Mid-year goals!!

This is a tale of "be careful what you wish for" -- one that I hope can be turned into a plan for making those wishes come true.

I've told everyone the setup to this tale about a million times, but in case you missed it, let me get you up to speed:

A few years ago I got the impression that my career was stagnating. I took a look at my experience and skill set and determined that the job I'm most qualified for is CTO of a tech startup. (Check out this article I wrote for The Startup with some of my insights on the subject.) And so I took a risk, worked my butt off at a new company, and now I find I have succeeded in becoming the highly-valued CTO of a tech startup! One that is actively fighting climate change -- another of my big goals!!

But... The problem is that while growing my career was an important goal -- it's not my only goal or dream. Working full-time-plus kind of crowds out everything else, and I'm left with this constant background of stress of wondering when I'll have time to pick up this or that project again.

Being undervalued, on the one hand, was enraging and depressing -- but on the other, there's something to be said for being in a dead-end job where you're overqualified enough to just phone it in (and where you only have to work three days per week). I sure had the time and energy to get a heckuvalot else done, and I miss that... :(

It looks like I am on track to get my IT department into a state where I can reduce my hours to 80% -- or ideally even 60% -- in the beginning of 2019. That's great, but it means another almost six months of postponing all of the other junk I want to do. So, I was thinking that -- maybe if I outline it all here -- I might get some of it done on evenings and weekends...? Also note, I'm currently taking off Fridays for the Summer in order to make some progress on drawing my comic book, and I am really, really hoping to finish at least the dining hall scenes before this vacation time is up.

So, aside from my comic book (which is dream/goal #1, always), here are the other things I would like to have time to do, organized into categories:

2. Organize my apartment

This perhaps shouldn't be #2, but it is. I hate the feeling of being slowly buried in clutter, and I don't want to just throw stuff out. I want to go down to my basement, donate or give away online everything that is usable (but not by me), and hence free up a bunch of space down there.

Then, I have this dream of constructing my own "Ikea-hack" Lego table (which I have designed in my mind) so that I can free up a huge amount of floor and shelf space in Nico's office (a.k.a. the guest room), and have a beautiful place to sort the whole Lego collection -- and build an awesome city! (I would love to do some of this stuff again!)

I'm thinking I might be able to get the table constructed during Christmas break if everything works out. Then, naturally, I'll be in a position to organize/donate the rest of the clutter, and for a brief moment, I will live in a blissfully clutter-free home.

3. Articles, conferences, and MAA Books!

Here's what I would like to do:

• Promote MAA Books in general, and Donna's awesome book in particular -- It would be really great to be able to get enough reviews and listings for this book so that we could realistically start working on finding, editing, and promoting our next book.
• Stoke up the fires of Main Street Plaza -- unfortunately I don't seem to even be able to keep Sunday in Outer Blogness alive. :( Fortunately, Donna has helped recruit another author, but in my fantasy universe we would have a collection of people writing regularly (and be able to pay them...).
• Write a couple of more articles for The Startup. I have the drafts ready, it's just a question of focusing and doing it.
• Give a lecture on startups in a tech lecture series (this is in the works).
• Help organize a Mormon Stories Workshop in Switzerland. This one actually has a deadline (plus I'm not the primary responsible), so it looks like it's really going to happen.
• Write more articles for this blog. It's not that I think I'll ever have a non-trivial readership here -- it's that I really enjoyed having this sounding-board for my ideas here in the past. After a while I got to the point where I'd written about all the subjects I was really burning to write about, so I stopped. But now it's been long enough that I have a backlog of topics again, and I'm just having trouble getting started.

There are a couple of additional things standing in my way from getting this sort of stuff done. For some reason I can't seem to start writing a simple blog post without many hours of psyching myself up to do it. Not sure why. Even on a topic that I've been churning over in my head and constructing arguments and phasing for weeks or years -- sitting down and composing it is daunting.

