Une de mes blagues préférés dans la série télévisée Au service de la France, c’est l’accent horrible de tout personnage américain qui paraît dans la série. J’aurais aimé trouver sur YouTube la scène où deux agents de la CIA sont incapables de prononcer « communiste » à la française, employant toujours la prononciation américaine d’une manière qui souligne bien l’attitude américaine paranoïaque envers le communisme pendant la guerre froide. Ne la trouvant pas, je présente donc cette autre scène, où un autre agent CIA parle de combien le président Kennedy « aime les femmes » avec un accent vraiment horrible:

I got the chance to preach in my home congregation yesterday and wanted to post the text here. In high school, I competed in extemporaneous and impromptu speaking (these were two different competitions with two different formats in Kentucky speech and debate, so I’m not just rattling off synonyms). This is something which has really impacted my life in terms of teaching me how to think on my feet. In the context of giving sermons, I usually know more or less what I want to say within a few minutes of reviewing the passage that I’m assigned to, though over the days and weeks that follow, I spend a lot of time figuring out the details of what I want to say. I really felt that with this sermon: The text I used on Sunday morning was the third draft of a sermon, and I even made some last minute changes over breakfast. I’m fairly happy with how it turned out, though there are parts of previous drafts that I missed, too.

I feel like the common wisdom is that if seasonal changes are going to affect your mental health, it’s going to be the winter, when temperatures get colder and days get shorter. My experience has often been the opposite, though: It’s not that I don’t sometimes struggle during the winter, but it’s spring and summer that really do a number on my mental health. It’s been helpful to recognize that over the last year or two, not because it changes the pattern but rather because being aware of the pattern is a first step toward developing healthier responses to it.

Kentucky primaries for the 2026 elections take place a week from today, so it’s not surprising that we’ve been getting some political mail over the past couple of weeks. Today, though, something came in the mail that really took me aback. David Kloiber’s campaign sent us something that was clearly more than a regular mailer, since it came in a letter-style envelope and was addressed to both me and my spouse.

Mon français est assez fort, mais pas hyper, hyper fort quand-même. Il y a certaines expériences, comme les appels téléphoniques et les films, qui me rappellent surtout mes lacunes linguistiques. Je suis maintenant en train de regarder la cinquième saison d’Un village français, et comme je la regarde grâce à un service américain de vidéo à la demande, la seule version de cette série qui m’est disponible est celle qui a des sous-titres en anglais imposés sur la vidéo—on n’a même pas la possibilité de regarder sans sous-titres. Même si j’aurais préféré des sous-titres en français, il est vrai que ça m’aide beaucoup, avoir les sous-titres pour surmonter les faiblesses qui restent dans mon français.

I’m working on a couple of projects right now (one professional, one personal) that have me asking the question that makes up the title of this post. While working on one of those projects last night (the personal one), I came across the verse that is Alma 5:5 in Community of Christ versification and Alma 7:12 in LDS versification. For this project, I’m reading out of the 1830 text of the Book of Mormon, as captured on WIkisource, and when I read over the verse, something felt off to me:

As I’ve noted a few times before, I’m a de facto Trinitarian, but I can’t say that I’m tremendously invested in the Trinity as an orthodox doctrine of Christianity. I know that some of this has to do with my Mormonism—growing up in a non-Trinitarian tradition has surely shaped my thinking about this—but I don’t think that’s really what’s going on here. Yes, I’m often sympathetic to the beliefs of the tradition I spent so much time in, but I’m also a non-theist who tends to see God as more of a metaphor for humans’ fleeting experiences with the ultimate than as someone whose nature and consubstantiality can (and must) be understood in distinct terms.

You don’t have to spend long on my blog to figure out that I default to being grumpy about generative AI, but if I’ve made one exception to that rule, it’s for Kagi Translate, which I’ve found to be a genuinely helpful machine translation tool—and to have some neat features that I haven’t found in its Google or DeepL equivalents.

It took me back a little bit tonight, then, when Kagi Translate straight up hallucinated something on me, in a way that I imagine wouldn’t be out of place for a more mainstream LLM (which I’ve never really used). Earlier today, while working on a paper for an upcoming conference, I was consulting a Jacques Ellul book I was about to cite, and I wanted to make sure that “genetic engineering” would be an accurate translation for his phrase « intervention génétique » (which could obviously also be rendered “genetic intervention,” but I’ve never heard that phrase in my life, so I’d prefer to go with a more well-known phrase if it’s accurate).

