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. ...

Miss me? As I sort of expected, I didn’t get a ton of writing done while I was in Dublin, but I made up for it on the weekend of my return. Here’s the current card PDF, updated with a first draft of the Location cards. I also gave all the Characters Locations to start at. I think I’m short on Tour Bus occupants, though. You can see how I implemented the city Locations I talked about. I sort of feel OK about how they read, although I’m both tempted to add like four more and worried I won’t be able to maintain enough variety in the cities. As is I’m giving into stereotypes here and there (sorry, Sicily). I’ll think about it and see how it plays out. ...

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.