Zaq is Baq!

Okay, I’ll admit it.  This blog basically died.  Some of that had to do with me working grad-school hours doing grad-school things, and some of it had to do with me trying to write a fantasy novel while working grad-school hours doing grad-school things.  But I think a lot of it had to do with me being less interested in fighting religion.  And that is because here in physics-grad-school-land, it’s the wildly religious who are in the minority.  So religion hasn’t been a big eyesore in my life these days, and that means I’ve lost some of my interest in fighting it.

But this is supposed to be a blog about skepticism, and skepticism goes farther than religion.  After all, I’m supposed to be applying consistent standards here, and that means I need to apply my skepticism to all kinds of things.  Not just imaginary sky-daddies.

So I’m back, and I plan to stay back for the foreseeable future.  That means weekly posts.  But it also means that this blog is going to move away from religion a little bit.  In fact, the blog’s going to diversify a bit.  I’m going to be writing about random stuff that interests me.  So that means I’ll be doing some posts about fantasy writing.  But I also have a couple of commitments to keep.

First off, if you go back through the previous posts you’ll notice that I left off after part one of what was supposed to be a series.  The ideas I planned to develop in that series are really important, because I think the way we use and misuse concepts drives a lot of society’s discrimination.  But a big part of what kept me from coming back to the blog was the need to finish that series.  It’s a difficult one to write and the insistence that I return to it kept me from things that were more fun to write, and made the blog feel more like a chore than a hobby.  So while I plan to return and finish the series at some future date, I’m going to take a break from it until I’ve get back into the habit of weekly blog posts.

Secondly, you may have noticed that several of my most recent posts talked about discrimination and in particular my issues with how people fight discrimination and how they re-define problematic behavior out of the fight.  This interest of mine didn’t end with the blog, and lately I’ve been posting some “political correct double standards” to my Facebook feed addressing these sorts of things.  The latest was about feminism's tendency to ignore male victims even while insisting that The Patriarchy Hurts Men Too^TM, as displayed in the #YesAllWomen campaign and, more specifically, the backlash against the more-inclusive #YesAllPeople campaign.  This resulted in a woman saying that she’s interested in listening to the male side of things, including hearing about how sexism hurts men.  This was such an extremely rare event that I decided I should seize the opportunity.

So sexism against men is going to be the topic of my first return post.  After that, I’m going to make some posts about fantasy writing and storytelling in general.  I might also make some posts about designing tabletop RPGs, as I’ve kind of been designing my own system between my novel-writing and working-graduate-school-hours.  And maybe every now and then I’ll go back to the topic of religion.  But even when silly sky-daddies aren’t under attack, the focus will always be on asking questions and searching for answers.