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Bryant Durrell

@innocence.com

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. https://innocence.com/~durrell

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Bryant Durrell@innocence.com · 2d ago

For better or worse, you could build a litrpg premise out of this. “Devour the enemy for power” is a common enough trope over there.

Premee Mohamed@premeemohamed.com · 2d ago

The only *guaranteed* piece of craft advice I can give -- I mean the advice that is universally applicable -- is that if you kill many other writers and eat their scribere gland (roughly the size of a black-eyed pea, so be careful not to damage it) then your prose will improve immensely

Bryant Durrell@innocence.com · 3d ago

Fairport Convention’s three Sandy Denny albums, because her voice and Thompson’s guitar and Ashley Hutchings and the story they tell about the evolution of the band’s music. For posterity: What We Did on Our Holidays Unhalfbricking Liege & Lief

Mia Murphy 🏳️‍⚧️@miamurphy.com · 4d ago

What's the best three album run from a band? (the correct answer is Moving Pictures, Signals, and Grace Under Pressure by Rush, but I'm excited to learn second place)

Bryant Durrell@innocence.com · 3d ago

The good: I can see three PSH films I’ve never seen on the big screen this September! The uh: and I’ll get to see them along with a theater full of avid Hunger Games fans. Actually that’ll probably help the overall experience.

Bryant Durrell@innocence.com · 5d ago

Population: One: Fantasia 2026 Wrapup (RSS crosspost)

Population: One: Fantasia 2026 Wrapup (RSS crosspost)

Another Fantasia visit wrapped for me and S! I already talked about how nice it was to be back in Montreal; that continued to be awesome. I spent an hour or so after I got back going through and meticulously adding theater tags to my old Letterboxd Fantasia entries, so I can now say that I have spent around 128 hours sitting in Théâtre Hall (the main theater), 108 hours in De Sève (the secondary theater), and 8 hours in Cinéma du Musée (the spillover theater). All in all this is a significant portion of my movie-going life. I’ve spent more physical time in SIFF Uptown, but fewer viewings thanks to all the shorts.

popone.innocence.com

Bryant Durrell@innocence.com · 5d ago

Hot damn, 12 blog posts this month? I might be back. August will be quieter for sure but I feel good about my pacing... well, I feel good that I'm writing again, really.

Bryant Durrell@innocence.com · 5d ago

Apparently after Fantasia I like watching classics. Come for the discovery of how cynical Minnelli could be, stay for the lukewarm Supergirl take. 📽️

Four movie posters, with ratings: Some Came Running: 4 stars Ninotchka: 4 stars Supergirl: 3 stars Wanda: 5 stars
Bryant Durrell@innocence.com · 6d ago

Just saw Some Come Running and I was not at all prepared for how savage Vincente Minnelli could get. And the way Sinatra, MacLaine, and Martin leverage their personas by showing the frustration beneath, wow. 🎥

Bryant Durrell@innocence.com · 6d ago

I don’t have any skin in the game as far as Star Wars D&D goes but I’m interested insofar as someone at Disney was willing to sign off on this. Disney IPs are not centrally controlled per se so this doesn’t mean the Dungeons & Disney floodgates are wide open but still.

Bryant Durrell@innocence.com · 6d ago

Population: One: Varying Vacations (RSS crosspost)

Population: One: Varying Vacations (RSS crosspost)

I’m going to tell a couple of related stories about a similar topic today, just because they fall together in my mind and I think it’s an interesting contrast. Let’s talk about time off from both a management and a human perspective. (All quotes are paraphrased from memory.) I’ve generally been fortunate enough to have managers who, at the worst, would listen to HR when they were told that they needed to make me use up my accrued vacation time. And I assume they weren’t generally just waiting for HR to nudge them; they genuinely understood that vacation was important and everyone needs time off now and again. Even working in the video game industry, which is legendary for crunch, I only had a really brutal stretch once. Even Chris Chong, my boss at Amazon, was pretty good about nudging me – although not during preparation for peak traffic periods. At Amazon you gotta plan your life a little more carefully than usual.

popone.innocence.com

Bryant Durrell@innocence.com · last wk.

I have beaten my OCD by painstakingly adding per-theater tags to every last Letterboxd diary entry for my Fantasia trips. Add some SQLite work with my LB exports and I can tell you I've spent 308 hours watching movies at Fantasia, of which 127.4 were spent in Hall Theater and 107.7 in De Seve.

Seattle City Council@council.seattle.gov · last wk.

City Council and Mayor celebrate progress for housing and environment with passage of SEPA appeals legislation council.seattle.gov/2026/07/28/c...

City Council and Mayor celebrate progress for housing and environment with passage of SEPA appeals legislation - Seattle City Council Blog

Today the City Council passed Council Bill 121215, streamlining appeals processes for zoning and planning actions by the city. The legislation impacts appeals related to the State Environmental Policy...

council.seattle.gov

Bryant Durrell@innocence.com · last wk.

Just got out of Agnes Varda’s adaptation of the Odyssey. Jane Birkin is amazing as Penelope and I found I didn’t miss Odysseus as an on-screen presence at all. The way Varda uses art as a metaphor for communication between Penelope, Circe, and Athena is pretty cool.

Jess Nevins@jessnevins.bsky.social · last wk.

Just got out of Béla Tarr's adaptation of the Odyssey. Really amazing. Three shots: the beach at Troy, the beach on Circe's island, and the beach on Ithaca. All the dialogue was in Attic Greek *and* was muffled by the sounds of the waves. Ended w/BOB from Twin Peaks digging his way out of the sand.