I was finally motivated to get my phone screen fixed (again) so I could get the selfie camera cleaned so I could verify my age for OnlyFans. The next day, my little cousins called me on Facebook Messenger, and because I'd gotten the camera cleaned, I was able to entertain them by using the things that turn my face into a cat or Santa Claus. If I were still Mormon, I could share this story in testimony meeting as an example of how God orchestrates the little details of our lives.

I tried OnlyFans out of curiosity, not sure if I'd spend any money on it. Living through years of poverty and facing the prospect of more poverty after Trump's trade war and mass deportation increase the price of everything I need to survive (which most of my family members voted for, but whatever) has made me not like spending money. There are OnlyFans profiles that you can subscribe to for free, which seem to post pretty tame stuff. But I didn't expect that as soon as I subscribed to each one, I received automated messages from them, which turned into conversations geared toward persuading me to give them tips or purchase their less tame stuff.

Some of the messages were copy-pasted at the very least. Maybe all of them were AI-generated. It does seem odd for women in Serbia, Italy, and Ukraine to message me around four in the morning local time. The woman in Serbia said it was evening there, but I can give her the benefit of the doubt that she meant night. I can give her less benefit of the doubt for saying she'd been thinking about me all day. The woman in Ukraine didn't react at all to me saying that I hope she stays safe and her country wins the war soon, which I thought odd. The woman from Italy, at least, had an excuse for being up so late/early, and I could be wrong, but I work with AI for a living, and I don't think it's advanced enough yet to emulate the cadence and vocabulary she had from speaking English as a second language. To be clear, I know these are all real women, but I'm not confident that they spend their own time writing messages to nobodies like me.

Still, the attention was unexpected and pretty awesome. Even if they just want money, at least they want something from me, which is an unfamiliar feeling. I'm most inclined to give it to the Italian woman because she did the best job of pretending to care about me as a person. She said she does OnlyFans to supplement her income as a horse riding instructor and pay for her horses' vet bills. I respect that. Anyone who thinks this platform is immoral or exploitative or whatever should direct their outrage at the forces that have made it impossible for millions of people to live on one income. Attractive women are lucky that they have this option. Men do OnlyFans too, but obviously in much smaller numbers to meet a much smaller demand, and I'm clearly not attractive enough anyway. Years ago I actually did research on the porn industry (which was less fun than it sounds) and learned that here, the gender wage gap is reversed. Hooray, I guess.

Jokes aside, my former religion would shame me for talking to these women or their chatbots. My current religion couldn't care less. It doesn't try to regulate my behavior. It just encourages me to care for the planet and love everyone. Granted, I'm failing at even that much. I'm sorry, but it feels really, really, really good to tell a transphobic bully that nobody would miss him if he got hit by a truck, and I'm not sorry, so I lied just now when I said I was sorry. Anyway, this is a contrived attempt to segue into the next thing I wanted to mention, which is another difference between my former and current religions. Today, most of our meeting was devoted to commiseration over the shitty reality we're going to find ourselves in for the next four years (at least) and advice on how to endure it and keep hope alive. My chances of getting that from a Mormon congregation would be close to zero. The LDS Church only gets involved in politics when it's supporting legislation to force its beliefs on other people or exempt itself from child abuse reporting requirements, and I know if I were to attend a random congregation in Utah, I would be surrounded by idiots who are overjoyed that they elected the opposite of literally everything Jesus stood for.

I don't think religions should be politically neutral. They should stand up for human rights and social justice. Their teachings are just empty platitudes if they don't. In theory, they shouldn't speak for or against specific parties or candidates, but when specific parties or candidates are objectively evil, that's a dumb principle to maintain (except to the extent that they must, of course, to avoid losing their tax-exempt status). The LDS Church's partisan neutrality extended to appeasing the Nazi regime while some other churches opposed it. Anyway, I'm not looking forward to the next four years (at least), I don't know if I'll ever forgive my family members who voted for this because they have no principles and don't care if people who are different from them get hurt, and I'm definitely getting high tomorrow. But that doesn't mean I'm giving up. Here are two positive notes to end on.

First, MAGA Republicans, who are now mainstream Republicans, are the stupidest and most self-absorbed people on Earth. Trump and his cabinet picks are almost universally evil, but they're also so unqualified and have so many competing agendas that they may be unable to accomplish much at all. A total fustercluck of incompetence and infighting is the best-case scenario at this point. Elongated Muskrat has already backtracked on his pledge to cut a bunch of "wasteful" spending on programs that people need to survive, and MAGAts have already turned against him over a disagreement on H1B visas - he favors exploiting foreign workers for cheap labor, while they favor not letting any brown people into the country. Fuck both sides, but more power to them as long as they're fighting each other.

Second, the United States honestly deserves to lose a lot of its global power and influence. It's used those to do terrible things and ruin millions of lives, from its war crimes in Vietnam, to its installation of the theocracy that abuses women in Iran, to its recent funding of Israel's genocide in Gaza. Individual citizens who didn't vote for Trump don't deserve to suffer, but on a larger scale, it will be good if the country loses some of its ability to mess around in everyone else's business. And that's why I'm not even mad about Russia interfering in our elections. It's 100% karma. I'm sure the United States has interfered in more foreign elections than it's even admitted to. I know, I know, I'm an evil liberal who hates America just because I hold it to the most basic standards of right and wrong instead of worshiping it for no reason. 

