It’s more comforting to convince yourself that all men are assholes then it is to face reality which is that your ex boyfriend wasn’t destined to become an asshole but for a variety of complicated societal and personal reasons he ended up that way anyways even though he could’ve chosen to not be an asshole
Your dad doesn’t suck because he’s a man. Sure, him being a man probably contributed to the various circumstances in his life that caused him to suck and believing that men are destined to suck gives you an easy to understand answer of why the world is this way but in reality your dad sucks for a variety of complicated reasons. You’re probably still justified in throwing ice water in his face and cutting him off but he didn’t drive you to that as an inherent extension of his manhood. He drove you to that because he personally sucks. A lot of men personally suck for a lot of complicated reasons but unfortunately there isn’t one universal easy to explain answer as to why that is.
"Just because I'm right, doesn't mean I'm being helpful" is a vastly underrated thought process that I strongly encourage others to get comfortable with
At last, it is time. So this post is going to be different from my Hollow Knight one as I drew way more stuff this time around.
I was ecstatic when I found out that Silksong had food related worldbuilding in it. I was really grasping at straws with the Hollow Knight one, so I’m glad I have much more to work with here! >:)
In the past year I’ve learned way more about agriculture and food production. Previously, I was very reliant on Greenpath (I also regret not making proper use of Fungal Wastes)—however, Silksong also has way more varied and “nature-rich” regions which allowed me to spread out crops and resources over different areas. I’ll likely be making another post at some point that’ll go more into depth about my field research since I took over 200 in-game screenshots of plants and such…and then learned how to rip game files so I could get the raw spites.
Also bc I got questions about this with my last hk food concepts piece, if you want to use any of the ideas here for personal projects, fanwork, etc—go ahead. You don’t need my permission, the world is your oyster
But anyway, my commentary regarding the art will be under the cut since this is already getting pretty long.
Spices, Herbs, and Seasoning
Man I didn’t even come up with unique names for like 90% of this. Okay so this section probably takes the most inspiration from in-game environment sprites out of any of the agricultural sections. Thyme, tarragon, rosemary, sage, chamomile, white plum blossoms, the red pea flower, sumac, and of course clovers all are based on my silksong field journal. I added a new blossom to the nectar flower section, the purple ones are more rare but you can harvest saffron from them. The white ones come with plums and nectar. Vanilla blossoms are rare but chamomile is plentiful, it blends in with the white rose-like flowers that are all over Shellwood. The red flowers are called “pea plants” in the game files so i kept that part of the name. But the seeds are a stand-in for allspice. I haven’t decided on what to do with the leaves/main body. Coral stars are based on star anise—peppercorns, cloves, chives, and coriander are just that. I finished this section ages ago, I’ve just been procrastinating on every other section.
Fruit
A lot of these are inspired by either in-game environmental sprites and/or real life fruits. Mossberries and silk fruit are obviously in game, but everything else is made up. So quick rundown:
ice apple → ice fruit, cloudberry → puffberry (I had also called it “powderberry” in my notes), jackfruit → mega-mossfruit, durian → spikefruit, Yang Mei → coral plum, miracle berries → rosary berries, mangosteen → crustfruit, rattan fruit → oocula, sugar apple → plated sugar apple. I didn’t change the name for the Kaffir Lime because I got lazy. My, uh, design for the rattan fruit may have been inspired by the Ooca, tit fruit.
The coral plums were still called yangmei up until like the last second, I truly had no creativity left. The lotus fruit probably should’ve been in this section but reorganizing these pages is a nightmare.
Vegetables, Roots, Yams
The spiral sprouts, moss artichoke, abyss root, lotus fruit, and cotton puffs were influenced by environmental spirits I screenshotted while doing field research. I would’ve just combined this section with the fruits but these pieces are so crowded and convoluted, it would’ve been a mess.
