Oy gewalt!. For reasons that completely elude me, Facebook has disabled my account. And by “disabled,” I don’t mean a temporary suspension like the one-day one I oncerecived for one day when someone on the Global Humanist website (of which I’m a moderator) complained about someone else’s post and got all of our personal sites suspended. No, this is a more serious matter. When I try to log in, I see this:
I’ve done all I could to reinstate it, which means filing a brief appeal and adding some form of identification, but it’s still being adjudicated.
When I look at the items that are considered banning offenses, I don’t see that I’ve committed any. Here’s what Facebook says:
If your Facebook account has been disabled, you’ll see a disabled message when you try to log in. If you don’t see this message then you’re probably experiencing a login issue. Get help logging in.
We disable Facebook accounts that don’t follow the Facebook Terms. Some violations include:
Please review the Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities to learn more about our policies. If you think your account was disabled by mistake you can submit an appeal.
Appeal submitted—two days ago. “Case” is still pending.
Now I’m not sure what happened. There have been some rumors that there was a general hacking of secular websites, but I haven’t been able to substantiate that. I have not published any “hate speech”, nor have I received a “warning” from Facebook. I haven’t impersonated anyone else or posted content that violates Facebook Terms. (For crying out loud, they allow all kinds of genuine anti-Semitic hate speech!)
The only thing I can imagine is that either someone tried to hack into my site (and I don’t see how that could cause it to be disabled), or that some religious believer filed a complaint that I was posting offensive material. I tend toward the latter theory, but of course I don’t know, because Facebook doesn’t tell you anything.
If anyone can help, or tender useful advice about this issue, I’d appreciate it. I would find it absolutely unbelievable if they deep-sixed my account because I cross-post all the material that appears on this site, and that any of that material violates Facebook standards. There are lots of people, in and outside “the movement,” that I contact through Facebook, and it’s distressing to have this happen.
Happened to me about a year ago. Took several weeks for them to restore it.
How nasty of them. It is horror stories such as this one that have kept me from trusting any of the social media sites, or “cloud computing,” or any other variation on that theme. I’ll keep control of my own “digital identity,” thankyouverymuch….
b&
WordPress is a social media site …
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Yes, but not mine….
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But you have an account here …
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Only to post at WEIT. And I treat commenting here as no different from USENET and LISTSERVs of old.
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“Only to post at WEIT.”
Yes.
You don’t even need an account to post on WEIT. (I’m very thankful for that.)
True. The account just gets you your choice of picture in place of the inkblot.
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> True. The account just gets you your choice of picture in place of the inkblot.
I don’t see any pictures on WEIT even when I’m temporarily allowing scripts. (Which I usually don’t, and I’m also grateful that WEIT doesn’t need them.)
So which pictures do you mean? %)
The “avatar” pictures to the left of people’s names.
And, today, the red outlines are gone….
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I have no avatars next to people’s names on WEIT. This is how WEIT looks in my browser Firefox: http://imgur.com/gtzL5zM
Where the small squares are, most other people see either randomly-generated inkblobs or a picture of the user’s choice.
b&
Cloud sites, meh.
I like the (dual) harddrives on my computer plus my external HDs, and my BluRay burner.
I’m one of those geeks that actually backs up my data. (I was around when data went on 1/2-inch magnetic tape that I kept in my desk. I’ve seen plenty of data failures. now that my primary personal data (writing, photos, video) are digital, the imperative is even more emphatic.)
And where do you keep your backups?
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I keep some at my workplace and some at my Mom’s house.
My main concern is a fire.
Very good then!
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It’s neither a new problem nor a new solution.He says with the well data from the rig remaining on the rig, on a hard drive in Istanbul, on the Work’s laptop within throwing distance of the mouse, and on the Client’s laptop which is on a different murine trajectory. Got to take at least one of those into the Orifice on Monday.
“Backup early. Backup often. Back up soon.”
I run a Subversion repository on my own virtual private server, and commit my work to it regularly via SSH with comments. I pay them $5/month to do a backup somewhere. But that’s not enough, due to the cloud concerns mentioned in other comments here. I download a tar.bz2 archive of the subversion dump regularly and write it to various media in different locations. For some critical coding work, I recently made a GNUPG-encrypted copy of the .tar.bz2 file and emailed it to myself from one online account to another.
This geek doesn’t take chances with his data.
Love it. 🙂
I use three drives for my work and most importantly family photos and iTunes: 1TB, 2TB and 4TB (the largest one lives in a fireproof safe). I sync photos as I go, and run automated overnight overnight backups to the 2TB and weekly manual backups to the 4TB. When we travel, the 4TB stays in the safe and the 1TB and 2TB come with us. As drives get cheaper, I rotate them down and the new biggest one goes in the safe.
I’m doing way more work than I probably have to, but we get peace of mind from my obsessive fiddling.
I’m glad I’m not the only one with an obsessive back up schedule.
It’s partly superstition: it’s been my experience catastrophic hard drive failures happen only to those who do not take backups.
Also partly survival: if I lost any family photos due to lack of vigilance perfect wife would have my guts for garters!
My obsessive backups have saved me more than once both with hard drive failures on my main drive. I simply booted into my backups. I’ve also had corruption with Lightroom that a backup has saved.
