Bryant Durrell

@innocence

I like movies a lot. I worry about right-wing extremism. I play and sometimes write tabletop RPGs. I used to be an SRE but I got better. I grew up in New England and live with my wife in Seattle. He/his.

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Bluesky

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Bryant Durrell@innocence· 25d

A fairly random #LastFourWatched which includes the first movie of Fantasia. The Huston really clarified to me why Burton was such a star.

Four movie posters, with ratings:

Kung Fu: 3 stars
Saturday Fiction: 3.5 stars
Habit: 4 stars
The Night of the Iguana: 4 stars

Bryant Durrell@innocence· 26d

Landed in Montreal and found the right lockbox (in a cluster of 20 or so on a fence) to get us into our AirBnB. Good to be back. Time to sit around being mildly jealous of everyone who’s seeing the new Refn until it’s time for our late movie. #Fantasia2026

Rue Crescent in Montreal, from a balcony about ten floors up, looking north. The street is lined with bars and restaurants. You can see the plateau between a couple of buildings to the north.

Bryant Durrell@innocence· 29d

#Seattle quirk.

Statue of a humanoid frog, maybe five feet tall, playing a saxophone. He has a sign hung around the bell of the saxophone, on which is written the Washington State criminal code pertaining to intimidating a civil servant.

Bryant Durrell@innocence· Jul 10

Happy #lastFourWatched Friday. The twin strands today are Americana and crime, which is about as apt a pairing as I can imagine. They blend in Carolina Caroline -- I wanted it to be better but it wasn't bad. Gearing up for Fantasia next week. 📽️

Four movie posters, with ratings:

We're No Angels: 3.5 stars
Razzia: 3.5 stars
Carolina Caroline: 3 stars
Wet Hot American Summer: 3.5 stars

Bryant Durrell@innocence· Jul 9

Speaking of things you haven’t seen, @cemurphy.bsky.social, is this actually a thing in your neck of the woods? (The new food list for this year’s Minnesota State Fair dropped.)

An image of a line of dumplings on a skewer with a tub of thousand island dressing next to it. There’s illustrative text:

O'Gara's at the Fair

Sligo Slider Bites On-A-Stick

Handmade dumplings stuffed with a cheeseburger blend made of beef, cheddar, pickle and onion. Skewered on-a-stick and deep-fried. Served with homemade Thousand Island dressing.

Bryant Durrell@innocence· Jul 3

From their Instagram:

Screenshot of text:

ATTENTION:

A few minutes after 11 a.m. we received a bomb threat and we are evacuating the zoo. We are in contact with the Seattle Police Department and are prioritizing the safety of our staff, guests and animals.

In recent weeks, numerous zoos and aquariums have received threats that were later determined to be false swatting attempts. Regardless of this, we are treating this threat as a real emergency. We will provide additional details as they become available.

Bryant Durrell@innocence· Jun 30

But my handwriting sucks. And I like tinkering. So now I run two shell commands on my Mac, with the encounter note I showed earlier as input. The first one generates a TOML file containing all the data for the encounter; the second one is a typst command that turns the TOML file into a PDF.

A sheet with everything a GM needs to run a Feng Shui encounter. At the top are two blocks for mook stats, followed by a total of six blocks for Bosses and Featured Foes. There are boxes for attack, defense, and all other relevant stats. Wounds and mook count are small checkboxes. There's useful information about what happens when an NPC runs out of health down at the bottom.

Bryant Durrell@innocence· Jun 30

Mooks are just a table in the main encounter note. It's visually a bit inconsistent but I'm not gonna make a whole new NPC file for each group of nameless foes. That, too, is a template, with the default values for Attack and Defense filled in to save time.

Text:

Name Orangutan Mooks
count 6
attack 8
defense 13
weapon Raw monkey muscle
damage 10

Text:

> [!mook]
>
> | Name | |
> |---|---|
> | count | 6 |
> | attack | 8 |
> | defense | 13 |
> | toughness | 5 |
> | weapon | |
> | damage | 7 |

Bryant Durrell@innocence· Jun 30

Then I can pull that structured data into my encounter write-ups, using the dataview plugin for the data retrieval and using the templater plugin so I don't have to remember all the fussy syntax. The first image here is the encounter writeup, and the second is the fussy template.

Text:

Lok Tsang
Slob looking for something to believe in, featured foe

Attack: 13 (Martial Arts)
Defense: 13
Toughness: 5
Speed: 8
Weapon: Chunk of electified rebar (10)

No skills listed.

No schticks listed.

Buzz Smite-Yer
Cyborg fanatic, featured foe

Attack: 13 (Martial Arts)
Defense: 12
Toughness: 6
Speed: 5
Weapon: Buzzsaw hand (10)

Guns 13

Buzzsaw: As an interrupt after a successful close-combat attack fails to do more than 4 Wound Points to an opponent, roll a die. On an even result, target of your attack takes 10 Wound Points. On an odd result, you take 5 Wound Points.

