Secret Snow Club

You remember me, right? I wrote that review of Lancer that everyone liked? And a few other reviews?

Oh, oh, oh, a lot of people had opinions on that TTRPG iceberg that I think will outlive anything I ever write or put my soul into right?

Well, did you know that I have a blog? It's my patreon. Wow, wowie, wowza. So cool.

Now, here's the kicker, you (don't) have to give me money (insert evangelion meme). You can just read, like, all the shit I do and review over there. I'll be moving all of my substack posts there until I empty that b out.

BUT, if you do give me money, then you can also get my games for free. So, if you like my writing at all, you might find one or two of my games (SONGBIRDS) kinda cool.

I think it'd be cool if you joined me over there as a free member and just let me ramble to you sometimes. *Some* posts will end up on tumblr because I like it here a little more than everywhere else, but it's exhausting keeping just one thing updated, so...

See you there!

(this is an essay im working on)

I guess at some point you just stop eating bugs. I can’t say when or how. Or if there’s a why. One day you and your friend share a worm between you (it’s hot outside, too hot for skin, sky a painful blue, creek is begging for rain while trees hold their breath) and the next thing you know, you’re 34, and you can’t talk about it anymore. You think eating bugs is normal. They did it in the Lion King. Y’know, you were a kid. That’s what kids do. But when you bring it up, even couching it as a “weird thing you did a long time ago,” everyone is, like, “no, ew, gross, you’re a mutant, time to die.” Public execution at next light.

But I don’t know when I stopped or why. We never liked eating the bugs. It just happened. Slime and crunch. Bleugh. I would never do that now. I’d gag. I can’t remember if I did it then. And it’s not like we did it all the time, just more than once. And it wasn’t a dare or anything like that. Y’know, you punch his shoulder and egg him on to do something you’d never, ever do, like, poke the dead animal, or break into that abandoned building, or run away from his stepfather, disappearing into the night. But it wasn’t like that. Like, maybe at first we flirted with it as a dare. Haha, wouldn’t it be funny if? But the memories aren’t like that. I don’t remember the first time or the last, but it wasn’t like that. You’d just be trawling through the creek, hips wet, shirts soaked and wrapped around the scalp, and you’d see a little trawler on the water, scoop it up and down it goes. Sure, we’d laugh, or even say “ew.” But no one really meant anything. The eating didn’t mean much. Nothing really did.

It’s hot, and you bike down to the empty lot where they pile all that dirt, and you dig around for rocks to throw at passing cars. Overturn one and there’s a beetle, green glistening, and the wings stick to your teeth. I was terrified of bugs. My mom had to kill the spiders in my room until I left for college. I’d sit pacified by the thing on my wall. But the woods were different. I don’t even think we were human out there. Or separate people. Cause, like, we didn’t eat bugs when we sat around a backyard fire, or swam in the pool. Definitely didn’t do it when we were alone. Never talked about it, but some things you just know. 

The Woods wasn’t one singular place. There was a patch behind the railroad tracks just beyond Heath’s mom’s place. It squeezed between two crop fields, exploding out around it, leaving these flat expanses that were either impassible mud traps or dry, deserts of burnt skin. We hid in shade and laid in ditches when the teenagers rode by on motorbikes or farmers on their ATVs. The first time we got arrested was in those woods. Smashing bottles and old shit in the junkyard on the far side. The cop made me get my mom so he could reprimand me in front of her. She smoked her cigarette while he wasted her time.

There was the stretch of woods behind the Junior High, where my father took me for walks when we would visit my Grandmother, and where I would explore after we moved in with her. It unfolded like a dungeon as I aged from grade school, where the entrance twisted through a hilly, narrow path adorned with local art pieces, like the headless deer and rotting oak bridge, into junior high, where a new entrance was discovered that connected back to my childhood through an old mining trail, but then punched further into what might as well have been a new dimension of reality made of endless forests. When we’d walk far enough, we might come out into a cornfield, or a dirt road that we wouldn’t recognize until many years later when we’d drive out parent’s cars as far as we could on a quarter tank. 

Some genius poured a ton of concrete down the side of a hill into the woods. The ground a rough patchwork of stone with trunks of withered trees sprouting out of it. A tunnel that ended with a pinprick of light took us to somewhere else. There was a hill where wildflowers grew and thirty different paths all converged, like every animal knew this was the place to be. The thunder called them all there to feel the grass blow and see the sun. 

In our twenties, Heath and I would live in a trailer up the hill past the sewage treatment plant next to those woods. They were within a minute’s walk from us for several years and we never went down there. We didn’t eat bugs anymore. We worked in a warehouse together and would come home beyond midnight and play Dungeons and Dragons until five or six, go to bed, and do it again the next day. 

