I miss the old internet.

This is, undoubtedly, a sign that I’m getting older – it turns out that for me, my fifth decade is the one in which I start lamenting the good old days. I won’t deny that the internet is in many ways more useful now. If you’re looking for a practical piece of data, especially one likely relevant for many people – whether a shop is open right now, when a movie came out, how to knit a certain stitch – you can usually find it immediately.

But it feels as if the intensely personal little corners are gone. Speaking just about my primary passion, movies: it’s easy enough, in particular for new releases, to find showtimes, the cast list, major reviews and “the ending, explained!” It’s much harder to find the idiosyncratic essays. The personal recollections. The strange takes from an unexpected angle that will enrich your experience (or just baffle you).

There are still interesting conversations to be had. But they seem to be mostly in private corners – Discord servers and slacks where like-minded people congregate. But those are ephemeral. Same with newsletters: the best stuff is often reserved for the paying subscribers, and a girl can only have so many subscriptions (asking how many is impolite).

Recently, one of my movie group chats turned to Guillermo del Toro, and I found out he’s now married to Kim Morgan. I checked: it is indeed the same Kim Morgen who was married to Guy Maddin before, and who I knew back in the “blogosphere” days via her blog Sunset Gun, back when I was still As Cool As a Fruitstand. And you know? The page still exists, and she still posts occasionally (even still posts about Marilyn Monroe sometimes!).

I’d been playing with the idea of rebooting this site for a while. After all: I rant against AI slop all the time, stressing the importance of the process of writing… while not really writing all that much anymore. I like Letterboxd, but I’m bad at keeping up (I’ve seen four movies since the last one I logged), and not everything I want to write is tied to just one movie. It gave me such a thrill to rediscover Sunset Gun, a little bulwark of eccentricity against SEO’d blandness.

So why not take a little corner of the internet and make it mine? Regardless of who might find it. Or when.

One thing initially holding me back was coming up with a format. Deciding what language, what topic, what approach. But the name of the blog is Panpopticon. If it’s going to be random, then let it be random. So I plan to write whatever I feel like. Mostly about movies, probably. Mostly in English. But if the mood strikes to write about Lego in Dutch, or about knitting in French, then why not? There might even be the occasional photo dump, since I’m trying to wean myself off of Instagram.

So here I am. In a hammock, in France. Writing directly into the CMS, like that lunatic Jimmy Olsen. Using pieces of a tree that fell over as side tables, because we’d haphazardly placed them in what turned out to be the perfect place to keep a cold beer and a magazine with reach. Because I like stuff, and I like happy accident. And I like finding the value in things others would discard.