Rabid Sharks
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Prison Blog

In which Possum recounts his experiences as an offender in the system.

Possum Bones is autistic. He has identified as a dirty kid in the past, and he’s attended multiple rainbow gatherings. He has several years left to serve in the Washington Correctional system.

He has been making art since he could sit up. He communicates better in writing than speech. If you are interested in the experience of an autistic person doing prison time, check out his Prison Blog. If you are a fan of comic art, underground/outsider music, Lovecraft, Clarke Ashton Smith, Murakami, Cixui Liu, etc.

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon

Once you get to purity forest its much more like a hardcore dungeon roguelike such as nethack etc but where you can play as any pokemon. I think most people hated this part of the game but if you're expecting an experience like Rogue, then its not bad. To get to purity forest however you have to slog thru the super easy, dull story mode , and then save latios and latias . Probably you can skip the legendary dog bonus arc to get here, since i don't have ho oh yet, and you must fight each dog to get rainbow wing for ho oh. As I expected, the XP is altered in these dungeons ( your level reset to 1 ) to fit within the paradigm of a 100 level dungeon... further cementing my suspicion that the game was inspired by Rogue, Angband, etc - the greatest hardcore dungeon crawlers concieved in the 80s and 90s . Some of the battling is a bit tedious because you must conserve PP, but it is Rogue level difficulty. If you choose a " tougher " more evolved pokemon it will take 2-3x as much time to level up. So there's an incentive to conservatively choose a lower evolution , conservatively sized pokemon ... Salamence for example begins with good stats but grows painfully slowly ... while doduo evolves at a 100 xp rate. Items that can't be found in the rest of the game simulate potions found in angband - panic button items like invisibility orb and warp seed abound. Its very clearly a Rogue clone. Its actually the closest game to rogue I've played since being in prison, mechanically , which is very unexpected. One of the things that's cool about this is that it means you don't have to level grind every pokemon in the game to use them because you can just take them to purity forest for this sort of " rogue mini game ". Anyway, I intentionally fast tracked through the latias event in order to get this, which I see as being the main point of the game.

Elisa Carlson