Additionally, I haven't been reading books regularly for the past couple of years because I used to read in the tram -- and that time has of late been almost entirely eaten up by Pokémon Go. On one level, I feel like this is a shameful waste, but I can't dismiss it as entirely wasted time.

Pokémon Go has two big advantages for me: (1) it is very Zen -- it allows me to relax and shake off all of the stress while I'm commuting to and from my stressful job, and (2) I am -- really for the first time -- regularly socializing with actual Swiss people. Not just people like me -- international, third-culture folks, mathies and techies -- but really random people of all walks of life who live in Zürich.

Actually, not everybody who plays is Swiss -- Pokémon Go seems to cut across all categories, immigrants from all countries, locals, tattooed youths, bankers and finance guys in their suits, moms & dads with kids, moms who don't bother to bring their kids (like me), old, young, guys, gals, you name it! And to do it right, you really have to make an effort to meet people and make friends. This has meant stepping outside of my comfort zone in a major way and growing my perspective, so I can't really beat myself up for obsessing over whether I managed to catch this or that shiny pokémon, etc.

4. Other stuff that should be on the list

Here's the grab bag of stuff I would love to do if I had an infinite amount of free time:

• More projects with my kids. I would like to do some of the Kangaroo math challenges with Léo, and help them both to create more image and music assets for the video games they're developing,
• Political activism. I'm ashamed to admit that I'm one of those people that is watching the news, aghast at what is currently going on, and saying, "Wow, I hope somebody (else) does something about this!!!!" I did register to vote (I can legally vote in the US and France), so I guess that's better than nothing.
• My own podcast -- yeah, that's a fantasy, but maybe someday if our species lasts a few more decades.
• Figure out more recipes for the herbs in my balcony garden. That said, I think my garden has been a bit of a success story. I tend it a bit and it produces more foods that I would expect from a balcony.

I was going to include a list of the blog entries I'm hoping to write -- to see if there's interest -- but let's leave it at this. And we'll see how much I can get done!!

Procrastination!

I have a long list of topics bouncing around in my head. I really want to write the corresponding blog posts, but I never seem to have the time. Especially if it's something potentially controversial, I don't want to just dash it off -- I want to compose it carefully. And the longer I put it off, the bigger the hurdle (to just sitting down and writing something) grows. Does that every happen to you?

I'll just list some of the topics, and see if anyone has any comments on them to start with:

• Switzerland: "The country that continuously proves that no problem is insurmountable when you're sitting on a huge pile of money." On the one hand, I'm continuously impressed by Switzerland's ability to put money to good use in forward-thinking investments (eg. environment, scientific research), but there are some negative aspects as well (some xenophobia, for example).
• Obama: Let me count the ways I am not happy with his performance as president, and deconstruct the errors in my earlier endorsement. Bonus questions: (1) Is there any hope for real change? (2) After 10 years in Europe (and counting) why don't I bother to follow European politics as closely as I follow US politics?
• The Flying Spaghetti Monster: I got a really cute crocheted Flying Spaghetti Monster from Camp Quest. My kids love it! I'm planning to post a picture of it (possibly with Leo dressed as a pirate (since he'd already decided (before receiving this FSM toy) that he wants to be a Pastafarian)). The problem: my kids broke the camera I usually use for this blog. (That's why the food photo on this post is an embarrassingly blurry cell phone photo, unlike the sharp pictures on my Lego posts.) So I have to go borrow my husband's camera, and maybe get Leo to dress up as a pirate. Yet, somehow, I never seem to have the 1/2 hour that would require...
• Bonus surprise feminism topic: I can't seem to sum this one up in a couple of sentences without writing the whole damn post. So it's a surprise.
• I'll also be writing about Heaven Up Here for Main Street Plaza sometime this week.

What do you think? Are these topics too difficult/controversial, or is it all in my head?

Speed of Lightning! Roar of Thunder!

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a frog!

