I’m somewhat sleepy as I start this post since I’m halfway through the long trip from Dublin back to Seattle, so a fair chunk of my writing about the March Criterion Channel lineup may just be “Wait, you’re telling me Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Cruel Intentions is on the Channel this month?” It’s even the banner image on the lineup post. I’m not sad about this — it’s a guilty pleasure and gives me another excuse to remind everyone to seek out Miloš Forman’s Valmont, which is overshadowed by the admittedly superior Dangerous Liaisons and which is not streaming anywhere. However, Valmont has a delightfully sardonic cast (Meg Tilly!) and really I want to do a marathon of all three now. But it’s weird to see Cruel Intentions on this lineup. It’s not even part of any program. I am super curious about how it wound up here. ...

As more or less expected, I made very little progress last week thanks to travel and a busy work schedule. I’m sitting in Dublin right now and I’m too jet lagged to figure out how to run the card generator remotely so I’m just gonna copy/paste the three cards I finished into this post. More to come! The Stage If you’re not on the stage, are you even alive? If anyone else is on the stage, are they stealing your thunder? Up close, you can see the wear on the boards and the stains where the ghosts of bands past pissed in the corners. It smells like rat shit and dead dreams. It’s still the only place that matters in the whole entire world. ...

I spent a lot of time dithering about Location cards. According to the SRD (and to the two Desperation games published by Bully Pulpit), “Locations allow the players to form both a tactile and mental map of the setting you have created. They are the first thing players encounter and should strongly inform what is to come. Make individual Locations evocative as well as easy to tie to the People.” ...

OK, that’s properly back at it. I finished up the first draft of all 12 Character cards this week by the simple expedient of blocking out an hour or so, sitting down, and forbidding myself to be a perfectionist. They’ll need another pass – in particular I think I need to amp up the general potential for conflict, maybe give everyone a very stupid goal like Morgan already has – but I like what I’ve got. ...

Look, February isn’t generally considered an exciting month; how much can you expect? Me, I would have jazzed this one up a bit with, I don’t know, a collection of Boston crime flicks, but that’s me. The path Criterion took isn’t bad, though, so let’s get into it. The top collection is Stunts. It’s got everything from Buster Keaton to John Woo – I would bet that the recent Hong Kong collections were part of the inspiration for this one. There’re also some cool new to the Channel movies – maybe this is where I finally see Bullitt. And to save you a check, yeah, the curator Buddy Joe Hooker did do stunts for at least one of the included movies, which I think is cool. ...

Zero creative progress this week, but I did manage to get the card layout thingie working so this PDF is the same stuff you’ve already seen except formatted for print and play. Note that the locations listed are repetitive and not useful since I haven’t figured that out yet.

S. and I went back to Orcacon for the first time since the pandemic and had a great time. I played in three games, and she played in two of those, all of which were at the least a worthwhile way to spend a few hours. We also attended a panel, which was so exciting to me that I already posted about it. This post will cover the con in general and the three games I played. ...

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. ...