First off I am not going to give a rendition of Skepticon as it happened as I am not so great a writer and also because it will be up on Youtube.com soon so watch it and you’ll get it. If you don’t know I write kind of stream of thought unless I am doing research so don’t freak out on me for my grammar/spelling/ punctuation/jumbling of words ok? I am not a professional writer. SkepticonII = freakin brilliant, JT you are the bomb diggity for arranging this huge gathering of godless heathens for us to enjoy. When I first told my sister that I was planning on attending the event, we got into yet another huge, long discussion about religion (she’s wiccan) in which I was called both condescending and closed minded. So I told her she should come too… and she did… and afterword she told me that I had totally stolen the speakers arguments…but I hadn’t heard them yet, maybe they are the universal atheist arguments… lack of evidence, we don’t need god for anything except religious art and a large helping of guilt and submission, there is too much unaccounted for, look at where religion has gotten us so far, etc. My experience with Skepticon 09 I was planning on skipping class Friday, so I had to finish homework and projects n such on Thursday, so I was up till 4:30 doing that, I woke up Kal so she could go sell some blood so we could have food money while in Springfield and I took a nap. Then we needed to drop our kitties off at my parent’s house so they could feed and water them while we were away…more on that later(my mother claims to be southern baptist and "just doesn't know where she went wrong"). We left Independence with my sister in tow around 7:30am. Kal was driving so I slept (poor thing she ran on about 2 hours of sleep) it was a 3 hour drive to our hotel we checked in around 10:30 am thinking we had plenty of time to find the MSU campus and get in n such. WRONG… we ended up going round and round in circles first trying to find the campus (found out it really was like 10 mins from our hotel) 2 hours later we found it and parked (on a street somewhere) and finally get in to see the last half of the pro debate. But we made it WOOHOO!!! I really wish we could have seen the debates I heard they were geektastic. We actually got to sit down when we moved to another venue… right next door and I got to hear JT tell us all about why we should be criticizing religion it was very informative… I had had issues explaining this arguement on several occasions whilst arguing with one theist or another… PZ blew me away, he has a great way of being really informative, and really funny as he sets up his points (heeheehee sneaky fucker). Then it was off to the bar to drink with the big names in atheism… fabulous… I was lucky enough meet many other atheists and chat them up but of the speakers I only got to chat with PZ and R.C. and JT So then I hunt down a very sloshed JT after his first stint at karaoke with Rebecca Watson (also sloshed) I wanted to shake his hand and get a pic with him (he is my fav blogger after all) and what do I get but a whole show, he sang Opera in 3 different languages, and performed several magic tricks, messin up a couple of them (did I mention he was sloshed?) HAHAHA JT I now know your secret to the rubber band trick, don’t worry I won’t tell so you can go on impressing others with your sleight of hand skills. The next day was even better… I remember sitting there thinking to myself holy cow we should broadcast this to everyone in the world. After some great talks and jokes, I learned a lot, and I added quite a bit to my arsenal of theist excuse blasters. I fell in love with Rebecca Watson she is by far the coolest feminist asshole I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. I felt really bad about not being able to support the speakers by buying up their books, but I am a very broke student and none of the speakers had any problem signing a piece of notebook paper instead. Woot!! I am going to have to go check out their books from the public library, yay liturature on the cheap... it works. Kal gave $ to the donation basket which meant we were eating on the hella cheap that night no drinks L I would have loved to have gone to the after party Sat though I think it was a closed affair, we had to conserve funds for Lambert’s to which I had never been, it turned out to be very tasty I must admit, and kal got beaned in the head with a flying roll, when we got back in Independence I had that for dinner. Oh well, I got JT’s autograph, PZ Myers’, Rebecca Watsons’, Dan Barkers’, and Richard Carriers’ and got to chat them up for a few seconds all while the wild atheist throng tried to smash us all. I have to say I had a great weekend Semiunrelated: I am a student at a semi religious college, they say they aren’t religiously affiliated but they are, they pray at just about every meeting, which makes it hard for me to want to get involved, but I do anyway. Is it wrong to feel satisfaction in that when the school needed to make budget cuts the one position to be cut was the in house chaplain? (evil internal chuckling). Someday I will sit down and write out why and how I came to be an atheist but I have to get back to homework. PZ Myers and JT 
JT and Me 
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