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I was raised with a fundamentalistic theological view of Revelation, where I was to study modern-day political events to try to find the clues to prove my particular prophetic interpretation of the book. It was therefore unconscionable for me to consider that the book of Revelation could be about anything but a future event. So much of the Bible interpretation I used was to present the events of the Bible as a prediction of what was to come in my lifetime. The Bible was effectively being written for Christians alive in my generation (even though generations past had been told much the same thing).

Scholars who are open to perusing other religious materials and historical documents of the time can offer a better perspective of the Bible and its stories. Instead of being bound by a need (or a requirement by some seminaries) to hold the Bible to a particular interpretation before studying it, some scholarship is open to considering many interpretations and sources to come to a conclusion. Additionally, what is refreshing about this more open kind of scholarship is the willingness to change interpretations when new evidence presents itself, such as when a new document or artifact is found or a new PhD graduate presents an iteration on a pre-existing historical position.

The Bible had long begun to feel disconnected from my personal life in the application-based mindset I had for many years. The stories in the Bible felt written as object lessons, closer to fables than anything related to history. The bits of advice or suggested actions almost seemed like magic spells I could cast to have an all-powerful deity be bound to do my bidding. I exaggerate, but I think you might understand my meaning: some people think certain prayers or certain ways of praying might lead to greater success; some think fasting will get God’s attention; some feel that suffering is the key to answered prayer. These all seem like superstitions, but they were part of my culture and I couldn’t make sense of them. I didn’t understand how this could apply to my modern life.

Scholarship has made the Bible exciting again, enriching it with life and historical foundations that I couldn’t find before. History is alive within the text in ways I never knew before. Long-confusing lines of text in the Old Testament finally makes sense in the context of other contemporary kingdoms and religions. Prophetic text that felt unmoored from reality became firmly grounded in a specific era and situation. And all of this has been thrilling to learn in ways I haven’t felt in a long time, perhaps ever.

This short video offers an example of the breadth of knowledge available online from critical scholarship. There is so much out there available for free in a way that feels unprecedented. The internet has plenty of problem areas and has done much to harm society, but at the same time good information has never been more available to the public.

Religion for Breakfast

Was Nero the Antichrist? (And Why Early Christians Thought He’d Rise Again)

Nero died in 68 CE—or did he? Meet the impostors, rumors, and apocalyptic traditions that convinced many he would return, shaping the meaning of 666 and the Beast in Revelation.

I made my first website on Tripod, cataloging all the various GIFs of Star Trek: The Next Generation I could find while abusing my visitors via the tag. As I got older I became very interested in the user interfaces of websites, but I was almost equally fascinated by the semantics of the web and earning my Valid HTML and Valid XHTML badges from the WorldWideWeb Consortium. I grew my website into a hand-edited blog that emulated a database-driven site but lacked any such features, requiring me to manually change multiple pages with each new post. My first corporate job was working primarily on the content for a website, but I continued to learn how to make CSS improvements and tweak whatever limited access I had to the HTML. This lack of ability and lack of opportunity carried over to different roles at different companies until I landed at my current employer who allowed me to learn web development on the job and transition over from solely a web designer into a front-end web developer on a Next.js project.

Over the entirety of my time in web design and development I have maintained an interest in the quality and structure of my code, even when my knowledge was fairly limited. In fact, I think it was because I didn’t know much about JavaScript that I spent so much time learning HTML and CSS. Other developers seemed to downplay the importance of CSS and HTML in an effort to comprehend the far more complex JavaScript and its various frameworks. I understood the reasoning but I disagreed with the choice, as I found they were missing many opportunities for optimization and readability in the more basic field I was choosing.

Now LLM usage is even making the harder languages less interesting to developers who seem eager to bring about the end of the majority of their hands-on coding, threatening the credibility and interesting elements of the field for all developers. My history of obsessing over HTML semantics, fretting about accessibility, endlessly tweaking my CSS files, and building pages by hand and loving it is now being placed in the category of tasks so tiresome that a computer must consume them all. It saddens me to see developers devalue the elements of the job that make the work important to me. It’s frustrating that it took me so long to finally get into this field only to have developers start talking about moving beyond coding to learning how to talk to make requests to a chat bot.

Is it FOMO driving this push to LLM usage? Are the developers in these large companies worried that they’ll be replaced if they too don’t start using LLMs for coding? The businesses making cuts to their staffing are citing LLMs as the reason, but they’ve tended to make extreme cuts on a fairly regular basis to boost stock prices and fake out the markets. Reports seem to indicate that like many other parts of the LLM takeover of businesses, the actual loss of jobs has been overstated and distorted, and the actual productivity impact of LLMs have been less than reported. I guess that’s a small comfort for me, but the effects of LLM use feel far greater than just potential job loss: rather, it’s the loss of credibility and value in the job itself. I’m proud of my job and hate to see it lessened by my colleagues for what seems like short-term goals.

I don’t like the zealotry surrounding the affair, but if I was going to have to pick a side, I’ll stick with the creators.

As I get older I realize how much I prefer opinionated news over the detached method that keeps writers out of the stories. I don’t want to have journalists creating the news but I also want to see or read them reacting to it. I don’t want them to only share the information they’ve gathered but rather to share their reasoning and conclusions. The idea of removing one’s bias from reporting seems impossible to me, so far better to admit it, in my opinion.

Here’s the kind of difference that grates on me:

Fact Checker — The Washington Post

In four years, President Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims

The Fact Checker’s database of the false or misleading claims made by President Trump while in office.

