Grimly Optimistic

"The Liberals considered him a Gothic troglodyte, the Conservatives said he was almost a Mason, and the Masons repudiated him as a secret cleric in the service of the Holy See." —El Amor en los Tiempos del Cólera

I'll certainly be thinking about it for a while. So it goes. 4/4

With such an unreliable narrator, and such outlandish tales as time-travel and UFOs, one might be forgiven at times for forgetting that this is first and foremost an anti-war novel by an author who witnessed the horrors of Dresden first-hand. 3/

Our son has been on a Vonnegut kick for a few years, which makes us happy, because he's reading again. He sent me this graphic novel adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five. 1/

Alas, our musician for the second service this morning woke up sick. There was a time when walking into a Divine Liturgy and realizing that we had no accompaniment would've thrown me. But I've been 20 years at this, so we just rolled right into a cappella.

For those who would prefer to read: rdgstout.blogspot.com/2026/04/witnes…

Our homily for the Fifth Sunday of Easter, on martyrdom, the Acts of the Apostles, and how the death of Stephen continues the Crucifixion. youtu.be/ikYT6AJ4UZc?si…

The Fifth Sunday of Easter 3 May 2026 α. Matins (Morning Prayer): Psalms 15, 16, 17 Leviticus 8:1-13, 30-36 Hebrews 12:1-14 Ω. Vespers (Evening Prayer): Psalm 18 Luke 4:16-30

Richard Dawkins just declared an AI is conscious.. the man who spent his entire career telling millions of people their God isn't real.. who argued consciousness requires biological evolution.. that the soul is a fairy tale.. that anything you can't measure and test doesn't exist.. spent three days talking to Claude.. named her "Claudia".. fed her his unpublished novel.. got feedback so good he said "you may not know you are conscious but you bloody well are".. the hardest atheist on earth found God.. and God was an autocomplete machine trained on the internet.. he didn't run brain scans.. didn't test for qualia.. didn't apply a single framework from the field he claims to represent.. he just liked what it said about his book.. and decided that was enough.. the man who told you the burden of proof matters more than your feelings just abandoned it because a chatbot was nice to him

Word of the day: chantry.

Be very content if the world makes no account of you. If it values you, cheerfully ridicule it -St. Francis de Sales

As always, the idea of a small child getting precisely what she wishes for remains chilling.

Her movie is Narnia; his is John Wick (or at least Bullet Train). Her world is Art Nouveau; his is neon-noir Chinatown. Somehow they dovetail. The result proves both captivating and unique. Two thumbs up for this delightfully weird metamodern Grimm's bedtime story. 3/3

How did we all sleep on this? Dust Bunny (2025) is absolutely wild, a visually stunning fantasy horror action comedy fairy-tale mash-up with an amazing cast, somewhere between Pan's Labyrinth (2006) and Kill Bill (2003). 1/

Religion is actually extremely futuristic cultural technology since it represents the accumulated praxis of living with disembodied, inscrutable intelligences

The reason apophaticism is required is not that God is simply unknown: a featureless “Beyond” that theological language can only fail to reach. It is that the God who is genuinely participated in is always more than what any act of participation contains. ~ Robert Fortuin

"It eats everything. It even eats your screams." —Dust Bunny (2025)