Save The Croissants

10/Jan/24 – 08/Jun/25

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It is a new year! and I, your movie-watchingest friend am here to remind you that you subscribed to the criterion channel and haven’t watched anything on there in awhile.

Leaving Soon!

I always look at the leaving soon list. Every streaming service churns their releases in and out but only criterion does it with an actual letterboxd list. Starting with movies I’ve seen:

Daughters Of the Dust (Dash, Julie. 1991) — I saw this in college as part of a film class and I still sometimes think about the scenes where they make the indigo dye and talk about where souls are before they’re born. I’ve seen two of Dash’s films and you could probably write a pretty easy essay just on her use of sound as distancing effect, so like. Fair warning.

The Big Sleep (Hawks, Howard. 1946) — On the subject of using the form to create a weird distancing effect between the audience and the work, The Big Sleep is one of those movies I love but damn if I know whats going on in it. This is becuase of the Hayes code! The book is very sensical, almost straightforward, but they had to jump through so many hoops to satisfy the manic whims of a peverse protestant the film is almost totally incoherent. Kinda the ultimate product of tiktok kids saying “unalived”. The Hayes Code: Techincally Not State Censorship.

Unrest (Schäublin, Cyril. 2022) — I’m having a really hard time giving a blurb for this one without just doing a summary. So don’t read this blurb, just go watch it and come back. OK. Here’s best i got: Its a synecdoche about the importance of human labour in even the most seemingly mechanical of things, focusing mostly on one woman who makes the precise little spring that keeps a watch ticking by keeping it constantly off balance, as she is herself unbalanced by the suddenly enforced implementation of the newly developed assembly line and efficiency — made possible by her every movement being timed and optimised by some clark with a clipboard and one of her own damn watches. For an anarchist screed about the mechanisation of labour its beautifully framed and still and very quiet, letting you come to your own conclusions. Cannot reccomend enough.

Movies I havent seen but intend to before the end of the month:

Ran (Kurosawa, Akira. 1985) I used this movie as set dressing one day but haven’t actually seen it. Not the easiest film to track down for whatever reason.

Scarface (Hawks, Howard. 1932) n apparently definitional gangster picture that has completely missed me by

Rio bravo (Hawks, Howard. 1959)

Red River (Hawks, Howard. 1948)

The King of Comedy (Scorsese, Martin. 1982) I saw that awful Joker picture and I cannot stand only watching the modern remake/ripoff of something

Floating Point:

Maya Deren is one of my favourite film wierdos her style is so simple, technically, but effective. A true master of leading motions and the cut. This is why you’ve probably seen her Meshes of The Afternoon (1943) in a class or video essay on editing. But she did a lot of other stuff before being slowly poisoned and losing her mind, and her collected writings in the book by documentext is rival only to Eisenstein for per-page film theory (my favourite is still the first one I read; “Magic is New”, in which she tries to get a permit to shoot in central park). Rarely are her films collected and presented in any notable way so its really cool criterion is doing a “Maya Deren, Master Of the Avant Garde” collection and you can watch my favourite of hers, At Land, as well as the one about cats and even her unfinished (masterwork? white whale?) Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. These are the Kino Lorber scans so I think they’re just DVD quality but worse they have soundtracks. Turn off the soundtracks. a study of choreography for the camera dosn’t work with sound.

2025-11-11

I am a person who reads. I have recently bought an iPad mini for just that purpose, and so have been really delving into using your ebook app. There are several parts about the experience that I would like to change.

