I haven’t paid much attention to gestures at all this before now, but this critique convinces me.

This was fine. I’m glad I read it, so I can continue my Doctorow completionism, but I’m not sure I would have missed much if I didn’t. You can see the beginnings of Walkaway in here, but it just makes me want to reread that yet again.

One of the most famous photographs in the world is the Blue Marble, a picture of Earth taken from Apollo 17 as it made its way to the Moon. I learned something interesting about the photo today, though: Apparently (see here, among other sources, though I wish I could find a NASA comment on this), the photo was originally taken with the South Pole facing the top of the photo—and with the Earth not exactly centered.

Creepy as hell. Gift link.

Ça faisait plusieurs mois que je voulais lire ce livre, et j’ai été content de pouvoir en commander un exemplaire—surtout avant la folie actuelles des taxes douanières. Je dirais pas que le livre m’a deçu, car il y a plusieurs passages qui m’ont impressionné. Pourtant, il me semblait peu organisé et trop concentré sur des « preuves » que la Bible est un livre anarchiste. J’aime assez bien les inteprétations qu’Ellul a proposées, mais toute insistence que la Bible doit forcément dire telle ou telle chose m’agace.

What moral bankruptcy. Gift link.

Despite what my recent Star Trek comics binge might lead you to believe, my Star Trek fandom is actually kind of spotty in its coverage. It’s not so complete that I’ve ever actually seen Star Trek V (though I hear I’m not missing much), but it’s absolutely complete enough to be familiar with its most famous line. A being claiming to be the ultimate, galaxy-wide monotheistic deity asks for transport on the Enterprise, prompting a skeptical Kirk to ask “what does God need with a starship?

I recently reread Steven Peck’s Wandering Realities, a collection of short stories on Mormonism. One of the more moving stories in the collection is “Two Dog Dose,” which features two old friends, one of whom is still a practicing Latter-day Saint while the other is not. That second character is one of those characters who is more interesting than the brief format has room for: We never learn exactly what led to his loss of faith, but we do learn that he had served as a bishop at some point before that happened.

Incredible levels of bad faith manufactured outrage here. What a dumb world we live in.

I may no longer be a practicing Latter-day Saint, but this is the kind of cultural artifact that keeps me thinking of myself as Mormon. Peck’s writing—see also Heike’s Void, which I’d love to reread—depicts a beautiful Mormonism that I still feel connected to and that represents what the religion can be at its best. That doesn’t mean I don’t have complaints about these stories. They’re very male-centered (I’m not sure any of them pass the Bechdel Test), and even though it’s one of my favorites in some ways, the story of the crafting of the Liahona bugs me for the way that it imposes Mormon theology on first temple Israelite religion, as Mormons tend to do.

I admit to having peculiar tastes in fiction, but I’m completely serious in my belief that one of the best things Mormon literature has produced is a short story about unicorn-riding knights on Mars.

Last week, I blogged about how the purported inevitability of generative AI gets used to sidestep moral concerns about it. Earlier this morning, I shared a link to a story from The Verge that illustrates that perfectly, and so I wanted to write just a little bit more about it. First, let’s quote some more from Jacques Ellul, whom I referenced in the last post (and whom I’ve just been referencing a lot in general recently).

NCII enrages me, but I’m skeptical of this as a solution.

Sure this looks bad, but heaven forbid the U.S. lose AI leadership or whatever.

This sort of thing reminds me why I’m so entrenched in my skepticism of generative AI. There’s an uncritical insistence that the world needs AI, that America should be first in AI, and that we’re just going to have to increase energy production instead of ask ourselves if that’s worth the cost. Credit to Trump, I guess, for illustrating just how dangerous all these attitudes are.

Is this story ever going to get less dumb?

I don’t know that “inevitable” is the right word to use in the title of this post. What I’m trying to evoke is that specific argument about generative AI that now that it’s here, there’s no going back, so the only real/responsible/whatever choice is to learn to use it properly, teach others to use it, accept it as part of life, etc. These are the arguments that the world is forever changed and that there’s no going back—that the genie is out of the bottle so we might as well harness it.

I appreciate Masnick’s roundup of all the stupid things going on re: tariffs.

Well, if he’s going to ruin the economy, at least he can come by his strategy in the dumbest possible way.

I’ve had this on my radar since listening to the audiobook and thought I’d give it a try. It is terminally 80s in some ways (I liked the music anyway, but the sound effects felt like bad Doctor Who), but there were some excellent choices for adapting it to radio. It kept what I found interesting about the book: depicting the possibility of another way of living but without settling for naïve utopia.

Studio Ghibli pictures are neat (legitimately! it’s one of the first generative AI things that’s tempted me!), but these deepfakes are the price we pay for them, and I think that’s too high a price.

I think this is a good example of why digital labor is a particularly salient critique of generative AI. Yes, Wikimedia content is licensed, but not as strictly as copyrighted works. Yet, ripping off of their work is arguably worse than grabbing some copyrighted works.

Good—if depressing—article.

I skipped over this article the first few times I saw it, but I think there’s some good stuff in here. Is defying Ghibli the point?

Unlike LDS General Conferences, Community of Christ World Conferences involve debate and voting, so you can’t just stream it. A European friend of mine has told me how panicked they and some other int’l delegates are feeling about travel to the U.S. right now. This all sucks.

This seems… good? So good that I’m suspicious I’ve missed something.

Generative AI products make me mad, I don’t like them, and I’m not going to defend them. That said, if this gets framed as a copyright problem, is there any way to give Studio Ghibli (or Pixar or the Seuss estate) power to cry foul here that doesn’t also shut down fan art, parodies, and the like? I’m skeptical, and that’s why I think “labor” is the more productive—if more legally ambiguous—framing here.

Really wishing Jesus had told a converse version of the parable of the laborers in the vineyard that I could use for theological arguments against generative AI. You know: Bunch of volunteers make a beautiful community garden that a rich dude takes over to further his wealth.

Where does one start with how wild this story is?

Today’s Community of Christ lectionary passage is from 1 Corinthians 10, and includes this, from verse 9 (NRSVUE): We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did, and were destroyed by serpents. This is one of a few different stories that Paul evokes in 1 Corinthians 10 that all rub me the wrong way (I’m not a big fan of any punitive God), but this one stands out in particular because it reminds me of how the “serpents” story (originally in Numbers 21) gets evoked twice in the Book of Mormon.

50,000 is roughly as much as all students, faculty, and staff at the University of Kentucky. The whole university gone.

Let’s all support the Internet Archive—that goes for you, too, publishers.

What a dumb, petty administration this is.

My Day One journaling app told me this morning that today marks one year since I read Cory Doctorow’s For the Win after picking it (and many other of his books) in a Humble Bundle. That means that it’s finally time to write out some thoughts that I’ve been having over the past several weeks, all centered around wanting to reread the book. I have a lot of other books on my “to read” list right now, so it’s kind of ridiculous to want to get back to this one, but there are two things that have been really pushing this idea.

As far as I can remember, EVERY situation in which I’ve experienced multiple “Spencers” in a group and we’ve had to distinguish ourselves from each other has been in a Mormon-adjacent context. (“Greenhalgh” is also a disproportionately Mormon name, but that has fewer practical consequences.)

Surveillance sucks, and here’s the latest example.