HIIII I'm chiara, i love women colorful art and sex euphemisms. And my friends, always my friends. the extent of organization on this blog is me tagging my fandoms, I really like fiction podcasts, video games and horror tho I mainly participate in smaller fandoms cause people who start discourse about playing with dolls scare me.
i have an art sideblog! :)
@acornzest
@acornzest
@acornzest
(and a ko-fi who said that)
[3rd by twinkfrottage, 4th by james-spooky, 5th by monthmans-queer-cousin]
there's this weird thing people fall into online a lot, where people assume that if the [perceived-to-be-inferior] version of [activity] is discouraged then people will, naturally, do [perceived-to-be-superior] version of [activity] instead. When really it's just as (or more) likely that if [perceived-to-be-inferior] version of [activity] is discouraged people just won't do it at all.
audiobook listeners are not necessarily people who would otherwise do a lot of traditional reading if audiobooks did not exist, many are people who simply would experience zero books. Booktok romance readers would not necessarily be reading the classics if booktok did not exist, many of them would simply not read. Fanfiction writers would not necessarily be novelists if fanfic wasn't an option, many would just be people who didn't write. You know?
“So... We got the exploding diarrhea. Here's my advice for anyone who doesn't have it yet:
It's going to take a minute for the government to pin down where this is coming from, and then issue a recall, because the FDA has been gutted. But, I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt : this is coming from Taylor Farms produce, and you will see them recalled.
You'll want to avoid all Taylor Farms produce in the grocery store. They supply McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut, about any fast food place you can think of.
Raspberries, watermelons, cilantro, and the veggies you're hearing about are not causing this many people to get sick. It's the shredded lettuce, specifically, that's the problem. But, you'll want to stay away from every type of produce this company puts out, because one strand of shredded lettuce is all it takes to contaminate bushels.
Taylor Farms is the source. Taco Bell proactively pulled their produce from their restaurants. You're going to see other fast food places doing this, and probably will see that before the government names a source. The FDA knows this, but they can't come out and tell us all until there's proof, which takes resources and research, which takes manpower, but the FDA has been cut by about 20-30%
During the Biden term, onions at McDonald's had ecoli. We knew this because DNA testing was done quickly and they were able to narrow it down to one place that caused the outbreak. And, it was traced back to Taylor Farms. This isn't going to be solved as quickly though.
When you get this, make a virtual appointment to your PCP - a "same day sick" appointment. Tell them someone in your family just tested for this and was positive and was prescribed Bactrim. If you go in person, they're probably going to make you poop in a cup and wait until results come back to prescribe.
You'll know when you get this. Trust me on all of this.
You'll want to stay hydrated because this parasite damages the lining of the small intestine. Your small intestine, in turn, secretes more water into the gut, and less nutrients and liquid are able to remain in the body. So no matter how much you shit, you're going to want to drink. A day of this leads to dehydration if you don't increase your fluid intake, and a few days will land you in the hospital.
If you have headaches, weakness, muscle cramps, dizziness, or an increase heart rate - hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. Go to the ER for fluids if you can't drink enough.
Thank you for coming to my Ted talk. Brought to you by America's 250 birthday celebrations, workforce reduction in the FDA and CDC, and viewers like you.
Please feel free to share this.
And, MAGA - don't blow up the comment section. I argued with y'all on COVID bc I was afraid y'all would die, but I really don't care if you get explosive diarrhea.
As an update, the OP of this post did eventually clarify that they did not have inside knowledge that it was Taylor Farms; that was a conclusion they reached from publicly-available information & history.
However, per CNN and numerous other news outlets, as of Thursday afternoon, the outbreak has been at least partially traced to lettuce supplied to Taco Bell from Taylor Farms, in Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky.
Other states and/or businesses could have received the same contaminated lettuce, or there could be multiple simultaneous outbreaks with different sources: currently, it's not clear.
