A candid-ish peek into our lives. Our dining room table. Contents: one semi-complete Legend of Zelda anniversary jigsaw puzzle, various computer parts and tools, a pair of glasses, a 64 pack of crayons, zero space for dining.

This is me blogging, instead of fretting about various outstanding blog issues! Hello!

(I omit the fact that this is an attempt to test my freshly reflashed phone’s WordPress app’s ability to connect to our freshly launched website of course.)

The post But where do we dine? appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

There are probably easier (or harder) ways to do this, but my back was up against a wall yesterday after a very important virtual machine was in a very bad state yesterday, after a series of hardware issues with the host, and basically one of those perfect storms of bad backup and bad host and bad VM happened.

Apparently, backups for this machine had been failing in a deceptive manner that didn’t clue us in that they were failing, and the host (VMware ESXi 5.0) was building new snapshots of the drive over and over again when Veeam tried to take a backup.

Worse, every time you tried to do a VMware level operation with the machine, it was complaining about the disks with something like “Error caused by file /vmfs/volumes/########-########-####-############/VM-Name/VM-Name-0000001.vmdk” and failing out. Little extra could be gleaned from SSHing into the host and checking dmesg, but it was plain the disk was being weird in a software way, not a hardware way. Luckily, the virtual machine itself could read the whole disk just fine, and it still ran just fine. So I was stuck with flaky hardware and no way to move the VM off of it.

But I was able to recover the VM by throwing this Hail Mary pass. Fair warning, this will probably take a lot of downtime. But it’s better than losing that very important VM altogether.

I’m sure there are better or worse tools to use than the Ubuntu 12.04 server iso that I had handy, but this worked just fine for my purposes. Feel free to suggest others — I know HJ Hornbeck is more partial to ddrescue than vanilla dd, but I don’t need any of those bells and whistles myself.

– Add identically sized drive(s) to VM
– Set to boot from BIOS on next boot
– Set CD to Client mode (or, if you have patience, upload ISO of CD for ubuntu 12.04 server to the datastore)
– Using console, mount ISO
– Set boot sequence to boot from CD first
– Save bios and boot from CD
– Pick recovery mode
– Enter your way through to where it wants to mount a root filesystem
– Pick “launch shell in installer environment”
– dmesg | grep sd — should show you your identical drives, one with partition, one without.
– dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=4k conv=sync,noerror &
– Ampersand puts that task in the background so you can do this — to see progress, find the PID of the process you just launched via ps, then:
– kill -SIGUSR1 ####
– Number of records * 4096 = number of bytes it’s done so far. This is the closest to actual progress report I have been able to get.
– When it’s done, it’ll spit out the number of records again without you having entered a usr1 signal.
– Shut down the machine
– Take note of the SCSI connection, then remove the old drive (don’t delete it in case you need to recover or this didn’t work)
– Change the new drive’s SCSI port to what the old drive’s was
– Set to boot from BIOS again
– Change boot order back to usual
– Try booting the machine — it should work now
– Try migration, backing up, etc. — it should work now

I’m mostly adding this to the blog because, well, it’s all based on public knowledge, so why write out this procedure and only keep it at work?

The post VMware VM can't be cloned, moved or backed up? No problem. appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

It’s gotten so’s I gotta put a year in the title to make it unique! How weird is that.

My CONvergence schedule is a bit thicker this year than in years past — I’m invited to participate in six panels. That’s a record for me! One of them is even my own brain-baby — the Superheroes in our Modern Day Pantheons panel.

And as usual, I’ll be hanging out in the FtB / Skepchicks “party” rooms wherein we’ll not actually be partying, but rather fending off constant attacks from the encroaching Royal Manticorian Army and Klingon rooms. Also, there will be science sandboxes, commisserating with like-minded individuals, and modest amounts of alcohol to lubricate the conversation. I might also provide hilariawful Bible games on the big-screen TV, e.g. Super Noah’s Ark 3D, if I can manage a better setup than last year.

The panels are:

Friday, July 4 • 5:00pm – 6:00pm
Alien Conspiracy Theories

The truth is out there, and we’ll help you find it! We’ll cover a wide range of alien-centric conspiracy theories and discuss the implications these have on individuals and society at large.

Panelists: JD Horn, Jason Thibeault, Nicole Gugliucci, PZ Myers, Scott Lynch

Friday, July 4 • 7:00pm – 8:00pm
Superheroes in Our Modern-Day Pantheons

Nobody really worships Hercules or Thor as Greek and Norse gods anymore, but don’t despair, because now they’re both members of The Avengers. This panel will explore the commonalities and differences between our ancient and modern pantheons.

Panelists: David Schwartz, Jason Thibeault, Roy T Cook, Jonathan Palmer, Ryan Consell

Friday, July 4 • 11:30pm – 12:30am
It’s (Not) Written in the Stars
We’ll explore the myths and beliefs of astrology and why some people still find it convincing in the modern age of science.

Panelists: Jason Thibeault, Brianne Bilyeu, Dan Berliner, Matt Lowry, Nicole Gugliucci

Saturday, July 5 • 12:30pm – 1:30pm
Criticism and Empathy Online

When people abuse anonymity to give hurtful, damaging criticism, is this merely a failure of empathy, or is there something more there? How do you criticize people without triggering a flame war? Should you even TRY to avoid flame wars?

Panelists: Miri Mogilevsky, Jason Thibeault, Wesley Chu, Kameron Hurley, Ted Meissner

Saturday, July 5 • 8:30pm – 9:30pm
Organizing Online to Make a Better World: Do We Need to Tear the Old One Down?

Criticism and even rage blazing across social media has proven remarkably effective in getting complaints heard, but what are the downsides? How do we maintain communities when anger and volume get things done?

Panelists: Miri Mogilevsky, Jason Thibeault, Beth Voigt, Stephanie Zvan, Debbie Goddard

Sunday, July 6 • 3:30pm – 4:30pm
Urban Legends: Myths, Facts, and Half-Truths

From alligators in the sewer to clowns in the attic, urban legends walk the line between total absurdity and being just so outrageous that they might be true. Where do these stories come from, and why do they capture our imaginations so effectively?

