Weeknote #11 [W25.50] - A new home for the blog, and arriving at Trivandrum for IFFK

A new home for the blog

I have a new home for my blog at blog.anikthink.com

It’s built with Astro and simple HTML, CSS, and Markdown.

I ended up not going for Ghost as a CMS for now (which is something I had mentioned on my last weeknote). I do think I’ll need one eventually. I don’t want to make a GitHub commit every time I want to post something. Which isn’t really possible from my phone, especially when I’m traveling without my personal computer (like right now).

At the same time, I like the simplicity of the current setup.

I sometimes wonder if the medium I publish through shapes what and how I end up writing. I like the bare bones nature of mataroa (thanks Tanvi!) Its lack of polish seems to help me be more unfiltered in my writing, perhaps because it feels lower-stakes, less demanding of perfection.

Arriving at Trivandrum for IFFK

I took a bus from Bangalore on Friday evening and arrived at Trivandrum on Saturday morning.

The bus reached Thampanoor at exactly 7:59 AM. This was a minor tragedy. Reservations for the next day’s films at IFFK open precisely at 8:00AM every morning, and they run out in seconds.

In the two minutes it took me to get down from the bus, most seats were already gone. I managed to reserve only the less well-known films — the ones no one else seemed to be booking, and I hadn’t even heard of before.

I had also missed booking anything for Saturday itself, having woken up late on Friday.

This meant that I spent a lot of time at the Nishagandhi auditorium, the open air theater where you don’t need reservations.

Some of those lesser known films turned out to be rather good. I probably wouldn’t have chosen them if not forced by circumstance, but letting go of plans ended up being part of the pleasure of this trip.