I might as well just repeat what Charlie has to say, as the Prattle is moving in the very same move, and the effects will be identical:
The time has come to move servers.
(This one is so ancient it's trying to figure out who to vote for.)
Some time in the next 24-48 hours I will switch off comments globally on this blog, so that we can mirror the database over onto the new machine. The blog will still be visible — just read-only for a few days.
I'm currently running on an old version of Movable Type. One of the benefits of the move is a chance to do some spring cleaning, and in due course I will be upgrading to a much newer MT installation (and merging the other MT installation hosted on the old server, so we've only got one piece of blogging software to maintain).
When it's all up and running again, comment posting will be re-enabled. (And it had better be sorted before October 5th, because that's when the old server goes away.)
(Our email set-up at antipope.org will also be interrupted; nothing will be lost, but mail delivery may take a bit longer than usual while the DNS records are changed.)
We now return you to your regular but soon-to-be-interrupted discussion ...
Just to say a quick "thank you" to A Voice of Sanity, who's been trawling through the Prattle archives and providing updates to many of the stories, and links.
There's a new tool on Facebook for tracking blogs. Don't know if it's any good yet, but you can find the Prattle here.
The Atheist Blogroll was getting too long for the sidebar, so this entry contains the list of all the blogs in it.
Continue reading "The Atheist Blogroll"Venerable atheist magazine The Freethinker is online, featuring a news blog, so it's been added to the blogroll. It's also possible to subscribe to the magazine using Paypal, so I did—something I'd been meaning to do for some time.
If you look to the sidebar, you might have noticed that Newsvine feeds for both Red Wolf and myself have appeared recently. Several of the stories you will spot are the same as those that appear in the Prattle, but you will also see the ones which were interesting to us, but which were not substantial enough to write up.
I really shouldn't check my referrers, and I should especially not check the search terms by which people have found the Prattle. Recent searches have included religious meaning of eating own semen, rattlesnake venom in wine health benefits and nuns and priests having children together . Usually I can work out how these strange terms attracted people here, but these three have me baffled.
After seeing some interesting links in the referrer logs, I discovered the Prattle was listed on the Atheist Blogroll. I've now added it to the sidebar—at the very least, that makes it easier for me to browse through its contents.
The Prattle's official birthday is Hallowe'en. It isn't the day the first paper edition came out—I don't remember that—but it is the date it bore—Samhuinn 1988. Which makes it 18 today. Maybe I should take it to the pub or something, now that it's old enough to drink beer?
Having been excited by Modemac's contributions to alt.conspiracy, I was pleased to discover the Bulldada Newsblog, which consists of tons of links to more of the same sort of stuff.
Australia: The apparent silence around these parts is because I'm temporarily encamped somewhere near to Prattle Towers (southern hemisphere), and connectivity is not as good as you might expect for a major metropolis. I'm currently reduced to Starbucks (avoiding the alleged coffee), which only has pay-for wi-fi here.
There's lots of loony fundie interference in politics around here, which is being covered in some depth by a local LGBT freesheet The Pink Broad, although the tale of the Exclusive Brethren hasn't made it to their web site yet. RedWolf should consider this a poke in the ribs!
Comments are off for the forseeable future. The house geeks are hard at work. If you really need to say something, you can always comment on the LiveJournal feed of this site.
At the moment, if you Google for "hurricane katrina conspiracy", guess what you get?
Microsoft has been advertising its new search engine on the telly, promoting its accuracy. Which is why, according to my logs, it has never sent anyone to the Prattle who was actually looking for the sort of thing you find here. Here are a few of today's stunningly accurate hits.
22 Apr, Fri, 15:35:11 http://search.msn.co.uk/results.aspx?q=TITS&FORM=QBRE2
22 Apr, Fri, 16:19:06 http://search.msn.co.uk/results.aspx?q=bukkake&FORM=DNSERR
22 Apr, Fri, 16:22:23 http://search.msn.co.uk/results.aspx?srch=105&FORM=AS5&q=bare+tits
22 Apr, Fri, 16:30:02 http://search.msn.co.uk/results.aspx?srch=105&FORM=AS5&q=TITS
22 Apr, Fri, 18:43:03 http://search.msn.co.uk/results.aspx?q=sick+photographs&FORM=QBRE
22 Apr, Fri, 19:34:42 http://search.msn.co.uk/results.aspx?FORM=MSNTOD&q=tits
22 Apr, Fri, 20:21:19 http://search.msn.co.uk/results.aspx?q=tits&first=21&count=10&FORM=PORE
22 Apr, Fri, 20:25:14 http://search.msn.co.uk/results.aspx?srch=105&FORM=AS5&q=macadamia+nut
I wonder if the lone fundie who has so much influence over Microsoft knows that the company lets people search for evil macadamia nuts?
