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 At any given moment it might be a few hours out of date, since I only run the reindex job once a day.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.) ...

I had the pleasure of playing in a one-shot of Hollows, the roleplaying game of tactical combat in a poisoned England lookalike from Rowan, Rook, and Decard. Yet another winner from Chris Taylor, Grant Howitt, and a very capable team. The crowdfunding campaign is more informative than the product page, so read that too if you’re curious. But basically you’re playing doomed Hunters who might as well spend the rest of their lives delving into Hollows, places where the world has encysted around horrible formerly human monsters, beating up those monsters, and bathing in their life force. The only significant fights are party vs. single boss creature, and there’s a lot of shifting around the positioning map, thinking about when to use special abilities, and getting seriously hurt. My kind of game. ...

One of the things that was really important to me was maintaining the ability to post to Popone from more or less anywhere. For the last year or so I’ve been using Obsidian with a Wordpress plugin to post; with the move to Hugo I needed to work out something new. I think I’ve got it now. The source of truth for posts is a private GitHub repository. In theory I could write the posts in GitHub’s web interface but that feels sloppy to me and it’s not a great mobile experience. What’s the point of using modular components if I just lock into yet another proprietary solution? The quest continued. ...

So here we are! As threatened/promised over a year ago, I’m moving off WordPress. Matt Mullenweg has not gotten particularly more relaxed about anything; last week he decided to tell a CSS framework to change names because their current name is similar to his company name. Given that the CSS framework is named Automatic, similar to Mullenweg’s company name, you can sort of see it, but really? No. They already added a disclaimer on their Web site, and “automatic” is a very generic term. I have still had enough of Mullenweg. Time to move.

November is unthemed this year: one noir collection but otherwise not heavy on the femmes fatale and criminal sorts. It’s also nicely varied, with one blockbuster of a collection and a fair amount of other cool stuff. Actually two blockbuster collections now that I think about it.

The news broke today that the performative anti-gay, anti-abortion activists Mayday USA are suing Seattle for imaginary free speech violations. Well that’s fun. I’m not about to waste the research effort I did just because the Seattle Times had to close their comment section, so here we go! One paragraph summary: they’re a bunch of New Apostolic Reformation assholes who came to Seattle this summer to fire up controversy and got what they wanted – counter-protesters, arrests, and a lot of free publicity. So it goes. Now they’re suing because the publicity is fading and the grift is based on constant weeping and wailing.

Well holy crap, that’s a year’s worth of these. I’m certainly not blogging like I used to but the monthly commitment is working out! And what a good lineup for my 12th month. The top line collections rotate around two unquestionable masters, and the good programming doesn’t end there. We’ll eat well in September. Let’s get to it.