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At 1am after watching the first two episodes of Barry, season four, I realized that Nope was also available for streaming. I’ve been wanting to watch that movie for a long time and the only thing stopping me was being a cheapskate and not wanting to pay for a streaming rental. It’s now available as part of the subscription to Crave, so my patience paid off.

Instead of going to sleep, I watched the first 30 minutes of it so far. It hooked me immediately. I briefly thought about just going for it and just watching the whole thing. That would probably bring me to around 3:30am. That’s late and I have a 9am meeting tomorrow. That’s too late and my morning is too early tomorrow.

The great thing is, the movie isn’t going anywhere, and I resume it tomorrow at a much more convenient time. The thing is, if I had won the lottery, I wouldn’t need to worry about work tomorrow. Hmmm… maybe it’s time to start playing the lotto again.

I cancelled my Netflix subscription a few weeks ago. I did this for several reasons. First, I realized that I am subscribed to too many streaming services. Back in the day, Netflix was basically the only streaming service around, so it just made sense to subscribe to it if you wanted to have streaming entertainment. Fast forward to the present and I’m now paying for Netflix, Discovery+, Disney+, Apple TV+, Prime Video, and Crave. Each of these costs anywhere between $10 to over $20 a month. All of that adds up to an appreciable amount of money dedicated to just streaming entertainment. The thing is, I don’t have nearly enough time to watch shows from each of these services on a weekly or even monthly basis.

Second, I realized that it had been three months since I’d even started the Netflix app on my TV. There was nothing on Netflix that I really wanted to see. There were no shows nor original movies on Netflix that made me think twice about cancelling my subscription. That made it a very easy decision to cancel.

It’s for these reasons that over the last two months or so, I cancelled subscriptions to Netflix, Discovery+, and Apple TV+. I’m keeping Disney+ because I need to finish the last season of The Mandalorian and the latest Ant-Man movie is going to stream there later this month as well. I’m staying with Prime Video because it’s relatively cheaper and also there’s a benefit of being an Amazon Prime member as well. Their entertainment offerings kinda suck but the Amazon Prime shipping perks win me over. Crave is staying because it has a lot of great HBO content and I have about two seasons worth of Picard to watch as well.

Going forward, I might strip it down to just one or two streaming services as a month. I know some people just switch from one service to another per month. For that month, they watch all the episodes of a particular show and then the next month, it’s off to another service to binge episodes of another show there. After this month, the next big release on Disney+ is in late June with Secret Invasion, so there’s really no need to be subscribed in between.

It’s time to save some money!

About two weeks ago, I heard that there was an in-house catered team event at the Burnaby studio where I used to commute to every day. Some teams have decided to return to the studio, at least a few days of the week. Anyways, there was some sorta social event, which had food served. Some of the employees who ate the food fell ill shortly afterwards with all the classic signs of a food-borne illness. There was nausea and the nasty stuff coming out of both ends.

Now I’ve heard the studio has been implementing sanitation and preventative measures that you would do for a norovirus outbreak. Apparently, employees have continued to fall ill and they believe that a norovirus has found its way into the studio. From what I understand, such a virus lives on surfaces and that’s how it is spread. To reduce common touch surfaces, they’ve even removed the silverware cutlery from the cafeteria, so that they don’t have dozens and dozens of hands reaching into the same container and touching many utensils while they get one from the pile. Instead, they’re now using these disposable and compostable utensils that you grab one at a time from a dispenser. Each person can get a fork or spoon and not touch the next one.

This is the first time I’ve heard the studio try to fight a norovirus proactively like this and I’ve worked there for many, many years. Could have such a virus been in the studio before? Possibly. I know I’ve gotten food poisoning while I was working there but it’s hard to tell if I got it somewhere else as well. I definitely have not heard about many people on the same team getting sick from a single team event. That’s new to me.