My message to both of the people reading this is don't give up and don't give dictatorships more power by obeying them in advance like the media are. I've been criticizing the orange taint since 2015, and I'm not going to stop just because he might throw me in a concentration camp if he runs out of talk show hosts to persecute. I wish I had a wider audience and more influence, but this is what I get for choosing not to be a billionaire.

PSA: Here's a recent example I observed firsthand of how Russian trolls and bots manipulate millions of Americans who should have been declared mentally unfit to vote.

Reminder that my new memoir is out as an ebook on Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble. I want to talk some more about how much I love the cover. I was very disappointed with the cover for my first book. The artist ghosted me for weeks at a time and then turned in a half-assed job at the last minute. I can barely think about it, let alone look at it without getting depressed, and I'm not very sad about the possibility of AI crushing his dreams. This cover, on the other hand, is one that I'm actually excited to show people. It was created by my transgender ex-Mormon brother, the only member of my immediate family who won't be upset that this book exists. (On the other hand, my genderfluid ex-Mormon cousin was the first person who bought it.)

It's primarily based on a nightmare I had after reading Carl Sagan's Cosmos at the height of my existential crisis, which I describe in the book. It gave me an unsubtle visual representation of how much I didn't matter and almost brought me to tears. The Milky Way in the background is a touch I didn't request, yet it fortuitously happens to align with another bit that I mention in the book - namely, the time I was in Logan Canyon with friends looking at the Milky Way and thinking deep thoughts, and thanks to Carl Sagan's Cosmos, I was able to tell them that it's called the Milky Way because it came from the goddess Hera's breast.

We wouldn't have been able to put that on the cover anyway. The Milky Way looks, rather, like it's coming from Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother, the exalted heterosexual couple that rules the universe in Mormonism. Heavenly Mother is cut off a little to subtly indicate her inferior status. She's not worshipped or prayed to, she's rarely talked about, and nothing is known about what she actually does. They're looking at me with disappointment, which is self-explanatory. It occurred to me just this week that they could also be considered a representation of my real parents. The latter respected my decision to apostatize (which I appreciate) and have never wanted to talk about it at all (which I don't appreciate), but I know they can't be happy about it because their lives revolve around Mormonism. I remember my dad's annoyance when his sister and brother-in-law left it, and I have no reason to think he's changed since then. "I thought they got it," he said. I feel the same way about my parents voting for a fascist with dementia who embodies the opposite of every virtue they ever taught me, so we're even.

The flying saucer is there because I wanted a flying saucer there. I have no real justification. I like science fiction. There's a chapter in the book about aliens, but it has little to do with anything else.

I've never felt less happy about the New Year. My country is almost certainly about to enter its darkest hour since the Civil War for no reason except that a majority of its voting citizens have no principles and are easier to brainwash than first graders. At this point, I sincerely believe the best-case scenario would be a bird flu pandemic disrupting President Musk's government and naturally selecting a big chunk of stupid out of the population. I'd rather not have a pandemic every five years, but oh well, at least I already have a remote job this time.

On the plus side, I beat the odds by living long enough to experience my country's death by suicide in the first place.

I published my new book on the last day of last year. I don't know how long I'll keep up publishing a book every year, but two is two more than I had two years ago. I could say a lot about this book, but there's no point because it's all in the introduction that you can read in the free sample.

I, my roommate, and our landlord all spent Christmas at home alone, but at least I did fun things while my landlord decided it was a good day to paint the empty rooms and wash his car. I watched a 1933 short film called The Mascot, which is a live-action fever dream version of Toy Story. It follows a toy puppy on an adventure to get an orange for a little blind girl. It's not a cute children's film, though, because one of the toys gets his head run over by a car and the others spend an inordinate amount of time in hell with Satan and various monsters for no adequately explained reason. Artists, am I right? I loved it, though. The stop-motion effects look phenomenal, and in shots where the toys interact with the real world, they're integrated flawlessly. It's sure to become a Christmas classic in my household.

I'm thinking about this part of the Christmas story:

Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost.
Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privily.
But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost. (Matthew 1:18-20)

When I heard this part of the story at church as a kid, this is how I understood it: "Joseph didn't want to marry Mary, but an angel told him he had to."

I reminisce about this amusing anecdote because now my former church is teaching children, "Joseph [Smith] didn't want to marry thirty women and teenage girls, but an angel told him he had to." (paraphrased) That narrative sounds absolutely deranged to everyone else in the world, but it's what they're going with. Joseph, the new illustrated scripture story on the church's website would have us believe, was like, "Oh no, God, please don't make me cheat on my legal wife with all these other women and teenage girls. Anything but that, please. This is the hardest thing ever. It's so hard. It's really hard. I really, really, really don't want to do it, but I will be obedient because sometimes God tells us to do hard things. Did I mention that it's hard?" Yes, the captions use the word "hard" so many times that it seems intentional. And the images depict beds more often than necessary. What they don't depict is multiple wives. Somehow the images remain almost entirely focused on men and how hard they were finding polygamy.

