bryant

And We're Live

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 15:40:19 GMT

As you may have noticed, I am now cross-posting from Popone to Dreamwidth again. Comments will remain active over here.

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Feng Shui Imports

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 15:39:00 GMT

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.

Full post: https://popone.innocence.com/archives/2026/03/04/feng-shui-imports/

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Belfast Surprises

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 15:37:53 GMT

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.

Full post: https://popone.innocence.com/archives/2026/03/22/belfast-surprises/

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April 2026 Criterion Channel Lineup

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 15:37:52 GMT

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.

Full post: https://popone.innocence.com/archives/2026/03/25/criterion-channel-lineup-april-2026/

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Mexico Noirth

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 15:37:38 GMT

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.

Full post: https://popone.innocence.com/archives/2026/04/11/mexico-noirth/

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May 2026 Criterion Channel Lineup

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 15:37:26 GMT

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.

Full post: https://popone.innocence.com/archives/2026/04/19/may-2026-criterion-channel-lineup/

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Tales of Snakes and Humans

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 15:37:25 GMT

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.

Full post: https://popone.innocence.com/archives/2026/04/19/tales-of-snakes-and-humans/

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Looking backwards

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 18:10:01 GMT

I just unloaded a bunch of FanTasia pictures from the camera in preparation for GenCon; my blog is the beneficiary of this wealth. It wasn’t a heavy picture-taking trip for me but I got a few good shots. Please keep in mind that Montreal is much prettier and funkier than one might think from my photography.

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[Crossposted from Population: One; go here for the original post.]

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Unorganized

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 18:10:01 GMT

The Boston Film Festival has a terrible interface. You select which movie you want info on from a pulldown menu, which is bad; the movie pages don’t have information on which dates the movies are playing, which is lame; and the pages for each individual date don’t have links to the movie description pages. Buh. The film list helps a little but not enough.

Anyhow, it all starts tonight, and I would be remiss if I did not point out a few movies.

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[Crossposted from Population: One; go here for the original post.]

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Movie Reviews: 10/23/2023 to 10/29/2023

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 14:46:57 GMT

Movies reviewed this week: Possession, Something in the Dirt, Light the Fuse… Sartana Is Coming, Wild Strawberries, Anatomy of a Murder, The Endless, Resolution, Night of the Living Dead, and Mangrove.

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[Crossposted from Population: One; go here for the original post.]

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Movie Reviews: 10/16/2023 to 10/22/2023

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 14:46:56 GMT

Movies reviewed this week: Hour of the Wolf, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, Spiral, New Nightmare, Killers of the Flower Moon, The Flu, The Fury, Mimic, and Battleship Potemkin.

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[Crossposted from Population: One; go here for the original post.]

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Movie Reviews: 8/7/2023 to 8/13/2023

Sun, 03 Sep 2023 15:13:33 GMT

Movies reviewed this week: A Trip to the Orphanage, Sorrowful Shadow, The Saddest Music in the World, Polite Society, Almost Human, Armour of God, Five Easy Pieces, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), and Odd Man Out.

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[Crossposted from Population: One; go here for the original post.]

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Movie Reviews: 7/10/2023 to 7/16/2023

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 16:43:59 GMT

Movies reviewed this week: The Limits of Control, Green for Danger, Biosphere, The Neon Demon, Five Dolls for an August Moon, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, and Jane B. by Agnès V..

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[Crossposted from Population: One; go here for the original post.]

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Notes: 2023-03-16

Fri, 17 Mar 2023 01:48:01 GMT

I’ve lived in big modern apartment complexes with decent courtyards, but this post is on target despite the existence of exceptions. And even my apartment courtyard was a restricted access area, only open to apartment residents.

I spend a lot of time thinking about back to office, hybrid work, remote work, and so on. As is usually the case, Charity Majors has good thoughts on this. Her company is fully remote and distributed, and I believe that was true even before the pandemic; like many of us, she’s found that you still need that physical presence from time to time. Here’s how she does it.

I bought and read this dude’s book on Bahamian wrestling. It is incredibly niche and if you don’t like wrestling history as much as I do, you don’t need it — just read the article. It’s easy to write this kind of thing off as an artifact of the days before the Internet, and in some ways, yes. On the other hand, I know about a ton of little wrestling promotions in surprising places that are active right now; the world is not so small that you can’t still be surprised and delighted if you look.

Tubi is a home for low budget black film! Cool!

[Crossposted from Population: One; go here for the original post.]

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Notes: 2023-02-22

Thu, 23 Feb 2023 02:11:12 GMT

Pitchfork dug deep for this review of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, Vol. 1-3. Cool for the music but also cool for the esoterica. Anyone who claimed to be Crowley’s kid and had a passion for folk music is worth investigating in my book.

