shel

The Transsexual Chofetz Chaim

Mutant, librarian, poet, union rabble rouser, dog, Ashkenazi Jewish. Neuroweird, bodyweird, mostly sleepy.


I write about transformative justice, community, love, Judaism, Neurodivergence, mental health, Disability, geography, rivers, labor, and libraries; through poetry, opinionated essays, and short fiction.


I review Schoolhouse Rock! songs at @PropagandaRock


Website (RSS + Newsletter)
shelraphen.com/

hthrflwrs
@hthrflwrs

OIL IS LIFE - LIFE IS MONEY - MONEY IS DEATH

IT IS THE YEAR FIFTY THOUSAND AND YOU ARE A SNAKE FARMER WITH TEN DAYS TO LIVE. BUY SNAKES, WATCH THEM BURST FROM THE GROUND, AND FIGHT THEM TO THE DEATH WITH GARDENING TOOLS. SELL THEIR OIL AND TEETH FOR RARER SNAKES AND BETTER WEAPONS. OIL IS LIFE; LIFE IS MONEY; MONEY IS DEATH. YOUR ONLY LEGACY WILL BE A HIGH SCORE.

OIL IS LIFE

SNAKE FARM is a top-down, *Vampire Survivors*-style action roguelike that lets you set your own challenges. Buy snakes to fight, then use their remains to buy stronger snakes and better weapons. You decide your enemies, pushing your luck every round in pursuit of exponential growth. You only have ten days to live; make sure every one counts.

LIFE IS MONEY

With twenty upgradable pieces of equipment, from deadly throwing trowels to tractors that hate you, each run's build can go a different direction. Will you rely on high-risk headshots with a pitchfork? Igniting your own oil supply to explode snakes? Freezing your enemies with a high-power hose? As your farm fills with snakes, only smart build-crafting can keep you alive.

MONEY IS DEATH

Eventually you'll make a mistake. You'll get too greedy, buy too many snakes, get cornered and destroyed. With each new run, you learn a little more, get a little further, get a better score. The more you go, the more you realize that your truest enemy is your own hubris.

Wishlist it now!


shel
@shel

I play tested this game and it's really really really fun



We got this YA novel in at work called Cub which is about a 17-year-old chubby gay guy who works for a commercial kitchen and has various relationships where his low self esteem about his body causes him to let himself be taken advantage of by his boss working at a commercial kitchen—and an older guy named Mama Bear teaches him to have confidence and turn down creeps. It's one of those "high interest novellas" written for older teens who are struggling with reading and need something very short and easy to read but not written for children.

But this is the cover image. This guy is absolutely not a cub or plus-sized at all. This guy is only slightly too large to be a Twink but is certainly conventionally attractive. It drives me crazy like we can't even feature a fat person on the cover of a book about being fat?! Literally a book about learning to love your plus-sized body through a community of plus-sized people and you can't have a plus-sized model on the cover?!

It actually seems like a pretty good book too and as someone who was an insecure gay teen who was mentored by an older bear, it's super touching to see that portrayed so well in a book! Even though very soon after turning 18 I ended up transitioning.

The publisher credits the cover image to a stock photo company. So I guess the issue was they couldn't find a plus-sized model in a chef's outfit in any stock photos. That's also messed up!!! Booo



I'm reading the graphic novel adaptation of the 1970 classic Ringworld and while I'm sure that the quality of the original novel is much greater, it's still fascinating how a book that was so influential just has... such bad character writing. In particular the protagonist is such a Cool Guy Party Dad who is always smarter and more reasonable than everyone else, stronger, cooler, tells everyone what to do and is always correct, has no real personality beyond being gary stu wish fulfillment fantasy for the presumably male reader. It really does feel like the parody of a pulp sci-fi novel as portrayed in a later story about a nerd who escapes into fantasies and imagines himself as a Cool Guy who Gets All the Babes. In terms of world-building, this book invented so many of the sci-fi tropes we take for granted now. So that certainly takes a lot of creativity. But a lot of it is just so stupid, like humans being bred for luck through eugenics simply through making it so you have to win a lottery to have children. Therefore, all humans became very lucky. That's... so dumb... IDK I guess it just really makes me appreciate how far we've come with science fiction. I'm really grateful that of the influential 1970s sci-fi authors, it is LeGuin and Butler whose work is most influential on today's Hugo winners, and not Ringworld.