miniblog #1

recommendations and sketchbook pages 🌷

Cinematrix and Moviegrid.io

It’s the age of the word game. People are spending more time on New York Times games than reading articles. Every day, Will Shortz, Wyna Liu, and the rest of the department of semi-high-brow vocabulary-themed iPhone gaming pump out a new “thing” that people feel compelled to do daily—Connections, Strands, etc. But I’m here to talk about Vulture’s Cinematrix, which is basically Wordle for Letterboxd users. It is the Vulture version of Moviegrid.io by Sam Shulman and Alex Nunan, which is the exact same concept but they have like a million of them on a minimalist, #f4f1c1-colored site flanked by distractingly rotating web ads. That game looks like this:

points if u could picture #f4f1c1 lol

You have to fill out each of the nine squares with a movie title that fits both the X and Y axes, with extra points earned for answering with a film that has a lower “popularity score,” represented by a percentage. But be careful! You only have 9 guesses, so if you don’t know for sure if that movie would be considered a drama, or if it really earned $100 million in the box office, or if you’re mixing up Natalie Portman and Keira Knightley, you can immediately go fuck yourself because there is no room for error.

I’m not gonna lie—it’s hard. It’s actually really hard. There will be actors there whose careers you haven’t paid a lick of attention to (sorry Meg Ryan) and suddenly you have to name three movies they’ve been in like you’re wearing a t-shirt with their face on it and you have to prove you’re a real fan. You will completely forget Helena Bonham Carter’s entire filmography. Any televised Oscars ceremony you’ve ever seen will be erased from your mind.

The emphasis on and reward for capital-o Obscurity reminds me of that time I went to a single meeting of my university’s film journal club where they asked everyone their favorite movie with a prominent train scene and people were saying shit like “Oh this unreleased Hsiao-Hsien Hou short film that only 23 people in the world have ever seen that I watched at an exclusive screening in a restaurant backroom in Paris when I was 17.” I answered Spider-Man 2 and I sweat through the entire icebreaker hoping nobody would steal it before it was my turn. I digress! This was supposed to be mini. Anyway. I hope you enjoy this game!

Other stuff I’m into these days:

• Boy Room

• Trader Joe’s pre-made salads

• Green Frog by Gina Chung

• Shuffling my entire Liked Songs list

• Empanadas

• Carrying around a mini sketchbook wherever I go, which leads us to:

Sketchbook

One of my New Years Resolutions for 2024 was to get more into drawing traditionally, because as much as I love digital, the tactility of a sketchbook was calling to me. It’s also so much more convenient for on-the-go carry than a laptop-sized iPad. So here are a few selections from the last few weeks of sketching :D