Panelists: Jason Thibeault, Anne Sauer, Naomi Kritzer, Bug Girl, Shawn van Briesen

The post My CONvergence schedule – 2014 appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

I absolutely loved the shorter version of this speech that she did at another con a while back, and was pleased to get to see it live. Unfortunately for me, though, Dave Muscato of American Atheists had put out a call to the intertubes asking whether or not anyone had a flash card reader and the ability to transfer a movie file to him by email. I happened to be on my laptop with a flash card reader and an internet connection, so I swept out to be the big damn hero and ended up missing a significant chunk of this speech. I’m happy this video exists so I can fill in the missing bits.

At the moment, I am actively attempting to control my activist burnout by learning Java programming, learning LibGDX, and generally pursuing my pipe dream of building a rogue-like Castlevania-alike platform game with retraversal and RPG stats*. It seems like a more immediately attainable goal, to me, than expunging sexist sentiment from a community whose members often prioritize getting along in a big-tent fashion rather than actually fixing the systematic empathy failures entrenched in some quarters.

* If you don’t get this, and care, ask me. I’ll explain. At length.

The post Skepticon video: Greta Christina – Avoiding Activist Burnout appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

About a month ago, since Jodi can’t work on the Spousal visa she’s under, she decided to start volunteering some of her time at a local animal shelter. The shelter was at the time flooded with animals after a puppy mill — Country Pride Kennel, owned and operated by 60 year old Deborah B. Rowell in Pine River, MN — was shut down and all the animals were seized. All 130 animals. All of whom were evidently kept in insufferable heat, mud-filled hovels as kennels, and rarely with available clean water or shade. One was reportedly found dead in its kennel, in fact. Enough of the dogs were pregnant on being seized that the shelter ended up with more than 200 animals to deal with.

This was a heartbreaking-enough situation, but while the court case was going on, nobody was allowed to adopt out those animals, and the volunteer shelters were grossly overtaxed. So we briefly fostered a five year old black lab mama, whom we’d called Tali.

She was a completely broken shell of a dog. For two weeks, we tried to get her to come out of her shell and realize that humans are not cruel animals. We mourned with her every time she started frenetically looking about for her last litter, which was born July 29th in shelter, and from which she had just recently been separated. I felt a pang of sorrow every time any human made any sort of move and she would retreat from wherever she was immediately to a safe place — either on a couch she’d staked out as her spot, or back in the kennel we’d brought her home in from the shelter. We got her to wag her tail or act even remotely relaxed or at ease only rarely; to eat freely only when everyone was perfectly still or better yet not present. We tried to teach her that good things come from humans, like chicken and cheese, but her trust was already so terribly frayed that making a connection was nigh impossible.

We had to keep mum on this, because the court case was ongoing. Now that the court has ruled in favour of the shelter, all the animals are up for adoption. Over the weekend, a good many of these animals were adopted, but others are still left waiting.

Thankfully, someone adopted Tali. I hope she has a life of luxury after the hell of forced impregnation and labour and too-early separation she’s gone through for roughly the last four years of her life.

If you’re wondering why I’ve been so silent lately, that’s at least a small part of why. While I didn’t have a lot to do with Tali, where Jodi did most of the work with her, I did have some small involvement. There are other, bigger reasons I’ve been silent lately. I’ll get to blogging about those as soon as I can.

In the meantime, please help out the Animal Humane Society, which supports five sites, including the one Jodi’s volunteering at. The whole system is slammed with need right now, given how many resources caring for these puppies and older mill dogs,and getting them appropriately vaccinated and spayed/neutered, has been taking.

The post Pine River, MN's puppy mill animal seizure, and our temporary foster dog appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

This is an absolutely sublime speech. It is full of both realism and optimism at the same time. It is full of skepticism. It sounds nihilistic at times, but Tim Minchin does that oratory sleight-of-hand that has you looking one way while he delivers a truth sucker punch from the other.

This speech has brightened an otherwise fairly dismal day for me. I hope it does likewise for you!

A kind reader sent along a transcript for your enjoyment.

Tim Minchin’s commencement address,

University of Western Australia, Perth

upon receiving an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters

September 17, 2013

 

In darker days, I did a corporate gig for a big company who made and sold accounting software.  In a bid I presume to inspire their sales people to greater heights, they forked out twelve grand for an inspirational speaker who was this “extreme sports” guy who had had a couple of his limbs frozen off when he got stuck on a ledge on some mountain.  It was weird!  Software sales people, I think, need to hear from someone who has had a long, successful and happy career in software sales, not from an overly-optimistic mountaineer.  Some poor guy who had arrived in the morning hoping to learn more about sales techniques ended up going home worried more about the blood flow to his extremities.  It’s not inspirational, it’s confusing.  And if the mountain was meant to be a symbol of life’s challenges, and the loss of limbs a metaphor for sacrifice, the software guy’s not going to get it, is he?  Because he didn’t do an Arts degree, did he?  [laughter]  He should have — Arts degrees are awesome, and they help you find meaning where there is none.  And let me assure you, there is none.  [laughter]  Don’t go looking for it!  Looking for meaning is like looking for a rhyme scheme in a cookbook — you won’t find it, and it’ll bugger up your soufflé.  If you didn’t like that metaphor, you won’t like the rest of it.

 

Point being, I’m not an inspirational speaker, I’ve never lost a limb on a mountainside, metaphorically or otherwise, and I’m not here to give career advice, because I’ve never had what most consider “a job”.  However, I have had large groups of people listen to what I say for quite a few years now, and it’s given me an inflated sense of self-importance.  So I will now, at the ripe old age of 37.9, bestow upon you nine life lessons, to echo of course the nine lessons and carols of the traditional Christmas service, which is also pretty obscure.  You might find some of this stuff inspiring, you’ll definitely find some of it boring, and you’ll definitely forget all of it within a week.  And be warned, there’ll be lots of hokey similes and obscure aphorisms that start well and end up making no sense.  So listen up, or you’ll get lost, like a blind man clapping in a pharmacy trying to echo-locate the contact lens fluid.  [turns around]  Looking for my old poetry teacher…

 

Here we go!  Ready?

 

One: you don’t have to have a dream.    Americans on talent shows always talk about their dreams.  Fine — if you have something you’ve always wanted to do, [funny voice] dreamed of, like in your heart, go for it.  After all, it’s something to do with your time — chasing a dream — and if it’s a big enough one, it’ll take you most of our life to achieve, so by the time you get to it, and are staring into the meaninglessness of your achievement, you’ll be almost dead, so it won’t matter.  I never really had one of these dreams, and so I advocate passionate dedication to the pursuit of short-term goals.  Be micro-ambitious — put your head down and work with pride on whatever is in front of you.  You never know where you might end up.  Just be aware, the next worthy pursuit will probably appear in your periphery, which is why you should be careful of long-term dreams — if you focus too far in front of you, you won’t see the shiny thing out of the corner of your eye.

