From The Hart

Copy part of a message in Bluesky

2026-05-17T11:36:00-07:00

There’s a particular brand of horseshittery that involves taking away user control. I’ve posted before about web patterns I wish would stop existing, but now I’ve got a new one to add to the list: disabling copy/paste.

Bluesky is particularly egregious about it. In DMs, you can click a little button to copy the entire text of a message, but they disable the ability to click and drag to copy part of a message.

Imagine the following:

You ask your friend for one piece of information and they reply with more than you need. Bluesky says the answer is to copy the entire message, paste it somewhere like notepad, and then trip down to the part you want. Horseshit.

Here’s a TamperMonkey script that lets you select parts of messages like a normal human being. Note: the default behavior on click of a Bluesky DM is to expand the message and show the time it was sent. You lose that functionality with this script, and replace it with better, universal functionality instead.

What’s Tampermonkey?

Tampermonkey is a browser extension that exists in Chrome, Firefox, and their derivatives. It lets users write their own scripts to modify the look or behavior of various websites. You can write your own, or find them from the community. For example, when Amazon announced they were removing the ability to download purchased ebooks, many scripts to bulk download purchased titles were released (downloading one title typically required 3 mouse clicks).

Once you install TamperMonkey, make sure to go into settings and enable “Allow user scripts”. Otherwise the extension won’t do anything. Security 🙄.

Then, make a new script, paste in the below, save it, and refresh your Bluesky DMs. Now you can copy/paste like a normal human, instead of having to roundtrip through notepad like an animal.

The Script

// ==UserScript==
// @name         Bluesky DM Text Selector
// @namespace    http://tampermonkey.net/
// @version      4.0
// @description  Disable DM bubble button behavior while allowing text selection
// @match        https://bsky.app/*
// @grant        none
// ==/UserScript==

(function () {
    'use strict';

    function applyFix() {

        // Each message is a button, per bsky.
        const buttons = document.querySelectorAll('button[role="button"]');

        buttons.forEach(button => {

            if (button.dataset.textSelectFixed) return;

            const text = button.querySelector('[data-word-wrap]');

            if (!text) return;

            // Disable ALL interaction on the button
            button.style.pointerEvents = 'none';

            // Re-enable interaction only for the text
            text.style.pointerEvents = 'auto';

            // Allow selecting text
            text.style.userSelect = 'text';
            text.style.webkitUserSelect = 'text';

            // Make cursor feel normal (instead of clicky pointer)
            text.style.cursor = 'text';

            button.dataset.textSelectFixed = '1';
        });
    }

    // Bluesky is React-based; keep checking for new messages
    setInterval(applyFix, 1000);

})();

A Fistful of movies

2026-05-11T22:38:00-07:00

Below is the list of the last 30 movies I’ve seen, very roughly sorted by how much I enjoyed them (least favorite at the top, favorite at the bottom).

Failed State (2026) The Lobster Bob Wanna Kill Rain Was Not In The Forecast Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues Bugonia 1941 Stand By Me News Without a Newsroom [\French] Being 17 Master and Commander Batman: Gotham by Gaslight Black Panther: Wakanda Forever The Great Dictator (1940) Roofman (2025) My Life as a Zucchini The Floaters [French] Paris, 13th District [French] Girlhood (2014) Total Recall (1990) Weapons (2025) American Fiction (2023) Coming To America (1988) [French] My Little Girl (Rewatch) Ocean’s Eleven (2001) Blue Evening (Rewatch) The Grand Budapest Hotel Prawn Bhuna [French] Petite Maman Project Hail Mary (2026)

Poem for Lacy

2026-05-07T21:55:00-07:00

One sound could rouse that dog
from the deepest sleep anywhere in her home.
The spinning of the popcorn maker,
the slightest shifting of the kernels.
She would spring awake, leap to attention
three feet away from anywhere in the house.
Her attention rapt, a small pool of drool growing
as she watched and waited,
knowing
that there would be a small portion set aside for her.
Unseasoned
A kernel at a time
Tossed and caught from her own metal bowl.

Now
She is gone.
The kernels pop and spin
in the silence created
by a lack of Labradoorial thunder down the stairs
and when it’s time to dispense the bowls
there’s always
one unseasoned bowl
too much.

I wrote this poem when missing my dog, of course. But having been studying what makes a poem, I’m not terribly pleased with it. The words aren’t sonorous, don’t have an internal consistency of sound to reinforce the mood. The first sentence doesn’t flow with stresses and their absence the way a good poem should. Writing is rewriting, and poetry is no different.

In Review: JDIFF Film Festival

2026-05-03T12:41:00-07:00

Last week I went to my first film festival, the Julien Dubuque International Film Festival (JDIFF). Most of the movies I saw there can’t be seen by normal people in normal places. Several of them aren’t on LetterBoxd or IMDB! Most of what I watched was forgettable, and yet I’d gladly go again. Because some of it absolutely ruled, and I feel like I got a sneak peak at what’s coming.

The best case scenario for most of the films here are that they find a distributor. Some studio willing to give them money and put the thing in screens, or on your third-favorite streaming service. Some of them are just happy to be where they are. These films were made by students or new filmmakers, or people without that particular aspiration. One in particular, the worst movie I saw at this festival (and possibly in my life!) knows exactly where its aspirations are: the writer/director wanted to make a movie and share it into the world. He observed the failing state of the Hollywood model and eschewed it, following the path laid out by indie music bands and comic writers, two industries that have followed a similar path.

What follows is half travelogue and half movie review. Most of what I saw was shorts (partially because you can’t watch just one — they bundle ‘em into 90 minute blocks and you’re in for the whole ride). I don’t know what success looks like for a short film, but there are a handful of these that I desperately hope get a wide release, that I want other people to see, to enjoy, and to discuss. Others could find a home on YouTube or Vimeo, relegated to the 99.999% of videos uploaded per day that never break into double digit view counts.

The first day

The moment the Uber pulled out of my driveway, I realized I had forgotten my wedding ring. Wracking my brain, I knew it had to be on my nightstand (as I’d learn later, no, it wasn’t). I debated asking the driver to wait, but decided against it. I didn’t want to be a bother.

Car to train, train to airport, mile walk to terminal. I stayed left, as the sign told me to, to avoid the shuttle that carries bags and people from the light rail stop to the airport proper. This was a mistake; I had to dive out of the way in the dim headlights of a souped-up golf cart. He glared, and I couldn’t gesture at the sign, because it was half a mile down the road. I’m sure he saw it, reflected on his grave mistake, and issued up a silent apology, one that drifted behind my, arriving in Chicago just a few hours after I did.

American Airlines neglected to put pre check on my boarding pass (a problem not unique to me!), so I went to the plebian lane, where a guard insisted I cross beyond some tape and signs to the pre check area (it’s in our system!). I nervously pass a DO NOT ENTER sign, cutting in front of a gaggle of precheck passengers to a guard who barely notices my indiscretion. The rest of the trip goes without incident.

I arrive in Chicago, take a train to my friend’s apartment, and sleep on an air mattress that more closely resembles a see-saw in texture.

The second day

Wake up at 7:30 (feels like 5:30), cross town, rent a car, 3 hours to Dubuque IA. We arrive minutes before a 2pm showing and decide to leisurely catch a 3pm showing of:

DEJA VU, which would go on to win best documentary at the festival. It was about the ongoing plight of farmers in India attempting to fight for basic promises they need in order to continue producing food. Smartly, the director clocked that the best way to raise awareness of this issue in America was to make it about Americans. So the movie is largely about how Reagan’s policies ushered in an era of farm consolidation, which has lead to the eroding of farms in the country, and how the few let are unable to support themselves. One stat claims that there are more prisoners than farmers in the US! It’s a good doc, and the director-led Q&A afterwards generated some great discussion. It doesn’t cover many issues with farming (like environmental concerns), but even if you think you don’t care about this subject, it’s worth checking out.

The third day

Due to other commitments, I could only catch one show on Wednesday, so Thursday I hit the ground running.

The first short block I saw had three highlights:

Blue Evening, which won best short. It’s an inspirational story about a homeless drug addict with a fine arts degree, and it goes about the way you’d expect. It’s a touch cheesy in a couple moments, but there’s a reason this type of story keeps getting told, and it’s because it always lands.

Jamarcus Rose & Da Five Bullet Holes: I wish I had been able to stick around for a filmmaker Q&A, because watching this so recently after American Fiction, I really wanted to know what inspired this title. The “Da”, paired with the sudden spark of violence that ends this short paint a picture that doesn’t quite sit well with me. Inspired by true events, according to the interstitial, but it’s the framing of the events I object to, more than the events themselves.

Counterfeit: A social worker begs an abused woman to testify against the pimp whose thumb she is under. This has one of the sharpest cuts I’ve ever seen in a movie (“You want something to drink? How about a —” snap of a coke can opening in a new scene), and the back half is an incredibly tense five minutes, with constant cuts to the ticking clock. It’s a woman futilely begging, serving her role in the cog of the CPA machinery. As a short, this is fine, but it absolutely feels like the standout scene of a much longer, Oscary film. Leaving, I heard someone remark that this was too short and they had no idea what was going on. Respectively, skill issue. It was exactly as long as it needed to be, and it gave all the context required. Still, give me the outer frame. Not because I lack context, but because I want more of this!

as an aside, when I was first looking at the set of movies on offer at this festival, I saw a film called “Dead Dog”. Well, I don’t need to see that one! I said. My friend urged me to not judge a film by its title (or poster, or logline, or…). So when this short block opened with a car hitting a dog, I had the same thought as the woman two rows in front of me: Oh, this must be dead dog. Unlike her, I kept this thought in my head. (It was a different movie, so as funny as it would have been for me to have stumbled into the one film I wanted to avoid, it did not happen)

Bravado

Another excellent poster, though one that feels like it’s from a different movie. A few days after seeing it, I recalled the poster and said, “Dang, I was hoping to see Brava… oh, wait, I did see that one.”

