OKC 4 of 5: Saxophone & TV & Games May 12

Tuesday, May 12 Robin had meetings with out of state co-workers that she had to attend. Jeremy took off from work and dedicated a couple hours mid-day to Park Day at Isaiah's school. It is Isaiah's last week before summer break and Park Day is one of several fun activities planned. Parent participation is encouraged and Isaiah loved having his dad there. Ya gotta take advantage of those opportunities before the teen years of parental avoidance start.

After work on Tuesday Robin and Jeremy attended a press-the-flesh type dinner with Robin's out of town co-workers. Frank and I had a chance to bond with Autumn and Isaiah on their home turf throughout the evening.

Autumn got out her saxophone and played for us. She just started this school year and I was impressed with her progress. She sight read several songs from a music book I had brought for her.

To encourage her budding interest, I also made her a project bag for her music or anything else saxophone related (or even non-related). Some closeups and the details of my making it are in my other blog DianeLoves2Quilt in a post dated 4/16/26.

I also made an item to suit Isaiah's interests, a crocheted Wooble raccoon named Scooter. Isaiah loves these crocheted critters. He visits the Woobles web site and has made a prioritized list of those he would like for me to make for him. Scooter is the fifth and most recent. Details are in my other blog DianeLoves2Quilt in a post dated 4/20/26. That post also contains a list of links and snapshots of the previous four I have made for him. Isaiah has read all of those posts. All five Woobles are lined up on the game table in the photo after Scooter.

Isaiah's Woobles can also be found on his lap as he watches TV. They are definitely an eclectic crew. I picked a movie to watch with Isaiah. I assured him that if he did not like it several minutes into it, we would switch to another of his choice. I did rule out one category of his favorite — YouTube movies of video games played and recorded by some random individual out there in the digital universe. Personally, I do not see the allure, but perhaps Isaiah is honing his gaming skills by gleaning playing strategies during observation.

The movie on Netflix that I picked for us to watch together was Remarkably Bright Creatures. I had read the book several years ago and had really enjoyed it then. Sally Fields plays the starring role of a lonely widow who works as a cleaning lady at an aquarium. Correction: Sally Fields plays the starring human role. Marcellas is the octopus star. Per an article from Octonation.com

Marcellus has a real-life muse, and her name is Agnetha. She’s a three-year-old giant Pacific octopus living in the Pacific Canada Pavilion at the Vancouver Aquarium, and she’s the reason Marcellus moves and looks the way he does on screen. The entire CGI Marcellus was built from hours of footage of Agnetha that VFX lead Chris Ritvo and director Olivia Newman captured at the aquarium. Think of it like rotoscoping (the old animation trick of tracing live-action film frame by frame): every Marcellus arm curl, every color shift, every long stare through the glass is based on something Agnetha actually did.  ...  Agnetha appears in the actual movie! Real footage of her is intercut with the CGI throughout the film.

I kept observing Isaiah to see if he was enjoying the movie or merely being polite. The underwater scenes were awesome. He was really in to it! I was impressed with his depth of empathy and understanding, which I thought was more developed than what I would have expected in a ten-year old boy. He saw a photograph of the cleaning lady, Tova, with a man and young boy. He commented, "She must be a widow who lost her son". Also when Tova kept the door closed to a room, Isaiah guessed correctly that it had been her son's. Isaiah got was so engaged at one point he chastised me, "Aw, Grandma! You made me get all emotional over a squid!" Luckily it was a good choice of movie. I highly recommend watching it if you have not yet seen it.

Later on Autumn picked something for me to watch. It is called The Amazing Digital Circus. Wikipedia lists its genre as "adult animation, dark comedy, psychological drama, and surreal comedy", an apt description on all counts. Autumn warned me, "Grandma, it's weird." I watched the first episode and part of the second with her and she is so right. I intend to watch the follow-on episodes after travel back home from OKC, but so far, I have only watched one more. I will persist. 

The premise is that a bunch of extremely creatively-drawn characters go on a series of adventures within an amazing circus that they cannot escape. When they get emotionally distraught they "glitch" — black, jagged, spiky images — like any streaming transmission is wont to do. Here is a YouTube trailer that may explain it best — if it can be explained at all.

The Amazing Digital Circus features a main cast of six humans trapped in a virtual reality simulation, overseen by an erratic AI ringmaster, named Caine and his bubbly, floating, and obedient sidekick name Bubble. Their following descriptions should allow for matching them with the previous illustration:

Pomni: The newest human to join the circus. She is a jester whose design features a panic-prone, wide-eyed expression and a colorful jester hat.

Jax: A tall, purple, rabbit-like humanoid who is known for being a mischievous and cynical prankster.

Ragatha: A kind, optimistic, and motherly ragdoll who often tries to keep everyone's spirits up.

Gangle: A timid and melancholic ribbon-wearing humanoid whose comedy and tragedy masks change based on her current emotional state.

Kinger: The longest-residing human in the circus. He is a chess piece-themed character who is paranoid and slightly unhinged.

Zooble: A cynical, gruff character made of various modular, geometric toy parts that can be detached and rearranged.

Screen time sometimes get a bad rap. I got some insight into my two grandkids watching shows with them. But we also played two games Uno and Apple to Apples. Did Autumn pick those games because she thought we could handle them? If so, I choose to be pleased with her thoughtfulness rather than be offended by her possibly low assessment of us. She does have adequate data from other times we have been there and had our eyes glaze over as we struggled to learn more complicated role playing games. So how did we do with the games she selected? 

With Hello Kitty UNO we did OK but did hesitate just a bit because the stylized icons for Reverse and Draw 2 in the Kitty version were sometimes a bit obtuse for Frank and me since we'd never confronted them before. UNO is a classic game that has reached icon status and those stylized directions should have been obvious to Frank and me. You do not need to know the name Nike to know what a check mark means nor do you need to know the word McDonald's to recognize the golden arches. But we figured those UNO icon out and soldiered on ... and lost.

Apples to Apples was a bit more transparent. In this game a player sets out a green adjective card and the other players put out the best choice among the red noun cards they are holding in their hands to match it. The person who set out the green descriptive card is the judge and also the player who picks the best red naming card to go with it. Although this game is straight forward there was a definite division between the way the minds of the young and the minds of the old think. Invariable, and not with cheating of any sort, Isaiah and Autumn tended to pick the card of their sibling while Frank and I tended to pick the card of our spouse. Surely this phenomenon was not random but rather more evidence of a generational diversity of experiences and brain processing.

While Robin and Jeremy were out of the house, between TV and games Frank and I took advantage of a wonderful opportunity to get to know our grandkids better. Chilling at home has its rewards. Frank and I reaped those rewards that evening.