The Hi-Lighting

I love to highlight. I read best in physical media when I have a pencil in my hand, and the power to take notes and underline things when reading in the built-in ebook app ibooks is what got me back into reading after college. The hi-lighting experience in your app is terrible. It is inconsistent, and imprecise, and when I use the silly magic wand apple calls a pencil to try and add precision, your app both hi-lites and turns the page meaning that I often will get what I want hi-lit and release the pencil from the page, and the page will slide back, cancelling the page turn and the contextual selection menu with it. The text will ==stay selected==, as if a second interaction will reveal again the contextual menu, but no. The option to interact with the text in any way other than what the system default ascribes has been lost. So I have to cancel and try again. I’m sitting in a coffee shop carefully and deliberately rubbing a plastic tech-marker on a piece of glass just to make a smarmy aside to myself in the future. It’s embarrassing. Compare the experience of hi-liting in the library app Libby; I select the text, and it hi-lites it. I can select it again to change the color, and press and hold to copy and paste out. Nothing happens but what I expect. Libby cannot be customized to match my bear writing environment, but when I download the book again, there are my notes, as if i really wrote them in the margins of a real library book1. Your hi-lites, in contrast, are often off by a character or three on books I have kept downloaded on my device the whole time. I believe they are not tied to the text itself but inserted to some floating marker, as my highlights often get fucked when I switch from portrait to landscape2 and then back. Which is just like. Ebooks are a dynamically-reflowing list of text having a relative marker based off some approximation of a page number or something sucks. I would edit this copy of the book, insert a couple of =‘s like in markdown, but maybe you can’t just edit the text. IBooks and the library figured it out though, you can too.

Turning The Page

When a footnote is too close to the side of a page, the app takes this as an indication to turn the page. I have never met an app so thirsty to turn the page. This makes sense, as a common paradigm for ebooks is that when you tap the side of the page, or anywhere on the screen over the median, the page turns. I love footnotes3 and having support for both kinds of footnote in text4 is great, but if I click a link and it takes me to page 462 and then I don’t pixel-perfect nail the little number — I am not trying to go back one page! I am trying to click the referent that got me here so I can go on reading the paragraph the footnote was in!

The Offline Menu

This iPad has no cellular connection, why would it need one, I have an iPhone and a grand-fathered unlimited data plan. But often, I am sitting in my car waiting, and want to read a book. So I load up your app5 to read a book. If I do not have data, I am met by a mysterious field of grey squares. The first time this happened it was quite a surprise! Then I realised the issue: the book covers weren’t stored locally, probably to save space. This makes sense, so I went to the settings to change the display paradigm to “text only” or something. There was no option to do this anywhere. My only options for looking at my library are a field of externally hosted jpegs. My library can be sorted at my whim by author or title, but nowhere was there a way to surface this information in the interface. I can tell I’m, for example, 69%6 of the way through the new Doctorow, and when I click on it the book’s there. But it seems like you did not expect people to have ebook libraries of any size.

Slop

I bought a copy of the little prince and, and this is on me, the cover is obviously AI slop7. I don’t want my dollar back, I want to never have to look at this abomination of a cover ever again. however. Although I have supposedly deleted it from my library, ~there it sits, mocking me~. This book is an illegal addition of a public domain work, it even says so in the copy, and I would like it removed from your servers but mostly I would like it removed from my sight. As an aside iBoooks has a large number of public domain works available for free, but your app charges between a dollar and like five per each. Some of these are obviously, for example, penguin editions with special introductions or something, but the logic there doesn’t track for me.

Conclusion

I like reading ebooks, I love to read and I move a lot, ebooks are perfect. Being able to buy them from the bookstore down the way or the bookstore in my old hometown is an incredible improvement over locking myself into iBooks or god forbid, kindle. I have a ton of books in iBooks that I’ve bought over the years, and the switching cost of buying them all on say, kobo, is far too great, so apple’s stupid walled garden continues to bleed me. Along with the strange difficulty and apparent illegality of cracking the DRM on an iBook or kindle protected file, even though near as I can tell iBooks is just a skin for the kindle store. I like things being Open. I like ~supporting local business~ etc. If I have to download an app to send a commensurate share of the profit to a bookstore as if I had bought this digital copy of Index, A History there – good. Fine. Doesn’t matter how janky the app is, I’ll do it.

But for gods sake fix the hi-lighting.

—Jacob

something I would never do. ↩︎

accidentally. Your app is awful in landscape. When I turn a reading app sideways, I expect a two-page layout not to read each a paragraph in CinemaScope. ↩︎

I love footnotes ↩︎

the kind that are a little pop-up nad the kind that are an interlink ↩︎

Lately to continue reading C. Doctorow’s Enshittification or Dr. J. Sadoski’s The Mechanic and the Luddite, both highly recommended . ↩︎

nice ↩︎

c. 2003

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Or: “My drawing book for snowy & sunny days !!!”

undated, c. 2002–2003

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undated, c. 2002

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