(circa 10:30 a.m.)
My upstairs neighbor is absolutely screaming his head off, presumably at his girlfriend who does the karaoke. I can't even hear her under all of his rage but I presume she is his target, as women ever are. I can't even tell exactly what he's saying but it's 20 minutes of rage. He doesn't even sound like he takes a breath.
I wouldn't be able to do anything, of course. I don't want the guy to know his trapped neighbor called the cops and that might be easy to deduce and not safe for me. Calling the cops in general isn't safe for many reasons. They probably won't do anything. It's not like anyone in a domestic violence situation can leave or have anywhere to go anyway now. I don't hear anything that sounds like physical abuse yet either. Fuck if I know.

Later:

Today has been a bust. They didn't charge me for my $400 grocery order this morning (you place the order and they send you an email of what you ordered, and then the next morning they send a list of what they actually found on the list that they could charge you for, and I didn't get the latter this time), so the delivery didn't show up. I had to email them about a late delivery and to be fair to the automated system, they got back to me in a half hour saying the order hadn't been charged and due to high volume they will probably have to cancel it. So on the one hand, at least I'm not out $400 for nothing. On the other hand, I was REALLY LOOKING FORWARD TO NEW FOOD. I haven't had pizza in over a month* and fried chicken in longer than that. And you have to start all over again from scratch on ordering because the food keeps disappearing while you are placing the order. This sucks. I'm not totally out of food at the moment, mind you, but it's depressing. Also, as long as the order hasn't been confirmed canceled or anything, when do I place another one?

* per Jackie, why don't you just order a fresh pizza...I just don't want to deal with outside food ordering when I am trying to limit all contact with humans and it feels very unnecessary to risk being around a human just for one damn pizza. I also technically have two pizzas left in the fridge, but I don't want to keep going through the frozen food until I can get more of it. I prefer that stuff to the things I actually have to MAKE....

Under my normal every-other-two-weeks schedule, I should go out driving today. But I drove the car on the 15th and then just again on Tuesday, so I think I can reasonably assume it's not going to die if I miss this weekend and pass it to next weekend. Also it is around Local Moving Weekend and I am hearing more people out in the halls today (which was driving me nuts while waiting for the order) so I might as well skip it. I also took trash out and got mail Tuesday (really nothing in there) and there's nothing that came in in the last few days according to my email, so why leave? Might as well stay home and drink.

And then Jackie called, crying ("I cried today too") because her aunt is being shitty. Her aunt didn't lose the house and moved back home, but is generally insulting Jackie and Jackie wanted to know if it's okay to not speak to her one remaining aunt after her grandma dies. I say it's fine. Hell, I was crying while she was crying on the phone, but hopefully she didn't hear it.

Mom called for about five minutes right before I was about to do something (see below) and then she and Roger, per Roger, were going to be occupied tonight. I said he'd better give it to her (well, something innuendo-y, I forget exact phrasing) for all of us who can never get it again. "I don't know what to say to that!" he laughed. "Have a nice night," I said, and hung up. I wanted to talk to her longer, but...oh well, that's how the day is going.

I ordered food again tonight.WE'LL SEE HOW IT @#%@$^%$ GOES.

I didn't get totally drunk today, though I pondered it. Instead, I watched Aggretsuko, season 3. Oh, this show. SPOILING WITHIN.

The problem with this show is that it always has to reset to the start. Retsuko isn't allowed to escape her hell job or have love, even though this season gets her very close to getting out of the job. Thanks to a car crash, Retsuko gets a second job doing accounting for a salaryman/manager of an underground idol group. The guy is terrible at doing anything but buying merchandise, so she puts the kibosh on that. (This is kind of funny since even though Retsuko is an accountant, the opening of this show is her blowing a lot of money on a "virtual boyfriend" game. To be fair, once this is pointed out to her, she sells the game because no matter how bad your life is, you don't need to waste money on your clotheshorse virtual unicorn boyfriend.) Anyway, once the manager hears her at karaoke, he wants to throw her into the group to be "a sea urchin in the desert" and make the band stand out. And it goes great and Retsuko (who at the beginning of the season is feeling like she belongs and her soul comes out of the closet and she literally BECOMES AGGRETSUKO and the band starts to become a small hit and even though it comes up at work, she decides she'd quit work if the band takes off and it's all awesome....