To all those who are younger than Gen-X, please excuse the obscure reference to the "Underdog" theme song. ;)

If you follow the atheosphere like I do, you probably already know that Camp Quest -- that fun science-not-Bible Summer camp for kids -- needs some funds. And, to make the fund-raising more interesting, they decided to turn it into a competition between PZ Myers and a team of other cool atheist bloggers. In round 1, PZ totally wiped the floor with the competition, so some more cool underdogs signed on.

Now, as fond as I am of PZ (I met him in person and even included the photo of our radio interview together in my masthead if you look closely), I am compelled by some mysterious human compulsion to support Team Underdog. (Also note: Team PZ doesn't need my help, but I qualify for Team Underdog.) Hence I've added the donate widget to my sidebar =>

And remember, it's not just about beating PZ (and watching Hemant shave off PZ's beard). It's a great cause! As much as I loved LDS girls' camp as a kid, I wish I could have gone to something like this!! I'm planning to send my own kids as soon as feasible.

Helpful fly-by critics

One amusing thing about Main Street Plaza it the number of fly-by critics we get. By "fly-by" critics, I don't mean people who are intentionally trolling. I mean people who take one look at the site and are incensed -- incensed! -- that non-believers would be discussing Mormonism. We get so many of them that that's our one FAQ.

For a while, I assumed that this is simply because Mormons are taught in church that "apostates" are bitter and hateful. Hence -- if Mormons see any "apostates" on the Internet -- they sometimes post a "Why are you so mean and bitter?" comment without making any attempt to determine whether that criticism applies. I imagined that -- if it weren't for prejudice against former-believers -- they'd have the common courtesy to read the welcome page before criticizing.

The more I thought about it, though, (over the years, as these fly-bys have flown by), the more I asked myself: Is this supposed 'common courtesy' really so common? Do people really read the welcome page and FAQ on other types of sites before posting comments like "I can't believe you people are wasting your time discussing this topic!"

I certainly got my share of that in my few posts on the Hathor Legacy (eg. helpful fly-by: "Why are you wasting your time analyzing a kids' movie? It's just a movie!" me: "Um, because I find the topic interesting. If you don't, then I agree that one of us is wasting time by participating in this discussion. But it's not me.")

Then I thought: Maybe these helpful fly-bys only appear on blogs about touchy topics like feminism or religion -- topics where some people feel threatened by the mere existence of discussions they disagree with. Maybe blogs on topics that really are frivolous [royal wedding watchers, Edward Cullen's hair-care tips] don't get as many "This site is so stoopid, you all need to get a life!" comments.

But what do I know? I'm starting to think that all websites get these. My kids have been watching some (rather ridiculous) YouTube videos reviewing various Lego sets. And even there, one of them spent a good three minutes complaining about all of the negative comments. His advice? "If you don't like these videos, don't watch them." Makes sense to me.

The thing is that the Internet is full of people discussing every topic you could possibly imagine (and plenty of other topics that you would never have thought of in a million years). There are so many interesting discussions to read -- plus an uncountable number of discussions that you personally won't find interesting (but someone else, apparently, does find interesting). That's what I find perplexing. Given the infinite selection and finite amount of time -- why take the time to read the ones you find uninteresting and post comments telling them how uninteresting you find them?

But that what I love about the Internet -- you're exposed to so many new mysteries of human nature to contemplate!! My personal motto is a variant of a famous quote by Spinoza: "I strive not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them."

Vote (for me) in the 2010 Brodies!!!

It's that time of year again! Time to showcase the best LDS-interest stuff posted to the Internet in the past year!! And vote for which ones deserve awards as the very best!

Several of my posts are in the running. Please vote for me -- unless, of course, you think someone else's post in the same category is better. ;^) There's some pretty stiff competition!

• for Best Interfaith Interaction: Our Heavenly Nico!


• for Best Philosophical/Religious Discussion: Faith vs. Bias


• for Most Interesting Commentary on Mormonism: Survival of the Fittest: Mormon Style!


