I had not thought this much about the privacy implications of VR, and ooooof.

Wild story, and heck of a scoop. Says far more about Tucker Carlson than about Ye.

Politicians need to better understand the internet. This is just as dumb (and perhaps more devious) than the nonsense the governor of Missouri was up to.

The Salt Lake Tribune’s Mormon Land podcast is one of my favorites—I’ve gone so far as to support it on Patreon so that I can get all the Tribune’s religion coverage without having to subscribe to the entire newspaper. Mormon news interests me a lot, but Utah news doesn’t interest me at all. Yesterday’s episode on age and Latter-day Saint leadership was one of the most interesting episodes that I’ve listened to. In particular, two of Greg Prince’s comments during his interview stood out to me.

This is a terrible idea, and it is wildly irresponsible to do research like this.

I am growing more and more nervous about our future.

Amazing stuff here.

During the last few years I spent as a practicing Latter-day Saint, one recurring pet peeve that I had was the overbroad use of the term “gospel” to refer to all Latter-day Saint doctrines, teachings, and beliefs. In hindsight, learning to separate the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ from everything that I believed was a major part of my faith transition—and my ability to continue in Christianity even when the version that I was used to started to no longer work for me.

After recently finishing an excellent biography on Brigham Young, I’m starting to make my way through some other Mormon Studies books that I own but have not yet read. This has brought me to Paul Reeve’s Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness. It’s very good so far, and I regret having waited until now to read it. I’m currently working through Reeve’s chapters describing Mormons’ relationship with American Indians, and I just now read a paragraph that really surprised me. First, though, some background:

Russia is currently demonstrating just how powerful and dangerous nuclear weapons are—and, unfortunately, how complicated disarmament is.

Unsurprising but disappointing.

Good read on the emptiness of recent Musk bluster.

Good reporting on a scary but important subject. I’ve been collecting Gab blog posts to eventually study some of this Christian nationalism.

Very interesting article on how Tolkien can inspire far right thinking.

This is juvenile enough that I feel guilty finding it funny, but it’s a good demonstration of the problems with this backlash against content moderation.

Ooof. AI-generated art is fun, but it comes at a price, and we can’t afford to forget it.

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to preprare a “focus moment” for today’s worship service in my Community of Christ congregation. There are some things I might change for a different audience (putting more nuance into my current view of God, for example), but I’m still pretty happy with what I came up with. I’m particularly happy about the translation of the song—I didn’t bring it up when sharing, but this is a French Canadian song that I translated for today’s purpose. I recently blogged about this same song, because I’ve been listening to it for years but only just recently learned what the words actually meant (this happens a lot to me in French music). I ended up learning a some new French Canadian vocabulary from this, and I’m pleased with how I managed to translate the lyrics in a way that mostly preserves rhymes and rhythm in English.

Lots to love in this article, but I especially appreciate the point that God and Creation resist binaries.

Great movie, great example of the difficulty of content moderation.

I had heard about this kind of software at a conference last year, but reading about it just makes it scarier.

What a dumb allegation. Just makes me want to vote for Wu even more.

This article provides good examples of how the efficacy and efficiency of a given technology is often less important than deeper questions of reliance and roles.

I missed the vertical integration aspect of this in earlier reporting I’ve read. It makes this story even worse.

We need to do more work to divorce free speech from content moderation. The world without content moderation would be a much worse world, and we don’t want to live in it. Sure, social media platforms are too powerful, but this is not the answer.

This is a gross idea for a TV show, and I’m glad people are pushing back against it.