You might think I'd be glad that the church is teaching children about Joseph's polygamy. It never taught me about Joseph's polygamy. I knew about Brigham Young's polygamy through cultural osmosis, but all I ever heard regarding Joseph was Emma this, Emma that. I learned the truth from a secular magazine article when I was seventeen. I thought it was a mistake, but my parents said it was true, so they'd also known about this and never told me, which kind of pissed me off. (My mom hates polygamy so much that she's said she won't discuss or think about it at all, but why she doesn't see that discomfort as a colossal red flag about the religion she belongs to and the god she worships is beyond me.) The church is now being a little more honest because the internet has given it no alternative, but "a little" are the key words here. Its story for children leaves out literally all the actual details of how Joseph practiced polygamy because it's almost impossible to learn about those without recognizing him as a sexual predator. For example, it mentions that sometimes "Emma did not want Joseph to marry other women" and leaves it at that. It doesn't mention that he did it behind her back anyway and told her in a "revelation" that Jesus would destroy her if she didn't quit complaining. So no, I'm not glad that the church is still lying to children.

Rebecca Biblioteca from Mormonish podcast threw together some AI pictures to fill in the gaps in the church's illustrated scripture story. (She loves making AI art. I know that makes her evil in some people's eyes. Artists, am I right?) A lot of people have now gotten hers mixed up with the real ones. They're all based on documented historical facts that the church won't tell children. Well, most of them. The first one is bullshit, but it is a documented manipulation tactic that Joseph used on a least a couple of women.

The other problem with this dishonest indoctrination is that the church is making it much easier for child predators, of which it has no shortage, to copy Joseph's manipulation tactics. "Sometimes God tells us to do hard things," a priesthood leader might tell a child. "Sometimes God tells us to do things that make us feel yucky. Sometimes God tells us to keep secrets." I don't think this is intentional, of course. I think the leaders of the church and the people who design its curricula are just very out of touch with how the real world works and how normal people think. Of course, the part where the church's lawyers protect the church's child predators and fight against their victims in court is always intentional.

Mormon polygamy is weird, but it isn't bad because it's weird, it's bad because it's manipulative, predatory, abusive, and degrading to women and girls. It's indefensible as a divine practice, and the sooner the church gets a clue about that, the better. I don't see that happening for several years, but I think it's inevitable. Just like the church had no choice but to start talking about it in the first place, I think it will have no choice but to come around to the position of Patrick Mason, one of its own leading faithful scholars and apologists, who said that Joseph Smith's polygamy looks like sin and that defending it is like putting lipstick on a pig.

Incidentally, he and his wife had been separated for years. I wouldn't imply for a moment that everyone who's separated from their spouse is evil, but it's stupid that his very few defenders think having a wife who didn't love him is a point in his favor. And his kids will get over it too. They're set for life. They'll never suffer the deprivation that his victims did. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge fan of vigilante violence. In an ideal world, it wouldn't have been necessary because he would have been executed by the state after a fair trial. Scratch that - in an ideal world, he never would have profited from human suffering and death in the first place because the United States would have universal healthcare like every other developed country that exists.

Of course, one man's death doesn't fix the systemic problem that is health insurance companies, but I bet it will make his successor and other CEOs think a little harder about the way they treat us peons. If they didn't notice before how normal people feel about them, they absolutely have now. We can see from the effort that went into finding his killer and the absurd decision to charge him with terrorism that this one death has rattled our oligarchic overlords more than all the schoolchildren being mowed down every week in the United States (including on the same day). I've had it up to my eyeballs with obscenely rich douchebags doing whatever the hell they want, and it's only going to get worse in the immediate future now that the richest one of all has bought all three branches of government. President Musk, with the help of First Lady Trump, is going to give them even more tax cuts and repeal the few regulations that keep them from screwing the rest of us even more than they already are, and morons who've been brainwashed into thinking that people on food stamps are the source of their problems will cheer them on all the way. Brian Thompson's well-deserved removal from this planet is a small sliver of comfort as we head into that bitter reality.

So yeah, this is about as un-merry as I've ever felt during the Christmas season. The other reason is that there's no snow where I am. I think we've had snow on the ground for less than a total of twenty-four hours so far. It was fifty-two degrees Fahrenheit yesterday. And this after I moved here just in time for a record-breaking heat wave that lasted a month. Tell me more about how climate change is a hoax. The good news is that my memoir is coming out by the end of this year. It's called Goodbye Mormonism, Hello World: My Slightly Pretentious Search for the Truths of Life, the Universe, and Everything. As you can guess, it's about my religious deconstruction and spiritual journey. I keep it focused on myself so I'm not preaching or telling people what to believe, but I wrote it to help people, and I flatter myself that it's more important now than ever. I'm really pleased with it. And because it has Mormonism in the title, I bet it will sell better than my first book.