Non-theist Christian and elder in Community of Christ. I have Mormon roots and aspirations to do better with justice and peacemaking—especially in the digital sphere but also in Lexington, Kentucky, the U.S., and the world more broadly.
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🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Death Of A Forum: How The UK’s Online Safety Act Is Killing Communities'
- kudos:I don’t like Big Tech, but I’ve become more wary of regulation in recent years because folks like Masnick have compellingly made this argument over and over: It’s the smaller, better companies and sites that suffer the most from it. link to “Death Of A Forum: How The UK’s Online Safety Act Is Killing Communities”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pregnant Kentucky woman cited for street camping while in labor'
- kudos:Horrific story; not sure why we’re so eager to punish the unhoused. link to “Pregnant Kentucky woman cited for street camping while in labor”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Christ in the Rubble: A Liturgy of Lament (2023 Christmas Message by Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac) | Red Letter Christians Podcast'
- kudos:I’m bookmarking this so I can sit with it and return to it. It is powerful, searing, and condemning. link to “Christ in the Rubble: A Liturgy of Lament (2023 Christmas Message by Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac) | Red Letter Christians Podcast”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: Nurses whose shitty boss is a shitty app (17 Dec 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
- kudos:I don’t think I’ve ever been more angry about the gig economy than when reading this post. link to “Pluralistic: Nurses whose shitty boss is a shitty app (17 Dec 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'To Log Into WordPress, You Now Have To Agree Pineapple on Pizza Is Good'
- kudos:Look, I don’t know all the finer points of this debate, but Mullenweg has repeatedly struck me as petty and juvenile, so it’s hard to imagine taking his side on any of the more substantive issues here. link to “To Log Into WordPress, You Now Have To Agree Pineapple on Pizza Is Good”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: Social media needs (dumpster) fire exits (14 Dec 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
- kudos:Some more reflection by Doctorow on Bluesky and Mastodon. link to “Pluralistic: Social media needs (dumpster) fire exits (14 Dec 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for The Liars' Gospel, by Naomi Alderman
- kudos:Some of my favorite stories are those that are big and well known enough that they have invited us to retell them over and over in new ways. This is why I will never tire of new takes on Spider-Man even if I agree that cinematic takes on the character have been rebooted too many times recently (also, put classic Marvel characters in the public domain!). It’s also why, after reading The Future, I was drawn in by Naomi Alderman’s take on the four gospels, writing four stories that barely intersect with each other and barely intersect with Jesus, retelling the gospels in a new way.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'A Message Of Hope From Global Tetrahedron'
- kudos:This is the best possible response to a bad situation. link to “A Message Of Hope From Global Tetrahedron”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Some Other America, One I Do Not Know'
- kudos:Some good observations here. link to “Some Other America, One I Do Not Know”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'TCL TVs will use films made with generative AI to push targeted ads'
- kudos:Well put: TCL plans to get more into original content, fueled by a dystopian strategy that seems largely built around minimizing costs and pushing ads. link to “TCL TVs will use films made with generative AI to push targeted ads”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'I Went to the Premiere of the First Commercially Streaming AI-Generated Movies'
- kudos:This is a solid article. I think the opening is reflective and that there’s an effort to be open minded (more than I would be). It’s also amazing to me, though, how explicitly the goal here seems to be profiting from a surveillance-supported content mill. link to “I Went to the Premiere of the First Commercially Streaming AI-Generated Movies”
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All the guilt I felt about cancelling our local news subscription vanished during the corporate slog I had to go through to actually make it happen. Looking forward to redirecting funds to news orgs with a little more respect for their subscribers.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: Predicting the present (09 Dec 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
- kudos:Like anyone who’s read Cory Doctorow’s Radicalized (now free to read here, and you should go read it), I’ve thought a lot recently about its central conceit of an online message board where people stiffed by insurance radicalize each other into gruesome acts of violence. The story is hard to read: It’s vicious in its implied critique of U.S. healthcare companies, but the people being radicalized are also ugly in their response to those companies’ callousness.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'New KOSA, Same As Old KOSA, But Now With Elon’s Ignorant Endorsement'
- kudos:Post election is a great time to realize the dangers that KOSA poses. link to “New KOSA, Same As Old KOSA, But Now With Elon’s Ignorant Endorsement”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: Battery rationality (06 Dec 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
- kudos:Some interesting reflections (and reasons to up one’s baseline existential terror) in here. link to “Pluralistic: Battery rationality (06 Dec 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Gender Is Determined by God, Biology, and the Highest Governing Body of Some Random Sport'
- kudos:Listen, The Onion is great, but sometimes McSweeney’s is where it’s at. link to “Gender Is Determined by God, Biology, and the Highest Governing Body of Some Random Sport”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Six hours under martial law in Seoul'
- kudos:I’ll admit that I haven’t read much on all of this, but I can’t imagine any coverage better than this article. link to “Six hours under martial law in Seoul”
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This is a friendly reminder that DRM sucks and that corporations have perverted the digital technologies that should make things easier for libraries and their patrons into ways to squeeze more money out of us while giving us less control.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Certain names make ChatGPT grind to a halt, and we know why'
- kudos:Interesting stuff here. I think most complaints about OpenAI “censorship” are hogwash, but it’s still fascinating—and worrying—to see how much control the company exercises over its product. link to “Certain names make ChatGPT grind to a halt, and we know why”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Trump Doubles Down on Defiance After the Collapse of the Matt Gaetz Selection'
- kudos:Here’s hoping the Senate shows some spine. Gift link. link to “Trump Doubles Down on Defiance After the Collapse of the Matt Gaetz Selection”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, by Douglas Rushkoff
- kudos:Cory Doctorow’s review of Naomi Alderman’s The Future mentioned this book, so after wrapping up the former, I decided to start the latter. It’s not what I expected—Doctorow’s comments suggested the whole thing might be about billionaire survivalist bunkers—but in a good way! It turns out that it’s a broader take on a broader attitude behind survivalist bunkers and the way that attitude manifests in other ways. I had a hard time deciding on a rating for this.
