To celebrate my retirement (which is a retrofitted justification; I’d have done this anyhow), S. and I woke up at 5 AM Friday, left the house at 5:30, and drove down to Portland for the Criterion Mobile Closet. We didn’t get back home until 10 PM. This… is our story. Seattle to Portland chews up about 80-90% of our ID.4’s battery, depending on weather. Usually we pause for a 30 minute charge somewhere north of Portland, so we have more flexibility coming home. This time we knew we had to get there early in order to secure a spot in line, so we just pushed through, arriving with around 60 miles of range left. Plenty. ...

Now that I’ve slept for a week or so, it’s about time I wrote a post about my SIFF experience. (Link goes to the stable film program page for 2026, not the top level page which is subject to change.) I made a mistake by attending a midnight showing the first Friday of the festival, which left me pretty wrung out for the rest of the week. I feel better now, though. ...

I won’t bury the lede: I’m retiring! After literally 30+ years working as a system administrator, manager, director, and general thinking-oriented person, I am hanging up my last employee badge and riding off into the sunset. I told my team last week, and May 28th will be my very last day. It’s a big step. Yes, I’m excited. Yes, I’m also nervous. S. and I were the right combination of lucky and talented to be able to retire comfortably at a relatively early age; after a lot of discussions with professionals over the last six months or so we decided it was better to take the leap and maximize our personal time in the decades remaining. Pokémon has been a good place to work, but my anarchistic self has never actually been all that comfortable as a manager despite the fact that I’m very good at it. ...

Decent month with a great themed collection as the centerpiece. Any time you can put one of the biggest stars in the world in your banner image has to feel like a win for the Channel and there’s George Clooney being all home spun front and center. Do you ever contemplate the fact that Clooney is a nepo baby, or is that just me? So let’s start with Odysseys, since that’s the collection we’re talking about. Brilliant theme, everything from Sullivan’s Travels to After Hours to, yes, O Brother, Where Art Thou? There is not a bad choice in the bunch, and the concept is focused. I think this one is simply deilghtful. ...

Our old friends Gretchen and Brad came up to Seattle to visit for the weekend, and we found time to try the new Bully Pulpit/Jason Morningstar game, Zhenya’s Wonder Tales. It’s been forever since we gamed together; they were pillars of my gaming experience back during my first run through the Bay Area. Champions, Feng Shui, Shadowrun — the good old trad gaming days. It was awfully nice to sit down and tell stories with them again. ...

About time for another Criterion Channel lineup. I’ll admit it, it’s been kind of a middling few months on the Channel, usually with at least one really exciting collection. I’m not sure May even has that one standout. Obviously the long-awaited Boston Crime collection is the answer here; until that day comes, it’s hard to complain too much. Still a cinephile’s delight. OK, let’s run it down. The first collection is ‘80s Remakes (and Their Originals) which is at the least a clever idea. Everything from The Thing and The Thing from Another World to Breathless and Breathless. I can’t say I’d go out of my way for most of these remakes, though — Carpenter being the clear exception. This feels more interesting as an exploration of how remakes can go wrong than anything else. ...

S. and I spent a long weekend up in Vancouver the other weekend to attend VIFF’s Mexico Noir series. Click through and read Sylvia Moreno Garcia’s essay on Mexico’s film noir during their golden age of cinema; if you’re lazy, though, the quick summary is that Mexico had its own film noir tradition in an era when Mexico was the largest producer of Spanish language movies in the world. Argentina and Spain were busy being fascist regimes, which always puts a pall on creativity. These movies are mostly unseen and unavailable today, so the chance to inject eight of them directly into my veins was too good to miss. ...

Another month, another batch of movies! One very exciting program and a bunch of stuff that I generally approve of even if I’m not quite as excited about it. I found someone on Letterboxd who seems to be maintaining lists for each program, which made writing this easier, I tell you what. Thanks, Robby! You know, I’m gonna skip to the exciting bit: Tramps, Troublemakers, and Trailblazers: Trans Filmmakers. Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay curated this and it looks amazing. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is going to be the one most people have heard of, and it’s great. I’m really interested in Maggots and Men because it’s a historical story, and I’m looking forward to seeing what a trans lens brings to this bit of Soviet history. Drunktown’s Finest caught my eye as well – intersectional! – as did No Ordinary Man since it’s a biopic about a jazz musician, and I have this persistent feeling that I should know more about jazz history. ...

Way belated, but I wanted to talk a bit about my day trip to Belfast from February, the last time I was in Ireland. It made an impact on me. So some of my work trips to Dublin are two weeks long, which is honestly more time than I like but gives me a good solid chunk of time with my Dublin teams. Also it means I get the weekend to do touristy stuff. I gave some serious consideration to flying to Berlin for the weekend this time until deciding that I wasn’t going to have the energy for a winter Berlin trip. Instead, I spent one day taking a bus tour up to Belfast. ...

I tried some experiments in my Demon Haunted Feng Shui game the other day, and it worked out well enough for me to want to write about them. Love Letters The first one was Love Letters, stolen from Apocalypse World. The concept in a nutshell is one-off character-specific mechanics intended to get people back into the swing of the campaign after a hiatus. For a great podcast on the topic, see Dice Exploder. ...