Another month, another Criterion Channel lineup. Still no Boston Crime collection. It’s OK, this is my first of these posts from the lovely city of St. Paul so now I’m gonna demand a Viking themed collection instead. Fun month this month, which definitely reflects the wide range of programming the Channel provides, so without further ado, let’s hit the headliners. And this month the main attraction is Directed by Abel Ferrara. They did a great job here, getting movies from Ferrara’s whole career. I’m interested in his first (non-pornographic) movie, The Driller Killer, and his most recent fictional movie, Padre Pio, both of which are here. So are his classic New York movies, his Body Snatchers, New Rose Hotel — it’s really comprehensive. The only thing I’m sad is missing on a quick look is Mary, which has such a good cast (Binoche, Whitaker, Cotillard), but it looks like rights are a bit of a bear there. ...

I have a lot of cheerful funny stories about interviewing and being hired. I also have a similar number of harder stories about leaving jobs. This is the toughest one. It’s a layoff story, too, just not my layoff story. There I was at AltaVista in 2001, entering my third year or so as a director and my fourth year as an AltaVista employee. I ran Production Operations: our system administrators, our NOC, a very small project management team, and a few other things. I owned servers for AltaVista.com and the Zip2 services, and another director — Ken Rouleau? — owned shopping.com. There were a couple other departments in there but we don’t need the laundry list. ...

There’s this restaurant in Seattle, Canlis. It has a reputation for excellent service and very good food. It is the only restaurant in Seattle with a dress code, which is fairly loose but don’t show up in a T-shirt. It is pricy – $185 a head for a six course tasting menu before you get into drinks – and it has a remarkable view of Lake Union. My in-laws kindly gave us a gift certificate for Christmas several years ago and it’s use it or lose it now that we’re moving, so we invited our dear friends Joe and Harli out to a big old blow out dinner. Here’s how it went. ...

It’s a point of pride for me that I oversaw technical operations for a pair of very smooth MMO launches at Turbine. Back in the early 2000s, this was by no means a foregone conclusion; in 2004, World of Warcraft had a very rocky (yet successful) launch, and EverQuest had a bad launch in 1999. I’ve had people compliment me on the Dungeons & Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online launches at the Game Developers Conference. One person, anyhow. I even did a talk on why Devops is important for online gaming companies at GDC back in 2012, but I can’t figure out where my slides went so I’ll spare you the somewhat outdated evangelizing. ...

Another Fantasia visit wrapped for me and S! I already talked about how nice it was to be back in Montreal; that continued to be awesome. I spent an hour or so after I got back going through and meticulously adding theater tags to my old Letterboxd Fantasia entries, so I can now say that I have spent around 128 hours sitting in Théâtre Hall (the main theater), 108 hours in De Sève (the secondary theater), and 8 hours in Cinéma du Musée (the spillover theater). All in all this is a significant portion of my movie-going life. I’ve spent more physical time in SIFF Uptown, but fewer viewings thanks to all the shorts. ...

I’m going to tell a couple of related stories about a similar topic today, just because they fall together in my mind and I think it’s an interesting contrast. Let’s talk about time off from both a management and a human perspective. (All quotes are paraphrased from memory.) I’ve generally been fortunate enough to have managers who, at the worst, would listen to HR when they were told that they needed to make me use up my accrued vacation time. And I assume they weren’t generally just waiting for HR to nudge them; they genuinely understood that vacation was important and everyone needs time off now and again. Even working in the video game industry, which is legendary for crunch, I only had a really brutal stretch once. Even Chris Chong, my boss at Amazon, was pretty good about nudging me – although not during preparation for peak traffic periods. At Amazon you gotta plan your life a little more carefully than usual. ...

Coming at you hot this month cause I was at Fantasia for a week and a half and like I had time to write a whole extra blog post… it’s the August 2026 Criterion Channel lineup with commentary by me! And it’s a hot month. Because of the collections. Desert Trips, get it? Maybe I’m still a bit thrashed from the festival. Let’s run through this in order. Opening up, Rock Biopics That Don’t Suck, which is fair. Michael will not be appearing in this list. It includes the best biopic of all time, which happens to be about a fictional rock star, Velvet Goldmine. It’s also got Love & Mercy, which anyone curious about Brian Wilson should watch – there’s a great Paul Dano performance in there. Putting in Amadeus and Lisztomania is clever (plus I’m generally up for a Ken Russell I haven’t seen). Oh, and Nico, 1988 will give me my Velvet Goldmine fix. This is one of those collections that seems fairly complete on the topic. ...

Time for another “how I got hired” story, this time about my entrance into the video game industry. I’ve really enjoyed the time I spent working in games, and Turbine was maybe the best of it. Despite being the only job in my career where I had to support Windows servers. A couple of years before I got to Turbine, I’d started playing their first MMO, Asheron’s Call, fondly known as AC. At the time, particularly if you were an AC player, AC was one of the big three massively multiplayer online RPGs or MMOs. The other two were Ultima Online and EverQuest. They were way bigger than AC, which was a distant third, although big enough to claim that third place status legitimately. Later on, Blizzard would destroy all of us with World of Warcraft (and cause me some difficulties getting datacenter space), but that’s another story. ...

We’re a little more than halfway through Fantasia by any measure. I’ve seen more than half of the movies I’ve got scheduled, it’s the sixth day of a ten day trip, and my ass has been in semi-comfortable lecture hall seats for an awfully high percentage of the day. So far so good. The trip feels a bit longer because I’m really used to flying out here on the first Saturday of the festival, given work constraints. This year we arrived on a Thursday night in order to make sure we could catch Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma so my mental clock is off. Well worth the mental disruption; it was the best thing we’ve seen so far this year and I don’t think anything else will supplant it. It’s a daring exploration of the slasher genre, it’s funny as hell, and Gillian Anderson is great. As is Hannah Einbinder. ...

I don’t remember how I wound up at the Internet Archive. Obviously I interviewed and all that but I don’t remember how I found the job or anything. Maybe through someone I met while I was volunteering as a sysadmin at the 24 Hours of Cyberspace event? Regardless, it was my next job after Sun Microsystems, which I left after the JavaStation work I’ve already written about. Fascinating place, no matter how I got there. There’s not going to be any central thread to this post, just a bunch of memories of a cool place to work and a bit of technology nostalgia. ...