#bully pulpit

[hale-my-nathan]

Trump Weird News - Bullying By Threats Of Primarying!

That's Hitting Below The Belt!

[open-hearth-rpg]

#RPGCovers Week Thirteen The Warren (2015) Brennen Reece (Layout and Visual Design)

Sometimes I want clean, smart simplicity. And that’s hard. You can do it with minimalism, but to do it in a way that evokes a feeling, grabs the eye and tells a story, that’s challenging. Bully Pulpit Games has always been great at this– Fiasco, for example, reset the template of what an indie could be and look like. It used simple, distinct graphics in combination with a dynamite font to establish something immediately recognizable. 

And much as I love Fiasco, I want to talk about two of their later games (today & tomorrow). 

I really love the cover of The Warren. It is simple, with only five colors, with one of those being white. I love how the three colors of the background (red, yellow ochre, tan) shift in a rainbow. There’s the feeling maybe of a sunset, with our rabbit silhouette against that. It takes a moment to realize the rabbit’s looking away from us– I don’t know if the silhouette there is in black, but on the printed version the adjacent colors make it look more like a super-deep brown. 

The font is simple and lower case, which is appropriate, matching the background colors. 

And here’s why I think this cover is perfect. It is a rabbit, outlined roughly. We can tell that at a glance. And it could be any rabbit. One of the strengths of The Warren which gets overlooked is the variety of stories, eras, and themes which can be played out. My favorite convention game was run by Renee Knipe, with rabbits living in historical Egypt. If we had a distinct, specific image of a particular rabbit, that would have closed out the imaginative space. 

We would see a rabbit which would lock down things about the breed, the place, the health, of these animals. We might assume it is just a Watership Down game, when it is actually so much more. Instead we get a more universal image. That’s so important in games like this where players do the heavy lifting of collaborative creation. Rather than images that direct them in particular ways, the game offers a token, a platonic shadow that we can move to perceive. 

[kakita-shisumo]

A Modest Proposal

So here's the deal: the Life is Strange fandom, pretty much from its beginning, has used a very utilitarian standard for ship names: LastnameLastname, possibly cutting multi-syllables in half. For the most part, it works, but a) there are definite problems (fr'ex, any ship involving Brooke, because of Nathan), and b) it's boring. Thematic/punny ship names are much more fun, and dangit, we already have Maximum Victory out there in the wild, so the precedent is set. I therefore call upon my fellow LiS fanatics to take up the cause of more interesting ship names! And in that vein, I hereby offer my contribution: hereafter, the Victoria/Kate ship shall be known as Bully Pulpit! thanks for coming to my tedtalk, yadda yadda go Bully Pulpit

[nuggetjvance]

I'm working on helping Bubba get healthy. He is a recent rescue. He is the sweetest little senior American Bully. He deserves to be healthy so he can play and have fun for the rest of his senior years.

His Neuter $130 vaccinations $75 microchip $40

$40 to look at his skin and in his ears.He also has to have a heartworm check. I don't have a cost for it. They will be checking his left eye for entropion. It is always watering and crusty no matter how many times a day I clean it. In total for this small part it is almost 290. That doesn't include any medication. It also isn't going to cover any bloodwork, fecal testing, or skin scrapes. He will also need his monthly preventative. If anyone would like to donate the donations are going straight to the veterinarian.

You can call in donations for Bubba under Tammy Vance

Animal Medical Center

107 Strauss Drive

Park Hills, Mo 63601

[phone]

[adtothebone]

It’s nice to get out of the office for some location scouting now and then.

[open-hearth-rpg]

#RPGCovers Week Thirteen Night Witches (2014) Brennen Reece (Layout and Visual Design)

I mentioned The Warren yesterday and the way it manages rich simplicity– again not that the covers look simple but they’re elemental in their presentation. Night Witches does the same, but with some additional tricks in its arsenal. 

Let’s start with the split in the front cover– reflecting the day/night cycle of the game itself. The division is sharp and there’s a downward trajectory to the line, a feeling of flying not unlike the planes themselves crashing down. The sharp color split also echoes the look of a signal flag. There’s a little touch which might not be symbolic, but I love. The way the red of the spine bleeds over onto the front cover, creating a striking block 

The font is not exactly distressed, but more looking on close examination like an ink-pad stamp. The mirroring of the English title and the Cyrillic lettering is great and again reinforces the sense of the split. 

Then there’s the plane and the moon. The latter is striking because it is out and exposed. Moonlight makes for better raiding, but at the same time it exposes those pilots even more. There’s a danger to it and yet another one of the costs and hard decisions which our protagonist pilots have to make. 

But the visual image silhouette here isn’t a sleek warplane. It’s a biplane– a remnant which our squadron is condemned to use. It’s a subtle signal to the reader about what historical setting we’re about to enter. The bottom of the split triangle returns to that image– subtle and marked with yellow lines against the red. We see the schematic of the archaic tools the PCs will be given. 

[ohyeslawd]

damn son.

[hendrik-ten-napel]

"Why'd you pull yer piece??"