Hello! I am Marlon de Castro, and this is my new site.

Nightporter was a publication that I had inside of my old site, titled the-thief. Every time I wished to talk about art, in my own personal way, it would happen through Nightporter. But I’ve always wanted a place where I could put more professional texts without being surrounded by extremely personal ones, present in the site mentioned before, so since I already had to migrate from WordPress.com to WordPress.org (long story), and after a lot of thinking about the existence of the previous site, I decided to create an entirely new one solely for the Nightporter publication. If you were a reader of the-thief, know that the publication won’t be continuing to exist, at least for a long time, I presume. But I technically can create more sites in this new thing I paid for, so the door will be open.

I am here to talk about the different places you can go in the site as of now, to help you navigate through all the changes I did on the old layout for the other site.

First of all: Languages

One of the reasons the site took its time to be launched is that everything in the site had to be manually translated by me to Portuguese. I always wished the-thief had two languages for every post, as I am brazilian and also write in Portuguese, but that was something that took a lot of time for not a lot of praise, so I decided that I’d focus on just expressing myself and whoever could understand me, would.

Now, you have a little icon at the bottom of the page with a flag opposite of the language you are currently reading. By clicking on it, you’ll either have the Portuguese or the English site.

One thing to note is that if you understand both languages, I HIGHLY recommend you read the text in the language it was written originally (and you’ll know it as I’ll always point at the beginning of the text). I am a native Portuguese speaker and am fluent in English, but because of the way I learned my second language I am terrible at translations, so often I won’t be as effective in a language different than the one I originally expressed myself.

Note also that I can only translate texts AFTER I post them because of the way this plugin I’m using works, so if you’re brazilian and wishes to read it, you’ll have to wait a bit. I’ll put in the update feed whenever the translation for a new post is finished.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here, am I not?

Front page

The main hub. Every place that exists within the site can be accessed through there. The Nightporter playlist of the month will stay in the front page, so you can have an easy access to it. You’ll have a few recent posts from all of the different spaces in the site ordered from newest to oldest, so you can also easily see if you’re missing something. But in case you’re still worried…

Update Feed

At the bottom of the front page, there is an Update Feed. In there, everything I work on the site, be it new pages, new posts, new layouts… Anything that happens within the site will be there. I’ll even put when new songs will be added to the playlists, although if I add a lot at the same time, the entries will be less specific. Speaking of playlists.

Menu

Playlists (we’re going out of order because of the segue, I’m sorry…)

The older Nightporter publication had a lot of playlists made exclusively to the site. Every month, there will be a featured playlist with songs I’m getting into. In the past, I used to make posts for those playlists; I would write about every single song in them and give a quick word about what happened in my month. These would be so incredibly time consuming to write, that as I fell out of love with the other site, I abandoned them for a bit. I plan to go back to them, maybe from where I stopped or maybe just the one for this month. Regardless, it will be a lot of work, so I’ll appreciate any love you can send my way.

Other than the playlists for each month, you have access to every playlist I ever created, be it on Spotify or YouTube. As I said before, if any of this playlists receives an update, I’ll try and put it in the Update Feed.

My Creations

This is a specific section for all the art I personally made. As of now, you have my short movie (which has a dedicated post for it which I recommend reading) and the video about the song I managed to put in the piano in the winter, as well as the song itself.

I plan to keep posting songs and creating, so wherever I do so it will be there as well. I also plan to start a photography section in there, too (inspired by a person in my life who was really good at it), but that will have to hold for a while until I have good material to put there (and maybe an actual camera, since mine is doodoo).

Since I needed images for the little slide thing (it took a while to do that by the way) in the music part, I decided to just put texts of what I plan to be my future albums. In this order: Songs of a Nothing (Songs in Everything would be a complement of it, but not a different album), A Woman Mirror and The Forest of Sound. I needed one more, so I put Lyz as well, which is the first project I ever made of an album of mine back in 2019. I still wish to do this album, but it would be important to me if that trilogy of mine would be completed first.

Every art I ever make will be there.

Archive Page

Something the other site didn’t have was a search bar to search for specific artists, bands, genres even. In the Archive Page, you can search for everything that is on this site.

About

Quite literally nothing to say, although I wish to perhaps move my Linktree to this About page. I would have to see in the future if that’s something I’d like to do.

Film

Now we’re getting to the interesting parts. If you scroll down, you’ll see that I managed to put my Letterboxd in some way in the site. Every time I watch a new movie the numbers get refreshed, and a the movie’s poster appears (it may take a few hours to do so, I think).

I wasn’t the one who made the code for this, but still, you guys simply wouldn’t know how difficult it was to make this work, I spent half a day just trying shit out. One tip: Letterboxd doesn’t have an open API. That’s all I’m going to say, those who know know.

As of now, there are four categories for different types of posts about movies in Nightporter. Film Essays (self-explanatory), Amateur Critique (my attempt of trying to write actual film critique), Filmographies (where I’ll watch a director’s [or maybe not only directors] entire filmography and make a different post for each movie, all being compiled in this section) and …While [film] Plays in the Background, which is a bit similar to some posts I’d do on the-thief; I’ll watch a movie, but instead of writing a lot about the movie, I’ll make a themed post about how my day was when I watched it, including fantasious bits and realities.

As of now, the only film post is my old critique for Mysterious Skin by Gregg Araki. I made this critique back when I still had my old film magazine with my friends, but don’t think too much of it as it is still amateurish.

Music

The music page is a bit more interesting. The month’s playlist is there of course, but I also managed to put my Last.fm there (and I thank God for Last.fm’s open API). You can see what I’m listening the most in this month, but also see what I am listening to right now.

The music page is also divided into four segments as of now. They’re Music Essays (essays about albums or songs or bands or whatever), Album Reviews, Discographies and …While [music] Plays in the Background. It is quite similar to the ones in the Film page.

One thing to note is that these …While [music/film] Plays… will probably be as close to a the-thief post as I’d be able to do in this site at the moment, so that’s for the zero fans of my previous site out there.

The Nick Drake post, the only one up at the moment, was supposed to go in the other site, but I’m glad I can start this man’s discography over here.

Art

Art that isn’t music or film won’t get as many posts written by me, I’m afraid. But I’d still like to write them, so every time I feel like doing so, we have a section for these moments.

I definitely want to write about books, for example. Photographies as well, of course. Video Games (which most wouldn’t consider art) will have a post up in a few days, maybe. It was one written a while ago, I’ll just need to translate it. Any other kind of art can appear in this site as well.

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That’s it. I hope you find this site inviting to you. Goodbye.