Is a blog still a blog when most of the posts are about not blogging often enough? Heh.

I’ve been thinking about the reason I started this thing in the first place. At the time, I felt the need to blow off some steam after coming out of 24 years of theism. Mission accomplished, really. It felt like there was some momentum behind it at the time, so that I’d be able to launch into a semi-regular rant against religion to the amusement and/or consternation of all involved.

That’s not what happened though. I think one reason is that I’m in Australia, where although Christians are nominally in the majority, it’s not considered the default position, especially among twenty-somethings, and especially especially (for some reason) among twenty-something software engineers. You read Pharyngula or Friendly Atheist and you get the impression that they’re continually battling against the surrounding brainwashed masses; but I look around and I generally see irreligious, or at least non-fanatical, people. With the occasional exception, of course; the exceptions are always out of place in a way that doesn’t seem to happen in, say, the US. To cite a recent example, when Cardinal Pell spoke out against stem cell research back in June, Catholic MPs said he was a goose. Basically, I really like this country.

(PZ, you’re welcome to stay at my place.)

The reason that the word “atheist” exists at all is because there are opposing theist positions that are (more) widespread. The whole “New Atheist” movement is a rebellion against the silliness that has held prime position in people’s minds for so much of history. In the absence of theism, there’s no reason for atheists to do anything; which is what I feel like at the moment.

Another perspective is that maybe it took me until now to get rid of the Christian idea that it’s my “mission” to spread my worldview as far and wide as possible. (Okay, maybe that’s just an ICOC thing, or at least a less-than-liberal-Christian thing.) The idea that I don’t have to be on a crusade for what I believe (or don’t believe) is a relatively new concept that I’m only just getting my head around.

Of course, none of this is to say that I’ve changed my mind about anything. Just how much of my life I want to devote to pushing it.

Now, having said that, I do want to keep this blog going. So if you’re a Christian (or theist of any flavour) reading this, feel free to pick a fight with me. If you don’t, I’m going to start talking about my plants again.

(In case you’re wondering, this post was written under the influence of a McLeish Estate 2004 Merlot.)

The migration is complete – the address of The Right Side of the Boat is now

rightside.fissure.org redirects here, and the RSS feed redirects to the appropriate place. In theory, at least. Update your links before something breaks.

Well, my blogging attention span didn’t hold out, frankly. I got stuck in a loop that sounded like “yeah, I’ll write about something… tomorrow.” All good intentions, not enough momentum. If more than two-ish people a day were reading this, they’d be pretty annoyed by now.

So, it’s about time to take another swing at it.

Okay, I haven’t posted for… wow, over two weeks now. That’s pretty impressive.

I spent a fair bit of time working on the story of how I became an atheist, partly spurred by Frank the Financially Savvy Atheist putting out a call for such stories. That stalled a bit when I tried to work out how much personal detail I wanted to go into, and especially how much I should say about other people. It’ll be up soon, hopefully before the second round of Frank’s collection (Part 1 is already up).

A lot of stuff has been happening in the last couple of weeks, which has sapped a bit of my free time. I’ll write about some of it soon. One of the things is an upcoming Hapkido grading, which is tonight.

Decay has not set in just yet.

Billboard Heckler is now its own category. It’s the most regular… okay, the only regular feature so far, so I thought it might as well be.

We’ve moved to a new host (”we” being all of fissure.org along with Hear Ye!). Everything looks like it went smoothly at the moment, but there are always a few teething issues. If you see anything misbehaving, let me know.

Haven’t had much time to post lately – I’ve had a few other projects on the backburner for a while, and I’ve actually gotten around to sinking some time into them in the last couple of weeks. So not much new around here.

As a slight diversion, I did spend a few minutes randomising the site banner – you’ll now see one of five banners, three of which are from my parents’ house in the Blue Mountains, which I’m housesitting every couple of weekends while they’re overseas (another thing that’s distracting me from otherwise blogworthy free time). The other new one is the view of the entrance to the Megamall from my hotel room in Manila.

It’s occurred to me that I’m never going to get around to posting about the Barossa trip – apart from the fact that I never quite worked out what was going to be interesting about it to anyone else. I’ll probably just do a bit of a photo digest and leave it at that.

And I’m collecting an impressive backlog of church billboards. No shortage of material there.

This post has a few points. Firstly, I’m still here. The site hasn’t fallen into disuse just yet. (Of course, at the moment I think there are approximately two people for whom the response is other than “I didn’t know you were here”; but I suspect that to stop posting now is not a logical way to change that situation.)

Secondly, and somewhat related, I guess there comes a point in the existence of a blog when you realise that real, physical people are actually looking at it and reading what you write. Not many, but some. And a subset of those are people you know personally. (Particularly if you get a plug from a friend’s site, and you know quite a few of the same people.) There’s nothing deeply surprising about this; I don’t know all that many people without regular easy access to this cyber-interweb thingy. But it makes you stop and think about the actual purpose of broadcasting your thoughts to the world. Especially if major things have happened recently in your life that not everyone knows. (Like, say, becoming an atheist.)

I’m not really trying to make any kind of concrete point out of this; but I’m curious whether it is actually a common thing that happens to everyone who starts up a personal blog.

This has been an indulgent navel-gazing session. Thank you for reading.

For anyone who’s looking for my online sudoku solver, it’s here.

To anyone who got here from the sudoku solver… well, hi.

To do:

• Comment posting system.
• Page navigation (currently the front page displays the latest 10 posts, although you wouldn’t know it yet). Also some kind of category navigation.
• Search.
• Random quotes.
• Add more stuff to the sidebar.
• Improvements to the admin pages.
• RSS.