• for Best Gender Issues Discussion: Career women vs. SAHMs round II: There Can Be Only One True Choice!


• for Best Book Review: The Church of the For-Profit Corporation: Daymon Smith's "The Book of Mammon"


• for Best Book Review: Steven H. Lee's "Falling into Life: A Gay Exmormon's Journey"

Plus, I was nominated for "Best Bridge Building" (overall). We'll see if I can beat John Dehlin -- he's a lot more famous than I am. ;)

Whether I win or not, though, I'm thrilled to see how many people are excited about these awards!! This is only the second year we've been holding Brodie Awards at Main Street Plaza, and I'm glad to see that people are having fun with them! :D

2011 State of the Me Address

You may recall from last year that I'd isolated three main categories of goals where I need to put in some effort: (1) career, (2) German, and (3) arts (writing/blogging).

So, how have I done?

1. Career -- on track. As usual, this is a point where it's not appropriate to post too many details to the Internet, but I'll just say I had some specific goals in mind about the direction I'd like to see my career heading, and where I'm at right now is (if anything) better than what I was hoping for.

2. German -- on track. I'm at the point where I can carry on more-or-less reasonable conversation with a very patient German-speaker. I'm about halfway through my intensive German class (two afternoons per week), and I'm enjoying it immensely. And I'm planning to spend my vacation this Summer on a really, really intensive German class/immersion in either Germany or Austria.

3. arts (writing/blogging) -- pretty much totally dropped the ball.

I had a number of different creative projects I wanted to work on this past year, and I got very close to zero work done on any of them. I haven't given up on them. Rather, as Jen Hancock (and Madonna) explained:

So NARAS asked her, how do you keep all those balls in the air? She said she didn’t. She just makes sure to remember where she drops them so that when she has the time she can pick them up again.

Even though lots of amusing stuff happened to me and my family -- which I could have written about -- I didn't even bother to keep my blog updated regularly! At least I updated my masthead so y'all would know I'm not dead...

The trouble is that I have more than twice as much stuff I'd like to do than I have time in a day to do it. I used to write a lot of blog posts in a little notebook while I was commuting on the bus or tram, and now that time has been taken over by German homework. (Well, let's be honest -- for a stretch of several months in there, I developed a rather unfortunate Sudoku habit that also ate up quite a lot of otherwise-potentially-productive commuting time.)

The one exception -- the project that I'm very proud of -- is how well things have been going at Main Street Plaza. For years I've been gathering all of the former-Mormon blogs into a common list (Outer Blogness) and encouraging community discussion by highlighting new blogs and interesting posts in my weekly column Sunday in Outer Blogness. But it was hard for MSP to really get a foothold as a central gathering place because we didn't have enough news and other content to keep people coming back. Then Chino Blanco signed on and changed that. And in the past year MSP has really taken off, from having a small-but-loyal readership to being one of the Internet's most popular blogs on the topic of Mormonism. And the success builds on itself: the more popular MSP becomes, the more people are willing to contribute interesting guest-posts!

Naturally, the blog that's doing well is the one that gets all of my Internet time lavished on it. Usually, I feel like I'm hardly doing anything substantial over at MSP, but it is amazing how time-consuming it is just to read everyone's blogs every week and look for ways to weave the different discussions together.

Another goal that wasn't on my official list -- but that I did a good job on -- was to spend more time with real-life (non-Internet) friends and with my kids. As far as the kids are concerned, I'm a huge believer in undirected, free, imaginative play. However, it's possible to go overboard on that. I like to set aside a certain amount of time to read to them, and to just sit down and play some of the things they're interested in with them. Especially now that they're getting to be old enough to build some really cool, complicated stuff out of Legos!

So, my goals for the comping year are (1) to keep going on the items that are on track (German, career, family, friends, MSP), (2) pick up some of the balls of creative projects I've dropped, and (3) Put some more effort into "thinking globally, acting locally" regarding the environment, charity, etc.

