I’ve been (very slowly) digitizing old journals, letters, and other text-based keepsakes over the past few years. This involves both scanning the original documents but also typing them up to enter into my Day One journaling app (and make them searchable). Because a solid majority of the letters and keepsakes that I had were related to my time as a Mormon missionary, I’m still chipping away at that era of my life. Fifteen(ish) years later, it’s fascinating to go back to this formative part of my life and see what’s changed.

Free speech absolutism wins again.

Really enjoyed this.

As I’ve written before, I don’t necessarily believe that the dubious historicity of a particular religious event ought to undermine its theological significance, but I do strongly believe that dubious historicity undermines the ability of an individual or organization to insist that others agree with their theological conclusions. To take a major example, the unlikelihood of a literal resurrection in scientific terms isn’t going to stop me from finding value in the resurrection story at Easter, but it sure as heck is going to stop me from insisting that my atheist spouse make that story an important part of her life.

Masnick puts this better than I could. This legislation is dumb, but this advocacy feels dumber.

Membership in one of my local libraries includes access to Freegal, a kind of janky, third-tier music streaming service. The selection isn’t fantastic, but my tastes in music aren’t exactly mainstream, and over the past four years, I’ve found a lot of music I like available through the service. In fact, because you can download a limited number of tracks per week, I have Indochine songs, Gérard Lenorman albums, and even the Stranger Things soundtrack all saved to my phone so that I can bypass the jankiness of the service and the official app.

I have spent far too much time blogging this week (even before the sale of the Kirtland Temple was announced), but weeks like this don’t come often, and I feel like holding onto this week’s thoughts will be important in the years to come. So, here’s another post!

A friend recently suggested that I subscribe to the daily meditations sent out by Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation, and today’s was lovely, focusing on finding God in all things. Here’s the passage that stood out to me in particular (and perhaps you’ll see why):

For as quickly as I felt like I came to peace with the sale of the Kirtland Temple, I’ve had conversations and encounters since yesterday’s post that make it clear that I still have a lot of work to do processing all of this in the weeks, months, and years ahead. I’ve heard from a lot of people in pain: people who have been to Kirtland dozens of times but never want to go again, ordained women in Community of Christ who are angry that the new owners of the temple can’t respect their ordination, and yet more. It would be wrong of me to lean on the peace I’ve come to and not be present for others’ pain. I’ve also seen at least one petty Mormon comment arguing that Community of Christ’s recent history with schism and financial instability is proof of Brighamite superiority (buddy, do I have some bad news about 1830s Kirtland for you!). It would be inaccurate of me to argue that I’ve already fully come to peace when that kind of comment makes me so angry.

Companies can really suck. I liked Roku, too.

Yesterday, Community of Christ and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced that the former had sold the Kirtland Temple, other historic sites, and some important documents and artifacts for $192.5 million dollars. As the title to this post suggests, I’ve pretty quickly come to peace with the decision, and I want to explain some of that process in this post. However, there are some conflicted emotions lingering beneath that peace, and I want to make clear that the goal of this post is not to tell anyone how to feel about this.

Flock provides the ALPRs here in Lexington, which makes this especially frustrating.

So, if employers save time from AI, and applicants save time from AI, where’s the net benefit? Or does it become a new burden for everyone?

Last few sentences of the article really make the point.

I have my own (complicated) thoughts to share on this later, but more than anyone else, I’ve wanted to hear from David Howlett (and, okay, Lach Mackay). Appreciate Jana’s coverage here.

Cory Doctorow is one of my favorite authors, and I’ve also (mostly) appreciated the work of Humble Bundle over the past decade. When I learned this weekend that there’s an ongoing bundle of Doctorow’s fiction, I was ecstatic. The only thing that I was disappointed about is that I’ve already bought so many of these titles… however, that still wasn’t enough to stop me from buying all 18 items (it helps that while I own many of these already, most of the ones I own are in formats rather than epub, so now I’m a multimodal owner). As a plus, this bundle benefits the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a great organization that Doctorow has done a lot of work for.

Bookmarking for future reference. Are the purported benefits of generative AI worth these (and other) costs?

Helpful reminder that it’s low-paid, underappreciated workers who contribute to AI as much as high-paid programmers and household-name executives.

This strikes me as illustrating the digital labor issues associated with generative AI. It’s someone else profiting off of one’s work.

Aw, geez, and I liked Automattic, too. I get that financing Tumblr is hard, but why this?

I feel like I say this whenever I talk about Doctorow, but I love that his fiction reads like an op-ed. While waiting for this book to come out, I’ve been slowly reading his co-authored book Chokepoint Capitalism, and I feel like The Bezzle is all his (and Rebecca’s) critiques about large and greedy companies wrapped up in a fun, action-driven narrative.

Here’s the thing about me: I’m an academic, and I respect facts, reason, and citations. However, when those are the basis of an argument, I sometimes also struggle with feeling like I need to be better read and know all the angles before I can get on board with the argument. A narrative, on the other hand, sucks me in and convinces me. I ended this book feeling angry about prisons, DRM, and unscrupulous corporations and their executives—I’m on board with the argument. That the story was exciting and fun to follow was only a plus.

Dammit, I literally just started following Motherboard again.

I enjoyed Nolan’s movie so much that I thought I ought to eventually read the book—yet, I couldn’t imagine that it could live up to the film adaptation (especially after hearing the audiobook narrator’s awful attempts at any language other than English).

Yet, this ended up being amazing—perhaps better than the movie. Funnily enough, I felt that the best parts weren’t about the man himself. Rather, his life provides fascinating insight into the existential horrors of nuclear weapons, the authoritarian impulses of McCarthy-era conservatism, and lots more besides. Lots to think about in this book!

About a week ago, I felt like I was going through an audio drought—I wasn’t listening to any audiobooks, my podcast consumption has continued to go down in recent months, and I just wasn’t listening to anything while doing the dishes or whatever. This wasn’t necessarily a problem (it’s been good in terms of mindfulness, for example), but it had gone on long enough that I decided that I wanted something to listen to. In particular, I decided that it was as good a time as any to revisit Thomas Römer’s excellent lectures on the bible, which the Collège de France makes freely available in podcast format.

Darkly hilarious.

There are few phrases grosser than “monetizing our user base.”