If you’ve spent time on the Patheos atheist channel, or hang with the same people I do, you might have read Temple of the Future, James Croft’s blog about humanism and ethics. I’ve known James for about as long as I’ve been in the blogosphere myself—we’ve spoken together and write about many of the same things, often disagreeing fiercely—and last autumn he hired me to give his blog a new look. I’ve been worn out over the last ten months, stretched thin between a day job and half a dozen other projects and creatively tired—all credit goes to James for showing me far more patience than I deserved—but this week I at last signed off on it.

The brief for the redesign was simple: bring the blog’s imagery up to date by making it ‘cleaner, more modern, less stuffy’, and focus on a millennial audience. On starting out as a blogger, James had given his site a visual identity based on humanist symbols—a Happy Human with a flaming heart, circled by a ring of fire. In other images, the emblem got set in stone and (in the case of the blog’s banner) carved out of wood. Come 2012, when Temple of the Future moved to Patheos, it got a new banner designed in-house. James told me he preferred the original, and I agree.

Here’s where it gets more interesting. Over the three years I knew James before commissioned me, I always his logo—the best bit of either banner—was a mechanical cog. Perhaps it was the way the flames were shaped, or how the green-and-orange banner made the wood look coppery—but as I told him, I liked the concept. The work James does—see his Skepticon talk from 2012—is about building things, and cogs and gears make a good symbol for community activism. Religions, it strikes me, tend to employ geometric emblems—crosses, stars, eight-spoke wheels—and using an industrial object felt like a fun materialist spin on that.

How do you turn a nut and cog into a blog banner? In silhouette, a cube looks like a hexagon—once I’d overlapped some translucent ones, I ended up with what looked like a stained glass window full of building blocks. This was the first time I had anything that harmonised all four of the motifs I wanted to apply: nuts and bolts, cogs and gears and bricks; LGBT rights; tech and modern communication, and religious architecture.

Even at that point, I wasn’t quite satisfied. The lettering needed to be fatter, the small and large text more harmonious, the background less Colin-Baker-busy. Look carefully at the bottom right hand corner above, and you’ll notice the subtle shadow used the help the text show up is bleeding out onto the white edges—in the next version, this was fixed. After the update below passed the text, all that remained was to give the banner below whichever slogan James preferred in place of the stand-in new millennium line I’d used. What resulted was what you saw at the top of this post.

Finally, there was the blog’s Facebook page. Initially i suggested combining the hexacog with the Temple of the Future wordmark, but although doing so turned out well, Facebook demanded a separate page image and cover. I ended up uncoupling the blog’s logo from its horizontal masthead, so the two could assume different functions.

My favourite version, which James and I retained for business cards and the like, is still this one.

Things are busy for me right now, so I’m not taking on many commissions for the next couple of months—but if you’re interested in hiring me as a designer, feel free to get in touch.

The post James Croft Asked Me To Give His Patheos Blog A New Look, And I Said Yes appeared first on Godlessness In Theory.

You may have seen a recent post at Brute Reason where Miri announced she was dropping her comment section. Here’s something you don’t know: when we were building the Orbit early this year, I talked about wanting to do the same. Since launch I’ve been going back and forth on it—a couple of months away from the blog made it hard to know what I’d be missing—but now the gears are turning again, I’m doing it. My reasons are completely different from Miri’s.

If you’ve followed this blog, you’ll know my comments were never especially busy. Only the occasional post received more than a few, and those posts were the controversial ones. This isn’t to do with pageviews: even pieces that got many thousands of hits never got comments in corresponding numbers. Small posts got individual messages that rarely demanded replies. Big posts sparked arguments that weren’t to do with me. Both meant keeping up with new notifications.

I know a lot of people with active comment sections. Most started blogging before social media arrived, and have maintained the regulars who found them when comment sections were where you reacted to things. I started this blog in 2013. Since then, other platforms—Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Reddit—have been where people react to my posts. I’m ditching comments for the same reason as more and more big media sites: I don’t believe comment sections are the future.