I don’t know where the Silk Squash or Lufta’s names came from, squashes all look so similar that it’s impossible for me to figure out what I based them on. Those may very well have been their actual name but google is not helping me here. Celtuse is the original name but the coloration is different. Lotus root, lotus fruit, oca, mashua, and the bamboo shoots didn’t get special names. As for the others: black radish → void radish, black carrot → void carrot, scorzonera → abyss root, winged bean → verdania bean, cardoon → cotton puff, fiddlehead → spiral sprout, samphire → asparagus, crosne/chinese artichoke → artichoke root
Mushrooms (Bilelands)
There wasn’t enough here to fill a full page so I vertical-ized it. Get condensed fool. Anyway, I got lazy here after the Paper Mushrooms. These are all based on real mushrooms (minus the aforementioned paper mushrooms which are based on environmental sprites), I didn’t really do any research on their habitats or anything (morels probably shouldn’t be here). So this section isn’t super high effort compared to the others. Also I combined Sinner’s Road, Bilewater, and Putrified Ducts together for the Bilelands, since that’s how Vog refers to them.
Extras (+ baking soda)
I’m now going to subject you to my algae farming agenda.
Algae is a super underrated resource, in real life where we have sunlight and large swaths of land for agriculture, its usefulness is less so, but for limited settings (like space faring or underground bug civilizations) algae is a good resource for farming. Algae/spira flour and glucose can be produced through it, as well as oil (which I believe can be used for plastic production). Other sources for flour like rice and sorghum have to be farmed in specific conditions, but for the citadel, spira flour is probably more accessible. Sucrose requires sugarcane which likely became less accessible when the burning bugs took over wisp thicket. Spira flour has a natural green coloration but the capital uses bone char to bleach it white (bone char comes from deep docks). Fructose and glucose sugar have a whiter tint so they don’t need as much processing. Some of this is based off of real life processes, some of it is me talking out my ass.
And yes, I did come up with a method for how they’re acquiring soda bicarbonate, unfortunately it’s very convoluted. In my HK food chart I just listed soda bicarbonate as coming from mineral springs, but Pharloom doesn’t have hot springs everywhere so I had to get more technical.
Salt Spikes (from Sands of Karak) combined w/Ground Limestone to create “Soda Ash” which is then dissolved in water and combined w/Carbon Dioxide (found in groundwater & lakes) to create Baking Soda.
Alternative method: Salt Spikes combined w/Ammonia (found in Deep Docks) and Carbon Dioxide to create Baking Soda and Ammonium Chloride (used in fertilizer).
Can be found (albeit rarely) naturally occurring in basins & hot springs. Sometimes found in mudrock (Deep Docks), co-product of shale oil extraction from solution mining. This is all based on real life, I’ve just simplified it heavily. Method two is literally just the Solvay Process. A lot of this is paraphrased from Wikipedia and I understand the basic gist of it but I’m not a chemist.
This project had me googling insane shit again, but this time it was more to the tune of “do bugs have collagen” rather than “do bugs make milk” so we’ve improved slightly. I’m ignoring the fact that they don’t have collagen, there’s probably some beasts around somewhere that are vertebrate.
Oh yeah also I’m into vinegar now. I had some pomegranate vinegar and it was delicious. Pour some of that into a nice cold glass of club soda and it would be perfect unfortunately my mother has hidden the vinegar. Uh, so anyway, there’s more vinegar options. Fruit, sugarcane, and grains. Oh yeah and the Cheong method of syrup making returns, this one uses a lot of sugarcane so its more old fashioned (in this setting not in real life).
Animal Products
I previously had roach milk as this decadent dairy product and then Silksong introduced roaches and put them in the biohazard area, so, surprise! It’s gone sour now.
Weaver milk is infinitely more rare here, but I should clarify that when I’m saying weaver milk I don’t just mean The Weavers, I meant spiders in general. The weavers aren’t having kids, but the Phallids may produce more offspring that will require some nutrients.
Ant and craw milk are more normal. I realize the craws are bugs, but I’m treating them like birds. So they get eggs and milk. Ant milk is thicker and richer in flavor while craw milk is more watery and nutritious. The cheeses present are all based off of real cheeses—Lebanese white cheese, camembert cheese, and blue cheese. Weaver silk cheese is inspired by the Centaur’s silk cheese in JayEaton’s “Runaway to the Stars” series.