The one silver lining, if there is one, is that the washrooms at the Burnaby studio have been renovated in the last three years and they’re just so fantastic to use now. Most now have gender neutral individual stalls with doors that go from ceiling right down to the floor. They make for a very private experience to have a poop. Before the pandemic, they had already converted a single washroom like this and it became my default place to poop. I actually didn’t mind pooping at work anymore because of this new stalls.

It used to be that anywhere between ten minutes to an hour after waking up, I’d need to poop. I could rely on this almost like clockwork because I knew I wouldn’t normally need to poop in the afternoon or evening. I’d have my morning poop and be done with it.

A few weeks ago, I started consuming lactose-free yogurt on an almost daily basis. It offers a decent amount of protein and probiotics. I have reason to believe my yogurt consumption has altered my poop habits slightly.

While I still regularly have poops in the morning, it’s not a guarantee it’ll happen within an hour of waking up. Sometimes it’ll happen several hours into the day. Also, my morning poops have always been a bit “loose”. Things have “firmed up” slightly in the last few weeks.

There are a lot of variables at play here but I do wonder if my gut flora has changed enough to affect my poop habits. I don’t mind the change as I frequently have a lot of Zoom meetings within an hour of waking up. There have been countless times where I both had to poop and attend a Zoom meeting at the same time. There’s fewer of these conflicting needs now, so that’s good.

A long time ago, when I was a much younger person, one of the ways I knew I had stayed up way too late watching TV, was when the show ended, I’d hear the Canadian national anthem, overlaid with images of this great nation. Once the anthem was done, there would be a test pattern shown, and the channel would be off-air for many hours until the morning, when programming would resume.

For some of you younger viewers, it may come as a surprise to you that television did not broadcast 24 hours a day. Depending on the channel or the year, sometime after midnight, channels would just stop broadcasting programs. The test pattern was shown so that you could adjust your televisions at home (and also not show static for several hours).

There was no Internet or streaming services, so once it go too late and all the channels went off-air, there was very little in the way of entertainment to watch on TV. In the time before VHS players, you couldn’t even pop in a tape to keep yourself occupied. Those were simpler and obviously more boring times.

In the present day, broadcast channels really don’t go off-air daily anymore. There’s a lot of automation going on, so you can broadcast programs around the clock with very little human input. It probably makes more financial sense to broadcast throughout the night as well, as you can sell ads for more hours. Also, I’m not sure who used test patterns to calibrate their TVs back then but I’m sure no one needs to do that now. To be clear, even modern TVs need to be calibrated but I don’t think people are relying on a TV channel to help them with that.

It used to be you could rely on the test pattern to tell you go to sleep. Now you don’t have to sleep ever!

In a previous post, I wrote about how I started watching a show because they filmed a whole bunch of scenes just a few blocks away from where I live. Normally, I wouldn’t watch any show just because it filmed in Vancouver. If I did, I’d probably have a dozen shows to watch a year based on how many shows are shot here.

This show, however, shot a few scenes mere blocks from where I live, so it feels even closer to home. At first, I watched it to see how many other locations close by they used but then I started caring less about the locations and more about the show itself. It turns out the show has a certain heart to it, which is endearing. I’m almost at the end of season three. I don’t think there will be a season four but I’m just glad they even got three seasons to begin with. In Canada and the US, Loudermilk is available on Amazon Prime.

I bought a new tube of sunscreen on the weekend because the one I already had was expired. Apparently sunscreen can expire and I really don’t want to take my chances with sunscreen that has broken down enough that it doesn’t work anymore.

I’m getting old now and that means sun damage can take a toil on my skin. In my younger days, I could go in the sun, get a nice tan, and have no consequences. Now, the sun can still give me a tan but there’s also a chance it can give me spots on my skin. Being sun safe should be something you do all your life really but it’s especially important when you’re older.

Though it’s April and it’s still cold as hell, there have been a few days where it was sunny all day. The plan is to have sunscreen on sunny days where I’m out in the sun for any appreciable time.