And now my immense psychic powers will make this blog more relevant to your life!!

Check this out!! In the course of livening up the ol' blog, I've added this this fab new sidebar widget --> to psychically *cough* randomly *cough* select a batch of amusing old posts just for you!

After a bit of playing with it, it's kind of making me want to go back and delete all of my less-interesting filler-posts. Like this one. ;)

p.s. If any of the posts it chooses really are eerily relevant to your life, please leave a comment! I'd like to build up some (self-selection-biased) evidence to prove that my psychic powers really are amazing!!! :D

Finally updated my masthead!!

I've been living in Switzerland for three years now, so it was getting to be time to replace the old masthead that I drew for France (the one with the word France crossed out and Switzerland written in). I spent all morning on this one, but I'm not totally thrilled with it. I'm thinking maybe I should try again...

*** ETA: OK, I redid the masthead. Here's my first attempt:

The second one is better, don't you think?

BTW, here's mo old masthead, for comparison:


Also, I've thrown away all of my sidebar junk, and I'm slowly replacing it with updated stuff. Bear with me for the moment on the missing blogroll, etc.

One Million Hits!!!

Yep, this past week my humble little blog-and-novel combination reached that magical milestone of one million hits! That's not a million different readers, BTW -- just a million page loads. My novel ExMormon, however, has been read by more than a thousand different people (and the gratuitous love scene by more than two thousand), and that's a lot of pages, so I guess that explains a lot of the pageloads.

I'm happy, though, because -- ever since I stopped reading my blog stats religiously -- I started getting this (wrong) idea in my head that nobody reads my blog anymore.

Why did I stop poring over my pageload information? Three reasons:

1. I'd learned about as much as I could learn about what draws people to this blog,
2. Further poring over the logs was kind of a waste of time, and
3. It was causing me unnecessary stress about stuff I can't control (like who is/isn't linking to me). Then I would stress some more about all the time I was wasting on reading my stats.

The downside is that I'm no longer inspired to do those amusing search query posts...

Long-time readers may have noticed that a couple years ago I was manic about blogging, and now I'm far more laid-back. The thing is that when I first started blogging, part of the challenge was figuring out the strategies for building up an audience. That has been an incredibly fun learning experience, but one of the things I learned is that it takes a ton of work all the time. There isn't a magic formula that will make your blog popluar without daily effort.

Now, I'm not allergic to hard work -- far from it -- but I found it happening more and more frequently that I'd think of a project I want to do (artistic, professional, or around-the-house) and I'd say, "Ah, I can't ever do that -- it would take so much time, and I can't squeeze it in with my family, work, and blogging..." And I realized that I can't let blogging be something that limits me. If I did, I'd eventually have no life left to write about!!! (Actually, I still have yet to figure out how other bloggers get around this conundrum.)

I thought long and hard about it, and I realized that I love blogging in the sense that I love being able to write up my thoughts in a careful way and then bounce them off the wonderful folks on the Internet, and get good feedback, etc. What I don't love is the pressure of feeling like I have to post X times a week -- whether I feel inspired or not -- because people will unlink me and stop bothering to read my blog, so no one will be around for the times when I do feel inspired.

So, I guess what I'm saying is that I hope people will subscribe to this blog and/or follow it -- just don't expect me to post as often as I wish I had the time/energy to do it. ;^)

And, from my stats (which I exceptionally took the time to review today), it looks like that's what folks are doing, thanks!!

blogging/blogroll update from Outer Blogness and beyond!!

As you may have noticed, the service that was hosting Outer Blogness has vanished in a puff of smoke. Mojoey's Atheist Blogroll was using the same service, and has plans for something new. I'll probably use whatever service he finds (or founds), but that solution isn't coming any time soon.