As for eggs, the craw eggs are more like typical bird eggs, while the maggot eggs are gelatinous and usually laid in gooey bunches underwater. I had to google ant eggs for this drawing so you all owe me money for that. The moss egg is me capitulating to the game design, they look like artichokes to me so I used the design simultaneously for the vegetable and the egg. I imagine some foragers have had the traumatic experience of dropping what they thought was a plant and it then cracking like an egg upon impact. Or biting into it and it making a gooey crunch. These are all good ideas.
Oh yeah, meat. Standard meat here. Added some more organ cuts and included some creatures that are referred to as edible prey either in the compendium or by NPCs.
I’m glad my pickling inclinations the last time were fulfilled here, more pickling. Vinegar is great and we should be using it more. Get pickling now! The sauerkraut is here because I was so focused on pickling that I forgot that the page was for animal products.
Also ignore the crust organ, I put it in the animal products section, but in my head its a 50/50 between “stone from the guts of a [previously] living macro-organism” and “big walnut”.
Miscellaneous Musings
I know that in-game the Memorium is meant as a sort of zoo/archive for the fauna and flora of different regions. But I think it would also serve as a useful area for farming, since the citadel likely doesn’t want to have to rely on other regions for food production. Deep Docks serves a strong role in mining/harvesting the materials needed for filtration, purification, etc. for various baking ingredients. But Shellwood and Sands of Karak likely also were and are very important for food production. Salt is a necessary resource, which may still be harvestable post-collapse. If Pharloom Bay somehow gets added in a future DLC/update (Edit: right after I fucking posted this) then I can probably use that for salt production.
I need to learn how to mod Silksong so I can add new regions/areas in. That’ll likely take me forever though, I have a microscopic level of modding experience. The HK modding community is more combat/platforming focused, which makes sense considering the game genre. I just wish modders did region expansions in Hollow Knight like the Rain World modders do. I love the Rain World region expansions, The Mast, Fog Gulch, and Preservatory are my favorites.
But in terms of achievable Silksong mods—the organ harvesting quest is my favorite quest in the game and if someone could make a mod that extends it to like 100-150 per category I’d appreciate it.
Team Cherry should hire me to design/draw stuff for a DLC, I definitely won’t spend the entire time creating 30 food-related fetch quests. I have depths beyond this!
Do you think Hoaxe after spending most of his life in a human house would develop agoraphobia after seeing an actual sky, or is that just my hypothesis?
One of the best ones I saw was a thing noting that every single one of the few survivors of suicide jumps off of the Golden Gate Bridge realized, on the way down, that the problems they were killing themselves over actually were fixable or could be worked through...except for the now - extremely unfixable - problem of gravity.
Went to the Holocaust Museum in DC once. There was a video interview of an Auschwitz survivor who said he and some other prisoners stayed up all night with a man who wanted to kill himself. The man didn’t kill himself and survived to liberation.
In the video the survivor said “Never seek a permanent solution to a temporary problem. And they’re all temporary problems.”
Hearing that from a guy who survived the Holocaust rewired my brain a little bit.
I think something a lot of people don't understand is that depression is not suicidality, and suicidality is not depression.
People can, and are, depressed without being suicidal, and sometimes suicidality peaks as people are emerging from depression.
Suicidality is a wave, and the trick is to allow that wave to crest and subside WITHOUT acting on it.
Whatever it takes to ride it out. For some people that's distraction, like watching television. For others it's calling a friend -- not to talk about the suicidality, but just to talk. For others it could be as simple as going to sit in a coffee shop or library, because the presence of other people is a huge diminisher of suicide risk.
That's what suicide safety planning is about. It's like having any other type of emergency plan, like a plan for fire or evacuation. It's making a plan when you are in the frame of mind to do so, so that you can just DO the plan without having to think about it when the occasion arises.