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Some Sundays, you cancel your church plans so you can Zoom into a relative and her girlfriend’s spur of the moment “let’s at least get legally married now in case things get bad before our September wedding” service.
communion, tarot, and Lavina Fielding Anderson: some thoughts on sacraments
- kudos:My kid is being raised by a mother who is entirely done with anything that smacks of religion and a father who is very non-literal and not very exclusivist, so it’s unsurprising that she tends to pick and choose when she wants to do church stuff with me. If I’m driving over to Louisville to attend church in person, she’ll usually come with me. If I’m attending church via Zoom because Louisville is over an hour away, she tends to read or play in her room instead.
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I (someone who doesn’t really believe in a literal resurrection) have been scheduled to preach in February on Paul’s “if there’s no resurrection, this is all in vain” in 1 Cor. 15. Gonna have to think about this one.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Spill, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:I listened to the first parts of this as Doctorow was reading it on his podcast; the spacing out between chunks was distracting me and making it hard to follow, so I ultimately bought an epub (harder to download than it should have been) and restarted the story. Then, I took a two-day break near the end of the book—all of this to say that I wonder if I would have liked it even more if I’d read straight through.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The Twitter Board made a historic mistake and the World will pay the price. '
- kudos:Some good points in here about how “shareholder value” can lead to bad decisions. link to “The Twitter Board made a historic mistake and the World will pay the price. “
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The Redbox Removal Team'
- kudos:What a wild story. The unceremonious end of Redbox is a reminder of how much stuff we make and buy, and how, when companies fail to plan for end-of-life or go out of business, they often leave a bunch of devices that suddenly become e-waste behind. link to “The Redbox Removal Team”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Bluesky, AI, and the battle for consent on the open web'
- kudos:Lots of interesting reflections here. link to “Bluesky, AI, and the battle for consent on the open web”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'X's Objection to the Onion Buying InfoWars Is a Reminder You Do Not Own Your Social Media Accounts'
- kudos:This is an important take, and I appreciate that the article concludes with a reminder that indie is the answer as we move forward with the social web. link to “X’s Objection to the Onion Buying InfoWars Is a Reminder You Do Not Own Your Social Media Accounts”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Looking for the Answer to the Question, Do I Really Own the Digital Media I Paid For?'
- kudos:This is a question that everyone should ask—and then be infuriated by the answer. link to “Looking for the Answer to the Question, “Do I Really Own the Digital Media I Paid For?””
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Inside Bluesky’s big growth surge'
- kudos:Lots of interesting stuff in here, including the difficulty of content moderation, and yet another way that generative AI is screwing everything up. link to “Inside Bluesky’s big growth surge”
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Whenever I put this shirt on for a November jog, I wonder what the Venn diagram is between those who believe gender is biological and immutable and those who believe we have to show one turkey jogger with lipstick, eyelashes, and a pearl necklace so that we know she’s a woman.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life, by Jonathan Alter
- kudos:I am too young (and was for too long too disconnected from politics) to know much about Jimmy Carter except for a vague understanding of the common wisdom that he had been a poor president and of the progressive reclaiming of him in recent years. I’ve had my eye on this biography for a while: I nearly bought it at full price from my local bookstore, but when a used copy was on sale at the library for $3, I knew I couldn’t pass it up.
proposing legislation on Creative Commons for the 2025 Community of Christ World Conference
- kudos:Even after many years of attending, being a member of, and now serving in Community of Christ, I’m still alternately surprised by how many things are the same as my Latter-day Saint upbringing and how many things are different. In the latter category, even though I’ve intellectually understood this for a while, it still surprises me that the World Conferences of Community of Christ (renamed from General Conferences in the 1960s) are sites of debate and discussion rather than a series of sermons.
John Hamer on Star Trek and the afterlife
- kudos:Leandro Palacios from the Beyond the Walls ministry out of the Toronto Community of Christ congregation gave me a heads up yesterday that they would be using a clip from the most recent sermon I gave for them as part of today’s service. I forgot about this until well after the service, but I visited the recording later in the afternoon to see what clip they’d used and to see what else I could catch from the service.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'I’m a Good, Normal Family Man Who Just Wants to Inspect Your Genitals Before You Pee'
- kudos:McSweeny’s strikes again. link to “I’m a Good, Normal Family Man Who Just Wants to Inspect Your Genitals Before You Pee”