About...

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.

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. Her favorite movie set in her hometown is Lies and Illusions. Her favorite movie of all-time is Yi Yi (maybe). She hates 90% of modern movie previews. She likes foreign language films. She is terrified of being perceived as pretentious, but also doesn't know what that word means anymore. She is desperately trying to empathize with thin and gorgeous cis white women a little less, so she thought Barbie was a decent enough car commercial.

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.