I just spent way too long (even longer because I insisted on doing it in French) writing up a post about movie posters I remember seeing in France and Switzerland while living there as a Latter-day Saint missionary. I have final grading to do and a lawn to mow, but those specific memories of movie posters pop up every once in a while (despite, as I explain in the first post, not really being much of a movie buff?), and this morning, it felt like I wanted to capture them before they disappear on me. I have many, many dumb little memories like that of my time as a missionary, and even as the fact itself of being a Latter-day Saint missionary gets more complicated for me (thanks to dramatic changes in my religious life), those tiny memories continue to feel valuable and important to me.

“Kentuckian” has long been an important part of my identity, but every time I watch the Kentucky Derby, the more it makes me mad.

Look, I have some sympathy for Mozilla because it’s Mozilla… but Mozilla’s dependence on Google is a real problem.

I finally read about the whole tattoo thing. It’s so dumb that it makes me angry. I don’t want to think about it, but I’m bookmarking it because if I don’t, my brain will refuse to remember that Donald Trump made such a dumb assertion. It will get drowned out by so many other dumb things.

Last Sunday, I preached in my Community of Christ congregation, beginning five weeks of messages from Revelation. This sermon came together with more difficulty than the last few that I’ve done, but I took advantage of being the first person preaching on Revelation by setting the stage for a responsible reading of the book as about the past, not the future. I attend a relatively conservative Community of Christ congregation, so it was unsurprising to get some pushback on that, I guess. I also managed to work one of my favorite novels into that explanation, which was fun. I think I could have gone harder with the message of anti-imperialism, but I’m pleased with what I did fit in there.

This book makes an interesting, important, and compelling argument. I find it personally interesting, and it will be useful for a conference paper that I’m thinking of putting together next fall (it turns out that Jacques Ellul’s ideas overlap with the Book of Mormon in interesting ways!).

If I’m hard on the book, it’s because that argument feels scattered. While I appreciate the mountain of sources that the author draws on, I feel like a shorter, tighter book (or even article!) could make the case just as well and with fewer digressions.

I started the day grumpy about generative AI, but articles like this just make it worse.

I have already been skeptical about Duolingo (as a company—the app is mostly not bad) for a while, but this is the sort of thing that makes me want to find an alternative for kiddo to use fast.

Every fake ad in this month’s print issue of The Onion is making fun of Elon Musk. All of them. What a great news source.

Matthewdown is an implementation of Markdown that has cleaned up the Greek some and included some popular features from Qdown.

Chilling read. gift link

Everything in this article makes me sad.

4chan has led such an interesting life.

Solid post with damning critiques.

I’m sure this is more complicated than I appreciate, but what stands out to me is that every time I watch the Kentucky Derby, I’m overwhelmed by what a display of wealth it is. That’s not what I see when I look at public schools.

Il faut peut-être que j’arrête d’essayer de lire des œuvres philosophiqies ou théologiques en français (même si je n’ai payé que 10€ chez Cultura), car j’avoue avoir du mal à tout comprendre dans de tels livres.

Pourtant, ce que j’ai compris dans ce livre j’ai beaucoup aimé. Lagandré distingue entre le théisme et la religion d’une manière fort intéressant, et il arrive à exprimer plusieurs pensées qui m’arrivent d’une manière bien moins mûre depuis des années.

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. Frequently, though, it’s displayed with a vertical flip and some cropping so that it matches our expectations of what the Earth looks like.

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. J’aurais préféré une attitude qui soulève la possibilité d’une telle interprétation.

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. There are tantalizing hints of a rich character that can’t be contained in a short story but who is all the more interesting because that’s all we get of him.

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