As kids, we would start at that sewage treatment plant, where the clean water spilled out and formed a creek, and trudge through the water as it changed in depth, seeing how far it would go. Now I know where it goes and how far. I can point to the furthest spot we made it, just there, where it goes through someone’s front yard and under the stone bridge that makes up their driveway. I think that was the last time I went to those woods. We hadn’t eaten bugs for years at that point.

I consider myself lucky to have grown where I did. Within ten miles reach there was a county forest preserve, a state forest preserve, and a national forest preserve. Three distinct sets of woods. Three more places The Woods grew and took root. Y’know, we’re older, driving legally, skipping school to hike seven miles around the lake all the old men pretend to fish at while they get drunk. After class, we load a bag full of stones and hike fourteen miles to an old campsite where Paul shows us the rock where his boy scout troop crucified a frog. He promises it was already dead. Who cares.

Community college. We buy a 32-pack of Natty Ice and lay in the shallow of an icy river, drinking until we can’t feel our flesh. Talk about the old adventures. Buy a two dollar tube from Walmart and float down the county river until we’re in Indiana. One time I saw a snake drop from a branch into the water and imagined the scales crunching in our teeth, the body long enough to fit in each of us at the same time. Do snakes bleed? And is it blue?

In The Woods we slithered out of our skin. Ditched intestines, glottal instrument, cast them to the river. Liver left behind. Bone broken into shapes sort-of-human. We spit on leaves and stuck them to our bodies. Chewed the sticks into paste, painted ourselves in the glue. Rolled in it. Molded it to our bodies. Three young larvae wrapped in slime. Hardening pupa. Cracked to reveal proto-creature eyes, blinking tall ways. Inside is dark cold and dormant cobwebs. 

That shared monster. Psychographic readings off the charts. No delineation between flesh. Just as The Woods comprised every patch of trees big enough to block view of the roads, a living planar space from spatial memory, we were one. And only existed together.

She ate bugs. She drank from the creeks. Stared at the sun. Oh god, what a thing. Y’know. A disciple–The Woods, the body and the blood. Psyche, pscyhe, psyche. It’s all there if I could simply show. Let your eyes feel the bumps of her flesh as sweat drips from her stinger. That sunflower taste. 

We were afraid of it when we were older. I don’t go to The Woods anymore. I walk paved path and gaze into it, but the thought of a spider web tangling my ratty hair makes me ill. It’s dirty out there. I used to shed a pound of dried mud on the classroom floor from my fidgeting feet. Her stench clung to us after devolution. It would have been so much simpler if.

I twist my spine, mirroring the corpse of the animal until it hurts. A mangled doe. Found in the backyard, slumped lazy near the recycling. I’m in the country where town ceases and one, black road reaches towards Indiana. Two antlers poke through the doe’s head. Small. Blunted. Cracked after kissing windshield. The puff of tail stands up. Showing white. Cease, young deer. Wait for mommy to cross the road. I am Jane Doe.

“Fucking freak of nature,” the killer says. A farmer, old-sun face, grizzly bear chin, dirty sleeves rolled. “Would have shot it myself if it hadn’t walked out in front of my Ford.” He drove home buzzed last night, or the night before. Doesn’t matter. He describes to me the three or four different guns he would have used. “Now the shotgun, she’s messy, but at least she makes it painful.”

I pull out a cigarette and lean against my uncle’s garbage truck. 

“Okay, Tom,” he says. “We’re gonna wrap it and toss it in the back. You take it with you.”

“Like, home?”

“No,” he says, wiping sweat into his head. “The dump.”

“Oh,” I say. He’s not supposed to see me smoking. “I’m glad it died quick.”

“Sure,” he says.

The compactor wines and scoops the messy tarp into the early-morning ocean of waste-rot held in its metal carcass. Dirty diaper bags, a soiled twin mattress, a dropped 32” television. So many little lives lost in the garbage. Violent and meshed with blood organs.

He gives me $120 at the end of the day. I fold it into my pocket and ask if the landfill will take the doe. He tells me that, after the beast is full (slapping the side of his truck, passed down to him from his father), the dump takes the truckload. Doesn’t matter what’s in it. I wonder how many bodies hide just outside my small town.

I’m going to get the procedure done today. There will be hands inside of me. I point to the graph and say “I want the Marathon.” And all the scientists and their wives nod and motion me onto the table. My organs will be scooped out by latex hands. Fondled. Shaped and folded to fit in jars or new bodies. The bones pulped, but that’s much later. They will take pictures for me to see. God, I can’t wait. And then the brain. Finally. Free. Stem become wire and plugged ethernet-style into the great hub. Uploaded forever. 