It’s a fun movie! Perhaps a little heavy-handed in its portrayal of writing as an addiction, but the main character’s need for validation and methods of seeking it out feel real, and it’s fun to boot. It reminds me more than a little of Barry, but there’s more than enough uniqueness in here to keep things fresh and fun.

Short block 10

The Seventh Turn featured some of the best acting I saw at the festival, and my only complaint is that it wasn’t longer. Forbes plays a gaslighting, abusive fiancé, and he oozes charm and smarm in equal measure until the film’s climax forces him to ramp it up to angry yelling for the final few moments. He pulls it off well, but I’d have liked to see it simmer.

This movie is three things: one, a PSA about abusive relationships. Many festival films end with a title card at the end informing you that what you watched was secretly a metaphor for something else. Sometimes these are a source of humor. This was not one of those times.

Two, a horror short about a piece of Spanish folklore. This was the weakest of the three parts, and I wish it had either been cut entirely (my preference), or been more of a focus. With the runtime what it is (a matter of minutes), it feels like a distraction from the thesis. It’s trying to do too many things!

Three, a story about an abusive partner. This is the part that really, really works for me. See above: re simmering.

Bob Wanna Kill. To date, this is the worst film I’ve seen at the festival. I wish it remained that way. The premise (people who want to end a relationship must murder their partner. This is not a crime, but they can never enter a relationship again) makes no sense, and is explained on a title card. The ending is unclear, and the synopsis introduces elements that the film itself only hints at. Bah.

Prawn Bhuna: This short rules. If you can find it anywhere, do it. The writer mentioned that he wanted to experiment with how “evil” of an act a person can do while still being able to evoke empathy. It works. The movie is funny, tense, sad, and a little scary. It’s a little John Wick: what happens if you steal the wrong guy’s taxi? Highly recommended!

The Solution: If this had aired before Bob Wanna Kill, it would have been the worst film I’d seen yet. Alas, Bob holds his crown a little longer. Don’t worry, the next short block will give him a run for his money, over and over again. The Solution is a story of greed and insecurity, of ambition and a lack of communication. A professor’s golden student overtakes her ability, and a fight for credit leads to an act of violence in this needlessly stylized film.

I ended the day by seeing Landlord, the movie with one of the best posters of the festival. I knew from the logline (everyone knows vampires can’t enter your home uninvited, but what happens when a vampire owns your housing?) that this movie would either be incredible or terrible. It ruled!

We’re introduced to one of the coolest characters in modern cinema, and it’s a nonstop action movie that feels more like Terminator than Lost Boys. Light on exposition (and names!), heavy on characterization, a must-see for fans of vampire movies. Horror only by association, this movie aims more at social commentary than frights.

The Fourth Day

Short Block 1

Short block 1 drew me in with its promise of the festival’s singular noir film, Rain Was Not in the Forecast. Boy, that sucked. Beautifully shot in black and white, two noir stock tropes spend 5 minutes exchanging terrible weather puns in increasingly husky voices (“Are you full of hot air, or does my barometer sense the rising tide?”). The audience (mostly older white ladies) adored it, laughing at every line read. I couldn’t wait for it to end.

May I Put You On Hold feels like fanfiction for the Good Place. The less said about it, the better.

My Little Girl, a French film, and one of only a small handful non-English films I caught, absolutely rules. It’s about a single dad trying to support his daughter, and coming to terms that she is way more grown up than he has realized.

The Pic is the most charmingly wholesome movie about a dick pic I’ve ever seen, and based on the names of the cast, I suspect it’s based on a true story.

The rest of the films in this block range from middling (The Inspector, Harvard) to bad (Bag Ladies, Legend of Fry-Roti: Rise of the Dough (at least this one was extremely well choreographed and shot) to forgettable: the program says “Till Death Do Us Apart” was on the docket, but even reading the logline, I either completely blocked this movie from memory or it was actually omitted from the program)

News Without a Newsroom

News Without A Newsroom was my second documentary feature of the festival, this time about how our democracy will change (and has changed!) with the evaporation of the classic newsroom. This starts razor-focused, with the destruction of the Miami Herald’s newsroom, and quickly loses focus. It keeps zooming out to wider and wider implications, but loses a throughline by the end. Before its over, the movie will invoke AI, Blockchain (?), Virtual Reality (??), the Israel-Palestine conflict, and subject audiences to a barrage of famous people and images, very few with any context whatsoever. Great message, poorly polished.

Floaters

A coming-of-age camp comedy about a failing Jewish summer camp. I’m not the target audience for this one, and still had a blast with it. A couple of the jokes were easy, but it was a fun, low-stakes romp that goes about how you’d expect. The remarkable thing is that almost every single character is portrayed sympathetically, even when they’re being assholes or bullies.

Failed State

I ended the day by seeing Failed State. After a Q&A with the writer/director, I feel like my understanding of this film tripled, and I still don’t feel like I understand it. This is not only the worst film I saw at the festival, it might be the worst I’ve ever seen. I’d have walked out if I was alone. It begins with a frame story by two aliens (at least in spirit, if not in practice), who explain that the movie they have constructed is recreated and unredacted. We pivot into a hilarious scene of two writers frantically trying to pitch a half-baked movie idea, ending with the two white men struggling to explain the concept of “tokenization” to a black producer.

Over the next hour, their pitch will blur with reality in a story so convoluted, the aliens will reappear to reassure you that if you’re struggling to follow the plot, it’s because there isn’t one. They proceed to drop acid, an excuse to flex the crew’s color-grading skills, and the movie continues at pace. The best gag of the movie is an extended Mickey Mouse voice, though until the Q&A, I did not grasp the context of the scene in which it was used. The funniest part of the movie is an unintentional one where a title card reading “Yemen” shows over a park absolutely filled with Canadian Geese.

The point of the movie is to satirize our own government and the absurdity of the January 6th riot and coup attempt. It takes a long, winding path to get there, and it absolutely did not land for me. Failed State is pay what you want on OhKeyDoh.com.

The Final Day

The last short block I saw had was full of intense thrillers. The Other End of the Hallway looked and felt like it was filmed on a phone, with no budget to speak of. I suspect Percheron would have been slightly more comprehensible if I could understand more than half of the accents, but only just. The most impressive thing about The Moddey Dhoo was the filming location in an actual castle. The dog was too cute to be scary, for one. Plastic Surgery, a 10/10 short is the winner here, and one where I feared the PSA title would evoke laughter. It did not. Berta comes close as a second, which is just the rmmm revenge scenes from Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

Pyre, about a woman interrogated for witchcraft, features some interesting acting that I still can’t decide the quality of. Paranoid was well-acted, but felt like a student script (maybe it was!)

Coming Home

I woke up in Chicago again, my 5th city in as many days, and made it to the airport 10 minutes before boarding began. Unable to find the Delta desk, I asked an agent who helpfully told me, “It moved, Bro. It’s in Terminal 5 now, it moved!”

A sign would have been nice.

I caught a train to terminal 5 and followed the line for TSA pr Pre Check. Unlike American, Delta actually put this on my boarding pass, so the guard let me in. Then the line opened up and I followed a sign labeled “All Passengers”. I’d learn later that this actually meant “General passengers”, that is those without TSA Pre Check.

But by the time I learned this, I was already at the X-Ray machine, where an agent asked me why I wasn’t in the Pre Check line. I told him I was going to miss my flight, as it had started boarding 5 minutes prior.

“What gate are you in?” he asked.

“M8”

“Take a right out of here.” He pointed in the opposite direction of a sign reading <—– ALL GATES LEFT. Sure enough, I took a right and was just outside of M6, a short jaunt to my gate, grabbing a wrap on the way. I arrived just before my group was called.

Not a single person at ORD knows what the word “all” means.

My flight was uneventful, though my train north was partially canceled, so I had to take a shuttle bus to where the line started. Full of hubris, I stood for this trip, which ended up being 20 minutes. By the end I was slightly nauseous. I transferred to my train, and arrived home an hour later.

Conclusion

Definitely see:

Consider seeing

Breathless: an interivew with RP Deshaies

2026-04-12T11:24:00-07:00

I spoke to René-Pier Deshaies about Breathless (currently on Kickstarter!), what it means to be "Rules-bright", staying inspired, and building tools that give back to the community. The below is edited from a conversation on April 9, 2026.

Alex: You wear a lot of hats in the RPG world. Can you tell me a little bit about the various roles that you play in this space?

RP: I run Fari RPGs, which is like an indie design studio. That's the brand that I use to publish tabletop role-playing games. I also love making system reference documents of my games, which are kind of like open-licensed versions of the systems that I develop, so I publish those online so that people can make their own games based on the rules that I've battle-tested.

Apart from that, I also maintain various web tools, like web applications. I'm a software engineer during the day, so I use those skills to help the TTRPG community in various ways. I've published a website called Keeper, which takes a bunch of open license content and SRDs and makes it accessible on the web in a nice format.

I also love to record tutorials for the Affinity Publisher software, and also record interviews. Essentially, my brain is very fuzzy and it takes me to a bunch of different places. I cannot focus on one single thing at a time, so every time I get an idea I'm like, "Oh, I should do this," and then I invest a bunch of time and then forget about it for six months. So that's kind of what I do.

Alex: You are always sharing advice around how to do things in Affinity or design techniques that you like. Can you talk to me about that spirit of community, of giving back? With Fari, and building these SRD tools, where does that come from, that drive to build tools for other people?

