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).
Did I watch a movie just so I'd have something to automatically repost to my blog with my new automatic letterboxd reposting tool? Yes.
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. It's a shell script called posthog.sh which:
In my imo you should never do something smart when something stupid will do.
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.
This feels like a difficult transition; whereas before in Match Factory Girl, Ariel, and Shadows in Paradise, Kaurismäki was working with a group of actors who seemed so perfectly and completely in tune with his sensibilities, here everyone seems to be coming at the challenge from a slightly off-kilter angle.
Kaurismäki is stretching in a lot of ways; he's depicting a setting that's new to him, he's casting actors who are new to him, he's working in a language he hadn't done a full feature in before. It's all ultimately in service of watching Jean-Pierre Léaud build a character scene by scene, slowly finding things for his shattered salaryman to hold on to for (very literally) dear life.
Still a great watch; Léaud is of course incredible here, but so is relative unknown Margi Clarke and long-tenured English character actor Kenneth Colley (you may recognize him as one of sundry imperial officers in Star Wars). And as always, Kaurismäki has this incredible property of holding your attention with a movie that feels almost unyielding in its quietness so that he can catch you entirely off-guard with a joke or a moment of unexpected tenderness.
Very glad to have seen this in a theater!
In my last couple of posts I've talked about my desire to support "micro" and "meso" blogging more effectively; ie make it easier for me to post things that aren't necessarily full essays.
I've gone ahead and added a new class of content to Azhdarchid that I call "notes"; notes are like posts, except they're untitled by default and shown differently on the front page. I'm still feeding them into the RSS feed, and I've built a little automated tool to make writing and publishing these more easy.
Obviously I've been thinking about blog and the IndieWeb a lot these days. We are not very far from the two year anniversary of Cohost shutting down; maybe I'm thinking about how to build some of that social experience up again brick by brick, using the web as a substrate rather than a silo (or a federation of silos, which is the approach some others have been taking).
For me personally, the core design that made Cohost so valuable was a particular mix of features that enabled:
I am thinking a lot about how to achieve similar things using those open web tools within the constraints of a static-website (or "JAMstack") setup. I don't really want to go back to any kind of service that has a CMS; using Eleventy is just too nice in terms of the control that it gives me over templates and the long-term portability and safety of the material, which does not in any way live in an opaque database but rather in the filesystem on my computer (backed up in several places) where it belongs.
I like the concept of Micropub but I also like the static website workflow, and it occurs to me that it'd be pretty easy to build an adapter of sorts as just a server that ingests Micropub POST data and spits out git commits (which are, de facto, the standard for "publishing" posts on a Jekyll or Eleventy website). You could run this on an actual server or just as a local-machine daemon that adapts desktop micropub clients to a static website project. I know such a thing exists for Jekyll already, though a particular difficulty with these tools is that (as far as I can tell) micropub clients expect to spit out HTML, and what I'd want to eventually land in the git repo is in fact well-formatted markdown. I don't think that's intractable, though, and tools like Pandoc exist which can "un-render" Markdown.
It is possible however that I'm overthinking this terribly and the solution I really want is a shell script that 1. opens an ephemeral vim session, like the one you get to write a commit message 2. turns whatever I type into that session into an untitled post dated to now and asks if I want to immediately post it or save as a draft.
On the other half of what I'm thinking about: webmentions only provide the "reply" half of the reply/comment duality, and with comments I feel a bit more stuck. I would love it if something like Comentario existed, but set up to use IndieAuth as its only authentication method.
Authentication systems are the annoying hurdle of operating a blog with a comment system. Obviously having distinct "user accounts" adds complexity, but having to have a distinct account on the blog of every person you read and comment on is itself impractical. Traditional email/password login, besides not being terribly secure, requires a server somewhere that can send email—and sending email is itself an incredibly annoying task, because the email system is so choked with spam that we've kind of landed on an internet where we only let a single-digit number of major providers really send email.
Comentario itself supports Oauth with a few different services, but I think that's not good enough. IndieAuth is; it's a stable long-term solution. There's no need for the consumers of authentication to know or care about which providers of authentication are available, which means that you are not essentially maintaining your authentication system's usefulness against the ongoing churn of the internet. Using URLs as identities has some inherent anti-spam properties; domain names are simply a more limited commodity than email accounts, and they have a public verification mechanism baked in. Such a comment system wouldn't even need an admin password or any kind of secrets at all—you could log on to the admin panel by simply logging in with the domain name of the website itself. I believe other people have built similar setups as one-offs, but this is something that really is begging for a turnkey solution that occupies the same "slap this webcomponent on your template" niche as Comentario or Disqus.
Ultimately I am enjoying this exercise in trying to reconstract a good version of the social media web as essentially a hot-rodded, self-built project, even if I eventually hit a wall with how close I can approximate that experience.