Day Twenty-Five: Shaun of the Dead (MotM 2019)

Man, oh man, what a day it’s been for me today.

I wake up to blue. Blue screens of death. Every time I try to get into my laptop, the bloody blueness comes at me like, “Yo, lad. How ya been? How come ya’never call me anymore?” I open and close and open and close and still the blue remains! After the fourth close, my laptop finally pipes up and levels with me: “Hey, uh, you’re kinda fucked, y’know? I’m about to have to refresh this whole thing, y’know what I mean?” And I say, “Yes! Yes, please, get this horrid blue bane out from my circuitry! This is my life, you must understand!”

So I refresh the thing. Had to go to work before it could finish doing so, leaving me with five-and-a-half hours of dread, wondering whether or not my four-year-old buddy was going to make it. I get home and everything’s very quiet. No one’s in the home. My laptop sleeps peacefully up against the side of my living room couch. I quickly open it up to see the familiar login screen. Not able to bear the thought of an incoming blue screen, I avert my eyes slightly as I type in the password. I get through.

Everything is gone. Barren, without a home, with files and shortcuts spread unevenly across the screen. My background is the same, my files appear to be in order. Internet Explorer was my default browser again, like I had traveled back to 2015. I quickly get to work recovering everything that had been lost to the refresh.

I don’t remember quite everything. A few bookmarks remain missing even now, banished to the weaker part of my memory. A vast array of emulators no longer hug the bottom of my screen, attached to my taskbar. I figure I don’t really need them there if I’m not going to use them for years. Logging in to every site again proved painful, as I had forgotten a few from sites I’m never used to putting passwords into. Thankfully, I figured out the password to my e-mails, which made everything much more smooth.

I still fear the blue. It could pop up at any moment, perhaps only dormant from the efforts to erase it. The next few days are ones I feel cool towards, anxious of the lack of security I have in knowing that the death screen is nevermore. The trigger before happened to be putting my laptop into sleep mode (by closing it) or shutting it down. I tried putting my laptop into sleep mode soon after returning home from work—fortunately, no blue. Perhaps overcautious, I tremble to think about the possibility that the refresh was nothing but a respite, that the blue should return at a moment’s notice when I least suspect it.

Pray for me, everyone, so that I may not have to splurge an extra grand on purchasing a new laptop when I have more dire things to pay with my bi-weekly earnings.

…Oh, fuck, I was reviewing a movie, wasn’t I? Yeah, okay, uh… Shaun of the Dead. Yeah, it was pretty good.

Final Score: 8/10

The rating for all other films can be found at Letterboxd.

For more, check out the March of the Movies Archive!

Thank you for your time. Have a great day.