RP: It's funny because I think it may be coming from the fact that, again, I'm a software engineer professionally, and a lot of the things that we do as software engineers rely on the shoulders of developers who created tools like 30, 40 years ago that we still heavily rely on today. Even MacOS would not exist without Linux and Unix at its core, and this core is free and open licensed. It has been powering servers around the world for decades now, and the fact that we can rely on these tools today makes technology truly a marvel.

If you take the same idea and apply it to TTRPGs, then you also create some sort of space that is welcoming and supportive. Instead of each creator being an adversary and being combative and competitive, it's all about, "Hey, I created this cool thing, you can use it. I use this license, which is essentially just give me attribution, just say that you loved that and it was inspired, just drop a link to my name or my website, and that's good enough for me." Using those things really makes for a more healthy community, and I think this is something that is very dear to me because, as a hobby, we really thrive a lot in that sort of environment.

Alex: Yeah. And I think I've seen you looking into building an Itch alternative. Is that something you're prepared to talk about?

[Editor's note: itch.io is an online marketplace commonly used to host and sell TTRPGs]

RP: [Laughs] Yeah, I can talk about it. This is the kind of thing where I got hyper-focused. The tech industry is absolute chaos nowadays, and I used to work for a company and they fired all the Canadians in my team, and I was part of that layoff. I got a couple of weeks of salary and I was like, "Well, what can I do?" So I focused a lot on TTRPG work while I was looking for new jobs.

Then I got the idea, "Well, maybe I can build my own alternative to Itch," because it was made for video games and not TTRPGs, and we kind of acted our way into this thing, and now there's a category called "physical games", which is kind of weird, but whatever. I bought the domains, created the app, and I still have all the code. It's working very well. I've got all the databases set up, the web servers, everything is ready to go.

But the main hurdles with creating a platform like that is, first of all, taxes. A platform like Itch or DriveThruRPG, you're not just selling a service to one person; you're selling a service to a person that then sells it to others, and you're considered a marketplace. From there, you enter the marketplace facilitators laws, and then it becomes really, really hard to manage. The tech side of things is solved, that's not a problem. It's the legal side of things. That's why I've been joking online, saying DriveThruRPG should just hire me and I'd redo their website in an afternoon.

Alex: It's always the bureaucracy that gets in the way. Zooming in on the games you make, getting closer to the reason we're talking today, I want to talk about Stoneburner, one of your recent big projects. What can you tell me about that?

RP: Stoneburner started off as a shower thought, where I had this idea of, "What if you were dwarves in space, and your great-grand half-uncle on your dead uncle's side has died, and you're the only person who can inherit his mines that are tied to it, like an asteroid belt, and those mines are infested with demons?" So the general idea of the game was sci-fantasy, where everyone's a dwarf, a space dwarf, and you have to mine an asteroid belt filled with demons.

That started off as a joke, and then I started working on a master page inside Affinity. I had a friend who started creating fan art for a game that didn't exist, and that art became the actual art of the game. Now the game kind of evolved out of those ideas. It's like a 120-page game based on the Breathless system, which was one of the first games that I released. It's all based around a dice degradation mechanic, where your skills are associated with a die rating, and every time you roll them, those dice step down, so you get more exhausted as you play and as you perform those challenging actions.

The only way for you to reset those ratings is to catch your breath. Pretty simple: you just say you catch your breath and all your skills are refilled. Great. But every time you do so, the GM gets to pull a strong move. They get a freebie of, "I can throw a complication into your face because you just decided to catch your breath." So there's this continuous cycle of tension and release, which was really great for Stoneburner.

I released the game two or three years ago on Kickstarter, and it got like 45,000 Canadian dollars at the time, and got a couple more on BackerKit. So it was a pretty big success for one of my first campaigns ever. But of course, the industry was a bit different than it is today.

Alex: You mentioned that you started with the master page in Affinity. Is that usually how you work, with a design-first approach?

RP: Yeah. I am not inspired in working in a note-taking application or Google Doc. I often need a little bit more to stay inspired. I can jot down some notes when it's related to mechanics or things I want to test. I also love to write code to test scenarios and simulations of my game, so sometimes I'm going to write that inside a note-taking application.

But when I write a game, if I'm working in Google Docs, I'm going to get bored very quickly and not want to work on the game. One thing that I love doing is I'm either going to make a website for it and use nice fonts and nice art and nice layout, or I'm going to work directly inside a layout software, because that way I can create a nice master page and use nice fonts and paragraph styling and all that to keep myself inspired, versus just working with black text on a white background using Arial as a font. Working inside the layout helps me be motivated to work on a game for a long period of time.

Alex: I hear a lot of people decry working directly in layout, so it's interesting to hear you advocating for that approach.

Everyone has their own approach. There are obviously pros and cons to this approach. Of course, as you work inside your layout software, you're going to have to do a lot of reworking to make sure that things fit, and then you add a word and it breaks the layout. But for me, it's part of my workflow. This is what I love. I don't care about redoing my pages a bunch of times.

Of course, I'm not working in a 300-page document. That would be completely different. But when you work in layout, it also allows you to be a bit more creative. For example, I'm pretty sure Mörk Borg was created in layout. If it wasn't, I don't know what happened there. There's a way to stay inspired when you work there and to be a bit more creative, and this also forces you to rethink the way that you write and how things are placed, like information hierarchy. Pros and cons.

Alex: Okay, I've put it off long enough. The main reason we are here today is to talk about Breathless, which is currently on Kickstarter. But before we talk about that new edition, can you tell me what is Breathless?

RP: Breathless is a pamphlet-sized game that is a zombie survival horror game. It fits on one piece of paper that you can print at home, and it has everything you need to play the game. It has character creation, the rules, a nice cover, and a character sheet in one pamphlet. It's really made to be as accessible as possible. You don't know what to play tonight, you want to play some zombie survival horror one-shot, you just print that and you're ready to go.

It uses the same mechanics that I outlined earlier when talking about Stoneburner. I released it in 2022, and that was during the TTRPG Twitter era, and people got really excited about the game. So I decided to open license it, create an SRD out of it, release it for free, and organize a jam. Now, four years later, there's more than 300 published acts that I know of that are using the core mechanics that I developed for Breathless, and a hundred of those have been published in Japanese on a site called talto.cc. So that's Breathless in a nutshell. It's this little pamphlet game that really sparked the imagination of a lot of people.

Alex: And what is new in this edition?

RP: Last year Ray from Mythworks reached out. He is a big fan of Stoneburner, big fan of Breathless, and he offered to publish a new edition of Breathless, but really wanted to stay true to the community aspect of the original game, the pamphlet accessibility-focused aspects of the original game.

So this new edition really stays true to what made Breathless successful. It uses the STORYPAK format, which they use for their game CBR+PNK. It's going to be 12 pamphlets, four-fold pamphlets, inside one VHS-style box. Those pamphlets are the kind of thing where you could open the box and play right now.

There are six pamphlets that are going to be for the players, which will include all the character creation rules, the core rules, as well as the character sheet. There's going to be four pamphlets' worth of adventures. There's going to be a pamphlet that's about new rules that I developed for going from one-shot to campaign play.

If you've watched or played The Last of Us, where Ellie and Joel go on a long journey, or if you've read The Walking Dead, where eventually Rick and his group find some sort of haven that they can stay in and want to protect as their resources dwindle, and they need to restore some of those resources, but by doing so, their other types resources dwindle down.

Those types of gameplay loops [are] what this additional pamphlet of rules will bring to the table: going through different phases of play like survival, journey, and haven. We have four adventures that will take you from one phase of play to the other so you can really get the full cycle of classic zombie media.

It's all laid out by Jack of the DNGN Club, so it's got this classic VHS retro aesthetic, which is pretty cool.

Alex: Who is this for? Is this just for people who love zombie games, people who like low-prep games? Who's your audience here?

RP: If you love things like The Walking Dead, The Last of Us, 28 Days Later, you're going to have a great time with Breathless. But also, if you want to play a game that will really bring you places and keep you on your toes and have a lot of tension while not overburdening you with rules, that's kind of the way I would phrase it.

I like to call those games "rules bright," as in it's not about crunch, it's not about being light on rules. It's just the right amount of rules to carry the theme that the setting and the game want to put into focus. This is a zombie survival horror game, so all the mechanics are there to create this cycle of tension and you getting more tired.

There are mechanics for looting, because looting is a big part of zombie games, but also item degradation mechanics. The items you use are going to be stressed, there's going to be wear and tear, and eventually those items will stop working. You're going to need to loot again, but when you loot, you may be finding a bump in the dark.

Alex: Did you coin "Rules bright?"

RP: I did! It was a tweet, and it got viral on Twitter.

Alex: Is there anything else you'd like to mention?

RP: One thing that's been very important for us for this Kickstarter was to really reinforce the fact that Breathless would not exist without its community. So what we did is we reached out to a bunch of creators that we deeply respect, that have made Breathless games in the past, and offered them to join in on the project.

Our stretch goals are essentially gifts. If we reach this stretch goal, we're going to pay this creator a royalty fee and give you a free copy of their Breathless game. So yes, you're going to get Breathless if you back the game, but as we hit those stretch goals, you'll also get Substratum Protocol from Pandion Games, you'll get The Facility from Galen Pejeau, you'll get Trespasser from Binary Star Games, and also Anomaly Hunters from Wendigo Workshop.

So a bunch of super cool Breathless games that you're just going to be filled with, so many games that are all about dice stepping down. That was something that I thought was very cool of Mythworks — they really understood what made Breathless special. It wasn't just about a fancy step-down dice mechanic; it was also about the community and everything that came out of it.