So long as we’re discussing our backup strategies…I don’t necessarily have all pieces in place at all times, but stuff I care about goes onto a six-disk RAID 6 array. Two disks can go tits-up at the same time and the array still works fine (and I’ve had a single disk die a couple times, now). Apple’s TimeMachine makes backups to an ioSafe fireproof hard drive. I’ve got a couple portable hard drives; stuff gets manually copied to one, taken to my parents’s place and swapped with the older one I had left there earlier.
If that’s not enough, that’s fine. If I survive whatever takes out the data, I’ll be happy.
b&
I’ve considered this sort of route too, but the variably atrocious quality of the internet connection on the rig (which obviously varies rig-by-rig) makes me worry about this too.
I keep an rsynced copy of my documents and public folders on a portable hard drive, and manually sync it with the file server at home. Every so often I change out the portable drive for one stored at a friends house.
Don’t even get me started on back ups. I have a mirrored drive that backs up every 2 days. I also have a RAID a drobo and I back up my data to an external bootable drive once per week and store that offsite. There are 2 of these drives that I rotate each week.
I also use cloud storage: Evernote for notes I need with me on multiple devices and for clipping things from the Web and saving my own bl*g posts. I use One Note mostly for work and I back up pictures from my phone to box. I put receipts and such on Dropbox.
I have so many apps tracking where I am (coffee store apps that activate when I am near my favourite locations), I figure if the Canadian or US government becomes tyrannical, I’m pretty much screwed. I chuckled when I accepted the Starbucks agreement for their digital app on my iPhone that said my information would be transferred and stored on US servers. I guess the NSA are going to know all about my chai tea lattes habit.
So, you’re happily using cloud apps.
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I am also happy using cloud apps.
(full disclosure – my son is a senior software engineer at Google working on cloud server software).
Yes I use them a lot but I don’t rely on them for backups. More for convenience.
Sounds like Facebook must be run by Catholic Priests.
Specifically, of course, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith….
b&
I guess They need to update that Wikipedia article to include Facebook lockout as another in the list of punishments for heresy.
Reward for heresy, surely?
Me either. I don’t like a lot of aspects of them, but I’ve seen people invest so much into that and youtube or whatever and then for some difficult to understand and to appeal bogus reason, bamm, gone.
With little redress. I’ll give them as little as possible.
Google disappeared all my vids.
It is said that once one puts something on the internet, it is there forever.
This is probably true.
If one has not been actively blocked maybe there is a way to find them?
Way before Google bought YouTube I chose Google’s nascent video hosting service over YouTube because I trusted Google more. Then they bought YT but assured us that we had nothing to worry about. A year or so later they informed us that we would have to transfer all our Google vids to YouTube. We (and there were several Google vid users) raised holy hell and after nearly a year of stonewalling, Google gave up and said they’d do the transferring for us. In the process maybe a 5th of my vids were lost.
Otherwise, I switched to YouTube with no problems for quite a while. Then Google insisted I make a “new account” (with, of course, all the information I’d rather they not have), and I started to a few times, but quit in a rage every time I got to the part of the application which asks for gender. Beside that there was a button to click for “why we want to know this,” and when you clicked on it they told me they wanted to know what pronoun to address me with. Yeah, sure, you expect me to be dumb enough to buy that, Google? And I’d remember why I didn’t want to be part of the Collective again. So they disappeared my vids. Which I consider a fucking breach of contract. But I was maybe even sadder than madder to lose all those files.
I’ve had many hobbies over the years and posted vids of aspects of them to related forums. Probably the most were reef tank vids–I had spawning fish, spawning starfish, and all sorts of other cool things to post. I had threads on a dart frog forum with vids of my vivaria. Vids of tarantulas molting. Of tortoises mating. All X’s now.
Please excuse the rant.
Oh, and Google also ditched iGoogle, their homepage creator (which I was using). They let me use Google labs for a while on their maps, but now I can’t do that, either. I wonder when they’ll stop letting me access the maps at all? There have been other services Google’s started and then pulled the rug out from under customers of same. Why is there no revolt?
Golly, sounds like a lot of interesting stuff going on in your world.
Yes I do remember that account changing stuff and how they used it to force for info out of us.
I don’t think I followed the ‘why we want to know this’ because it would be nonsense.
The reason is, because the more we know about you the more we can sell you out in as many ways as we can think of.
I have nothing substantial on any of those things but did feel a bit invaded.
Sounds like you think google disappeared your stuff in retaliation. No good.
You mention starfish. Have you seen the time lapse films of them. They run around just like us, only really really slow?
“The reason is, because the more we know about you the more we can sell you out in as many ways as we can think of.”
No duh.
Ah, starfish are much more fun to think about.* 🙂 I do seem to remember similar videos.
*Unless you think about the wasting disease that’s killing so many of them. 🙁
And, I forgot to say, rant welcome.
🙂
Thanks, it felt good.
A woman I was following on youtube a few years ago, (I can’t remember who) who was into science and stuff like us, including science fiction, got banned from an early youtube.
Why, she was playing with her sonic screwdriver, a prop from doctor who.
They didn’t know that and assumed it was something else.
Point was she got no result other than by going to theIR offices which she was lucky enough to be near.
The other point being, the ban was dumb.
I am not sure if one could do that now.
Oh dear! A sonic screw driver ban!
Yes indeed.
I suppose that those with delicate sensibilities, who did not know the real purpose of a sonic screwdriver, may indeed swoon.
