Emmalyse Brownstein Vero Beach, Florida March 27, 2020 4 p.m.
Dating from a Distance
Today I tried something I’d never done before — a virtual date.
Last week, I had to move out of Stanford Residential College and back to my home in Vero Beach, Florida, which is about 2.5 hours north of Miami. My boyfriend, Leo Beleno, is living in Miami with his grandparents.
In an attempt to make up for the time we’d usually spend together, we “hang out” over Face Time. While video calling, we discovered an app called Kast that allows users to join “parties” and screen share from computer to computer.
So, we decided to watch a movie together…ish.
Leo put “Enemy” on his computer, selected to share his screen with me, and I was to watch along. At first, we thought our ingenious idea was squashed by copyright — Netflix, Hulu and even third-party watch sites were showing up with black screens on my end.
In my determination to make this “date” happen, I found an article online about fixing the issue. It wasn’t copyright — it was something about hardware graphics acceleration. I don’t know. But we fixed it!
As we watched “Enemy” — an A24 movie that gave a similarly perplexing mood as “Inception” — on our laptops, we also Face Timed on our phones so we could still talk and see each other. A lot of Wi-Fi and battery life were sacrificed.
Although I had no one to share my bag of popcorn, it was nice to be able to do something sort of normal. I just hope this isn’t a thing we have to do for much longer.
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