Considered Harmful

I now understand that there are so many kinds of errors, we cannot stamp them out by systematically eliminating everything that might be considered harmful. I now understand enough about my propensity to err that I can accept it as a fact of life; I now can be convinced more easily of my fallicy when I have made a mistake. Indeed, I now strive energetically to find faults in my own work, even though it would be much easier to look for assurances that everything is OK. I now look forward to making (and correcting) hundreds of future errors as I write[.]

—Donald Knuth, Literate Programming

This is straight-up blogging, amateur prose written quickly and with neither guiding stricture nor sober editing. I am going to tell it like it is, right from the heart.

—Paul Ford, Rotary Dial

Many [view] blogging as civic engagement for themselves and their readers. As a practice of critical thinking, blogging provides the space for writers to work through ideas before the polish. It affords an enclave to challenge ideas and arguments before the work is complete.

—Catherine Knight Steele, Digital Black Feminism

The one who got away

30 Aug 2025

I was at a party talking about the “ones who got away” with some folks, and I mentioned that I’d had a weekend with a girl I’d dated and now wasn’t seen but for whom I still had feelings. Then in a different context I mentioned that I keep a blog, and I was asked whether I blogged about this missed connection. I was embarrassed to say I hadn’t, so I’m going to change that.

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Tags: Personal

Travel check-in

12 Aug 2025

It’s been one hundred and thirty-four days since I left Chicago, and I haven’t blogged once in that whole time. Sucks to suck, I guess. I’ve had other stuff going on. In brief, my itinerary has been: Denmark, Thailand, Japan, France, Belgium, USA, Canada, USA again, Scotland (now), and then France again and back to the USA. Then maybe Brazil before a longer stint in the USA for a 200-hour yoga teacher training in San Francisco, which really is a delightful city.

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Tags: personal travel

Here we go again

20 Mar 2025

So here we are once again. I guess it’s terminally online of me to immediately turn to the internet to say what I’ve got to say. The blog is strangely public and private at the same time. I’m not sure why it feels so natural, but it does. I know I don’t write at the level of some people: for example, I learned in a previous post about Sara Ahmed’s blog feminist killjoys, where she says far more interesting things than I do. I’m just working through my feelings, I guess. A semi-public private kind of life.

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Tags: personal travel

Move-out check-in

06 Feb 2025

I’m moving out of the apartment that I moved in to almost two and a half years ago. This is the longest I’ve ever stayed in one flat. I was in my college apartments each less than a year, then in the place in Bologna for a couple months. The only places I’ve stayed for a longer time were the three houses I lived in with my mom.

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Tags: Personal

Reading notes for the near future

03 Feb 2025
Tags: commentary
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Considered Harmful by Preston Firestone is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.