For me a big part of “sex work is work” is that sex work should be socially viewed as totally legitimate work. I should be able to put sex work on my resume. I should be able to lean on the skills and knowledge I gain in this field and have that experience be respected. Right now I have a gap in my resume. But I’m also consistently doing advertising, social media management, inventory, merchandising, customer service, upselling!!! I’m working self directed, I’m solely responsible for every aspect of my business. I deserve respect, fuck.
to be clear you SHOULD buy that cast iron pan and you SHOULD buy that knife set and you SHOULD buy that fancy rice cooker and you SHOULD buy that novelty mug. high quality kitchenware is always worth it you’re literally gonna be using that almost every day
Hello, I am nothing if not ambitious for my own good and decided to write some character analysis on the silk siblings that’s probably going to brush up some discourse but I don’t really know cause I kinda avoid engaging with fandom too much (cause new people are scary) but if I don’t write this I’ll go crazy My intention is academic but my execution isn’t really going to meet those standards. I’m drawing from various sources that I’ll link down below but I’m not really going to cite. I do want to transfer this over to ao3 where I will cite everything a bit more formally. TW for child abuse, childism, abelism, + suicidal ideation
A Child
Ok so what the fuck is Lace? Well according to the Caretaker she has the “looks of a child and the mind to match” despite being around the Citadel for ages Okay..what the fuck does that mean? So, what is a child? Look, I’ll ask more invigorating questions later but really what is a child You could say that a child is someone who has yet to reach the point of maturity for their species but childhood covers more than just time It’s also about the socially constructed ideas of how one is “supposed” to develop over that period of time Childhood studies is field specifically dedicated to calling attention to the socially constructed nature of childhood and how it affects how we view and treat childhood Childhood is dynamic and time inherently moves forward Childhood ends but culturally we have ideas about how a child acts and what a child is or isn’t capable of
Now something we’re going to find is that Pharloom (and Hallownest) do not necessarily hold the same cultural ideas that we do in our world There’s two layers going on here: what is being culturally communicated in the world of Pharloom and how the characters interpret it and what is being culturally communicated to us in the real world and how we as actual people interpret it I cannot fucking tell how old a bug is just by looking at them Some of these bugs are the size of a football while others are the size of a football player and they could potentially be the same age If the game is telling me that Lace looks like a child then I have to just go “well I fucking guess” and move on Now, here (at least in this sort of Western sphere a lot of the players of this game are from) we tend to associate childhood with innocence and purity This seems to be less so in hk/ss, which judging by the youth of various tribes and the conversation with Huntress, youth is more associated with a sort of primal protectiveness and fierceness (which isn’t to say innocence is entirely missing, mossfirs seems pretty docile and blank slate like before coming of age) You can see this in Lace, who’s described as “manic” and is seen as more trigger happy and impulsive than other bugs implied to be more mature than her so it’s pretty reasonable to say that the way Lace behaves is reflective of childishness within the world of Pharloom Her fencing skill seems to that of a well trained adult, skill is subjective, difficulty in game isn’t the be all end all but it is notably that is there’s one but if there’s one thing that puts Lace on the level of more mature, more “alive” bugs, it’s her fencing She’s referred to as a child by others Hornet calls her such first dismissively than latter I’d argue with affection She refers to herself as a child, though in the context of her failure (broken child, ailing child)
That still doesn’t entirely tell us who Lace is Well, Lace is a being of pure silk created by Pharloom’s monarch to be a perfectly loyal child but let’s put a pin in that for now I’d also argue, that she, and her sibling, are disabled Insofar as we can define disability within the fantasy world of Pharloom, in the sense that their bodies (or shells, which I’ll use interchangeably) have a marked difference that makes them unable to naturally perform what most other bugs can (create silk, or more specifically their own life force) that needs to be accommodated for
Disability and child activists are two groups with similar goals They’re both advocating for the rights of people seen as incapable, insufficient or otherwise not full members of society and who are in some way dependent, and that dependency disqualifies from them from having rights