In the meantime, if you have the Blogrolling code for Outer Blogness on your blog somewhere, please remove it and just link to Main Street Plaza instead. The whole blogroll is there. I'll try to come up with a nice button graphic for it soon. :D

While I'm at it, I'll probably try and update the ol' blog here, too (the way we spiffed up MSP). That code was the only thing keeping me from switching from an old-style blogger template to the more modern version (with "widgets" to choose from instead of just mucking around in the html code!). Maybe I'll even be inspired to create a new masthead -- something a tad more relevant to my current life here in Switzerland. We'll see if I manage to come up with something!

Naturally, it's getting to be about time to update my own blogroll. There are plenty of blogs on it that have kind of petered out, and there are plenty that I read regularly now (through my RSS reader) that I've neglected to add. So if you read this blog -- and have a blog yourself -- please leave a comment here so I'll know to put (or keep) you on my upcoming new-and-improved blogroll. Thanks!

*** Update ***

As I'd hoped, my fellow MSP permablogger Chino Blanco prepared some lovely buttons!!

If you're a part of Outer Blogness, I'd like to ask you to please link to Main Street Plaza, and perhaps even use one of these lovely images!





Either save your favorite image and link it to MSP on your own, or copy this code into your blog template:

<a href="http://latterdaymainstreet.com/"><img src="http://i51.photobucket.com/albums/f394/Chino_Blanco/Brig-Blue-120-web.jpg" /></a>

Thanks, and I hope to see you in Outer Blogness!!

I'm back -- now with more science!!!

I'm back from my trip to Italy -- with so many stories and pictures!!!

First stop was the science museum! Yes, even if we didn't bring our kids this time, and yes even with one of the most famous art museums in the world right next store, our first stop in Florence was the Galileo Museum, showcasing the most advanced science and technology of the renaissance! The high point: they have some of the earliest machines that were invented to study electricity and magnetism -- and they're so simple that you can understand them even if you know very little about electromagnetism! The low point? They have Galileo's finger in a jar. No, I am not kidding. You can even buy a book about Galileo's finger, oddly enough.

Unfortunately, we couldn't take any pictures in that museum, but we got a few pictures in the Leonardo da Vinci science & tech museum in Milan, where they have the history of early telecommunications technology. (To the left, that's me with an ancient, pendulum-based fax machine.)

I wrote an overview of my various science museum adventures at Science-Based Parenting here. (Note that Rational Moms merged with Science-Based Parenting, so I'm over there now.)

At least we got a picture of Galileo's tomb. It turns out he's buried in a Catholic church (which surprised me a bit, considering the trouble he got into with the Catholic Church...). (He's mostly buried in a Catholic church, that is -- not his finger.)

Before we set off on our trip, my husband's mildly-Catholic mom asked him to be sure to light a candle in one of the churches. So, naturally, we lit one for Galileo's monument. We wanted to light one for Machiavelli too (he's buried in the very same church! So's Michelangelo!), but Machiavelli's tomb didn't have one of those little candle-stands set up by it.

Spring Cleaning!

Yep, it's getting to be about time to spruce things up around the ol' blog. It hit me the other day that I haven't updated the "greatest hits" selection in my sidebar in years!! (Wow, time sure flies fast when you're blogging.)

I don't think this ancient selection is still the best of this blog, so I combed through my archives and selected a bunch of new choices. I'll update the sidebar when I get a minute later this week.

I also noticed that I'm starting to get to the point where I've blogged from Switzerland almost as long as I ever blogged from France. Will I ever get around to updating my masthead?? Stay tuned!

Vote in the 2009 Brodies!!

If you're following Main Street Plaza, you probably already know that author Walter Kirn won 2009 William Law X-Mormon of the year, and that he has publicly accepted the award.

Now we're following up with another series of awards -- the Brodies -- for X-Mormon online excellence!! You can vote for excellent posts, sites, and people in twenty-two different categories.

