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.

Mormon Studies professional organizations are funny because when you ask for someone’s affiliation on a survey, there’s a distinctive minority of people who list their religious status instead of (or alongside) what university they belong to.

Despite meaning to reread this ever since I first read it, this is my first reread. While it’s very clearly related to Red Team Blues, it’s remarkable how different this book is. Rather than a tight thriller, this feels more like a meandering story that has a clear throughline but skips from event to event as more than a decade goes by. There’s a fun framing device that makes this work, though.

So, I actually finished this last week and am behind on bookblogging. It’s the third time I’ve read this book (twice on audio), but with the final book in the trilogy coming out next month, it was time to revisit the earlier ones.

This book is fun in an action movie sense while also being a searing critique of wealth and of our society’s seeming inability to take care of the poor. Wil Wheaton does great narration on the audiobook, and it’s just an enjoyable listen all around.

I have always thought the TikTok ban was dumb, and it just seems to get dumber with every new development. It’s not that there aren’t salient arguments in there, it’s that they’re all buried under vibes and nonsense.

I… didn’t mean to wait until the day before the Inauguration to post the text of my sermon on hope in the face of despair. The weekend I gave the sermon was also the weekend of a funeral and near a very busy end of semester, so blogging was on the backburner. Even if I had had more time, my website-to-social media setup was a bit borked and I’m just vain enough to not post things if I think my audience is going to be diminished. I finally had some time yesterday to figure out what was going on and fix it, so now I’m trying to get back into regular posting.

Darkly hilarious.

Not the headline I would have chosen, but very interesting argument here.