When you're in the midst of suicidal ideation, or even intent, you're not in a problem-solving mood. So knowing past!you, with the help of a therapist hopefully, came up with the plan and all you have to do is follow up until the wave crests and subsides, is what allows you to see another day.
ETA: Here's a link to a safety plan. https://www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/988-safety-plan.pdf
yes, I use generative AI as part of my creative process
no, I don't use generative AI as part of my creative process
Voting ended onDec 29, 2025
I should probably define what falls under the umbrella of generative AI here but I kinda don't feel like it, but like. using an image generator to make references. brainstorming by talking with chatgpt. generating images of characters as inspiration. all that kinda jazz counts. as of course does full-on using genAI to make your stuff.
remember that your vote is anonymous, so you don't have to out yourself on one side or the other when you share. I'm just curious what the spread is actually like when there's some anonymity. if you're wondering my own opinion it's in my original tags, but I'm attempting not to be judgemental in this accompanying text.
The "unreached" Palestinians and Global Evangelicalism
Among progressives, The Joshua Project is best-known for its deceased missionary John Allen Chao, an evangelical who was killed while trying to make contact with the residents of North Sentinel Island.
The project is an organization dedicated to spreading evangelical Christianity across the globe, especially in isolated areas they consider "unreached" or "frontier people groups." This includes areas in the Global South with significant non-evangelical Christian populations. The heavily Christian countries Nigeria, Ethiopia, and the Philippines often make an appearance on these lists, further demonstrating the white Christian chauvinism here.
This applies to Palestine as well, despite its Christian population.
The very birthplace of Christianity is considered "unreached" because despite having Christian populations, these Christians are Catholic, Orthodox, and Lutheran, not primarily born-again Evangelicals. Not all evangelicals think this way, more on that later.
Country: West Bank/Gaza (The Joshua Project does not recognize the name "Palestine")
2-5% Christian, 0.1%-2% Evangelical
About 1/3 of Lebanon's population is Christian, but The Joshua Project counts less than 1% of them, as the vast majority of Lebanese Christians are not evangelicals.
In both Palestine and Lebanon, the majority of Christians are Catholic or Orthodox.
The Joshua Project's form of evangelicalism is both racist and anti-Catholic. This supremacist evangelicalism is the brand of Christianity that excuses genocide in their backing of the Zionist state, both because of its racism as well as the chauvinism that says that Catholics aren't actually Christian. In many right-wing western evangelical circles, all Catholics going to hell is a given (Orthodox lumped in here as well), so this chauvinism is not out of place. Calling the Pope the anti-Christ isn't unusual, either.
Christ at the Checkpoint: The other Evangelicals
The Joshua Project and many organizations like it use the Lausanne Covenant as their statement of faith. Ironically, the Lausanne Covenant was written in 1974 as an evangelical Christian statement of faith supporting Christian outreach while opposing sectarianism and racism. The original covenant was signed by representatives from over 150 countries.
From Section 5, "Christian Social Responsibility" and Section 6, "The Church and Evangelism"
We affirm that God is both the Creator and the Judge of all men. We therefore should share his concern for justice and reconciliation throughout human society and for the liberation of men and women from every kind of oppression. Because men and women are made in the image of God, every person, regardless of race, religion, colour, culture, class, sex or age, has an intrinsic dignity because of which he or she should be respected and served, not exploited.
The church is the community of God’s people rather than an institution, and must not be identified with any particular culture, social or political system, or human ideology.
The Lausanne Covenant and its ongoing conferences cannot be called "left-wing" as they openly oppose same-sex relationships and affirm that Christianity is the only faith that leads to salvation. However, they express more solidarity with colonized people than MAGA or Joshua Project types.
The Lausanne Conference has re-convened three times, producing the Manila Manifesto in 1989, the Capetown Commitment in 2010, and the Seoul Statement in 2024. All emphasized "breadth within boundaries" allowing for greater inter-Christian cooperation under the evangelical umbrella.
