Weeknotes 2024 W33: Banana equivalent doses

August 12​–​18, 2024
1100 words

Quick bits:

There are few things that are as upsetting as cyclists overtaking from the right. This is unfortunately commonplace in Berlin, despite it violating the traffic rules.

The other day, a cyclist coming from behind me on the right pushed me out of the way, nearly causing me to fall, and when I yelled “watch out” they responded angrily with “no, you watch out.”

The majority of cyclists in Berlin apparently neither know the traffic rules nor care to follow them.

Ahh, gremlins. The other day, I could no longer open Firefox. It didn’t crash on opening; it just failed to open.

The Console showed the error message “org.mozilla.firefox is not linked enabled,” which — grammatical weirdness aside — is a message that I have never seen before, and neither has apparently anyone else: the search term “is not linked enabled” has exactly one Google result, and not even a relevant one at that.

Reinstalling Firefox did not help, but restarting my laptop (a M2 MacBook Air) did.

This isn’t the first time that I had an error that apparently nobody else has had before. Two years ago, I had hard drive corruption issues that seemingly nobody else had experienced.

Following up on the banana story from last week, Tom pointed out that since bananas naturally contain trace amounts of Potassium-40, eating large amounts of bananas not only puts you at risk for hyperkalemia, but also radiation poisoning.

Fortunately, the banana equivalent dose (BED) is so small that consuming even large amounts of bananas won’t create a radiation problem, and neither will it lead to problematic hyperkalemia.

Bananas are safe, folks! Remember to eat fruit and stay hydrated. Y’all matter.

I have identified three reasons why I struggle with fiction writing:

  1. The fear of failure. The idea of spending a good amount of time and effort on something, and it at the end being “not good enough,” is terrifying to me. In general, I struggle with doing something without knowing that the outcome will be good.

  2. Perfectionism. I have started many, many stories, and given up on almost all of them, because I simply don’t think they are good enough. My stab at the Alphabet Superset was an attempt to combat this; I pumped out a handful of stories without planning or thinking too much. But now that I’ve gotten better at fiction writing, I’ve inadvertently raised the bar for myself, and the perfectionism is back in full force.

  3. I don’t know what I want to write. Plenty of the stories that I read, from a variety of authors, I simply don’t like all that much. I am picky, and the judgement I cast on books that I’ve read, I also cast on my own work.

All these three points are closely related, and might even have the same underlying cause. I don’t know how to combat this.

Fiction writing? More like, erm, friction writing, ahahaha.

Entertainment:

Links:

AI links:

Tech links:

  1. Mysterious Skin, directed by Gregg Araki, written by Gregg Araki and Scott Heim (Antidote Films (I), Desperate Pictures, Fortissimo Films, 2005). ↩︎

  2. Night on Earth, written and directed by Jim Jarmusch (JVC Entertainment Networks, Victor Company of Japan (JVC), Victor Musical Industries, 1991). ↩︎

  3. The Zachtronics Solitaire Collection (Zachtronics, 2022), published by Zachtronics. ↩︎

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