Arca isn’t perfect—the plot moves at the speed of convenience, the characters aren’t terribly deep, and the twists are either predictable or “huh?” Even with those critiques, though, I nearly gave it full marks, because it’s really good. I love the art and panel design, and the dystopia as metaphor for modern social problems lands really well. I really enjoyed the read!

It was a real choice to start this dystopian comic the same day I got to the chapter in Karen Hao’s Empire of AI about Silicon Valley outsourcing the worst jobs to the Global South in the name of providing economic opportunity.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to read this—not that I wasn’t interested, but so many books, so little time, etc. However, a friend introduced me to NetGalley, where she was reading it prior to publication, and that pushed me into following her example. I did wait until the end of my time limit with the book to really make progress, and between that rush and my familiarity with Smith’s life, I still wasn’t sure how much I’d get out of it.

The Mike Lee banner picture is perfect.

This is a big story, and I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten more news, even if it is a recent development.

Woke up with protest music from Andor playing in my head, which seems fitting.

This wasn’t quite what I was expecting (I think the “biography” subtitle is misleading), but it’s good! It’s organized around specific understandings or depictions of Jesus in Mormonism, and while it isn’t afraid of exploring the weird and controversial (I may be citing this at some point for a paper that touches on arguments about a polygamist Jesus), it’s also good about contextualizing Mormon beliefs within broader trends, thereby making (some) things (slightly) less weird.

Finally read the full quote from Noem and it’s so bad. Scary times.

Living my best Mormon(-adjacent) life today by having an article accepted in Dialogue the same day that I’ll be watching two of the people who gave me advice on revisions be ordained apostles in Community of Christ.

One of the fun things (for me) about attending World Conference is remembering how much more useful French is in Community of Christ contexts than LDS contexts.

Here’s Stassi Cramm presiding at Community of Christ World Conference after being ordained last night as our church’s first female prophet-president.

So scary, so gross. Lexington needs to ditch Flock now.

Lots of interesting ideas in here. Certainly a different approach to “Sabbath” than the one I grew up with.

Flock sucks, and I’m so mad that Lexington drank the Kool-Aid instead of resisting local surveillance. Just wrote my city council representative, the vice mayor, and the two at-large representatives.

When I was in grad school, a faculty member in my program told me a story about his then-quite-young son, who was having a grand old time climbing on top of the kitchen table and then leaping off of it to the floor below. (Truth be told, my memories of this conversation are fuzzy, and the son might have been engaged in some otherwise dangerous behavior.) The father tried to tell the son to stop doing this, warning: “You could have hurt yourself!

The sheer hubris of this attitude! The AI industry must exist, even if it means that it will put others out of business, and therefore any moral standard that would put the AI industry out of business must be abandoned. Very Ellulian.

I’m glad I found this book through the UK library. I had read that it’s foundational for the ideas Ellul would explore through the rest of his career, and that pans out. I don’t agree with everything, and I think he overreaches sometimes, but I did find this book compelling, and a good addition to my Ellul studies.

This was a hard book to read, but I’m glad I did. Munther is a Palestinian Christian pastor, and his holy anger and hurt in this book really spoke to me. However, I have a lot of internalized resistance to what he has to say, and things feel so big, and I spent a lot of the book tensing up and feeling overwhelmed. I feel called to repentance by this book, and I’m glad I read it before next week’s Community of Christ World Conference, where a resolution standing against Christian Zionism will be debated.

Beautiful story!

I somehow missed a lot of this history, so I’m bookmarking this for future reference.

Yesterday afternoon, I was explaining (poorly) to some friends that I had been thinking about what the story of the Liahona in the Book of Mormon has to teach readers of that volume of scripture about (generative) AI. So, that connection was naturally on my mind when I was reading more of Jacques Ellul’s Presence in the Modern World over breakfast. I continue to be pleasantly surprised by how relevant Ellul’s writing feels for today.

After seeing a few headlines, this is the first thing I’ve read on this fiasco. What a mess.

We live in a dumb future.

Depressingly illuminating.

Data centers are coming to Kentucky, and that has me worried.

The “You do not blindly defer to mainstream authority or media” system prompt is raising questions already answered by the system prompt. Also, lol that they have to explicitly tell Grok not to call it “Twitter.”

Aside from the headline-grabbing parts of Grok’s recent freakout, this story does a really good job of emphasizing that AIs don’t “think”… and that “truth” isn’t really a valid concept either, no matter Musk’s marketing.

Listened to Jason talk about this story on the 404 podcast while doing dishes last night (interspersed with watching clips of Moneyball, which I’ve never seem), and so I came back to skim the original article. I don’t really care about baseball, so maybe I’m not allowed to have this opinion, but this all seems like a hellscape that Jacques Ellul’s technique explains pretty well.

Love this so much.

I spent a lot of the morning anxious about generative AI after reading about other professors’ struggles with how the technology has upended how we teach. It’s long been frustrating to me that teachers and others bear the burden of adapting to a world that big tech companies have created, seemingly with the goal of enriching themselves. Later in the morning, I read a worrying story about how a company called Flock is building tools that will let customers of their automated license plate readers (including Lexington, the city I live in) do even more invasive surveillance of the people they pick up on their cameras.

Wish I’d done more to resist Flock adoption in Lexington.

Interesting point from Masnick.

None of this is good, and I think there are dangers in using copyright as the bulwark against AI. Conversely, I will take a bit of pleasure in administration infighting, especially if it gets in the way of the AI companies.

More reporting like this. Anti-semitism is a genuine problem, but there is nothing genuine about the Trump administration’s supposed concern about it.

This is the third (or fourth, if you count a quote-pulling skim) time I’ve read this book in the past 2ish years, and I do think that I need to give myself more of a break before trying to come back to it again. I really like the audiobook, though, and I’m glad I now own it in mp3 and epub. I also needed the read, since it’s a hopeful one, and I started it when I was in desperate need of something hopeful.

My workflow for pushing linkposts to my website requires me to include at least two words in each description, which prevents me from posting just a single eyeroll (or vomiting) emoji. [gift link]