... except for Retsuko getting a murderous stalker who thinks she ruined the band with her incoherent screaming.
Jesus Christ, the scene where he forces her to hold his hands for five minutes while he eviscerates her in public.... Seriously, she needed two stalkers in three seasons?! I know, if you get famous, you get them, period, but still.

So suffice it to say by the end of the show, even though Retsuko had decided she'd quit the job for the band, quits the band. Waaaaaaaaaaaaah. I know the show can't let her, but until the end it was really good and hopeful and I was really enjoying it! I know, you can't relate to an idol like you can a salarywoman, but still... I still say a girl can have some rage. Or have the band be less of a hit. Or SOMETHING that doesn't just go backwards. I can't blame her for wanting to hide forever now and it's the "safe" choice to make and Retsuko has been encouraged to be a passive good girl her entire life and the show makes a point of it, but it still sucks.

I want to say while I'm here that I really enjoyed Manaka, the usual lead singer of the group. She's a bit catty, but accepts Retsuko into the group, encourages her, and most definitely keeps warning her when she figures out the whole stalker thing. I liked her and am sorry to lose her. I felt like the whole girl group thing was a great mentoring experience for her and I hate that it's wasted now. Meanwhile, the show kept Anai, though thank god he's only in a few episodes and as far as we know he sold a cookbook and got a girlfriend. (Why does the shitty little bully get all the awards? Oh, right, he's a guy.)

The other main plot of this is, god help us all, Haida. I don't know how I feel about Haida. I think I just don't care about him really. All there is to him is he has a crush on Retsuko and he plays bass guitar and eats a lot of ramen. Now, admittedly Retsuko's love interests (by virtue of the show always going back to "situation normal, all fucked up") are generally not great. Tadako is the best of the bunch, not just because he's rich but because he's nice, if pretty hippie/laid back. Whathisface with no personality, I can't even remember how to spell his name, and Haida so far have been our options. I really didn't give a shit one way or the other if Retsuko dated him. I don't love him and think he's great, but neither do I think he's a complete mismatch either. But the issue was....

I CANNOT FOR THE LIFE OF ME FIGURE OUT IF THIS SHOW WANTS HAIDA AND RETSUKO TOGETHER OR NOT. It goes back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. We never were shown how Retsuko turned Haida down in the Christmas special and we've never been shown how she feels about him, which is pretty weird since we see every other tiny thing she feels. He's had a crush on her for five years--we find out here he thought she was "vanilla" until he saw her guiltily filling up water bottles at work. Why this was the trigger of love for him, who knows, other than she wasn't perfect. Otherwise, I have no idea why he's so into her.

Haida meets another girl at work, Inui, who literally everyone (except possibly Fenneko, who's grumpy on everything) thinks Haida should date. He seems to like her, albeit not as much. But when coin flips, list making and plucking daisies all come up with Inui, when Retsuko herself says to date girl B, all this shit keeps coming up Inui...he still can't resign himself to choosing Inui. He tries out Gori's dating app (she's making one) and he and Retsuko come out 100% a match! And when Haida gets the opportunity to save Retsuko from her stalker, he gets to be the hero! He gets to go around saying that she's strong, she won't let this fear beat her!

....To which her friends pretty much are all, do you know her AT ALL?/?! and also, you don't get to tell her what to do, it's up to her. Also, obviously Retsuko IS the sort of person who would get beaten by this, because most women ARE beaten by this. Look up anyone harassed by oh, G_m_r G_t_ (I won't even spell it out for fear of demon summoning). Obviously a lot of women are still plugging away at careers, but that shit is life ruining. Not everyone is gonna go Brianna Wu and run for office. Hell, I only have/had a minor bit of this shit in my life and it's unnerving AF, I can't imagine the fear and agony of someone wants to kill you because you came out of the closet and finally was doing what you wanted to do in life. And having that dream squashed FOREVER because of a fucking psycho, and all the other fucking psychos that will inevitably come after him.

The thing we have everyone else pointing out to him over and over is that despite five years of work and pining, Haida doesn't know Retsuko at all. She doesn't let him in on her idol career, he has to stalk her a bit to find out. (Though admittedly, which of her friends find out from her vs. who find out via spying is kind of a plot point.) She asks for guitar lessons but never tells him why. She admittedly isn't great at letting people in, but she doesn't seem inclined to let him in specifically either, as opposed to "I just didn't tell Gori because of my debt problem and she doesn't have the money."

