I’m really proud of this game, and would appreciate any help in spreading it around!
]]>It was difficult for me to tell if this device would meet my needs. Most of the comments I can find online suggest that the Retroid is not powerful enough to play PC games. Inevitably, someone will clarify that they are trying to play the newest Call of Duty or Forza game, and someone else will point out that “anything newer than about the XBOX 360 will struggle to play.” They mean this disparagingly, but I want to play, like 2D Zelda clones. We’re different people!
Downloading games onto the device is done through an app called GameHub, which emulates enough of Windows to tell the lies Steam needs to hear to download your games. It works great, unless the screen goes dark during a download. There’s a popup that warns you about this every time. Don’t leave the app, don’t let the screen go dark. I understand / don’t show me again.
We all know how this story goes. Just as Adam was destined to be cast from the garden, I too said I understood these simple conditions and then let the screen go dark. I’m sorry! It defaults to a 15-second timeout. While most of the games I play are under 2GB, sometimes people put fully voiced scenes into their murder mystery visual novels! This raises the size to 8 GB, which takes several minutes of screen flicking.
And if you do let the screen go dark, the download is forever paused, like a broken clock. Deleting the files resets it to to 0, but does not erase the shame and sin of your crime. Ne’er again will the app download. You had your warning.
To be let back into Eden, you must perform dark, edlritch rituals, gaining a level access to your hardware that would make a congressman blush. You must use this access to wander into a place where, like a surgeon, you can trim away certain, specific, unlabeled files in order to re-establish the wards, earning for yourself a second chance to prove worthy. Can you keep the screen alive until the download completes?
If the screen goes dark, you lose it all, stuck. Nothing can be done. You must complete the ritual again, this time with an extra serving of shame. “Known issue”, though solutions are slim. It’s a niche product. As I write this, i flick a joystick after ever three words (flick), probably shortening the life (flick) span of this device, (flick) introducing drift into (flick) a brand new novelty.
I have another complaint (flick), that of the case not fitting the grip (flick), even though I bought them together (flick), and you’d think that the official case would fit the official grip. No! But it’s smaller than a steamdeck (and cheaper too) (dangerously long time between flicks, flick), and it plays the kinds of games that are just for me, but that I’d never (flick) sit down and play at a computer (flick). Like this one, that’s a murder mystery game where you gain clues by completing picross puzzles. Extremely my jam!
Aw rats, it just stalled at 90% AND I’D BEEN DILLGENTLY FLICKING! Back to the arcane mines.
i have another ocmlaint (flick) , that of the case not filtting the grip. but it’s smaller than a steamdeck (and cheaper too) (dangerously long time between flicks), (flick), and it plays the kinds of games that are just for me, but that I’d never (flick) sit down and play at a computer. (flick). Like this one (link) that’s a murder mystery game where you gain clues by completing picross puzzles. Extremely my jam! Aw rats, it just stalled at 90% AND I’D BEEN DILLIGENTLY FLICKING. Back to the arcane mines.
]]>They didn’t tell me it was automatic. We’re at our most vulnerable when we’re poopin’. Animals watch each others’ backs during the act. Or, at least they did that in an episode of The Expanse, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen my dogs standing guard for each other (and outside my own closed bathroom door).
I was 5 years old, starting kindergarten, and using the toilet in the bathroom attached to our classroom. I finished my business, reached for the toilet paper and FA-WHOOM, a tsunami exploded beneath my exposed bottom. A fear was planted that day, one that has blossomed and sprouted since. I don’t truck with automatic toilets.
That’s not to say I never have. But I avoid it unless it’s an emergency. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve used one in the last ten years. The number in the last twenty isn’t much higher. But I’m not here to talk about the fear, that’s for my therapist. The fear is just the context you need for what I’m really here to talk about:
Last month I went to my first film festival, in Dubuque, IA. Travelling isn’t always easy (see above: re automatic toilets). Airports love those auto flushers. But I made it to Chicago just fine, rented a car, and rode three hours to Dubuque with some friends. I arrived, full of colon, one hour before our first film.
I ran to the hotel my friend said served as HQ and rattled off two questions: is this where I buy tickets, and do you have a bathroom I can use?
No, they moved it this year. And yes, it’s just up the stairs.
