A Random Thought To Keep The Light On

I've been abhorrent in terms of keeping this blog updated, barely sticking to my monthly pledge. In my defense, it's not for lack of trying, only a lack of motivation. It's been a rough few months on a personal level, a lot of travel, a few happenings, some emergencies here and there, and the stress gets to me. I've got at least three drafts for the past several months, but they haven't gone beyond that, mostly because the "moment" of investment passed. Nobody cares about Brightburn and I've said plenty about Far From Home elsewhere. Movie reviews simply aren't that interesting to me most of the time. What I do want to talk about in relation to movies is a movie I've been searching for for years and haven't gotten a single clue about. 

I only saw the trailer. It had to be at least 20 years ago. Part of the reason it sticks in my mind is that although I saw it on television, it was completely in a foreign language, even the narration. I want to say it was in French, but I can't be sure. It was so out of the blue for this totally foreign advertisement to insert itself into the airwaves. I remember I even saw it more than once, so clearly this was a thing that someone somewhere wanted to hype to high heaven. There was no release date beyond what I can only surmise was a "coming soon" or some other vague time frame. 

As for what it was about, I have only images and flashes, so it's entirely possible my memory has substituted certain details for others. Anyway, the central "event" the trailer harps on is two people bumping heads in a pool. That's the most concrete thing I can recall, a man and a woman, underwater, swimming straight into each other. There's a scene of one of them in a hospital bed (the woman, I think) talking to a nurse or orderly, with the camera very, very far back. The title was something rather long, practically a sentence, and it was overlaid on the same shot as the head-bump, looking up from the bottom of a swimming pool. For all I know, it's either a barebones romantic comedy with an exotic location or it's some magic realism farce about people swapping bodies Freaky Friday-style. 

I wrote a description slightly less detailed than what I've got above over on Yahoo! Answers but didn't get a single bite. I even remember asking a South Korean friend I've since lost touch with if she recognized anything because she's a colossal French film buff. Nobody seems to know a damn thing about this movie and I'm almost wondering if I could have made it up. Funnily enough, Quora isn't exactly set up for long, detailed questions, but jumping off my point about a possible false memory, someone on Quora shared with me that they were convince for years the movie Space Jam was just some dream he had. It's one of those quirky little things about our memories, how they can be so vivid and at other times so fuzzy we literally can't tell them from dreams or even our own imagination. This is where I'd also bring up the Mandela Effect, but I'd rather focus on this mysterious foreign film trailer from the forever ago. 

Maybe someday I'll tell you all the tale of how for years I never knew there was a second half to Logan's Run beyond Logan and Jessica ascending the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. 

Royal Mother's Karibbean Key Lime Pie

Made a Key Lime pie today, specifically from a recipe my mom got from a chef on the Royal Caribbean cruise lines. I would imagine it's fairly stock, but adding "Royal" and "Caribbean" makes anything sound exotic. 

It's a small slice for a reason. I've only had Key Lime pie once before, and it was not exactly a pleasant experience. I was very young, and between my tastes not being very well-developed and having absolutely no idea what to expect from something called "Key Lime pie," the term "acquired taste" was apt. It was extremely tart, not actually sour, but a kind of sweet I was not prepared for. I remember not being able to eat any of it and avoiding it thereafter, even in yogurt flavors. In other words, I was confident I could handle the flavor now, but I wanted to be sure. 

I went back for seconds. 

Next time I'll try making a meringue topping with the egg whites instead of using them in a batch of botched peanut butter cookies.

Twitpic Is An Apt Name

My phone has been having fits lately, mostly over the number of apps that I have installed to the memory card as opposed to the internal memory. Here's the problem, the internal memory of my phone doubles as the RAM. Most smartphones, going all the way back to the SDA I had, which was an old-school Windows Mobile phone, had a task manager where you could turn off anything that was running if it didn't already have an exit button programmed into it.
Anyway, the problem lately has been that the phone will claim it can't find the memory card, meaning even my photos can't be seen. As you might imagine, this really irked me in the worst way. Eventually, it would just sort of "fix itself" if I gave it time, at worst just restarting the phone. To be fair, I am a bit rough with my phone, but in my defense, its entire design scheme is built around never turning it off. The HTC Rhyme has a number of quirky little features and accessories that really endeared me to it when I started up my new cell service. One of these items of interest is a charging dock that turns the phone into a kind of desk clock. In fact, it's my primary alarm clock that I wake up to for workdays. The issue with this is that I have to set aside time in the day to allow the phone to die, to run completely out of juice and essentially "let it rest" for a while.
The trouble lately is that it doesn't seem to be enough, and it continues to give me grief over not being able to see the memory card as well as not being able to run certain applications if they're installed to the memory card. I would be browsing sites or checking messages when suddenly I'd get an error message that some app I'm not even really using has "encountered an error" presenting me with the choices of "report" or "force close." It got to the point where I stopped getting eBay notifications because it couldn't really run the app anymore.
As a result, I tried to do a little bit of housekeeping today, going through all my apps, clearing caches and moving them onto the memory card or erasing them altogether if I could, while leaving some apps on the internal memory (apart from the ones that are "locked" and can't be deleted for various reasons), namely Evernote, as it's sort of been my best (non-human) friend on my current writing project. One casualty of this venture has been Twitpic, which is only in a non-working state because it doesn't seem to recognize my account information. I mean, I know I'm entering the right password, but it's not recognizing it. Granted, I'm probably putting in the wrong password regardless of my confidence to the contrary, but I've really just given up on it. Twitpic used to be a place where I posted sketches and work-in-progress photos of art projects I would later post to DeviantART. It was kind of a "behind-the-scenes/coming attractions" sort of exercise, showing a glimpse into my admittedly unremarkable process. I haven't used it much of late as I've been writing, but even when I have made a few drawings or notes, I don't really miss posting the images.
Who knows, maybe I'll join the rest of civilization and just start using Instagram?

Doubtful, but I do have a short essay in mind about Instagram, and the often ludicrous level of popularity surrounding it. In a way, it's kind of like how I felt about Twitter: in theory, it's genius, a kind of "bad by design" camera in line with Lomography or other classic experimental photo techniques. In reality, it's earned a rather unfavorable nickname, something like "Hipster's Polaroid." There's a tweet I found once that's a reply to Nikon regarding their Android camera that came out some months back. If I can find it, I'll write the essay then.

In the meantime, short summation of events:
Phone is wonky.
Writing project is going very well, for better or for worse.
Twitpic has packed up.
Evernote is my best friend.
I'm considering getting an eBook reader, but I'm debating about a color scheme, and the only place I can post a poll about it is on DeviantART, which would mean bumping down a poll that's relevant to my current project.
Current random object of fascination: Book straps.