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Not Actually A Castle

December 20, 2024
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S. and I are up in Victoria for a brief pre-Christmas holiday vacation; mostly just lounging about. We’re sitting in Saint Cecilia as I write this, which I strongly recommend if you’re into coffee. They do great hand-brews. One of the non-lounge activities, though, was Craigdarroch Castle.

Craigdarroch Castle from a slight distance — it’s a big Romanesque Revival stone building.

I say “not actually a castle” because the family that built it, the Dunsmuirs, did not actually call it a castle. I imagine being from Scotland they had higher standards for the term. You can see why locals picked up the habit, though.

It was cool enough (and surpassed expectations enough) so that I wanted to blog about it. I’m a sucker for museums which are built on top of old robber baron collections. This isn’t exactly that; Robert Dunsmuir wasn’t particularly into collecting art, and he died before Craigdarroch was finished. As far as I can tell, he was into collecting money and children. However, he liked nice things and Craigdarroch is a window into the way the extremely wealthy lived back in the 1890s.

The Castle Society also made the smart decision to preserve and display the rest of the history of the building. After Robert Dunsmuir’s wife Joan died, it was sold off — the rocky history of inheritances and lawsuits in the family is a whole different post. Since then, it’s been a military hospital, a college, a local governmental office, and a music conservatory. All this is part of a vibrant history, and the Society decided to restore those aspects as well.

So, for example, there are places where the linoleum floors put in for the college are still there and will remain. Most of the work so far has been centered on the Dunsmuir era, but as you descend from the fourth floor down through the servant quarters there are displays pertaining to the rest of the history, and outlined plans for more reconstruction. It’s a good decision to show the full history of the place.

Which is not to say that the original mansion isn’t the focus. The stained glass in particular is eye-catching. According to one of the docents, 75% of it is original; some pieces went missing after Joan’s death.

A stained glass window depicting a woman with a swan; she’s holding a bunch of peacock feathers. It’s based on a pre-Raphaelite painting called The Odalisque by Sir Frederic Leighton.

The Dunsmuir family faded in prominence fairly soon after Robert and Joan died. Their son James was likewise a robber baron and politician and the influence of the family was huge, but there weren’t more than three generations of fabulously rich Dunsmuirs. The gracenotes I found most interesting were a) Dola Dunsmuir’s long relationship with Tallulah Bankhead, and b) Kathleen Dunsmuir’s funding of the first Canadian talking motion picture. Alas, The Crimson Paradise is a lost picture.

WordPress and Migrations, Oh My

October 7, 2024
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I really intended to spend the rest of my blogging life, such as it is, on self-hosted WordPress. It satisfies my basic needs: I control my own data and I can type words into it from pretty much anywhere. (I’m using Obsidian right now, in fact.) It is not a perfectly resilient platform in that it’s dynamically served, so I need the developers to continue to patch and update it or it’ll wind up as a security flaw, but WordPress.org always looked pretty stable and has been fine for a long, long time.

Welp.

I’m not convinced that current events require me to move from a practical standpoint. There are enough websites using WordPress so that there’s strong motivation for someone to continue maintaining the open source version or a fork of said version. For a while, at least, but that removes the immediate urgency.

However, I think practically speaking I should understand how I’d move.

There is no dynamic blogging platform, self-hosted or not, that fits my needs. Basically that’s a longevity issue; every migration means I’m losing a bit of fidelity. Redirects I didn’t handle right, weird custom WordPress shortcodes, all that jazz. If you look you can see the places where my migrations between MovableType and Tumblr and WordPress screwed up small details. Nobody notices but me, I know.

Still, if I’m gonna migrate yet again, I’d like to wind up with something as simple as possible on the back end. This probably means a static site generator. That’s cool, there are plenty of those.
(Image embeds on old posts are gonna look bad but that’s OK, the information doesn’t tend to rely on exact image positioning.)