It seems that someone found the Prattle today by searching for free online powerful magic no fucking about.
If you're reading this, it means the Prattle has a new home. The old server has served us well for the past three-plus years, but 64Mb of RAM isn't really enough in this day and age.
Remember to update your bookmarks to www.prattle.net.
The Prattle is ready to move to its new home. To make it easier, the comments script will stop working (this is not a bug - we've done it deliberatly) and there will be no new entries. If all goes well, we'll be up and running at http://www.prattle.net/ in a day or so.
They're on to you, Red Wolf. An entry in the referrer log reveals someone looking for "Red Wolf" conspiracy.
Here are the top 10 referrers to the Prattle home page, not including search engines, or other Prattle pages. I've also added together the figures when I know that more than one different addresses really point to the same place.
Armed and Dangerous (Eric Raymond)
Making Light (Teresa Neilsen Hayden)
Charlie's Diary (Charlie Stross)
Early Days of a Better
Nation (Ken MacLeod)
Morons.org (various)
paganwiccan.about.com (Terri Paajanen)
Electrolite (Patrick Neilsen Hayden)
The Sideshow (Avedon Carol)
Holy Weblog
The Null Device
I think when you combine that lot with the regular commenters, the Pagan Prattle seems to have fans right across the political spectrum, which is cool. Now to persuade someone to knock up a perl script that'd check the logs each week and post this chart to the sidebar.
Your editor is too lazy to download and analyse web server stats, so has been using Extreme Tracking to provide some basic data. One of the things it does is to extract search terms, when a user was referred by a search engine. Here, then, is a top 20 (with words such as 'the' and 'and' excluded):
1 143 12.41% pagan 2 57 4.94% passion 3 42 3.64% prattle 4 39 3.38% christ 5 33 2.86% gibson 6 25 2.17% mel 7 18 1.56% nail 8= 11 0.95% pastor 8= 11 0.95% glass 8= 11 0.95% movie 11= 10 0.86% online 11= 10 0.86% jack 11= 10 0.86% pendant 14= 9 0.78% warez 14= 9 0.78% hutton 16= 7 0.60% cross 16= 7 0.60% antipope 16= 7 0.60% audio 19= 6 0.52% sedna 19= 6 0.52% speak 19= 6 0.52% piece
As well as the obvious obsessions of the moment, it's nice to note that a gratifying number of people seem to have been searching for this very site.
I'm terribly sorry if you came here expecting tasteful naked women with big breasts (how did Google know?), or because you wanted to know about watching lesbian porn online or what is a pagan.
Hopefully I've changed the templates so that those commenters who have no website will not have their e-mail address exposed to the world. They were anti-spammed to begin with, but now they simply don't show up. You still need to give one to comment though. The addresses will disappear from older comments gradually over time as the site rebuilds.
And as usual, we have led Feòrag astray so we can report on religion, superstition and AIDS. As soon as we find out where she lives, we will arrange for the Australian Sisters to importune Red Wolf!
Red Wolf is a regular commenter around these parts, and also sends me lots of fascinating links, so to save time I've invited her to join us here down Prattle Alley.
Today is the Prattle's official birthday, and it's 15 today! The first issue came out for Samhuinn 1988.
The more beady-eyed of you will have noticed we have a new contributor to this fine organ. Deducing who 'Charlie' might be is left as a (rather simple) exercise for the reader.
I probably have something more important to do, so I've spent the day messing with the Prattle. Most obvious is the list of extracts from the five most recent comments in the sidebar. Also, as I hate both cookies and JavaScript pop-ups, I think I've successfully stopped imposing them on people. If you used the 'remember me' cookie on this site, you might as well delete it because it doesn't do anything any more. Your browser should have the same functionality anyway. Hopefully, and I haven't tested it yet, the individual entry archive (what you get when you click on the timestamp/permalink) should list trackbacks as well.
