less than expected
Shobhit and I went to see Vice together yesterday morning but other than that it was a pretty quiet and relatively uneventful weekend. That movie yesterday was the only moment all weekend that qualified for the next Social Review, and in both Shobhit's and my cases, it basically served as ticking off a box. For me more generally, I just felt like it was something I needed to see -- although I suspect this will be one of those movies that has more SAG-AFTRA nominations than actual Oscar nominations. I can't really see this building a whole lot of Oscar momentum. Because who really cares that much about real-life Darth Vader Dick Cheney?
In Shobhit's case, it was literally because it got two SAG Award nominations (Christian Bale for Best Actor as Dick Cheney and Amy Adams for Best Supporting Actress as Lynne Cheney, both actually incredible), and so he got "eMovie Cash" passes for about six of the movies, allowing him to get into movie theatres to watch them. He used his pass for Vice to join me for the 10:45 a.m. showing yesterday at the AMC at Pacific Place.
And I'll say this about the movie: it's definitely not boring. It's also not the best time of our lives to be watching a movie that so depressingly holds a mirror up to how the state of the world got so fucked up. I left this movie kind of wanting to throw up. And since it's not a marvelous artistic achievement about a horrible subject like, say, Schindler's List, I struggle to find the value in it, well-made as it is.
Anyway, I was going to have a Braeburn Condos Theatre Double Feature with Laney on Saturday, but she had to postpone at the very last minute due to car trouble with a minivan she just purchased, so now we're doing that tomorrow -- in the condo, because the theatre got booked in between my suggesting the date to Laney and her responding that it would work. Damn it! Oh well, it'll be fine.
And it worked out well for me anyway. Turns out having the extra time was super helpful, because I then worked on the "2018 at PCC" post I shared yesterday morning (and sent in email photo digest form to coworkers or work contacts or former coworkers this morning), and then finished up the "2018 in Ten Minutes" video I shared this morning. Between those two things it pretty much took me the entire rest of the day, but at least that freed me up from being too busy with all my year-end stuff yesterday afternoon.
As per usual, I am having some technical difficulties with that video. Shobhit will immediately take an "I told you so" stance on that statement, as he has suggested I not make them with copyrighted songs in them -- but they're not even a fraction as good or as fun to watch without the music, and I thought I had a pretty foolproof workaround on at least one level: I decided I would upload the video directly to Facebook instead of linking it from YouTube. The problem with that is that the upload process takes so long, and I forgot to check the status before leaving for work this morning, so I don't know if it's still loading and it will just take hours, or if it hit a wall or something. And I'm afraid to just fall back on linking to YouTube now, for fear that the direct-upload will just repeat it later. So now I have to wait until I get home to figure that part out.
That said, on YouTube itself, so far at least, I have gotten no notices of copyright issues, and the video continues to play just fine.
. . . Well, I have half an answer regarding my video: I finally downloaded the copy of the video I had uploaded to my Dropbox account, to my work computer, and tried again with uploading it directly to Facebook. So much for that: I got a notice that it was "partially muted in some countries" due to copyrighted material, and, not having any idea whether that included the U.S., I just deleted the post -- and then went with what I always have: posting a link to the YouTube page.
We'll see if it gets me into trouble with YouTube again. They removed my 2016 video, but my 2017 video remains, so maybe it just depends on the content. The video on YouTube has been there since last night, and I'm not positive about this, but I think it makes a difference that I uploaded it as "unlisted" so it won't come up in people's YouTube searches for anything.
Shobhit made some comment about risking getting sued, but he's just prone to paranoia. I'm not going to get sued. The worst that will happen is the video will get removed, or I suppose my account could get suspended, but the latter has never even been threatened, so I don't think that will happen. I'm not using this to make any money, after all.
Anyway, what else can I tell you about the weekend? Later Saturday night Shobhit and I finally watched the last two episodes of Killing Eve, a pretty great show. We spent most of Friday evening doing our requisite shopping: Costco, PCC Greenlake Village, MacPherson's Fruit & Produce. This entailed driving from Capitol Hill to Shoreline to Greenlake to Beacon Hill and back to Capitol Hill.
We did go out again briefly to a couple more stores late Saturday morning, after I had been rushing to be ready in time for Laney to arrive at 11 a.m. only to have that get postponed -- so we went to Les Schwab, where Shobhit was told he could not return his tire chains until after the winter is over and he hasn't used them through that time (it apparently makes no difference we have zero plan to drive over the pass again until next December); and then to the Northgate Ross, which is closing and so they've got everything on clearance. We finally got a new comforter -- two of them, in fact!
In the end that was all I made myself up for on Saturday. Les Schwab and Ross Dress for Less. We came back home and I was in my pajamas for the rest of the day.
I spent yesterday afternoon, after the movie, writing the movie review, and then both Shobhit and I fell asleep for a little bit in the afternoon. I was in the bedroom and he was on the living room couch, but we both took short naps. Then he finished Sherlock Holmes on HBO Go and I actually, finally, finished my library book that was about 9 days overdue. That's $2.25 in overdue fees racked up again right there. Oh well. I walked to the library to return it just so I wouldn't also get charged a quarter for today.
Now I am free to read the book Gabriel gave me for Christmas. I actually own that one so I can take all the time in the world.
[posted 12:39 pm]