ETNO: River, Diamond, Producer

 The latest ETNO Art Challenge, (based on the randomly generated words River, Diamond, and Producer) was extended to two weeks this time around, which gave me a little time to play around with different "compression abuse" strategies.

These projects should ideally be kept pretty small in terms of time commitment and effort, so that no one is threatening to cut into valuable work or family time doing unpaid creative labor, but I'm already bad enough at time management that when one of the "trinities" goes long, I'm going to have to watch out for impulses to top myself or overreach...

The Producer that sprung to mind first was Michael Bay for whatever reason, and of course thinking about showbiz just called to mind all the current ugliness surrounding corporations and studios not wanting to compensate entertainment writers adequately for their craft.

Initially, I went down a couple of dead ends trying to find the name of a Hollywood producer that specifically has said or done something really crass recently in response to WGA's demands, but research time counts toward the challenge, and without a standout example mug to make uglier I opted to just run with the initial instinct. No love lost for Bay to be sure, but perhaps he'd be flattered that the prompt brought him to mind first!

The Diamonds are self evident, but the River part of the prompt comes from aping the font choices and logo stylings of the tremendously ahead of its time NES brawler River City Ransom, a game I never owned and thus am not intimately familiar with but is fascinating to study given it's one of the most notable early examples of the particular style of genre hybridization that the industry would go on rely on so thoroughly that the designation "RPG" barely describes anything that doesn't mechanically occur in just about every genre's core design!