Short post this week – Orcacon was this weekend and consumed most of my available weekend braincells. I wrote up two more People cards and started working on something to generate playtest cards. (For the geeky: the cards live in Obsidian, using YAML frontmatter for metadata, and I can pump that into HTML templates and then convert the HTML to PDFs easily enough.) Whitney I’m Whitney, and they pay me to make them look good. They’re not bright enough to know that’s why they pay me, but it is. I don’t get high before I go on stage, I don’t sleep with underage fans, and I’m a good musician. And I am so tired of seeing no-talent idiots like Jay getting royalties for albums he barely plays on just because he went to school with the almighty Robin. I wonder what it would take for Jay to get fired? ...

We attended a fascinating panel at Orcacon today; Caroline Pitt, a University of Washington postdoc, and several graduate students (Runhua Zhao, Lane D. Koughan, and Michele Newman) discussed their work on a TTRPG designed to teach digital civic engagement skills to teens. (“There’s no definition of that term. We polled the youth we worked with to figure out what would be meaningful to them.”) They’ve previously done some really interesting work on misinformation education games, including escape rooms and a Minecraft server designed to be an educational resource for elementary school kids. This all apparently informed their current project. ...

Short week but I wanted to get started! Today I have the first draft of the relationship map I’m using to design my People cards, and the first three of those cards. We’ll start with the former. I took a pretty straightforward approach here: I made up 12 band members and associates and made sure they each had one clear point of relationship friction with another person. By keeping track on the map, I made sure there weren’t any tight closed loops. You don’t want to set something up where three people hate each other and none of them have any connections to anyone else in the band. I wound up with one grouping of four people who’re unconnected to the rest of the band anyhow. ...

Another year, another batch of Letterboxd stats. I’m pretty happy with it once again. Let’s see what they remind me of… ...

So the other day I mouthed off on Bluesky about a game I’ve been wanting to write for a year or so: Oh crap. Well… let me be gentle with myself. 1 game I want to make in 2026: - Just A Rock and Roll Band (a rock band’s final tour, using @bullypulpithq.bsky.social’s Desperation engine) — Bryant Durrell (@innocence.com) 2025-12-24T03:29:54.077Z I played Jason Morningstar’s Desperation twice with friends the other year and loved it. I have a couple of ideas for hacks rattling around in my head; the less ambitious one is The Last Tour, which will capture a fading rock band making a comeback tour in Europe in the late 1970s. And failing, of course. Now I’ve gone and told the world in an attempt to pressure myself into getting it done. ...

Another month, another juicy Criterion Channel lineup! Not an all timer of a month, but pretty decent, and putting Philip Seymour Hoffman on your banner image is always going to get you on my good side. So let’s break it open and see what we’ve got. The first big ticket collection is The ’90s Do the ’70s, which is so much in my cultural wheelhouse that I’ve already seen (and enjoyed) almost all of them. I’d like to get to Summer of Sam this time around, since hey, Spike Lee, and I think it’ll harmonize well with the slow motion crime flick binge I’ve been engaged in this year. (Night of the Juggler, say.) And if you haven’t seen Velvet Goldmine, here’s your chance to catch up on your Todd Haynes – it’s one of my favorite movies about music ever. ...

I’ve wanted to get Outgunned to the table for a while; last weekend I finally had the chance. (Thanks, Josh & Lisa & Gareth!) I ran the quickstart/back of the book adventure, with the goal of getting a feel for the mechanics and finding out if the game is really the general-purpose pulpy action game of my dreams. My benchmark is of course Feng Shui, which holds up pretty well in 2025. ...

Knocked another task off my blog migration list: we have search functionality again! This was much easier than I thought it was going to be, but as promised, Pagefind is super easy to install. At any given moment it might be a few hours out of date, since I only run the reindex job once a day. I don’t think that’ll matter much to anyone. Couple of technical notes just in case it helps someone else: ...

First Criterion lineup post on the new platform, how exciting! I had hoped to celebrate with, I don’t know, a new collection of movies about New England holidays? But alas, this month is still not the month. It’s fine, it’s still a solid lineup. First up is Hotels on Film, which is a very clever idea for a collection and doubly so in that it’s a season when a lot of people travel. Solid list of movies, tending a bit to the dark side. The Palm Beach Story is really funny, though, as one might expect from Sturges. And while I’m not the first person to lament the lack of The Grand Budapest Hotel, I am sure there are good reasons. ...

Kind of a belated Character Creation Challenge post here, huh? ANYway. I was reading through the Hollows corebook after this weekend’s game, thinking about the Priest pregen, and I noticed that the stats on the preview seemed a little off in the low direction. I also had the aforementioned dissonance with optimal tactics for the two weapons. So I ran through character generation, mostly for the sake of checking the math but also to see if there were any easy tweaks I’d make if I wanted to play Caleb in a campaign. (Which I do, of course.) ...