A few months after moving into our current home, we found ourselves needing to buy our own lawnmower for the first time. We learned that electric lawnmowers were a thing and figured that taking that route might be the most responsible thing to do from an environmental perspective, especially once we realized we could buy a string trimmer from the same company and use the same batteries for both. Both purchases have served us well, but our first battery didn’t last as long as we’d hoped, and with a second one currently on the fritz, I’m starting to suspect that the amount of e-waste that we’ve generated so far is outweighing any environmental benefit that we’ve created by not using gasoline to mow our lawns.

Ça fait maintenant plusieurs mois que j’ai l’habitude d’écouter en boucle un concert des Cowboys fringants aux Plaines d’Abraham à Québec lors de la fête nationale québécoise en 2013. Vu combien de temps j’ai passé avec cet enregistrement peut-être piraté, quand j’ai découvert que les Cowboys vendaient un enregistrement d’un concert film enregistré une décennie plus tard, quelques mois avant le décès de Karl Tremblay, je me suis dit que j’avais une certaine obligation de l’acheter.

I really enjoyed watching Artemis II lift off yesterday and immediately realized that I would also enjoy tuning into the live broadcast over the course of the mission. The YouTube feed is pretty good, but what I’d really love (and haven’t been able to find) is to find an audio-only feed that I could plug into my internet radio client and just listen to. I’m mostly interested in tuning in to the mission while working, and while the audio will make for good white noise, I don’t really need (or even want) the visuals in there.

Les Cowboys fringants is a Québécois folk rock band that has gotten a lot of my attention over the past five years (though I’ve enjoyed their music for even longer than that. I have a bunch of their albums, but over the past few months, I’ve taken to listening to some of their concerts that have been recorded. I do this while I’m working, so I’m usually listening to the sound rather than watch the visuals, but I do enjoy taking the occasional peek at what’s happening on stage, too.

Last Thursday, I listened to a recent episode of The Vergecast during my morning bike commute. The episode featured Paul Ford talking about his recent experience with Claude Code, and I was genuinely surprised to find some of his comments resonating with me. It helped that Ford wasn’t uncritical about AI (though certainly not as critical as I would have been), but some of it was just that I recognized some of the thrill that he was describing of using tools and resources to learn how to solve a problem. In fact, I found that thrill so contagious that a passing comment he made got me to spend some time once I got to the office converting my Twitter archive into a CSV that I could finally import it into the Day One journaling app that I use.

Early 2025 was a difficult time for my focus and mental health given all of the nonsense happening in my country at the time. I channeled a lot of my anxiety and distraction into messing around with my Hugo site, which is both something I find genuinely fun and something that is professionally useful, since I teach a course on content management systems where I’ve doubled down on Hugo as a teaching tool. Yesterday marks the one-year anniversary of my observation that it was “[t]ime to write up a summary post,” and I’m finally getting around to that today. Waiting so long to write that post means that some of my memories are a little fuzzy now, but I made some further updates to my site over the summer and then again last December, so a “the last year in Hugo adventures” post allows me to capture some of that stuff, too.

Over the past few months, one of my afternoon traditions has been to take a short break to read through the day’s passages in Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and Enuma Okoro’s Common Prayer: Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals. I bought this book after being impressed by Claiborne’s work in Jesus for President (which is much more radical than the title sounds) and with the hopes that it would be another resource for me as I continue to learn about the liturgical calendar. I didn’t stick with it long during the 2024-2025 liturgical year, but I’ve been having more luck with the 2025-2026 liturgical year. Sometimes, I’ll admit, I just go through the motions, but every once in a while, something really stands out to me.

This post takes for granted that one is familiar with the first season of the Apple TV+ show Pluribus—I don’t make any effort to explain the premise of the show or to avoid any spoilers about it.

As I concede just about every time I write something related to anarchism, I don’t claim to be a serious student of this political philosophy, and I don’t know if I’m ready to declare my allegiance to it. Yet, there are two basic beliefs of anarchism that I find attractive and that keep me coming back to anarchist writing (both fictional and philosophical):

The year or so that I spent living in France (alongside another year or so in French-speaking Switzerland) was under very particular circumstances—working with a group of mostly Americans doing volunteer work for a U.S.-based church—that led to some idiosyncratic experiences in the country. Perhaps one of the oddest was a small, shared, and superficial obsession with Marshal Ferdinand Foch of World War I fame. This grew out of the fact that the church we were working with rented an apartment on the boulevard Maréchal Foch in Grenoble; those of us who had been assigned to work in that area and live in that apartment had really fallen in love with Grenoble, which translated into constantly talking about Foch (the street) as a superior place to live. We didn’t know much about Foch (the person), but we knew he must have been pretty cool to have a street named after him, and we knew—with all the confidence of Iraq War-era Americans—that he must be better than Marshal Pétain, since Pétain had been a coward who surrendered to the Germans. (That Foch had been dead for nearly two decades at this point wasn’t really on our minds).