My author section below gives my email and social media links for a reason. Like most commentators, I like interacting with interested people. I don’t consider it the function of my blog. For many writers I’m lucky to know, blogging works as a dialogue, with readers’ comments part of the process. Especially as someone who experienced abuse, part of what makes writing therapeutic for me is that my blog isn’t a dialogue—it’s a space devoted to my own voice. Round here, I’m talking.

If you’ve been a commenter here, chances are I wasn’t paying much attention. Having designed posts to stand on their own, the comments never felt as relevant as tweets and emails do. You probably deserve better than that. Over the last week, I’ve received a lot of messages in those places, and they’re where I’m likeliest to respond. I’ll also say what Miri said: if you’re one of my patrons, or you’d like to be, let’s get to know each other more. Unlike my blog, Patreon has comments, and I’ll read them.

That’s all there is to this. I’m not closing comments because of any I’ve received, or because I’m stressed out (not that those aren’t perfectly good reasons). The comment section just isn’t why I’m here. I don’t write because I want to defend my opinions. I don’t write because I want to mediate other people’s arguments. I don’t write because I want to manage comments. I write because I want to write. I’m going to focus on that.

The post Why I’m Ditching My Blog’s Comment Section appeared first on Godlessness In Theory.

You might have noticed that since June, I’ve been using Patreon to get paid for the writing I do. (Patreon, if you haven’t heard of it, lets readers pay content creators a sum of their choice per post, up to a monthly maximum—for example, $3 per post up to $15 in any given month.) When I first started using it, one of my pledges was to post at least twice a week, or eight times a month. For lots of reasons, including homelessness and a bout of ill mental health, it took me till November to make good on that, and now that I’m being as productive as I want to be, I’d like to do some self-promotion again.

One thing I’ve found with Patreon is that it pushes me to write longer, more serious posts I might not have otherwise: getting even a few dozen dollars per post from a small group of patrons has focused me on content I really care about. I mean to keep going in that vein, and for this blog to continue to grow—November was its biggest month ever, largely due to me getting paid enough to concentrate on it—I need to keep up the momentum, so I’m going to try and get into the habit of advertising. In case you missed any, this post is a recap of everything I wrote last month, and I’m hoping to publish a compendium like it every month, partly as a portfolio, partly to motivate myself.

‘Modern Homelessness: Privatisation, Policing and Public Toilets’

There’s nothing like carrying everything you own to make snails seem nobler. It’s 3am, and having put my life into a rucksack weeks ago, I’m plodding homelessly across London without a place to crash. Pints of coffee are catching up with me, and unlike a snail, I don’t have the option of seeping fluid as I go. There are toilets, I realise, back at Charing Cross, but because I hate u-turns more than being illogical, I decide I’m bound to bump into some. I know I’ll regret it even as I make up my mind, and sure enough, by 4.30, my kidneys are in full revolt.

By 5am I’ve managed to find a hostel whose receptionist takes pity: after bursting my banks behind an unlockable door, I head back to Victoria. In two hours places will reopen, meaning food, heat and a replenished supply of caffeine, so I opt to rest my legs in the station until then. By the entrance, a woman my own age asks for spare change, hoodie pulled balaclava-tight around her face. I reach for coins, only to realise a card’s all I have, and apologise, trying much too hard to sound honest. From her lack of layers, she can’t have been on the street long, but her face says she knows that line.

If you haven’t discovered Novara Media, you should—it’s probably the best source of left wing online journalism in the UK. Wire, their growing text platform, recently introduced a ‘Sunday long reads’ series, and I had the pleasure of writing the first one: it’s the story of a night I spent in London without a place to go, and how Thatcherism shows up in contemporary urban planning. Read it.

‘Paris/Baghdad/Beirut, November 2015’

When guns go off, people fall silent. Some fall silently.

Silence takes many forms. There is the silence of the dead, that of the living who see death, and in between, that silent half-second when gunshots are first heard.

Sometimes you feel compelled to say something, but it’s hard to know what. (I felt similarly after the Charleston church shootings in June.) After the bombings and gun massacres last month, this post was an attempt to acknowledge both those feelings. Read it.

