Scotch was more his drink. It’d be the death of him one day, if this job didn’t get him first.

Merope saw his man at the bar and hovered towards an empty seat at his side. Time was of the essence.

“Buzz on the street is you know who’s behind the Mallory Road killings,” said the Detective, keeping his gaze fixed on the bar in front. People, he’d found, were intimidated by this.

“Yeah?” said the gaunt man next to him, a beer in his hand and a drunken twinkle in his eye. “I don’t know nuffin.”

“You’re testing my patience and I’m running out of time,” rasped Merope. He pulled his coat back to revel his weapon. “I really don’t wanna have to use this in front of all these nice people.”

“Yer bluffin,” the man smiled. “You gots one shot with that. Two, tops. Then yer dead.”

“You willing to bet your life on that? Because the sweat on your brow says otherwise.”

I’ll post it on Ficlets once they get their act together. I’m considering cross-posting ficlets here from now on as well.

Interesting Sidenote: This is my 100th ficlet. Or it will be, once it appears on the site. In the words of Socrates, “Woo.”

Edit - ficlets.com is now up and running again, so I’ve posted the ficlet there as well.  I’ve had to make some minor tweaks - MSWord originally counted twelve less characters than I’d actually used.

On Sunday I completed the design for the business cards I’ll be using at this year’s Comic-Con:

It’s nice and to the point, I think. I’ve ordered 1,000 of them, that being the minimum order for the local company I’m using, and I imagine that realistically I’ll use 100 of them, if that. Still, it’s always nice to have the cards. It makes me feel marginally less unprofessional. Besides, if nothing else I can pop ‘em in as a sort-of “With compliments” card when the first Jump Leads book comes out. Or something.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it elsewhere, but the foreword for the book is going to be written by Kris Straub. There’s a lot of crossover between our fanbase… wait, no, let me rephrase: Jump Leads’ fanbase is made up almost entirely of fans of Starslip Crisis, which isn’t a bad thing. He’s been quite vocal about how much he enjoys Jump Leads, so I’m looking forward to what he’ll wind up writing. Kris is a top bloke, and he’s been remarkably tolorant of my presence on these precious Intertubes. Maybe one day he and Tauhid will finally rise up and trample me into the ground.

Terrifying.

I caved and upgraded - that Quick Find glitch was really starting to piss me off. I’m surprised to note that the glitch is still there, although since upgrading it’s only happened to me once. As opposed to, say, every seven bloody minutes.

I’m seriously considering switching to Opera at this point. Hmm.

I like Firefox. I don’t get quite as “Holier-Than-Thou” about the browser as others do, largely because it’s just a web browser*, but I can read web pages the way nature intended (i.e. without a bunch of Internet Explorer proprietary shit getting in the way) and so all is right with the world. Firefox 2 is not without its bugs, however, and one bug in particular is beginning to… well, to bug me. It’s this one:

Quick find bar opens when typing in text fields

The / (slash) and ‘ (apostrophe)keys are shortcuts to open the Quick Find bar. You can also configure Firefox to automatically search for text when you type any characters outside of a text field. When typing in a text field these characters should show up in the text field and not trigger the Quick Find bar.

I don’t know if this bug has been fixed in Firefox 3 as I haven’t downloaded it yet (I’ll get into that in a bit) but from what I can recall while researching the bug a year or two ago it was one that Mozilla were aware of but weren’t fixing. I remember reading that when people reported the bug the Firefox devteam would get quite arsey about it, saying that they had no intention of fixing it and stupidly telling people to fix it themselves because it’s Firefox and it’s Open Source and they have Better Things To Do than to fix one teeny tiny bug. Indeed, a simple Google search for firefox Quick Find bug reveals a number of fixes available. Mozilla never fixed this bug themselves, though. Note that down because I’ll be referring to it later.

The bug is annoying, but as it only happened sporadically (maybe once a week, if that) and it can be “fixed” by opening and closing a dialogue box such as the Options window or the “About…” blurb, I saw no real pressing urge to repair the glitch.

Spin on to this past two weeks - this glitch is now popping up every time I run Firefox. Not just on my desktop PC at home, but on my laptop and my work computer as well. I’ve come to anticipate the glitch by first opening and closing the “About…” dialogue, which is easy enough, but then there are some other small glitches which occur as a side-effect of this - opening a new tab with Ctrl+T doesn’t automatically place the focus on the address bar, for instance, so I can open a new tab and type in an address only for nothing to happen at all.

I yesterday I was about to do what I always do when a program is glitching on me - look for an updated version. Then I remembered that, oh yes, Firefox 3 was released this week. And, oh, weren’t Mozilla trying to go for a download world record on June 18th? The little cogs began a-turnin’ in my head and I began to wonder: What if Mozilla deliberately “timed” this bug to become more annoying around the time Firefox 3 launched? What if the very reason they decided not to fix this glitch and become arrogant cocks at the mere mention of it were because they had planned to use it to encourage annoyed people to update when FF3 became available on the 18th?