The big problem is of course comments. Self-hosted comment systems for static site generators exist. Hashover is interesting but fairly unmaintained (2 years since last commit). Staticman is likewise pretty fallow. I imagine I can figure out a way to pull over comments as part of the static files, I’m just worried about allowing ongoing commentary.

So what if I don’t? I’ve gotten a handful of comments which were really cool over many years of blogging. I mirror this blog to Dreamwidth anyhow, and my friends tend to comment there.

Avoiding the problem entirely seems like one good answer.

Another neat answer would be pushing all my posts to Mastodon and Bluesky, which would be a trivial exercise, and letting people comment there if they wanted. Not really user friendly and many of those cool comments were from non-tech savvy people; I think I’d lose some functionality. Still rather attractive from a distributed Web standpoint.

What if I also wrote some code to pull back replies to those posts and show them on the blog page? Substantial loss of control over spam, is what. Might be fun anyhow.

October Criterion Channel Lineup

September 29, 2024
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This is in part an experiment to figure out if I can keep to a monthly posting cadence on a particular topic. Unsurprisingly, it’s about movies — specifically, what’s coming to the Criterion Channel next month? Criterion themes their months around collections, which typically stick around for several months thereafter; any given collection is usually a mix of new to the channel movies and existing faves. Here’s a rundown of October’s collections and some specifics which caught my eye.

Continue ReadingOctober Criterion Channel Lineup

Radiance Films

April 7, 2024
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Being prone to collector disease, I have bought some Blu-rays during the last few years of obsessive movie watching. I’ve been more restrained than I used to be — I focus on movies I’m pretty sure I’ll like. I got the Criterion Ingmar Bergman boxed set after watching a handful of his movies, and I’m working through it slowly but happily. I picked up both Arrow Shawscope sets and S. and I are watching our way through those. Restraint.

But I’m me.

As you may know, the last few years have seen an explosion in the number of boutique Blu-ray labels. It’s not just Criterion for the arthouse and Arrow for the exploitation any more. I’m not sure of the economics of this business, but it seems that releasing a couple of titles a month in limited editions of 1,000-3,000 is enough to sustain a business if you’re in it for the passion.

And a couple of them have subscription programs. Vinegar Syndrome is the most notable example. They land a bit further on the exploitation side than I do, so their subscription program wasn’t interesting to me. (I do recommend checking out their partner labels even if you aren’t into sleaze — I have a couple of Deaf Crocodile releases from the amazing Aleksandr Ptushko, and they distribute Music Box Films Blu-rays.)

On the other hand, Radiance Films, well. They hit this incredibly sweet spot for me that’s sort of in the place where genre film overlaps with arthouse cinema, plus they do a great job of finding movies I’ve never heard of. Their definition of “Radiance-core” matches my tastes so well: Wong Kar-wai, Aki Kaurismäki, old movies, new movies — and everything I hadn’t heard of was interesting.

So I picked up their World Noir and Piotr Szulkin sets while over in Dublin — at the Irish Film Institute store in Temple Bar, it’s great, check it out — and I liked those a bunch. Theory confirmed, 2024 subscription purchased. And the movies are panning out wonderfully so far.

If 2022 was the year I dove into film, and 2023 was the year I broadened my experience with great films, 2024 may be my year of diving into great pockets of genre. None of that is completely accurate; all of it is a bit glib; it’ll do as a thematic statement.

The Big Move

March 23, 2024
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No, bigger than that. We’re moving to Dublin!

Long story short, my illustrious employer needs someone with my skill set in the Dublin office, and both S. and I think living in Dublin sounds like an interesting adventure, so we’re doing it. Estimated move date is sometime in September, pending the excitement of getting a visa (in process) and all the other logistics details. The plan is to keep us there for three years, after which we’ll return to the Seattle area and carry on with our lives.

Even though we’re getting a good relocation package, it’s daunting. We may not need to find our own place to live eventually; we still need to talk to tax consultants on both sides of the ocean, and get paperwork done, and figure out what we’re going to move.

