2025 in Ten Minutes

All that time spent with all these people I love dearly. UGH. It's the same shit every year! — पांच हजार नौ सौ चौंतीस — I usually post my "[Year] in Ten Minutes" video as a standalone post, but not this year! This time I'm combining it with the requisite Daily Lunch Update (DLU). Most of the notable parts of my last day have revolved around the making of this year's video anyway. I think people will generally really enjoy it; it's always good to remember that no one watching it has any consciousness of what it otherwise could have been or could have included—all that shit exists only in my head. Still, I have some ambivalence about this year's video, as it's far more ambitious in scope than any of my previous videos have been, but it's nowhere near as polished as it could have been, considering I literally opened the new project for it in iMovie on Sunday night. I had only a short while to start adding video clips and photos to the project on Sunday. I already noted yesterday that I worked a solid six hours on it through Monday evening, powering through from the time I got home from work until 12:30 that night. I was pretty tired through much of yesterday as a result; I only got about four and a half hours of sleep that night. I had only taken breaks Monday evening to prepare my dinner and, later, make myself a cup of peppermint hot chocolate. In the end, I'm glad I worked that much on it Monday night. I had about two hours to finish it up last night, and that proved to be the perfect amount of time. I felt comfortable enough with it by that point. Also, I use several pop songs in the video, as always; this is why I have to load these videos to Flickr and not to YouTube, which will block the sound for the use of copyrighted material. (Which kind of begs the question as to how long it will take for Flickr to start doing the same, aside from the fact that YouTube gets used far more music sharing than Flickr does, which is a photo hosting site.) Ironically, I used an audio downloader link for the YouTube pages I found for most of the tracks I used, which is technically illegal. I used to pay for individual tracks for this purpose, but this year it finally occurred to me: I have this tool and I only need the tracks for this one purpose (I can't use newer tracks from Apple Music since I now subscribe to their music streaming service and no longer purchase individual albums to download), so I didn't see the sense on wasting the money. Even if it only would have cost me a few dollars all told, but I also don't need duplicates of tracks I already have access to on Apple Music. As I said yesterday though, I think next year I will make much more of an effort to assemble the clips and photos in the 2026 iMovie project as the year goes on. I really need to find new ways to ease the crunch of these projects I do and share at the end of every year. I am always deeply satisfied by the end results, but also this shit is exhausting. — पांच हजार नौ सौ चौंतीस — — पांच हजार नौ सौ चौंतीस — In other news, the other things that took up the bulk of my evening last night: Alexia came in to Seattle to see Anaconda with me, at the 5:00 showing at Pacific Place. We met there at 4:45. Alexia had such a good time with it, I even mentioned the friend I saw it with in my review. She laughed so hard she was crying at one point. I admitted to getting several good chuckles out of it, but that doesn't make it not one of the worst movies I've seen all year. In fact, had I not already posted my best & worst of the year, I'd consider making this among the five worst that I saw. I think the others would still squeak ahead of it, anyway. This made the 100th movie I reviewed in the calendar year 2025. A nice, round number. It's worth noting that six of my reviews were of movies I watched on streamers at home, so that means I saw 94 movies in-theater this year—and this was a rare year in which none of those were repeat viewings. I thought I might eventually go see One Battle After Another again, but theatrical windows are so short anymore that it's already on HBO Max. My movie log from 2024 was of 114 films; 2023 had 95 though, so the variances haven't been too huge the most recent few years. I did work on finishing the "2025 in Ten Minutes" video first, as that was more pressing—I needed that ready before I went to bed, so I could just post it as soon as I got out of bed this morning, as I always do. I spent the hour between 9:00 and 10:00 writing the movie review. Shobhit called me on FaceTime for a few minutes both while I was working on the video and while I was writing the review; he let me go both times when it was clear I needed to focus. — पांच हजार नौ सौ चौंतीस — I did call Shobhit on FaceTime at 10:20 this mornig, hoping to be on with him when they rang in the New Year in India—which was at 10:30 Pacific Time. I called at 10:20, no answer. I called again at 10:24, and even tried the video call feature on Facebpook Messenger, where Facebook indicated he had been active only eight minutes earlier. I don't know why he didn't seem to be seeing my calls. I'd say maybe he didn't have his phone with him, except he texted me at 10:28: 2 minutes to new year here. Not even an acknowledgenent of the text I had sent him literally a minute before that; it was as though he hadn't gotten it. Hmm, maybe he hadn't? It's possible my text did not deliver fully until after he started writing his text. They were only a minute apart, after all. I had gone into one of the phone rooms with the intention of getting on FaceTime with him, so after that I attempted to call again, and this time he answered. I was with him when he watched a countdown on TV. Apparently the TV was not indicating that it was live, and it was an indoor event with lots of famous Bollywood actors as guests. I kept asking if Shobhit knew where they were on the TV, and he said probably Mumbai, but they probably also pre-recorded the entire program. What a strange thing to do. I tried to get him to show me the view out their window, as he said he could hear people outside there in New Delhi as well. But, the windows were all covered, and he said the place is not very well insulated and cold air was coming in. (It's 52° there as I write this). He said he wasn't going to go outside; I said I didn't expect him to. But, he also noted that the smog is so bad there right now that a hundred flights a day are getting canceled due to low visibility—from smog—and he was lucky his plane landed on schedule when he arrived on Saturday. He said he could even see some of the smoke inside his mom's apartment, which I found to be truly nuts. I looked it up and Delhi's AQI rating is in the "Hazardous" zone, worst in the world with an AQI of 447; this is almost double the second-worst, also in India, Kolkata at 255. Delhi has been the worst major city in the world for smog for a few years now, and I have no idea what solution they'll ever find for it, as it's the result of a host of factors blending to create a truly horrible situation. It's bonkers that Shobhit's 80-year-old mom—and 35 million other people—just live with it. — पांच हजार नौ सौ चौंतीस — [posted 12:46pm]