Indie Webbing and Movie Watching
September 1, 2026
Indie Webbing and Movie Watching
Greetings Gang —
I’m Ratik and this is C’Mon C’Mon. Welcome back!
First up, an action item:
- This is being sent using my new home cooked newsletter software; if you get this, please reply and say “Hello!” as a signal that delivery is happening. Thanks!
Following my ‘crisis’ last month, a lot of you reached out with C’Mon-C’Mon’s for me. Some friends, some complete strangers. Reading those replies was exactly the fuel I needed to keep going. Thank you.
Months are starting and finishing so quickly this year. August was absolutely packed. My weeks are primarily filled with Kagi work. I start around noon and (happily) go on till laaaate evening. The work is fun and rewarding. I’ve been feeling a strong sense of belonging lately, like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. It’s a good feeling. After Kagi work, there usually isn’t a lot of time left to do much else. I spend what’s left chilling with the girlfriend: yapping, watching things, doing life admin things, or lately, solving jigsaw puzzles.
Hobbies in August were restricted to mornings and weekends and I’ve been enjoying Saturday afternoons in particular. I love when the: ‘OH I can do whatever I want right now’ feeling hits. During my slivers of free time this month, I have been thinking about the Independent (or Indie) Web.
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The Indie Web
If you’re close to me, you know that I love the cosy, self-run, scrappy side of the Internet – the Indie Web. It consists of blogs, wikis, digital gardens, newsletters (like this one!), etc. The Internet has gone through many transformations since it was founded. It started off as a web of pages filled with text, images, and (hyper)links. Then we got Web 2.0 with the rise of Google, Facebook, and countless other Internet startups. This brought advertisements, e-commerce, and addictive algorithms to the Internet. More recently, we’ve witnessed the Web3 movement with crypto and the blockchain and are currently in the AI-era. Throughout all this, the Indie Web has stayed strong. In fact, the more we stray away from the original promise of the Internet, the stronger the Indie movement becomes.
In August, I spent a lot of time on the Indie Web reading blog posts from people I like. I especially enjoyed reading things by Marcin (on his blog: Unsung), Pooja, and Tanvi this month. A few favourites:
I keep up with people’s writing using the magic of RSS feeds. RSS is an important feature of the Indie Web. It stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS allows people to receive updates from their ‘favourite’ sites in the form of a feed. It eliminates the need to manually visit multiple websites to check for new updates. Imagine: an Instagram / social media-like feed but with updates only from your favourite websites. For this to work, the creators need to publish an RSS feed for their website.
Here’s a fake RSS feed I wrote. It contains two updates from a fake website. The first (and latest) update is about the website owner’s awesome Tiramisu. The second update contains their thoughts on Coffee. Try to read through and see if you can follow what’s happening.
<rss version="2.0">
<item>
<title>My Awesome Tiramisu</title>
<link>https://example.in/tiramisu</link>
<pubDate>Sun, 21 Aug 2026 17:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
<description>
<p>All you need is coffee, mascarpone, and lady fingers</p>
</description>
<category>cooking</category>
</item>
<item>
<title>Coffee Rocks!</title>
<link>https://example.in/coffee-rocks</link>
<pubDate>Sun, 21 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
<description>
<p>Coffee is love.</p>
</description>
<category>personal</category>
</item>
</rss>
So, what does one do with such a feed? We put them into RSS readers! RSS readers are software / apps that know how to read an RSS feed and present its contents in a readable format. You copy the link for the RSS feed, paste it in your reader, and you’re all done.
There are many RSS readers out there to choose from. My personal favourite is NetNewsWire. It’s simple, free, and fully open sourced. My usual NetNewsWire session includes going through the app’s Today section. This section contains updates published on the current day across all the RSS feeds I subscribe to. The finite nature of the Today section is a great way to keep up with reading without getting overwhelmed. It has an end which keeps things calm.
I revamped my own RSS feeds this month as well. I now have a feed for blog posts on my website, another feed for C’Mon C’Mon (which you could use to read this newsletter in an RSS reader instead of your email Inbox), and one feed for photos I publish to my site. The photo feed just has a photo per update, no text. There is also an Everything feed which gets updated whenever I post something new on the site. Check them out here.
