2020.May.Watched

Here’s what I watched in May. Yeah, May. (More recent updates coming; I’m slow.)

2007 NBA Finals, Game 4 (iMac)
Booksmart (iMac)
2010 NBA Finals, Game 7 (iMac)
Trying (S01E01-5) (iPhone)
30 for 30 (episode 2) (iMac)
2015 NBA Finals, Games 1-5 (iMac)
2016 NBA Finals, Games 1-7 (iMac)
2017 NBA Finals, Games 1-5 (iMac)
Crimson Tide (iMac)
Superbad (iPhone)
The Hunt for Red October (iMac)
Cul-de-sac (iMac)
Draft Day (iMac)
30 for 30 (episode 3) (iMac)
Fast & Furious 6 (iMac)
Furious 7 (iMac)
Rust Valley Restorers (S01E01-8) (iPhone/iMac) (S02E01-6) (iMac)
The House I Live In (iMac)
Molly’s Game (iMac)
Patton Oswalt: I Love Everything (iPhone)
The Fundamentals of Caring (iMac)
Ozark (S01E01-10) (iMac/iPhone) (S02E01-08)
Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich (S01E01&2) (iPhone)
Space Force (S01E01-3) (iPhone)

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January (44 different titles)
February (21)
March (34)
April (55)
May (65)

That’s an average of 43.8 titles a month.

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2020.May.Sneezes

Aside from the lack of sneezes in the first 10 days of the year, May was my strangest sneeze month so far. I finished the month with a respectable 73 sneezes, but 16 (or so, maybe 15) of those came in the final two days – 10 on the final day, when I absolutely exploded.

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January’s total: 51 (1.6451 per day)
February’s total: 69 (2.3793/d)
March’s total: 79 (2.5483/d)
April’s total: 78 (2.6/d)
May’s total: 73 (2.354/d)

2020 subtotal: 350 sneezes in 152 days: 2.3026/d.

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2020.April.Watched

Not a bad month, aside from the rest of Tiger King, which I hated, and The Plot Against America, which was disappointing:

Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness (S01E04-7) (iPhone)
The Man in the High Castle (S04E05-10) (iMac)
Car Masters: Rags to Riches (S02E01-8) (iPhone)
Ugly Delicious (S02E03) (iMac)
Fleabag (S01E01-6) (iMac)
Rams (iMac)
Sincerely Louis CK (iMac)
Looper (iMac)
Enemy of the State (iMac)
Hoosiers (iMac)
Wonder Wheel (iMac)
Sicario (iMac)
The Fast and the Furious (iMac)
2 Fast 2 Furious (iMac)
1991 NBA Finals, Game 2 & 3 (iMac)
Downhill Racer (iMac)
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (iMac)
Fast & Furious (iMac)
Fast Five (iMac)
Avenue 5 (S01E01) (iMac)
The Plot Against America (S01E01-6) (iMac)
Ronin (iMac)
To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before (iMac)
1993 NBA Finals, Game 4 (iMac)
30 for 30 (episode 1) (iMac)
2001 NBA Finals, Game 5 (iMac)
2007 NBA Finals, Game 1-3 (iMac)

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That’s 55 different movies and TV episodes – and old NBA games – for the month, a new record. Here are my prior months:


January (44 different titles)
February (21)
March (34)

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2020.April.Sneezes

April comes thru with a respectable, but not record-setting number of 78 sneezes – one sneeze and one day fewer than in March. With that average tho, April does set a new mark in terms of sneezes-per-day – which is, of course, the whole reason we’re here.

This trend does continue to illustrate just how anomalous January’s no-sneezes-for-the-first-ten-days was. That 51 looks evermore strange as we see a truer representation of my irritating (and irritated!) nasal activities.

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January’s total: 51 (1.6451 per day)
February’s total: 69 (2.3793/d)
March’s total: 79 (2.5483/d)
April’s total: 78 (2.6/d)

2020 subtotal: 277 sneezes in 121 days: 2.289/d.

