Maybe not clicking with Utah is because so many of my interactions with Utah and Utahns involved being defensive about or emphasizing my being from somewhere else. Even in my Mormonism, I was a Kentucky Mormon, and I filtered a lot through that perspective.

Visiting Utah for work this weekend has me thinking about how I’ve never really felt like I understand this state—and that despite attending college here and all four of my grandparents being born here. I feel like it should be more familiar to me than it is.

Looks like Masnick’s (and others’) predictions about Musk’s changes to Twitter are coming true. This isn’t what verification is for.

Don’t know how I missed this story yesterday, but what the heck? Like the article says, nothing particularly new revealed by these stunts, but it’s still a compelling critique of Amazon.

This was an interesting read, and there are portions of it that I expect to come back to later. However, I was surprised by how often I felt like I already knew what was being covered. Given my familiarity with both faiths, I expect that I’m not the target audience (anymore) for this volume.

Welp, this is scary.

Free speech absolutism at its finest.

Solid article right here.

Last Sunday, I attended a Latter-day Saint Elders Quorum meeting for the first time since March of 2020, when I taught Elders Quorum on the last Sunday before Latter-day Saint services shut down because of COVID. I had enjoyed most of the sacrament meeting (I took issue with some parts of some talks, but I have to admit that I miss the size, songs, and sense of community of Latter-day Saint services), but Elders Quorum turned out to be kind of a disappointment. Truth be told, I had been hoping that it was a Sunday School week, but I couldn’t remember which weeks are Sunday School and which are Elders Quorum/Relief Society after being out of practice for so long.

Public-private surveillance is the worst of both worlds. Ring is creepy.

Amazon: also the worst.

Facial recognition is the worst.

I’ve been attending Community of Christ for over three years now, and I’m still surprised by all the little things it does that the LDS Church would never do. Both churches were born with problematic attitudes towards indigenous peoples of the Americas, but while Community of Christ isn’t perfect, I’m impressed with the steps it takes.

How a platform is managed has real consequences.

C’est bien inquiétant, cette histoire.

Content moderation is a good thing.

What a gross idea.

I backed this before Kickstarter could even say “Hey, you’ve backed stuff from Doctorow in the past…”

The narrator in my current audiobook just wondered (critically) if a character found an ethically dodgy situation “too useful to have a conscience about,” and I think it’s one of the best lines I’ve ever heard.

Over the past few years, I’ve been slowly digitizing a bunch of analog letters, keepsakes, and other things that I think are worth keeping a copy of in the Day One journaling app (and, more importantly, in a PDF export from Day One). My current project is copying over a bunch of old emails that I sent friends during the two years I served as a Latter-day Saint missionary, and in the email I was copying this morning, I wrote about a time when I was working as the legal secretary for the mission and had to do an audit of our legal documents because:

Very happy to see this op-ed emerge—especially from a BYU student. Fidesz is not a party Latter-day Saints should praise or look up to.

Glad to see action being taken against this law.

It baffles me when platforms think “oh, but we can help you see more relevant ads” is a selling point. Also, “not sharing data outside Reddit” doesn’t help either—it’s still an invasion of privacy.

Look, I don’t know much about Hungarian politics, but it seems to me that it would take a hell of a lot of self-confidence to brag about an ally of Viktor Orbán visiting BYU. This feels like wading into the culture wars in a way that the LDS Church usually tries to avoid.

I love this interview so much and for so many reasons. I haven’t been a member of Community of Christ long enough to have personal connection with Wallace B. Smith, but I have a lot of respect for him.