I like Vandal because she’s skinny. Do fat people deserve to live? We surveyed 100 people and found that the number one answer is fuck no. I’m six years old, sat in the dentist chair and that fucker wouldn’t give me a tootsie pop cause I’m chubby. Mom says it’s McDonald’s for dinner tonight, but it’s my fault for being overweight. Never had a doctor’s visit that wasn’t just about how I’m a fat piece of shit that deserves to die. I’m thirteen. Like, what is in my control right now? Apparently everything and I’m deserving of the hell my body gives me.

I am inextricable from my body. It is perception manifest. I am what others see. I live this as a trans woman. I live this as a fat girl. I live this as a queer. The old man on the street calls me “brother” while the lady getting off the bus calls me “miss.” That is who I am to those people. They see me as a fat, white woman. They see me as a smoker who can bum them a cig. I can’t remove myself from this with language or self love. 

I’ve never felt comfortable in this shell. It’s not right. I’m trans, and I’m supposed to make peace with my body and yes, my dysphoria has gotten much, much better since starting estrogen, thank you very much, but I refuse to be a good little girl for your model. I am doing the procedure. I am getting a new body. It is made of silk. It is skinny. I am a girl and I will wear baggy clothes. My jeans fit nice now. I don’t have to think about how my tummy looks every second of the day. Thank you. Have a nice day.

I don’t want to disappear.

I like Vandal because she has swagger. She has an arm cannon. Bam. The spikes on her head are sexy. She can slide far and has nice tits. I like her because she’s soft like silk and has divots cut from her thighs. I like the fan art of her and Thief sharing a liquid cheeseburger. I don’t want to have to feel guilty for eating a cheeseburger. 

They make the burgers out of people, y’know? Or something like that. The Dire Marsh project was struggling. Food running out. So they make a trip up to the mother ship and bring down one of the cryo pods full of people frozen from Mars. Blend em up. Turn them into slush. Tell everyone it’s a liquid cheeseburger. Put two spouts on it, so one meal gets shared between two. 

Clothes never fit right until my body got used to the estrogen. I like being a fat girl. That’s my life. Has been for all time. Y’know, you can’t really say that around people without them trying to convince you it’s not true. There’s a hard line to find that distinguishes the cultural dislike and the eating disorder. Its signal jammed and pixelated. Crosses over itself, Evangelion psychograph. 

When my gf grabs my tummy and growls like a fucking wolf, I am in love. 

Still. I want to change my body. Thus the procedure. 

I was looking at the brochure and the marketing department behind these shells is flawless. Each one has its own personality modules, their own voices. You not only are adopting a new face, a new body, but a new way of moving through the world. Your thoughts and memories, their skills. Their expressions. 

It’s less that I am Vandal or that I want to be Vandal. It’s that Vandal is an expression of something inside of me that before I could only feel. When I see the Vandal shell in the Achromatic Rush variant, I see my shoulders in boxy clothing. I see a face that hides somewhere in me. Uncovered by the vision of it. It’s all in there. It’s always been in there. And seeing it for the first time unblurs her in my head. I don’t see myself in other things, I discover.

There’s no fear of losing myself along the way. Just as I would be a different person if I had been born in a different body, I will continue to be a different person in any shell. Old. New. Doesn’t matter. The human brain doesn’t stop developing at 25. It forever changes. Forever. Infinite. And now I can be infinite. And I will change forever. 

The Marathon procedure isn’t about acceptance. I refuse to make this about accepting my body. Acceptance is not about desire. Or change. I take drugs to change. To move close to something true within me. It is not my job as a fat girl to keep my body on behalf of society. You shut up and you love it. It is not my job as a trans woman to keep my upbringing for the benefit of society. Culture is not my responsibility as a servant and victim of it. 

I’ve lived most of my life with my body at odds with the rest of me. My body is a cage rather than part of me. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream type shit. It’s body horror. A pilot in a machine I don’t understand. Now, I inject LCL into my veins and slow assimilate with the bunny girl inside of me. It’s an experience of transhumanism, altering the body through technology: syringes, prescription estrogen, and metabolic altering pills. I am a creature of science fiction.

Transhumanism has been central to science fiction since its inception. Machines that take a form reminiscent of the human body and act as an extension of it, perhaps even a stand in for it. In our lived reality, we get cars, tanks, fighter jets, shapes that are inhuman. They are machine and we are flesh. The separation is clear. But in fiction, we get new bodies. The lines are blurred. We are connected to it and reliant on it to exist.