From the Manila Manifesto under "The Whole World"
Christians renounce unworthy methods of evangelism. Though the nature of our faith requires us to share the gospel with others, our practice is to make an open and honest statement of it, which leaves the hearers entirely free to make up their own minds about it. We wish to be sensitive to those of other faiths, and we reject any approach that seeks to force conversion on them.
From the Capetown Commitment on interfaith work:
A) We commit ourselves to be scrupulously ethical in all our evangelism. Our witness is to be marked by ‘gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience.’ We therefore reject any form of witness that is coercive, unethical, deceptive, or disrespectful.
B) In the name of the God of love, we repent of our failure to seek friendships with people of Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and other religious backgrounds. In the spirit of Jesus, we will take initiatives to show love, goodwill and hospitality to them.
C) In the name of the God of truth, we (i) refuse to promote lies and caricatures about other faiths, and (ii) denounce and resist the racist prejudice, hatred and fear incited in popular media and political rhetoric.
D) In the name of the God of peace, we reject the path of violence and revenge in all our dealings with people of other faiths, even when violently attacked.
E) We affirm the proper place for dialogue with people of other faiths, just as Paul engaged in debate with Jews and Gentiles in the synagogue and public arenas. As a legitimate part of our Christian mission, such dialogue combines confidence in the uniqueness of Christ and in the truth of the gospel with respectful listening to others.
Compared to The Joshua Project:
When cross-cultural missions is discussed, conversations often center on "unreached" peoples, but there's a sub-category of unreached peoples that demands urgent attention: the Frontier People Groups. While unreached peoples have minimal gospel presence, Frontier groups represent a crucial frontier of gospel need.
The Lausanne project has covered Palestine before, including the Christ at the Checkpoint conference run by Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac and Bethlehem Bible College. Bethlehem Bible College is also a part of this very different face of Evangelical Christianity. They are part of the World Evangelical Alliance, and also regularly engage in justice work for Palestine.
The most recent Lausanne Conference produced the Seoul Statement, which includes the following paragraph supporting Palestine:
We acknowledge with grief and shame the complicity of Christians in some of the most destructive contexts of ethnic violence and oppression, and the lamentable silence of large parts of the church when such conflicts take place. Such contexts include the history and legacy of racism and black slavery; the holocaust against Jews; apartheid; ‘ethnic cleansing’; inter-Christian sectarian violence; decimation of indigenous populations; political and ethnic violence; Palestinian suffering; caste oppression and tribal genocide.
This section names the Christian context in which many of the world's worst atrocities took place, either in Christian environments or through Christian complacency.
The Seoul Statement expands on the need for Christians to avoid religious and ethnic nationalism. It cautions against conflating Biblical peoples with modern-day communities as well as reminding evangelicals that modern nation-states cannot bring about salvation.
We echo the Cape Town Commitment in calling “for repentance for the many times Christians have been complicit in such evils by silence, apathy or presumed neutrality, or by providing defective theological justification for these.”
Much of this defective theological justification arises from a failure to distinguish between the “nations” of Scripture and modern “nation-states” and from a failure to think biblically about nationality...We affirm that every modern state is accountable to the divine demand for the just and merciful treatment of both the individuals and peoples over whom it exercises sovereignty as well as those of its neighbours.
It is critically important that Christians think clearly about biblical peoples when they (e.g. Israelites, Egyptians, Syrians) are associated by name, history, geography, or ancestry with modern nation-states (e.g. Israel, Egypt, Syria) and the peoples who live under the political sovereignty of these states (Jews, Palestinians, Arabs, Copts, Druze, Armenians, Kurds, and many more)...In the Middle East, and elsewhere, Christian leaders must work to correct theological errors that provide ideological justification for unjust violence against innocent civilians or seek to legitimise violations of international humanitarian law.
We lament that some Christians have looked to the state rather than the gospel as the key means for bringing about God’s intentions for the world. This takes an especially regrettable form when wed to nationalism—here defined as the belief that every state should have a single, national culture and no other—or ethnonationalism—which is the belief that every ethnic group should have its own state. This is a great evil in our world...Against this, we assert that no modern state is able to claim or will ever be able to claim to be the special agent of God’s saving rule.