 

All right? Good!  Advice, metaphor — look at me go!

 

Two: don’t seek happiness.  Happiness is like an orgasm.  If you think about it too much, it goes away.  Keep busy and aim to make someone else happy, and you might get some as a side effect.  We didn’t evolve to be constantly content.  Contented homo erectus got eaten before passing on their genes.

 

Three: remember, it’s all luck.  We are lucky to be here.  You are incalculably lucky to be born, and incredibly lucky to be brought up by a nice family that helps you to get educated and encourage you to go to uni.  Or, if you’re born into a horrible family, that’s unlucky and you have my sympathy, but you’re still lucky — lucky that you happen to be made of the sort of DNA that went on to make the sort of brain which when placed in a horrible childhood environment would make decisions that meant you eventually ended up graduating uni.  Well done you for dragging yourself up by your shoelaces, but you were lucky — you didn’t create the bit of you that dragged you up, they’re not even your shoelaces.  I suppose I’ve worked hard to achieve whatever dubious achievements I’ve achieved, but I didn’t make the bit of me that works hard, any more than I made the bit of me that ate too many burgers instead of attending lectures when I was here at U.W.A.  Understanding that you can’t truly take credit for your successes, nor truly blame others for their failures, will humble you and make you more compassionate.  Empathy is intuitive, but is also something you can work on intellectually.

 

Four: exercise!  I’m sorry, you pasty, pale, smoking philosophy grads, arching your eyebrows into a Cartesian curve as you watch the Human Movement mob wind their way through the miniature traffic cones of their existence.  You are wrong, and they are right.  Well, you’re half right — you think, therefore you are, but also you jog, therefore you sleep, therefore you’re not overwhelmed by existential angst.  You can’t be Kant, and you don’t want to be.  Play a sport, do yoga, pump iron, run, whatever, but take care of your body — you’re going to need it.  Most of you mob are going to live to nearly a hundred, and even the poorest of you are going to achieve a level of wealth that most humans throughout history could not have dreamed of.  And this long, luxurious life ahead of you is going to make you depressed.  But don’t despair!  There is an inverse correlation between depression and exercise.  Do it!  Run, my beautiful intellectuals, run!

 

Five: be hard on your opinions.  A famous bon mot asserts that opinions are like assholes, in that everyone has one.  There is great wisdom in this, but I would add that opinions differ significantly from assholes, in that yours should be constantly and thoroughly examined.  [laughter]  I used to take exams in here!  It’s revenge.  We must think critically, and not just about the ideas of others.  Be hard on your beliefs — take them out on the veranda and hit them with a cricket bat.  Be intellectually rigorous.  Identify your biases, your prejudices, your privileges.  Most of society’s arguments are kept alive by a failure to acknowledge nuance.  We tend to generate false dichotomies, then argue one point using two entirely different sets of assumptions, like two tennis players trying to win a match by hitting beautifully-executed shots from either end of separate tennis courts.  By the way, while I have science and arts graduates in front of me, please don’t make the mistake of thinking the arts and sciences are at odds with one another.   That is a recent, stupid, and damaging idea.  You don’t have to be unscientific to make beautiful art, to make beautiful things.  If you need proof: Twain, Douglas Adams, Vonnegut, McEwan, Sagan, Shakespeare, Dickens, for a start.  You don’t need to be superstitious to be a poet, you don’t need to hate GM technology to care about the beauty of the planet, you don’t have to claim a soul to have compassion.  Science is not a body of knowledge, nor a belief system — it is just a term that describes humankind’s incremental understanding through observation.  Science is awesome.  The arts and sciences need to work together to improve how knowledge is communicated.  The idea that many Australians, including our new P.M. and my distant cousin Nick Minchin believe, that the science of anthropogenic global warming is controversial, is a powerful indication of the extent of our failure to communicate.  The fact that thirty percent of the people in this room just bristled is further evidence still.  The fact that that bristling is more to do with politics than science is even more despairing.

 

Six: be a teacher.  Please, please be a teacher!  Teachers are the most admirable people in the world.  You don’t have to do it forever, but if you’re in doubt about what to do, be an amazing teacher.  Just through your twenties, be a teacher.  Be a primary school teacher, especially if you’re a bloke — we need male primary school teachers.  Even if you’re not a teacher, be a teacher.  Share your ideas, don’t take for granted your education, rejoice in what you learned, and spray it.

 

Seven: define yourself by what you love.   I found myself doing this thing a bit recently where if someone asks me what sort of music I like, I say I don’t listen to the radio because pop song lyrics annoy me, or if someone asks me what food I like I say I think truffle oil is over-used and slightly obnoxious.  And I see it all the time on-line — people whose idea of being part of a subculture is to hate Coldplay or football or feminists or the Liberal Party.  We have a tendency to define ourselves in opposition to stuff — as a comedian, I make my living out of it.  But try to express also your passion for things you love.  Be demonstrative and generous in your praise of those you admire.  Send thank-you card and give standing ovations — be pro-stuff, not just anti-stuff.

 

Eight: respect people with less power than you.  I have, in the past, made important decisions about people I work with — agents and producers — big decisions, based largely on how they treat the wait-staff in the restaurants we’re having the meeting in.  I don’t care if you’re the most powerful cat in the room, I will judge you based on how you treat the least powerful.  So there.

 

Nine: finally, don’t rush.  You don’t need to already know what you’re going to do with the rest of your life.  I’m not saying, sit around smoking cones all day, but also, don’t panic.  Most people I know who were sure of their career path at twenty are having mid-life crises now.  I said at the beginning of this ramble, which is already three and a half minutes long, that life is meaningless.  It was not a flippant assertion.  I think it’s absurd, the idea of seeking meaning in the set of circumstances that happen to exist out of thirteen point eight billion years worth of unguided events.  Leave it to humans to think that the universe has a purpose for them.  However, I am no nihilist, I am not even a cynic — I am actually rather romantic.  And here’s my idea of romance: you’ll soon be dead.  Life will sometimes seem long and tough, and God, it’s tiring, and you will sometimes be happy and sometimes sad, and then you’ll be old, and then you’ll be dead.  There is only one sensible thing to do with this empty existence, and that is, fill it.  Not “fillet”, fill it.  And in my opinion, until I change it, life is best filled by learning as much as you can about as much as you can, taking pride in whatever you’re doing, sharing ideas, running, being enthusiastic.  And then there’s love and travel and wine and sex and art and kids and giving and mountain climbing, but you know all that stuff already.  It’s an incredibly exciting thing, this one, meaningless life of yours!  Good luck!  And thank you for indulging me.

