November 30, 2024

spencergreenhalgh.com posts digest for Nov 30 2024

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Here are long-form blog posts I published this week:

• John Hamer on Star Trek and the afterlife

• proposing legislation on Creative Commons for the 2025 Community of Christ World Conference

• communion, tarot, and Lavina Fielding Anderson: some thoughts on sacraments

Here are microblog posts that I published this week:

• I think one of my favorite things about following a They Might Be Giants lyrics bot on Mastodon is that I’ll occasionally get a TMBG song I haven’t thought about for a while stuck in my head for a few hours.

• We picked up some of the Exploding Kittens-brand goofy party games for our upcoming big family Thanksgiving, and my inner board game snob is kind of offended at how actually fun they seem.

• Freeing our family from Audible by starting a libro.fm account is a normal thing for a dad to be proud of, right? (Don’t tell me if the answer is no.)

• Love that our family makes a point to stop at the Kentucky Artisan Center rest stop instead of the Buc-ee’s just up the road. Further love that my favorite locally-made tea company can always be found there.

• I often wonder if a “sandbox” board game is possible. Played 7 Wonders tonight, and it’s close: I so enjoyed playing that endgame scoring almost didn’t matter. It also made me want to finish Carse’s book on finite and infinite games.

• I (someone who doesn’t really believe in a literal resurrection) have been scheduled to preach in February on Paul’s “if there’s no resurrection, this is all in vain” in 1 Cor. 15. Gonna have to think about this one.

Here are photos that I published this week (or at least their descriptions):

• 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.

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

• 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.

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

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

Here are news articles and podcasts I commented on this week:

• 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Inside Bluesky’s big growth surge'

• 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'If You Like Mille Bornes, You’ll Love One Billion Users'

• 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Looking for the Answer to the Question, Do I Really Own the Digital Media I Paid For?'

• 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'X's Objection to the Onion Buying InfoWars Is a Reminder You Do Not Own Your Social Media Accounts'

• 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Someone Made a Dataset of One Million Bluesky Posts for 'Machine Learning Research''

• 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Bluesky, AI, and the battle for consent on the open web'

• 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The Redbox Removal Team'

• 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The Twitter Board made a historic mistake and the World will pay the price. '

Here are my reviews of books and other media I consumed this week:

• 📺 tvblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Agatha All Along

• 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life, by Jonathan Alter

• 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Machine of Death: A Collection of Stories about People Who Know How They Will Die, by Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo, and David Malki !

• 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Spill, by Cory Doctorow

If you have thoughts about anything I've posted, feel free to comment directly on my website through Hypothesis or to reply to this email with what you have to say.

Thanks for reading!

Spencer