Another thing we've been thinking about, and this is a bit of a spoiler, is we're planning on organizing a third iteration of the Breathless Jam. There's already been two Breathless Jams, and we're planning on organizing a third one that will happen during the Kickstarter. It will last only a couple of weeks, it will be very short, but the goal will be to create material that is based on the rules or material that is compatible with the zombie game.

If you want to make an adventure, a supplement, or even a poem, you can do so. If you want to make your own game based on the original SRD, you can do that as well. To make the game even more accessible, I decided to revamp the original Breathless pamphlet with updated rules and new art and new layout, and publish it for free on Itch, so everyone can already get a sense of what we're trying to build there.

Back Breathless now.

The Circle and the Breakdown

2026-04-02T21:34:00-07:00

I want to share pieces of table tech that help bring characters closer together, ground them in the world, and encourage a depth of, well, character that can sometimes disappear.

The Circle

Put simply, the circle is just a way of establishing relationships between characters. Many games formalize this (I’m thinking of Masks), and many GMs will either delve into this during session 0, or at least open with “So, uh, how do you all know each other?”

But if you’re playing a game that doesn’t have a ritual for this kind of thing, here’s a simple one you can adopt: each player establishes a relationship to the person on their left. Bob is my roommate. I owe Alice $800 dollars. Carol and I are siblings! Dan knew my brother. Eve and I used to work together.

You can take it a step further and establish a positive relationship with the person on your left, and a negative on with the person on your right (or, better yet, to randomize it, so each one isn’t strictly doubled). The key is to make sure you have a web of relationships. It doesn’t need to be fully fleshed out, but no one should be an island either.

State of the world

I mentioned masks earlier. It has every character answering questions about the group. Many games formalize pointed questions: Why don’t you trust [character you choose / charater on your left]? When did you first become afraid of XXX? What secret are you afraid of YYY revealing?

These questions are great for certain types of game, and they seed tensions, but don’t forget to relish the mundane sorts of relationships that tie us together. Looking at my friends in real life:

We used to work together
We went to school together
Former roommates
Met at a party
Married to someone I used to work with
Lived in the same town and kept running into each other at the rental store / mall / etc.
Friend of a friend
Sibling of a friend
Shared hobby (internet friends)

It doesn’t have to be grand.

The Breakdown

This is a bit of tech that I stole form my Outgunned GM, who stole it from his Cthulhu GM, who stole it from Prometheus, who in turn stole it from some gods that were much chiller than the ones with the fire.

At the end of each session, ask each character what else is going on in their lives outside of this. The background stuff that creeps into their mind in moments of silence (or around the campfire).

Then, they roll a d6. On a 6, it’s the best possible news. On a 1, the worst possible. A 2-3 is bad news, and a 4-5 is good news.

What’s the news? How do they find out, who do they tell?

In Outgunned, I play an almost illiterate man of action¹. It seemed natural that he was mostly divorced, and so when the opportunity came to get a letter from his wife — the ONLY document he read (most of) the entire game, I jumped on it. The 6 I rolled meant that she had heard of my exploits, and said that if I found myself back home, there’s a chance my key would still work.

And so I told my cousin.²

This hack lends itself best to games where you have something going on apart from the “real world”, whether you are traveling, or where we’re only seeing part of the character’s lives. But it adds a richness similar to the Unscene, but for characters.

I made this character almost entirely as a reaction to a Lancer game I was in, there the other players refused to get off the pot, so to speak. I left the group after 4 sessions, several of which I was the only one actually advancing the game. If your group isn’t a good match, hit da bricks! They still play without me, and have a grand ol’ time with the players they recruited to replace me. ↩
This particular group doubled down on it, with other characters mirroring their stories to mine once I introduced this. With my consent, another character wanted to be having an affair with my wife, and that thread ran in the background. My “cousin” tied his to it as well, and this first session ended up centering my drama a little more than I think the GM hoped, but he employed the #1 rule (talk to your playes), and sessions since then have been more dynamic. ↩

March 2026 Roundup

2026-03-27T11:21:00-07:00

Below are things I’ve learned or found interesting in the past month:

From Tom Scott’s Newsletter: Topsy-Turvy World.
World’s first pollinating frog
Innovations from golf video games.
Am I good at Cinematrix? No. Do I play it every day anyway? You betcha.
This review of the Mac neo (worth your time)
Good climate news!
Fred Hicks (Evil Hat) on layout (2018)
In dino news, crocodile dinosaur turned into ostrich dino (by posture) as it aged! Research done by Seattle’s own Elliott Armour Smith, who has a name that rules.
Double dino day! We’ve got a new South Korean dino. Meet Dooly!
Children find mysterious Gaulish sitting skeletons.
For thousands of years, we didn’t know how eels reproduce. Spontaneous spawning was a popular theory. Turns out (as we learned in 2022), they grow genitals when near their secret spawning grounds. There’s also some pokemon-style evolution along the way.
Related, locusts are grasshoppers that have a swarming phase when their populations get too high.
Sam Dunnewold of Dice Exploder: 12 questions to ask when making your game.
Come for the baller opening paragraph, stay for a great article about sharks.
On conformity and dissent

A quick review of drawing books

2026-03-21T13:19:00-07:00

I have been learning to draw for the past few months, and while the #1 most useful way to improve is… to actually draw, I’ve also been working through some textbooks. Here are some initial thoughts:

Drawing on the right side of the brain

I liked this book a lot, and it really focuses on how to “think”, and how to get into the right mindset to let your creative brain take over while your analytical instincts relax. There’s a good amount of theory and practical skills mixed in.

BUT there’s a mismatch between the latest text and the latest workbook, which can be annoying at times. It also asks for a lot of materials, like specific art supplies or flowers.

Did it help?

Yes, but it took me a long time to get through, since I found myself needing to acquire a particular item (mirror, flower, chair) several times throughout.

Start Here: Draw

This was more of a kickstarter of ideas for already creative and creatively skilled people. The book trampolines into much more complicated explorations of theory in the back half. It wasn’t a great match for where I’m at now, but I do like the exercises contained within, and might revisit it once I have a better grasp of fundamentals.

Did it help?

No, but I had fun doing some of the exercises, like making animal shapes exclusively out of straight lines.

Learn to draw in 30 days

I love this book. It’s very focused, with practical lessons, using no special materials. It has an emphasis on learning the basic techniques, combining them, and experimenting to see what works. It’s very similar to “How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way” in that respect, except with a much bigger emphasis on exercises over theory.

Did it help?

Yes! I worked through this book for all 30 days, and can consistently draw several of the things we learned. It also served as an excuse to draw hundreds of foreshortened squares, cubes, and spheres, and dozens of cylinders (I should practice my cylinders!) Bouncing between this and the Marvel approach, I have a better understanding of how to build bigger, more complicated shapes out of simpler ones.

I’ve heard some critiques that this book teaches the “wrong” way, so maybe I’ll regret some habits I’ve learned later on, but for now I can say that working through this for a month was the easiest way for me to consistently improve. I never had to stop to get a specific tool, and each of the lessons were focused, with optional bonus exercises afterwards.

Conclusion

I’m only just starting my artistic journey, and i have a bunch more books on my shelf I want to investigate. I’m currently working through a Loomis book (Fun with a pencil), which is heavily stylized, but I see the practicality in. I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts as I continue to learn.

Until then, it’s time to practice perspective!

Jason Cordova: Public Access

2026-03-17T09:41:00-07:00

I spoke to Jason Cordova, creator of Brindlewood Bay and The Between about Public Access, the analog horror RPG that is Kickstarting right now!

Edited and adapted from conversation on 2-14-26.

Alex: Today I’m talking to Jason Cordova, who is best known for The Gauntlet, producing games like Brindlewood Bay, The Between, and Public Access, which we’re going to talk about more today. Am I forgetting anything in that introduction?

Jason: Thanks for having me.Those are the big games that I’ve written. I’m also a podcaster [for Fear of a Black Dragon], and I also publish the Trophy RPG. I’m not the writer of that, but I publish it.

Alex: Brindlewood Bay made a big splash because of its approach to investigation games, and that Carved from Brindlewood approach has been very popular. It is the backbone for the other two games, The Between and Public Access. So that Carved from Brindlewood framework is very popular for mystery games. Can you tell me what that framework is, and how you came to that approach?

Jason: Yeah. “Carved from Brindlewood” encompasses, at this point, a number of things. But probably most prominently is the way that it does mysteries and investigations, right? The idea is that, in these games, your characters are going to be collecting clues in order to solve mysteries. Usually they have some kind of question they have to answer.

In the case of Brindlewood Bay, the question is always the same: who did the murder? But in The Between, you can have questions that are much more varied, like: is this tiny vampire actually young, or are they an old person who’s just a small vampire? Or where is the lair of the killer? That kind of thing.

So you’ll be collecting these clues in order to answer the question. But importantly, once you have enough clues and you’re ready to answer the question, there is no canonical solution that the Keeper — which is what we call the GM in these games — has. The solution comes from the players.

The players will be looking at all their clues, and they’ll have a discussion. And indeed, they will engage in a certain type of deduction where, based on the clues they have, they have to come up with a solution that makes sense both for the story and also logically.

Once everyone is satisfied with the answer, there is a little formula for rolling dice. Depending on how many clues you’re able to incorporate into your theory, you get certain bonuses. You roll your dice to see if you’re correct. If you are correct, you can then pursue the opportunity associated with that question, which is usually to take down the bad guy.

Alex: If there is no canonical solution, what does a mystery or adventure look like in this system?

Jason: So these systems are modular in the sense that they have scenarios that they come with. Each game has eight or so that they come with, and then there are lots of expansions and things for them.