And so I waddled, nudged open the door, and saw the dreaded black sensor. Nope. I retreated downstairs, thanked the attendants, and reported to my friend. The real HQ was just down the street, at a Holiday Inn. I repeated my questions there, and wandered to the toilets, explaining to my friend a simple lie: the toilet had been occupied. Holiday Inn, don’t disappoint… NO! Another automatic. I gauged my colon, debated girding my loins… but desisted. I said a little prayer. I will if I must, I promised.
I left the bathroom, bought my tickets, and saw that we had just over 40 minutes until the show started. My friend, who is not religious, turned to me: hey, I’ve got a pal who works in this town. She works at a church nearby. Do you mind if we stop by and say hello for a bit?
I did not. As we pulled up, I told my friend lie #2 (heh): the second toilet was filthy, and couldn’t be used. We walked into the church, found the friend, made an introduction, and I power-walked to that toilet the very second it wasn’t rude to do so. And hallelujah, it was a manual flush.
]]>
I’m really proud of this game, and would appreciate any help in spreading it around!
]]>Imagine a straight line. On the far left, we have perfectly symmetric games. On the far right we have asymmetric games. Let’s move along it from left to right.
On the far left of the line are perfectly symmetric games. Every player has the same knowledge, and there’s no state that affects those levers. This would be something like Zombie Dice, a simple push-your-luck game. On your turn, grab dice from the bucket and roll them, trying to collect as many brains as possible while avoiding headshots. Some dice are different colors (red are the most dangerous, green are the least). The first person to succesfully gain the required number of brains wins. Get 3 headshots on your turn, you lose all the brains from that turn. Otherwise, you can stop and bank what you have.
There is game state (like the number of banked brains, and how many headshots you have that turn), but at the start of each turn, everyone has the same levers they can pull.
I would also put games like Monopoly in this category, as your position on the baord doesn’t change the options available to you.
One step to the right of this is games where the levers are the same, but state can change those levers. Thse are games like Ticket to Ride or Scrabble. In Ticket to Ride, you can either draw train cards, play train cards to build a route, or draw new destination cards. But the state of train cards in your hand dictates what routes you can build. So while eveyone has the same levers they can pull, the state of the game changes how those levers can be pulled. One player may be able to build a route that is inaccessible to another based on how many cards they currently have.
Similarly, in Scrabble everyone has the same two options: play a word on the board or exchange tiles. But the words you are able to play with AETINNX are very different than what I can play with MIIOJSR.
All of the above games are very legible. No one will ever pull off a move that requires reaching for the rulebook to explain how what they did was legal. Each turns looks very similar to the one before it, and will look similar to the one that comes after.
Many RPGs have classes. Theoretically, these classes do different things, but the level of asymmetry changes.
Take Blades in the Dark. Every class (“playbook”) has the same actions they can take during play, but they have different resources and abilities that are unique to their playbook.
Moving every so slightly more right, you have something like HEDGE, a game I adore. In HEDGE, each Warden has the same three abilties (Might, Slight, and Bright) as all the rest. But they also have their own unique resource that are gained and spent in different ways.
The Starless Knight gains Dread when it kills foes, and spends it to add Harm to its allies’ attacks. No one else can gain or spend Dread. The Briarbound Torch gains Blaze when it heals, and spends it to shield its allies from Harm. No other warden can gain or spend Blaze.
Each playbook is structured in the same way: it has a score for Might, Slight, and Bright. It has starting Health and Fate, and it has its own resource that it gains and spends in different ways. No player needs to know the details of the other players’ playbooks, but they recognize the format of it. We’re all playing the same game.
For me, this is the sweet spot. It’s easy to keep track of what everyone else is doing, but every class feels unique. I can express my unique ability in terms of how I gain it and how I spend it, and my friends can perfectly understand the scope of it. Making a new class in this space is fairly easy, assuming you can find space for it. Like a blank space on the periodic table, it’s easy to imagine the shape of the thing that would go here.
Balance is easy, classes are legible, and communication is quick.
But we can go further.
The next spot on our journey rightwards leads us to Spencer Cambpell’s Slayers, a game I’ve relesaed many adventures for.
In this game, each Slayer is playing its own minigame. The Gunslinger has 6 d6s that it spends and reloads. The Blade rolls a single d6, but combos, rolling another until it misses. The Arcanist chooses a spell, then rolls a d6 to see if it goes off.