I appreciate that The Washington Post took this time to build this database — but do you know what would make me even happier? Just say Trump lied. Back in 2021, plenty of news agencies seemed unwilling to admit this truth and seemed to depend on various opinion posts to do the majority of the work for them. With the second term now underway, more mainstream news organizations seem open to finally just say what is obvious to so many common people: Donald Trump is a liar.

Daniel Dale — CNN

Analysis: Donald Trump’s top 25 lies of 2025

Just like his first presidency, President Donald Trump’s first calendar year back in the White House was an unceasing parade of lies. In 2025, though, the variety of Trump’s false claims shrunk even as he maintained his trademark staggering frequency.

Isn’t that far more refreshing? No pretense.

That boldness and brashness is what I prefer in other areas of commentary, such as movie reviews. This is why the review I read about Avatar: Fire and Ash was one of the most impressive reviews I’ve read in a while.

Walter Chaw — Film Freak Central

Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025)

When I first got all up in my feelings reviewing Avatar sixteen years ago, much of the hate mail accused me of imagining that Cameron was retelling the Native American genocide with Lakota Sioux who “fought harder.” Then he confirmed it.

…

Whenever we Americans recognize a horrible truth about ourselves, we say it’s not like us, and I have to say: I agree, it’s not like us. It is us. Not the fact of Avatar, but that Avatar rakes in a billion dollars every time a new one comes out. Imagine an unbelievably paternalistic rollercoaster that makes you feel less racist for a few hours. If you build it, they will come.

I feel the same thing about people in history. There’s something about my brain that doesn’t find it worthwhile to offer greater respect to people in positions of power or to find those positions as inherently more valuable than others. The output of that position might make it more useful and the person might be individually more moral than others, but the position itself doesn’t lend that person any additional credibility. In fact, I often find myself far more critical and skeptical of those in power and I think it’s a better position to take over credulity and trust.

I don’t just point this view towards things that I don’t care about: while Avatar means little to me, Star Trek shaped my childhood in a variety of ways, yet it too has become obviously dated and hard for me to recommend even within my own lifetime. It’s sad because of how much the show meant to me, but it’s encouraging because the basic idea of Star Trek is alive in us if we’re constantly progressing in our cultural standards and find old series in the franchise falling behind.

Jessie Gender

Why Tech Fascists Keep Reading Star Trek Wrong

What happens when Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman watch Star Trek and somehow think it’s about them?

Once we can get over our hero worship we can start properly looking at the world. We can’t ever expect to get better if we prevent change. I am shocked when people bristle at criticism of generations past or the history of the United States, as if we should in our understanding of older cultures ignore the obvious flaws in their ideals or their regressive views as compared to today. It’s integral to any conversation to keep these flaws in constant view so as to not repeat their mistakes. To begin to see them as anything but intensely flawed people is to ignore history and to endanger our future. I deeply hope that each successive generation after mine sees me as a little less progressive than them — a little less refined a person than the younger generations. If I seem the same — or worse, even better — then our society is in trouble.

In other words, just say Donald Trump is a liar.

My full-time job is working as a front-end web developer for a Next.js project. I’ve been working on the project for close to four years now. If I were able to be the framework choice-maker for the company’s next big project, I would choose anything but Next.js.

Dominik Meca

Next.js Is Infuriating

I don’t know. For me, personally, I don’t want to use Next.js anymore. You might think that this is just a singular issue and I’m overreacting. But there’s bugs and edge cases around every corner. How did they manage to make TypeScript compile slower than Rust? Why make a distinction between code running on client and server and then not give me any tools to take advantage of that? Why? Why? Why?

clover caruso — paper clover

One Year with Next.js App Router — Why We’re Moving On

As I’ve been using Next.js professionally on my employer’s web app, I find the core design of their App Router and React Server Components (RSC) to be extremely frustrating. And it’s not small bugs or that the API is confusing, but large disagreements about the fundamental design decisions that Vercel and the React team made when building it.

Harshal Patil — Medium

Why Next.js Falls Short on Software Engineering

I have reservations against using or recommending Next.js as a general purpose framework for React projects. If I do so, then I feel I am not doing justice to software architecture. I wrote about my challenges 3–4 years ago after adopting it for many products.

What I’ve come across with Next.js is the carelessness when it comes to stability and iterative progress, like the tendency to use React canary code in “stable” releases, that sudden switch to a half-baked app router, the lack of basic web standard support, and a focus on supporting their own infrastructure to the detriment of other hosted options. Vercel’s choices feel hostile to the open source community. Next.js feel fundamentally dated by the choices made by React. React probably made a lot of sense when it was first made; I’ve heard enough horror stories of working on the native DOM to know that I probably would’ve welcomed the idea of React when it first premiered. But in practice I feel like React is just too big for most projects and unnecessarily complex for basic interactivity on a page; it feels like I’m having to worry about both the real DOM and the virtual DOM, especially with the way React Server Components work.

Mayank

React Server Components: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I debated not publishing this post because of the way the React community has historically handled criticism. It is only recently that I decided it is important to share my thoughts, especially after seeing that much of the existing criticism is either not well-documented or stems from unfamiliarity.

For most projects I think Next.js would not be my first or even second choice. I think smaller and simpler frameworks or tools are a better fit for most projects; few of us really need the type of system that Meta needs for Facebook. Most of the ex-Next.js users seem to be pushing for Vite and Tanstack; I just want something that isn’t Next.js.

Modern-day attempts to reach a consensus on the Bible’s many mysteries just spin off new religions or new denominations. The core Christian community remains moored in its history with a text largely sealed from edits. The Christian Bible clearly needs a new New Testament, another addition that conclusively provides the answers sought and debated for centuries.

🐣 Continue reading “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”

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”

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?”