About nine months ago, I wrote about abstraction being on my mind and my thinking about how games abstract human life in potentially problematic ways. Abstraction is still on my mind, not least because I’m continuing to read Jacques Ellul, whom I referenced in that post (among so many others). In particular, I think a lot about Ellul’s argument that efficiency and efficacy are the ultimate value in the technical society, and that everything essentially gets ground down to that. I also think a lot about how “efficiency” so often comes down to “less money for others, more money for me,” turning complex policy and other decisions into a single, self-interested abstraction.

Kiddo and I often play a little bit of Switch together right before or after dinner. Last night, she was humming what my spouse and I both thought was a nonsense melody that she was making up—but that immediately reminded both of us of the Romanian dance song Dragostea Din Tei as featured in the classic internet meme Numa Numa.

It turned out that kiddo was humming Dragostea Din Tei—the adults had both forgotten that a version (or sample? I dunno) of the song features in Mitchells vs. the Machines, but she’d watched it recently on her own, and that’s what she had in her mind when singing during Switch time.

I can’t remember why I had a version of this post bouncing around my head several months ago—maybe a Times and Seasons post? probably a message from an acquaintance at BYU who isn’t up to date on my religious situation?—but I never got around to writing it. With Clark Gilbert’s call to the Latter-day Saint Quorum of the Twelve Apostles today, it felt like a good moment to actually get those thoughts out of my head and into a text file.

It was last November that I signed up to preach on Isaiah 58:1-12 (“Bring an End to Oppression”) on February 8th, and it was depressing how much the universe gave me to work with over the course of the first few weeks of 2026. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to address the idea of the prophetic critique in Isaiah and invite those of us in the service to emulate that critique in our own day. What I had trouble figuring out—almost right up to the end—was what I wanted to use as examples.

I began my sudden but immediately sustained interest in Jacques Ellul about a year ago now, and I’ve found his work to be terribly influential on my personal thinking and my professional work. I’m currently working on a manuscript that makes the argument that Ellulian thought is useful for drawing our attention in certain ways when considering artificial intelligence in education. I see theory as serving an analytical and rhetorical purpose for the way that it makes suggestions that a certain phenomenon works in certain ways and invites us to consider whether or how that is true.

Yesterday, I got another opportunity to preach for the Beyond the Walls online Community of Christ congregation based in Toronto, Ontario. I enjoy contributing to their services when I can, and I was glad that the winter storm here in Kentucky (and so many other places) spared our power and internet so that I could show up as planned. I got to work Jacques Ellul into my sermon (perhaps unsurprising, given how often I reference him these days), though I did oversimplify his thinking a bit and would appreciate the opportunity to dive a bit deeper into what he had to say at some point.

Over the past several months, I’ve noticed something funny about what kinds of video recommendations I get when I watch something on YouTube. I have watch history turned off on both my personal and professional Google accounts, so if I’m logged in to Google in the browser where I’m watching the video (usually on a desktop/laptop), I get pretty generic recommendations, with an obvious connection to the video at hand but no awareness of my past viewing. On my phone, though, I’m not logged into Google in my main browser, so if I bring up a video there, I get way more personalized recommendations that are very tied in to what I’ve previously watched on my phone.

En fin mars 2025, craignant l’arrivée des taxes douanières, j’ai commandé un exemplaire d’un livre de Jacques Ellul d’une maison d’édition à Genève. Quelques jours après ma commande, j’ai reçu un courriel avec le message suivant :

Je vous remercie pour votre commande passée sur notre site. Afin de vous éviter des taxes douanières, j’ai enregistré votre colis en “cadeau”.

En fin de compte, mon livre est arrivé avant l’annonce des taxes, et ce n’était donc pas nécessaire, mais je me souviendrai toujours de ce brave employé qui savait que je vivais sous une présidence de folie et de cruauté et a voulu m’en épargner un toute petite chose.