Google “disappeared all your vids”, or “Google disappeared all the videos that you’d uploaded to Google without keeping a local copy”?
About 2 years ago … maybe three … the wife was using some Google thing called “Picasa” on her laptop. Which had the “big box” of a hard drive mounted as a drive (as necessary for Windows). I didn’t use Picasa, so I don’t know what exactly she did, but by deleting some folders of photos in Picasa, she essentially wiped our networked hard drive in the closet. Destroyed all the family photos, wedding videos, etc. My tens of gigabytes of stored podcasts and papers from journals. Poof! gone. Wiped.
90% of the stuff I recovered from a couple of months old backup, but since we were recently back from a holiday, there were things unbacked up. There are extremely limited options for restoring deleted files from an XFS file system (internally, it runs a WD version of headless Linux). But I got them all back. Eventually. It took about 6 months. I’m glad I’d finished storing the photo documentation in their metadata, so I didn’t have to work out exactly which photo was which, again.
Last night, after giving the wife the freebie iPad from work, somehow she ended up in her Picasa account (for the first time since the Great Erasure ) to find at least some of the missing files still exist there. Really bizarre.
I’ve stopped having arguments with her about double-checking what she’s doing before she hits the “Do It” button. I just try to keep the backup more current. Particularly after holidays.
[SIGH] I know what I’d better be doing tonight. Particularly with a new toy in the house.
“Google “disappeared all your vids”, or “Google disappeared all the videos that you’d uploaded to Google without keeping a local copy”?”
Google disappeared all my uploaded vids. I still have copies on disc files. But it would be impossibly time-consuming to find all the posts I’ve made that should have vids in them in all the various fora, re-upload the vid to another hosting site, and replace the file name in the posts. Uploading even a 40-second vid via my DSL connection takes an incredibly long time, during which the operation is frequently aborted due to god knows what. It was one thing to do this post by post; it would be something different entirely to set out to replace all those “lost” vids one by one to the places they should be posted.
But thanks for the vote of confidence in my back-up skills… :eyeroll:
David Silverman has been having the same problem. His was down twice but is now back up. From his Tw****r feed: “David Silverman @MrAtheistPants May 8
My page and the American Atheists page on Facebook has been hacked/disabled. We are working to resolve this ASAP.”
My account was also disabled, just several days ago! I appealed also, and provided a picture of my drivers license which they asked for. Today I received an email stating that the decision was final and that my account would never be reinstated. I’m more upset about the pictures I have lost forever than anything. Thanks Team Facebook you bunch of assholes.
Do you have any idea why it was disabled?
Again, there seems to be no obvious reason, no breach of any of the given ‘rules’. I cannot for the life of me think why they would have disabled it, and like you said, they give no reasoning behind it ever!
That’s insane.
I think the lack of info may be for liability reasons. If they give you a reason you can sue and say that reason is untrue/not against the rules/illegal. But if they don’t give you a reason, you basically have nothing, no grounds (even ‘they didn’t tell me’ might not be legal grounds). Its the same reason at-will companies will often not give any reason for a firing: because there is less legal risk in giving no reason at all than there is in giving a reason and potentially having it backfire on the corporation.
OK, maybe not insane, but ostensibly random.
Apparently, God and social media both work in mysterious ways
The mentality behind all that is pathological one way or the other. Insane is as good a description as any.
Sorry, but what is an “at-will company” in this context? I’ve got a horrible suspicion, but – could that possibly ever even be legal?
We’ve got a large number of American companies operating here and trying all sorts of tricks to break British and European employment laws and import American anarchy. It’s quite important to have some sort of idea what illegalities they’re likely to try next (even possibly being under the deranged idea that some of them might actually be legal).
“At-will” means that your employment is, well…at will. It’s an option in “right to work” states.
In a right to work state, companies are under no obligation to hire unionized workers, and companies can fire anybody at any time for no reason whatsoever and without notice.
Yes, it’s every bit as Orwellian as it sounds. Yes, most of what was hard-won a century or so ago in the labor rights movement has now been pissed away. But this is America! And we have to do this to encourage job growth!
b&
It’s a bizarre nation indeed. I deduce from that that there are states where someone doesn’t have a right to work and you can be fired, for example, for being black, or having a fatal reaction to the chemicals you work with, thereby negating the company’s need to pay your insurance costs.
No wonder your government need to read your emails. What would you get up to without the oversight of your ever loving government.
Have the ballot results for the coronation of Bush the Third been printed yet?
Oh, no. That would be highly illegal and open you up to all sorts of civil lawsuits.
No; instead, you can fire somebody for no reason whatsoever.
Indeed, most companies these days have strict policies in place whereby they not only refuse to give referrals, but they won’t tell anybody anything about past employees other than to confirm dates of employment. Might not even reveal a job title. For anybody, period.
So…yeah. They may well fire you because of the melanin content of your skin or whatever…but good luck proving it.
For that matter, if it ever does go to court and their records get subpoenaed, there’ll be plenty of stuff in there giving them some sort of legitimate reason for termination, no matter what the real reason is. Nobody, and I mean nobody, has a perfect evaluation record; there’s always something on there under “opportunities for achievement” or the like. Push comes to shove, they just make a list of all of them and cite that as the reason you were “separated” (not fired).
Many employees have taken to surreptitiously turing on the voice memo feature of their smartphones and slipping them into a shirt pocket before stepping into the boss’s office, especially at review time….
b&
Yeah, we’re getting people trying to import such despicable practises to Europe on a regular basis. Seem to be winning too.