All of these classes have one thing in common1 they roll d6s and are trying to get a 4+. Each player is essentially playing their own game. It’s not obvious at a glance what the player next to you is doing, or what the significance of their roll is. The Arcanist gathers Corruption over time, and the Blade might be going for a second attack when other players think their done.
The design spaces of these classes is fairly small (each class fits on just a couple pages). But there’s still a potential source of confusion.
That said, the design space is fairly unconstrained: anything can be a Slayers class! It just needs to be able to hit on a 4+.
Then there’s Root.
Root is a fully asymmetric game. The faction playing the birds is building a push-your-luck deck of cards2 empire, while the Cat constructs buildings in every open space. The Raccoon player runs around selling goods to other players, and will easily win if people don’t realize he can be attacked.
Expansions add more complexity, and more confusion. One faction dies and adds sympathy tokens to the board, springing up unexpectly with little notice.
Each faction is so separated from the rest, both spacially and mechanically, that it really does feel like you’re all playing different games. Oftentimes one faction will win and other players will say, “Wait, what just happened?” until they play again, armed with this new knowledge.
This isn’t a bad thing! At the time of writing, Root is the 34th most popular game of all time on BoardGameGeek!3
But full asymmetry means that there is a legibility cost, and in an RPG that can lead to confusion.
Symmetry isn’t inherently good or bad. It reduces cognitive load, and makes balance easy. Asymmetry introduces options, but can risk leaving players scratching their heads, or zoning out as someone executes a move they don’t have enough context to understand.
It can also rule! I’ve played in more than one game of Masks where someone playing the Doomed reveals a few games in that they are, well, doomed, and every time it’s a memorable moment for the table. I knew we were playing slightly different games here, but I didn’t realize THAT was on the table!
Asymmetry can also be a fun selling point! It’s what appealed to me about Slayers, which is the game that brought me back into game design after a 5-year hiatus. Like everything else, it’s a tool to be wielded with thought and care.
Many fan-made classes, including some I’ve made, play with this notion, and have Slayers rolling piles of d4s, or other dice other than d6. ↩
In the sense that it’s doomed to collapse, not a literal deck of cards. ↩
A platform that favors games that are new and complex. Root releasing in 2018 is a testament to its staying power. Of the 33 games above it, only two (Twilight Struggle, 2005, Brass: Lancashire, 2007) is older than 15 years4 ↩
The natural counter-argument is that maybe better games are being released all the time, and it’s not a recency bias at all! I won’t debate it here. ↩
Good news for ocean waste removal, though some want to leave the Pacific garbage patch because some species have adopted to thrive there. I don’t think that’s a good enough reason!
Adam Mastroianni on positive incentives and learning from your environment.
How a mysterious ghost ship brought cosmic disco to Cape Verde
A handful of teeth may rewrite the story of marsupial evolution
In the RPG design world, there’s the 2 axes of abstraction
CSS-only puzzle box (desktop only)
The body of King Richard the III was lost for ages, and found under a parking garage (“car park”). My favorite detail whenever I remember this story is that the woman who organized the dig did so because she had a psychic vision telling her where it would be.
[Video] Stephen Sondheim coaching “Not Getting Married” from Company.
Transforming robots on the moon? It’s more likely than you think!
As much as I love the original article’s title, “The Warrior-Witches of Ukraine’s Resistance”, the subheading is much more clear as to what’s actually happening: An underground intelligence network uses subterfuge and honey traps to direct drone strikes deep inside Russian-occupied territory.
A deep dive on the history of wanting to colonize Mars, and why it’s a foolish notion.
Cyberrats in Space is on Kickstarter. I’m immensiely proud of this game, it’s a ton of fun, and it’s one of the last TTRPGs I’m planning to make. Take a look.
This New Yorker article about making movies, particular Wall-E and John Carter.
“What I realized,” Stanton told me, “is, ‘Fine, I’m not an auteur. I need to write with other people, I need people to work against. It’s not about self-exploration—it’s not about me—it’s about making the best movie possible.’
15. More than I knew there was to know about cheese theft.
]]>Masters of the Universe starts on Eternia. We follow him through his daily life. We watch him train (he’s the weakling and the welp), we learn about the mythical power of a god and the sword what contains it. Then, enemies attack, his parents are attacked, and he is sent through a portal to Earth. I wasn’t timing, but I think it was 20 minutes until we hit the 15 years later text.
Then, MotU hits us with a bit of product placement (Coca-Cola!) and we reveal that Adam is a grown, honest-to-a-fault dweeb on a first date. He’s been talking continuously about his fantasy land for twenty minutes.
