Matinee

I’ve logged hundreds of films on Letterboxd — half-star ratings, dumb little one-liners, the occasional review I’m actually proud of. And all of it lives in an app I open, scroll, and forget. The stuff I think about the most has no place in the room I actually live in.

So I built the room a screen. Matinee takes my latest Letterboxd entry and turns it into an object — poster, rating, my words — that just sits there, on the wall, being true. It’s the opposite of a notification. You don’t check it. You catch it out of the corner of your eye and remember you have taste.

The hardware does almost nothing on purpose. There’s no processor grinding away, no app running on the device. An ESP32 wakes up, asks the cloud “is there a new picture?”, and if there is, it paints it and goes back to sleep. That’s it.

That decision is the whole design. Every hard problem — fetching from Letterboxd, laying out the frame, fitting a poster into six colors — happens on a server I can fix in seconds, not on 200 boards I’d have to physically recall. The panel is e-ink because a movie poster shouldn’t glow, shouldn’t refresh, shouldn’t cost power to keep showing. It holds its last image with the power off. Like paper that changes its mind once a day.

The original spec was greedy. Matinee was going to surface my whole taste — Letterboxd and Untappd, concerts I’d been to, books, the works. I built the architecture to handle all of it, sources as plug-ins.

Then I ran the honest math on a 200-unit Kickstarter and made the call I’d make again: one source, flawless, beats five, flaky. Every extra integration was another feed to babysit, another way for a stranger’s wall to show a broken frame. So I cut. Letterboxd only — the one I actually use every day.