If you can figure out an effective way to push back, please let us know.
I’m not joking.
b&
Getting out of Dodge and joining the civilised word and fighting from there. Hopefully the various dangerous parts of the world will implode first, and learn to not be such arses.
It’s a hope. It’s not an expectation.
I’m afraid it’s a case of you get what you pay for. You have to assume that a service you have no contract for and do not pay for can disappear without the slightest warning. (Of course paid services can as well, but it is less likely.)
Facebook is the worst ever place to store pictures – it shrinks them and reduces their quality dramatically on upload. Always keep the master copies elsewhere.
You did sign a contract with FarceBook when you joined up – it’s the “terms and conditions”. Of course, if you’d read this, you’d have seen that FarceBook don’t have any service level agreement obliging them to you. But that is why they do their damnedest to encourage you to never read the Ts&Cs
Two questions:
First. I wonder if it’s possible to obtain an archive of your data? They have a mechanism to do this when you have an active account:
https://www.facebook.com/help/131112897028467/
Maybe they have a mechanism to bundle up your photos, at least, and send them to you? Might be worth asking.
Second. While you can’t think of any valid reason, can you think of a reason a stupid person might think you did? Like posting anti-Islam memes, or pro-atheist memes, or anything? I’m just curious in light of PCC’s issues. I can’t think of any valid reason he’d be disabled either, but I can think of reasons that some grunt at Facebook people might think was valid. “Oh, this is an anti-Islam cartoon… I see he’s been warned about that and here it is again…off with your account!” That would clearly be stupid, but stupid people are not in short supply. Can you think of anything like that that might have been a trigger?
A few years ago, the data archive download of all your facebook content worked pretty well, and I kept a backup of my facebook data regularly, but these days it doesn’t, it seems to cut stuff out if it doesn’t fit a 2mb size limit.
There is a mechanism to get a copy of your FarceBook data, at least in Europe (my CD images came from an Irish department). But it’s damned hard to understand and very difficult to wade through.
NOT using FarceBook to STORE any of your data is a far wiser idea. Keep your own data, and look after it for yourself. I have a semi-automated script that generates shrunken (1/9 to 1/16 size) versions of our photos shortly after the come off the camera, and the wife posts those to her FarceBook page, uses them in emails, posts them into letters, etc. The much larger originals get accessed much more rarely.
Agreed, copies of my entire (personal) website reside on my hard drive and a couple of backup DVD’s. Not that I use Farcebook. So far two ISP’s have sunk without trace on me – no biggie, they didn’t owe me much in fees. I just went shopping for another ISP and uploaded everything again.
OK, so it was just a few tens of MB, not the hundreds of GB that WEIT must be by now.
Hundreds of GB? Averaging 3 or 4 posts a day, for what? 10 years (when was the site set up, Proc CC?. Say 10,000 posts. 50 comments averaging a kilobyte each.
On the order of a CD worth. Two if you include the pictures. But I think the videos are all linked to YouVim and TubEo and such like services.
That’s my guess anyway.
OK, I didn’t do a calculation. Just replace ‘hundreds of GB’ with ‘much too big to want to upload all over again’
That’s terrible. At least they should allow you to log in to save your photos. Heartless faceless bastards.
One idea: sometimes facebook pages get hacked and people spam other people from them (e. g. adds about Walmart cards, sunglasses, NFL jerseys, etc.)
Thought crossed my mind. Facebook was offline for an hour about 6 hours ago and there was another outage a day or so earlier.
Facebook’s disabled my page?
They probably think you are impersonating the REAL PCC, a.k.a. Professor Jerry Coyne. For your sake, I hope you signed your appeal with the picture of a cat and a meow.
I would be honored to have Facebook disable me. Then I could tell my kids that I can no longer ‘like’ the hundreds of pictures per week of my grandkids or their pets.
Or the author named Jerry Coyne who write Devil’s Child
EVILUTIONIST PROF. JERRY COYNE !*IS*! THE DEVIL’S CHILD!!!
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Hmm, I’m thinking of telling everybody my account has been disabled, even though it hasn’t.
Never opened a Facebook page and never will. I think in your case, there are monetary losses to consider.
I’d consult an attorney.
On the other hand, “Banned in Boston” used to be a lucrative book blurb.
Actually…rather than talk to a lawyer, get the publisher involved. With the book due out in a week, not being able to do promotional stuff via FaceBook at launch time could affect sales, something that would likely righteously piss off the publisher to no end. And they’ve got big lawyers, I’m sure….
b&
Good idea.
If Jerry didn’t pay Facebook for their services, I doubt he’d have a case at all. At any rate I suspect the ToS doesn’t promise any continuity or quality of service, and all decisions re. banning are Facebook inc.’s alone, etcetera, so good luck.
Facebook is no democracy and a user is not a shareholder, so you get the according amount of attention, which is nought (rounded).
That’s true for individuals looking to go up against Facebook, but likely not true of a big publishing house and its legal and marketing teams telling Facebook to stop stepping on their toes or they’ll have a nightmare of a religious discrimination fiasco on their hands.
b&
To go along with that and your first comment: the humans who build and maintain Facebook pages are not Facebook’s customers, advertisers are Facebook’s customers. The humans who build and maintain Facebook pages are Facebook’s product. You are their meat, which they offer up to their real paying customers, the corporations.