The post Tim Minchin addresses University of Western Australia graduates (UPDATE: With transcript!) appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

My talk for FtBConscience! Hooray!

Comments are disabled there, but are enabled here. The video should hopefully also helpfully direct would-be commenters here via the description.

Full text of my speech below the fold. It doesn’t contain any of the verbal burrs or slight tangents I took but it’s largely intact. I hope some kind soul is good enough to transcribe the Q&A portion, but if not, I’ll do so myself eventually. Richard Carrier asked a question about libertarianism, and I was forced to answer honestly rather than hedging. I’m sure I’ll incur some wrath!

I’m going to wholesale steal an anecdote before I begin, and I hope she does not mind: Carrie Poppy of Oh No Ross and Carrie told a story at Women In Secularism 2, about her former boss fretting about her organization falling into mission creep any time legitimate and impacting concerns outside of the text of their core mission were brought up at meetings. Her retort was, “YOU’RE the mission creep!”

I’ve come to realize over the past few years that our skeptical and atheist communities have a problem with change. Not that individuals don’t agitate for change, or that we are unwilling to adopt new strategies or incorporate new ideas — on the contrary. The problem our communities face is that there are several fragmented factions at play, each wanting to effect different sorts of change within our movements. One side wants to pull in a particular direction, fighting for or against a political ideology, while the other wants to pull the community in the polar opposite direction. And these directions are always political, even when not identified as such. Our problem with change is that the people agitating for it are pulling in different directions; we are politicking with one another. We are locked in a perpetual tug-of-war for the heart of the movement itself.

Skepticism as a method of thinking leads in generally one direction and not its opposite, whenever you apply it in determining the most appropriate position on any sliding-scale or binary choice. In the tug-of-war between religion and atheism, scientifically minded skepticism is the steadfast ally of us heathens. When you take that very same skepticism and apply it to a number of other societal constructs like prejudice and bigotry, or like political ideologies borne of wishful thinking and the multitudes of cognitive biases to which we humans are vulnerable, you will find that skepticism is the steadfast ally of one side over the other in those fights as well. If you form your moral and political ideologies based on the best available evidence, you pretty much always land on one side of the scale. Part of the problem here is that we may not always have all the data to make the best, most rational, most skeptical conclusions. And when people fail to come to the same conclusions over topics unrelated to the “core mission”, new rifts are borne, where both sides believe the other to have done skepticism wrong, and our movements fracture and splinter and fight with one another interminably.

In many ways, these secular communities of ours are defined by their tenuous common grounds — we generally find common cause with one another over what we believe most everyone else is wrong about. Online atheist communities define themselves as those people who are right about the question of whether or not there’s a god; online skeptical communities who claim to “fight the fakers” define themselves as right about questions like homeopathy or psychic powers or astrology or Bigfoot. Atheists don’t necessarily become atheist out of a healthy skeptical inquiry into religion, though. Some atheists might simply hate any god that could allow injustices to themselves or their loved ones, or to hate people who hurt /others/ in a god’s name. And they might adopt the name “atheist” without actually taking a stance on God’s existence, out of defiance. Likewise, some skeptics are likely to believe in a deity without sufficient evidence, refusing to apply their rationality and demands for repeatable science to their religion. Already, this early in my narrative, we’ve developed an intersection where great fights break out; where “Great Rifts” are borne.

And there are more.

In order to give you a better idea of why I’ve come to the conclusions I have in my thesis, let me take you through the story of how I became what I am today.

I grew up a Catholic in northern New Brunswick, in a town heavily populated by French Catholicism. I was not MUCH of a Catholic, mind you, but my parents — liberal though they were — still insisted that I say my prayers at night; that I go to church about once a month (when they themselves could be bothered to go); that I attend Sunday School regularly; that I be confirmed.

I believed in the usual gamut of nonsense, as well — my father being interested in Star Trek, and (as far as I know) believing in the movie Communion as a true story, I likewise believed that aliens were visiting us. I believed in Bigfoot. I believed in psychic powers, astrology, x-ray glasses advertised in the backs of comic books. I believed in the stereotypical family unit of a mom, a dad, and two kids (a brother and sister), the white picket fence and a dog to guard it — because it was our family unit; the family unit of most of my neighborhood, and the aberrations stood out like sore thumbs. I believed that men were breadwinners and women were homemakers, just like TV told me. I believed that hard work was rewarded and that misdeeds were punished. I was a fairly credulous kid, and I absorbed every bit of nonsense society threw at me and, though it started to get hard to do near the end, I tried to incorporate it all into my philosophy.

But cracks started to form. I began questioning religion around the time of my Confirmation. My next-door neighbor was an older gentleman, a sweet and mild-mannered man, a devout Catholic, and was involved in the ceremonies around my confirmation fairly heavily, helping my parents with the planning and the party and the rehearsals. He tried to impress upon me how important a step this was. I didn’t get the candles, I didn’t get the pomp, and I definitely didn’t get what it was I was being asked to do. In fact, I was totally put out by the idea that I, a thirteen year old boy, who was far more interested in playing Nintendo than affirming the supernatural, was being asked to promise to believe something forever. Even at that tender age, I was keenly aware that everything could change at a moment’s notice.

So for the confirmation ceremony, I “phoned it in”, doing exactly what people asked of me, going through the motions and wondering how long it would all take so I could get back home to play the copy of Megaman 3 that I had rented that weekend. And then, I decided to try to find out what was lighting the fire in the grown-ups’ bellies over all this religion stuff.

When I got home, I did the unthinkable, for any religious person — I started reading the Bible. I put aside my Hardy Boys and my Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, I put aside even Megaman (which was a huge deal for me even at the time — I so identify Megaman with this episode in my life that I’ve since gotten a tattoo of him on my shoulder!). And I snuck a copy of the Holy Bible into my room where I read it late into the night every night for however long it took to complete. I promised myself over and over, as the narratives failed to capture me and I tired of it so quickly, that I would give it all a fair hearing and judge it only once I’d gotten to the end. I thought it was all familiar, where the more pleasant stories had been whitewashed and repackaged for children over the ages, but the stories took on a decidedly different timbre in their full verse.