Those of you reading the Prattle via LiveJournal will have noticed, firstly, a sudden burst of 15 repeated entries, then that they look better. I changed the RSS 2.0 template to a better-behaved one from Brad Choate. The spurt of repeat entries was caused by the rebuild. Sorry.
Sorry if you noticed that the Prattle was down briefly earlier today. This is because of Guy McFarland, a child pornographer and comment spammer whose address is 4009 Dancing Cloud Ct, Destin, FL 32541-3388, USA. His phone number is apparently 850-269-2814, but his voicemail is full (I wonder why?). I have a low opinion of the sort of person who steal someone else's resources to advertise their commercial enterprises--it makes no difference to me how dubious those enterprises are. But, I am a pacifist, and would never ever think it appropriate to do violence to anyone, and I remember occasions where fake registration information has been used as a means of getting revenge upon an innocent party. I do hope that Florida does not suffer from a vigilante problem, and I've heard worrying things about the treatment of child abusers in US prisons.
I'm afraid if you are a legitimate user of Utah ISP SISNA/Ikano Communications, where the comment spam originated, you will not be able to comment here as the spammers were using a whole range of their IP addresses, so we blocked the lot. More discussion on this issue at Electrolite.
The Pagan Prattle is now available as a syndicated feed to LiveJournal users. You can either add user paganprattle as a friend, in the normal manner, or via the form at the bottom of the LiveJournal Syndication page.
Pharyngula is the weblog of Paul Z. Myers, an associate professor of Biology, created to support his teaching and describe his research. What interests the Prattle is his commentary on religious interference in science teaching, like this on Alternative hypotheses for the origin of life.
Unfortunately, none of this is whatteach the controversymeans to the Discovery Institute or the Texas Board. What they mean is that we ought to give half-assed, metaphysical speculation about deities or aliens from outer space guiding the history of life on earth all the weight we would give to the RNA World hypothesis or endosymbiosis. Intelligent design has not earned that kind of respect. If I were compelled to address the issue of Intelligent Design in a one hour lecture, it could be nothing but a scathing deconstruction that highlighted the lack of evidence, the lack of research prospects, and the abysmally poor scholarship and misguided sociopolitical motivations of its proponents. It would be a disservice to my students, however, who are presumably in class to learn some real science, rather than hear about the superstitious delusions of a group of politically astute clowns.
I have redesigned my personal web site, where you can read about holy wells, download Macintosh fonts and look at my illustrations and photos of plush Cthulhus up to no good. It's less embarrasing than it was.
This is my last post as a single person. Posting will be sporadic, or probably non-existent, for a few days.
I've been changing things around. Mostly I've just moved and categorised the links, but there's some interesting new stuff. Technorati Breaking News (found via Kathryn Cramer):
...brings together the most relevant news stories from over 4000 news sources, and presents them in chronological order, with context and commentary from bloggers worldwide. Keep track of the news as well as the pundits, as soon as it happens.
The Memory Hole exists to preserve and spread material that is in danger of being lost, is hard to find, or is not widely known... The emphasis is on material that exposes things that we're not supposed to know (or that we're supposed to forget).
One worth watching.
The Prattle has recently experienced a spike in the number of comments, mostly regarding extremely old articles. A vanity search reveals nothing that could have triggered it. Anyone know if this fine organ was mentioned somewhere popular?
Meanwhile, back to that vanity search on Google. Have a look at the sponsored links - you might not get the same as I did, but I got a link to what looks suspiciously like a fundie hate site 'The Lure of Paganism' by Twin City Fellowship (as they're paying for it, I suppose I should click it to check). One of the services Google offers to third parties is the ablility to have the same 'targeted' advertising on your own site, and I'm guessing that Pagan webmasters who might have considered this option will be put off if they have to carry links to such stuff as part of the deal.
Google isn't the only major site that appears to not give a shit about their potential customers. Did nobody at eBay UK consider that filling the Plus Size Clothing listings with ads for slimming products might just be a tiny little bit offensive? For extra amusement, such ads cannot be found in the category for low-fat cookbooks.
