• 0 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
cake
Cake day: March 4th, 2025

help-circle


  • Sorry for late-reply/paleo-posting this one. I’d say the biggest personal change I’ve experienced since my ordination is how “broad” a lot of my thinking has become as I’ve delved deeper into the traditions of the Church. Christianity is so much more (good) weird than we often allow it to be, to our detriment. And we don’t have to abandon the traditions in order to become “progressive.”

    I came from a Southern Baptist upbringing that was very homophobic. I began to question that alongside my shift into Anglican/Episcopal Christianity. My studies into the ancient aspects of the Church wound up making me far more open to various Queer identities than I would have imagined as a teenager. So that’s a big change.

    The other is that I’m absolutely convinced that Christianity is supposed to be about telling people that they no longer have to try and save themselves. God loves us as we are, a place in His kingdom is ready for us. We just wind up robbing ourselves of something liberating when we keep thinking that God has abandoned us and throwing each other under the bus. Jesus doesn’t save some at the expense of others. He saves all of us.



  • I’ve had adblockers on my browsers for years and pay for ad-free streaming. I easily went over a decade without seeing an ad on a screen in my own home. But when I’d go to a restaurant that had TVs (or to my mom’s house where she’d run the TV constantly) I’d marvel at how unwatchable it was. Just a constant interruption.

    My wife has a friend who produced a TV series for Tubi and so we signed up to check it out and, wow. I had to tap out of watching it because of the ads. Just completely obnoxious and loud.





  • I’m an Episcopal priest, and I’m trying to imagine how I’d respond to this. The only time I’ve ever had to ask someone to leave was when a, say, mentally unbalanced man came into the church and screamed profanity at me in the middle of the service and told me that I needed the permission of the Korean consulate to preach (this was a white guy in a Navy sailor’s cap, in Hawai’i where I live—not sure what his deal with Korea was). He did this twice over a couple years and I have a person who works with unhoused veterans in my parish who’s told me that she’d been instructed not to interact with the guy because he was deemed too dangerous. So, asking him to leave was a safety issue. But no one tackled him.

    I’d like to think that I’d let this guy have his say. If he’s not cussing anyone out or getting violent, I’d probably let him talk and then invite him to hang out and talk some after the service. I sure as shit wouldn’t demand him to “respect my authoritah” or see him tackled to the ground. That is something I can’t wrap my head around.







  • Correct. Signal is still an excellent app. The problem is that it can have a wide array of contacts that can be added by the slip of a thumb (aka User Error). I’d imagine that secure government software does not happen to have the editors in chief of major news publications saved on there. They probably also have a flag coded in there that alerts you if someone without proper security clearance is added by mistake.


  • This makes me wonder if this was part of a ploy to let the public know how messed up things are in a “blink twice if you need help” kind of way. Or did Waltz feel these people are undeserving of their cabinet appointments and so managed to lift the veil so we can all see it? Is he mad that he wasn’t considered for the Secretary of Defense position? Is this his way of being Jim from The Office and looking into the camera?


  • The security approach was what first drew me to Apple back in like 2005. The whole focus on proprietary software that resulted in practically zero malware was definitely worth me having to do file-type conversions on documents and all that crap to keep up with people on Windows. And I loved it. And I kept adding every device and loving how seamless they all interact with each other.

    But then there’s that shadow side you refer to. The gradual dumbing down of software, the constant hand-holding. The walled garden began to feel like a lock-in.

    My last new Mac purchase was in 2011. I still use that machine. But I was not getting security updates and other things I use were leaving me behind so I decided to give Linux a try. Chose Ubuntu and the hardware was suddenly like new again. Apple makes beautiful machines but waste them on some increasingly basic software. My Linux-run Macs have made me fall in love with computers all over again.

    If this somehow results in me being able to run like Graphene on my iPhone in a few years, or even connect my Apple Watch to a non-Apple phone, I will be pretty excited.