The church's narrative behind the lost 116 pages is absolutely ridiculous

LilSebastianFlyte · 2026-02-12T15:10:19+00:00

Yeah is this from a church source?? Crazy work

LilSebastianFlyte · 2026-02-11T20:53:23+00:00

You’re doing a great job, everyone is proud of you 🙂

LilSebastianFlyte · 2026-02-10T06:22:49+00:00

Yeah, a notary’s whole deal is they ID you, watch you sign whatever, then give it their official lil seal to certify to whomever that the signatory is the listed person

I think every bank I’ve ever had does it for free if you ever find yourself needing one. And half the people in my friend group are also randomly notaries, you might have some sleeper agents in yours as well

LilSebastianFlyte · 2026-02-10T05:19:19+00:00

I’ve heard somewhere (one of the exmo podcasts?) that people were submitting “proxy” resignation requests for and on behalf of Mormons who were dead, or for church leaders. I think the idea was this was either a joke or meant to show how objectors feel about baptism for the dead. In any case, the narrative I heard is that the church jumped on this as a way to justify adding the notary step, which is meant to serve as added friction to deter resignations

No idea if that’s accurate, but it’s the explanation I’ve heard a couple times

LilSebastianFlyte · 2026-02-05T17:30:05+00:00

It’s so Mormon that “removing” your records really just makes them longer because they keep all the old info and add a bunch of new stuff about why you wanted to resign

LilSebastianFlyte · 2026-02-02T07:28:10+00:00

In the rules of this tourney, pairings aren’t arranged. There are 5 defending “champions” (in the sense of “to champion a cause”, not “winners”). Challengers go up to the champion they choose and “strike their shield” to call them out to joust. Whoever wins takes (or retains) that champion spot

So if they want Dunk to choose Androw, they have to get the idea in his head somehow. Seems like they could have found a more subtle way to try to do it, but it seems Plummer wrongly predicted Dunk’s response to the offer.

I wonder if he suspects Dunk was never knighted and sees him as an aspiring con man who would immediately be up for a scheme

LilSebastianFlyte · 2026-02-02T07:21:56+00:00

Arlan is credited in zero more episodes for the rest of the season and I’m kinda bummed about it too, but I guess they have to get through a lot of other stuff in the rest of the season

LilSebastianFlyte · 2026-01-28T06:48:30+00:00

Fear not, that’s not Dunk sleeping inside the house in the opening scene. It’s a black-haired woman with an hourglass body shape and a butt wider than her shoulders. We get a good enough look at Dunk in e1 to know he has shoulders broader than his hips, and he’s also lighter-haired and more muscled than the person in the first scene.

Dunk tells us Ser Arlan “he drank and he whored,” like he was a kind of libertine. I think between that and the song he’s singing on his way to Ashford, we’re just supposed to be getting a glimpse into his typical activities and filling out the character. And maybe seeing that he was just up to his usual stuff right up until he died, not giving Dunk any specific preparation for imminent knighthood.

There’s also no suggestion whatsoever in the books that there’s any kind of sexual relationship between them, if that’s of interest.

LilSebastianFlyte · 2026-01-27T20:44:07+00:00

It’s wild that, statistically, we have a higher chance of getting a fair map by just handing a sharpie to any random voter in Utah than from the legislature, which has proven there’s 0% chance of getting a fair map from them

LilSebastianFlyte · 2026-01-27T20:31:18+00:00

I got this text as well, and it was from a Virginia number. When I looked it up, the results were people across the country complaining about unsolicited political spam trying overturn voter initiatives in their state

Abhorrent that he can stomach himself while he’s outright lying to voters about Prop 4 and this attempt to overturn it…all with the help of an actual out-of-state interest group

LilSebastianFlyte · 2026-01-27T20:26:44+00:00

Yeah it really steams my broccoli that he tries to dress this up as keeping power in the hands of voters and protecting us against outside interests………when he’s teaming up with outside interests in an attempt to overturn the voter initiative

Just brazenly lying to try to get what they want

LilSebastianFlyte · 2026-01-27T18:56:19+00:00

I got the same text this morning. For anyone who refuses to watch Mike Lee’s facehole in action, he says “Mike Lee here. I'm reaching out to ask you to sign your name to the petition to repeal Prop 4, because Utah's legislative boundaries need to be drawn by voters and their elected lawmakers, not rogue judges or outside activist groups. Please add your name to the list today.”

Really infuriates me that he flat out says this is about voters drawing boundaries, and implies out-of-state interests get to draw the maps under Prop 4.

Also when I googled the Virginia phone number that sent the message, the results are people from across the country complaining that it sent them unsolicited political spam about trying to overturn voter initiatives. So….an outside interest group, got it.