Masters of the Universe is not a Sonic Movie, and it doesn’t want to be. It wants to be a different Paramount movie, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023).
These two movies occupy the exact same spot in the cultural landscape: a heartfelt genre film with charm and humor in equal parts. The D&D movie, unfortunately, did it more earnestly, and better all around. The CG here all felt like CG.
David Erlich on IndieWire compares it to Guardians of the Galaxy, and I see it. “Give ‘em Head” is a line as funny as it is jarring. It’s delivered by a joke character we spend little time with, when it should be a a Peter Quill line. There’s a “pussy” joke aimed at the giant cat that really doesn’t land, written just because they could. The humor is strangely raunchy for such a toyetic world. If this seems a hard circle to square, it gets easier when you remember the target audience: 50-year old children.
That’s not to say that a movie is above analysis, criticism, or the standards of good storytelling just because it’s aimed at children! The Sonic movies are better than they have any right to be. The recent Sheep Detectives film is one of my favorite movies of the year! But Masters of the Universe commits a few basic errors.
The biggest one is having Skeletor quote the bible. Doubly bad, he does it in a cliche. Adam comes back to face Skeletor after time away, and Skeletor rightfully taunts him. Unfortunately, he does this with, “Oh, look. The prodigal son returns!”
NO! Bad!
Prodigal means “spending a lot of money!” That’s not a thing Adam has done! The prodigal son is a reference to a specific bible story! It DOES NOT MAKE SENSE FOR SKELETOR TO SAY THIS, and it totally broke my immersion of the film in the middle of its best monologue! Bah! At this point in the film1, this remark is inexplicable and inexcusable.
The biggest difference between this movie and Sonic or Guardians of the Galaxy is that those movies aren’t ashamed of their source material. Star Lord’s name is made a bit of a joke in the beginning of the movie, but he’s never ashamed of it. He’s ashamed that he’s not more famous. And by the end of the movie, he earns that fame.
Here, all of the characters couch their names by the excuse that a 10-year old boy named them. That’s Trap-Jaw, there’s Fisto next to Ram-Man. Of course these names are dumb, and the characters all take umbrage with the names. But at no point do they say, “My name isn’t Fisto, it’s Jack.” Because they can’t! There is no other name. So the movie tries to have it both ways by having the characters accept their new dumb names, and it doesn’t work.
Adam himself fails at this in two ways: first because he’s constantly telling people, “I’m Adam… you know, the king’s son?” Does he not have a last name where he’s from? Presumably Glenn is his Earth name, given by whatever foster family fished him out of the lake and hooked him up with a social security number.
Second, because they want to have your title drop please clap moment, he’s set up to reveal his own nickname for himself at the end of the movie. And I simply refuse to believe that he had a superhero name for himself. He was idolizing the people around him, and saying that He-Man is the kind of dumb name only a 10-year old boy could come up with is both true and insulting to the viewers.
The movie is afraid to take risks. In the third act, it invokes another one of my movie-going pet peeves. A bunch of rocks fall on Adam’s dad, prompting him to clear the rubble away. The king is bleeding lightly and has exactly enough time to forgive and apologize to Adam, providing the closure he needs before dying quietly.
NO!
It’s much better to have the king die in front of Adam, showing that as strong as he is, he’s still powerless. Have him seek validation from his father that he NEVER could have gotten, and now never will. By having his father say “Yeah I was wrong, being weak is great actually” and then dying because his super-strong son couldn’t save him, even at his strongest, is just serving to make Adam happier. Well-adjusted, perfect heroes aren’t compelling!
Have Adam’s mom tell him that his dad would have been proud. Let him wrestle with the fact that it’s a lie, that he wasn’t strong enough to save him. Show him doubt over whether his emotional strength really is as good as his father’s actual might. Give us a hero who aches to prove himself to a man who would never accept him and could never accept his form of power.
Kill the king before his arc is complete, and let the audience wrestle with that lack of satisfaction. And, again, GIVE US A SCENE WITH HIS MOTHER WHO IS ALSO STILL ALIVE!
The movie is a romp, I won’t deny that. It’s not as much of a romp as other movies in the same sapce, and unlike some of those, it’s embarrassed to be what it is. It’s a coward’s movie, one that allows a dad to give a soliloquy about why all of his beliefs are wrong moments beofre he dies, one that apoogizes for its characters having dumb and goofy names.