$Text of a template. Title: Add NPC to Encounter Body: <%* const files = app.vault.getMarkdownFiles() .filter(f => f.path.startsWith("Gaming/GM/Active Games/Demon-Haunted/NPCs")); const file = await tp.system.suggester(f => f.basename, files); if (!file) return; const block = `## ^= L.file.name^ ^= L.title^, ^= L.type^ Attack: ^= L.attack^ (^= L.attack_skill^) Defense: ^= L.defense^ Toughness: ^= L.toughness^ Speed: ^= L.speed^ Weapon: ^= L.weapon^ (^= L.damage^) ^= choice(typeof(L.skills) = "array", join(L.skills, " "), default(L.skills, "No skills listed."))^ ^= choice(typeof(L.schticks) = "array", join(L.schticks, " "), default(L.schticks, "No schticks listed."))^ `; tR += block .replaceAll("L.", [[${file.basename}]].) .replaceAll("^", "`"); %>$

Bryant Durrell@innocence· Jun 30

First off, I drafted a standard metadata/frontmatter format for named NPCs. (Mooks don't get a standalone file.) This makes it easy to build up a stock of NPCs, reuse them as need be, etc.

Text: the top is the NPC name, Buzz Smite-Yer, formatted as a table. Following that there's a table of properties:

title: Cyborg fanatic
attack: 13
attack_skill: Martial Arts
defense: 12

And so on. It has space for freeform lists of schticks.

Then at the bottom there are a couple of lines of freeform text:

A local SLA nut who set aside his original identity of Min Dai to fully embrace his new cyborg status. Now he's glad he got his hand ripped off during a raid on a drug lord's boat!

Bryant Durrell@innocence· Jun 28

Yeah it's Sunday, I'm still doing #LastFourWatched because my accidental pattern of Canadian dramas exploring how we remember stories about our family trauma alternating with anti-fascist thrillers is too good to miss capturing. 📽️

Four movie posters, with ratings:

The Order: 3.5 stars
Blue Heron: 4.5 stars
Becky: 3 stars
Stories We Tell: 4 stars

Bryant Durrell@innocence· Jun 24

Packing to move; feeling the nostalgia.

A Le Video membership card from the now defunct SF video rental store, with the old address: 1232 9th Ave.

Bryant Durrell@innocence· Jun 20

Jacques caught in a moment of repose. He’s not sad, just somewhat vacant of mind. 🐈‍⬛

A furry black cat resting his head on my tummy, photographed from my POV. His eyes are open.

Bryant Durrell@innocence· Jun 20

It's been a while; pretty solid week this week. Lots of politics -- even the weird Spanish vampire movie was political. 📽️

Four movie posters, with ratings:

Bloody Sunday: 4 stars
Lust of the Vampire: 3 stars
Spirited Away: 4.5 stars
The Battle of Chile: Part III: 4.5 stars

Bryant Durrell@innocence· Jun 10

Seen in the wild (The Beacon)! @crossroadsfolk.bsky.social @theharvestmaid.bsky.social

An array of movie zines on display, with Crossroads: Folk Horror in the United States in the center between a copy of Cinema of Actuality and Cashiers du Cinema.

Bryant Durrell@innocence· Jun 8

I swear you can't just leave clauses like this lying around in Wikipedia entries without a bit more context.

Screenshot of text: "the John H. Stevens House, built in 1849 and moved to the park from its original location in 1896, utilizing horses and 10,000 school children;"

Bryant Durrell@innocence· Jun 5

And a personal pilgrimage. I’ve always wanted to see Uncle Hugo’s. (We also drove by the Trylon since it’s right there.)

The storefront of Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore. Red brick with the name of the store on an awning above the windows, typeset in sort of 70s computer typefaces.

Bryant Durrell@innocence· Jun 5

Lovely.

Bryant Durrell@innocence· Jun 4

The Mall of America is as I had expected. Good Barnes & Noble.

An action shot of a roller coaster in the middle of the Mall of America. The car is revolving horizontally while moving down the track.

An atrium in the Mall of America, showing three floors and a ton of stores. It’s busy even on a Thursday morning.

Bryant Durrell@innocence· Jun 3

Found time to go check out Source Comics & Games and i am legitimately impressed. Good mainstream TTRPG stock and nice featuring of indie stuff. Now I really want both Bastionland physical books, they’re gorgeous.

A small spinner rack labeled “RPG Zine Club.” Visible are games called Lichcraft and Time Force.

Bryant Durrell@innocence· Jun 1

Another sterling commenter from the Seattle Times, which should probably stop assuming reporters can moderate their own articles in their copious spare time. Both of these are from the same guy, both posted around the same time. Self-awareness is for liberals, I guess.

Comment reading “No dissenters allowed in the comments. God the left is intolerant.”

Bryant Durrell@innocence· May 30

Look what came in the mail! Super cool zines full of @kinoventura.bsky.social’s crime movie reviews and some nifty art which I admire the hell out of. Get yourself copies at kino-ventura.square.site/s/shop.

Two zines, issues 1 and 2 of Apache Revolver (cinema crime journal). Issue 1 is a bright yellow cover with a photo of an Apache revolver (weird combo brass knuckles/revolver item). Issue 2 is a white cover, red lettering and a sketch of a Japanese woman in a kimono with a gun, also in red.

Bryant Durrell@innocence· May 30

Annnnnd done!

Three Criterion Blu-ray boxes, arranged attractively side by side on my lap: Point Blank, the Zatoichi box set, and Rififi.

Bryant Durrell@innocence· May 29

A winner is me! They did a few rounds of trivia and I was able to remember which Criterion movie includes songs like “Hellhole” and “Stonehenge.” I won this book of postcards. 🎥