There are multiple periods in my life that I consider “lost time.” For example, my entire stint working for AT&T was lost time because I worked 10-hour days, six days a week for five years. I missed out on a lot of stuff, including movies, music, and any semblance of a social life. The entire period, save for a few key moments, is a complete blur to me.

Another such period in my life when this happened was the years between 1995 and 1999. These years are slightly more memorable, but there is a lot I missed because I was in some self-isolating social cocoon. This stemmed from stress and depression that I still do not know why I had. In hindsight I had nothing to worry about, as everything somehow managed to work out in the end. While I did miss a lot of things, there were some movies that I got to enjoy. In 1995 I was taping a lot of movies from HBO. Crimson Tide, Braveheart, The Net, Assassins, Virtuosity, Money Train, and Die Hard with a Vengeance are some that stick out to me as having watched repeatedly on my recorded VHS tapes.

My goal today is to catch up on the movies I missed. While these aren’t considered classics by any means, they are movies I remember either seeing the box art or watching the trailer. One of these movies is the 1995 Sigourney Weaver serial killer thriller Copycat. In a nutshell, it is a Silence of the Lambs knockoff, albeit four years later. Sigourney Weaver is a serial killer profiler who suffers an assault from the man she helped put away, Harry Connick, Jr. After that she begins to suffer from agoraphobia, Holly Hunter is a police detective who is noticing a string of serial murders. The two reluctantly join forces, Holly on the street, and Sigourney from her techy techy fortress of solitude. Stuff happens, the serial killer is copying famous murders and he turns his attention on both Holly and Sigourney. That's when they turn to Harry Connick, Jr. for advice. Despite how generic the movie sounds, it's actually surprisingly good.

Or, digital minimalism.

I cannot pinpoint the exact moment it began, but for the last few years I've had this burning desire to go off grid digitally. I don't mean go live in the mountains away from people, but to not be easily reachable, and to just live a normal person's life that exists outside the barriers of social media.

When the Internet kicked off I was all about it. I spent so much time online just looking up stuff and engaging with people through chat rooms and forums. Now, what changed for me was the iteration of having to be our real selves on social media. Where I used to be able to just get away with having a photo of Gandalf as my avatar, Facebook made it impossible to be just an anonymous nobody and have an active feed to look at. Thus, I became terminally online.

Back when blogging first became the hot thing to do, there was a young lady who had a website that was entirely dedicated to her every move. On her webpage there was a location tracker, cameras in her home, a blog where she detailed every aspect of her life, and a few other creepy things that I've forgotten about. At the time I thought this was absurd. Then came a time period where we all started doing that, just not on one single webpage, but a myriad of social media platforms.

This is merely a test to see if this works. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.