Below are posts associated with the “photo” type.


Every once in a while I surprise myself with how well I can read music, despite all I’ve forgotten since long ago piano lessons. Getting the musical jokes in Ryan North’s Lower Decks comic is the most delightful this has ever been, though.

Beckett Mariner from Star Trek Lower Decks is in a turbolift on the USS Cerritos, whistling the TOS theme song (which I’ve never really liked but am excited to learn I recognize in musical notation).


I’ve been a Mozilla fan for a long time, but this sort of default behavior is why I’m souring on the organization (and why I abandoned Firefox a few months ago).

a screenshot of Firefox’s new Terms of Service, which reads: “Mozilla may also receive location-related keywords from your search (such as when you search for “Boston”) and share this with our partners to provide recommended and sponsored content. Where this occurs, Mozilla cannot associate the keyword search with an individual user once the search suggestion has been served and partners are never able to associate search suggestions with an individual user. You can remove this functionality at any time by turning off Sponsored Suggestions - more information on how to do this is available in the relevant Firefox Support page.”


Oh, please no. I get (and support) that Community of Christ wants to explore doing digital church, but it also has really compelling theological reasons to not deploy generative AI products, and this makes me sad.

image has the Community of Christ seal with “CofChrist-BOT” underneath and then “I’m a chatbot-in-training! While I’m not a person, I am here to assist. How may I help you today?”


Taking a moment to remember that the Garden of Enid webcomic is a pinnacle of Mormon arts.

Enid, from the eponymous webcomic, holds a copy of the Book of Mormon and says “This is the Book of Mormon. It tells the story of two societies that caused their own demise by hoarding wealth, following crooked leaders, stigmatizing the poor, making war, and manipulating the oppressed. OH! And SECRET COMBINATIONS… they loved those. Good thing we’ve been so much wiser in our day.”


Currently reading David Graeber’s “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” and while it’s really dense, one clear theme is how money has the power to abstract our moral thinking in dangerous directions. This NYT blurb seemed relevant.

A quote from a New York Times article reading “In private conversations, Mr. Musk has told friends that he considers the ultimate metric for his success to be the number of dollars saved per day, and he is sorting ideas based on that ranking.”


J’ai commandé un album de Guy Delisle juste pour ajouter à ma petite collection de bd francophone, et j’espère que cette case ne sera pas trop, TROP utile pendant les quatres années à venir aux USA.

Guy Delisle qui s’allonge sur un lit et dit « Ah oui, tiens ! C’est vrai. J’oubliais qu’on est sous une dictature »


My first print copy of The Onion came today, and it’s the only news I’ve been happy to read for days.

a picture of an article from The Onion with the headline “Trump Boys Hook Dollar Bill Up To Potato To Make Cryptocurrency”; also features a great photo


Tonight’s ethics lecture for my internet research class this semester will include a brief discussion of protecting researchers, so I got to go through my collection of screenshots of when a reactionary Mormon group took issue with our studying their posts.

it’s a reply on Twitter to me and one other account; the tweet text is just “#DezNat”, but it includes a meme of a peacefully sleeping dog with the caption “How I sleep at night knowing all enemies of Christ will burn in hell.”


I started reading Doonesbury reruns a while ago. I’ve forgotten exactly when they date from (maybe 2002?), but this panel felt very contemporary.

an image of dialogue from the White House or another federal building; an official is saying “So go out there and kick some terminally ill ass!” and others are responding “Yes, sir!”


I know I shouldn’t back crowdfunding campaigns just because they touch on two of my favorite things (Franco-Belgian comics and the public domain), but this is going to be hard to resist.

a “recommended project” from a Kickstarter email called “The Big Lie” and with the description “As he just enters public domain, the Belgian reporter embarks on a journey to the unknown…”


It turns out I find “associated with PRC = inherently good” just as annoying as “comes from China = inherently bad.”

a screenshot of a 404 Media article showing the text “the fact that DeepSeek comes from China, a perceived adversary to the Unites States/the West is making hawks and xenophobes, and tankies foam at the mouth.”


For what it’s worth, Calvin and Hobbes reruns also get me this morning.