And, on a totally unrelated note, look at this drawing my 6-year-old Leo made in Tux Paint:


"Origami", by Leo

"Nothing will make me stop believing in String Theory!"

That's what I heard my eight-year-old Nico say to his little brother this morning.

Nico is totally hooked on these theoretical physics videos. If you're not sure what String Theory is, or how it works, or why it's controversial -- just ask Nico. He'll be very happy to explain it to you. At length.

Meanwhile, of course, getting him to do his homework is like pulling teeth...

In other news, I had some of my posts featured in two of my favorite carnivals: The Humanist Symposium and The Carnival of the Godless!

The latter linked to one of the awards we're doing at Main Street Plaza. We're still collecting nominations for the "Brodies". If you don't know what Brodies are, they're a little like "Niblets", only (hopefully) without the 200 comment battle.

As usual, I failed to win a Niblet. However, in this year's drama, I was one of a handful of people singled out by name (as being one of those naughty atheists whom good Mormons should be excluding from Niblet-land), which I guess is some sort of honor. It puts me in the same class as other bloggers who have been at the center of the Niblets' traditional yearly brawl in the past, such as fMh ("Big blog or not???") and the various Mormon mommy blogs (I forget what the dispute was around them)...

I'm neither a poet nor a photographer

So how can I share with you this amazing sunny/windy fall day we're having?

I've somehow internalized the idea that it's not enough to just have experiences -- I have to record them and impart them. But when I try to press the little violet between the pages of a book, it's never quite the same as in life...

Why? Why not just be and do?

I'm tempted to trace it to my Mormon upbringing (given that that's my blogging theme), but I think it comes more from my non-religious outlook: any experience that I can't preserve will one day be lost (see why I don't like death). Either that or it's my ingrained Protestant work ethic. Must... make... myself... useful... at... all... times...

All of this real-life that's been going on since I've been here in New Jersey -- it's really cutting into my blogging. I have a backlog of about ten things I'm planning to post about! I can't believe I still haven't gotten around to recounting the Mormon Fundamentalist (polygamist) church service I attended when I was in Utah! Not to mention a bunch of other more mundane things that have been happening lately (my trip to Boston this past weekend, the dinner I went to last night where the hostess showed us Albert Einstein's desk that he had brought with him to Princeton from Berlin). But the problem is that it takes me a few hours to write a careful post, and those are hours I could be spending on more real-life experiences!

Meanwhile I keep obsessing over my elaborate plans about how to get an amazing new job when I get back to Zürich, plus I'm at a fun part on my professional research project that I'm doing during this sabbatical. But this weather is making me want to blow off work and go on a walk through the woods, crackle some crispy fall leaves under my feet.

I want to work,
I want to play,
I need three times as many hours in every day!!!

I'm going to Sunstone!!

Just have a look at the preliminary program! My panel is #275: "Bridging Stereotypes Through Blogging" -- including such notable celebrity bloggers as fMh Lisa, Jana Bouck Remy, Bored in Vernal, and mfranti!!

This is going to be so much fun!!! I can wait to meet these ladies and many other cyberfriends in the flesh!

Plus -- as a bonus for going to Utah -- I'll get to be the first in the family to meet my little sister's new boyfriend. Any ideas on what interview questions I should grill him with?

Niblets!!!

It's time to vote for this year's "Bloggernacle Niblet Awards"!!!



This year, for the first time, I've actually been nominated for one! OK, well, I mean I nominated myself, but I'm in the running nonetheless: for "Nicest Evil Villain."

You may recall that I tried to get written in for this honor last year, but I guess I didn't understand the nomination procedure or something. This time -- as soon as I proposed the category "Nicest Evil Villain" -- a bunch of other people decided that they should be in the running for that category as well! So my little "write-in" category got promoted to being a full-fledged Niblet category!

But I'm the original "Nicest Evil Villain" of the Mormon Blogosphere, so please vote for me! :D

Blogspace slowing down? Say it ain't so!