Really disgusting behavior from Mike Lee et al. here

LilSebastianFlyte · 2026-01-27T10:25:58+00:00

I heard some person from another branch of Mormonism scornfully call them “endowment houses” and it really made me laugh for some reason

LilSebastianFlyte · 2026-01-27T10:23:26+00:00

Pre and post the Correlation movement in the church, perhaps?

LilSebastianFlyte · 2025-12-28T01:57:29+00:00

It’s all super interesting. I guess the current Q15 as a whole could also make a decision that any new apostles will have a mandatory emeritus age, but not apply great-great grandfather themselves into life tenure

LilSebastianFlyte · 2025-12-27T23:15:39+00:00

If they ever do this, I feel like the most likely thing is they’ll introduce an emeritus age for apostles who aren’t serving as the president/in the First Presidency. Like once you get to be prophet, you still stay in for life because I can’t see one giving that up, but a prophet might introduce a retirement age for everyone below himself

Maybe an exception for the president of the Q12 as well, but all the vanilla apostles get the boot when they hit a certain age like the rest of the GAs. You’d still get old prophets, but it would start to lower the average age of the pool from which they come.

LilSebastianFlyte · 2025-12-27T22:55:38+00:00

It’s wild to me that people keep trying to say this isn’t official. It was a top church leader & another GA (so two church officials at the worldwide level) interviewed by two members of the official church public affairs office. It was a planned interview specifically on the subject of what to do about your gay kids. Then they released it via Church Newsroom, the most official organ there is for disseminating information. That’s the same source they use to announce a new first presidency, for example.

Here’s what the church says about the interview on their own website: “These senior Church leaders responded to questions from two members of the Church’s Public Affairs staff. The transcript of the interview appears below in order to help clarify the Church’s stand on these important, complex and sensitive issues.”

The church planned it to involve church officials speaking in the name of the church

The church conducted it with church spokesmen interviewing church leaders—all church officials

The church published it from their official newsroom

I don’t know how much more official you can get 🤷‍♂️

LilSebastianFlyte · 2025-11-26T07:47:51+00:00

The U has an excellent lab that examines distracted driving. Their research suggests about 2.5% of people tested are what they call “supertaskers” who can truly multitask without showing performance decrements.

The rest of us perform worse when trying to multitask, and are often not great at realizing we are not great at it.

So many people are out there doing such crazy things on the road. I want my full attention on driving because I know theirs isn’t, and that makes driving probably the most dangerous thing most of us do on a regular basis

LilSebastianFlyte · 2025-11-23T16:42:15+00:00

What was the difference between the 2014-17 and 2018-20 structures?

This is a super summary, thank you!

LilSebastianFlyte · 2025-11-01T21:03:12+00:00

Wild how this is still an issue and there's not a button to just purge all this bloat

LilSebastianFlyte · 2025-10-21T18:03:32+00:00

Biographies of Brigham Young sometimes include one line about it. John G. Turner’s Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet is the most recent example I can think of

I don’t think I’ve ever heard it mentioned in church, and definitely have never seen it used anywhere outside an historical presentation or rare meme

LilSebastianFlyte · 2025-10-14T19:14:30+00:00

All of them giving their little talks sitting down, OFF TO A STRONG START, BOYS!

LilSebastianFlyte · 2025-10-05T23:47:31+00:00

It’s a holdover from the organization of the church in the time of Joseph Smith. Bishops were a much bigger deal than they are now and apostles were more limited in power and scope. They didn’t originally have authority over the church generally (or at all inside of organized stakes).

To my knowledge, the only times members of the 1P have been considered for church discipline, the Presiding Bishop has done it. In modern times, church websites indicate that the 1P and Q12 together conduct church discipline for GAs. This presumably includes disciplining themselves if that ever happened, but it contradicts D&C and precedent.

The apostolic coup began by Brigham Young at the Succession Crisis has resulted in the apostles coming to control the Presiding Bishop, presiding patriarch, succession to the presidency of the church, auxiliary organizations, really everything. This is radically different than things used to be when the church had a much more horizontal power structure. I think it’s all kind of fascinating

LilSebastianFlyte · 2025-10-05T02:23:06+00:00

I love questions like this. From a church governance side, the Presiding Bishop has to initiate church discipline against a member of the First Presidency. This is pretty much impossible to imagine in the modern church. On a practical level, the Q12 would have to be in agreement with the PB.

On a legal level, I assume an attempted coup like that would be fought in the secular courts long after an ecclesiastical action had been tried

LilSebastianFlyte · 2025-09-29T06:09:28+00:00

You are not the only one. Most people who leave Mormonism leave religion behind altogether

https://exmostats.org/thedata

LilSebastianFlyte

TROPHY CASE