Sorry about the lack of updates recently, but I got distracted into drawing a comic. Normal service will now resume.
MacOS X comes with a 'lite' version of NetNewsWire - a nice RSS aggregator. Patrick Neilsen-Hayden had the same problem I had, and Alison Scott mentioned some alternative templates, so now the RSS feeds come with the full text of the articles, and not just the first 20 words.
Entries are likely to be sparse over the coming days. Normal service will resume in just over a week.
Gullibility isn't in the dictionary describes itself as An atheist's weblog of human folly: wishful thinking and fanatacism. Laughter at mankind, its representatives and works
and covers much the same ground as the Prattle, but with more emphasis on silliness and less of the depressing stuff.
When you go to comments the first time, the site will try and set a cookie. All it's for is to save your details (on your machine), to put in the comments form when you comment. You don't have to accept it to be able to comment, and you might get the same functionality better with the form manager in your browser. Also, it's read by a Javascript thing, so it doesn't work if you have remotely secure settings in Mozilla.
If you want to comment you must give an e-mail address but, if you also give the form a link to your own web site, it will use that with your name instead of the e-mail address and you won't be barraged with spam after the harvesting robots get here. I do not save the information anywhere other than in the database which handles the comments. I'm not going to spam you and I ain't going to sell it to anyone who will.
The timestamp at the bottom of each post is a permalink, and clicking on it will also open up the comments page in the same window, rather than a pop-up.
When commenting, any HTML will be stripped out, and returns are converted to breaks or paragraphs, depending on how many you do. There is no need to ever hit return except at the end of a paragraph. URLs are converted to links to that URL.
Some people seem to have some very strange ideas about the Prattle and the person behind it. Let's clarify things a little and answer some of those questions and strange comments. Think of this as a policy statement which explains where the Prattle is coming from.
Continue reading "Pagan Prattle policy statement"I should've added it ages ago, but morons.org has made it onto the list of blogs I read. What's it about?
Moronic behaviour and attitude knows no political, social, or economic boundaries. Hypocrisy plays no favorites. Therefore, this site is neither liberal nor conservative. It is our wish to neither uplift the poor while vilifying the rich or vice-versa. We're neither yuppies nor hippies. We're just people, just like you (we're all people), who have grown weary of the morons in our society dragging the rest of us down.
You see, we're thinkers and armchair philosophers. We want to be free to think and reason. We want to be free to live our lives and make decisions as we see fit. We are tired of the interference we get from a variety of sources. We are angry at them for trying to block us from being happy because they cannot attain happiness for themselves.
The site is strongest on stories about homosexuality and those who are scared of it.
As part of the promised changes to the Prattle, the address has changed. Please redirect your links, bookmarks etc to http://www.prattle.net/ as soon as you've confirmed it's propagated to where you are. The current address will not stop working for the time being.
We have kidnapped Feòrag and will release her tomorrow. Do not try to rescue her - we dipped her in chocolate and threw her into a room full of randy, redheaded, busty lesbians, and she'll be really pissed off if you show up and spoil her fun!
Today is World AIDS Day, and for the next 24 hours, the Prattle will be written by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. It's all part of Link and Think:
Link and Think is an observance of World AIDS Day in the personal web publishing communities. The project involves hundreds of webloggers, journalers, diarists and other personal website publishers, each linking to resources about HIV/AIDS or publishing personal stories about how the AIDS pandemic has affected them.
We'll be out and about in Edinburgh today. We will be blessing the drag procession as it leaves Planet Out at 2.30pm, and joining it as it trails to the Vigil at St. John's Church before going out on the scene handing out safer sex packs. Full information about World AIDS Day events in Edinburgh can be found at the (horribly broken) World AIDS Day Lothian site. But for now, we need to get our beauty sleep...
Right, that's your lot for a few days. I'm off to Dublin in a few minutes for the Irish National Science Fiction Convention and to sink a few pints of Draught Dublin Ale in Messrs. Maguire's brewpub.
I'm off to the airport in half an hour, on my way to San Jose and San Francisco. Updates are likely to be erratic for the next few days, unless I obtain plenty of plum loony fundie nonsense in the US.
If you scroll down to the Ras Mikael Enoch story, you'll find an update with an entertaining link.