My favorite photos

After having so much fun making a mini site for the Constellation Browser version of the site for the Panic Playdate I decided to make one for the application Hopper. My Gemini capsule is now up at gemini://dhepworth.smol.pub and the Gopher version is up at gopher://smol.pub/1/dhepworth, but you can see the capsule in your web browser at https://dhepworth.smol.pub.

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Scholars who are open to perusing other religious materials and historical documents of the time can offer a better perspective of the Bible and its stories.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.