Things I Have Learned from OBS/Green Screen:
(a) Really, nobody needs to see your feet. This isn't ballet. Full bodies on screen just looks tiny. (I note that Comedy of Errors looked great and only had people from the waist up.)
(b) Take advantage of cameras--CLOSE UPS OF ACTORS' FACES is a plus!
(c) You probably need longer than one week of Tech Week with green screens.
(d) You probably do need a giant empty room in your home just for a green screen. (And really good Internet in it.)
(e) Green screens are fragile, rip easily, and can't be ironed.
(f) The tech will not fix everything.
(g) Green screen is a pain in the ass. I'm not ruling it out in the future, but it probably needs to be done more precisely.
(h) Standing in the green screen for 1-2 hours a day just for "calibration" is utterly boring AF and the worst thing about green screen.
(i) Second worst is not being able to see shit on your laptop from 10 feet away, having no idea what anyone else is doing.

This morning I watched the Pasadena Doo Dah Parade, something I only heard of a few days ago and decided to see what the heck that was about. The two hosts are very blinged out, especially the lady. Everyone has VERY INTERESTING OUTFITS and titles. The Doo Dah Parade idea came from guys being drunk in a bar and annoyed that they couldn't do the Tournament of Roses Parade on a Sunday. Now there are two parades, this one being the artist/hippie one that also spoofs off "torment of roses" and "dead rose queens." This definitely makes me want to visit Pasadena.

Then there's puppets and singing about social distance. Then there's videos sent in from various people....let's just say "SoCal Burning Man" would describe what's going on best. They throw tortillas. Just so you know. "He became a PRIEST because of the Doo Dah Parade," specifically because John Paul showed up. Er.... I'm assuming this is a celebrity resemblance thing since everyone else in the clip, well.... "What does the Antichrist look like?" "I think we just voted him out." Then the priest is asked to bless the parade and push the virus out.

There are queens. There is a hibachi grill drill team. There's a giant ferret float.. Investment bankers who drill for only 45 minutes a year to march around. Synchronized Briefcase Drill Team. Fred Willard narrated parades, apparently. "Snotty Scotty and the Hankies" is apparently a band? Dr. Demento attended, in a record float.

Today I went out and got a new phone since my phone decided it is FULL yesterday and told me a lot of things might stop working and texts might not download, and no matter what I tried deleting I could not get it to go below 97% full. So I went into the T-Mobile for an hour and a half, picked one out for reasonable size/price/has features I want, transferred all the information back onto the new phone, which went a lot better than I would have expected. It has saved all of my texts, including all the ones I've had to delete over the years. (Though no, I'm not missing any more texts from anyone.) So, yay. Everyone had masks on and was spacing as best they could, though really, if you need someone to wait on you/to buy things, you can't do six feet. Both the girl and I had to touch my new/old phones repeatedly to do stuff, for example. Well, fingers crossed, I guess.

I also got the car washed and gassed, and Dawn came by for about five minutes to drop off the purple pumpkin basket she got me. She bought her ticket for Charlotte's Web for Friday, was disappointed it wasn't live, and I was all "no, trust me, you WANT this version and not the live one!"

The old phone still works, it just doesn't call anything, so I can still use it with the wifi in the house. Go figure. So I have been going back and forth between the two phones while getting my pacing back and forth exercise done today.

I did not do a Silkwood shower today after having gone out. For one thing, I did yesterday and didn't feel like showering again (plus I didn't eat all day and was starving hungry by the time I finished exercising during the day). For another, I think I am just getting exhausted of ALL of the precautions. I was out around strangers for an hour and a half, indoors, and then saw Dawn later, but .... argh, oh, hell with it. I washed hands, I washed all the masks (I had multiple ones on today), I changed clothes and dumped them in the hallway to sit around for a few days, that's about what I felt like doing. If I've already contaminated myself, what else are you gonna do, I guess. I didn't have the energy to do it.

Jackie called tonight. She's happy I have a new phone. Still went off about Mom for awhile. Sigh.

Tonight I am watching, per Reggie's request, "The Gods Must Be Crazy" while waiting for the groceries to come. (They finally came around 9:15 p.m.) This is a very weird movie. I was too lazy to take notes during it, but it's weird. I don't get how this movie got made, really? It's in Africa, nobody famous is in it, and the plot is pretty weird.

A Coke bottle accidentally drops from a plane into a tribe of African bushmen. They are pretty baffled by the whole thing (I don't think anyone figures out they could just use it to hold water), get into fights, etc. and one of them, Xi, decides the thing is evil and he's going to get rid of it, so he sets out to find the edge of the world to throw the bottle off. (This is the "gods must be crazy" bit to leave this present.)

There's a strapping young blonde biologist, Andrew, who is in Africa to study manure and gets asked to go pick up a new schoolteacher. This goes terribly for him in many ways since (a) he can't speak to ladies, (b) he gets RIDICULOUSLY CLUMSY around them, and (c) he has the world's worst car, a shitty Land Rover called "The Antichrist." This car takes a LOT of work to start. It has no brakes and just drives itself around. Good thing there's nobody else around to hit, but Andrew doesn't even give Kate a warning that the car will just go off without him.

Also, he drives it into a giant lake of water and of course the thing stops working, forcing them to camp out in their underwear, have a rhino run through their fire and stomps on it, Kate thinks Andrew is gonna rape her, and at one point Andrew ends up somehow getting the car tied up and hanging from a tree. Romantic comedy, of course. And eventually some folks come along to rescue, specifically a strapping hot brunette guy with a much nicer tour vehicle and beer in a fridge. Andrew later tries to visit Kate at her classroom and literally falls into/drops/breaks EVERYTHING.

Andrew has this other friend (I forget his name, but he is beardy) who used to live in the bush for 3 years and thus understands the bushman language. He calls them something like sweet little buggers. Xi gets himself into some legal trouble with a goat--he makes off with someone else's and then politely offers to share dinner--and the friend wants to rescue him from jail. So he and Andrew arrange to "hire' the guy for 11 weeks instead and use Xi as a tracker.

Some guy and his goons randomly shoot up half the Cabinet and then go on the run. And on their way running, they get the bright idea to take ALL OF THE SCHOOL HOSTAGE. This is probably at least FIFTY PEOPLE, MOSTLY KIDS, THAT THEY ARE DRAGGING ON THE RUN. This is so amazingly stupid, I can't even. Why didn't they just grab the hot blonde teacher as a hostage?

So Xi, Andrew, and the friend enact a scheme in which they shoot (most of) the bad guys with tranq darts to rescue everyone. This actually ends up working out (except for the two guys who miss being darted), but then the hot brunette guy with the nice car rolls up and rescues Kate again and everyone else is all, wtf?

Xi eventually leaves, throws the bottle off the edge of the world somewhere, and goes back to his tribe. Andrew attempts to talk to Kate again and destroys an entire table while attempting to explain that this must be some kind of psychological problem. Because it is a movie, she kisses him anyway.

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