its really fucked up that Roger Ebert died before the first true Games As Art game came out.

RIP dude, you would have loved Onee Chanbara Z2 Chaos

I'm a speculative fiction writer and artist called Polenth Blake. I'm generally known for stuff that's strange, quiet and diverse. A fair bit of my work is more gentle/cozy, but I do also write horror (especially at short story length). I've sold short fiction to places like Strange Horizons and Nature. The best known longer thing I've written is my novella Werecockroach.

I keep fish and invertebrates as pets. My focus is on cooler climate species (more temperate than tropical). This includes various species of millipedes, woodlice, cockroaches, mealworms and a few tarantulas. Zebra danios are my favourite aquarium fish.

Other hobbies include Second Life (I make mushrooms in Blender and sell them) and video games (I love walking simulators). I used to do more active stuff like monofin swimming/freediving and walking, but then I got long covid.

I created the covers for my books, but my main art thing is selling through POD art sites like Zazzle. I also have a YouTube channel with relaxing stuff like nature ambience, ASMR, invertebrates and rain. It's one of those weird arty channels without a firm niche that the experts always say you should never do.

I'm non-binary (androgynous), asexual, aromantic, dyslexic, dyscalculic, non-white, working class and have tinnitus/hidden hearing loss, sensory processing disorder and a delayed sleep phase (nocturnal). Plus whatever is going on with the post-viral stuff. I also live in the UK, so Twitter burning down turned out to be the least of my worries this year.

Hope to meet some new people and reconnect with others fleeing the apocalypse. I added a whole bunch of tags because people here said you could never have too many tags. 🍄

I'm curious about how others are keeping themselves safe from It's Multiple Airborne Viruses At Once and/or pollution and/or wildfires.