Non-theist Christian and elder in Community of Christ. I have Mormon roots and aspirations to do better with justice and peacemaking—especially in the digital sphere but also in Lexington, Kentucky, the U.S., and the world more broadly.
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🔗 linkblog: Trump Declares A Trade War On Uninhabited Islands, US Military, And Economic Logic
I appreciate Masnick’s roundup of all the stupid things going on re: tariffs.
🔗 linkblog: Trump’s new tariff math looks a lot like ChatGPT’s
Well, if he’s going to ruin the economy, at least he can come by his strategy in the dumbest possible way.
🎙️ radioblog: The Dispossessed (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
I’ve had this on my radar since listening to the audiobook and thought I’d give it a try. It is terminally 80s in some ways (I liked the music anyway, but the sound effects felt like bad Doctor Who), but there were some excellent choices for adapting it to radio.
It kept what I found interesting about the book: depicting the possibility of another way of living but without settling for naïve utopia.
🔗 linkblog: 'I Want to Make You Immortal:' How One Woman Confronted Her Deepfakes Harasser
Studio Ghibli pictures are neat (legitimately! it’s one of the first generative AI things that’s tempted me!), but these deepfakes are the price we pay for them, and I think that’s too high a price.
🔗 linkblog: How crawlers impact the operations of the Wikimedia projects
I think this is a good example of why digital labor is a particularly salient critique of generative AI. Yes, Wikimedia content is licensed, but not as strictly as copyrighted works. Yet, ripping off of their work is arguably worse than grabbing some copyrighted works.
🔗 linkblog: OpenAI's Studio Ghibli meme factory is an insult to art itself
I skipped over this article the first few times I saw it, but I think there’s some good stuff in here. Is defying Ghibli the point?
🔗 linkblog: Nintendo’s new system for sharing digital Switch games, explained
This seems… good? So good that I’m suspicious I’ve missed something.
🔗 linkblog: OpenAI's viral Studio Ghibli moment highlights AI copyright concerns | TechCrunch
Generative AI products make me mad, I don’t like them, and I’m not going to defend them. That said, if this gets framed as a copyright problem, is there any way to give Studio Ghibli (or Pixar or the Seuss estate) power to cry foul here that doesn’t also shut down fan art, parodies, and the like? I’m skeptical, and that’s why I think “labor” is the more productive—if more legally ambiguous—framing here.
🔗 linkblog: The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans
Where does one start with how wild this story is?
the bronze serpent as anti-universalism and religious exclusivism in the Book of Mormon
Today’s Community of Christ lectionary passage is from 1 Corinthians 10, and includes this, from verse 9 (NRSVUE):
We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did, and were destroyed by serpents.
This is one of a few different stories that Paul evokes in 1 Corinthians 10 that all rub me the wrong way (I’m not a big fan of any punitive God), but this one stands out in particular because it reminds me of how the “serpents” story (originally in Numbers 21) gets evoked twice in the Book of Mormon.
🔗 linkblog: Palestinian deaths in Gaza rise above 50,000 as Israel expands its military campaign
50,000 is roughly as much as all students, faculty, and staff at the University of Kentucky. The whole university gone.
🔗 linkblog: Humming along in an old church, the Internet Archive is more relevant than ever
Let’s all support the Internet Archive—that goes for you, too, publishers.
🔗 linkblog: No DEI allowed for US mergers and acquisitions, says the new FCC chair
What a dumb, petty administration this is.
why I want to reread Cory Doctorow's 'For the Win' despite all the other books I need to get to
My Day One journaling app told me this morning that today marks one year since I read Cory Doctorow’s For the Win after picking it (and many other of his books) in a Humble Bundle. That means that it’s finally time to write out some thoughts that I’ve been having over the past several weeks, all centered around wanting to reread the book. I have a lot of other books on my “to read” list right now, so it’s kind of ridiculous to want to get back to this one, but there are two things that have been really pushing this idea.
🔗 linkblog: Facial Recognition Company Clearview Attempted to Buy Social Security Numbers and Mugshots for its Database
Surveillance sucks, and here’s the latest example.
🔗 linkblog: Pluralistic: You can’t save an institution by betraying its mission (19 Mar 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Some good things to think about right here.
🔗 linkblog: Rather than lower rates, Arkansas jail simply cancels all inmate phone calls
Cory Doctorow’s The Bezzle continues to play out in real life.
policy and the prophetic voice: generative AI and deepfake nudes
This is a mess of a post blending thoughts on tech policy with religious ideas and lacking the kind of obvious throughline or structure that I’d like it to have. It’s also been in my head for a couple of weeks, and it’s time to release it into the world rather than wait for it to be something better. So, here it is:
I am frustrated with generative AI technology for many reasons, but one of the things at the top of that list is the knowledge that today’s kids are growing up in a world where it is possible—even likely—that their middle and high school experiences are going to involve someone using generative AI tools to produce deepfake nudes (or other non-consensual intimate imagery—NCII) of them.
🔗 linkblog: “Awful”: Roku tests autoplaying ads loading before the home screen
This weekend, I visited family and complained to myself that their Amazon Fire sticks were emphasizing ad delivery over being a TV. I guess that’s the future for my Roku stick, too? What a sucky future we live in.
🔗 linkblog: AI Slop Is a Brute Force Attack on the Algorithms That Control Reality
The “brute force” metaphor is helpful here, and the article also draws attention to the vulnerability of algorithmic media to generative AI brute forcing.
🔗 linkblog: Pluralistic: Amazon annihilates Alexa privacy settings, turns on continuous, nonconsensual audio uploading (15 Mar 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
I’ve been trying to figure out how angry to be about this move from Amazon, and Doctorow’s thinking is helpful: Very angry. (I don’t own and would never own an Echo, but it still makes me mad).
🔗 linkblog: They look like Nazi salutes. Here's why some people think they're a joke'
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.
🔗 linkblog: OpenAI declares AI race “over” if training on copyrighted works isn’t fair use'
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.
🍿 movieblog: When the Wind Blows (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
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.
🔗 linkblog: War heroes and military firsts are among 26,000 images flagged for removal in Pentagon's DEI purge'
If I don’t bookmark this article, I will quickly forget how dumb this whole thing has been (not to mention petty and mean).
🎙️ radioblog: When the Wind Blows (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
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.
📚 bookblog: Picks & Shovels (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
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.
🔗 linkblog: Bluesky Deletes AI Protest Video of Trump Sucking Musk's Toes, Calls It 'Non-Consensual Explicit Material''
Honestly, I get the original call, but I’m glad Bluesky backtracked. Content moderation is hard.