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online gaming companies at GDC back in 2012, but I can’t figure out where my slides went so I’ll spare you the somewhat outdated evangelizing.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. ...

Can’t resist touching the third rail: it’s time to talk about Graham Platner! Platner discourse will get another injection of life this fall if Collins wins (odds are good, alas), when everyone spends months arguing that Platner would have won or that Janet Mills would have won if we hadn’t wasted months and millions on Platner or that a better candidate would have won the primary if Schumer and the DNC hadn’t tried to clear the way for Mills. It’s gonna be the best kind of bitter political discourse, because there are at least three sides to the argument and the stakes are so high. If I sound frivolous, it’s only because I’m depressed, and I’m writing this to get some of that depression down on paper. ...

I am planning to see a grand total of 76 movies at Fantasia, which sounds ridiculous for a week and a half until I remind myself that I’m seeing four of the short films programs so 43 of those are short films. That leaves only 33 features. Maybe that’s still ridiculous. I got impatient to write about the festival so I decided to do a top ten list of my most anticipated features, in no particular order. I’m curious to see how this balances out against my rankings once I’ve seen everything. ...

My dear wife S. likes to look at me despairingly and ask why I’m the way I am. It’s a fair question. My usual trite response is that my mother raised me that way, at which point she says I should show my mother more respect, and so on. (I love my mother, truly.) While this series is more focused on my career in tech than on my formative years, those formative years do explain a lot, and I like all the stories. This is the story of how the family wound up half-moving from Cape Cod to New Hampshire, plus an explosive revelation. It captures a lot of our family dynamics, and sheds a little light on my tendencies to resist authority. ...