But the scenarios are not long, prose texts like you might find in, say, an old-school adventure module or something like that. I like to call them a sort of “toy box” approach to a scenario. You are given a collection of interesting characters, interesting locations, a bunch of clues to pick from, and other helpful things for the Keeper. Descriptive [elements] that you can pepper in wherever, dangers, that kind of thing.

You’re given all the components of the scenario, but they’re not presented in any particular order. So it’s up to the Keeper, at any given moment as the conversation is happening with the players, to decide, “Okay, I’m going to use this thing here because that makes sense.” It’s kind of a grab-bag way of running the scenario.

I’ve heard it described as a “deconstructed module,” which I think is a good way of describing what the mysteries in these games are. It’s all the elements, but they can be used as you need them.

Alex: And how do you get to this approach from a design point of view?

Jason: There’s a really direct line, actually, to how I got here. Before I was a game publisher or a game designer, I mostly was just running games for The Gauntlet. The Gauntlet was originally essentially just an online game calendar with a community attached to it, and we were running, I would say at that time, from around 2015 to 2018 or so, we were running dozens of different games every month.

When I was running games, I always wanted a way to prep a little more ably and quickly, without having to write a lot of notes or do a lot of reading. So I came up with this technique that I called 7-3-1. Some people still follow it to this day, even though I’ve kind of moved on from it.

The idea behind 7-3-1 was that, to prepare each session, I would come up with seven things — either seven places or seven characters. I would give each of those things three distinctive descriptive features, something I could describe at the table. Then I would give each of them one thing I could roleplay at the table.

In the case of a character, I would make a note about how they sound or maybe something they say, that kind of thing. And so I would do this 7-3-1 thing before any session I ran, essentially just a couple pages of quick notes, but notes with a purpose, a real intentional use for them. That style of GM prep is what I eventually adapted into the mystery and scenario structure of the Carved From Brindlewood games.

If you go and look at a Brindlewood Bay mystery, or a Public Access mystery, or an assignment for The Silt Verses roleplaying game — which we haven’t talked about, but that’s another game I co-wrote — you can see that in its DNA.

I mean, it’s more expansive than 7-3-1, but you can kind of see that that’s where it comes from. You can see the roughly seven things in each category, and you can see the three descriptive details. In the case of characters, there’s a single quote that you can roleplay. That’s where it came from. It’s just an adaptation of how I was prepping all my games.

Alex: And you’ve talked about this approach publicly before?

Jason: Yeah, we talked about it a fair amount on the old Gauntlet podcast. I mean this is real old Gauntlet religion, right. It’s not really a current thing anymore. It was a pretty simple technique, and a lot of people really loved it.

There’s a certain type of GM — and I am one such GM — who doesn’t want to do a ton of prep, I’m not a prep-heavy GM, but I also don’t want to go in cold. I am not one of those GMs who can just sit down cold and run the session, right? I have to have done a little bit of preparation, and so it was a good middle place.

And indeed, when you’re running a Carved From Brindlewood game, it has that feeling. It’s a sort of middle prep. You’re not having to read a big long module, but you’re also not sitting down to nothing. It takes about ten minutes to read through a scenario, and then I usually spend another ten or fifteen minutes kind of marinating in it and thinking of ideas. Then I’m ready to go.

Alex: I have one more question before we move on to Public Access. Brindlewood Bay is murder, The Between is more supernatural. Are there also mechanical differences between these systems?

Jason: The biggest difference, I think, between Brindlewood Bay and The Between — there’s actually kind of a funny history there that’s maybe worth mentioning — is that The Between actually came first.

That was the first game I was working on, and I had written all these playbooks. At that time, it was much more strictly a Powered by the Apocalypse game. I knew that I wanted to have this sort of abstract mystery system, this organic mystery system. I knew I wanted something like that, inspired quite a lot by other games that were out in the world, like Lovecraftesque by Becky Annison and Josh Fox and Psi*Run by Meg Baker.

So I knew what I wanted, but the problem was I had written all these playbooks for The Between, and that’s a lot of work. I didn’t want to have to reinvent the wheel if my mystery system didn’t work. I didn’t want to have to rewrite stuff a bunch until I got that part right.

So I set out to write what I considered to be a smaller, shorter game for the express purpose of testing out the mystery system. And that’s where Brindlewood Bay comes from. Brindlewood Bay does not have playbooks. It has just a common character sheet that every player uses, and it’s smaller in scope in terms of the world and the kinds of things the old women get up to.

I’m assuming people know what Brindlewood Bay is, but if not, it’s a game about elderly women solving murder mysteries in their town, and there’s an occult conspiracy behind it. I like to say it’s Murder, She Wrote meets H. P. Lovecraft: “Cthulhu, She Wrote.”

James: It was originally a small-scope, almost sketch project to try out the proposed mystery system for The Between. It just so happens that Brindlewood Bay was a big hit. In some sense, Brindlewood Bay was a little bit of an accident, because I never intended for it to be the big game. I intended for The Between to be the big one. But Brindlewood Bay was a big hit, and so that’s great.

All that is to say that these two games have always been in communication with each other. Once Brindlewood Bay came out, I took a lot of the learning from that and put it into The Between. Then, once The Between was coming out in its digital form, we took some lessons from that and put them into the Kickstarter version of Brindlewood Bay. All the games are like that, Public Access is in communication with these games as well, as are Silt Verses and so are our other in-development projects. That’s just kind of how we do things.

I guess the big mechanical difference between the two is the fact that, yes, they’re different types of mystery. One is a murder mystery, and one is monster hunting. Also, importantly, as I’ve noted, the Murder Mavens — the characters you play in Brindlewood Bay — use a single common character sheet. There aren’t individual types of Murder Mavens. You get to personalize them, but it’s a common character sheet sheet. Whereas The Between is playbook-based.

There are also some structural differences. The Between has a day–night phase cycle, which influences things. All in all, The Between is a more complex game. I don’t think either of them are complex, but it’s a more complex game than Brindlewood Bay.

Public Access

Alex: You mentioned Public Access, which is the reason we’re talking today. What is Public Access?

Jason: Public Access is a Carved From Brindlewood game about a group of young people in the year 2004. They’re twenty‑year‑olds in 2004 — which, I’ll note, is how old I was in 2004. It’s about a group of young people in 2004 who travel to this remote town called Deep Lake, New Mexico. They’re there to investigate the disappearance of a public access TV station that they remember as children, but that no one else remembers.

Now, the reason why they got onto this is because they all met on a forum and decided, “Hey, let’s go back to our hometown and see if we can figure out what happened to this TV station that no one else remembers.” So they get there in order to investigate the disappearance of this TV station called TV Odyssey.

But when they get there, while they’re trying to figure out what happened to TV Odyssey, they also encounter other mysteries taking place in and around Deep Lake. Deep Lake is a locus of lots of strange, cosmic, weird, scary things going on in this little part of the desert. They get wrapped up in these other mysteries, but all of it ultimately leads to what happened to TV Odyssey at the end.

Alex: Public Access has been described as an analog horror game. Can you talk about some of your inspirations there?

Jason: People reading what I just said might have picked up on the setup being very, very similar to the creepypasta story Candle Cove. If you know Candle Cove, it’s a similar kind of story: a bunch of people on a forum talking about a kids’ TV show that nobody else remembers.

That was sort of the initial inspiration, as far as that part of it goes. The analog horror part of it is related to the idea that there is evidence that this TV station existed in the form of these videotapes called the Odyssey Tapes. The characters are trying to find Odyssey Tapes in order to watch these episodes of this weird TV station, the different shows, and then find clues within those weird episodes to give them a hint at what happened to TV Odyssey itself. That’s the analog‑horror part of it.

But the inspirations were not just analog horror. It was also creepypastas, urban legends. It takes a lot of influence from things like the V/H/S horror movie series, and Blair Witch, and things like that. So it’s swimming in a lot of those early‑2000s internet‑horror things. That’s very much where it lives.

Alex: And are there mechanical differences between the system and The Between and Brindlewood Bay, as well? You mentioned they’re in conversation with each other.

Jason: They are indeed. In a lot of ways, Public Access is an interesting blend of the two. In terms of its scope, it’s a lot closer to Brindlewood Bay, but it has the day/night phase structure of The Between.

Probably the most distinctive difference of Public Access is that you will periodically “watch” an Odyssey Tape that the characters find. The way this works is: you’re doing your mysteries, you’re engaging in a lot of weird, horror‑soaked nostalgia, and occasionally you find an Odyssey Tape.

In order to “watch” it, each tape is essentially four narrative prompts that describe the episode of the TV show. Every player is assigned part of one of the prompts, and together you’re telling a little story about what we see in this episode of the show. You get to have a little “around the digital campfire” story that you tell each other.

So that’s a major difference with it, is that process of watching the Odyssey Tapes. And in this newer edition of Public Access, which is what we’re going to be Kickstarting here pretty soon, that actually has a direct connection to finding clues for the TV Odyssey mystery

Alex: You mentioned the Kickstarter, which is active now. Public Access has been out digitally, it’s been digital only for several years at this point, and now you’re bringing it to Kickstarter. Why physical editions, and why now?

Jason: Well, we were always going to at some point. I guess the way we do things is we let everything have a really long digital life, like multiple years, before we go to crowdfunding and physical editions.

The reason why we do that is because I like to spend as much time as possible playing the games and getting other people to play the games before we take the big, expensive step of actually printing a book. By the time we go to crowdfunding, we’re going to crowdfund the ultimate version of the game — the game that exists after we’ve had all this time to play it, learn about it, figure out what works really great, and what to emphasize, what to change. In some sense, the digital‑only release is like a very, very highly polished beta: very playable and a done game, but you can always improve it.

That’s what we’ve done with all the games: with Trophy, with Brindlewood Bay, with The Between. The one we’ve taken to crowdfunding is the best final version — essentially a second edition, but we don’t call it a second edition. So we were always going to do that. That’s always the plan, and now is the time.