I’d deliberately avoided upgrading to FF3 before I came to this realization because the browser is incompatible with pretty much every plug-in and add-on available for FF2, but now I’m even less inclined to want to update. I don’t like the idea that Mozilla may be forcing people to update their browser just because they want to break some kind of non-existent, unimportant, trivial record. I don’t like the idea of being forced to update at all, to be honest. And now, as if by magic, Firefox is refusing to acknowledge input from the arrow keys, so in order to me to go back and fix a typo I had to click on it rather than use the arrow keys to get back to that point. Harrumph. Harrumph, I say.

Anyway, that’s my Unnecessarily Paranoid Conspiracy Theory for the year. Tune in again next June.

---

* I have a great deal of difficulty comprehending why it is exactly that people get so militant about their choice of browser. Firefox users tend to consider themselves the Cats Meow because they happen to have a standards-compliant browser, which is also Open Source (and we all know what a bunch of elitist wankers most Open Source advocates are). Opera users tend to rank themselves higher than the Firefox users because their browser is somehow more compliant and passes some obscure test that only people who work in web design for a living will have any idea about.

Why does anyone actually give a shit? Why does anyone give any bodily fluid about which browser they’re using? As long as nobody’s using Internet Explorer aren’t we basically alright? Get a little perspective, people.

On Wednesday night I recorded an interview with the wonderful guys at the GigCast, where we talked about Jump Leads, Ghost Hamster and PodWarp 1999, amongst other things. You can listen to the podcast here, if you’re interested.

Remember that “webcomic dumping ground” idea I wrote about earlier today? I’ve only bloody gone and done it.

In an attempt to make my blog seem as mundane as possible, I’m now going to talk about my posture.

Those of you who listened to Saturday’s edition of The Program with Kris Straub might recall a very brief discussion about how photogenic I’m not. Kris mentioned that he’s seen photos of me and I always seem to be slouching, which is something I’ve been vaguely aware of now for a long time. I’m 6′ 4″ and a lot of stuff - door handles, bathroom sinks, elevator buttons, etc. - seems to have been positioned lower than I require it to be. Plus I like to keep eye contact with the people I talk to, so if I’m walking and talking to them it’s easier to simply lower myself down so that they’re not looking up my nose. That and it’s less intimidating. Also I’m scared of heights.

However, Kris is right and I need to be less slouchy and more upright and awesome. That’s been my goal this week - stand tall, walk proud (I narrowly avoided the urge to write “Walk Hard”), etc. I’ve been pretty successful save for the fact that since I’ve been keeping myself upright my back has begun to ache and, as I mentioned above, everything seems to be just out of reach. It’s annoying, to be sure, but I imagine it’s something I’ll get used to.

In other news, I had lunch with Dino Andrade on Tuesday. For those of you who don’t know, he is (amongst other things) the voice of Skull on PvP: The Series, and the founder of geek dating site SoulGeek. He’s also a good friend and a top bloke, and I’ve been wanting to work with him for a while now. Fortunately for me he wanted to work with me as well, and he’s decided I would be the perfect guy to produce and co-host Radio SoulGeek, the official SoulGeek podcast. So lunch was mostly us talking about what we want out of our respective futures (there appears to be a fair amount of overlap there, which is nice) and planning the format for the podcast. It’s all looking incredibly promising and I don’t want to give away too much but besides the usual stuff - Geek News, Interviews, music, all of which will be delivered in a unique, fun way - there’s some really cool stuff that I don’t want to go into too much now for fear of ruining the surprise. I can promise you that it’ll be available to everyone (not just SoulGeek members) and, assuming we do it properly, it’s going to be a must-hear podcast. Whee!

There’s also some very cool stuff happening with Jump Leads in the near future but I definitely want to keep that one to myself for now.

Anyway, that’s enough from me for the moment. I have work to do!

This blog post contains some spoilers for the second issue of Jump Leads, so if you haven’t read it yet I’d suggest not reading on. There are also potential spoilers for parts of the third season of Doctor Who so if you’re not up to speed with that show - no actual text, but some links to episode descriptions. If you don’t want those spoilt for you I’d advise against clicking those particular links - you’ll know ‘em when you see ‘em.

Read the rest of this entry »

Euan and I have been secretly planning a collaborative blog called Skyscraper for the last couple of months, and the site is finally live although there’s no content on it yet. Eventually we’ll be using it as a sort-of central hub for all of our writing (except my Ficlets, natch) but for now it consists of a single post, a single comment, and an unfinished “About” page.

For those of you who are constantly bemoaning the fact that I don’t update my blog that much at the moment, I point you in the direction of my Twitter feed. Generally I’ll usually update that with What I’m Currently Up To™, and I can even update it from my mobile phone. So there - technology has made stalking me that little bit easier.