I’m mentally playing back the scene form Pink Floyd’s “Wall” videos of the school children being forced into the sausage grinder.
Facebook makes money by selling its users’ personal information to marketeers and the like; your allowing it to do so is payment in kind.
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Talked to my SO who is a social media specialist, who agreed with Ben Goren on the the publisher approach (plus possibly alerting your fellow authors like Dennett, Pinker, etc to petition on your behalf), but suggested waiting to play the legal card.
The thought of a combined complaint from the publishers and other authors would likely get Facebook’s attention, while a mention of legal might move them into protective mode rather than problem-solving mode.
This happened to AcharyaS awhile back, and it seems to me someone made a petition on one of those petition sites and got a lot of signatures to restore her Facebook. I don’t know how it was sent to Facebook, but I could look into all the different things she did to restore her account if it will help.
+1
You were probably hacked, or were the object for a ridiculous amount of hacking attempts. FB hacks seem to have been on a bit of a rise lately. (if you Google “facebook hack”, you can even see a zillion sites devoted to helping people hack FB sites)
Your account was probably having its logins bashed on from hacking servers all over the world, given that there’s quite a few deranged goddites out there. Speaking of which, I wonder how one certain deranged Mabus guy in Montreal is doing these days…
Have Butter fix it!
Butter informs me that not even an unholy collusion between Happy Cat and Basement Cat could fix this type of problem. Only if Ceiling Cat wiped out all except a select few hoomans and started again…
They’d better have a bloody good explanation.
If it is due to some religious apologist complaining about you it just goes to show the asymmetry between you and your censor-happy opponents – how often do atheists try and shut down speech that offends us?
I don’t know the rules on social media – I’m not a Facebook fan – but I’m hoping there’s some form of punitive action if a person/group makes false accusations in order to get other users banned.
I don’t think Facebook takes any punitive actions in such cases. I’ve never heard of it, for whatever little that’s worth.
They don’t tell you why, they don’t tell you who complained or what the complaint was. And the only communication you get from them is very brief canned messages. That is a recipe for some serious frustration.
And litigation, even though the intent of silence is to avoid litigation.
It’s all very Kafka-esque.
Somewhat related:
To the creepy line and beyond! From the BBC tech news website: Hacker given in-game death sentence
At least you’re not virtually dead, PCC!
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The on-line video-game community continues to amaze. I remember reports back in the 80’s of kids committing suicide after their Dungeons and Dragons character died. Probably just urban legend, but people get strangely attached to their game-characters/alter egos.
Ah, you’d be surprised. The gaming community has its peabrained, bullying losers, who have a tantrum if their latest shoot-’em-up introduces a female character, but they’re only so vocal because they’re being left behind by a medium that’s progressing at an exponential rate.
The indie scene is pushing the mainstream, and vice-versa, and more and more games like Papers Please, Everyboy’s Gone To The Rapture, Portal, Journey, etc., are being developed. It’s a medium like no other, with almost limitless potential, and you can’t read a magazine like Edge without coming across four or five fascinating new game announcements. The attitude of people like Roger Ebert, who arbitrarily declared that ‘games can never be art’, is not long for this world, particularly with VR only six or seven months away from mainstream release, and the gaming community is changing enormously. The majority of gamers are actually curious, engaged people like myself, about my age, who are turned on by the unprecedented potential the medium promises, and occassionally delivers upon. The foul-mouthed homophobic thirteen-year-olds are in a rapidly diminishing minority.
Apologies for the lengthy aside – but, like early cinema I suppose, people often have a skewed view of games and gamers, and I try to balance things out a bit.:)
I’ve heard complaints from gamers about many, many things. Some gamers will make a federal case out of the slightest problem with a title. In 20+ years of gaming, I have, not once, heard anyone complain that a title featured female character. I know how abusive some people can be, but the amount of misogyny in gaming culture has been ridiculously over-stated.
Me either.
That was my point! The knuckle-scrapers are a very, very loud minority(although I can only presume you’re just very lucky if you’ve never heard a gamer complain about the introduction of a female lead.). That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, but it does mean that the mainstream view of gamers is horribly skewed.
Passionate gamers as a whole tend to be rather liberal, open-minded people, often with an interest in science. I can imagine there’s some overlap between atheists and gamers too, although that’s no more than a hypothesis.
Anecdotally speaking, I think your hypothesis is sound.
I think my PCPowerplay count was 160. Among others.
Is that a magazine? American cultural references are a frequent source of bafflement for me. It’s like a different country.
Me too. Australia.
Oh and yes, a magazine.
I think I have around that number of old copies of Edge. All my old NMEs(eight years’ worth), Uncut, the occasional Q and Empire; they’re all gone. But Edge is so singularly excellent, and so beautiful to look at I’m going to hang on to them.
P.S. Apologies for forgetting about the existence of English-speaking culture down under…some Brits get irritated with Americans and what appears to be their complacent ignorance of British culture but we’re just as bad if not worse when it comes to Australia. I know Paul Abbott’s your PM(I hope that’s right…) and that’s more than a lot of people know. No wonder some Australians hate us so much.
I don’t know edge, I’ll look it up.
I had a similar number of other computer mags, motorcycle mags electronics mags, some flying, and some empire and 3D stuff and misc.
I picked this trend up from my old man and ended up with lots of his photography mags and electronics mags.
