Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

Friday was the long awaited session of One Life – no, not the Gijs’s, mine of course! The subject was “leading a better life” and was your typical group discussion though scaled up for the fact that we would have a lot more people there, having sub-groups which then fed back to everyone else.

It being AHS weekend we brought in loads of takeaway food which despite quite disappointing attendance we still managed to eat our way through it all. Which I think is testament to the hedonistic lifestyle led by most of our society members. And believe me, it’s good 😀 .

Having got out of work earlier than planned I headed over to The Terrace to meet Raby have have a bit of a catch up as we’d not seen each other in a month or so. All seems well in the School of Computing, the closure of 24 hours labs is more a change in official policy than something that has actually happened.

Afterwards we headed over to The Park Horse for the talk organised by the Philosophy Society entitled “atheist arguments aren’t much good.” The room was packed out which made for some fantastic photos to add to the A-Soc gallery (what, it was an A-Soc event to attend the talk :p ).

The talk was very interesting and I was impressed by how fast moving it kept with the basic premise being that atheist arguments don’t really work because disproving a specific god doesn’t disprove the idea of a god, it simply disproves that god but you can simply change the definition of god to get round that (for example, he doesn’t need to be all powerful, as this is never said in the Bible, he could just be rather powerful).

Of course this argument doesn’t hold up because if you accept there may be some kind of god but choose not to believe in any of the specific gods then you’re an atheist. It isn’t Atheism with a capital T (or positive atheism or whatever you wish to call it) but it certainly is atheism but regardless it was an interesting talk and well worth attending.

I’m not sure John took too kindly to my thoughts on philosophy as a subject though lol.

Having escaped work at about 1:30 I headed over to Sophie and Jon’s house party which was still in full swing. What I found was an orgy of drinking, sex and hedonism the like of which only atheists can truely practice.

Liz making out with random boys, Michelle making out with random girls, everyone drinking some kind of mixture that looked far too much like sewage water and all of this culminating in a human pyramid which made for some excellent pictures.

Good party guys, well done!

Norm currently being struck down with illness, it fell to Sophie to lead this week’s session of One Life.

It went quite well, we got a good turn out as usual and the discussion kept rolling on around this week’s topic, science and critical thinking. The lesson I really took from it comparing it to the sessions I led was that you really need a critical mass in order to really get good discussion going which this year we thankfully have always managed.

Lil also did quite a good job as head chef for the evening so all in all things went very well.

So much for the awesome fireworks display happening outside of my window, it was hidden behind the houses next door. Gutted.

Not that anyone else seemed to actually make it down there, despite many promises. Rumour has it Si was too busy getting his birthday present from Izzy too? 😉 .

I was very impressed by the Roundhay Park bonfire though it’s been literally a decade, probably longer since I’ve last been but they started building it last Wednesday. Last Wednesday! It was like a wooden pyramid by the time they had finished it.

Anyway, happy birthday Si.

Well, it’s over. America has a black president. A very white black president but a black president none the less. And rightfully so too, Obama is the man for the job.

We held somewhat of an election party to watch the results come in last night. With the projector hucked up to project accross our lounge wall and the sound system hucked into it too it was more than big enough to enjoy a life size picture of Christopher Hitchens when he appeared on the BBC’s panel.

Having work I went to grab some sleep not long before 4am and everyone else had dispersed by the time I got up but never the less it was a fun night. And I’m now loaded up with several litres of energy drinks at work so I should be able to make it through the day 😀 .

Good news girls, Norm is back on the market.

Discussing last night with my housemates I mentioned everyone had bailed on me at Nicola’s party (because they’re all rubbish). What I didn’t know is that Liz hadn’t actually home last night but had instead gone over to Oli’s despite having a taxi waiting to take her home.

Perhaps some context is required. Being back on closes last night I had work in the afternoon which due to the fact nobody turned up for work yesterday, took far longer than it needed to and I didn’t end up getting out until about 2:30.

Having finally got away I headed over to Nicola’s party which was still loving along with about ten guests or so remaining. I was a little too sober to really join in the festivities at this point though and given everyone else had left, I went home after about an hour. I did get the amusement of watching Zoltan try to play Twister however 😀 .

Having packed everyone into cars for the post One Life festivities we headed over to West Park Place for a Halloween party.

With the decks and sound system out we blasted our music until the early hours and I like to think everyone had fun. Things kept going until about 4:30 when the last of the festivities came to a close. Good times.

I was slightly worried about turnout initially given we had a whole eight people confirmed on Facebook, compared to the 54 that Nicola had confirmed to her house party. We ended up having well over 20 of us there though which is apparently about inline with the turnout to Nicola’s party so maybe we’re not that unpopular after all.

Last Friday saw another session of One Life come and go, this one on rights and responsibilities. It got off to a rather shaky shart – at five past seven nobody had turned up! But by the end of the session we had 15 of us which is more than a respectable number, especially given it was Halloween.

As predicted the session degraded into a big argument about speciesism which interesting enough seemed to produce positive results. Paul having made a massive rant about it prompted Zoltan to later suggest that maybe the whole speciesism argument didn’t make that much sense after all. So maybe we’re one step closer to thinking rationally about it 😀 .

I delivered my first proper talk of the academic year last night, the ever popular debating the theists. It went down very well from the people I spoke to in the pub afterwards though I did end the question with “none of this constructive criticism BS, just positive adjectives please” so who can really say.

We got around 25-30 people to the meeting and most stayed for the social afterwards which continued on until about 11:30, just in time for us to get to The D afterwards which worked out well. London is now sold out too so that is going to be an amazing weekend. As ever, things are looking up.