Population: One

April 2026 Criterion Channel Lineup

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:43:40 -0800

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.

Belfast Surprises

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 10:08:51 -0800

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.

Feng Shui Imports

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 17:03:02 -0800

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.

The Last Tour: Locations 1.0 Complete

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 15:53:07 -0800

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.

March 2026 Criterion Channel Lineup

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 11:08:44 -0800

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.

The Last Tour: Concrete Locations 1

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 18:47:34 -0800

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.

The Last Tour: Conceptual Locations

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 20:51:50 -0800

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.”

The Last Tour: First Draft Characters Complete

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 15:33:49 -0800

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.

February 2026 Criterion Channel Lineup

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 13:40:57 -0800

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.

The Last Tour: Plumbing

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 16:35:38 -0800

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.

Swimming with Orcas 2026

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 10:17:33 -0800

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.

The Last Tour: People 2

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 18:32:31 -0800

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?

Ludic Education

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 16:55:50 -0800

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.

The Last Tour: People 1

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 16:25:26 -0800

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.

Celluloid 2025

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 14:03:45 -0800

Another year, another batch of Letterboxd stats. I’m pretty happy with it once again. Let’s see what they remind me of…

The Parameters of Desperation

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 17:20:46 -0800

So the other day I mouthed off on Bluesky about a game I’ve been wanting to write for a year or so:

Oh crap. Well… let me be gentle with myself. 1 game I want to make in 2026: - Just A Rock and Roll Band (a rock band’s final tour, using @bullypulpithq.bsky.social’s Desperation engine)
— Bryant Durrell (@innocence.com) 2025-12-24T03:29:54.077Z

I played Jason Morningstar’s Desperation twice with friends the other year and loved it. I have a couple of ideas for hacks rattling around in my head; the less ambitious one is The Last Tour, which will capture a fading rock band making a comeback tour in Europe in the late 1970s. And failing, of course. Now I’ve gone and told the world in an attempt to pressure myself into getting it done.

January 2026 Criterion Channel Lineup

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 10:10:05 -0800

Another month, another juicy Criterion Channel lineup! Not an all timer of a month, but pretty decent, and putting Philip Seymour Hoffman on your banner image is always going to get you on my good side. So let’s break it open and see what we’ve got.

The first big ticket collection is The ’90s Do the ’70s, which is so much in my cultural wheelhouse that I’ve already seen (and enjoyed) almost all of them. I’d like to get to Summer of Sam this time around, since hey, Spike Lee, and I think it’ll harmonize well with the slow motion crime flick binge I’ve been engaged in this year. (Night of the Juggler, say.) And if you haven’t seen Velvet Goldmine, here’s your chance to catch up on your Todd Haynes – it’s one of my favorite movies about music ever.

Out(gunned) for a Test Drive

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 13:33:34 -0800

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.

As Thou Art Lost

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 09:08:24 -0800

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:

December 2025 Criterion Channel Lineup

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 16:29:30 -0800

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.

A Priest Remade

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 17:52:41 -0800

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.)

Actual Play: Hollows

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 18:41:34 -0800

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.

Mobile Assistance

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 10:48:26 -0800

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.

All Shiny All New

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 17:23:02 -0800

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 2025 Criterion Channel Lineup

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 00:38:06 +0000

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.