Lace is described in the silk heart dialogue as “frail” and “mad” both of which suggest she doesn’t have the physical or mental mental health that other bugs possess This is seen as a sort of comprise, better a frail and mad child than none Disabled children are similarly often seen as a sort of compromise of to the abled child the parent was expecting, with it being common for them to go through a grieving of the supposed abled child they lost It’s also common for the experience of parents making children an extension of their own identity to apply expositionally in the case of disabled children, with the parents’ own “strength” or “resistance” in caring for their child overtaking any narrative of the child’s own interiority or experience The disabled child challenges the idea of childhood as transition between dependency to independence and the normative development expected of a person
However for GMS, this dependency is the point Children are property of their parents, passive figures that are to be completely obedient to them This is even more so in the case of the disabled child, a child that could not possibly advocate for themselves, the disabled child is situated out of time with the markers of adulthood conflicting with their disability The point of Lace being designed to be a child, is that she is permanently situated into the role of property
Artificial Being
So…again, what is Lace? She’s a type constructed being Fantasy/science fiction being no stranger to the artificially created person (sifi being literally founded on the idea) The created, artificial person can be a stand in for a number of human drives or anxieties, for example that of parent’s fears around their child’s development and their own legacy Lace exists in a gray area where she is divinely created but not natural
But Lace’s narratives also mirror that of an inanimate objects come to life She’s certainly going through a bit of a Pinocchio thing where she’s an anthromorphized object who aims to become a real girl Pinocchio stories can act as a sort of symbolizing of parental anxieties around the development of their child and their potential to surpass them Pinocchio itself is a didactic bildungsroman (if you tell me I’m using that word wrong I’ll go crazy) where the way he becomes a real boy is becoming a moral, responsible member of society He has to shed childishness and embrace maturity Children are not real people, full people, they become real, full people
Hornet maintains that Lace is a life, if a fragile one She may not be able to obtain independence, as it’s implied she will always require silk to be maintained but she is still an autonomous agent, alive so to speak It’s interesting then that her first act of autonomy against her mother is phrased as a “rebellion” This could be seen similar to that as a rebellion against a government or corrupt leader but what first comes to mind is “teen rebellion” Her act is of the impulsiviness of a child who is trying to assert themself away from childhood, with all the messiness that implies
Dolls
Okay, okay, I hear you, you think I’m forgetting someone I’m not I promise See, while the Pinocchio comparison is apt I also have to admit that Pinocchio is a distinctly masculine narrative something which Lace, and by extension Silksong, is not
Again we have to go back to bug world having different cultural ideas than our world does
I cannot tell any bug’s gender just by looking at them To the best of my knowledge Pharloom nor Hallownest seem to have gender specific roles There are no expectations of what a man or a woman is supposed to do, just a social expectation a bug in general is supposed to fulfil but while there are no assumptions tied towards a specific gender there is towards the being gendered in of itself
Not every single bug that isn’t obviously male or female is depersoned however I’m led to believe there is a reason for Hornet being the Gendered Child Her gendered, female or not, distinguishes her from that of her siblings Creatures presumed to not fully be live or be imitations of it are often left ungendered This makes Grand Mother Silk’s first mad, frail child never being gendered significant
Whether Phantom is ungendered, or simply not identifying as either male nor female due to being created as such, having that stripped from them or because they chose to identify as such themself is impossible to conclude from the text (though my preference is towards the last with it being fueled a bit by the second) this gender nonconformity from who was meant to be a replacement for a collective of daughters marks them as notably…queer And like the disabled child, the queer child too, is cast out of time unable to fulfil normative development and this combination is what leads them to being the discard child, a child without a future
Phantom, in contrast to the more puerile Lace, is aging, made closer to a mortal than the divinity their supposedly strung from While Lace’s skill can let her pass as able bodied, Phantom’s decay is evident in their every movement Combat is so highly regarded in bug world, that of course it’s what both Lace & Phantom have access to to prove their worth Discarded and exiled from their original purpose their suicidality is no surprise in a society that valorizes death through combat or at the hands of another See: too many This is a societal issue One should take a bug saying they will an end through combat as cause to do a mental health check in
