Taste the Difference

This project started several months ago, when I suddenly became obsessed with making an ad for cigars from Crab Fragment Cay. I can’t explain it. (I mean, actually I can. Here I go.)

I like making things. I like designing games, writing stories, building models, painting minis, woodworking, filmmaking, podcasting, and anything else that lets me create.

When I started Crab Fragment Labs, I planned it as a creative outlet without boundaries. I wanted to make things for my own amusement, not just things to sell. The plan was to run wild for a few months, posting a mix of games and silly stuff, and then to look back and say “this is who we are, now let’s start a Patreon.”

I honestly expected to get more done in the first few months of 2020, but as I’ve already complained, time has slowed to a crawl, and neither the pandemic nor Animal Crossing are entirely to blame.

I called up my friend and fellow game maker Mike Selinker this week, to talk about reviving an old game called “Ladybug.” I told him I was feeling an unfamiliar emotion, ambition, perhaps for the first time this year. Sure enough, this week I had enough gumption to write some new outlines for game-related fiction, to build not one but two revisions of After the Fog, and to finish this ad.

Mike was also my guest on “Here All Week” this week, talking with Kelly and me about Animal Crossing, Lords of Vegas, Kickstarter, and politics in the age of CoronaVirus. Check it out here.

I think of Sabor del Cangrejo as a baby step towards building a deeper backstory for Crab Fragment Cay. Now I want to know where their factory store is. This in turn means that I want to design some of downtown Portunoidea, and build out more of the backstory of the island. There’s actually a lot there already, but none of it is finished to the point of sharing.

So perhaps I’m starting to shake off the paralysis of the new normal, and maybe I can pick up where I left off sometime in mid-February. I can’t promise anything. But then, promising things was never really the point.

And maybe at some point I’ll start that Patreon.

Okay, let’s talk more about this ad. At this point I have actually designed ten different labels for Sabor del Cangrejo in two product lines (Barata Caracha is the cheaper one). I shot this photo in my back yard this afternoon, using not only a custom label, but also a custom ashtray that I built earlier this week.

The format of this ad is obviously based on a half-page from a cigar catalog. I’m frankly amazed at the amount of work that goes into these things: they are pages and pages of basically the same ad: “This cigar is brown, it has a binder from Country X, where the tobacco is amazing, and a filler from Country Y, where the tobacco is differently amazing. It is currently on sale, and it tastes sort of brown., with hints of other brown flavors.”

The cigar in this photo came from a smoke shop in Puerto Rico. I picked it up when I was there with Nora last August (watch the video from BGG Cruise 2019). The flavor of this cigar was exactly as terrible as the text suggests.

The next step will be to create a whole sampler box, with ten different shapes and flavors. That’s a project for next week, though I’m already pretty far along. My sketch for that ad says it includes a “souvenir rosewood palm leaf” but that might have to become “souvenir rosewood palm leaf (not shown).”

I’ll let you dig deeper for more in this ad, but I’ll finish by noting that “sand leaves” are a real thing. They are indeed the least flavorful and most combustible leaves on the plant, and they are definitely trash.