Azhdarchid

I'm Bruno Dias, a São Paulo-based designer (systems, narrative, mechanics) and writer working in video games. Azhdarchid (named after the family of large pterosaurs) is my personal blog; I also have a more professional landing page at brunodias.dev.

You may know me from such video games as Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, Neo Cab, Pathologic 2 and 3, or Fallen London—you can see my full credits on MobyGames. I also edit the Game Narrative Reader, a link anthology of great essays about video game narrative design on the web.

For my sins, you can find me on Bluesky (@brunodias.dev) and on the Fediverse (@bruno@azhdarchid.online). For my cinema sins, I'm also on Letterboxd (notbrunoagain).

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I really do think you should learn to use the Linux command line.

An Azhdarchid
I really do think you should learn to use the Linux command line.
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I really do think you should learn to use the Linux (or Mac, I suppose) command line if you can find the time at all. It is, genuinely, a dramatically more empowering way to use your computer than the alternative, and it will enable to think about your computer as a tool in ways that are completely different.

So much of what's wrong with "computing", in general, stems from systematic user disempowerment... I think most people my age are cognizant of the harms of young people today not being exposed to even the most basic underlying concepts like the existence of the file system as an independent thing from siloed apps. But a lot of us never took that step backwards of considering the ways in which graphical user interfaces are disempowering. The thing about terminal interfaces is that by nature they must expose every affordance; if something can be done within the system, then it must be doable by a user from the terminal. And those affordances talk to each other, can be automated and connected in ways that go significantly beyond simply being able to toggle something or do something.

There's just such a wealth of useful tools (in the Linux world, at least) that exist as CLI applications. magick is just always going to be better than any graphical utility for doing stuff like converting a png into a jpeg; rg is always going to be the best way to search a bunch of files for a snippet of text. Becoming comfortable with it will eventually give you avenues to make almost any task you do on the computer better.

A ★½ review of The Vast of Night

An Azhdarchid
A ★½ review of The Vast of Night
The poster for The Vast of Night (2019

Reviewed by Bruno Dias

The Vast of Night

2019 · ★½

Watched

Mostly just dull and meandering. Whole thing feels like a badly-planned-out project; visually daring to no apparent end, and essentially little more than a shaggy dog story dragged on by two long scenes of people recounting events more interesting than what actually happens in the movie. Pure style over substance type stuff; formal experimentation without any real sense of what that experimentation is pointing towards or what it's doing in the context of this story specifically.

A ★★★ review of Infinity Pool

An Azhdarchid
A ★★★ review of Infinity Pool
The poster for Infinity Pool (2023

Reviewed by Bruno Dias

Infinity Pool

2023 · ★★★

Watched

A fun little romp through a psychosexual hall of mirrors. Written, essentially, like an episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation but with significantly more nipple play than usual.

I wish this picked at its scabs more? It's one of those horror movies where there's no first-act normalcy; we go from zero to unsettling immediately, and from there pretty soon to horrific. But it feels like it's missing that final step, that last rung down the ladder. Absent that it ends up just being a pretty good movie about, largely, an evil pack of feral rich people.

I did end up building a (very dumb) solution to making it faster to write small posts.

An Azhdarchid
I did end up building a (very dumb) solution to making it faster to write small posts.
Posted on

I did end up building a (very dumb) solution to making it faster to write small posts. It's a shell script called posthog.sh which:

  1. Opens a temp file in vim
  2. If I saved the file, asks if I want it to be a note or a full post and auto-generates some basic front matter
  3. Opens the front matter as a temp file in vim so I can edit it if to add tags, etc
  4. Generates the actual post as a file, commits it, and pushes the commit so the site gets rebuilt on the server.

In my imo you should never do something smart when something stupid will do.

A ★★★½ review of Lights in the Dusk

An Azhdarchid
A ★★★½ review of Lights in the Dusk
The poster for Lights in the Dusk (2006

Reviewed by Bruno Dias

Lights in the Dusk

2006 · ★★★½

Watched

At one point in this movie, Kati Outinen—the star of some of Kaurismäki's early films back in the late eighties, including the incredible and incredibly depressing Match Factory Girl—shows up for a brief cameo playing a glowering cashier at a miserable Helsinki supermarket. This is such a feel-bad movie that seeing her felt like a ray of goddamn sunshine.

A recurring theme for Kaurismäki is characters trying to scrape away the subtext of their relationships; approaching what they want with complete bluntness, as if they don't have time for flirting or skirting the issue. Here, this dynamic is a weapon. It's a noir without the ambiguity; you see exactly what Maria Järvenhelmi's reluctant femme fatale is doing, the entire way.

And on the other side of that, the sad-sack protagonist (Janne Hyytiäinen) sees it too. No one in this movie has any illusions about it; it's like they've seen the movie before, and they're living through a recurrence that reduces the events of their lives to mere facts.

Real brick of a movie. Three and a half stars.

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