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Category: Culture

Last Year in Carcosa

Or: ”A Lyric Scenario for The Yellow King RPG

  1. Gather no more than three people.
  2. Watch Last Year in Marienbad together in silence.
  3. Select characters from those depicted in the movie.
  4. Discuss your motivations, remaining in character. It is unnecessary to agree on the facts of the fiction.
  5. If there is disagreement on motivations, play Nim to resolve them.

“It’s a stupid game.”
“There’s a trick.”
“Just take an odd number.”
“There must be rules.”

Credit is due to Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

Seattle Movie Calendar

Before the pandemic, I’d been thinking about writing a little aggregator to pull movie times at my favorite local indie theaters into a calendar. I’m bad at remembering to see that cool showing a month from now but if I had a calendar that would theoretically help.

Obviously I didn’t need it for the last couple of years but the silver lining is that I got better at Python. I spent some time coding over the last week of my sabbatical and voila: the Seattle Arthouse Movie Calendar.

The code is here. I was sort of fiddling around with making it a real library but decided not to chew off too much at once. It was enough fun learning how to use classes to make it super-easy to add a new theater.

Lots of potential improvements. I am probably going to generate separate calendars for each theater next, for convenience. I’d also like to render maybe three days worth of calendar on the Web page. I feel like doing more than that risks pulling traffic away from the official theater sites, which I’d prefer to avoid, but three days seems reasonable.

I’m going to write up some notes on using the code for other cities too. If you’re decent with Python you could probably figure it out from reading what’s there but documentation is a good practice anyhow.

Mini-Sabbatical Movie Goals

I’m off work for a few weeks till my new job starts! Since I’m watching movies as a hobby this year, and since I like having some structure in my freedom:

A brief pause. How is there not an essay out there discussing the similarities between these two directors? A few people have mentioned their similar prolific tendencies, and okay, Miike isn’t out there working in experimental theater, but they’re both making movies about outsiders scraping to get by in an unjust society and at their best, they’re both cynically lyrical. I don’t think Miike was heavily influenced by Fassbinder and as far as I know Miike didn’t ever recalibrate his style after watching a lot of Douglas Sirk, but come on! They’re practically brothers!

Where was I?

Man, when I lay it out like that it’s more being around people than I’m totally stoked about. We will see; the trends are in the right direction around here right now.