Weeknote #7 [W25.46] - Selecting films for Cinema Next Door, the joy of rediscovering something familiar, and building design systems

Cinema Next Door — the name for the new film club

The new film club finally has a name — Cinema Next Door.

In last week's note, I’d written briefly about why we want to start a new club. The basic idea is simple: to be a place which is open and accessible to people. To make cinema feel less like an elite and exclusive pursuit and more like an open door. We'd place which can be:

• a non-intimidating introduction to people wishing to explore films, and
• a place where you bring your friends and have fun with them (while watching films, of course).

We went through a bunch of options (Beyond Subtitles had quite a few fans), but we settled on Cinema Next Door. It has a friendly neighborhood-warmth feel to it which, I think, encapsulates the spirit of what we're trying to do best.

(But it's still early days, and we might easily change things up before the first things. So, suggestions are welcome.)

Shortlisting films to screen in December

We've also made a shortlist of films we want to screen for the opening month (December).

We're not following a strict theme per se, but we're trying to give a taste of the kind of programming we want to do in the future: a mix of films across the world, which is playful, reflective, and also occasionally challenging.

Here's the tentative list:

• La La Land (USA)
• Pather Panchali (India)
• In the Realm of the Senses (Japan)
• Eat Drink Man Woman (Taiwan)
• Back to the Future (USA)
• Eyes Wide Shut (USA)
• Comrades, Almost a Love Story (Hong Kong)
• All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (USA)

A few of these are dependent on licensing, so things might shuffle around by the end of the month. But for now, this feels like a good starting point.

Kadana Kuthuhalam, and the joy of rediscovering something familiar

I went to Neeraja's Bharatnatyam recital on Wednesday.

It ended with a thillana — one I thought I recognized immediately as Raghuvamsa Sudha. I had first encountered that piece about a decade ago in the form a violin instrumental by TN Krishnan and had immediately fallen in love with it (this was back when I had a fleeting interest in learning the violin).

Except, the thillana at the end of the recital wasn't quite the piece I knew. The lyrics were different, and the arrangement kept drifting into directions that felt familiar yet distinctly unkown. This mix — a sense of recognition coupled with surprise — gave me an unexpectedly strong dopamine hit. I've been listening to both songs on loop ever since.

As I'm writing this, it makes me think about how innate the explore-exploit intuition is in us. We like enough familiarity to feel safe, but we also need enough novelty to stay curious. Like a child alternating between clinging to a parent and wandering into a new playground. We thrive in the space where both coexist. (I realize that's another good principle for curating at the film club.)

Aside

I looked things up later. The reason the pieces sound so similar is that they’re both set in the raga Kadana Kuthuhalam — and the thillana is actually derived from Raghuvamsa Sudha.

A thillana (which is something I was unfamiliar with previously), by the way, is traditionally performed at the end of a Carnatic concert. The closest Western classical equivalent is probably the coda in a sonata. They're both energetic, rhythmic and meant to end a performance with a flourish.

Links

• Raghuvamsa Sudha, violin instrumental by TN Krishnan
• Kadana Kuthuhalam Thillana, vocals by M. Balamuralikrishnan

Setting up a design system from scratch

This week, in my day job, I needed a number stepper component — the little thing with +/– buttons to change a value. I went looking for it in our design system and realized it didn’t exist. And I also realized that I do not like the design system.

I'm working at a startup — ad-hoc decisions, disorganization, and a "we'll fix it later" attitude are traits that come with the territory. A cursory look at the design system file tells that story clearly. Our buttons do not have hover/active/focused states for instance, among other problems.

Anything that doesn't break functionality isn't a priority right now, and that makes sense for for the context I suppose. It works just well enough to ship to production, and there are time when that's enough.

This is a very different experience from the last major project I had worked on — which was an internal webapp for Mecedes-Benz. I loved how well-structured and documented their design system was. I've moved from one extreme to another.

And it's fun! Building things from scratch means I get to use everything I learned there and apply it here. Nothing in the current file is really reusable, so I’ve started drafting an entirely new design system. Next week’s goal is to get the developers and product managers on board and begin fixing the components already out in production.