March 5, 2017

 I remembered the other movie I watched yesterday. It was The Visit, which is an M. Night Shyamalan movie. Which means it had a twist. It's kind of unfortunate when you forever become known as having twists in your movies because then you're almost always going to disappoint people. He got people with The Sixth Sense and then everyone started expecting and trying to predict the twists. Which then builds them up to a point where the real twist is almost always disappointing.

I think The Visit probably looked really good on paper, and would probably make a good book. I was not impressed by the movie. To spoil things, two young kids who are both into making movies, go to visit their grandparents for the first time while their single-mom goes on a cruise. The grandparents become increasingly weird and when the kids bring up something weird that one of the grandparents did to the other grandparent, that grandparent explains it away. It eventually get to the point that the kids feel unsafe so they Skype their mom and insist she come pick them up early. The grandparents are outside at the time and when the kids point the laptop out the window to show their mom the grandparents talking, her first response is... Those aren't your grandparents. Twist. Turns out the real grandparents used to volunteer at a psychiatric hospital and two of the patients killed them after hearing that their grandchildren were coming because they thought it would be fun to be part of a family. So yeah, I think it would have made a good book, but a whole lot of things came together, especially knowing that M. Night Shyamalan was involved, to make it an underwhelming movie.

This morning I slept in and it was really nice. I kind of miss my old bed, which is a lot more firm than my new bed. Turns out I like really firm beds.

After I fed the dogs and let them outside I was able to write my last discussion post for the week. I also figured out how to add the audio visualization bar to my tutorial video. I already posted my video to the forum so this was really just for my own interest because I forgot about it last night. I was able to export just the audio from my video editor, upload that into the audio visualization software I downloaded, and render out a video of the visualization. I then put that back into my video editor and learned how to overlay it on my tutorial. I cropped it and put it down in the black area where the closed captions go. I think it looked pretty good. I'm want to keep looking for visualization programs because the one I have really only shows activity on the left side. I thought about duplicating it and mirroring it but I wasn't that bothered because it was just a test. I was also glad to find out that I was able to download the closed caption file from the video I captioned last night and upload it to the video I made today.

My mom got back around one o'clock and I packed up and headed out not too long after that. When I got home I unloaded my car, watched YouTube videos, and eventually took a shower. For breakfast and lunch I had Chex mix that my mom made me. Not a great diet. For dinner I made biscuits, scrambled eggs, and the avocado pistachio dip. The biscuits used the heavy whipping cream I had. I was not impressed. I think maybe I kneaded the dough too much. They also cooked way long than the receipt said they would need to. I'm not really sure what was going on. They weren't bad necessarily but I've had better biscuits. The avocado pistachio dip turned out well and the scrambled eggs were freaking delicious.

While I ate dinner I finally started watching Weird Science. I've been meaning to watch it since Bill Paxton died and haven't had time. I don't know if it is because I first saw it when I was an impressionable young man but I think it's great. Watching it as an adult makes a lot of it seem pretty inappropriate, but I still love it. A drunk Anthony Michael Hall is funny every time.

After dinner I paused the movie and took break to do grown up things. I washed all my dishes, put new sheets on my bed (the green ones so I'm ready for St. Patrick's Day), and ironed all my pants for the week. Future me will appreciate all of those things.

Now I'm back to watching YouTube videos. I need to watch few videos. Or be more productive with my time while watching videos. I need to finish some cross stitch things and do other crafty things. I also want to start listening to podcasts again. And audiobooks. There are a lot of things I want to do. I need to work on my nightly time management.

Speaking of listening to things, and YouTube videos, I recently discovered a new band called The Japanese House. They have a female lead singer and they do the same sort of vocal thing that Imogen Heap does. I really like it. That's what I listened to while making dinner and doing the dishes tonight.

It is ten o'clock now and I am going to record my audio journal. I open tomorrow but because I slept in this morning I'm not really tired yet. Looks like I'll be starting the week off sleep deprived. Which isn't great because I've got to write my newspaper article, come up with something to do during my workshop on Thursday, start making my homebound lists, and probably several other things that I'm currently forgetting. It'll be an interesting week.