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Organization Fun (Part 2)

As I said in my prior organization post, I have time to spare. I’ve been meaning to organize my digital photos for well over a decade. It’s a task I’d occasionally start and stop, mostly using folders, only to be fairly uncertain where I was headed whenever I’d get back to it six months or a year later. Such is the speed with which I do things.

One of my goals, while home with nothing to do, was to finally aggregate (at least) all of my photos into a single place. Then I can organize them as time allows and when the feeling strikes. Because they’ll all be together, I won’t have the same overwhelming, where-is-everything/is-there-more-someplace-else/what-was-I-doing-last-time-I-started-this barriers to overcome. I can just dive in and pick up wherever I’d left off.

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I’d originally planned to use Lightroom, but it kind of locks me into Adobe’s ecosystem, as they say; whereas, Apple’s Photos app allows pictures to be edited anywhere – in the app itself, in Photoshop, in Pixelmator, etc. Perhaps Lightroom also does this. Another reason I didn’t go with Lightroom, which probably has loads of benefits over Photos, is I don’t understand it almost at all. But the organization of the Photos app makes perfect sense – for me, it basically functions as a dumping ground, which is precisely what I want. And, as I said, I can edit the pictures themselves anyplace.

Loading all the pictures into Photos by dragging and dropping – and dragging and dropping, and fucking dragging and fucking dropping – them by their tens and hundreds and (ultimately) many, many thousands, gave me a foundation on which to build greater organization and with which to triage pics as they are added.

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And so that’s how I started. Digging all over my iMac and MacBook, and both the external hard drives I have, to track down all the pictures I still own. After dumping them into Photos, I can now – slowly – sort thru them. I’m deleting bad ones, tagging and organizing reasonably good ones, and then editing them in other apps and posting them, when it comes to that, on Flickr or Instagram.

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pick count

This is where things currently stand. The photos to be sorted; the videos to be exported and dealt with during some future pandemic.

This is gonna be a longterm project – and I keep shooting more, which will make it even longer. But I’m cool with that because it’s good, clean fun. And I’m fucking great at organization.

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Organization Fun (Part 1)

If your work closed for about three weeks it gives you a shit-ton time to do stuff. If, like me, you have more than a decade of photos (more about that later) and movies to organize, hey, you should get to them.

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First, movies:

Back when iTunes sucked more and did absolutely everything for all kinds of crufty, everything’s-an-iPod-right? reasons, it functioned differently in really only one way that matters to me: the way it displayed movies.

How it usta was

How it usta was

I’m fundamentally bothered by disorganization and I’m a movie buff and I’ve always collected (hoarded) movies (VHS → DVD → digital copies). Remember Delicious Library? I bought it a decade ago just so I could organize my books and DVDs virtually, too….

Because iTunes would allow one-sheet style cover images, I would modify the data of each of my movies by finding and including posters (or, in worst cases, something similar – DVD art, lobby card scans, whatever else). This made iTunes display my collection in a way that looked, A, amazing, and, 2, like something from a well-stocked movie house – rather than a collection of random thumbnails of random sizes uglily displayed in a way that was surprisingly difficult to browse.

Sadly, it no longer does this.

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All horizontal and shit

All horizontal and shit

As with the TV layout, iTunes now displays everything – or at least TV and movies – inexplicably sideways. This means, anything not downloaded from the iTunes Store just shows up with any random thumbnail from the show/movie. This is ridiculous. And none of the art I added is worth a bucket of piss in hell or whatever that saying is.

They don't want it to be like it is but it do

They don't want it to be like it is but it do

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That said (complained about), looking for interesting posters each time I added a movie to my collection did get to be tiresome. Turns out, for a lot of movies, there just aren’t good posters. For a while, I considered mending this by creating a Penguin Books-style template that I could fill in any way I pleased (maybe with pointillized stills from each movie, etc.). But, as I’m not a graphic designer, I never had any idea as to what this would look like. And I never wanted to start it before figuring that out, because having it change over time would annoy me. (The Criterion Collection did this a couple times back in their DVD-release days and I could never get beyond the cases not all matching on my shelves.)