I can follow this back to Frankenstein, Mary Shelly’s iconic piece of feminine literature, which shows Men as a force of violence, creating life for punishment, while women reap the consequences. A piece of work that seeks to break open the role of motherhood and make it empathetic and understandable, and to do it, it had to create technology never before seen. You can follow it back to the Cyberpunk generation, where capitalist horror created Alien, and cultural fear of minorities pits them as androids in stories where they are hunted and killed. 

But to do only that would be a disservice to science fiction as it stands today. There is an elephant blocking the path towards Marathon. A swollen gum where bloody, tooth roots sever and a trail of blood inches towards the dirt.

“I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter,” by Isabel Fall is a weird part of internet history and science fiction, not only for the title being a controversial reference to popular, anti-trans, 4 Chan rhetoric from the 2010s, but for the subsequent attacks on the author, a trans woman, after it was published.

The story is a provocative piece of science fiction, both with its prose, and in the way it showed trans writers a path forward into a new lens of transhumanism. The short story used transhumanism as a way to disconnect from humanity, not transcend it. Technology as a step away from humanity, not a step towards divinity. An act of dehumanization felt deeply in the hearts of every girl who hadn’t started E, who feared the future, or didn’t think one existed.

And the reaction to it was tragic. Not only for the shoulder check to trans science fiction that threatened to shove it back in the closet, but also in the harassment campaign levied against Fall both publicly and privately, which was excused on the back of her limited internet presence. It forced her to out herself publicly, pull the story after just a few days, and subsequently detransition.It’s one of the most contentious internet fiascos of the 20s. It’s a tragedy. A work of science fiction being black-and-blued by our cyberpunk reality as a form of transmisogyny.

Let me say this: A trans woman has lived as a trans woman for her entire life, full stop. Her transition is just one act in the larger tapestry of her journey. She does not choose to transition in order to, say, erase the past or make right any wrong doings from the past–instead it has been true her entire life regardless of the rest of the world’s connection to her. Transition, before its undertaken, is either an idea she never heard of, or one that is so frightening and othering to behold that it takes time to even accept on a personal level, let alone let loose upon the surrounding world. Being a trans woman might involve half a lifetime struggling or being unsure before making any medical decisions. Regardless, trans womanhood is simply true from Then until Now and the fact that the story was used as a way to push a lot of AGP, anti-trans bullshit against the author is a tragedy. 

To me there is nothing more horrifying than being trapped inside a body that misrepresents my soul. Well, to be more specific, there’s nothing more horrifying than being limited to just my body. To the greater world, I am what I appear as and nothing more. That is a true and violent fear. Violent in that it puts people like me in danger. The body seen as a weapon can be responded to with violence in much the same way a person carrying a gun is seen as a combatant. I am no different from an attack helicopter in public. I am violence.

They said of Fall’s story, "this reads like it was written by a straight white dude.” A body limited to the words it chose to type and the order it chose to type them in. At that moment you are betrayed by your body and left to deal with the limited perception of those who feel hate towards your body. To eject from it and be jettisoned into space is the only outcome you see where your heart won’t thump, and your breath will return to your chest. 

The modern era of science fiction is shaped by the trans body. Much like how every movie, song, poster, or whatever, that features someone smoking a cig is a cigarette advertisement to anyone addicted to cigarettes, perhaps anything that centers the body, transhumanism, and violence will inevitably lead to trans horror. Considering these themes are shaped by its trans authors, this is purposeful, political, and powerful.

I write a lot of essays and fiction n stuff.

And I have a patreon that is free but also helps support me.

You can find all my essays and most of my games there, and for a dollar you can support an endangered artist and help make her habitat more enriched <3

Hope you're still into it because I'm chomping at the bit for your photography.

Been doing my damndest to spread the word of Kill Jane Doe as far as I can in the Marathon places I chill. It's the kind of art I want to see made. Presentation so slick if it were a coffee table book at B&N I'd expect it to cost 10 times your asking price. Peerless Arachne representation. Kudos so massive its gravity compresses it into a sphere. Thanks for putting it out there!

Yes! I'm excited for Night Marsh, the survival horror vibes will be off the charts. Photography will be so fun there.

Hihi, im snow, and im running a sale on my most recent published projects.

Stuff like this! A poetry collection, a huge zine on Marathon, and collection of TTRPG essays, as well as a few of my games as well, Soul Cemetery, Lilancholy, and Songbirds.

You should check it out.

Hope this is not too weird to share, and sorry if it is. You can ignore it if it makes you uncomfortable.