Acknowledging the ambiguity in Musk’s salute is important: not to let him off the hook, but to recognize how much more dangerous things are when they’re ambiguous than when they’re straightforward.

I believe that scraping the internet to profit off of generative AI is ethically problematic BUT I concede that it should be fair use BUT this is still a soulless and terrible argument.

Worrying stuff.

I still want to read the original comic that this and the radio adaptation were based on, but the Internet Archive copy is hard to read, and I had some work to do this afternoon that made it easy to put this on in the background.

I liked this a lot (well, “liked” as much as one can appreciate a black comedy horror story about nuclear war. Some of the experimental animation choices and blending of animated and film footage seemed odd, and I’m torn between appreciating them and finding them distracting. I think the movie does its job, though, and the naïveté of the characters landed more with me this time, as symbolic of our helplessness against nuclear weapons.

If I don’t bookmark this article, I will quickly forget how dumb this whole thing has been (not to mention petty and mean).

There’s something especially dark about the voice actor who played Wallace (of Wallace and Gromit) starring as a naïve Englishman in this story about the horrors of nuclear war.

I’ve wanted to read the book this is based on for quite some time—and may yet read it now that I’ve found a copy on the Internet Archive—but I got to the radio adaptation first. The couple at the heart of the story are so naïve as to make the story heavy-handed, but it’s also a good literary device for just how helpless one is in the face of nuclear weapons.

I was intrigued when I heard that Mormonism would feature prominently in the third (but first?) Martin Hench book. Mormonism is hard to get right in fiction, and I wondered how Doctorow would do. The answer: Some things were off, but overall, he got things right. It nagged at me some, but overall, I appreciated his take.

That’s not the most important part of my review, but it’s representative of everything I want to say about this book. It’s a fun listen in most of the ways that count, there’s a clear love for 1980s San Francisco that comes through, and I can believe it as Marty Hench telling the story of how he got started in his career.

Honestly, I get the original call, but I’m glad Bluesky backtracked. Content moderation is hard.

What a mess.

What gross software.

Yes please.

Oh, please no. I get (and support) that Community of Christ wants to explore doing digital church, but it also has really compelling theological reasons to not deploy generative AI products, and this makes me sad.

I’ve had many good church experiences in my life, but today’s listening over Zoom to a former pastor give her sermon calling out billionaires by name while filling in the last few details on kiddo’s D&D character sheet ranks hiiiiigh.

I have qualms about the U.S. providing military support to any cause, but if there is such a thing as good U.S. military support, Ukraine is a clear example of it, and either way, this is an embarassment.

Some bonkers details in here.

I soured on Section 230 for a bit, but I came back and largely because of arguments like this one.

If Jordan Bardella thinks it was a Nazi salute… gift link

Taking a moment to remember that the Garden of Enid webcomic is a pinnacle of Mormon arts.

DOGE continues to insist on the dumbest way to carry out its dumb goals.

It’s all bad right now, but it’s still important to call out the particularly bad stuff.

One more thing right out of the Twitter playbook from DOGE: Firing people without understanding how important they are.

When I was in grad school, I was pretty centrist: more liberal than most of the students from BYU (where I’d just finished my bachelor’s) but more conservative than most of the students at MSU. I had an odd experience one day when a fellow student far, FAR to the left from where I was teasingly chided me for a Facebook post I’d made defending Common Core from one of my BYU friends who was convinced it was a communist plot. This really confused me, since it had never occurred to me that one could critique Common Core from the left.

Bookmarking this in case I need to show it to a family member.

This is an excellent graphic novel adaptation of the earliest of Mormon history. The art is good, the story is compelling, and I enjoyed reading it. I came close to buying this twice in the past year after finding it in comics shops, and I was delighted to find that my local library had a couple of copies.

I do wish that I either knew a lot more history or a lot less history going into this. The details of Joseph Smith’s life and early Mormon history are sometimes sparse or ambiguous; more importantly, they’re hotly contested. I don’t mind at all a critical take on Smith, but even though the author is clearly respectful of the historical figure even with his warts and all approach, there’s a deeply ingrained Mormon skepticism in me that wonders if any of the choices verged on the salacious. That’s not a critique of the book so much as a personal observation and a wish that I could have enjoyed the story while setting aside the instinct to be skeptical of non-LDS tellings of the history (which is all the more ridiculous given that I’m going on 5 years of not practicing in that faith).

McSweeney’s pulls no punches, but Vance has earned no mercy.