DRM in the cinema

The story links to an "https" URL, which is odd for several reasons,

1. Since when does a blog need to be secure?

2. The certificate is issued to "*.wordpress.com", which is useless. Each subdomain under wordpress.com should have a distinct certificate since they have a distinct author. The certificate should be specific to the author, not the host.

- I realize it is not realistic to assign unique IP addresses to each wordpress.com subdomain. I just don't like it.

3. The page loads insecure content from gravatar.com and googleservices.com, which throws up annoying errors.

Mixing insecure content makes it stupid, but as someone who uses https on my blog, it comes down to why not to use it. For the time being there's no reason, especially when Gandi give free certificates with a domain.

The one quirk is that I'll always have to have something to redirect to unsecured should traffic ever get so high it becomes an issue. Although I certainly don't expect that any time soon.

You don't think there's a place for it in smaller / specialized venues for some time? It makes sense for mainstream Hollywood not to bother with it anymore, but I for one would appreciate to be able to see Bela Tarr on 35mm or Antonioni on 70mm again. I know many of these older prints are passed around too rather than struck per showing.

This is why I love analog, and not just in the sense of "I'm an old fart and old things are better" (though I'm sure there's a good dose of that), but because there's a whole spectrum between "working" and "not working".

(Environmental issues aside, that is -- I recognize that the chemicals needed to manufacture and develop traditional film are pretty nasty.)

With digital, if it works, it's 100%, which is great, but if it doesn't work, it's 0%, and that can make it hard to even get a grip on what the problem is or which direction to go to find a solution. (DRM just makes this worse.) I've got some weird routing to my TV because the obvious HDMI connection doesn't work, and how do you troubleshoot that?

I once went to a theatre where the projectionist came out and announced that they had just broken a lens (apparently they had the largest lenses in town at the time) and couldn't project the film as they wanted to. They offered a refund, but for those who stayed, let us vote on what to do: use a smaller lens and see the film normally but smaller, or use the proper size lens but put up with 3-4 minute pauses every 20 minutes. Everyone stayed, and we chose the latter (who wants to see a small movie in a theatre?), and I don't think it was the wrong choice, but I learned that changeovers are not like commercial breaks: some of them are in really inconvenient places in the film, plot-wise!

That's a situation that could never happen with a new digital projection system. The odd thing is that even though we groaned at how poorly-timed the changeovers were, in my mind the whole event is an overwhelmingly positive memory. I learned something about how projection systems work, and we got to interact with the projectionist, and it was a unique movie night we got to talk about, and I even enjoyed the movie still. We sometimes act as though the only goal of cinema is to reproduce every pixel and soundwave perfectly, but my most enjoyable movie experiences don't correlate to that, and in this case is almost the polar opposite.

I suppose I'm a bit weird like that.