‘The Rights Of Muslims Don’t Rest On Islam Being Sacrosanct’

It’s possible to be terrified by attacks on refugees and fire-bombings of mosques without thinking religious violence is ‘nothing to do with’ religion; without treating religion and ‘extremism’ as non-overlapping phenomena, or applying arbitrary and inconsistent tests for which kinds of Muslim count as ‘real’; without saying silly, ahistorical things about religions being ‘perverted’, or that believers who murder people are wrong about their own motives, and would behave the same in a world without religion — because shut up, they just would.

We don’t need bad apologetics to refrain from collectively dehumanising believers. Muslims don’t deserve to be treated as human beings because their religion is a squeaky-clean monolith of peace and love that never produces anything bad — they deserve to be treated as human because they are, and because no amount of harm a religion might cause makes all its followers responsible. If that’s not obvious, it’s because we’re used to debating brown people’s humanity.

When the Charlie Hebdo shootings happened at the start of this year, I never found time to post my thoughts about it. One of the boons of Patreon is that I no longer have to choose between writing and doing other work, so—because, like the last time Paris was attacked, many reactions troubled me—I wanted to write down the things I did feel I could say. Read it.

‘What If James Bond Fucked Men? Sex, Violence And Genre In London Spy’

Today’s conservatives have nothing, heavens no, against the gays—they’d just prefer not to be reminded they’re anatomically correct. The novelty of lifelike queer characters is such that realism feels unrealistic: it must be due to a quota, the Telegraph suggests, that in all of spy fiction, one queer lead role now exists. Whether despite or because of the number of gay historical spies, espionage is a fiercely heterosexual genre, and after half a century of straight secret agents in dinner jackets getting laid, the fury London Spy’s premiere drew with one sex scene shows just how overdue it is. This never happened to the other guy.

When I’m not being godless and left wing—at least, when I’m not talking about it—I sometimes write about TV. (Two of my most popular posts are about Doctor Who and In The Flesh.) London Spy, which stars Ben Whishaw and which concludes next week, is an espionage show well aware of its own genre. It nods constantly at its lineage, but never feels quite like a spy show—instead, it invites us to think about why, despite commentators saying otherwise, James Bond could never be queer. Read it.

‘To The 17 Year Old Who Got Cut Off In The Guardian’

I read your uncle’s letter to you the other day — the one he addresses ‘my dear godson’, before calling you stupid and selfish; in which he says he doesn’t want to demean your parents for not being middle class enough, but still does; where he admits he’s ‘a difficult person at the best of times’, then cuts you off for not being sufficiently adoring. I thought of writing a direct response, but decided I should drop you a line instead.

To quote one Twitter user who spoke for the crowd, your uncle sounds like a pompous, arrogant shit; he also sounds abusive. It wasn’t enough that you were always polite to him — you had to be warm too; it wasn’t enough to answer his texts — you had to answer them immediately, and not, shock horror, the next day; it wasn’t enough that you thanked him for his cheques — you had to pay him back by being however affectionate he liked. This is possessive, entitled behaviour, and you didn’t deserve it.

Last week an anonymous writer in the Guardian disowned his seventeen year old nephew in an open letter. Some it sounded familiar, all of it manipulative, so I sent the recipient a note of my own. Read it.

‘What Happened On The Back Channel When Ophelia Benson Left Freethought Blogs’

It’s one thing to leak private information from the list, another to leak misinformation. For those of us who take the rules and our own privacy seriously, this isn’t just one security breach — it’s a set of claims we can’t counter without publishing what we did say, and eroding our privacy further. I’d tell Ophelia to stay classy and get on with my life, but I believe she’s had too long to monopolise the story of what went on here, so that’s what I’m going to do. (Please note: because I actually care about this, everything reprinted from the back channel here is quoted with its author’s express agreement.)

Despite what’s sometimes said, I don’t much enjoy writing drama posts, but there are times it’s unavoidable. Since Ophelia Benson left this network four months ago, there’s been both speculation and outright deception about what went on, which this post addresses. (This post flagged up some confusion about what the wording of our rules meant. For the record, that confusion has been resolved.) Read it.

‘On Being Sick And Tired’

You might be sick of reading about this, and so am I—but I’m writing this because, mainly, I’m tired of reading things that aren’t true.

An addendum, in which I vent my last remaining thoughts on the issue, then draw a line under it. (This isn’t something I’ll discuss further. Leave it alone please, commenters.) Read it.

