The Striven Word

Striving to break through the barriers that hinder us from bringing ideas into the light of reality

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Original Poem #1, Walking the Shadows

Cover illustration by grandfailure, licensed from Adobe Stock. Cover design made using Adobe Photo.

I WAS NEVER YOUR GOD, AND YOU WERE NEVER ALONE.

Read.

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Golden's Diner in downtown Utica (OC)

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The Price of Writing Right, published on Medium as well as on my GitHub Pages blog Image design made with Affinity Photo, using stock photography from @vectorfusionart.

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A Plague Tale: Innocence uses aesthetics associated with virtue and pro-cultural values to tell an endearing story in detailed and contemporaneously relevant historical environment. Read the full review. (This cover design was made with Affinity Photo from a screenshot made with Photo Mode.)

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Inspired by the reformer Jean Calvin's coat of arms, which depicted a hand holding a heart to represent the concept of the the divine will controlling the human will. To me, it means perseverence, the hope that I will not give up because God will not give up on me.

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An infographic depicting in parallel the processes of human meaning-making (on the right) compared to digital deep learning (on the left). Made with Affinity Designer.

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Made in Affinity design for the best person I know.

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An illustration of the emergency medical decision making process, using stock imagery. It was created using Affinity Designer.

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Blog post about being an awkward ex-homeschooler student while reading The Wheel of Time. I've now moved on to the Affinity Suite for Mac for graphic design.

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"Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the Kingdom." - Luke 12:32 (NRSV)

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Flyer for a computer literacy program I will be teaching. It was designed using Microsoft Publisher, with the vector art placed between the date and the time being made using Inkscape.

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Flyer for a local library program I taught, designed using GIMP.

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The only way that humans can relate to reality is through meaning, so that existence cannot be analyzed without recourse to necessary meaning. The precedence of Necessary Meaning may be an impression of the transcendent Word. Meaning takes many forms -- from the most granular phonemes of languages to high mythologies to contemporary subcultures -- all of which are created by humans as they exercise this unique divine power as sub-creators of the only reality that they can authentically speak of experiencing. The ultimate result of this sub-creation is a complicated and jumbled system of meanings and connections between ideas that becomes more important and more determinative than objective reality, to the point of making objective reality obsolete. As a subject of knowledge in its own right, the system of meanings reflects itself. It becomes a simulation of the original human creativity that had brought it into being, and makes it harder for genuine sub-creation to continue, since humans are no longer free to project new creative meaning onto their experiences without remixing parts from the Simulation. Inevitably stuck staring into the distorted mirror, humans struggle to see the transcendent Meaning that is necessarily present even in the most convoluted parts of the Simulation. The transcendent Word is incarnate within the base elements of human experience -- perhaps in many ways -- but crucially through the objective historic life of Jesus Christ. Appropriating and expressing the Word objectively manifested to them, humans renew their sub-creations by perceiving experience anew. So renewed, humans continually work to renew the Simulation by returning to the original bases for description that built the meaning in the first place. Incapable of directly manifesting the Necessary Meaning in objective experience and always drawn away by the dark mirror of their own disassociated semantics -- which comes to reflect and eventually to simulate even sincere efforts to express the Word -- humans of the Word embark on a continual quest to find the relevance of the Necessary Meaning to every reflection and description, always redirecting the meanings that they are always creating back toward Necessary Meaning and away from the inevitable pull of the Simulation. From within the semantics of the Simulation, this reorientation effort is inevitably doomed. Only brief, subjective glimpses of Necessary Meaning can be apprehended, and the Simulation is capable of incorporating even those glimpses even very shortly after they are perceived, causing them to lose most of their power. However, humans of the Word hope and believe in the eventual unification of Necessary Meaning with human meaning, wrought not by humans' self-defeating attempts to express it but by the transcendent Word choosing to use humanity with all of its systems and simulations to become expressed.

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My current personal logo is descended by many iterations from my pixel sword forum avatar, which I originally made in Microsoft Paint years ago. This version was vectorized using Inkscape.