That last is a whole thing of a thing. We can ship stuff, but it’ll take months to get there by boat. We can take a few bags on the plane. We can maybe move a few things by air, like maybe one of the televisions? I am in the middle of the somewhat difficult task of figuring out which tabletop games I want to bring. There’s gonna be a lot of stuff going into storage for a few years.

Such an adventure, though. I have a spreadsheet of cities which are direct flights from Dublin. Rome is three hours away. This is going to be ridiculous.

2023 In Movies

February 5, 2024
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Aw, that’s cute, I thought I wasn’t going to watch as many movies as I did in 2022. Instead I went from 423 watched to 508 watched. Remember when I said “I want to spend more time following my whims”? That worked out really well. In 2022, I did a weekly challenge plus a weekly movie watching club plus another weekly movie watching club — it got to be a grind. In 2023 I was more varied about my tastes and I had more fun.

I also went to not one but two film festivals, SIFF and Fantasia. S. came with to Montreal! Including shorts, I watched 36 movies at SIFF and 45 movies at Fantasia, so that’s a pretty big chunk of the additional movies right there. The festivals were immensely fun and I really, really need to remember how much I enjoy that kind of thing.

My time spent watching movies was absolutely worth it. My top ten movies of 2023 were excellent, and there were way more good ones than just those ten. Plus this was the year I really discovered Iranian cinema (A Separation, Certified Copy, No Bears), I got that Bergman boxed set and watched a ton of it, and I dug into 1970s American film in a more serious way.

Directors who were largely new to me who I really liked: Bergman, as per the above; Claire Denis, as a direct result of watching Trouble Every Day and Stars at Noon as a double feature at the Grand Illusion; and Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson, thanks to the 2023 Hooptober challenge. I also kept watching more than my share of Aki Kaurismäki.

Oh, and while I only watched one Bela Tarr/Agnes Hranitzky movie in 2023, it was in fact enough to cement them among my very favorite directors. It gets no more grim than this. I’m very glad I got to watch Werckmeister Harmonies on the big screen, and I made a point of making Satantango the first thing I watched in 2024.

My most watched actor was Juliette Binoche, thanks to Claire Denis and a rewatch of Three Colours and a bunch of other good movies. After her it’s a lot of Shaw Brothers character actors — we finished the first volume of the Arrow Shawscope set, and got started on the second — plus some 70s Italian actors which I chalk up to a lot of poliziotteschi. Huh, I watched nine of those grimy nihilistic Italian crime flicks in 2023! Not bad. I did say I was more varied about my tastes.

How about 2024? For the second year running, I’m going to watch more TV. One reason I held off on this post for a month was because I wanted to test that theory out, and in fact I only (ha) watched 24 movies in January. Six a week is a lot of movies, but I also caught up on some Slow Horses and got started on a couple of other shows. It feels good.

S. and I won’t be attending Fantasia, barring something pretty unusual. I do plan to hit SIFF harder, since I got a pass this year, and I’ll be doing Noir City at SIFF this month. I also got a subscription to Radiance Films‘ releases for 2024. Not cheap! But I think of all the boutique Blu-ray labels they come closest to hitting my sweet spot, and S likes the look of the upcoming releases. So that’ll be cool.

All in all, if I had to guess, I’ll probably see close to 400 movies… but no weekly challenges again, other than our beloved Boofest.

As is perhaps obvious, I’ve stopped copying Letterboxd reviews to this blog. I finally figured out how to script downloads of my Letterboxd data, though, so over the course of the next month or so I’ll be writing code to pull my reviews into Datasette, which accomplishes my goal of making sure I control my own words without clogging up a mostly inactive blog.

And just like I said last year, the best video store in the country makes it possible for me to watch a huge range of movies I couldn’t see otherwise. If you have a local video store, and you like movies, support them. They need you.