About...

Table of contents

• The Site
  • "How do I use RSS?"
  • Goals
  • "Why not just used Letterboxd?"
• The Author
• The Name
  • "How do you pronounce it??"

The Site

Sceawian was born out of the ashes of other creative ventures that died for various reasons. It is an attempt to practice 2 things at once: writing about movies with intention and honesty, and finding a different way to relate to online spaces.

"How do I use RSS?"

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a way of privately subscribing to all the content of a blog, newspaper, or anything else that updates periodically (your podcast apps are usually just checking RSS feeds for new episodes).

On this site, the RSS links take you to a file that sceawian.com auto-generates for me, and updates for me whenever I make a new post. If you take the URL to that file and give it to any RSS reader application, that app will know about this blog and send you a notification of some kind when the blog is updated.

Some possible ways you could subscribe:

• Browser extension: in whatever browser you're using, you can search for "RSS" in the extensions store to get an extension that takes a feed and notifies you when its updated. On Firefox I am currently using easyRSS.

• Mobile app: there are RSS reader apps on your phone, like Inoreader on Android. I don't use any RSS feed app on mobile so that's not an endorsement, just an example.

• Discord bot: I don't know the specifics, but it is possible to set up a Discord bot to ping you on Discord when an RSS feed updates. The RSS.app discord bot seems like a good place to start. RSS.app has tons of other options as well, though I don't know if they are paywalled or free.

Back in the day, RSS was the primary way you would get updates and notifications when your favorite sites had updates. I think the decline of RSS usage is directly correlated with the general centralization and enshittification of the internet. So, try something new and be a part of a better internet!

Goals

I think it's important to put out the goals of a project from the start. Without clearly defined goals, a project has no way to end in a satisfying manner.

In the short term (by the end of 2024), I hope to:

• archive all my old letterboxd reviews on this site and fully link the two reviews together
• set up the P.O. Box and receive some kind of written communication to the site once a month, digital or physical

In the long term (by the end of 2025), I hope to:

• get a guest columnist rotation on the site, or even a permanent second columnist on the site
• feature a guest column from an incarcerated queer or trans writer in Washington state

Undefined ideas, hopes, dreams:

• Physical media share/club of some kind? Loaning physical media and people sending media to me like a library?
• Featuring homemade videos? Short films?
• Local screenings for the site? Feels like I need a discord to organize that but I hate discord. Integrate a FORUM onto this site?????? But then no one would use it. Maybe its just all done through email lists and we're a little nutty with it.

"Why not just used Letterboxd?"

I actually originally used letterboxd for all my film writings. Letterboxd is great. This site will start out as being almost entirely an external archive of Letterboxd reviews. But the hope is to transition slowly such that the end state of Sceawian is mostly original reviews that have blurbs or sections reposted onto Letterboxd for visibility.

Why go through this hassle? Because Letterboxd is not very fun to write for or read from when the reviews stop being short quips and start being longer essays. It's not fun to write for because you can't draft up a review (to which the author has lost more than one draft on an errant page refresh and had to start over), and because there are no formatting tools provided for the review. Now, yes, you can add your own <i> and <strong> tags and that sort of thing, and there are extensions to make it better. Ultimately, however, my process was just to write a markdown file of my review, then convert it to HTML and stick it in the editor in the browser.

For all that trouble, you still get a very slow and ugly (in my opinion) experience with reading a long-form review in Letterboxd. And if discoverability is supposed to be a benefit, you can't really search for reviews based on word count on the site. I have so often wished to find out if anyone else is being extra as hell in their reviews and I stumble into various examples but I think the real movie writers are getting paid to do it for actual columns somewhere. So, this is an attempt at having a bit of that bespoke feeling around a separate website for a column that updates relatively regularly about movies, while still being accessible and not part of any particular journalistic institution. In short, this is not Letterboxd hate!

The Author

June is a try-hard movie writer and is a lifetime resident of Washington state. She hates 90% of modern movie previews. Her favorite movie set in her hometown is Lies and Illusions. Her favorite movie of all-time is Yi Yi (maybe).

The Name

Sceawian was chosen as a name for 3 reasons. First, it's a cool word from old English. It's meaning is related to the theme and focus of the site. Second, the whole word was still available for domain registration when I came up with the idea for the project. And third, I just doesn't feel that I have any credibility to use any other words in any other languages for website/"product" names.

"How do you pronounce it??"

I am not an expert, but following this pronounciation guide, I believe it's something along the lines of:

SHAY-weun.