netflix

The rest is silence

I was well into my morning before I remembered to do my morning pages, having already had breakfast and decided to watch an episode of Quantum Leap. (On Netflix, where there are a lot of odd gaps in the episodes available.)

But I did them, and then a page of short story this evening, which has so far been the pattern, even if that single page does still feel awfully hard-earned at times.

In between, I’m sure I did some things. Watched an episode of The Muppet Show, helped my father change a light bulb on the stairs, went for a long walk. On which I listened to a pair of Studio 360 podcasts. I was particularly moved by Meehan Crist’s story about the fragility and unreliability of memory. (Which I’d actually listened to last night on the train home.) There’s something both wonderful and frightening about the idea of memory as this continuous game of telephone, in which we don’t remember things so much as the memory of the memory of the memory.

This evening, I watched A Dangerous Method, which is an odd (if often very good) almost non-movie. It’s about the early days of psychoanalysis and the rift between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and the performances are great. Unsurprisingly, given the topic, it’s mostly just a lot of talking. The film is many things, but exciting is not close to being one of them. When it first came out, and I was still part of the behavioral sciences group at work, we joked about going to see it as a group. I’m kind of glad we didn’t, and not just for all the talk of sex and the occasional nudity. It would have been a weird movie to watch with my boss and co-workers. It was a weird enough movie to watch on my own.

Anyway, that was pretty much my day.

Tuesday various

  • Netflix is pretty sure it has no future in DVDs. You know, I like streaming and on-demand, but the selection is still not that great, relatively speaking. If Netflix could ensure the same level of selection and quality with streaming as with the physical DVDs…well, I’d still occasionally be annoyed they were most often DVDs without special features of any kind, but I’d be more willing to switch over to streaming-only. (If the high cost of having both doesn’t force the issue for me at some near-future point.) But Netflix can’t promise that. Some of it is out of their hands — studios are covetous of their movies and shows, and some (like HBO) see Netflix, maybe rightly, as a direct competitor. So I really do hope Netflix doesn’t continue their push towards streaming-and-only-streaming, that they realize it wasn’t just the Qwiskter name that upset customers. I want a wide and varied selection of movies and shows. I don’t want more of “You can’t watch that, but have you ever tried this…?”)
  • Indonesian man arrested for kicking woman he thought was a ghost [via]
  • Want to smell like a superhero? [via]
  • “Twitter is the contemporary postcard—social updates that are limited by size, but not imagination. For a month, with a billion stamps, our correspondent moved his tweets from the laptop to the post office, and rediscovered the joy of mail.”
  • And finally, Basil Fawlty Impersonator Chat:

    As Mark Evanier notes, “There are literally more professional impersonators of Basil Fawlty around than there were episodes of Fawlty Towers.”