John R. Beckett
Welcome to my personal site. I wanted a place to share things that interest me. Like a lot of people, I've been working with AI lately, both professionally and in my downtime. Here you'll find some projects I've worked on. Obviously, a lot of AI was involved.
Professionally, I serve as Director of Digital Media Technologies for the Seventh-day Adventist Church. I work with a lot of talented technical and communication people, and I enjoy combining those two sides of the work every day.
Orbit Angel
A pixel-art game about circling the earth with a message from Revelation 14. A Mac screensaver is also available.
Luna Mothia
An interactive artwork of giant moths and a moonlit landscape, also a free Mac screensaver.
Dirt and Breath
Short biblical fiction, told by the people who were there.
Wallpapers
A small series of desktop wallpapers.
Integrity
Cloud makes the case that integrity isn't just honesty, it's whether all the parts of a person actually hold together under pressure. Without it, people either stall out short of their potential, hit a wall they can't get past, or succeed just long enough to watch it collapse. A useful lens for judging character today, when it's easy to mistake talent or charisma for the real thing.
Don't Make Me Think
Good design doesn't have to be complicated. A project with a small budget can still give people a great experience by paying attention to what they need. Professional usability testing is expensive and slow; simple methods get you most of the way there.
Age of Propaganda
The authors pair the history of propaganda with modern social science to show that persuasion is everywhere: campaign strategists, marketers, and even cult recruiters all use the same emotional triggers instead of solid facts. Many propaganda tactics we see today are unethical, but very effective, and social media makes them easier now than ever before.
Messiah: A Contemporary Adaptation of the Classic Work on Jesus' Life, the Desire of Ages
Thomas takes Ellen White's nineteenth-century classic on the life of Jesus and rewrites it in plain modern English, without losing the original's point that the cross only makes sense against a much bigger story about God's character. One of the clearer accounts of why the Gospels matter, not just what happens in them.
NLT Study Bible
This edition pairs the New Living Translation, built to read in plain contemporary English rather than word for word, with tens of thousands of study notes, maps, and background articles from a large team of scholars. It's built for reading Scripture in context, not just quoting verses out of it. I enjoy how the NLT translation brings Scripture to life in modern English.
Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks
Shapiro, a Yale law professor, tells the story of five real hacks, including the grad student whose accidental worm crashed the early internet, to make the case that our security problems are less about broken code and more about the human and institutional habits that keep writing insecure code in the first place. It reads like a set of true crime stories, but the point underneath is the sobering part. Relevant to anyone who assumes hacking is mostly a technical problem rather than a people problem.
Boundaries
Cloud and Townsend make the case that healthy limits on your time, your emotions, and what you'll tolerate from others aren't selfish. They're what make real love and responsibility possible, since saying no at the right time matters as much as saying yes. Worth reading in a culture that swings between having no boundaries at all and using boundaries as an excuse to disengage from everyone.
Measure What Matters
My biggest takeaway: in an age of measurement and analytics, we have to make sure our measurements actually push a project toward outcomes worth having. People can and do learn to chase the number instead of the thing the number was supposed to represent. I believe in numbers and measurement, but a team chasing a number instead of real value can go wrong fast.
Ecology of the Planted Aquarium
I love aquariums. This book describes how building with a capped soil substrate can achieve a beautiful low maintenance setup. I've personally just started a 72 gallon tank with soil and a pond filter sand cap. Washing the soil to get out as much woody inclusions was a real pain, but the substrate was inexpensive and my plants are growing like crazy. Currently it's running a big canister filter too though. One tip: my water went really acidic, so I used a little baking soda to bring it down some, then coral gravel in the canister filter. All is good now, zero ammonia, nitrates, nitrites and PH a smidge alkaline. Other tanks I've used aquarium soil under a thin gravel cap and been very happy.
Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World
Vaillant reconstructs the 2016 wildfire that forced the evacuation of an entire Canadian oil town, then widens out to explain why fires like it are becoming normal rather than freakish. It reads like a disaster thriller, but the science underneath it is the actual point. A hard book to read as purely historical once you notice how much of it describes conditions that are only getting more common.
In the Eye of the Storm
Lucado walks through one day, recorded in all four gospels, when Jesus grieved a friend's death, got mobbed by crowds he was trying to avoid, fed thousands of them anyway, then spent that same night calming a storm and pulling a doubting Peter back into the boat. The point isn't a history lesson, it's that whatever a hard day looks like for you, there's already a version of it in his. A grounding read for anyone convinced their worst days put them further from God rather than closer.
Guns, Germs, and Steel
An excellent explanation of how geography decided which peoples got domesticable plants and animals first, and how that early advantage in food surpluses and dense societies led to technology, disease immunity, and the global power we still see today.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid
I love the illustrations and humor of Jeff Kinney. Very funny and clever.
Micro
Grad students from a Cambridge biotech program get shrunk down to insect size in a Hawaiian rainforest, where they're hunted by both the wildlife (now monstrous at that scale) and the company that put them there. Crichton left it unfinished at his death; Richard Preston completed it from his notes. Like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, but as an adult novel.
Influence: Science and Practice
Cialdini spent years working in sales, fundraising, and marketing to learn firsthand how people get talked into saying yes. His central point is that when we're too overloaded to think through every decision carefully, we use automatic mental shortcuts, and that gap is exactly what these tactics are built to exploit. Recognizing the pattern is the best defense against it.
Super Gut
William Davis' book about the gut biome helped me tremendously. I was having serious challenges with night reflux, even taking some meds for it. The yogurt I made for myself after reading the book fixed it. No more meds or night reflux. I've posted the recipe and Amazon links to what I used.
The Complete Chronicles of Narnia
All seven Narnia books in one volume, following children who stumble into a world of talking animals, ancient prophecy, and a hidden thread about sacrifice and redemption running underneath the adventure.
The Bees: A Novel
Paull imagines a beehive as a rigid, almost totalitarian society, then follows one worker bee born into its lowest caste who turns out to be capable of far more than her role allows.