When I got to the end, I really felt like I had missed something. A lot of somethings, actually. I felt like I had just read a bunch of loosely collated fables, pastiched together with interstitial “life lessons” that didn’t really follow from the stories they were tied to. I had read a lot of unbelievable claims, a lot of stories that I had recognized as stories from other sources. I read some terrible morals, like offering your daughters to be used by townsfolk for unspecified horrors in order to save perfect strangers — which, even that young, I figured had to do with sex, and without the daughters’ consent. I read that there was an “old covenant” that this New Testament was a supplement to — a sort of prequel. I vaguely hoped it would make things make more sense later, but I got the sense that the New Testament couldn’t stand on its own. I kept that fact in the back of my mind for later.

So I resigned myself to the idea that my parents, my classmates, my teachers and my townsfolk were all wrong about just about everything. I had figured that if they were wrong about the existence of God, the most important statement one could make about this universe, surely everything else was to be questioned as well! I continued to grow and learn and question, I frequently read whole swathes of random passages from our Funk & Wagnell’s multi-volume Encyclopedia, I questioned everything that everyone else believed.

And I felt like I had absolutely nobody to talk to about what was happening in my head. I felt isolated. I felt like I had to “pass” as Christian. I put on airs of being a Christian, wearing a plain silver crucifix, hoping that was enough to camouflage what was going on in my head. I justified wearing it, mentally, because I really liked the Castlevania game series — a game that used what scattered religious iconography it could slip past the censors at Nintendo of America. The cross was used as a smart bomb that killed all the enemies on screen; and there was a throwing weapon that was originally a cross-shaped boomerang but whose graphics had been altered to avoid the overt parallel. I was amused that I was wearing an icon that to me represented a video game I liked, but to everyone else a symbol of their devout faith. I was definitely an atheist at this point in my life, though I didn’t yet know the word.

And I read the New Testament again, with a vague hope that something might trigger some sort of — heh — revelation. And it was just as inscrutable the second time.

I saw mention of Leviathan, and Behemoth, and I recognized the names as bosses and summons in Final Fantasy 2 for the SNES. That actually struck a sort of chord with me, because in the same game, one of the most important summons was Odin, which I recognized from Norse mythology. And all of these mythologies couldn’t be RIGHT simultaneously, but damned if they couldn’t all be WRONG.

RPGs on consoles had previously spurred interest in Greek and Norse mythology for me, and so I was already fairly well-versed with regard to Odin. Seeing those supernatural creatures together, in the same video game, performing the same function, suggested to me that they were in the same category — mythology. These great beasts involved in God’s own story, supposedly shaping the land that we live upon today — they were mythology. And so was God. That was a seismic shift in how I thought about religion. My parents, my classmates, they all believed in a religion the same way as the Greeks or the Norse did.

For a while, I believed in karma, fulfilling that “Just World” cognitive bias we all seem to have — genuinely believing that what goes around, comes around. Only that was quickly undercut by the prevalence of good people with bad things happening to them, and decidedly bad people getting away with their misdeeds and even reaping huge benefits. “Why do good things happen to bad people?” I asked, where others might ask the inverse. I realized that karma wasn’t real, no more than the idea of a heaven or hell. The upshot of that revelation was that I also learned that the only justice to be had is that which happens here, on Earth, in our lifetimes. If nobody challenged the bad, it would fester, and it would get worse.

Sometime later, my parents took me aside one day, when I was 14 or 15, and asked me if our Catholic neighbor had ever tried to touch me inappropriately. I was shocked, and disturbed, and though the answer was an uncategorical “no”, I demanded to know where this had come from. I had thought my neighbor to be a dottering old man and ridiculously pious and a generally good person, and I was gobsmacked that they were talking about him this way. It turns out their fears were predicated on having discovered that he was gay.

Please note that they did not discover him to be a pedophile — they discovered him to be homosexual. He liked men his age. And he loved one man in particular, apparently.

I was incensed that they’d treat him with such contempt and prejudice. But, like my religious sentiments, I bottled that up too.

In high school, I learned that at least one of the folks in my circle of friends was gay. He was not officially out, though he was treated horribly because he wore his difference on his sleeve. As far as I knew then, and as far as I know today, the majority of the kids at my school were Catholic, because that was practically the only game in town. So I attributed a lot of that cultural bias against homosexuality to the religious upbringing that generally taught lessons that my father echoed at me, that homosexuality was sinful and wrong.

I wanted to find out why there was so much hatred of homosexuality amongst Christians. I had access to the internet via my dial-up modem, and the internet was quickly becoming my go-to source for information about everything I had kept bottled up to that point. I quickly discovered a Usenet group related to religious discussion, wherein I read that the book I was looking for — that religious folks kept pointing to as damning gays — was called Leviticus. And that book wasn’t in that New Testament, it was actually in the older one. It had become time to read, at least part, of the prequel.

I brought up Alta Vista and began searching for that Old Testament. Within it, amongst other *proscriptions*, I read that shellfish was an abomination in the eyes of our Lord.

I, a young New Brunswicker, living in Maritimes Canada where half our food was from the sea, who’d developed a taste for lobster and shrimp and crab in an area where it was as common to see fishermen selling their catch from the back of the truck as it might be to see fruit vendors in other geographical locations — discovered that according to the mythology by which my parents raised me, one of my favorite foods, introduced to me by them, was an abomination.

At that point I was already convinced that my parents were mostly wrong about everything to do with religion, but this pretty much sealed the deal on the thought that they didn’t actually KNOW the religion they believed. They were prejudiced against gays because of a line in a book they had apparently never read, because they ignored the line practically on the same page about seafood.

So I took it upon myself to start forming my own philosophy. I recognized the tilts in my own playing field with regard to being an atheist in a predominantly religious town, and I extrapolated those out into a sense of what it feels like to be gay, to be completely unable to express natural biological and emotional desires for fear of being ostracized or murdered. I definitely didn’t get the scope of the pain that a gay person might feel, but I certainly empathized with them then. I was thus introduced to the concept of privilege, before I learned that sociologists actually used that word in exactly that sense. I learned that there were ways in which a person who “passes” as “normal” might actually be disadvantaged, especially if people discover that they’re NOT normal.