So when he drags her to the karaoke bar and sings his feelings and essentially tells her she's strong and she can get through this and all that jazz and that she's being chicken--she tells him the fuck off. In no uncertain terms. She is not into him because he doesn't know her. Grow up already. Your feelings aren't my responsibility. Where do you get off? How dare you. It's my decision. "You think that crap is helpful but you can't be more wrong." She calls him an idiot, in song, a lot. She says leave me alone, I didn't ask for any of this.

Why the fuck are they going to lunch again at the end of the season, is what I am saying. That was a pretty big BACK THE FUCK OFF GO AWAY I DON'T LIKE YOU LIKE THAT AND YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW ME. And yet...this is going to continue? By rights, these two should be avoiding the shit out of each other at work from now on after that.

Grrrr, argh, show. So much growth and then backtracking. I thought it was really good until the end, and then I was just disappointed.

After that, I watched the King Lear post-show Zoom chat. Once again, "we love to see your faces!" Fuck you, no. But other than that, the chat was great and very comprehensive on answering the technical questions I did have after watching that.

* Per the tech guy, he's got at least 3 GIANT screens, with everyone on Zoom on one monitor, script is up there, and there's a "very precise green screen setup." Each one is cropped from their windows into a "paper cutout" and he arranges them on screen in layers. It's compiled on the computer and sent to YouTube.
* Actors have a green screen area of 6 feet of depth and 8 feet of width, having to hit very precise marks.
* There's a half second lag on Zoom sound and more than half a second delay on screen.
* The actress playing Lear said she may not always hear the sound cute when she's at Goneril's, and someone has to go 'bark bark" at her. The sight lines seem to change every week and they have to keep redoing them. Today she said she was looking in the wrong direction for several scenes. You may hit your mark while filming, but if you move 6 inches while in the moment, you might throw everything off. She had "committed to wearing snazzy sandals" and can't change them because it would change her height.
* The stage manager says she's not doing very much here, it's the tech guy doing all the calls.
* Some folks had evacuation threat but were okay in their homes. They noted that if they had been performing IRL they probably would have had to shut down for the smoke.
* Facebook didn't work for this whole thing.
* Some actors have very small apartments, had to create studio space, and kids/pets wandering through.
* "It's always magic every time there's a letter handoff and fight choreography."
* The lady playing Cordelia said that all we have are each other's voices.
* I asked about more Zoom issues--i.e how do they not have the weird Zoom motion issues--and they said that using physical green screens make it a lot easier than relying on how Zoom cropping goes, which is relatively accurate. They mentioned "nose chop-off" and corners being the bane of green screens. They said they were double chroma keying it--green screens behind them that Zoom uses to crop them out, they send it to me with a fake green screen and he crops it out on his end a second time.
* I asked about the lack of swords---I assumed it was a physical/props issue-- and they said that the fight director decided to use small weapons because "a common person has a relationship with a knife."
* One guy asked if a pre-requisite to being cast was having a good Internet connection or were they able to beef it up for someone and they said that almost everyone was cast in January/February (a few were added/replaced later) and they just beefed it up for several people.
* The actress that played Regan said they were afraid about hitting their marks and that was hard on opening night, but now they're more used to it. She has the most technical sight map/line map of everyone (and a photo was shown of her floor) and she said she can't look down to check, so she has to "memorize the spike" and they all have that.
* The actress playing Cordelia was wearing textured slippers to find her spikes, which she held up. "I'm a cheater."
* "even with green screens, lighting setup is very critical and finicky. We have actors adjust several settings for white balance, brightness etc on the cameras, and even have to adjust those as the light decreases in the evening"
* Their playing space is very, very small. "You're acting in a small box."
* The actor playing Gloucester said his wife helps tie him to a chair, while another actor is projected in. His wife also paints in his blood.
He is wearing a shirt that says "Theater is life, film is art, television is furniture."
* Some folks have watched the play multiple times and they asked about the differences between opening night and now. Experience, basically! Especially with marks and the like.
* The newest actress in the cast says you have to trust the actors and intuition that you're managing, don't move from your mark.
* The guy running this chat said "It was not clear to me months ago that this would work," but all the teams got it to work.
* "We're streaming live at Burning Man!" in the Sparkleverse camp. They are going to experiment with virtual venues like Burning Man.
* Someone asked if they can change the angles of the characters with the paper cutouts and no, the actors have to adjust their angles.
* One guy's quote: "I’ve never seen an on-screen performance where I felt the characters popped into the living room as much as this. I think there’s a big future in this format (especially once the fingers stop being chopped off…)."

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