“…he can claim his characters’ memories as his own”

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In “The Lighthouse,” a manual of instructions for lighthouse keepers, from 1881, helped structure the action, and the Maine dialects of Sarah Orne Jewett’s nineteenth-century novels and poems informed the language. Eggers insisted on building his own seventy-foot lighthouse with a working Fresnel lens. The movie’s financiers wanted him to shoot in color, but Eggers stuck with 35-mm. black-and-white film, forgoing around six million dollars (more than half the film’s eventual budget) in the process. Eggers talks about constructing a doll’s house, in which his movies take place, and in which, through a massing of detail, he can claim his characters’ memories as his own.

THE LIGHTHOUSE remains one of my favorite films of the last few years, so I can’t wait for Eggers’s latest, THE NORTHMAN. Knight’s New Yorker profile on Eggers, above, is a must-read. Love the dollhouse analogy.

grappling hooks and guardrails

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As I've been immersed in a bevvy of open-world games over the last several months (FAR CRY 6, HALO: INFINITE, FORZA 5, and my "I can't process any other signal hand/eye/thing" fallback, GTAV), I've come to appreciate the sturdiness of the guardrails contained therein: while I can smash through buildings, over any number of obstacles or concrete or trees or shrubberies, those guardrails don't budge, rendering my flights from Covenant strongholds and/or my escapes with Chicharrón after storming the fascistas over before they begin.

Random FAR CRY 6 - HALO: INFINITE thought: the ability to use the grappling hook in HALO: INFINITE on everything ruined me for all other grappling hooks: that I had to search for conveniently-placed grapple-places in FAR CRY was a major let-down but we'll always have Chicharrón.