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Hmm. I did something different, stylistically, with yesterday's post: I went out of my way to put the title of the post in a different font. The phrase "There Will Be Puke" is in Old English style font, a nod to the font for the 1997 P.T. Anderson movie masterpiece There will Be Blood. I could not find any easy way to make squarespace.com, the host company for my website, change the fond of my regular blog title field, and so I left that blank and put the "title" at the top of the main entry section of the post. It took a while even to find the right html code to turn the font into "Old English" there.

Or at least, on a PC, anyway. Luckily—in this very specific, esoteric case—most people use PCs so that's going to be how it shows up in a browser screen. Unfortunately, it does not seem to work the same way on a Mac. When I looked at the post on my home iMac computer, there is no change to the font at all. It looks like any regular post title, except instead of it being above the date stamp as usual, now it's below. Annoying!

Oh, well.

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I spent most of my evening last night looking at the TV screen. I found out recently Toy Story 4 will be available on Disney+ in just a couple of weeks, so I want to watch all four of them in order. Shobhit wasn't much interested last night, and I was rather tactical last night in getting the original, 1995 Toy Story—the first Pixar animated feature ever made—started, just before Shobhit got home from work. Shobhit wasn't quite as into this one as he was Ratatouille, although he did keep recognizing voice actors in it: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen. Incidentally, Toy Story is to this day the second-most critically acclaimed of all Pixar Animation Studios films, with a MetaScore of 95. The one movie with a slightly higher score? Ratatouille—ironically never one of my personal favorites—with a score of 95.

WALL-E does tie with Toy Story though, at 95, and probably ranks below it because of its user score of 8.9 vs. 9.0 for Toy Story. It's well deserved; WALL-E was always one of my favorites and I will likely watch that one again before too long. #4, as it happens, is Inside Out with a score of 94, and I really love that one; it was the first thing I watched after first signing up for Disney+.

I'm a little baffled by Coco, which I thought was spectacular, being ranked 11th when sorting by MetaScore, although even in that position it has a great MetaScore of 81, the lowest score for which they put a "Must-See" badge on the film's MetaCritic page. This means, by the way, that out of a total 21 Pixar animated features released to date, 11 of them—just over half—are regarded as "must-see" films. What other studio has that kind of track record?

Anyway, Toy Story ended, and then I played this week's episode of The New Pope, which was straight up baffling; and then this week's episode of Avenue 5, which struggled even more than the series premiere to be genuinely funny or witty. If Avenue 5's next episode is not an improvement then I'm giving up. We don't have time for mediocrity! At least The New Pope is a visual feast even when it's totally confusing.

Then I went to get ready for bed.

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— चार हजार छह सौ तिरासी —

I wound up on the phone with Apple Care this morning for over half an hour while I was at work—they assured me there would be no cost; I realized a bit later that was probably due to getting Apple Care through the iPhone Upgrade Program—because I accidentally deleted my Cranberries album from my phone and I could not figure out how to retrieve it. All the online forum suggestions involved connecting my phone to iTunes on my computer, but I was not at home, and this was very much annoying me.

It started with a separate issue: for some reason there were "iCloud" versions of every track also listed under the album, which was making every track play twice. I was trying just to remove each duplicate track, but my finger accidentally clicked "delete album." Fuck! And there's no "recently deleted" or anything like that in the Music app. Lots of online suggestions had me go to "My Purchases" in the iTunes app to re-download from there, except the tracks were not listed there, even though when I searched for the album in the iTunes Store, every track there had a button that did say "purchased" on it. But when I clicked any of those, nothing would happen.

I connected with an agent in online chat first, who asked for my number and said someone in Creative Apps (or something like that, it was "Creative" something) would call me back; once I explained the issue to them, they transferred me to billing. The guy there actually did resolve my issue, albeit after half an hour, and after trying what amounted to the same thing about three different times. This was all while I was doing the "screen sharing" thing on my phone so he could see my screen, the first time I've done that on a mobile device and not just a computer. In the end, it was signing out of my entire Apple ID account in Settings and then signing back in that did the trick.

I had just the other day updated my Cranberries playlists with tracks from this album too. So I had to re-do all those again. But, so far as I can tell, all is well again now.

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[posted 12:17 pm]