Skepticblog

I’m a reasonably busy dude. In addition to working full time in my role as Family Breadwinner, I host and produce (as some of you may know) the Skeptoid podcast, with weekly episodes since 2006. I also have a plethora of side projects that I manage to work in somehow: writing this blog, obviously; my video podcast inFact with Brian Dunning; ongoing development on at least two television proposals with Ryan Johnson; miscellaneous projects like the weekly Skeptoid newsletter and the odd video like Here Be Dragons or Truth Hurts; and squeezing in Skeptics in the Pub or Skeptics in the Jeep as opportunity permits. I also play as much high-level volleyball as I can. But none of those activities get priority on my calendar; that honor goes to Being a Dad. All weekend long, and every morning at breakfast, and every evening from 5:00pm on, I’m a dad. Everything else that I do has to be worked around that.

I don’t have an army of clones like Mr. Atoss, and I do not believe Lisa could consider herself a podcast widow, given my top prioritization of family time. So you might fairly ask (and many of you often do): How the heck do I manage to do all of this?? Continue reading…

So right after Christmas, I’m headed to Berlin to speak at the 26C3 conference. It’s the 26th (!) annual Chaos Communication Congress, the annual conference of the Chaos Computer Club. Being a newbie I cannot speak from experience, but to me it sounds somewhat like an indoor Burning Man festival. Their page states that CCC “attracts a diverse audience of thousands of hackers, scientists, artists, and utopians from all around the world.” I guess I fall into the Utopian category, evidenced by my affinity for futuristic jumpsuits.

Why me? Well, the slogan for this year’s conference is Here Be Dragons, and apparently, someone told them that I once made a video of the same name. They must have answered “Good enough for me,” because the next thing I knew I had a plane ticket in my hand. For all they know I could have made a documentary about Komodo. Or Wagnerian characters. Or recursive fractal curves. Continue reading…

Secretly I’ve been holding a public grammar contest, open to anyone who sends me an email. Today, the winner is announced: Mr. Daren Lee of “The Zeitgeist Movement”. Initially, as his writing suggests that Mr. Lee has only a fifth grade education, I was going to disqualify him (must be 18 or older to enter). But the email headers suggest that he may actually be able to hold down a job, and so his entry is accepted and I’m proud to honor him today: Continue reading…

Here Be Dragons

Since the beginning of the Skeptoid podcast, people had been asking me for a video version. Tempting indeed, but having been a college filmmaker and done my share of dabbling, I knew that a weekly video podcast would require far more than the limited time I have available for Skeptoid. So this idea stayed on the back burner for a while.

But I finally got fed up with the amount of uncritical praise and attention given to the garbage conspiracy films Loose Change and Zeitgeist on the Internet, and decided that it was time for a counterattack of reason. So I spent a few months of odd hours putting together my thoughts and writing my own garbage film for the Internet, which I called Here Be Dragons. (I wish I’d picked a different title, because that one’s so common, but heck, I was fresh out of creativity by that point.) Continue reading…