‘Thin Skins And Male Tears: The Tragedy Of White Atheism’

Geek culture’s white male insurgencies are united by their emotional incontinence. Dawkbros, MRAs, Sad Puppies, Slymepitters, Gamergate: these groups rant about a cult of outrage, yet they know nothing else. They have no imagination, no sense of irony or history, no real political philosophy and nothing of their own to say, no reading skills, no writing style, no humour more advanced than a small child’s — no long term goals, no sense of what it is they want, no clue why they’re even angry, except that damn it, they are angry, and progressive culture is to blame.

There’s a reason Dawkins’ fanboys are hostage to emotions they barely notice, why he and Schierbecker dwell on being aggrieved yet fail to empathise. These men have never had to check their feels, or even to acknowledge them — never had to fear sounding unhinged, hysterical, blunt or angry, never been told to remain calm by officials with guns, or that it must be their time of the month; never grown used to non-confrontation under someone else’s power, or unused to telling their story in the third person, convinced reality is however the world feels to them.

This piece has had a huge response since being going live on Friday, fast becoming one of my most widely read posts. (In a few days, it will likely be the most widely read.) I’m glad I wrote it when I did, and that it seems to have helped some people. Read it.

That’s all for November  — I’ll write another post like this on January 1, and hopefully at the start of each month. In the mean time, if you feel like patronising my writing, relevant links are below.

* * *

The post Everything I Wrote In November 2015 appeared first on Godlessness In Theory.

It’s very nearly been a year
Since snow fell and I landed here
Citing at yours that night my lack
Of a coat for the journey back.
Next morning I face the outdoors
To lumber home in one of yours,
The mark left by its owner’s face
Proving a challenge to erase
Even as a fresh fall fills in
The trail where my feet’ve been.
Outside my window now the snow
Has come back for another go.
Almost a year on I can tell
This snow’ll bury you as well. 

The post Snow in Berlin 26.12.14 appeared first on Godlessness In Theory.

Greta Christina has a new book. (Doesn’t she always?) Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing To Do With God is a guide for atheists, agnostics and believers whose faith isn’t helping them deal with mortality. In place of wishful thinking it offers… well, the clue is in the name.

Since her regular collaborator Casimir Fornalski was unavailable, Greta asked me to design the cover art. I bit her hand off said I’d be delighted.

Certainly I had reservations. Fornalski and I have never interacted, but I’ve admired his work with her for two and a half years: the angry woman who looks suspiciously like Greta on the covers of her prior atheist books has become an unmistakeable part of her brand. Ending such an effective partnership is risky even when you have no choice, and I worried I’d be unable to create something as memorable or iconic.

The project became about creating something unlike Fornalski’s covers – in particular, I decided it should look illustrated more than designed, have a coloured background instead of a white one and be uncartoonish. (A further design constraint when Audible required square covers for audiobooks. So the image could be broadened just by adding a strip each side, the background had to be one flat, replicable colour.)

Greta and I discussed ideas. ‘A stylised tree with roots as well as branches, but with the roots being made of DNA double helix coils’ got vetoed: ‘As a many-times-over designer for atheists,’ I told her, ‘no more effing double helixes. They’ve been done so many times the concept’s over.’ (Movement: take note.) The tree motif I did like, so the next suggestion – ‘a person sitting or standing at a gravestone’ – became someone under its boughs.

I started doodling.

I won’t lie – this design intimidated me. The moment I knew how the tree should look, I knew I had to ‘paint’ it with digital sponges, creating foliage and paint blots from shapes in two different colours, green defining white – over eighty layers and over four hundred individual ‘spongeprints’ went into the end product above. For a while I was unsure I should attempt something so different from my previous work and toyed with the idea of a cover consisting solely of the title in narrowly-spaced Georgia, perhaps referencing Faber’s minimalist poetry collections.

It didn’t take – I suspect because I knew my first thought was my best and that I ought to persevere. When I did, I ended up with the following halfway house.

This terrified me. I’ve always hidden behind symbols and logo-ish abstractions, and human bodies are some of the hardest things to draw convincingly. (Nonetheless, easier than horses. Try it if you doubt me.) In the end I based the figure on a man’s outline in a stock photo, adjusting the shoulders, midsection and hair to make them appear gender-nonspecific.

