Archive for the ‘Humanism’ Category

Speaking of freshers’ week events, Thursday was the pub crawl, a bit of a good old fashioned social to introduce the new members to the society.

Not that our new member turn out was particuarly impressive, it wasn’t, and it certainly wasn’t what we hoped for but they came none the less. More importantly in the end, plenty of existing members turned up and had a great night by all accounts. I’m glad someone did.

We made it through The Old Bar, The Fenton, Dry Dock, Bourbon, Courtyard and Weatherspoon’s before finally being stopped by a very closed Bar Censsa. I mean, who the hell is closed on freshers’ week? Apparently quite a few places. Town was dead for what you would think would be the busiest week of the year. Still, that just got us served faster 😀 .

Wednesday saw the arrival of the long awaited Make Your Own God event.

It went really well to be honest. We got a rather large collection of home made gods in the end and signed up a fair few members too. Not to mention the debate that was sparked surrounding the event.

I’m looking forward to running the event again in the future.

Tuesday night saw the A-Soc members’ dinner party to welcome in the new acamedic year and say thanks to our existing members for sticking with us before the intake of fresh faces arrives.

No less than eighteen people turned up to sample the “delights” – a modest four courses by comparission to our last dinner party but never the less when you scale that up to that many people that is rather a lot of food to cook. Luckily Liz and Michelle very kindly contributed dishes, as did Tesco.

The real hero of the night was Fonze however who battled his way through the various dishes and a mountain of washing up alongside myself for the entire night.

I haven’t really had a debrief with most people as I didn’t get chance to get that much chatting done on Tuesday night though most people seemed to enjoy the food – I got no less than three adjectives in Paul’s thank you text message. I’m still fairly convinced the rice was awful and the soup was stone cold but for now everyone is at least pretending the food was edible.

And, as with last time, nobody died (that I know of), so perhaps we can chalk this one down as another success.

The final A-Soc social of the summer ended on a rather good note with 17 people turning up. We were yet again screwed over by the union but never the less things proceeded well with us re-grouping in The Old Bar for a night of good fun that didn’t end until gone midnight.

Especially given Nicola and Zoltan were at a gig, Moz is in Europe, Rich is missing in action, Bo was on a date, Gijsbert has just disappeared, Brett couldn’t make it down, Rosie is in America Bevis couldn’t make it either. These are just A-Soc hardcores if you also add people like Oli, Chinese Matt and Charlie we did fantastically to say so many people weren’t there.

Roll on freshers’ week!

Last night saw another A-Soc summer social. I arrived for the commitee meeting to find the union was locked down for a commerical event, of course, they didn’t bother to let us know. Not only could we not get in The Terrace but they actually closed down the front of the union and just presumed people would find their way to The Old Bar. Luckily the bouncer was kind enough to point people in our direction so it wasn’t a total write off.

We archived a nice healthy 16 people to the meeting and the preceeding committee meeting was attended by twice as many commitee members as last week so things looked fairly good. I think we’ll chalk another line on the old success tally for this week.

The early hours of Friday morning saw my new podcast launch onto the world wide web!

The first episode recorded by myself, Moz, Liz and Fonze is, as with all the episodes, officially about “religion” nut completely off topic constantly. From now on a new episode will appear each Friday and judging my the standards of last night they are going to get better and better as we go along.

You can find the podcast on my website and there is also an RSS feed so you can subscribe with RSS readers, iTunes, etc.

Thursday saw us do a second session of podcasting. Luckily my new studio mixer arrived that very afternoon so we were able to huck up all 4 microphones and all the sets of headphones so that pretty much everyone could have their own mic and headphones plus I dropped my Maplin on my way home to pick up a few more accessories.

Paul, Moz and Nicola turned up along with Liz and Sarann eventually joining us which resulted in a good solid number and some random conversations. We made it through 3 episodes though didn’t really manage to discuss any of the official topics for any length of time lol.

All in all it was really good although we were up talking until about 1:30 or something and because I had work to do after that my early night turned into getting to bed at 3:10! Needless to say I was rather tired Friday morning.

Another Tuesday, another record breaking A-Soc social. This time we managed 18 people just creeping ahead of the previous summer socials and most probably the most well attended event since Rationalist Week 2008. We had more people in there than the rest of The Old Bar put together including both patrons and staff.

There were so many people I wanted to chat to I didn’t manage to make it round everybody though I did manage to beat Oli at pool. It was fantastic to see everyone in good spirits too – Rich returned for a second week which was fantastic, Liz got quite drunk, George was out and about and both Matt’s were brandishing a smile which I am most pleased about.

The evening came close (in a way) with my somehow standing on the steps outside of the union preaching about upcoming events to everyone and though I am reliably informed by a multitude of texts from various people that many of the others went on to party in Hyde Park. Fantastic stuff.

Yeah :D.

A-Soc is continuing to do well over summer, we managed 16 people to this week’s Tuesday social.

We are getting a great attendance every week and a good mix of new people and recurring people which tend to mix from week to week as people go on holiday and we still maintain our numbers, not bad, not bad at all.

Meanwhile I got the proofs from the printers back for the business cards. I sent them the high quality 300dpi source files to printing and to make sure the vectors looked right when they opened them I sent along some sample JPEGs in low quality with the word “sample” written in big letters on them just so there would be no confusion.

It having been a few days I had already phoned them to ask where the proofs were, apparentely they had been sent and had just “gone missing” before they arrived in my inbox. So once it was re-sent I opened them up to find them with a note saying the image quality was poor and with the word “sample” written in big letters across them.

I’m assured by the graphic designers in my office that this is quite normal behaviour for printers. So the fun may be just beginning there. Hoodies might turn up soon if we’re lucky too.