The next New Testament

In my recent post about the damage of apologetics I highlighted how intellectually dishonest the field of apologists is, and how those who present themselves as such are spreading misinformation and ignorance about theology. I don’t regularly reference on my blog the overwhelming numbers of pastors found guilty of sexually abusing their congregation because it feels to me to be a rather obvious point, but considering the most recent updates about an online apologist I felt the connection to my previous post was too strong to avoid making a reference to the story.

Julie Roys — The Roys Report

Can a Psychopath and Rapist Be Fit for Ministry? A Response to Apologist David Wood

This week, The Roys Report (TRR) published a story about Christian apologist David Wood, who openly admitted he “had sex with” 13- and 15-year-old girls prior to becoming a Christian.

The admission was shocking enough. Making it more egregious was Wood’s seeming lack of remorse or apology.

What a reckoning for the online Christian apologist community. To admit this all came at a surprise requires admitting that they are no closer to the God they seek than those whom they admonish for not being properly informed on biblical matters. To claim divine knowledge of how to handle this situation requires them to apologize for terribly heinous actions in direct conflict with the morals they admonish the others for not following. How interesting that they choose admonishment of others instead of personal introspection! Could this all be a grift by narcissistic influencers seeking subscriber funds? Is this a general indictment of the apologist community and its usefulness for anyone, secular or religious? “By their fruits ye shall know them,” and those fruits seem pretty rotten to me.

The right-wing political takeover of the Christian community had seemingly reached its limits in my childhood, but the internet has proven to be a very promising method of an even deeper level of radicalization. In the midst of this increasingly fascist algorithm-driven atmosphere arose Charlie Kirk. He seemed to find the right mixture of theology and bigotry to tap into this our hyper-polarized political environment, and has helped commandeer a religion that once claimed to be firmly in control of the moral standards for the country to instead sink us all into ever-deepening levels of hatred for one another.

💊 Continue reading “Terminally Online Christianity”

Image credit: “Saul and the Witch of Endor” — William Sidney Mount, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of International Business Machines Corporation

Objective truth is neither harmed by questioning nor weakened through investigation. There can be no subject too sacred to be studied. Waiting years to accept that within my mind there were areas deemed too holy to scrutinize left scars of deep anxiety and shame.

📚 Continue reading “The damage caused by apologetics”

I am not impressed with the UI changes that Apple has been leaning toward lately, especially with their latest attempt at making their UI look interesting without doing much to improve it, and perhaps even making it worse for everyone in the process. In other words, they’re repeating the same kinds of mistakes they made in iOS 7, a version that they proudly reference in their presentation of the new interface. Such hubris and ignorance!

Pavel Samsonov — The Product Picnic

Apple’s Liquid Glass is a grim portent for UX

While the original Macintosh human interface guidelines were rich with human factors-derived insights, the Liquid Glass design pattern eschews accessibility for maximum luxury branding. Unlike Material 3, which at least bothered to claim that it was Google’s “most researched” Material update ever, Liquid Glass simply asserts that it is delightful, vibrant, and expressive. Did we want that from interfaces, over for example usable and accessible? I don’t get the sense that Apple asked.

Louie Mantia — LMNT

I’ve Got Better Things To Do Than This, and Yet

Succinctly, I feel sour about Liquid Glass.

Translucent UI is usually a bad idea outside of movies and non-critical game interfaces.

The early moments of joy are fleeting, while the usability issues remain. Windows and Mac have both been down this road before, but I guess a new generation of designers needs to learn the lessons anew. Sigh.

@ID_AA_Carmack (John Carmack) — X

The “Liquid Glass” UI treatment is an accessibility nightmare. What a mistake. Yes, they can improve upon it, but they can’t do much else but improve, since they decided to premiere an obviously unacceptable interface design! They made glaring accessibility mistakes within their WWDC presentation: poor text contrast with the background; shimmering layouts that distract the eye; and too thin text, among other problems I observed. I don’t hesitate to say that this is the type of UI that I would’ve been begging my superiors to not present, at least without a massive caveat displayed everywhere the UI is mentioned. This was not ready to ship, not even at a beta stage. This UI diminishes Apple’s accessibility credentials and damages their reputation within the UI community.

With the latest system update for the Panic Playdate now offering network connectivity, I enthusiastically downloaded the Constellation browser to find out how to get my site included in the list of compatible sites, and I was quickly accepted! Click on the button titled “David Hepworth” in the in-app directory to check it out. It’s just a very small chunk of the site you’re visiting now. I had fun editing the photos to make the compatible with the 1-bit screen.

Oh, also check out the latest news about the Season 2 batch of games — and be sure to watch the update video to see me in the intro!

After experiencing a few instances where someone linked to a user on Mastodon to share a post, I began reconsidering my choice to abandon the platform completely. Sure, I had been forced to relocate my account twice due to instances shutting down, and yes I did remember finding search and discovery processes basically non-existent on the platform, but it’s about the users not the technology, right?

That’s when I remembered Technology Connections, a YouTube content creator who posts to a variety of other social networks including Mastodon. He had expressed his disappointment in the platform and the community before I had left the system, but I wondered if things had changed. I found a post on a Lemmy instance that seemed to prove that the Fediverse continues to be weird in pretty much only the exhausting ways.

I’ll stick to Bluesky for now.