I learned a lot having electronics mags at hand growing up.
I ended up with a big big pile and an obsession. I have thrown a lot away but it was traumatic.
I don’t think Australians hate you at all, except for Cricket. I don’t. (my farther was from Wetherby)
It’s Tony Abbot, the equivalent of your David Cameron (I looked it up, even though the dramatic result has been in the news)
Tony Abbott, that’s right. I knew him mainly from a very popular(in our house) YouTube clip of him in parliament getting rhetorically dismantled by your previous PM. He doesn’t seem to be well-liked by Australian liberals.
Of the games you mentioned, I recognized Portal. That was an eye opening game that really impressed me about how interesting a game can be. ‘The cake is a lie’ gave me a chill when I 1st saw it.
The sequel is even better, just sublime. And it has one of the funniest/spookiest opening sections of any game I’ve ever played. The two Portal games are the funniest games I’ve ever played too, but it’s the central premise that’s so captivating. Just fannying around sticking portals one under the other and toying with the physics is interesting enough but they incorporate momentum and mass and the environmental exploration becomes dizzyingly complex.
I love both Portals – I feel evangelical about them the same way I do about a great album, and if I had to choose one game to show off what games are like at their best I’d probably choose Portal 2.
Portal hurts my brain.
I thought it was a mainstream game or at least made by a mainstream developer, Valve.
Who made my favourite game Half-life. I am still waiting for a worthy successor. The successors were good but didn’t catch the magic of the first one.
I hear Portal is in the sam universe? I haven’t played it because it hurts my brain.
Is it do you know?
Ditto – Half-Life is my favourite game of all-time, it absolutely blew me away. I played it about eight or nine months after it came out, having never played a first-person game before, and I could only get it to run on the family PC(I’m a console gamer) by lowering the resolution to something ridiculous. The writing in-game was illegible, it looked dreadful, and yet it completely consumed me for the three weeks or so it took to finish. No developer, not even Valve, has managed to run with the sheer brilliance of their scripting and design choices in HL. I too was left cold by the sequel and the episodes. They felt much less focused and much less like a real world.
The Portal games are set in the HL universe, so none of it’s contradictory in that sense, but it’s not particularly related to the Half-Life narratives and universes. The sequel feels more like a Half-LIfe game than the original though.
It made my brain hurt too, especially the later levels which tend to rely more on trial and error, and luck, than your ability to logically work out the solutions from first principles. I liked the first Portal, it was extremely funny, but it tailed off towards the end. The sequel is, to me, far more of a ‘proper game’, far more complete and varied. Also, it’s one of the few works of fiction that capture a feeling of deep ambiguity regarding the time in which it’s set. That unique, a-temporal atmos is instilled from the brilliant intro onwards.
It’s not Half-Life but it’s still well worth playing. I don’t like puzzle games and I still loved it, because the portal gun mechanic is genius and the narrative, atmosphere, humour and characterisation are all brilliant.
I think I might have gone slightly off-topic here. Apologies to PCC. Anyway, nice to hear from a fellow occupant of that bit on the Venn diagram where ‘gamers who like Valve games’ and ‘shrill, strident atheists’ overlap…
Yeah I had poke and prodded other games but half-life took me in and kept me there.
I think I still have remnants of the sore shoulder I got from sitting in the same place so long.
I too didn’t start it right away and wondered what all the hype was about. It was warranted.
I’ve always been PC, usually lucky enough to have close to the best stuff. I love good resolution.
Carrying a 17 inch CRT monitor on a motorbike is interesting.
I have to pay $20 to download Portal 2 but haven’t got into Portal properly yet.
Flight simulators are good too.
You have got me interested, I’ll fire it up now. I’ll probably have to download the whole thing again.
Urban legend: see http://www.religioustolerance.org/d_a_d3.htm for some of the refutations.
(Yes, I’m a D&D player.)
It was urban legend.
For the life of me I can’t remember what game it was (Maybe Ultima Online or Asheron’s Call) where GMs would appear in game as gods of death to smite players with bans and in game death for breaking the terms of service. And from what I remember from dabbling in GW2 death doesn’t have a lot of consequences, so the jumping to his death is pretty much just theater.
They deleted his character and the other accounts he controlled. Did you read the article?
Yes, but the stripping and jumping? Theater. Ant calls it creepy, but it isn’t. Even the deletion of characters and the banning of accounts after a public character execution isn’t all that creepy, it’s more or less the minimum expectation.
That struck me as having an unhealthy resemblance to the ISIS executions a few weeks ago in Raqqa (spelling?)
This was discussed briefly on Rock Beyond Belief’s page- a bunch of atheist and leftish FB pages were down- links to them would just redirect silently to the FB front page. AA, Silverman, ‘Being Liberal’, ‘Addicting Info’, Americans United, American Humanist Association. *something* big seems to have happened, but I haven’t seen any articles about it, just references here and there.
The thought police of Facebook are powerful and they don’t seem to be accountable in any meaningful way. Worrisome..
The more arbitrary and frustrating they get, the more their competitors will look attractive. I’m not saying this is the straw that breaks the camel’s back, but they don’t really do themselves any business favors by angering the page ‘owners.’
Their competitors? Diaspora (had to think for a few seconds to bring that one up from long term memory)? Ello?
Seriously WTF, Facebook?
