This feels a lot like the first volume: great premise, great art, but very hard to follow. Maybe it’s me not paying close enough attention, but it just feels twisty and turny without enough signposts to keep the reader on track.

There’s a lot going for this book: A compelling premise (Indigenous survivors of a climate apocalypse send someone back in time to kill Columbus, hoping that no America will avert said apocalypse), a willingness to interrogate the premise (violence begets violence, can the past be changed, etc.), and great art.

I felt like it didn’t live up to that potential, though. I had trouble following the timey wimey twists, there were a lot of shortcuts, and the dialogue and characters sometimes felt flat. I look forward to the subsequent volumes, though!

The Onion has once again done what only The Onion can do.

I dislike how true this rings.

Fanfiction is one of the most compelling examples of the labor issues related to generative AI.

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. In the end, though, it was a fascinating read. Like his take on Brigham Young, Turner is unsparing in his description but without being unsympathetic.

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. I’ve had this book for a while and am glad to have finally read it!

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 son’s response? “But I didn’t!” Sure, the action had been potentially dangerous, but the landing had been a success, and the son didn’t see what the big deal was.

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.