But sometimes fate – in the form of software updates – forces one’s hands. And that’s what happened with the new TV app’s appearance and iTunes’ dissolution. Confronted with the entirely new display-style, and the slate having been wiped clean, I had to find a solution, because those thumbnails just aren’t gonna fly at all.

So this is what I came up with:

Solutioned

Solutioned

That’s 200-point Futura Bold, where size allows – and the largest possible size where it doesn’t. The colors are vaguely reflective of the movies where I could think of a way to reflect some aspect of the movies – the orange and black of Harley Davidson’s logo; the blue-and-gray/silver of the police. And different shades of black, white, and/or gray for movies in black and white.

This accomplishes two additional somethings: There’s a bug when scrolling the Library view where the titles sometimes don’t appear. That bug can live as long as it likes; my solution covers it. And, because I’m using grayscale for black-and-white movies, it’s much easier to scan for them or to ignore them when scanning for something in color.

So there you go – some productivity. Takes less time than looking for posters. I can make and exportefive to ten of them in just a few minutes. And if I want to change them, it’s basically just minor adjustments to a few layers in Photoshop. (I probably should’ve used Illustrator….)

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I started this organization and post back when my company was closed for three weeks (originally planned for just two, before a third week was added). It was then open for two weeks, minus weekends which were inexplicably closed. And now I’m a week into a month-long closure. So, yeah – I’ve taken my time finishing this post. I’m about halfway through with the task itself.

終

A Couple More Reads – Coronavirus Edition

Part 1, probably….

From this article by Josh Margolin and James Gordon Meek about early US intelligence warnings of a contagion in China way the fuck back in November:

“the military's National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI)” ← part of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency

Seems like once a week I learn about another part of US Intelligence.

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From this editorial Dana Milbank about how Trump Blew It:

[Rabbi Jeremy Kridel, following several antisemetic interruptions of his Zoom service:] “This is just another indication of the fact that the current crisis isn’t the only one we face.”

This is one of those rare bons-mots that are also remarkably profound – and equally devastating.

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Catching Up On Articles Saved

I’ve been saving articles using read-later services for years. Since I first learned about Instapaper, sometime in roughly, 2013, I suppose; to when I switched to Pocket following Instapaper’s sale; to now.

With all this time off from work, one of my goals is to thin out my collection of still-unread articles. Here are a couple things that stood out so far, some literal highlights:

  • From this article about Breasts and Eggs, the new novel by Mieko Kawakami:

“All the books and blogs [about infertility] catered to couples. What about the rest of us, who were alone and planned to stay that way? Who has the right to have a child? Does not having a partner or not wanting to have sex nullify this right?”

…

“spring [sic] came and went, like someone opening the door to an empty room only to slam it shut again.”

…

“The real thing, the real Osaka dialect, isn’t even about communicating,” she says. “It’s a contest. Somehow, you’re both in the audience and on the stage. … Language is always art, but in order to achieve its highest form, the language itself — intonation, grammar, speed, everything — had to mutate over time.”

I like this one a lot, but it seems to look at language evolution in the same way people mistakenly look at biological evolution: like it’s going somewhere, seeking a higher plane, becoming more perfect. All it’s really doing is adapting with changed needs.

I’m adding this book to my “Books to Read” list.

終

I Was Six Months Alone

in

I didn’t have anything to say and I still don’t. Somehow, it’s been six months, just like somehow it was a day, then a week, then a month. Just like it will somehow be a year, then two, then five, then enough time will have passed that even Earth will be thought of as a myth.

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I miss him dearly.

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Thoughts wander and still snap back to him being dead and the shocks are still violent. I still see or learn things and think that he’d love to hear about them – lessons, words, etc. I gotta tell Dad about thi– fuck.

Fuck.

It’s like there’s a tear in the fabric where he stood. All that’s left are the torn edges and emptiness.

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There are no grand thoughts, just dismay. No progress, just stasis. I wake, I walk, I work, I listen to podcasts, I read, I struggle to sleep without sleeping pills, and then I do it all again.

