fantasia

Here we are in the middle of 2026, which is as good a marker as any to see where my movie watching is at. Thanks, Letterboxd, for enabling my OCD! All stats are as of June 30th. I watched 197 movies in the first half of the year. I have a not totally serious goal of 500 this year, which is a number I hit in 2023 after which I decided to stop being quite so obsessive. You don’t need to make the number go up every year, so I pulled back for the sake of my sanity. Now, however, I have more free time. The math says… maybe, particularly since I’m gonna see like 75 movies at Fantasia. (I do count shorts in this.) ...

I won’t bury the lede: I’m retiring! After literally 30+ years working as a system administrator, manager, director, and general thinking-oriented person, I am hanging up my last employee badge and riding off into the sunset. I told my team last week, and May 28th will be my very last day. It’s a big step. Yes, I’m excited. Yes, I’m also nervous. S. and I were the right combination of lucky and talented to be able to retire comfortably at a relatively early age; after a lot of discussions with professionals over the last six months or so we decided it was better to take the leap and maximize our personal time in the decades remaining. Pokémon has been a good place to work, but my anarchistic self has never actually been all that comfortable as a manager despite the fact that I’m very good at it. ...

Another year, another batch of Letterboxd stats. I’m pretty happy with it once again. Let’s see what they remind me of… ...

Well that was an excellent week. Some vacations are a great way to disconnect from work while not being at all relaxing; this was one of those. I came back tired and a bit uncomfortable from a week of trying to navigate diabetes plus campus area quick food plus short blocks of time between movies. Informative on my current physical limits, though, and it was a shining Fantasia in terms of movies. We hope to go back next year, although in the process of going through this blog and tagging all my old Fantasia entries, I’ve found out how often I said that only to hit blockers. 30th anniversary, though! ...

Midway through my week in Montreal for Fantasia Festival, and boy is my ass tired. Losing weight is excellent, it’s just that I don’t have as much padding as I used to and Concordia University lecture hall chairs were not completely designed for two hour stretches. Worth it, though. This is not my look at the full festival — that’ll come next week. Instead, I’ve been spending time thinking about why I cherish this festival so much. ...

OK, this time I really did cut back on movies. When I say “cut back” what I mean is I watched only 291 movies, which is only cutting back if you start at a baseline of 508 movies watched. Partially this is because we didn’t do Fantasia in 2024; really, though, I made myself be less obsessive, watched more TV, and so on. Also I had a nasty case of something at the beginning of the year which left me exhausted for most of the rest of the year; I want to say it was COVID but who knows? Either way my workday evenings were less useful than once they were. ...

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. ...

34 feature length movies and 12 shorts. Towards the end I was having a little bit of trouble connecting scenes into narratives so it’s probably just as well that my last two movies were a magic realism fable and a sociological essay. That was a very good time and I hope to do it again sooner than a decade from now. Since I’m that kind of person, I made ranked lists for features and shorts. It was a pretty good year. Hippo is particularly good if you like thinking about conspiracies and cult dynamics and such. Baby Assassins 2 Babies has a martial arts fight scene that’s probably going to wind up in my top ten ever. I’m also particularly pleased that the Southeast Asian films I saw were more mature than some I’ve seen in previous years — it feels like the programmers have a solid handle on how to program the good stuff. ...

We had eight days of movies scheduled; we have completed four days. Halfway mark! I am tired but very happy; our hotel continues to be perfectly positioned and the food’s still quite good. There’s this little counter service Chinese place next to the hotel which is unexpectedly tasty. Highlights so far: Lovely, Dark, and Deep, which is some of the best cosmic horror I’ve seen in a while. Not Lovecraftian. It lays out the situation in the first fifteen minutes, so that as Georgina Campbell discovers the scope of the horror, we have the same retroactive realizations she does. Smart movie. ...

It’s so good to be back. Previously: 2004, 2006, 2015. So I guess this is my 20th anniversary Fantasia, which is unplanned but nice. I’d like to go more than once every ten years — remind me in 2028, right? We might have squeezed one in around 2020, but the pandemic. View of a modernist college building with a line of people curved around the corner. ...