I also bought a mineral-based sunscreen. I think I wrote this before but I’m just a bit uncertain about relying on the chemical sunscreens to do the job without having side effects. Mineral sunscreens can leave a bit of a white shade on your body but it’s a small price to pay for sun protection that’s better for your skin and the environment.

I recommend everyone to be more willing to put on sunscreen anytime you’re out in the sun, not just when you’re at beach or on vacation.

The official low tonight for Vancouver is 2 degrees Celsius but I think that’s the forecast by the water near the airport. In some areas, the low will be lower than that, so it will be barely above freezing.

We’re into April now and while for many parts of Canada, snow and freezing temperatures are familiar for April, it’s normally not this cold for Vancouver. The forecast for Tuesday evening goes even lower, predicting that we’ll hit the freezing mark for that night. In response, warming centres have been opened around the city for the next several days. I can’t remember the last time we needed these so late into the year.

My family doctor is retiring at the end of August. He sent out an e-mail to all his patients informing us that he is leaving his practice along with three of his colleagues, who are also retiring. Four doctors, all from the same medical clinic, retiring at the same time. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that before.

So that will leave the medical clinic with just one doctor after they retire. I was also informed that they could not find replacement doctors to come take over at the clinic. This means that I will no longer have a family doctor after the summer ends.

My family doctor has been my doctor for well over two decades. Over those two decades, I thankfully haven’t had the need to see him very often or when I did, it was for very minor or preventative reasons. I know others haven’t been as lucky and I feel very blessed in that regard.

While my doctor has earned a well-deserved retirement and I wish him well, the timing isn’t great for me. Though I feel like I’m in relatively good health, I am getting older. As you age, having a good and consistent doctor available to you is important. Seeing a doctor at a walk-in clinic is fine as a stopgap measure but building that relationship with a family doctor is different.

The fact that four doctors are leaving the clinic and they couldn’t find a single family doctor to replace them, with a built-in set of many patients is quite telling. There is something not quite right with the medical system in this province and I guess in most provinces as well. There are just not enough family doctors to go around right now.

I need to start the search for a new family doctor now, before I actually have a dire need for one. Who knows how long it’ll take before I find one.

Earlier this afternoon, my employer announced that they would be laying off about 6% of their global workforce. Some of these layoffs actually started several weeks ago when my employer closed a studio in California and cancelled two games. Today’s announcement revealed more people will lose their jobs and in total, about 800 people will be out of work.

I gotta admit, the games industry seems to have weathered this economic storm better than other tech companies so far. Compared to the layoffs at Google, Amazon, and Meta, their layoff numbers would have wiped all the people at my company worldwide. That’s not to diminish what has happened and will continue to happen where I work though. Any way you look at it, 800 people losing their jobs is a lot. That’s 800 people with bills, mortgages, families, loans, children, spouses, and other responsibilities to take care of, all of which require a job to do so. If there might be a silver lining, it’s that the severance packages in the past have been extremely generous. I know of two people who were laid off a few years back that received severance for approximately two years. That’s not a typo, these people were given over twenty months of severance. Of course, not everyone will be as lucky. The amount of severance will be tied to the length of employment at the company.

Those getting laid off will also be put into the job market that already has been flooded with job seekers from all the recent tech layoffs as well. It might be a tough road for some. From what I’ve seen and heard, it might be especially rough for recruiters.

From a personal standpoint, I’m not worried. In the CEO’s statement today, he called out a few teams and games that were doing well and represent the present and future of the company. I’m lucky enough to work on one of those games he mentioned. I’m privy to a bit of our financial performance and without saying too much, the game I work on is profitable and provides a significant amount of revenue for the company. I also happen to work on features that a have direct impact on how much money the game brings in. Lastly, I was informed today, by more than one person, that our team is safe for the most part.

No one is ever 100% but as far as I can tell, the odds of me being part of that 6% is are extremely low. I have high hopes I’ll be ok and I hope everyone affected finds something soon.