At risk of being mawkish and overwrought, this is the dark time and I don’t know where to look for light.

終

2020.March.Watched

Here it is: March’s exciting list of stuff I watched. After what seemed like a slow start, this is a not-that-bad list of stuff.

Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (iMac)
Dickenson (S01E08) (iMac)
Phantom Thread (iMac)
The Informant (iMac)
Contagion (iMac)
The Martian – The Director’s Cut (iMac)
The Young Pope (S01E06-10)
Reservoir Dogs (iMac)
Kobe Doin’ Work (iMac)
Swiss Army Man (iMac)
Magic in the Moonlight (iMac)
Café Society (iMac)
The Banker (iMac)
High Fidelity (iMac)
Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness (S01E01-3) (iPhone)
Regarding Henry (iMac)
Fletch (iMac)
Picard (S01E01-3) (iMac)
Ford Vs Ferrari (iMac)
The Way Back (iMac)
48 Hrs. (iMac)
The Man in the High Castle (S04E01-4) (iMac)
Better Off Dead (iMac)

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Unless my math is bad, that’s 34 different movies and TV episodes for the month. Here’s January’s list (44 different titles). And here’s February’s (just 21).

終

2020.March.Sneezes

Here’s the latest update to my sneeze totals.

January was flu-shortened; February was day-shortened; so, March was the first regular month I’ve kept track of, and, predictably, it currently leads all categories.

I should note one key factor: it’s quite possible that I failed to add 5 sneezes. I think they were included, but, careful not to add them twice, I left them unrecorded after I remembered them later. I’m around 75% sure I included them, but 25% is an uncomfortably-high percentage so this is worth noting.

Also, hopefully this goes without saying, but I’m not doing anything to pad these numbers. I sneeze a lot. The whole point of this ridiculous exercise is to answer a softly nagging question I’ve had for years: how much do I sneeze?

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January’s total: 51 (1.6451 per day)
February’s total: 69 (2.3793/d)
March’s total: 79 (2.5483/d)

2020 subtotal: 199 sneezes in 91 days: 2.1868/d.

終

Shock and Awe(nnoyance)

When I got the first iPad the morning it debuted, I took it home and almost had several heart attacks because the ridiculous background image had star trails that looked every time like deep scratches in the glass.

Why, Apple? Fucking why?

Why, Apple? Fucking why?

The first real thing I did on that iPad, that very morning, was create a new deep-gray background image to replace Apple’s. That gray image has been the background on every iOS device I’ve had in the damned-near-decade since. (Except for my OLED iPhone X, which I gave an all-black one.)

Update: When I posted this last night, I lamented that the background picture I made was lost to computer moves and history. But I’ve been trying to take advantage of this time off by doing some things I’ve been meaning to do for ages. Sorting through all my pictures – trying to organize and compile them – I found it.

Less dark that I thought

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As I said earlier, I've been trying to read more, and, as I also said, I now have some time off to do so. I recently picked up a very-cheap used Kindle Paperwhite that’s in remarkably good condition. I’ve been carrying it around in my bag and kinda-sorta worrying about damaging its screen.

Today, this screensaver appeared:

jfc, Amazon

jfc, Amazon

Hey device makers! Stop including images that look like screen damage! FFS.

A day or so later, another one appeared that also freaked me out. (Update: Perhaps I should clarify that I have no idea at all what happens to an E ink display when it breaks. The photo here looks, at least, like what happens with a broken LCD. I suppose I could/should mollify my concerns by looking at online photos of damaged E ink screens. ~one minute later Okay, they just look like computer glitches – like something from the r/glitch_art subreddit.)

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After that momentary oh-fuck shock, I looked online to find out how to install my own image and delete Amazon’s – let’s-face it – not very good variety. It’s a hard no on that score – Amazon doesn’t allow it. It’s impossible without jailbreaking.

Pfft.

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For what it’s worth, this was gonna be my new screensaver....

kindle screen – mini final.png

終