> By the time we go to crowdfunding, we’re going to crowdfund the ultimate version of the game, the game that exists after we’ve had all this time to play it, learn about it, figure out what works really great, emphasize, and what to change. In some sense, the digital‑only release is like a highly polished beta.

The reason why now… there are a couple of things. It was next in line, and my plan was to launch the Kickstarter as soon as The Between was off to the printers, because once The Between is off to the printers, I have literally nothing else to do with it. I’m done with it, and I can totally focus on Public Access.

We’re actually going to be launching the Kickstarter a little bit before The Between goes to the printers, because there is something¹ that is forcing my hand. I’ll have to bump it up the calendar for reasons that will make sense when that thing happens.

But we were always going to launch it in the late spring or summer, so we’re just a little bit ahead of the curve. That’s it. Basically, Public Access is ready.

About a year ago, we put out this alternate ruleset called the Skinny Jeans Edition. The Skinny Jeans were some things I wanted to playtest specifically in anticipation of this new edition. So we had all this time to play the base game, then about a year with the Skinny Jeans playtest, and now I’ve taken the base game and the Skinny Jeans playtest and combined them into this sort of ultimate final edition of the game that’s going to Kickstarter.

Alex: And in this ultimate polished, “not a second edition”, how much has it changed from the PDF that first came out?

Jason: If I’m being honest, not dramatically. The biggest change is that in the old edition, the connection to TV Odyssey always felt a little indirect. We know the characters are there to investigate this TV station, but then they run into all these other mysteries, and the campaign kind of became about all these other mysteries. At some point — because of the way the campaign is structured — you do have to go deal with TV Odyssey, but it never quite felt like a focus, it was always something that got pushed to the background until you were ready to go do it, or until it was time to go do it.

In this new edition, the biggest change is that TV Odyssey is front and center. Even as you’re doing the other mysteries, even when you’re watching the Odyssey Tapes, everything is always pointing back to TV Odyssey.

So when you go to answer a question for a mystery — a mystery that seemingly has no connection to TV Odyssey, just another weird thing going on in town — there is a way that, if you get a certain result on your roll, the answer to the question also connects to TV Odyssey.

You just get this much more tightly connected, focused thing with TV Odyssey at the center of it. That’s the biggest change by far. It’s a great change. I love the original edition, and I played the heck out of the original edition, but this new one really feels like the game I always wanted to make. I’m very happy with that.

Alex: What all are you Kickstarting?

Jason: So, there is going to be this new edition of the game, this core book. There will be a second book you can get called Signals from the Other Side. Because the game has had such a long digital life, that’s given us a lot of time to write new mysteries, and we’ve got a bunch of brand new mysteries to put into Signals from the Other Side.

Signals from the Other Side will also have a new type of mystery called a Lost Transmission. A Lost Transmission is like a little side mystery that tells a prologue story, essentially. There will be some Lost Transmissions in that book as well, which is just another way of expanding the world and expanding your campaign.

It will also have a more in‑depth treatment of this aspect of the setting called the Chromatic Desert, which I’ll maybe save for people to explore on their own. But that’s the idea. It’s the kind of stuff I wanted to put in the original edition but didn’t really have a place for. And now I will.

We are also looking at having some Odyssey Tape cards. I mentioned those Odyssey Tape scenes where you narrate the tape. You don’t need the cards , you can print them out digitally or whatever, but these cards will have each tape on a card, and they’ll be presented in a VHS clamshell box. The clamshell will match the description of the Odyssey Tape clamshell boxes in the game. That’s another fun add‑on we’ll have.

Alex: And what if I inherited fortunes from a mysterious, deceased relative? Will there be a deluxe tier?

Jason: There might be! In our past crowdfundings, we’ve had higher‑level tiers where one of the excellent GMs from our community will run the game for you. Or, if you really want to kick in a good sum of money, I will come run a whole campaign for you. Those have always been kind of pricey tiers.

I have determined that my time to run a whole campaign is $8,000, and sadly no one’s ever bought one. I’ve never sold that. I’ve gotten close a couple of times. We have sold some of the middle‑higher tiers, but never that ultimate big tier. I’ll put it up again this time. Maybe somebody will jump on it and buy me a nice little vacation in exchange for running Public Access for them, because I need it.

Public Access is on Kickstarter now.

The Quinns Quest review of Public Access ↩

2026 movie awards

2026-03-15T10:22:00-07:00

It’s time for the annual movie awards! I haven’t watched most of what’s up for an Oscar, so instead I’ve given a handful of awards to the 32 movies I’ve seen this year, in all the standard categories.

Best foreign movie

The Count of Monte Cristo (2024).
*It’s a perfect movie! *

Best Sequel

Aliens.
Tight competition with Magic Mike The Last Dance and For a Few Dollars More

Best movie despite the supporting cast seemingly learning to act as the film goes on

Gran Torino

Best movie based on true events

~~Aliens~~ Apollo 13

Best PG-rated movie

Apollo 13, just barely over Conclave.

Best adaption of a novel from more than 200 years ago that has been adapted many times before but has never looked so damn good. In honor of the Oscar’s, awards for what I’ve been watching

Count of Monte Cristo (2024)

Best Clint Eastwood

For a Few Dollars More.

Surprisingly stacked category!

Prettiest movie

Conclave

Best Animated Movie

The Iron Giant

Below is the list of all the movies I’ve seen this year, very roughly sorted by how much I enjoyed them (least favorite at the top, favorite at the bottom). Commentary included for select movies.

[Czech] The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (1962)
You Were Never Really Here (2017)
Taxi Driver (1976)
[Korean] The Good, The Bad, The Weird (2008)
Father of the Bride (1991)
Sex lies and videotape (1989)
[Japanese] Ran (1985)
Logan Lucky (2017)
The Batman (2022)
A Fistful of Dollars (1964)
The Adventures of Tintin (2011)
Casino (1995)
Juror #2 Strong premise, fell off in the last 30 minutes. Did itself a disservice by evoking 12 Angry Men, a much better film.
Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010)
[French] Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Magic Mike XXL (2015)
(Rewatch) [Spanish] Pan’s Labyrinth
Magic Mike (2012)
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (1966)
For a Few Dollars More (1965)
The Mask of Zorro
Magic Mike The Last Dance (2023)
L.A. Confidential (1997)
(Rewatch) Gran Torino (2008)
The Phoenician Scheme (2025)
Aliens
Conclave (2024) The longer I think about this movie, the more I like it.
The Iron Giant (1999)
A Few Good Men
(Rewatch) The Mummy (1999)
Apollo 13
[French] The Count of Monte Cristo (2024) What a brilliant film. Absolutely perfect.

James D'Amato: The Ultimate RPG Villain Backstory Guide

2026-03-10T12:42:00-07:00

I spoke to James D'Amato about his new book, The Ultimate RPG Villain Backstory Guide. The guide is out today, grab it wherever books are sold! We also talked about his tenure on the One Shot podcast, the natural cause and effects of having too much money (hint: it turns you into a villain), and why you shouldn't handwave away the problems wealth can cause your villains.

Edited from a conversation on Friday the 13th, February 2026.

Alex: I am here with James D'Amato. You are the host of Skyjacks and the One Shot podcast.

James: The former host of One Shot! The current host of One Shot is Dillin Apelyan, who is my co-author on this book.

Alex: That shows how far behind I am on One Shot. You are also a professionally trained comedian and improv-er. Am I forgetting anything else in that introduction?

James: Part of the reason for the season is I'm also an author. I have published both books with Simon & Schuster's imprint of Adams Media and games that I've got coming out through Possible Worlds Games.

Alex: And you have a new book coming out very soon, in fact probably out today when this interview launches! We're here today to talk about the Ultimate RPG Villain Backstory Guide.

James: Yes, the original backstory guide came out close to eight years ago, and that is for player characters in the fantasy genre. We've since done editions that are for multiple genres, and now we're up to doing villains specifically to help GMs or people doing evil campaigns, or maybe even just anti-hero campaigns, making their characters a little morally compromised.

Alex: I want to get into that, since that is the reason we're here, but I want to ask a couple questions about the One Shot network. You mentioned you've stepped down as host now, but can you talk about what the goal of that podcast is, or why you started doing what you did with that?

James: I started this podcast over 12 years ago now, which is wild. The podcasting landscape looked very different, there were very few shows or streams or videos about tabletop role-playing games, and the few actual plays that were out there were shows that were primarily actually doing Pathfinder's Rise of the Runelords campaign. I was doing comedy podcasts at the time, and doing them on a network [ed: now defunct] called Peaches and Hot Sauce , and the head of that network came to me and was like, "Hey I'm listening to this actual play called Nerd Poker and I know you play tabletop role-playing games. Could you develop something like this for us?" My personal experience with role-playing games is that they can be so much more than just fantasy sword and sorcery adventurers, so once I looked around and saw that [the RPG podcasting environment was] either Pathfinder or D&D, I decided I wanted to focus on a show that shows off all of the things that role-playing games can be.

James: A big part of that is that I had such a great experience with role-playing games, and I didn't find them until I was in college. So I wanted to use my voice and use my abilities as a performer to help welcome people into the space and show them that, hey there are things that appeal to you here. Even if the most famous names, the household names in this hobby, aren't something that compels you, maybe there is something else in role-playing that you can like. And so all we did on One Shot is explore as many different role-playing games as possible with groups in a rotating cast that were hand-picked to support whatever game we were playing to put on an entertaining show that would maybe leave our listeners with the impression of, "Oh I liked that game and I can see myself playing it."