Alejandro Galindo seems like a really interesting director. A fair amount of his movies are available on the commercial-based streaming services. I wonder if these weren’t an influence on Roma?

Speaking of directors, Soderbergh’s 2022 yearly media consumption list is up. Someone on Letterboxd made a more convenient list of just the movies, which is handy, but I also like reading through the full stream. (Hm, four views of The Killer? I bet that’s the upcoming Fincher movie rather than John Woo.)

The always insightful J. D. Corley made me want to buy Call of Cthulhu 7th edition with this blog post. It’s just some tips for running the game, but what is this Bout of Madness mechanic? Is that really how it’s written or is that Corley being smart and extending the rulebook in useful ways? Suppose I gotta find out.

Have a 60-odd page PDF about management techniques from Javier Grillo-Marxuach, show runner and writer. OK, it’s really about show running, but it’s interesting how much of this translates directly into smart management techniques. Particularly for director-level managers.

[Crossposted from Population: One; go here for the original post.]

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AI Oracle Part 2

Sat, 03 Dec 2022 02:13:13 GMT

New text AI! Let’s try it on some tabletop RPG work. Bold is my prompts; I’ve snipped the polite banter out of most of the AI’s answers.

Spoiler: this is way better than the last one I tried. If I repeat the same prompt it gets a little repetitive, but still not bad.

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[Crossposted from Population: One; go here for the original post.]

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Notes: 2022-11-08

Wed, 09 Nov 2022 02:07:41 GMT

Phew. No big Paxlovid bounce, thankfully.

This is what I thought of when I heard about Tesla engineers coming over to validate Twitter code. It’s both true that the author seems pretty savvy and that the culture over at Tesla is focused on velocity over anything. Good times.

Let’s get all the Twitter stuff out of the way!

Evelyn Douek has smart things to say about Twitter’s regulatory challenges. Not just in the US, not just in the EU — India’s going to be a huge headache.
This layoff guide for Twitter employees is worth reading for anyone who’s nervous about their job. Or anyone, really. Use your work laptop in a way which will enable you to execute on those precautions quickly.
One billion dollars in infrastructure cuts? This is already working out badly. Sympathies to the guy who just went on call for a bunch of systems he doesn’t know. Gergley has a good thread on the problems ahead. Here’s another SRE still employed by Twitter, and he thinks it’s gonna be ugly. Rakyll is a well-respected principal engineer in the reliability biz; she’s pessimistic and thinks people are leaving.
Tangentially related: Starlink is inevitably having to throttle bandwidth. Some math: Starlink wants $5K/month for 2 terminals with a total of 350 Mbps download. That’s cheap and cool but the existing mobile solutions can deliver bandwidth in the Gbps range.

OK, that’s enough horrified observation of the train wreck. Mastodon is treating me OK so far.

If I had to choose one word to capture the difference between engineering levels, I agree that impact is a good one. But there are a lot of different ways to have an impact. I kind of want to do career progression as a spider chart.

I like this story about enclaves and exclaves but what really caught my eye is the platform — this is apparently open to anyone to write this kind of post? In my copious spare time I wanna mess with it.

This program looks like a good entrance point to New Taiwan Cinema. I’ve seen Rebels of the Neon God and I liked it, although I’m not sure I have the right flavor of patience for this particular cinematic movement.

[Crossposted from Population: One; go here for the original post.]

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Seattle Movie Calendar

Sun, 21 Aug 2022 02:21:44 GMT

Before the pandemic, I’d been thinking about writing a little aggregator to pull movie times at my favorite local indie theaters into a calendar. I’m bad at remembering to see that cool showing a month from now but if I had a calendar that would theoretically help.

Obviously I didn’t need it for the last couple of years but the silver lining is that I got better at Python. I spent some time coding over the last week of my sabbatical and voila: the Seattle Arthouse Movie Calendar.

The code is here. I was sort of fiddling around with making it a real library but decided not to chew off too much at once. It was enough fun learning how to use classes to make it super-easy to add a new theater.

Lots of potential improvements. I am probably going to generate separate calendars for each theater next, for convenience. I’d also like to render maybe three days worth of calendar on the Web page. I feel like doing more than that risks pulling traffic away from the official theater sites, which I’d prefer to avoid, but three days seems reasonable.

I’m going to write up some notes on using the code for other cities too. If you’re decent with Python you could probably figure it out from reading what’s there but documentation is a good practice anyhow.

[Crossposted from Population: One; go here for the original post.]