It’s rather disturbing now how much we rely on Facebook as a platform and how unbelievably obfuscated their entire internal processes and algorithms are. They control what shows up on your feed using algorithms we can only guess at, they can disable your account without giving you an explanation of why or any real reliable recourse to appeal it.
that is what you agreed to in the Ts&Cs you accepted on sign-up.
No! You’re not going to tell me that you didn’t read the Ts & Cs before you signed up? All 38 pages of them?
We must keep in mind that this is facebook. Not a democracy.
One of the basis of getting banned at feckbook is nudity. You did post a nude pix of you not that long ago. And you said you linked your website to your feckbook page. Who knows? I certainly don’t, but after some research I made this connection.
That picture of me climbing Mount Lewontin? That would be absolutely unbelievable grounds for disabling an account.
As a real complaint agree. As a pretext though it would serve nicely.
This is actually a reasonable hypothesis. I’m sure they fail to catch the vast majority of similar pics that the average person might post, but given that you are a known figure and proponent of atheism, I wouldn’t doubt that you probably have a lot of creationists looking for any remote reason to click the “report” button as an attempt to stir up trouble.
But I thought they usually notify someone when others report them? ..Maybe not if there are sufficient numbers doing the reporting.
Someone would have to complain about the picture and if that is the case that is just stupid.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all. Facebook are arseholes. All kinds of pages I subscribe to are constantly getting suspended and having trouble getting onto people’s feeds. Two main problems are nudity, and FB trying to extort money by not putting your posts on members’ feeds unless you pay them. GOD is one who has a lot of trouble. A page about breast feeding was banned for pictures of breasts. The whole site is arbitrary, prudish, and generally difficult to deal with.
On the other hand, the other day a photo of the face of a woman who had been burned to death by her husband for some religious reason appeared on my news feed with no consequences whatsoever for the poster.
That’s not surprising, violence is fine, sex is not. A normal attitude of those in power.
I wonder how many “50 Shades of Grey” fan sites have been banned?
This may be a temporary issue.
I think the “loving Christian” hypothesis is gaining some steam.
wow! Do unto others…Can’t imagine atheists doing this to xians
So, would this more likely be xians complaining to the FB powers-that-be resulting in account disabling or xians hacking the atheist accounts, disabling th unbeknownst to the FB powers-that-be?
That’s difficult. If I had to guess, I don’t think the likelihood is high that all these related sites got hacked through Facebook at the same time. This would involve a group figuring out how to circumnavigate the security system of a huge company that hires some of the best engineers in the industry. That said, big breaches have happened, but I can’t picture someone with the requisite skill set spending their time getting a few secular FB pages to disappear. More likely would be a virus and/or social engineering method that allowed access to the accounts, but the odds aren’t exceedingly high that they pulled this off with multiple people simultaneously. So, I’d still have to lean with the unbeknownst Christians reporting these pages, but FB isn’t exactly clear about the severity or quantity of complaints required to suspend accounts.
sub
FFBS
sub
In lieu of paying attorneys, I think a book tour punctuated with frequent references to FaceBook policies might get their attention.
I would wear the banning as a badge of honor.
Facebook may have disabled your account since you publish pictures of Mohammed. They threatened to do so many years ago for the same reasons we’ve discussed here many times.
A quick google search reveals quite a number of Facebook pages specifically devoted to drawing Mohammed.
Is “oncerecived” a new Coyneologism?
If so, I like it.
Maybe Facebook has a strategy to be a new religion…enforcing, once again, some whack-a-do arbitrary rules for its constituents.
Seriously, being banned might be inconvenient, but it appears like an award for reason rather than a punishment.
GrrlScientist also recently had her facebook account disabled. I think there was another one too… someone who did not send the info, but their account was reinstated as mysteriously as it was deleted.
If it wasn’t for family, I wouldn’t be on facebook at all. I use G+ for a lot of things. But, sadly, most of my blog hits come from facebook shares.
G+ is much nicer in most respects… excepting the chirping crickets.
It’s not that bad… there’s a nice science fiction community. There’s also a couple of decent (and one really bad) atheist communities and a fair number of evolution/anti-creationism communities there too.
If my family and friends were there, I’d just drop facebook.
It’s the family and friends that are absent. I get a lot of good work related stuff on G+. If my family and friends were there I’d drop Facebook without the briefest hesitation.
I doubt complaining religisterical folks because of all the atheist fb sites that seem to be fine….if why I type this…they go down…well all bets are off.
Should read…if, while I type this,…someone was talking and I’m not great at multitasking…
Unkeyboardinated🐸
Ha, ha, that’s a good one!
I can’t take credit for coining (Coyning?) it, but did see it on the infamous FB yesterday and thought it appropriate for most of us;-)
I believe you have defended free speech.
I see above a link where you criticized fb too on the issue.
This would explain why I haven’t been able to fwd you anything via FB in the last couple days. Sanctimonious sons of bitches!
Is there a mechanism for starting petitions via WordPress? And it might give Zuckerberg some pause to know the popularity of this site. If all else fails, add a banner to this site about this.
I was on the verge of succumbing and joining Facebook. Not gonna happen now for a while at least.
If I don my tinfoil hat, it sounds possible that your recent spate of posts defending free speech against SJW’s pissed some of them off enough to designate you as a Shitlord (they’re favorite ultimate insult), and create a campaign of real or sockpuppet complaint spamming.
You don’t have to do anything wrong to get social media accounts suspended these days, with all the special snowflakes fluttering about.
