there's a scene in captain fantastic. the oldest son kills a deer with his hands. his father smears the blood across his face. he is a man now. he is blessed.
i opened jellyfin tonight on my phone. poolside. oaxaca. tapped captain fantastic. it loaded instantly from a server in germany that i set up three days ago. streamed through caddy, served by docker, stored on a 5tb box in falkenstein. not a buffering wheel in sight.
and i thought: this is my rite of passage.
not the deer. the infrastructure.
i grew up on bootleg dvds in barcelona. five euros for three discs from a guy named paco in the gothic quarter. the subtitles were always wrong. the quality was always wrong. but paco was the algorithm. and paco had taste.
now i have 113 movies on my own server. 40 shows. audiobooks for the kids. youtube archives of ram dass and alan watts. the whole thing runs behind a vpn tunnel. the server's ip never touches a peer. ten services breathing in the background while i sit by the pool watching viggo mortensen raise his kids in the woods.
jellyfin on :8096
navidrome on :4533
audiobookshelf on :13378
radarr, sonarr, lidarr watching for new content
qbittorrent pulling through mullvad
the whole stack mounted on /mnt/vault
there's something about watching a movie you chose, on a server you built, from a library you curated. no algorithm deciding what you see next. no show disappearing because a licensing deal expired. no recommended section trying to turn your attention into product.
my kids will watch miyazaki and chaplin and pingu. not because a feed surfaced it. because i put it there.
paco would get it.
he is a man now. he has his own server.