My final Indie Web fascination for this month has been the IndieWebClub of Bangalore (IWCB). IWCB is a Bangalore based community meet-up for fans of the Indie Web. It was founded by Ankur and Tanvi — who I — sorta-kinda-but-not-really know through the Internet. They’re cool people. Great RSS follows, if you’re interested. IWCB organises in-person meet-ups twice a month where people can blog together, share what they’re working on, or just hang out with like-minded folks. Guess who really wants to attend? This guy. Guess who doesn’t live in or travel to Bangalore? THIS GUY.
Humph.
I got a taste of the club recently though when I stumbled upon recordings from their one year anniversary meet-up. They were really good and I got a healthy dose of FOMO watching them. So much so that … maybe … just maybe … I should start a club in Noida? Delhi? Noida feels more doable? Delhi is so massive. This is an EARLY and RAW thought which I might not act on AT all. I don’t know where I would even begin to set something like this up. We shall see.
IWCB is hella cool. Check ’em out. They run a Webring as well, which is a way to interconnect websites of IWCB members and encourage discovery within their community. Lots of cool blogs on there to sift through and read!
Outside all the Indie webbing this month, I watched some gooood movies. Well, three good movies and one, now demoted to BAD.
Warning: Mild spoilers ahead.
Started the month with rewatching Finding Fanny (2014). I first watched this movie as a teenager with my family. Finding Fanny is a rare breed of Bollywood movies that came out in both Hindi and English. I made it a point to watch it in English the first time round and remember enjoying it. It was an absurd watch and the music was really good. Very different from anything else released back then. Fast forward to the 2020s, I wanted to make S watch the movie. While we found the movie online easily, every service we checked had it in Hindi. The original English version wasn’t available anywhere. I looked for YEARS. Every few months, I’d try to hunt for it and fail. I even considered emailing the director of the movie. Then, at the end of July, Reddit came to the rescue. I found it!
We watched the film at the start of the month and … hated it. Yeah, I have NO idea what was up with eighteen year old me. Maybe I just liked it back then because it was novel in some sense. I don’t think I’ll watch this one again anytime soon. But hey, the chase to find the movie was a lot of fun!
Next up, I watched The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026). The original used to be on TV routinely when I was younger, but I never managed to sit down and watch it in full. I finally did that with S in May this year and loved it! The sequel on the other hand, was just okay. I enjoyed being back with the characters seeing how their lives had panned. But, other than that, it was just an okay watch. The movie definitely struggles with what Patrick Tomasso talks about in his famous video essay: Why don’t movies look like movies anymore?. The sequel looks waaaay worse than the original. Another strange thing I noticed in the sequel was how terrible the casting for men (excluding Nigel, of course) in the movie was. It felt so off. Their acting was bad and they had little to no presence alongside the women in the movie.
Two standouts from the month were Toy Story 5 (2026) and The Invite (2026).
Toy Story 5 was just the cutest. Pixar knocked it out of the park. Five iterations in and they’re still delivering on the magic of the first one. The story was perfect for the times we are living in right now. The animation was top tier. They managed to stay true to the original AND have scenes with newer, more modern animation styling (think: Sony’s Spiderverse movies). My favourite part of the movie was one of the new characters, Smarty Pants, a potty-training toy. His bits in the movie were the funniest. In one sequence, he realises that kids actually stop needing potty training beyond a point and gets so sad at this realisation. There is something for everyone in Toy Story 5. Fans of the series have callbacks and tropes to look forward to. Newer audiences get a good, standalone story with great animation.
And finally, The Invite. What a ride. I saw it last week with my Movie Club. All of us loved it. The comparisons and parallels to The Drama (2026) make a lot of sense. The two movies can be considered sibling movies for sure. The Drama just about edges it for me in the head-to-head. But, it’s close. I want to watch both of them again — which is a great thing for a movie to make you feel.
Speaking about The Invite — wow! I was definitely the audience for this movie. I love the people-in-a-room-talking genre of movies. It feels like the purest form of film making to me, where the focus is solely on the characters and their interactions. Everything else is secondary and there to only enhance the conversations between characters. I also loved how The Invite was edited. I could feel that Yorgos Mavropsaridis had edited it and I later discovered that he had. Finally, the set design for the film was absolutely gorgeous. The entire thing is mostly shot inside an NYC apartment with stunning interiors. There were so many frames in the movie which left me in awe of what I was seeing. Good stuff, Olivia Wilde, good stuff.
Alright, that’s all for this month. Hope everyone is doing well, keeping healthy, eating tasty food, watching and reading good things. Catch you next time!
Back to indie webbing,
R