A child no longer to able to perform as their role as child, having worn the use of their objectification, they are now only a burden in a society in which sickness and frailty is so stigmatized, it’s illegal They’re immortal, or at least very long lived but in a way that only reveals weakness, reveal aging, something derided Lacking a future with purpose, they attempt to regain agency through a death that is seen as meaningful in the eyes of their society rather than to exist cast off from it for the unforeseeable future
Lace, too, is not fully resolved in her gender This is gonna take more of a viewing this from our world than bug world approach It’s unclear how distinctly feminine Lace is in canon but her figure stands out as such to us the viewer She is built more femininely than the average bug taking after her mother
Grand Mother Silk is designed more humanoid than the other bugs, complete with actual hands, something I embarrassingly did not pick up on until the Lost Lace fight (yes, I know she has the whole eight arms attack, my mind was more focused on other shit like beating her ass) This marks her as uncanny and thus more divine She is more human like which puts her on a higher plane of sentience making for a more god like being Lace is obviously meant to look like her mother Culturally we tend to read femininity as more artificial than masculinity, femininity is a performance, masculinity just is, so in a way Lace’s femininity reads as more artificial, more of a performance than we would get from a more It’s also seen as subservient, supplemental, usually in relation to masculinity but in the context of mother and daughter, the mother’s own performamce of feminity is affirmed through the daughter’s correct replication of it In her needloin dialogue, she says “see me your daughter, see me your knight” specifically seeking affirmation of her performance of gender (and is also to my knowledge the only time she’s specifically gendered outside of pronouns) Both Lace and Phantom occupy the abject, either as the artificial and uncanny feminine or the discarded and depersoned queer
So what is Lace, and by extension, Phantom? Dolls They’re dolls Dolls are toys, designed with the primary intention to be played with for amusement with the second hidden intention of teaching proper social models of behavior Dolls feminine toys, where a child, is supposedly meant to act out feminine role play as practice for when the girl becomes an adult Baby dolls are meant specifically for girls to practice being mothers Dolls are blank slate of which the child can project and enact their own dreams, desires, fears and anxieties in a safe play space Objects meant for the serving the needs of their creator/mother
They do not change and they do not grow
They have a purpose, not a future
Conclusion
So back to what I asked earlier, is Lace a child? I think yes or no is a useless answer as her existence draws attention to the constructedness of childhood in the first place She exists in a liminal space of contradiction, frail and mad yet pure, deified yet objectified, beloved yet abused, victim yet violent and cruel, perfect daughter and perfect knight Neither Lace nor Phantom fit into a normative timeframe, they were not built to have a future, they require constant maintenance, the life force of another to live yet they aren’t respected as life themselves Their existence serves as foils to Silksong’s themes of legacy, futurity, and sacrifice, and the balance of life and death, parent and child I don’t think this is something to be run away from but embraced To not fit into the normative ideal of adulthood or childhood, for your timeline to not be what is considered the normative or even natural is a common experience is for those who are queer, disabled or have been abused all of which I’d argue the silk siblings implicitly if not explicitly are More than anything, they’re messy Lace in particular being the messiest victim we have in these games and I’m very pro treating the ambiguity of their age as something very messy and uncomfortable They are, however, a life, as in fully realized, autonomous individuals with agency That’s just text
References:
Blackford, H. (2007). PC Pinocchios: Parents, children, and the metamorphosis tradition in science fiction. In S.R. Sherman & M.J. Koven (Eds.), Folklore/Cinema: Popular Film as Vernacular Culture, pp. 74-92.
Kafer, Alison. ( 2013.) Time for Disability Studies and a Future for Crips and At the Same Time, Out of Time: Ashley X in Feminist, Queer, Crip, Pp. 25-69
Kuznets, Lois R.( 1994.) Coming out in Blood and Flesh and The Doll Connection in When Toys Come Alive : Narratives of Animation, Metamorphosis, and Development. Pp 59-75 and 95-114
Serano, Julia. (2007.) Whipping Girl
Tisdall, E. Kay M. “The Challenge and Challenging of Childhood Studies? Learning from Disability Studies and Research with Disabled Children.” Children & Society, vol. 26, no.3, Apr. 2012, pp. 181–91, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1099-0860.2012.00431.x.
Also the channel The Monster and the Child is great and I got a lot of general ideas from there