Alex: And I think you accomplished that goal. Thank you for that bit of background. But we're really here to talk about the Ultimate RPG Villain Backstory Guide. You mentioned anti-heroes earlier. Is this book aimed at GMs or players?

James: Mostly for GMs, though I do think there are players who might be playing an evil campaign, or, you know, more anti-hero characters. I think those people could also benefit from this book. But when I think of a villainous character, usually I'm thinking of an NPC that the GM is playing.

Alex: What was your inspiration for writing this book now? Did it come out of the success of the Character Backstory Guide, or or how did you come about this idea?

James: It definitely came out of our success with the character backstory series. They have been, since their inception, tools that readers have constantly mentioned to the publishers and in reviews as helpful to people in their process. Our backstory guides are not really focused on mechanics. They are all about how you develop the story of your character and using game mechanics, tools that people might be familiar with, playing Powered by the Apocalypse games or Belonging Outside Belonging games, using some of those tools to give people the ability to, by themselves, develop a backstory that will give them a little bit more juice to take to the table. It gives them something to go, "I know who this character is, and I have a better idea of how they got here."

James: So if you are somebody who just likes to play by yourself and you love your character so much you just want to know more about them, those exercises are kind of there for that. And if you want something more to draw on when you're at the table, that's kind of why we developed those exercises.

James: We, like I said, did the original backstory guide, which was mostly fantasy-focused. There were a few exercises in there that I think you could take to different genres, but fantasy was a big driver for that. The future guides that we did in the backstory area were about expanding it to different genres to give people more to draw on.

For this new one, we're going, how else can this concept be useful? What can we do to support people in a storytelling format? One of the things that came up as I was talking to my editor was villains and people wanting to give more personality, make the villains that they take to the table more memorable, and develop stories around those villains.

James: Just like with character backstory, I think creating backstory for NPCs really fills the game with these hooks that the players can pull on and can ground whatever you want to do with those villains in your game.

Alex: Now, you mentioned exercises in there. Are these solo journaling exercises or what's the shape of those exercises?

James: So there are a couple different ways that you can look at it. Some of them do have a workbook style in that there are questions and space to write in the book. So if you want to use the guide that way, as a workbook, or use it as a journaling exercise to write in a separate journal, it definitely works that way.

I tend to think of the material that we have in these books as exercises, mini games, and activities. They are all kind of expected to be interactive. In each of the guides, there's maybe a small section that is instructive and points you in the general direction of, "This is how you might develop a character." But the majority of the book breaks down villains into different categories and goes, "If your villain falls into this category, here is a specific thing that you can focus on."

If you walk through the questions, roll on the tables, or use whatever we've prepared for you, by the end of that exercise you're going to have something that exists in that villain's past and background that will inform their character and give them more interest and personality.

Alex: And you mentioned that this is not based on specific game mechanics. Does that mean I can use this for any system?

James: Yes, we try to be system-agnostic with these. The one thing we can't do is be genre-agnostic, because I do think the genres inform a lot of the flavor of these villains. If you strip things away, it actually kind of gets in your way creatively. So we try to make these informative toward different themes that you might be exploring by grounding them in a genre.

But the mechanics exist entirely within the exercise itself, so you can do this alongside another game system. Some of these are mini games, as I call them. They are kind of an RPG that you would layer on top of another RPG and sort of play along with the actual game that you're playing outside, again to help organize the thoughts and actions of characters.

Especially if you find yourself in a position as a GM where you are managing so many levers, you're like, "I really want to make sure that I'm furthering these plots along," or, "I am thinking about this when I present material to the table." So those games are sort of a way to manage that, much like the mechanics are a way to manage different actions and whatnot within any game that you might play.

Alex: And you mentioned that you're working on this book with a co-author. Can you talk to me about your process of writing with another person?

James: Absolutely. So for this book, I have the distinct pleasure and honor to write it with Dillin Apelyan, who is the person that I selected to succeed me on the One Shot podcast. I have been wanting to collaborate with somebody on a book for a while. To me, collaboration makes artistic expression so much more fun. It is what draws me to role-playing games and why it is my preferred creative output medium, because it's all about collaboration.

I think when you sit down with another person and you talk through ideas and you brainstorm, you come up with something that is so much better than what either person could do in isolation. So I wanted to work with Dillin for the joy that you get from a collaborative creative process. But also, at the time, I was designing Cosmic Century Knights, and I thought, if I am juggling a role-playing game at the same time that I am writing a book, it is going to be hard for me to hit the deadlines if I'm working completely alone.

So having Dillin there to tag team and work through this book made it a breeze! Instead of a nerve-wracking and stressful process, it was kind of a joyful process throughout, because I had somebody to work with and play with while I was writing this book.

Alex: That makes sense to me! Can you give me a teaser of what to expect, maybe share the piece of this book you're most excited about?

James: One of the things that I like is how we have broken down villains. When we were talking about villains and what is useful in developing them, I at first thought of genre. But when I was talking to Dillin, Dillin said, "Well, you know, there are a lot of different villain types that show up in various genres." I thought that was a really good point.

So we broke down our villains into the categories of Outlaws, Leaders, Believers, Opulence-based villains, and Supernatural-based villains. Your outlaw is your criminal. It is somebody who is a villain primarily because they are breaking society's laws. Leaders are villains because they are in — perhaps legitimate — power, but they are misusing the power that they have. You can see with a mob boss that there is a crossover between those. When we are looking at categories like that, the villain starts to get defined by the themes that it is carrying in whatever story or narrative you are putting them into.

I think that makes it a really useful angle for the book because a game master, or a player if they are developing an evil campaign character, can go, "These are the themes that I am thinking about. This is kind of the space that this character takes up within the moral framework of fiction." They can use that to mix and match different exercises that fit their character really well.

I really like that approach because of the way that I think it frees up readers to use the books in a lot of different scenarios.

Alex: I like that a lot! Is there anything else you want to share about the book?

James: Because you had asked for a sample of the book so that people can get an idea of what is in it, one of the things that we did for the Opulent — who is a villainous character primarily because they are extremely wealthy, and in fact so wealthy that just having that wealth creates problems in the world — is an exercise built around that concept.

Alex: There's some social commentary in there!

James: Some social commentary, yes, but I like to think of it as physics. There are certain forces that exert themselves in certain ways, and it is unavoidable at a certain point for a dense collection of wealth not to create problems and injustices around it.

And I find that, often, especially when you are presenting a villainous character in a role-playing sense, a trait like being extremely wealthy is hand-waved. Most of the time that is fine. I want to say this about any of the backstory exercises: they are not things that are explicitly needed. Anytime you hold a microscope to a specific aspect of your character and drill down on it, you will find more story details in there.

For the opulent, one of our exercises is called "My Holdings," which is literally a way to break down important assets that a very rich character has. We have a rolling table, but you can also pick. You define, "Okay, this is my primary asset. I own stock in this company." Because of that, I also own a collection of rare automobiles, or I happen to have an exotic animal that I am taking care of, or I have this piece of real estate somewhere out there.

We define those objects, and then we define how those objects create problems. They might be problems for your character. It is like, "Well, yeah, I technically own this huge, horrible monster, but it costs a lot to feed it. It's difficult to keep it contained and in place.

Alex: It keeps eating my henchmen.

James: It is a burden to me. It eats people. It actually causes this situation where I have to pay it in a certain way, in people. And it creates a storyline where, if this is the villain for your campaign, that suddenly becomes a vulnerability. Yes, it is dangerous. This is a beast that this villain could unleash against the party. But while it is not fighting them, it still exists. That means if you are a legitimate businessperson who society sees as legitimate, and your PCs are resisting this person who has legitimacy within society, you have to spend money and resources allocating them towards this thing.

And the problems that come along with that expose an area that is actionable for PCs. PCs can go, "He needs to move hundreds, like, of pounds of food. Maybe we cannot break into his compound, but we can waylay one of those trucks. And now he has a starving beast to deal with, and the chaos from that will allow us to do whatever the next step in our plan is."

All that exercise is doing is adding story to something that is normally hand-waved, to make it actionable for you as a game master, and for your players to interact with.

Alex: I really like how you've framed these vulnerabilities as potential story hooks.

James: Any fact that exists about your character is a potential story hook. Another exercise within the Opulent character is that, if you decide you have an old-money opulent and that money is mostly family money, there is a random rolling table for creating family members who may also have aspects of this fortune that you wrestle with occasionally or who come to you to cause problems.

This is definitely looking at it more [from the perspective of] "I am playing an evil PC," but you can always go, "Yes, the fact that I have this money is a driving part of my character, but I still have to contend with problems about it." I do have private access to a private island, but I have to go to my aunt, who hates my work or hates the way that I dress, and get access to that island through her.

All of that can be this delightful thing that just exists in the background, this is just for me, a way to play the game by myself, and enjoy my character. It's still in an interactive way, because the book is supplying information and ideas to you. [You can use it] alone, or you can be like, "Hey, I rolled up this crazy aunt, and I think it would be fun to interact with her. GM, can you please incorporate that into what we're doing?"

All of it comes down to this: anywhere that you look with a character, if you look closely enough, you will find the building blocks for stories that interest and excite you.

Alex: I really love the added texture of, "Is it really worth having to deal with Aunt Beatrice to get access to 'my' resources?"

James: And it addresses a problem that I find often with very rich characters, where you are having to work to justify them doing something. You have this character who says, "I am a billionaire", within the text of the game, I am a billionaire. "I can afford to hire a team of very capable people to deal with this problem. Why don't I?" Or, "I have a private island within my family name that we could set up our base on. Why am I not doing that? Why am I not just solving the problems that we have in front of our party?"

The answer becomes that there are other social complications. I can actually just solve this one problem, but it introduces Aunt Beatrice, who has a lot of finicky hooks that she can pull on to make other things difficult for you.

