Not all of us are lucky enough to live with friends. Or even have them. But there can be a way around that…in a roundabout way.

So, last night, I wanted to watch a video online that was thirty minutes long, but I also needed to make some (ratchet) dinner. Most of what I wanted out of the video was actually what they were saying (it was a video of two guys talking and Playing video games) rather than the visual, so I chrome-casted my computer to my TV. When I do that, it uses the TV volume, so it ends up being extraordinarily loud. And unlike TV, the sound on a YouTube video is not always so filtered out. Therefore, with the volume cranked up, you can hear breathing, chairs squeaking, noisy eating, and any background noises – the stuff that is excised from most television shows. And if I closed my eyes, I could imagine that there were actually two guys playing video games behind me as I cooked. I can usually hear my neighbors and all the noisy noise they and their friends make almost every night, so I imagined all my neighbors walking past my place, jealous of all the video gaming and fun going on in apartment 803.

In other news, has anyone seen that new commercial for the Princess Diana documentary? It’s weird that they have the horror-movie “one dark and scary night voice” to voice-over advertisements about a (mostly) positive documentary on her life.