I bought a Teenage Engineering K.O. II

Maybe I’m late to this, but it seems as if maybe America has never been the great country its history books has proclaimed it to be. In fact, we might even be the villain of the story. No wonder so many men in the United States think about Rome regularly: we might be its next iteration.

Moon Channel

Ka-Pow: America, Propaganda, and the Illusion of Soft Power

The United States is the best at soft power. Everyone’s wearing our blue jeans and listening to our rock music. America is the envy of the world: all other nations wish they were us, and we are happy to share our glory and superior way of life with them. That’s why everyone loves us.

Right?

Or is there something more to that notion? What comes first, the soft power influence, or the hard power coercion? Can speaking softly work without the threat (and gratuitous use) of the big stick? Let’s find out together.

Benn Jordan

The Richest Country Is Pretty Mid Now

“Leveragism” is a term I made up, and it describes what the American economy is increasingly heading towards. As you will see, this is really bad news.

PBS Origins

How America’s Foundation was Built on Propaganda

What is the true meaning of the 4th of July and American independence? This special episode of A People’s History of Native America argues that the 4th of July’s roots are further from patriotism and closer to propaganda. Rather than independence, this day represents the centuries-long seizure and ethnic cleansing of Native American land. By looking at the history surrounding the American Revolution, we will uncover that Native Americans were an unexpected threat to the founders’ vision for their future country and plans for Westward expansion.

A People’s History of Native America explores the current social climate in Native America and the factors that have shaped contemporary circumstances.

Laugh and learn with comedian Tai Leclaire and experts as they chronicle the accurate history with humor and brevity.

A People’s History of Native America is proudly brought to you by Mahebe Media.

Tom Nicholas

Capitalism is Dead. This is What Comes Next.

Capitalism is dead. Killed by its own biggest fans. That’s the thesis of economist and author Yanis Varoufakis. In his book Technofeudalism, he argues that markets and profits have been replaced by digital fiefdoms and economic rents.

I met up with Yanis while he was in London promoting his new book Raise Your Soul to ask him about the cloudalists, Trump 2.0, and how to survive in a world which appears to be ever lurching to the right.

I’ve only made it about an hour into this documentary and it is already a highlight of 2026 for me. This is an incredibly well-documented history of Creationism throughout written history and I think it’s important for people — Christian and non-Christian — to watch.

Gutsick Gibbon

DARWINIANA | How Science and Religion Killed Creationism

Why did fire-erupted lands arrive?
Why did murderous animals survive?
Why did we deserve to be revived?
Why was any and everything alive?

On Tuesday, the “Oklahoma Standard” presented by the voters carried a stark contrast to the initiative’s propaganda: when challenged to have empathy and consideration for their fellow citizens, those who even bothered to vote made a majority decision to hide behind technicalities and equivocations to avoid the discomfort of thinking about anyone but themselves. For a state inundated with Christianity, they sure seem to care very little about Jesus’ command to help the poor and needy. Such cowardice and hypocrisy.

I have a growing collection of books about Christianity in my personal library. These books are not devotionals, commentaries, or other theological pondering from seminary graduates: my shelf is filled with the folks who are willing to ask actual questions and provide unflinching answers about the Bible that wouldn’t ever be likely published by the Zondervans or Thomas Nelsons.

📚 Continue reading “My library should just be for me”

There was a time early in the AI usage increase that I struggled to find articles from writers who were speaking out against LLMs, so I collected as many as I could and saved them for the moments where I needed to share some of my reasoning for finding prolific AI use so troubling. But now in early 2026 I find myself overwhelmed: I can’t keep up with the newsletter posts, industry experts, or the artists loudly condemning AI use. An ever-increasing anti-AI sentiment is brewing amongst the people creating the content we see on the web and I am so happy to see it. We desperately need to retain our humanity.

The trouble with seeking answers from the Christian apologetic community is that their source of truth is confined to their denomination, seminary, or faith. They can’t extend beyond that frame of reference without risking the branding of “heretic.” They are just as much a victim as they are a perpetrator of their narrow-mindedness.

🧐 Continue reading “Why does “objective truth” require deception?”

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.