Quick bits:

• This is the shortest week­notes entry in a long time. Curious!

• I’ve been working on putting together a pedant’s guide to punctuation. I’d like to have that so that I can refer other people to it. I care about punctuation, see. It might get a little big; punctuation is a surprisingly large topic.

• My Belgian bank account is no longer free, it turns out. It’s €2 per month now. As I’m no longer using it, I’ve requested it to be canceled.

• I pushed a new version of my Solitaire game. This one adds a fun new game mode —  mom-approved!

• Gremlins! On macOS, I couldn’t open aliases anymore. Any alias just opened up home folder instead. After a bit of research, I found that the sidebar of the macOS Finder needs to have the Documents folder in it for aliases to work. Wild.¹¹1 How does one report bugs in Apple software anyway? I’ve never bothered to find out. 

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Shower thoughts:

• If you want your baby to go fast, you need to give it not baby formula, but baby formula 1.

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I have a new bike helmet. My old helmet was well beyond its expected life cycle, and had certainly seen enough action. Given my recent bad luck with biking, it seemed prudent to protect myself appropriately.

The other day, a car cut in front of me from the left, onto the bike lane I was cycling on, overtaking the stopped car ahead from the right, and running the red light.

Behold my shitty illustration:

I have seen some bad traffic infractions in Berlin, but this is one was exceptional.

Next on the shopping list: front- and rear cameras, so that I can document this kind of shit that happens to me and around me.

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I’m drafting a solo stage play. I’m not going to reveal much about it just yet, out of fear of jinxing it.

Until very recently, I had not thought of a solo play being remotely in the area of possibility. But… why not?

I will benefit, in many ways, from my experience as a public speaker. I’ve grown quite bored of regular public speaking, so moving towards a solo play is, in my mind, a step in a logical direction. A solo play is a bit like public speaking, but much weirder.

What attracts me so much to the idea of a one-man stage play is that I’ll have a great deal of control, and I won’t have many dependencies on other people — much less than a regular stage play, at least.

Still, because I’m working on this huge project all by myself, this project will take a long time to complete. Two years, one person suggested. That’s a lot, but I’d be doing the writing, the staging, a good amount of the production design, and so on — and I’m writing it for myself in the lead²²2 Lead, and only role — unless I change my mind and get other actors involved. I’m still open to that idea.  role, of course, so there’s the training and rehearsing on top of all that.

The biggest risk is losing motivation or being distracted and giving up on it. That risk, given my history in writing projects, is very real. And even though this will be a laborious project, the rewards will be great: if I pull this off, it’ll be a great calling card for me as a writer and as an actor.

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Entertainment:

• The Falling³³3 The Falling, written and directed by Carol Morley (Cannon and Morley Productions, Independent Entertainment, BBC Film, 2015).  is delightfully weird and touching.

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Toots and tweets:

• mhoye on converting miles to kilometers with the Fibonacci sequence

Links:

• TikTok Triptych (Russell Davies)

• How good is Advantage in D&D? (Joseph Newton): I have wondered about that as well, and I’m glad I have a mathematical answer to that question now.

• Winners of the 2024 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (Kottke): Those are excellent opening lines.

• Door closers: ubiquitous, yet unloved and often maladjusted (Technology Connections): I am reminded of one of my worst workplaces, where, to prevent slamming, a fire door was consistently propped open… with a fire extinguisher.