Twenty-five years ago today, the lights turned on here at OFB. We were going to help the Linux Desktop revolution happen. We’re not there yet, but it has been an interesting ride.

A controversy at a Christian publication this week gives us an unusual twist on the AI debate. The great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas and self-driving cars now have something in common.

The last decade, we’ve been told we have to speak — and speak loudly — or we’re the bad guys. And, of course, say what the mob says or we’re still the bad guys. But silence is often more profound.

My internet is reliable. Reliable at going down at 7 p.m. every Monday night for years. That’s unfortunate given that I preach a livestreamed sermon every week at that time.

A few hours away from me you can visit Silver Dollar City — a scenic, wooded theme park in the Ozark Mountains where craftspeople blow glass and mill flour 19th-century style. It’s charming and memorable. It’s also not the way I buy glassware or food normally.

People love this year’s Budweiser commercial. I get it: it’s beautifully filmed and feels good when so much is angry, ugly or both. It is also real to a surprising degree: the commercial was filmed with cameras, not constructed with computers.

We all love to hate Wikipedia: it is imperfect, but unavoidably useful; biased, but somewhat correctable. Could Grokipedia take what is good about it and round off the rough edges? Maybe.

We need to define terms. Our culture is always ready to debate and toss accusations, but we fail to stop and see if we even mean the same things by the words we hurl. No wonder we never settled anything.

Meta’s decision to roll back its Big Brother approach to censoring speech will help the battle against misinformation far more than its more Orwellian efforts ever could. Counterintuitively as it may seem, this is the way to cultivate a culture of truth.

It’s New Year’s Day. As a kid, I noted it as the day Christmas ended. The music cut off on the radio, the lights went off around the neighborhood and, curiously, the snowmen came down all over, too.