It’s been a week since my last entry here on the candler blog, so I thought I’d give a brief update on the week that was.

Plugging Away At Day One 2

Given how much time I devoted to questioning some of the new features in Day One 2, one might get the impression I gave up on it. In fact I’m using the new app even more than I used the original. I’m putting it through its paces and getting more and more delighted each step of the way. I still haven’t purchased the Mac version, which is $19.99 until Wednesday (they extended the launch…

We’re thirty-six days into 2016 and I’m yet to see a single film released this year. That doesn’t bode too well for my plan to see more new releases than I saw in 2015. The good news is that I’ve been watching older films. Here’s how I’m doing so far:

• The Hateful Eight (70mm)
• Ivan’s Childhood
• Straight Outta Compton
• The Mirror
• The Man Who Loved Women (35mm; Blake Edwards, not François Truffaut)
• American Dreamz
• A Man Escaped
• Inglourious Basterds (DCP)
• Stalker
• Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (35mm)

I’m finally tackling a handful of Tarkovsky films, and A…

Day One has long been a favorite app of mine, even if it fell out of regular use for me. Over the years1 I’ve tried using it a few different ways. Sometimes it’s a real diary (as in I hope no one ever reads it), other times it’s a little notebook, storing half-baked fragments of ideas. I even tried to use it as a catch-all for my digital life thanks to Brett Terpstra’s Slogger project, which he just updated for version 2.

The most consistent use I’ve gotten out of Day One has been using it as a running diary…

I’ve only ever been able to reliably read one book at a time. If ever I tried to read more than one, they had to be wildly different. One fiction and one non-fiction could work.

Lately I’ve started reading more than one book at the same time. There’s no special reason for this other than I’m still getting the hang of using library holds. Sometimes I go flipping through the Austin Library catalog and placing a hold on something I’d like to read someday, but that day often comes sooner than I’d expected. …

Now that I finally got around to sharing all the new films I watched last year, I thought I’d share all the books I read in 2015. This is somewhat influenced by Justin Blanton’s annual tradition of posting the books he’s read, though I don’t quite have the interest in ranking these books as he does. By the way, you should read Justin’s thoughts over at Anxious Robot; great to see him writing regularly again.

I’ve always been a reader, but never a very diligent one. I’m trying to change that, and I think I did a pretty good job…

This post, My Favorite Films of 2015, was originally published on the candler blog on January 27, 2016 at 11:19AM. Please consider reading it there because I really want you to read my website.

Who says you have to get your year-end list published in a timely fashion? We may be nearing February, but why not take a moment to look back on 2015.

Initially I resisted doing a year-end wrap up because I felt I hadn’t seen enough new films last year. For whatever reason I think I should see about sixty films a year. So when December 31st rolled around and my final tally was thirty-four newly released films (based, as always, on Mike D’Angelo’s New York master release list) seen, I felt so off my game that I shouldn’t even put…

This post, Write Anywhere But…, was originally published on the candler blog on January 21, 2016 at 10:54AM. Please consider reading it there because I really want you to read my website.

Dave Winer makes a strong case against Medium in his brief and aptly titled post, “Anywhere but Medium.”

When you give in to the default, and just go ahead and post to Medium, you’re stifling the open web. Not giving it a chance to work its magic, which depends on diversity, not monoculture.

I’ve been harping on this awhile. I gave Medium the old college try last year, but once The Dissolve (z”l) linked to my piece and claimed I wrote for Medium, I was done.1

I don’t think Medium’s “reach” is any greater than that of the open web…

If you know that Film Twitter exists, you’re probably in it, or so they say. It’s a thing, to be sure. I wrote about it (and all this) earlier today on the candler blog.

The short of it: I made a Slack for Film Twitter, a place to discuss movies publicly, in private. I have no idea if this will work. I have no idea is this is even an idea, or a good one at that. But now it’s a thing. And I’m happy about it.

So join us, won’t you?