I discovered that while I thought my upbringing was multicultural with a few dark-skinned folks in my school, I had no idea what kinds of prejudices they endured just for being different. I learned that my entire world was lily-white, from my teachers to my close friends to everything I saw on television (except perhaps where there was a blatantly-calculated multicultural team in cartoons, like on Captain Planet). I discovered that I didn’t really understand that whole communities and whole cultures could live side by side with precious little bleed-through between them. This despite being Acadian; despite being raised mostly English in a predominantly French region. I didn’t realize just how segregated my part of the city was until I returned many years later and merchants and townsfolk in those same areas spoke French first by default, instead of English as they always had while I was growing up.

In university, I took a social deviance course during my first year, and was incredibly excited to do so. The description in the syllabus had tipped me off that I was on to something with my present line of reasoning. And I was right to take it — the course did much to open my eyes further. Where previously I bought into the social construct that counterculture was to be shunned, that say “druggies” were bad people or were victims of predatory dealers, that a fried egg was a good analogy for “your brain on drugs”, this social deviance course taught me that people who fell into a drug-related lifestyle were not themselves morally failed, and that people could participate in counterculture for all sorts of reasons, and yet still be functional, contributing members of society. The course discussed frankly many social conventions, including monogamy, heterosexuality and marriage, capitalism and religion and anti-theism, and that there might be reasons outside of personal choice for participating or not participating in any of these — like biology, in some cases, and cultural indoctrination in others. Even where I thought myself suspicious of most of what I was being taught by society, I realized there were big chunks that I still accepted without questioning. And when I applied rational and skeptical thought to each of these, when I examined the actual evidence available for them, they fell apart under scrutiny.

I encountered libertarians for the first time, who’d read Atlas Shrugged and embraced it, and thought I might have common ground with them because many of them were atheist too. The specific selfish capitalist libertarianism Ayn Rand espoused, though, turned me off, and the thousand-page book seemed more like a bible to me than a work of fiction — not that I thought there was much difference between the two, except perhaps the breadth of their respective fandoms.

I took a women’s literature course, and discovered that women were largely unable to write through until modern times without having to disguise themselves, like George Sand, or to prove themselves worthy as writers to a degree that no man was expected to prove, like Jane Austen. I learned that despite being equal to men intellectually, they were largely subjugated to men as the baby-makers, the housewives I previously believed them to be. Culture had impressed into me that women were equal to men, but it had also impressed into me the ways they were supposedly inferior; that they were by necessity given certain roles they had to fulfill. I could no longer presume that any of these entrenched values were founded, and I took a women’s studies course in hopes of discovering why these women were being so disadvantaged despite the (admittedly conflicting) messages of women-being-equal, and women-being-mothers-only.

I learned of feminism for the first time then — of feminist thought, I mean, and some of the ways in which the world’s playing field was tipped against them, and this overturned the only other mention of feminism I’d heard to that point, that being that of Rush Limbaugh. I learned that the fight was ongoing, and that women were still disproportionately disadvantaged, even though women’s suffrage was achieved, and though women were allowed to work, and though women occasionally got high-paying or high-powered jobs, they were still not treated the same way as men in any of those situations. I discovered that religiously-motivated politicians were daily assaulting their reproductive rights and that pay parity was nowhere close to achieved, and that just being a woman, one could expect and would have to deal with all manner of abuse in “civil society”.

And I discovered that many of the reasons women were still an underclass despite being a numeric majority had to do with the fact that men have been the “doers” and the “thinkers” and the “achievers” throughout history, that that history had been written by the victors and elided the women who on their merits should have been included in these lists; even including the religious texts I’d previously rejected, authored by men.

At that point, it dawned on me. *I* had rejected them, but almost everyone else I knew was still religious. At that point, not necessarily Christian, but they believed in SOME holy text, and almost every one of those texts was grossly misogynistic. And even in the cases where people had rejected those beliefs expressly, they were still shaped by the society as a whole.

I had come completely full circle — right back around to where I started this journey, with atheism. The more I examined all the ways one thing influenced another, the more I realized that there were a whole bunch of conventions that needed more scrutiny, and that they all intersected. Where the specific memes that were damaging people in underprivileged positions had gained foothold, they had modified society itself. And those ideas permeated society, and were accepted uncritically by large majorities of our populations. The war we fight is a war of ideas, where the ideas have demonstrable effects on our behaviours toward one another.

Every social justice movement, as you explore it and learn about it, eventually touches on every other social justice movement. In movement feminism, the third wave of feminist thought expressly acknowledged where privilege was interacting and amplifying the pain that black women experienced; it deemphasized the “universal feminine identity” and acknowledged class concerns and intersections with other movements. That wave of feminists intentionally expanded their mission to address black women’s concerns. They thus moved toward common goals.

Any time, however, that a movement decides that the concerns of another are invalid, it sharpens and personalizes existing resentments, it underscores ideas of conflict between them, and eliminates goodwill between these movements. For instance, a faction of feminists who proclaim themselves to be radical exists, who expressly deny the femininity of trans* women and who deem trans* men to be traitors. They do much to sour the natural intersection between feminists and the trans community. By denying the fight that trans* folks have just in being treated as full and fully-realized human beings, these trans-exclusive radical feminists undercut our natural alliances.

In much the same way, large groups of atheists demand of the so-called luminaries of our supposedly leaderless movement that they “do something about those damned feminists” who are creating mission creep by working on those issues that interest them. They demand that these feminists be cut out of the discourse. They trot out absurd, contrafactual and antiscientific arguments for why feminism is a gross overreach, for why men and women are equal by fiat and that any attempt to tip the playing field back to, you know, LEVEL, are actually attempts to subjugate men to the feminazis’ fascist will.

I strongly feel that sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and the whole gamut of prejudice that we evince as human beings is just another sort of “woo” that we need to fight. That this fight, that we atheists face against a predominantly religious society, is but a single axis on a grander intersectional playing field. I believe those of us with functioning senses of empathy and the ability to self-reflect on our cognitive biases would agree.

Since coming to the realization that I’d started with atheism and wrapped around through several social justice movements and kept revisiting atheism time-and-time-again, I’ve discovered a great deal about how each of these axes intersects and interplays, and I’ve discovered whole new axes on this multidimensional playing field that I wasn’t previously aware of. I studied sociology in university, as my minor (against a BA in English, when I thought I would eventually become an English teacher). In my studies, I learned of privilege, and of objectivity, and of analyzing even the conventions in which I am steeped. I have since refined those ideas to the point where I am comfortable talking about them in front of an audience.

