Man, I should really go back and tag all of these posts with relevant directors and so on. But who has time when you’re busy lobbying the Criterion Channel for a Boston Crime collection? And here we are, almost at Halloween, with November’s lineup to discover. I hope you and yours had an October filled with all the horror movies you felt like watching. November is traditionally Noirvember in our household and sometimes Criterion feels the same way. Not as much this month, with the partial exception of a Starring Gene Tierney collection introduced by the always-awesome Imogen Sara Smith. Tierney was just generally great but Criterion’s correct to say she made her greatest impact in noir; I’ve seen all the noirs here but you should absolutely check out Laura and Leave Her to Heaven if you haven’t. I’m putting Rings on Her Fingers on the top of my month’s watchlist, sight unseen, just because I’m a sucker for con artist movies. ...

People reading this via my blog know I’m a tabletop roleplaying fan; for the LinkedIn crowd, here’s a piece of me that you probably didn’t hear a lot about at work. Unless you worked with me at a video gaming company. I have spent a lot of my life playing tabletop roleplaying games: Dungeons & Dragons and the thousands of games of roughly that style. I was introduced to the hobby by a disreputable dude a couple years older than me in high school, who showed me this game called Tunnels & Trolls, which notably supported solitaire play in the style of those old Choose Your Own Adventure books, except with dice. I spent endless hours as a solitary kid randomly generating new dwarves, elves, humans, and so on and sending them into dungeons to live or die as the dice demanded. I still have many of the books I bought back then, sitting a couple of yards from me on my shelves. ...

You’ve heard the Scott McNealy story; this is the rest of my time at Sun Microsystems. I started working at Sun in 1995, directly after I left Netcom. For the first chunk of my Sun employment, I was a contractor through Taos Mountain Software. Taos Mountain was a significant consulting company in Silicon Valley at the time; when I found out how badly Netcom was underpaying me, they were the easy outlet to make a reasonable salary. There was an insane appetite for competent engineers at the time. Those were the days, huh? ...

This is not going to be a surprising revelation. I am writing it down because otherwise I will keep forgetting and being surprised when I remember it and so on and so forth. Sometimes I’m slow. The other day I was noodling on a Frontier Scum one-shot I want to run at Con of the North, because I want to start running more games at conventions and Frontier Scum looks really easy to run and I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about Westerns in the last year. (I will playtest it before I run it in public, no worries.) And I had a great concept about a bunch of scum who get caught between the law and a bunch of people who are even scummier than them, but it wasn’t solidifying. It was a few frames of film in my mind and a couple of NPCs and then… what? ...

The term of art at Amazon for events like Black Friday and Prime Day is “high velocity event.” My entire time at Amazon was a high intensity event. I learned a lot, I appreciate what I learned, I liked the people, I’m grateful to the company, and I never really wanted to go back. Here are some Amazon stories, which I can’t tell without talking about Disney a bit. Bear with me. ...

We can forgive the Criterion Channel for failing yet again to provide the much desired Boston Crime collection, since it’s Halloween season and that simply wouldn’t make sense. No, today I’m going to complain about their failure to provide a New England Horror collection. The Dunwich Horror, Jaws, The Witch, The Haunting, and I suppose one could make room for some adaptations of that Maine guy’s novels. I get it. Criterion is a New York company and New Yorkers are allergic to Boston. I won’t dwell on this further; let’s get to the October lineup. It’s scary. ...

Eh, I had to get to the jobs I didn’t really enjoy eventually. I wound up at Oracle because I badly wanted to leave Amazon. Never the best reason for taking a role, but we’ve all been there. Also, true story, Oracle rejected me back in 2002 because I didn’t have a college degree, so I felt a little bit like I was getting some of my own back. Not really rational but we’re all human. ...

The first time I saw Sugar live was at the University of Iowa Memorial Union in Iowa City, on April 27th, 1993. That’s still one of the two most intense concerts I’ve ever seen, although I’m not a frequent concert-goer. I remember the music much more than I remember the band: huge sheets of guitar snarling out of the speakers and permeating my body. I’d never heard anything so loud. ...

S. and I took a little excursion to Lake Como this morning for Ingress purposes and wound up doing the mile and a half loop around the lake, just because it was pretty. Along the way we realized that this was a chunk of the St. Paul Grand Round (not to be confused with Minneapolis’ Grand Rounds National Scenic Byway, although they run parallel for a while). So because I am an OCD completist, I took this as an opportunity to start marking our progress along the full route. See the little tiny bit we’ve done around Lake Como? ...

I am pretty sure this is the specific story that’s gotten me hired more than once. It’s a good story about a project I’m really proud of and I’ve gotten pretty skilled at telling it. It’s also a great example of how rapidly careers could move in those days. I’m good at what I do but I also got lucky here and there and this story is about me being both competent and lucky. ...