Love to be living in a world where a blog I read for tech commentary—and that is more reserved than I would be on a lot of that commentary—is running articles describing current goings-on as “a coup in progress.”

More good writing from Masnick on scary stuff coming out of DC.

It’s obviously not the most worrying thing about it, but a very specific tragedy about Musk’s DOGE nonsense is that it may end up being the largest (indirect) influence Homestar Runner has had on the world.

Lots of bad things are happening right now, but this one stands out. There’s no good reason for this except to make Musk happy.

Some Bluesky posts are reminding me of what I wrote about how my LDS mission sometimes played fast and loose with immigration documents:

https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/the-missionary-with-the-expired-visa/

I always appreciate Sam’s writing and especially here. I’m waiting to see what—if anything—my current church has to say about the current mess, but I have a deep fondness for the church I grew up in, and it’s deeply disappointing for a rich church that is willing to throw those resources behind its interests to decide that combatting the present cruelty is not one of those interests.

If current events continue to echo the Twitter takeover, we’re about a year out from Elon Musk telling a gathering of world leaders to go fuck themselves for not supporting his agenda.

I’m grateful for The Onion right now.

Bookmarking this because with the sheer quantity of nonsense that’s happened in just the last couple of weeks, I feel like I will eventually need reminders of just how dumb some of it has been.

Masnick pulls no punches.

Government overreach is scary, but it can also be really, really petty.

Oh, he really is doing this like he did Twitter. That was a nightmare by itself.

Anyone who hasn’t should read one of two excellent books—Extremely Hardcore or Character Limit—on Musk’s takeover of Twitter, because I’m getting similar vibes here. Remember when Musk just refused to pay money Twitter owed because he didn’t feel like it?

What a mess.

My first print copy of The Onion came today, and it’s the only news I’ve been happy to read for days.

This headline would be hilarious if it weren’t so infuriating.

Yeah, it’s really hard to have any sympathy here at all.

Saw someone link to this and remembered I should probably read the whole thing instead of just the first few paragraphs. I fall somewhere between Doctorow and Masnick on Bluesky optimism, but I really appreciate their dialogue on it.

I started reading Doonesbury reruns a while ago. I’ve forgotten exactly when they date from (maybe 2002?), but this panel felt very contemporary.

I like bookshop.org and I’m glad they’re selling ebooks—it’s a much better option than Amazon or Apple. Yet, so long as DRM is still the default, there’s still a problem, and you still don’t own what you buy from them.

It turns out I find “associated with PRC = inherently good” just as annoying as “comes from China = inherently bad.”

I’m trying to get back into the swing of blogging with the new year, and it’s been a bit tricky with lots of school cancellations (or “non-traditional instruction” days) and the subsequent disruptions to my work schedule. Even considering that, I’m still surprised to be posting essentially two sermons back-to-back.

A few hours after last week’s post (which was from a six-week old sermon), John Hamer reached out to me to ask if I might be willing to put something together quickly to fill in for an unexpectedly missing sermon in today’s service. I wound up saying yes, because I enjoy working with Beyond the Walls, the subject was interesting, and I wanted to put my skills to use from doing competitive extemporaneous and impromptu speaking in high school speech and debate (those were two distinct events, even though the words for them are near-synonyms).

Reading all this recent coverage on Musk’s “gaming” has made me want to reread Cory Doctorow’s stories about gold farming—which is all the more fitting given that Doctorow uses gold farming to talk about exploited labor. gift link

This was one of the dumbest parts of all Meta’s announcements and now it’s… basically nothing, too?

Yes to all of this.