Alex: I love that. Is there anything else you want to mention?

James: The last thing I will mention, because One Shot did come up and I mentioned that Dillin has succeeded me as host recently, about a month ago at the time this is getting released, Dillin had his 100th episode as host of One Shot. He did a really beautiful game called Void 1680. It is essentially a game where Dillin is acting as a radio host and takes callers who are characters from the games that he has played during his tenure as host of One Shot.

It is this beautiful reflection on all the things that Dillin has done with that space and as host of that show. It is also a fun sampler. You can hear different characters and think, "I would like to learn more about that character," and they have an entire game attached to them.

I am excited to be working with Dillin in multiple capacities because I think he is wonderfully creative. I am so happy with everything that I work on with Dillin, this book and One Shot included, so I wanted to make sure that I pointed that out.

The very last thing to point out is that I do still host podcasts on One Shot. I am the current host of Campaign. We are approaching the final arc of the Skyjacks run of Campaign, which has been running a good long while.

The Ultimate RPG Villain Backstory guide is available now!

A study on enjambment

2026-03-06T12:39:00-07:00

I’ve been studying poetry recently, and have especially enjoyed Mary Oliver’s thoughts on enjambment, the decision of where and when to end a line, and the corresponding effects that choice has on the reader.

Consider the following:

We all sit around silently asking who can
cer will come for first. Will
thinks it will be him. No
one looks my way.

“Can” to cancer tricks the reader into thinking a question will follow, a matter of ability. Will attempts the same trick (but cheaper and far too soon), from a question to a name. And really doing it a third time with No to No one is almost putting too much of a hat on the trick, a fake answer that the reader (at this point) has no reason to believe!

There’s a reason she’s the poet and I just a student.

A handful of Steam Part 5

2026-02-28T11:38:00-07:00

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
and Part 4

Escape the Mad Empire

One thing I always look for in a demo is good tutorialization, and this has some of the best I’ve seen. The game itself looks great, and is full of polish. It’s a standard fantasy dungeon crawler with roguelike elements (that are explained clearly to newcomers, but not to tedium for veterans). As you progress, there are some sci fi elements as well, which I’m a big fan of. I don’t see myself returning to this one, as there’s a lot of involved inventory management, and the Diablo style combat has never hooked me.

But if a pixel graphics Diablo with recruitable party members and a meta plot interests you, then by all means — check this out. It’s a very well done implementation of the genre.

RKGK

This is a gorgeous 3D platformer where the main ingredient is Grafiti. Stylistically, it’s got a lot of Jet Set Radio, but with extremely competent platforming. Unfortunately, it loses some of the vibrant level design and the music. The music is the biggest loss here, but we get a straightforward plot and a bunch of stages that seem designed to speedrun. The generous demo shows off the platforming, and gives a good idea of whether or not this game will be for you.

It’s a Wrap

In my head, this game is called “That’s a Wrap”, and so I can never find it on Steam.

You play Johnny Rush, a washed-up action movie star who does all his own stunts. The game takes place in two phases: in one, you build a scene with an iMovie–like editor, and in the other you platform through the scene you’ve just created. At least in the demo, there’s rarely more than one “right” answer, so you’ve got a bit of puzzling to figure out the proper path.

Unfortunately, there’s a little bit of cruft around that. While I LOVE the theming, and being able to see “scene 1 take 5” as I repeatedly fail my attempts, the cruft does slow the game down a little. How much this bothers you depends on your taste for that kind of thing.

The art style is cute and cozy, and the whole game just oozes charm. I wasn’t sold at first: I didn’t like how far back Johnny leans while he runs, but it quickly grew on me. The tutorialization is excellent. The first part is fairly standard for a platformer, with on-screen text prompts (not pausing popups) telling you how to overcome in-world obstacles, but it’s very well done.

The controls feel good, and not just the platforming, the “Timeline” controls are also intuitive and reactive. I like the gimmick!

There’s a sense of humor here, lots of movie references and smooth controls. And of course, I love the theme.It’s not enough to build a scene, you have to build a scene that you can successfully platform though. It’s like a mix between Ultimate Chicken Horse and the planning phase in Chimera Squad.

There’ss also character arcs, and a bit of a story here. After each playable scene you get a short cut scene, which are characters doing their idle animations while text bubbles hover overhead. You can pauser or fast-forward through these, but doing so makes them go slightly too fast. Watching a normal speed feels slow. I don’t think they need the FF as much as they need to be like 20% faster by default. That’s a nitpick! Here’s another:

The framework of being in a studio means that a missed attempt has some cruft — skippable cruft, to be sure, but cruft all the same — of having to hear the director call cut and give a little banter before you can go again.

Verdict: This would have killed in the era of World of Goo, but today it feels a little off. Not bloated, exactly, but not as streamlined as modern puzzle platformers. The writing is fun, with lots of jokes and movie references. It took a minute for me to warm up on this one, but it does have a lot of charm, and by the end of the demo, I was smiling and hoping for one more level. (link)

All Will Rise

A legal drama deckbuilder, this is one of the more unique concepts I’ve encountered. You are a team of lawyers trying to get justice for a murdered river. Each week you choose missions (one to play, two to send your sidekicks on to resolve off-screen). Each conversation is a battle, where you play cards as consequences or causes to modify 3 attributes of yourself and your partner.

The game is beautiful, and the writing at times sharp, other times trying too hard. I like the concept, but there are so many scripted events that transform cards that I’m not sure it works for me. Ultimately this is a visual novel with an additional layer on top, and while I find it interesting, it doesn’t compel me. That said, I did get a feeling of “One More Turn” when losing a battle that I could have won if I’d picked a different card. The game is still early access, and I would love a text warning of “Last turn!”, instead of just the progress bar at the top of the screen.

Verdict: If you are interested in pretty graphics, sharp writing, or visual novels, check this one out. If you’re looking for a deckbuilder, that genre’s presence is a little overstated here. The cards are built up slowly, modified by conversation, and sometimes before you ever get to play them. It feels more like showing you a dialogue option and then changing it before giving you the chance to click it.

Shinobi: Art of Vengeance

Art is right! This is a stunningly gorgeous metroidvania where you play as a ninja named… Joe. The game is very easy, but the point is that you’re overpowered and can execute combos while leveling up quickly (with a very generous economy to learn new moves). It’s a beat-em-up that feels modern in its controls and in its setting. Early enemies start with swords but quickly move to guns and helicopters, and I saw a sizzle reel at the end of the demo that showed my ninja leader — who, once again, is named Joe — riding a missile towards some enemies.

Verdict A fun, pretty, arcadey game that isn’t for me.

February '26 roundup

2026-02-27T14:27:00-07:00

Below are things I’ve learned or found interesting in the past month:

I’ve been watching a lot of beloved movies recently. And while I’ve always enjoyed — if not agreed with — Roger Ebert’s reviews, I’ve found his series on Great Movies to be extremely helpful in understanding why people enjoy Taxi Driver, for example.
My favorite blog post from last year, Pocket-Sized Powder Kegs by Ty of Mindstorm Press. It’s possible I’ve shared it here before. Whatever, it’s rad. If you’re using factions in your RPGs, give this one a read.
Adam Mastroianni of Experimental History on why you should become a public person.
I’ve been learning how to draw out of a book, but people keep recommending Draw A Box. Haven’t tried it yet myself!
Chris McDowell’s article on GM-Focused Playtesting is basically how I create the handouts and cheat sheets for Cyberrats and my other games. Those are some of the universally-praised aspects of the games, even by the critics.
After the murder of George Floyd, Scrabble removed racial slurs from its official dictionaries. The subhead from CNN points out that this applies “Even if it would be worth a triple word bonus.”
Load Bearing Tomato On chasing player approval.

It doesn’t occur to most players that result they see was not always what was intended. It’s actually incredibly common for things to work out differently than how they were planned. On every single game that has ever been made, either tech debt, design debt, timing, capitalism, or all of the above has forced developers to make something than they intended.

8. Strip Panel Naked has an incredibly efficient video about characterization.

10. This audiophile study has been making the rounds, and it’s exactly the kind of thing I’d expect to see from Experimental History (unaffiliated).

11. This Tumblr post about Frank Miller’s colorist, and other ways to make his linework pop.

12. Dialged.gg, the HSL color matching challenge game.

13. New dino!

People never crouch

2026-02-21T11:57:00-07:00

I am forever moving towards organization. This might be hard to tell as an outsider, because you would see stacks and piles, overflowing seemingly at random. But what you didn’t see is those same stacks, bigger and looser the week before. It’s a process.

Last week, I was cleaning up my pantry. I purchased some canvas buckets so the snacks could have a home separate from the bread and bread-like products. In theory, this means there won’t be four open bags of pretzels at a time.

As I was sorting this, I realized that I couldn’t see the lower levels. My pantry has wire shelving. My canvas buckets are opaque. I mentioned this as my son passed by, and he remarked, “Well you could always crouch.”

HUMANS NEVER CROUCH

The path of resistance is never taken. I know I won’t crouch to see if there’s an open bag of pretzels any more than he’d get a stool to check the top of the fridge for open dog treats. If I can see through to the lower level, I’ll glance for that telltale flash of gold, but I learned how to search from Zelda games. if my line of sight is blocked, I assume there’s nothing there.

It’s not just me! People avoid friction wherever possible. For best results, when you encounter friction in your design, if you find yourself saying “well they can just crouch” (or they can just consult the chart on page 19, or one if it’s many other “just” heads), take a step back and redesign.

Resistance is the opposite of flow. Flow is speed, flow is elegance. The less you have to think, to stop, to change (consult, crouch, re-route), the smoother the process feels.

Maybe the buckets should go down a shelf.