DarkWyrm Unabridged

I love to write sometimes. It's why back when I was part of the Haiku project that I kept a blog . It was a great way to publish news about my misadventures, but it also was specific to coding for BeOS and Haiku and not so much on other things. That's what this blog was for: the runoff of my brain on anything random. Nowadays my favorite place is Mastodon , but it's not great for anything long form. So that's why I'm here again, more than a decade after my last post. It's still here, and so am I. What will you find here? Longer programming stuff, Linux, rants, brain dumps, probably situationally-useful tips, and stuff about Christianity. If you're not someone who believes, you might find the stuff I write about it actually interesting or at least different--I have spent my life as an exception to the rule, one who uses his brain and still thinks there's a God and that He's worth following. Politically I lean center and find both lots of things in c...

One thing I seem to come across more and more as I go about my daily business is the number of times people say that faith in God is crazy or senseless. I am very much a geek. I also loved the philosophy class that I took in college. Couple with that the fact that I fall under the Myers-Briggs INTJ personality classification, and you definitely get the idea that I'm both an intellectual and not one to just blindly put my trust in anything, let alone something I can't see. The Christian faith is something that is reasonable, not the realm of blithering idiots. God loves us all more than is imaginable, but He wants us to choose Him. I don't know about you, but if everyone somehow knew for certain that He exists, there would be a huge number of people who'd follow Christ just for "fire insurance." Faith could be put into the realm of playing make-believe without some form of evidence. If I were in His position, I'd sure put in enough signs to point to me b...

It's been quite a while since I last gave a peek into my life more than just a quick sentence or two on a certain well-known social networking site (which shall remain nameless here). At school, I have two bulletin boards in my classroom which I have to update each month. One of the two that I put together for November is entitled "How BIG is God?" Of course, any time that someone mentions God out in the general public the radar of those within hearing goes on alert. Religion, as most would call it, is a controversial subject and, like politics, everyone has some sort opinion on it. If you ask many people of their opinion on God, you typically get answers ranging from "I don't think he exists" to the Deists' Clockmaker God and all sorts of other things, but it's not often that you come across someone who has an answer that really conveys who He really is. The CCM artist Chris Tomlin popularized the song, "Indescribable." The God of the ...

Early this summer I bought my almost 5-year-old son the game Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga for the PC. Aside from a bug, which prevented me from completing one puzzle in the game, it's a great game. Expecting the same experience, when my mom asked for recommendations for gifts for him, one of those that I mentioned was Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures. She got it for him and since then, I've been playing it, off and on, for a little while. I now refuse to play it because of multiple infuratingly bad experiences. The cause? Bugs in the game. Two years later, there are NO patches for any of them or the one well-known bug in Lego Star Wars. In playing through five levels of Raiders of the Lost Ark, I have found three different bugs which put the game in a state where the only option is to bail out of the level, losing all progress. One of those bugs is 75% of the way through the level. It's both pathetic, indicative of bad QA, and totally, utterly inexcusable. I...

Apparently the folks over at Westboro Baptist Church have had another incident, this time at Comic-Con . I vaguely remembered seeing its protesting in the news some time ago and was intrigued when I saw the post about this on Slashdot. When I read the article about Comic-Con, I was both amused and saddened. There are a wealth of things I could say at this point, but nothing would put it as succinctly as saying that this is a great example of people -- I'm not sure they can be called Christians -- acting in a very un-Christian way. If even half of the information on the Wikipedia article about WBC is to be believed, I have to question their motives, let alone their theology. Their actions give proper Christians a bad name, no, a very bad name. As if Christians needed to do more to be disliked / hated. Most American Christians have no idea how good they have it. Read through some of the entries over at Christian Persecution India . These are real events happening around the worl...

Until this season I've been a Johnny-come-lately fan of the show. The last couple of seasons of SYTYCD have been really good. I'm a big fan of fine arts, and the show isn't really any different. It seems, though, that this one has been pretty unexciting. In fact, it's been downright predictable or otherwise disappointing for the most part. A "tribal" routine almost every other week. The token weird Sonya routine. Two competitors have been injured. The whole "all-stars" concept -- 10 competitors instead of 20, dancing with top-10 dancers from previous seasons -- it seems like such a lame attempt at a ratings grab. I hope this is the last season. It would be a shame for such a great series to grow sickly and die because it had been overdone time and again.