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
Help me
I don’t think I can look at computers as a source of leisure right now. Even this is an addiction: it’s like a narcotic. I just read Avital Ronnell’s Crack Wars. She’s a sexual assaulter whose career was ruined by her actions. My space bar is sticky. Right now there’s a lot of friction when I use computers, and I don’t know anymore how to do simple things, or have to think carefully about them.
(...)Happy birthday
Apocalypse vibes
The word apocalypse comes, via Latin, from the Greek word apokalyptein, “uncover, disclose, reveal,” itself a compound word made up of apo-, “off, away from,” and kalyptein, “to cover, conceal.”
(...)Post from the grave
It’s been quite a while since I’ve written a post here. I have been tinkering around with concepts for redoing the site, but for now I am mostly happy with the way this works. Of course the appearance isn’t great, but that can be fixed with some CSS, once the underlying HTML is doing what I want it to do.
(...)Letter to my father and step-mother I will never send
Hello Papa and [step-mother],
(...)Addiction considered harmful?
So it’s become clear that there exists a class of applications whose purpose is to be addictive. Their profit model is advertisements, and the number of advertisements the user sees is a function of how much the user uses the application. So perhaps “addiction” isn’t really the best word: it implies to me that it is difficult to quit a substance, but not necessarily that the amount of time spent using the substance increases. I want to particularly focus on the goal of maximizing the time spent using, for which “addiction” is a good enough term.
(...)Rejection is not expulsion.
Expulsion means being removed from a community. When the community expels you it sets itself as a unit against you, who are stuck apart from the remaining community and separated from as it if by a barrier.
(...)All art is advertising.
“Art” properly speaking is an advertisement for itself.
Ocracoke
That night was the first full moon after Analise and I fell in love. It was the summer after the last year of high school, and it was hot. We lived on a small island called Wocomac, a sand bar east of the mainland, held together by trees. On the inland, west side there’s a sound full of good fish; on the ocean, east side there’s the gulf stream. The sands gather on the shelf at the edge of the continent. Where grasses and bushes and trees take hold they keep a bunch of sand together long enough for it to become an island.
(...)