We cannot reduce Evangelical Christianity to Christian Zionism or to anti-Palestinian racism.
Many evangelicals are justice-minded people whose practice of Christianity involves a "new birth" experience and a close relationship with Jesus. They often hold conservative opinions on topics like human sexuality, but they still hold diverse opinions on topics such as colonialism and racial justice. When I use the term "right-wing evangelical" I refer to those on the right who support Trump, Netanyahu, etc. and who are much more likely to be both racist and anti-Catholic. This is very different from the evangelical Christianity within Palestinian communities.
An excerpt from Bethlehem Bible College's history page:
Life in Palestine was difficult. The Christian population was shrinking. Would this ancient Christian community in the Holy Land disappear altogether? A dream began to grow in his heart: an Evangelical, inter-denominational Bible College in Palestine, where students could study and serve in their native land.
From Rev. Isaac's 2024 Christmas sermon:
This is why we said last year, “Christ is in the rubble,” and this year, we say, “Christ is still in the rubble.” This is His manager. Jesus finds His place with the marginalized, the tormented, the oppressed, and the displaced. We look at the Holy Family and see them in every displaced and homeless family, living in despair. In the Christmas story, God walks with them and calls them His own.
Because of the public association of evangelicalism with its more vocal right-wing groups, especially in heavily ex-Christian and anti-Christian leftist spaces, it's hard to even define the word "evangelical." It is important to be as specific as possible when discussing different evangelical groups. But know that there are many worldwide rejecting Christian Zionism and working and praying for justice in Palestine.
Notes:
Note: searching for "mission to Palestine" yields a lot of charity orgs that are doing genuinely good work like providing healthcare. They may be Christian and may use the name "mission" or "missionary" but they shouldn't be confused with the Joshua Project and other groups like it.
Rev. Isaac is Lutheran, and many Lutherans though not all are evangelical (doing outreach, emphasis on personal conversion experiences.) "Evangelical" can also sometimes refer to any Protestant group in a largely Catholic or Orthodox setting. However, Rev. Isaac's Christianity is different from that of the Joshua Project, Project 2025, etc. The position of evangelicals in majority-Protestant countries like the USA is also different from those where most Christians are Catholic or Orthodox, eg. Palestine or Lebanon.
As always, all linked sources are free and open for anyone to read.
Further Reading:
Rescuing the Gospel from the Cowboys by Richard Twiss
The Cross and the Olive Tree by John and Samuel Munayer
Christ in the Rubble by Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac
Evangelical Postcolonial Conversations by InterVarsity Press
and of course
Orientalism by Edward Said
When I started this blog post, I only focused on the Joshua Project and the reality that many US Evangelicals on the right don't see Palestinian Christians as actually Christian. But then I saw that the Joshua Project cited the Lausanne Covenant for their statement of faith and I had to point out the hypocrisy as well as the diversity within the Evangelical world, especially in the Global South.
Repealing Section 230 is DANGEROUS. They're trying to do this while also trying to push 18 "kids online safety" bills that would age-gate and censor the internet. If they pass those bills AND repeal Section 230, not only would the internet be ID-gated and massively censored, but pretty much all user-generated content would become nonexistent. No more fan fiction and no more fan art… Fandoms would die, safe-spaces would be gone, and pretty much the internet would be destroyed.
We must stop this before it's too late.
Free speech is under attack. Trump is suing journalists for unfavorable reporting, investigating companies that have DEI programs, and tryin
people are wading through water flooded with trash and sewage as temperatures drop. the zionist entity will not allow not just tents but mobile homes that are waiting right outside the border to be let in. and now they’re being bombed again.
people are going to freeze to death. do yall remember last winter when babies died from hypothermia?
really going to need yall to keep hammad and his family alive during this incredibly harsh winter. they haven’t given up on you so show them you’re still there for them.