This degrading of our quality of life comes from a lack of historical literacy. We have forgotten how close to disaster we are at any moment; we live on a series of fragile systems upon which our daily life depends and we don’t seem to care. Ignorance of their existence or function leads us to taking certain privileges for granted, forgetting that many people outside our bubble of experience may not share in those advantages and that we too could find ourselves stripped of them within a moment. We have become dependent on these systems to survive; our graves might fail to contain the number of dead should any of these systems fail.

🧭 Continue reading “We forget our place”

Image credit: Widener Collection, National Gallery of Art

In the face of overwhelming economic instability, financial uncertainties, fascism, climate change, anti-intellectualism, governmental antagonism, Christian nationalism, and propaganda pushed by social media and media outlets, I have begun to wonder if my smaller desires for a more pleasant life may be requests so insignificant that they serve to only make my life less pleasant with their continued presence in my mind. Perhaps the better choice is to resign myself to what is likely never to change, find the satisfaction available to me within the choices I currently have, and work on surviving the upcoming chaos?

🏳️ Continue reading “Maybe achieving contentment really does require giving up a little bit”

Dean Kissick — Harper’s Magazine

The Painted Protest: How politics destroyed contemporary art

Great art should evoke powerful emotions or thoughts that can be brought forth in no other way. If art merely conjured the same experience that could be attained through knowledge of the author’s identity alone, there would be no point in making it, or going to see it, or writing about it. If an artwork’s affective power derives from the artist’s biography rather than the work, then self-expression is redundant; when the self is more important than the expression, true culture becomes impossible.

This article explores the issues with the current art world and the significance of art in a world saturated in content. The writer is not alone in feeling confused about the purpose of some installations, as I’ve also experienced mediocre art given prominence in collections merely on the pretension present in the text accompanying the installation.

I think the problems with art today are symptoms of the democratizing effect greater access to tools has offered for creators. Digital art has allowed an overwhelming amount of creative work to be presented online at little to no cost to the viewer, and AI artwork has then stolen that material to remix it into something new with only a sentence or two of prompting text. Why go to a museum to just see art? Museums seem to have taken the angle of hosting “meaningful” artwork that has a political message or a horrifying story attached to its creation in an effort to increase its value to the viewer. At some point though they seem to have forgotten that the extra messaging was supposed to amplify good art, not replace it.

The YouTube Christian apologist community has gained another leader in Wess Huff. Fans and critics agree: Wess Huff appears to be a well-educated source who confirms the existing beliefs of Christian viewers. What does the response in his sudden rise in popularity mean for Christian culture’s stated goals?

👑 Continue reading “A new Christian apologist is crowned”

This little handheld device has captured my attention with its unique controls, novel games, and friendly community. The rich catalog of game choices can be overwhelming, so use this guide as a suggestion for what to play next.

🎮 Continue reading “My favorite Panic Playdate games”

The chance that people are generally good and want to help others inspires hope within me. I want to believe that perhaps with a little more education and exposure to sensible thought, the average Trump voter can come to see how the far right doesn’t serve their needs. I want to cling to that, but I remain hesitant.

🐣 Continue reading “Do people want change?”

I used to host this site on GitHub and use Neocities as a bit of a mirror to the site, but I have changed my mind after watching a video about the history of the Web that a coworker sent me. I have decided to fully embrace the independent, old-school, quirky, and “slower” Web by becoming a supporter of Neocities and moved my site exclusively to it. I have removed the GitHub features from the site in an effort to lean into what made the Web interesting to me in the first place (besides, nobody used the GitHub features I had enabled here anyway).

The process will actually make publishing changes to my site even easier; I used to have to use Git to transfer content up to GitHub Pages and wait for a deployment. Now I can use the Neocities CLI to make changes within Panic Nova without having to deal with the frustration of managing branches and merging that is beneficial to large projects and teams but fairly pointless and frustrating for a small site like mine.

i really thought this country would say no. instead, it shouted yes

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) November 6, 2024 at 3:06 AM

I’m deeply disappointed in my fellow Americans and I’m struggling to understand the reasoning for their voting decisions. Is it entirely ignorance? How could it be? Surely they would’ve seen or heard accounts of some of the things Trump has said. Is it the far more unnerving possibility of bigotry and hatred? I fear that the number of voters in that group might be distressingly high.

I thought Americans would do better. I felt a swelling of pride that Americans would stop the advance of fascism in its politics and culture. I had hope for this election and for good people to make wise choices, and that was a mistake.

Image credit: Helena Gunnarsson Buhot Collection

The latest fearful response to modern technology and social change is upon us: the effects of social networks on young people. Will we succumb to the effects of this hysteria, or will we find a way to use technology to better ourselves and our world?

🧑‍💻 Continue reading “Another moral panic”

I purchased a domain name for my blog: dhepworth.com. I bought the license from CloudFlare and they made it a pretty easy process. One can still find the blog at dhepworth.github.io and dhpersonal.neocities.org.

Image credit: Justine Brun

I honestly did not believe it to be possible, after years of disappointment, frustration, and diminishing esteem for the country, to actually be able to consider the possibility of hope and pride for the future of the United States. I think I owe gratitude to Donald Trump for this, though I don’t think he would be pleased, for my reasons for seeing hope are extremely divergent from his own and contrary to his messaging.

🇺🇸 Continue reading “Donald Trump has made me proud to be an American again”

Have we allowed ourselves to process grief poorly, even if our reasons to do so are altruistic? Would we not serve ourselves and others better to refocus our methods to readily accept grief?

🙍‍♂️ Continue reading “What grief has done to us”