Since we're talking marketing today... I have a zine about branding coming out, but, like, here's a place the vast majority of us (including me) often just *don't do the work,* and if you want to improve results, you should do that work.
This is almost certainly effective guerilla-style marketing, but also, ask me why I feel good about moving furniture around for my money and generally making my game things for free.
Unexpected by fucking who?
Y'all got dipshits running everything, are letting billionaires be fully trash, and have stuck tariffs everyplace. Don't be shocked the wall falls down when you're hitting it with a sledgehammer.
I mean, Rowling would be living underground in a secret bunker somewhere, so maybe not more fun for her, but that's a sacrifice I think we could make.
I would prefer a world where a "gender reveal party" was something you threw when your trans friend came out, and instead of accidental fires, it was traditional to give them a molotov cocktail with smoke colourant inside and let them burn something down on PURPOSE.
I think that'd be more fun.
Which is why "branding" should not be your only lens for examining games, yes.
But it IS the topic of the zine I'm writing.
We're still in "It thaws a little in the daytime, then at night that all turns back into sheet ice" here in Edmonton.
*Sigh*
At least it's predictable, I guess.
I mean, old hands all could have *theoretically* identified "I don't get to fuck werewolves" as a pain point some people have had in the dominant vampire game, but.... I would not have ranked it highly?
More fool, me.
for bloodsuckers this was an acknowledgement that most people picking up a vampire game are probably here because they want to fuck a werewolf
Apparently the New York Times has posted a blind taste test for AI writing that is so bad it's turning people into the Joker?
Good times, good times.
(Needs a line to say "Your proposition doesn't NEED to be your tagline, but it's damned efficient")
Branding zine:
The unique proposition! Wheeeee!
It was way after anyone cared much, there was a friend-of-a-friend thing (trying to remember the exact connection, but it was two step, not one). Not absolutely solid, but enough.
*terms, bah.
I started out on USEnet, but RPGnet is very much "the streets that made me" in internet yes.
In the days those were from, yes.
It's far, far less like that now.
Fair. I don't know if I was much meaner, but I sure did laugh at a lot more vicious stuff.
(Or, I suppose, not so much when we were rougher but before those who like being mean for it's own sake kind of separated out to their own places; they're still around.)
Yeah, even back in the day when we were a LOT rougher, it got a lot of "Wait, what the fuck" but also a lot of "Dude is doing his thing, he's into it, let the man cook".
Yeah, it kind of kills the laugh. There's still a kind of fascination to it, but... Whole other thing.
The HYBRID / Timecube guy was probably genuinely schizophrenic, though.
There's that option, too.
My work here is done.
If you must read a review of one of the worst games ever, may as well have it be an entertaining one.
Top link on this page to get an archived review that is vastly better than the book.
forum.rpg.net/index.php?th...
Yeah, at the moment, there's no big call. But if BlueSky gets new management that wants to "clear out the woke" or some bullshit, that's my solid fallback position.
When people started fleeing twitter, a lot of them landed on ones where the rules are, like, shitty HOA strict.
It, uh, didn't go well for them.
Yup. It's a... network of networks? Like, I'm on the instance dice.camp while others might be on mastodon.social or one of a million others. All of which talk to each other unless an instance owner blocks them.
But local cultures and blocklists and such on some of them are... wild.
Probably half of my favourite books ought to require "Look, this has some nasty shit in it" warning labels of various sorts, so I get at least a little of that.
As someone on a GREAT mastodon instance, I think the ideal answer of where to jump in my head is "FIRST get some friends together and set up an instance of it or a fork off it (Friendica, etc) that suits you, then go THERE; take your own local culture along."