But that’s just a tinfoil headwear guess.
The only advice I can offer is to tell Facebook to f*ck off. At least that’s what I did, and I don’t miss them one damn bit. any namby-pamby company that will protect muslims from “hate speech” while allowing them to call for the destruction of israel…f*ck em. any company that will punish women for sharing post-mastectomy tattoos or even a hint of breast-feeding babies…f*ck em. I’d love to tell Mark F*ckerberg to kiss my hairy irish arse.
Sorry, I’m not much into I.T., or diplomacy regarding whinging spoiled little tw@ts like the FB people. at least this site doesn’t screw with you or limit your speech and opinions (as far as I know or have seen anyways)
well, at least you aren’t angry or bitter about them.
I promise to do my best to refrain from posting when in a general, stressed malaise…I seem to have left my sense of humor somewhere today. Anybody seen it laying around?
No worries, q, I quite enjoyed the rant.
Me, too:-)
Your goddamned bloody sense of humor is right were you left it — right in front of the door where anybody could trip over it, you miserable ba…
…er…sorry….
b&
Facebook’s experimental De-Humour-Competition-Posts add in (it adds itself to anything, including your coffee maker) took the humour from your post … and amplified it.
See, I told you it was experimental.
But what do you really think?
/@
yeah, sorry everyone! I dunno why I was so angry. Can I blame it on being a redhead? fiery temperament and all that? I’m actually quite shy and timid in person, I swear!
Borrowing from Monty Python (in The Cat License)
Zuckerberg:
If you’ve actually suspended the account of the author of Why Evolution is True (one of Newsweek’s Fifty Books for Our Time) I shall have to ask you to step outside.
When I try to find Jerry Coyne on Facebook, I get an About page with information mostly taken from your Wikipedia entry.
Same here.
Hmmm, things may be changing. From the UK, I’m getting several female Jerry Coynes of varying degrees of nubility (very nice, but not the right Jerry); two in academia of some persuasion, a “dish washer at Kelly’s Pub and Eatery” (career progression, way to go!) ; and three accounts who use photos of PCC himself (hmm, potential copyright or misrepresentation issues for at least two of them) listing him as
“Teacher” (2,567 ‘like’s, (appears to be a robot : “This Page is automatically generated based on what Facebook users are interested in and not affiliated with or endorsed by anyone associated with the topic.)”
“PTC Jerry Coyne Lecture” (81 ‘like’s, something to do with a past lecture on 2nd Feb),
“Jerry Coyne” an “Interest” (another Wikipedia-fed robot)
and “Jerry Coyne Chicago, Illinois Read LOLcat Bible, The Magic of Reality and もっと、まるです”。) with 2,160 followers”, which appears to be the real deal, stating “Jerry Coyne published an article on WordPress.
1 hr ·Once again it’s your lucky day …”
Working out which one of those is the correct one, wasn’t really clear. Needed some hunting around.
But I don’t think I’ll click the “like” because I get too much splutter on the FarceBook page already.
Seems like Will Shetterly, a science fiction writer and author of “How to make a Social Justice Warrior: On identitarianism, intersectionality, mobbing, racefail, and failfans 2005-2014”
also had his facebook page disabled today.
http://shetterly.blogspot.com/2015/05/facebook-disabled-my-account.html
Apparently his account has been restored, as mysteriously as it had been disabled. Most peculiar.
Facebook TOS allow them to do whatever they feel like doing, not only with everything you upload but also with the integrity of your account. They are a private company just interested in making money and, provided you do not interfere in anyway with that goal, they let you alone; but as soon as something you do, voluntarily or not, sensible or stupid, legal or illegal, threatens that goal you are dead. You are always at their mercy. To me, it seems foolish to trust them. Sooner or later, particularly if what you have to say is somewhat controversial, you will feel the pain.
It seems to me that Facebook is what was called a “natural monopoly” – that is, whoever got it right first got all the business. As such it is just as much a utility as the gas company, electric company of phone company, and should be regulated by a utility commission.
It’s even worse than that because it’s not just the USA, the whole world uses FB. I know Americans have a tendency to forget or ignore the rest of us, but there is a huge issue here. Being excluded from Facebook is no joke, and there is nothing you can do about it, they’re less vulnerable than the US government. I agree it needs to be regulated as any other essential service.
I just read through the terms and stuff, interestingly, the US and Canada are subject to Facebook Inc, and the rest, Facebook Ireland Limited. What does that say?
Why anyone would want to continue to be a Facebook customer mystifies me. I can kind of understand putting up with their ridiculous “terms” before they proved over and over again that they just don’t care. Now it just seems like masochism.
And they can change those terms when you are already hooked, which I believes they did.
I am a Faecesbook refusenik. I like Twi**er as Matthew does, because is it communicates directly with people, including lots of scientists, enabling the sharing of interesting info or articles.
I am too, Dominic, but I think most professionals & esp. authors must have FB accounts these days. It’s simply expected of them.
I don’t ‘do’ Farcebook. Can’t be bothered. And this arbitrariness of theirs just makes me more resolved to never touch them.
Actually, on reflection, I may be telling a lie. I needed to get in touch with an ex-tenant of mine, I found her, by Googling, on Farcebook, and the only way I could send her a message was to join. (Or was it Twatter? One or the other…) But since I got her contact details, I don’t think I’ve ever been back.