But my mission has crept decidedly far beyond where I had started. I learned much of what’s wrong with this world when I became an atheist, and I learned much of what needs fighting when I figured out what a godless universe actually MEANT. I have privilege on a large number of axes, even where I am underprivileged on a few others. I consider it a moral imperative to use that privilege in ways to provide comfort and succour to the folks without those privileges I have; to try to level the playing field as I would hope they would do likewise.

I am proud to adopt the label of “Atheism Plus” in solidarity with others who feel the same way, who felt that atheism alone was not enough common ground. Some say that’s just humanism; fine. Some say that’s divisive; okay, sure, but only in the same way that taking on any label divides you from those who don’t share the label’s ideas, like the label “atheist” divides us from theists.

As I said earlier, there are natural tectonic rifts that form around political differences, but I’m confident that myself and my compatriots are among the most rational, skeptical and yet still empathetic folks fighting for the cause of secularism and skepticism. I am confident that when we misstep, we generally take care to rectify it and learn from the experience. I am confident, thanks to ample evidence of such, that we’re on the side of the proverbial angels.

When PZ Myers first suggested to the Freethought Bloggers that we might have a free, entirely online conference, I was elated. I’ve had to fundraise to make it to conferences to talk with people whose ideas have helped shape me, and surely I mustn’t be the only one who can’t afford to fly out to every big convention every time a new one is announced. In the marketplace where most conventions cost big bucks, this one stood a chance at breaking through the class barriers we’ve inadvertently erected around our movements. We could reach people who had no ability to go to live conventions; we could give people an opportunity to have panels who haven’t gotten to participate in that way before. We could have an entire convention with hardly any actual overhead, short of a couple hundred hours of our volunteers’ time.

We have our own niche in this movement.

I’m proud of this. I’m proud of the fact that we are willing to allow our mission to creep, to address these sorts of concerns and to improve our pluralism in order to bring in fresh ideas and address more issues relevant to our cause. Without growing our scope, we cannot continue to grow our base.

There are obvious shortcomings still — computer-related events that are done without care can be particularly ableist, for instance, without transcriptions available at or soon after the events. But with time, with more volunteers, with space to grow, and with a firm hand to fence away naysayers and those people who would tear us down (without bothering to engage with our ideas), I truly feel that we, as a movement, will flourish.

That can only work, however, if we keep letting our mission creep.

Thank you.

The post #FtBCon: Mission Creep (with text) appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

Well, as “abroad” as a Canadian living in the unofficial-Canada-adjunct that is Minneapolis gets, I suppose.

My first week in the Twin Cities was, as expected, a ridiculous flurry of activity. I think this is the first night I’ve had since arriving where I had no specific plans, and/or no specific plans-to-stay-home that went to hell. I’ve also spent a good deal of time helping my hosts get their upstairs bathroom set up, knowing that four people wrestling for one bathroom every morning is the kind of grating activity that might lead to ill will amongst us. So I’ve been plowing a good deal of my spare time into that project, in part to help pay my way while I’m still living on the charity of others. (In other part, because the end goal involves a gigantic clawfoot tub for awesome baths that I’m totally going to take!)

Jodi’s still in Nova Scotia. I miss her terribly. She’s finishing up her last week at her job, and working on getting the house and car sold and possibly finishing her courses — she’s taking chemistry and physics through correspondence via the local community college so she doesn’t have to deal with classes, only the proctored tests. However, she might end up having to withdraw come time to rejoin me, if she can’t get all her requirements done before leaving and if tests can’t be proctored here. Which would be a minor shame, but it would be like having had a practice run through the courses.

My first week at work started out with something like an explosion, with a hardware failure that let me prove I’m competent but didn’t really let me shine, since most of the problem was resolved by replacing said hardware outright. I’m making friends and influencing people though, which is nice. I figure at this rate, it’ll be at least another week before people start getting the impression I’m a decent steward of their digital dependencies. Have been making a checklist of things I’d love to accomplish while I’m there, and if I get through half of them in my first year, people will worship me, I figure.

I have a local bank account now, but spent a half day waiting in the social security office today only to be told it’ll be four to six weeks before I find out what my number is. Work’s trying to figure out what to do with me in the meantime. Looks like I’ll be cashing cheques manually. I’ve put a star in my phone’s Google Maps for easier navigation back to the place… figure I’ll be needing it soon enough.

Speaking of which, my damned iPhone 4 is now a brick. Well, not literally, but might as well be. I had gotten it through my last job, sort of — paid the difference in an upgrade cost from a Blackberry, and they kept paying the data package through Rogers. Rogers is unwilling to unlock the phone right now, until the next upgrade goes through and my old job has the new hardware. Anxious to get working, I tried to unlock the phone manually since it’s already jailbroken, and ended up accidentally putting it into a state where it’s deactivated and wants to be activated via a Rogers SIM card before I can get to Cydia to install SAM to “hacktivate” the carrier over to T-Mobile. Since that’s pretty much impossible at this point, I was in a situation where I could either wait several weeks then call Rogers and pay them $50 to unlock the phone, pay $140 to unlock it through some third party (YES, before you say it, that’s the cheapest you can get a Rogers phone unlocked anywhere!), or buy a new phone.

So I ordered a Google Nexus 4 and used a loaner phone until it arrived. I am in love with this thing. Gorgeous, slim, powerful, huge-ish. YOU KNOW, LIKE ME. Same form factor as a Galaxy III, but unfortunately can’t use the existing and ubiquitous cases for it because all the holes are completely wrong. So I have an Android case on order. Hope I don’t smash it to crap in the meantime. I’ll hopefully even get to blog from it sometimes, maybe, possibly. Swype isn’t exactly as good as a hard keyboard, but it does make typing significantly faster so far.

I’ve already eaten out far too often — four times — but have had excellent food each time. Mancini’s and Gasthof Zur Gemütlichkeit both stand out as amazing places worth a visit if you have the extra cash to spare for the atmosphere. Unfortunately, my gut is still getting used to the local fare and probably the water, so I haven’t had too pleasant a gastrointestinal experience lately. But that’s to be expected with my squirelly gut I guess. I’m on Omeprazole, so this is becoming second nature to me, I guess. But I’m by no means in as bad of shape as, say, Sarah Moglia, who’s in really rough shape lately (GO TELL HER SHE’S AWESOME U GUISE).