And the biggest sin of all is that Battle-Cat, the talking green tiger, is on screen for like 3 total minutes. (To say nothing of the times where both he and the kickass robot lady disappear from the backgrounds of scenes until the moment they are plot relevant again).
If you’re a child of a certain again (and again, that age is 50), this is a fun afternoon. But it doesn’t respect you as a viewer, it doesn’t take risks, and it’s embarrassed to be a movie about he-man. Is it good? Sure. Is it fun? Absolutely.
And that’s about the nicest thing I can say about it.
Near the end of the movie, Skeletor enters Adam’s mind and pokes through his memories. Adam had liked in Oklahoma City for 15 years at this point. It’s likely he knows who Jesus is, and my even be familiar with the story of the Prodigal Son. By extension, it’s plausible that Skeletor has a passing familiarity with the same. In a sequel, I could excuse this line (but probably wouldn’t). ↩
Sheep Detective: I laughed, I cried, I loved the mystery. Full of heart, and worth your time.
Conclave: What a gorgeous movie, and one of Ralph Fiennes’ best roles. I want to watch it again just for the umbrella scene!
Juror #2: This will be Clint Eastwood’s final film, and it’s not a bad note to go out on. Still, If you’re going to make a courtroom drama, don’t make allusions to 12 Angry Men unless you’re REALLY sure you’re that good. It’s like saying you’re the next LeBron before attempting a layup. There’s no good outcome! Don’t make your audience think about a better movie they could be watching instead.
The Count of Monte Cristo (2024): Every deviation this movie makes from the book is completely defensible. Haydee is no longer a slave NOR a lover of the Count’s, two great choices. It’s gorgeous and just fun to watch.
Petite Maman: A wonderfully low budget film, the kind where you don’t realize until it’s over that it has 3 sets and 6 actors.
]]>This post depends on CSS styling, and is best viewed directly on the site
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]]>Bing style experience points (via Design Explorers)
This roundup of Area 51 history
The state of Idaho was named after a made-up word that was falsely claimed to be a Native American word meaning “Gem of the mountains”.
ancient amazonian village found by LIdar (2024) https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67940671
Related, lost city of Z https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_City_of_Z
English Corpa, like Google nGrams, but for the web.
Related, positive (?) news from the world of degrading slang: the term “village bicycle” (everyone gets to ride “it”) seems to have fallen out of favor for “community ball”, (one who is passed around a lot). One day the youth won’t have a term for this concept at all.
The famous Charlie’s Angels pose is largely a myth. In the original, it was gun / karate / walkie talkie (and only in silhouette!). In the remake it was all karate, no guns. The classic 3 gun pose never happened.
Certain NYC subway trains make a noise similar to the opening of Somewhere from West Side Story. This is known. In Spielberg’s 2021 remake of the movie, he included this train sound, despite it not occurring until 1999, over 40 years after the movie is set.. Neat!
Aside: there are technically two competing schools of thought on this, prescriptivism (language *must* work this way) and descriptivism (*this is how people seem to be using this word*). Prescriptivists get made when people use literally to mean figuratively; descriptivies say “ooh, interesting, people are using ‘Trespass’ as a transitive verb? Time to update the dictionaries, I guess!” (aside: every major dictionary describes itself as descriptivist. So the excuse of “that’s not what the dictionary says” is sort of like arguing that you can’t be grilling an egg on the hood of your car because the thermometer says it’s only 68. The egg still sizzles!)
Language works on a shared understanding. New words get created for precision. Jargon is a specific word (or way of using an existing word) that exists to create clarity in a specific context (usually industry). Friend groups have their own jargon !
But here’s the thing: no word truly has a rigid, fixed context. Take Friday. 5th day of the week1. Goes between Thursday2 and Saturday. Seems pretty rigid!
Except the phrase “It’s my Friday” is immediately understood by all: sure it’s Tuesday, but I don’t have to labor for the next day or two.
That’s how you get definition 2: the last day before a work-week ends.
I don’t think you’ll find that definition in any modern dictionary, but the usage is there, and the meaning is understood.
Words aren’t special. Go make up your own. Maybe they’ll even catch on.
]]>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 trim 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.
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.
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// ==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);
})();
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)
]]>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.
]]>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 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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!)
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.
Definitely see:
Consider seeing
]]>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.
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