At least it seems like blogspace isn't growing as rapidly as it used to. Mojoey notes that the atheist blogroll has been hovering around 900 for months; similarly Outer Blogness has had a population of around 200 for a while.

Here's TooManyTribbles' video of where the atheist blogroll was at two years ago:



It looks like blogging is still quite popular, and still growing in popularity -- just growing at a slower rate. My guess is that the people who thought blogging would make them rich-n-famous have given up, the people who were just in blogspace to share photos with family and friends have switched to FaceBook, and people who like to try the latest fad... well, I'm not in the loop as to what those guys are up to. The people who remain here in blogworld are the ones who just happen to like expressing themselves in this format.

Like me!!

I like socializing online (see my friend, the Internet), and I especially like having the motivation to write out my thoughts in coherent essays. It's fun to share ideas and discuss! :D

Announcements

Many of you have figured out by now that Main Street Plaza is down. Actually, it's been broken for more than a week. If you were thinking that the reason we hadn't posted anything new was because we'd run out of material, nope, it's not that. We have posts waiting to be posted, but unfortunately, we've been plagued with technical difficulties! I had hoped to wait until it was fixed, and then announce that it's fixed, but... well, we're working on it, and hope to be bringing you more fabulous discussion as soon as we can.

In the meantime, there have been some fabulous new carnivals posted! Check out Humanist Symposium #37 and Skeptica Parent Crossing #8!!! Also, the Carnival of the Godless is already up to episode #117, and the next one will be posted in just a few days over at Right to Think. It's not quite too late to submit a post.

Also noted: it turns out that it is now possible to buy Exmormon via Amazon. This may or may not be a convenience, given that they're charging $23.41 for it (presumably before shipping costs). There will be a new edition coming out this fall which I hope will be cheaper. Even if it's not, at least there will also be an e-version, including the illustrations. That means, of course, that you only have a limited time to get a copy of the super-expensive first edition -- which will undoubtedly one day be a valuable collector's item. ;^)

Results of My Religious Identification Survey!

Since I didn't specify an end date on my poll, I will aribtrarily pick today as the day to analyze the results!

3% - Mormon (believer)
29% - non-theist (atheist, agnostic) with Mormon heritage
57% - non-theist, no Mormon connection
4% - non-Mormon Christian
5% - other monotheist
2% - polytheist

So what do I learn from this? Well, it looks like my readership is about a third Mormon-interest. That's cool because it means that I've got a niche, but I'm not confined to it. Similarly, 14% of readers reported being theists of one kind or another. That may seem like a low proportion, but I figure it's not that I have so few religious readers, it's just that I have so many non-theist readers! :D

Also, from the comments, it looks like a lot of people don't fit easily into simple categories, but instead have varied, individualistic attitudes towards what may or may not be out there. I think this applies to some people who selected non-theist as well as to those who picked "other monotheist." I was surprised by how many people selected "other monotheist" (because I'd kind of just thinking in terms of Jewish or Muslim believers when I wrote it), but I think it's rather a reflection of one phenomenon that was discovered in some of the recent U.S. national-level religious statistics: many people raised in the Christian tradition no longer identify as Christian, even if they still believe in God.

My biggest surprise, however, was the very low proportion of polytheists -- only 2%! I totally thought that neo-paganism and Wicca were on the rise and that lots of people are reading my blog in India. And I thought that the polytheists would be flocking to my blog after that post I wrote a while back explaining that I think polytheism makes more sense than monotheism (here). I really do think that, BTW -- belief in the supernatural is one thing, but to postulate on top of that that all of this chaos fits into a coherent plan of one loving and omnipotent being...? Let's just say that's a pretty big additional stretch. Interestingly, that post was cited on a theological discussion thread on an English-speaking forum in Pakistan. But that was a while ago, and I guess those readers didn't stick around...

Oh, well. All-in-all, it looks like we've got a fun bunch! Thanks for reading and commenting, everyone!!! :D