This hardly even covers half of what’s gone on here. But yeah. It’s been pretty life-changing thus far. Hope I don’t run out of spoons for it all. And I feel the need to do some catch-up blogging now, before the entirety of my list of things-to-blog goes completely yesterday’s news.

The post Chronicles of a Canadian abroad appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

In February 2010, Jodi and I got married. In June, we spent our honeymoon in Minnesota, going to CONvergence in Minneapolis. (My wife is every bit as much a geek as me.)

Little did I know that that visit would plant the seeds for what’s been happening over the past few months in my life.

Over these three years, we’ve returned to Minnesota for most of our vacations, reconnecting with all the awesome people we met, branching out and meeting even more awesome people, and generally finding the city and the lifestyle there to our liking. We’ve grown extremely close with the Zvans, to the point where they were taking all their vacations here as well.

Meanwhile, Jodi has been getting the itch to go back to school, after spending several years working at a vineyard, making assistant vineyard manager. She wants to get her Bachelor of Science (Agriculture), during which time she couldn’t work, meaning I needed a better-paying job. But the IT industry in Nova Scotia was pretty well stagnant, and I couldn’t find a job to my liking that would pay me what it would take to put her through school.

Then a friend of a friend dropped a job into my lap practically custom-built for my exact skillset, and the salary associated with it is more than what Jodi and I make presently, combined.

The job is in Minnesota. And a second friend apparently works at the same place, paving my way into the company. I interviewed with them, and they were — in their words — “blown away”. They wasted little time in writing up the job offer. If we believed in a deity, this whole thing would be divine providence — the perfect job under the perfect circumstances falling in my lap, and I already have connections there. A job that’ll let me put Jodi through school, and we wouldn’t even take a lifestyle hit for it.

The only problem here is, I’d be moving to Minnesota. That’s not in Canada. It’s not a HUGE problem, but it presented a unique set of obstacles.

First, we hired a lawyer to go through the application process for a TN NAFTA visa. Sure, it’s possible to simply go to the border with the job offer in hand and get waved through, but we decided to go the “long way” to make damn sure we had all our ducks in a row. The last thing I want to have happen on such a monumental move is to be thrown out on our earS (SEE BELOW, SIMON).

Said lawyer started collecting all the papers necessary to file, then — despite suggesting to me that everything should be fine based on my resumé — blindsided us with one black mark on my history.

No, no, I didn’t commit a crime, nothing that juicy.

See, I had never officially graduated from university. That means that one of the prerequisites for the TN NAFTA visa — post-secondary education — was not fulfilled. Which means, in that state, the visa application would probably fail.

That was a Tuesday night. I wrote an email to my alma mater’s Dean of English that night. I also developed a backup plan, getting a computer certification on the side, just in case things didn’t go so well. I called the Dean the next morning, and sorted everything out on the spot — a story I told you about last month.

But our lawyer told me that that was insufficient for our purposes, that because the official letter said that I will be graduating this spring, not that I had graduated back in 2001 when I finished the degree, it wouldn’t pass muster.

So that night I bought two exam vouchers for CompTIA Linux+ certification. I borrowed a study guide from 2010, and did nothing but cram for the next several days. I took the first exam the next Monday, and the next exam the next Wednesday. I was fully certified very shortly thereafter.

My new job put together the last items while I waited impatiently for my certification, and when it finally came, I sent it along to the lawyer. I got her permission to both tell my present job that I was leaving (she was very protective of my present employment the whole time!), and to obtain the very last piece of evidence necessary before filing — the letter of recommendation from a supervisor in my current employment. They needed the original, with the original signature. I overnighted it to the lawyer and when it arrived, we finally filed for my visa application. I paid for the rush processing, too — otherwise the wait time might have been 30-45 days. Even on the fast-track TN NAFTA visas, there’s a glut of applicants, apparently.

This morning, my visa came through. I’ve been approved. We’re moving to Minnesota. Jodi will go to school, and I will be working in what promises to be an excellent work environment with people doing things I wholeheartedly endorse.

The last few weeks we’ve been doing whatever we can to prepare for this, whether we were approved or not. I’d already started documenting the hell out of my present job, and Jodi and I have been going through all our stuff — years of accumulated cruft that we’ve been long overdue in selling or throwing out. We were preparing for the best-case scenario, fully knowing that it could all get pulled out from underneath us if the application was turned down. We’d been packing that which we wouldn’t use immediately, and putting stuff up for sale on our local Craigs-List-alike. We’ve been avoiding telling anyone so we didn’t sour our chances, and so we didn’t get people unnecessarily riled up. I’ve let my blog suffer in the meantime, and there’s honestly no end in sight to how much upheaval there is left to get through before things will return to normalcy around the digital portions of my life.

But I can talk about it now, and you have no idea what kind of relief it is.

It’ll change precious little about what I blog, mind. I’m still very interested in how Harper’s trying (and in many ways succeeding!) to screw up our great nation. I’m still a Canadian citizen. I’ll just be living a few kilometers — err, I mean MILES — south of the border, instead of north. (Or rather, east, as was the case in Nova Scotia. We’ll be at pretty much the exact same latitude, only well landlocked and so prone to the weather extremes only buffered by the Great Lakes.)

Dammit. My blog header’s gonna have to change, ain’t it? Yet one more way I’m a lousy canuck. LE SIGH

The post My life in upheaval, but in a good way appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

Hooray! I passed my CompTIA Linux+ certification today. Sorry I’ve been neglecting you folks over the last little bit, but see, I’ve been studying from an old exam study guide from 2010, stolen from an acquaintance, and it’s basically eaten all my concentration since I hatched this hare-brained scheme of mine.

Last Wednesday, at about the same time as I got it in my head to finally rectify my Bachelor of Arts situation, I also bought exam vouchers for the two tests necessary to become Linux+ certified. I scheduled the tests for the soonest I could get them, then I cracked the books. And today, after melting my brainpan for a week, I am now finally a man of letters and papers and shit. I now, finally, have certifications and degrees and paperwork proving I know what I do. Well, some of it anyway. There isn’t a certification for knowing the location of every extra life in Super Mario Bros 1, sadly, or I’d be going for that next.

To celebrate my achievement, I drew a dancing turtle.

He has a top hat and a diamond tipped cane, because he gots just that much swag.

(There’s a story behind this turtle, though it’s short and kinda silly. You might hear it one day.)

The post Linux+ Certified! appeared first on Lousy Canuck.