It’s obvious to me the background colour to the left was wrong, but making it an apple green was Greta’s suggestion. She also mentioned the typeface – Bebas Neue, also present in my blog banner – may be too stark, asking whether a handwriting-style font could be used instead. It couldn’t, I said, because only chunky all-caps sans serif had the impact not to get lost. (Chinese Rocks was briefly a contender, but Hemant Mehta had shotgunned it with his own book.)

The actual problem, I realised, was the black. Changing the background and making it a soft grey fixed that problem, though it created more. The final alterations were the addition of Greta’s name, deciding whether or not to centre it and experimenting with text in different colour schemes.

Since we both liked the second image from the right best, that one became the cover.

Want to buy Greta’s book? Head over to her blog for details.

Want to hire me? That also works.

The post Designing Greta Christina’s new book cover appeared first on Godlessness In Theory.

If like me you watch Doctor Who, you may have seen last night’s episode ‘Dark Water’, which revealed who series eight’s villain Missy (above) is. Actually, it revealed her back story – it was clear who she was the moment photos of Michelle Gomez in character emerged.

Missy, as fans have guessed all series, is River Song: a feisty, morally ambiguous adventuress and femme fatale with a murky past who flirts with everything and controls men through sexuality, boasting a hands-on relationship with the Doctor.

In this sense, of course, Missy and River are both Tasha Lem.

And Tasha Lem – with the Doctor in lieu of Sherlock Holmes – is Irene Adler.

As of her most recent appearance, transformed into a pistol-toting, sex-on-the-brain siren since Steven Moffat can’t write actual women, Mary Morstan is the same character.

You might think to include Madame Kovarian here, who’s a close cousin of River and especially Missy, but in fact she’s a slightly different Moffat trope: the executive, a middle aged woman with no first name whose villainy is tied to her professional veneer.

Particularly in Kovarian’s guise, the executive still often appears dominatrix-like due to her seniority – lipstick, nail varnish, formfitting black business suit and (usually) skirt – but has no sexual relationship with the male hero, being a powerful woman in the workplace, thus colder and ‘bitchier’ than the adventuress: in other words, a ‘ball-breaker’. Generally she’s also less action-oriented, commanding soldiers rather than aiming a gun.

The executive’s earliest incarnation in Moffat’s work is probably Ms Utterson, leader of shady company Klein & Utterson in Jekyll (2007):

Ms Utterson; Madame Kovarian. If you’re sensing a theme, it continues with Miss Kizlet in ‘The Bells of Saint John’.

Miss Kizlet, for her part, regenerated into Ms Delphox for recent episode ‘Time Heist’.

Though her episode ‘The Great Game’ wasn’t Moffat-scripted, it’s notable another such woman – gallery owner Miss Wenceslas – appears in the first series of Sherlock.

Ms Utterson, Miss Wenceslas, Madame Kovarian, Miss Kizlet, Ms Delphox – Missy. An argument could be made Gomez’s character is more executive than adventuress (her sinister organisation 3W certainly supports this), but her flirting with Peter Capaldi’s Doctor and willingness to murder in person leave her closer overall to River than anyone else.

River Song starts life, of course, as Melody Pond – a girl who encounters the Doctor as a prepubescent child, becomes obsessed with him, develops adult romantic feelings for him and ends up part companion, part love interest to the detriment of her own life.

She shares all this with Reinette Poisson, also known as Madame de Pompadour…

…with her mother Amelia Pond…

…and with Amy’s successor in the TARDIS Clara Oswald, as established in the prequel webisode to ‘The Bells of Saint John’.

Moving swiftly on because the less said the better…

Another of Jekyll‘s women, psychiatrist Kathryn Reimer, is a lab coat wearing scientific assistant to the series’ hero whose competence and knowledge are undermined by her fangirl crush on him.

Yes.

Yes.

To be fair, Jekyll does feature Meera Syal and Fenella Woolgar as a crimefighting interracial lesbian detective couple.

Oh.

The post And Doctor Who’s Missy is… one more of Steven Moffat’s interchangeable women appeared first on Godlessness In Theory.