Personal

The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.

Year 50 Day 298

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Me on the couch in my Star Trek pajamas, with my MacBook Air open on my lap and the Music app running full screen and displaying a long list of tracks.

Day 298: I have more energy, but still have a head full of goo. Spending some of my downtime on prepping my music library for DJing the Thursday night dance at Norwescon.

Which involves more swearing at Apple than this long-time Apple user would like it to. I really wish they’d give the Music app the love and care it so desperately needs, particularly when it comes to people like me, who have a large library of owned music and care about metadata, and are not interested in cloud features. I just want an app that concentrates on organizing, managing, and playing what’s on my computer. iTunes in its early days did a great job of that, but it (or its current “Music” incarnation) hasn’t been solid in years.

Year 50 Day 296

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Me in my home office, with shelves full of books and trinkets behinnd me.

Day 296: Good news — improvements are being made! While not at 100%, I’m definitely feeling better, and actually got dressed today instead of spending another day in pajamas. (Though, really, sweats and a t-shirt aren’t that different from pajamas, but still!)

Bad news — it looks suspiciously like now it’s my wife’s turn to go through this. Which is not great, but better to go in series so that we can take turns taking care of each other, instead of both of us being sick at the same time and nobody having the energy to do anything for the other.

It Was All My Fault

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I was one of the first of my friends group to really get into “home theater” — at least, as much as I could in the mid-’90s on a financially questionable 20-something’s budget. Our apartment had a big-screen rear-projection TV (bought used, of course), later replaced with a (ridiculously huge) three-beam projector sourced from a bar that was closing down, an early surround sound system, and I started collecting widescreen movies with the special edition of The Abyss on widescreen VHS. I had a pretty decent widescreen VHS collection before finally upgrading to DVD.

At one point, Chad and I were sitting around, bored, and looking for something to watch. “I’ve got The Crow,” says Chad. Sounded good to me, so he went to grab it. And pulled out his copy — a home VHS tape, with the movie taped off of TV, over something else, in broadcast pan-and-scan, and probably in mono. He popped it in, and we started watching.

About ten minutes in, suddenly he turns to me and spouts off with a hearty and apparently random, “Fuck you!”

“What the hell?” I said.

“Until I lived with you, I didn’t care about widescreen, or surround sound, or any of that. I’d just watch the movie. You’ve ruined me!” And as I laughed, he turned off the movie in amused disgust. And it wasn’t too long before the widescreen DVD found its way into the collection.

(Originally posted to Mastodon, and prompted by the announcement of The Crow on 4K Blu-ray.)

Year 50 Day 295

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Me with an annoyed expression.

Day 295: More of the same. I did rally enough to go to work (from home) today, and will for the rest of the week. I am extremely fortunate in that I have a job where I can easily take sick days when I need, and am also able to work from home on days when I’m not sick enough to take a sick day but still sick enough to not want to risk bringing this into the office. Too many people don’t have those options.

Year 50 Day 294

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Me looking bored on our living room couch.

Day 294: Day four of this head cold, and very over it…but it’s obviously not over me just yet. Watching two Marvel movies in one day maybe was a bit much inanity, but it was also right about the level of braining I could manage. Apparently other people at work have been hit with this bug, and it’s nothing more than a doozy of a cold, possibly exacerbated because it’s the first cold I’ve had in around four or five years at this point.

Year 50 Day 293

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Me standing in front of a bookcase full of science fiction books.

Day 293: Still sick; another day of doing as little as possible. Read a bunch of my current book (Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars), finished season four of For All Mankind (very good), and watched The Last Voyage of the Demeter (not very good). At this point, unless a miracle occurs overnight, I think tomorrow’s going to be a sick day instead of heading back to work.

Year 50 Day 292

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Me sitting in my living room chair with a grumpy expression.

Day 292: Well, it’s official. I’m sick. This sucks. It’s a cold (or, at least, I haven’t popped positive on my COVID tests), and I don’t like it one bit.

📚 Grave Peril by Jim Butcher

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17/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

More of the same, and so far, my overall opinion remains unchanged. Entertaining enough adventures, just not anything particularly amazing. On the one hand, friends have told me this is where the series really starts to pick up steam; on the other hand, when after three books I’m still just saying, “well, it’s okay…”, this may be the last of these I dive into for now. Maybe curiosity will bring me back later on? We’ll see.

Me holding Grave Peril on my iPad

Year 50 Day 291

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Me sitting against a pile of pillows in bed.

Day 291: Woke up this morning with a bit of a scratchy throat and cough. While it was minor, we didn’t want it to become anything major, and since we didn’t have any real plans for the day, we just decided to “not”. Stayed in bed, read books (I got through most of a Dresden Files novel), watched TV (just one episode of the latest season of For All Mankind to go), napped, and let my body do what it needed to to, hopefully, not develop into anything worse. At the end of the day, I’m still kinda horky and mildly gross, but I’m not any worse, so we’ll just see how tomorrow goes.