Calvin and Hobbes are standing in the snow. Calvin says “Some days you hey up and you already know that things aren’t going to go well. They’re the type of days when you should just give in, put your pajamas back on, make some hot chocolate, and read comic books in bed with the covers up until the world looks more encouraging.


Well, at least some of today’s comic strip characters also have a “non-traditional instruction” day.

Comic strip characters are talking over walkie talkie (or, as the French say for some unfathomable reason, « talkie-walkie »). A voice over the radio asks what everyone is doing today. One character responds “probably just play video games.” Another points out that they have an online class and asks if anyone is going to attend. The others all say no.


I recently started to read select newspaper comics to bring some fun into my morning, but this one is going to haunt me for a while.

A plumber has just installed a toilet and is informing its owner that ‘There’s no handle; you need to download the FlushMe app.’


Kiddo did lots of fuse bead art with cousins over Thanksgiving. When I complained that the train in the instruction manual was out of the 19th century and that kids’ stuff never acknowledges awesome modern trains, she improvised this high speed beauty for me.

A high speed train made out of perler beads. It kind of looks more like an American mail truck, but I like the idea of a world where the USPS operates high speed rail, so I’m not complaining.


This semester, I have learned that: 1) if I have building toys on my desk, I will turn them into a robot, and 2) if I have a robot on my desk, I will fiddle with it during Zoom meetings.

a robot figure made out of small waffle building blocks


This is a friendly reminder that DRM sucks and that corporations have perverted the digital technologies that should make things easier for libraries and their patrons into ways to squeeze more money out of us while giving us less control.

A ‘hoopla content update’ from a library I used to belong to reading ‘Although it is free for members to use, Capitol Area District Libraries is charged a fee od up to $3.99 for every hoopla checkout. With CADL members checking out more than 19,000 hoopla items each month, costs add up quickly.’


Today’s bike commute getup. One more distant colleague didn’t know who I was until I spoke to her. Other folks who see me more often could recognize me by my helmet alone. 🚲

A man (me!) in a bike helmet, balaclava, sunglasses, a second face covering, and bright-colored jacket. Not pictured: layers of clothes underneath the jacket and a nice new pair of fleece-lines pants.


Reorganizing folders in my RSS/Mastodon/Bluesky client is making me curious about how emoji get alphabetized.

A series of folders, all with the same base name but different emojis afterward. What makes them appear in that order?


J’ai une petite collection d’aimaintins au travail qui me donne de la joie, même si la plupart serait incompréhensible à mes collègues.

des aimantins des trains français et suisses parmi d’autres trucs de nerd


Whenever I put this shirt on for a November jog, I wonder what the Venn diagram is between those who believe gender is biological and immutable and those who believe we have to show one turkey jogger with lipstick, eyelashes, and a pearl necklace so that we know she’s a woman.

Two turkeys on a Thanksgiving 5k commemorative shirt. One turkey has ‘feminine’ eyelashes and is wearing lipstick and a pearl necklace for the race.


Nancy is giving me the courage to finally confess that I do not really like the sweet-potatoes-slathered-in-marshmallows dish.

A Nancy comic where Esther is confronting Nancy on the existence of the ‘marshmallows on top of sweet potatoes’ dish—and on Nancy’s insistence on using a thin layer of sweet potato as a vehicle for a crap ton of marshmallow.


I love having a co-author who can provide the theoretical framing to turn my weird data from a dark corner of the internet into an interesting argument.

Screenshot of a paragraph from a special issue abstract where my co-author and I argue that Mormon groups on Gab illustrate how both Mormonism and the far-right platform rely on balancing the familiar and the strange to be successful.


Have people ever used Snopes as a verb, à la Google? Or is this just the best throwaway detail in a science fiction short story ever?

screenshot from a short story reading ‘I know this is probably an urban legend but I don’t want to snope it and find out’


Love these digs at Twitter in the Kickstarter video for Mike Masnick’s new card game.

picture of a playing card with a stylized Z labeled ‘The Hellsite’ and listing features like ‘Toxic Boss,’ ‘Inflated Metrics,’ and ‘Bot Armies’