How it goes.
Thursday, April 23rd, 2020
I started today sipping a delicious cup of coffee, carefully crafted by Sammy. Then!
- Watched an episode of Perry Mason on MeTV. They apparently they air in order, and they’re most of the way through the final season, so you get a sense the writers were struggling to keep things interesting, and the director and camerapeople were experimenting with even more noir-ish lighting and dramatic push-in camera moves and super-tight shots of sweaty foreground suspects with the split-diopter effects of Perry or Burger in sharp focus in the deep background. Also: great mid-1960s cars! Dial telephones! Paul Drake’s sport jackets!
- Put together an Amazon order that should show up on the weekend—stuff we were having trouble getting at Target. Yes, a spreadsheet was involved.
- Discussed global shipping with my brother, who awaits a fancy yet tiny new phone at his doorstep tomorrow, and yeah, he’s tracking it.
- Sent a couple of emails wherein I could assure folks that despite gubernatorial idiocy, we’re fine and hanging in there..uh, here. Also, when the afternoon brought severe weather to the southern part of our state, I could reassure one western correspondent that yes, we were largely north of the severity.
- When the morning rain abated, went out and tried to scrub some of the pollen off of the car, in hopes that the late-afternoon storms would rinse it the rest of the way.
- Watched one of the masters of in-the-trenches vfx discuss how to get fancy ‘bullet-time-like’ results by (to start with) shooting with your iPhone. It involves putting the pricy-but-increasingly-powerful device at the end of a broomhandle and whipping it around a room, which sort of makes me nervous. No iPhones were harmed, though.
- Chatted online with our niece about her new fancy animal-portrait-mode capable phone, which is not going on the end of a broomhandle, as far as I can tell.
- Checked around Wall Street closing time if our retirement savings had evaporated when I wasn’t looking. Not yet.
- Discovered that SMPTE, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, has made some of their very technical standards—the stuff that defines how television and movies work—available online for free. Nice! Now I wonder whether I should point out their website has a (slightly) wrong version of their organization name on the copyright line of their site. Yeah, probably should.
- Read on Twitter about a planned workers strike on May day, affecting Amazon, Whole Foods, Target, and Instacart. (But, uh, our order should be here by then.)
- Discussed reasonable takeout options nearby with my dear spouse.
- Prepared for an evening’s consuming of content.
