First screening of Cinema Next Door
We finally had our first screening of Cinema Next Door last Tuesday on Dec 2. We screened Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali.
40 people turned up!
That's not a number I had anticipated. When we were doing screenings for TPCC, the average attendance was around 11-12 over the past year and a half. We had hit above 30 only once in that time. So the response we got was quite overwhelming in a positive sense.
I was unsure how it would pan out until a day before the screening. The registration link for both the screening, and the season pass were both not available until Monday afternoon. I thought we'd barely get any people.
Working on the CND website
I also spent a bit of time working on the Cinema Next Door website.
It's a bit rough around the edges, doesn't look particularly good on the phone yet, and some links might not work... but at least it's up and running.
I decided to go with Astro on top of Sanity as a CMS for this one. Mainly because I want to move my personal blog (the one that you are reading right now) to something more custom; and I've been thinking of using Astro for that. (The idea that's been floating on my mind is to use a static Astro site which uses the Ghost API as a headless CMS. I don't want to use the Ghost front-end because themeing Ghost is bit of a nightmare, and way more tedious than what I expect designing a static site from scratch would be. I tried theme-ing Ghost for the now defunct TPCC blog, and while that was fun, I don't want to do that again.)
Anyway, I took this also as an opportunity to play around with Google's Antigravity. I did not like it (mainly because it seems to use too much compute by default, unless you manually switch to "fast" mode, even for simple tasks and runs out of credits really fast). I think I'm gonna stick with VS Code + Copilot for now.
For the first time in my life, I might be addicted to coffee
I've always actively disliked coffee.
Or I should say, I had.
That started changing when my friend Lynette gifted me a bag of 500g instant coffee for my birthday last year. I took more than a year to finish that bag... but since I had this huge bag of coffee lying around which I had to somehow finish, I started experimenting with different ways of making coffee. I tried varying the portions of milk, cream, dark chocolate, and coffee until I hit a combination I like. I even ended up buying a frother.
Anyhow, all that experimenting led me to eventually get over my hatred of coffee. That has now become a problem.
My new office has a nice coffee maker. I find myself perusing it whenever I'm in office and need a break (which is something I never did before Lynette's gift).
The trouble is, I've always struggled with sleep. Drinking multiple cups of coffee on top of that has been, naturally, a recipe for disaster. I'm now probably getting the least amount of sleep I've gotten since my final semester of college.
I had listened to the Michael Pollan's audiobook, Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World. In which he writes about his own conflicting relationship with the drink (along with a brief history of coffee drinking).
One of the worst things about a coffee addiction, he writes, is that it creates a negative feedback loop. You drink coffee, which makes you sleep worse, which makes you wake up tired and groggy, which makes you go back to using coffee to get over the grogginess.
I need to start hating coffee again. Soon.