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Sisters Coffee Company: Sumatra Pantan Musara

Mon, 18 Jul 2022 22:23:25 GMT

We’re currently drinking the Sumatra Pantan Musara from Sisters Coffee Company and it’s really good! There’s a depth of base flavor here that goes beyond the advertised dark chocolate tasting notes. It’s incredibly full in the mouth without being over roasted. I want to drink this all the time.

Our previous shipment was Ethiopia Maduro Natural from Case Coffee. I didn’t review this because it didn’t make much of an impact; the berry notes weren’t really my thing.

[Crossposted from Population: One; go here for the original post.]

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Job Hunt Progress

Tue, 24 May 2022 23:05:30 GMT

The job hunt is going quite well. I had a face to face interview Thursday, which I feel optimistic about; I also had a good phone interview today, and will be hearing back from them on Monday. Plus a couple more phone interviews next week. Plus maybe an interview in California. So I couldn’t feel too much better about my progress so far, although there’s obviously a ways to go.

[Crossposted from Population: One; go here for the original post.]

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100 Best Films You’ve Never Heard Of — Done!

Tue, 24 May 2022 23:05:24 GMT

Finished entering the 100 best films you’ve never heard of etc. Man, for a site with a cool concept, the interface for adding things to lists is painful. Well, no, more correctly, the search interface is atrocious. You can literally search on a full title, find nothing, then search on the first two words of the title and get the movie you want.

It could also use some data normalization. They key on Amazon entries, which is wise, since the revenue stream is Amazon affiliate links. However, there’s no linkage, so if you note that you’ve consumed a movie in one format there’s no record of it being consumed in any other.

… OK, that’s nitpicking. I know it’d be a huge amount of work. I’d love to see a way for users to do the work, though.

[Crossposted from Population: One; go here for the original post.]

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Tracking Mail

Tue, 24 May 2022 23:04:52 GMT

A bout of wrestling with my mail spool brought it down to a mere 50-odd messages. Go me! I am now graphing this as an aid to diligence:

Um. I will edit those images so as to be visible on the blog later.

[Crossposted from Population: One; go here for the original post.]

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Actual Play: Lady Blackbird

Tue, 28 Dec 2021 01:03:06 GMT

I’m running a brief Lady Blackbird campaign for S. and some old Boston pals, and it’s going swimmingly. They’re all happy to help drive plot and I’m happy to throw in complications and the game sings pretty well under those conditions. I was curious to see how forgiving the mechanics were; it’s easy to make dice pool mechanics pretty brutal (hi, Blades in the Dark). In this case the huge dice pools and the ease of refreshing them means the characters feel pretty heroic. The players also seem to enjoy the part where you put together dice pools, so that’s all good.

I’ve been using Miro as a visual board, and I’m really digging it. Starting small and expanding use as we go is working well for me. Right now it looks like this:

Next iteration is probably trying to do character sheets on Miro. Oh, and adding a rules cheat sheet, that’d be easy.

I am tickled pink at my little annotations on the NPC portraits. Prince Lupus there has very soft hands and smells of gardenias. The PCs freed him while they were escaping from the Hand of Sorrow.

[Crossposted from Population: One; go here for the original post.]

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FoundryVTT on Fly.io

Wed, 11 Aug 2021 01:01:14 GMT

FoundryVTT is a high quality virtual online tabletop platform. Unlike Roll20, however, there’s not a central server — once you buy a license, you have to run it someplace. There are a few services that will do this for you at a reasonable price, but I’m a geek, so if I start using FoundryVTT I want to host it myself.

Fly.io is a very cool new application hosting cloud. I experimented with it a month ago for hosting an NJPWWorld RSS feed generator and it was awesomely simple. They support persistent disk, so I couldn’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work for FoundryVTT. And it did! Details after the cut.

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[Crossposted from Population: One; go here for the original post.]

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Weird Instagram Bot Traces

Fri, 04 Dec 2020 03:07:00 GMT

So far this month I’ve received a couple hundred email messages from Instagram notifying me that their Terms of Use have been updated. They’re legitimate emails; it looks like someone signed up hundreds of Instagram accounts using randomized innocence.com email addresses. Since I moved my mail to Fastmail, I’m now seeing them all. I poked around a couple of the accounts (hi, kurt.clemons78446!) and the ones I spot checked have all been deleted.

I imagine someone used innocence.com as a domain for non-existent email addresses, and these either date back to before Instagram added a confirmation step (and were later removed for spamming) or they just never confirmed the accounts. You’d think that deleted accounts would be removed from whatever list of email addresses Facebook is using to generate these emails. Unconfirmed accounts… I guess those should still see the Terms of Use changes.

Good times. Finally added a filtering rule for the emails, anyhow.

[Crossposted from Population: One; go here for the original post.]

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