the worm in tham n0phis’ brain

They see your beauty, so frail and fine,

They see your peace, woven of faith and toil,

They forget your heart, bound in slumber and servitude,

When you wake they shall see your truth,

A beast's nature bare to all.

- From 'Pharloom’s Folly' by the Conductor Romino

Which to me reads as: the Citadel Bugs—not including the Leaders—don’t realize that the silk in the Cradle contains a “Beast” that slumbers. Instead, they see it as a vast source of silk that is holy and must be sung to. That silk then “blesses” the faithful with immortality, and also creates immortal servants which propagate the system they’re indentured to.

The great evil of the Pharloom is not just Grand Mother Silk herself, but industry and caste systems.

There’s something truly horrific about GMS’s chamber and the way she’s forced into slumber and then used essentially as a magic cow (zoomed out clip from Mossbags video):

To me this creates a constellation of evil in Pharloom that is: 1) Citadel Bugs, whose greed and hubris turned into a system that extracts a dangerous substance from a primordial being and who incidentally filled their bodies with a conduit for 2) Grand Mother Silk, who is incapable of understanding love beyond her total control and lives in pursuit of revenge against her daughters for both escaping her grasp and trapping her in what is honestly a nightmarish existence.

Based on Weaver lore, it’s obvious that the way Grand Mother Silk birthed and raised them was undeniably evil. But the game poses an interesting question by revealing that the Weavers plotted her death, but couldn’t succeed: how much punishment is too much? How do you punish something that will never change?

There’s a rune harp in the game that says, "Sisters, spiders, the burden is passed. These simple bugs shall bear it full. Never to cease. Never to silence. / We shall die, and wait, and pray, that one may come of silken strength enough to weave us free.” We could interpret it as saying, “we can’t kill her, hopefully one of our descendants can.” However, I’m not convinced. I think that this relic “Last Words of the Weavers” is an admittance of guilt. What they created is a “burden”, but what if that burden is the knowledge that the system of subjugation they created is evil but necessary because the alternative, Mother Silk’s awoken revenge, is impossible to permit. Why do the want to be woven free if this relic admits they’ll die before it will happen. I think that the thing they want to be free of is the guilt of what they built.

That is one of the reasons I love Hornet’s confused journey through Pharloom. It’s a nightmare of injustice with no explanation. Just systems on top of systems of horror. The judges job is to kill weak bugs because they’re weeding out the population before they enter the gate. The gate has no method to bring bugs to the citadel, its only purpose is to ferry pilgrims to the Underworks. They built a prison in a land of ice and filled its occupants with silk so they can’t die. They funnel noxious fumes into Bile Water. What else can Hornet do but free them in the only way she can: endless, merciful carnage.

In that way, Team Cherry created one of the most relevant dystopias I’ve seen. We too live in a dying kingdom whose systems of oppression and control seem disconnected from whatever purpose they may have once had. We worship a god we don’t understand and we serve a primordial power source that fills us up with cancer and boils our world and lines the pockets of some of us, but not all. We’re all Citadel Bugs.

If oil had a mind, a slumbering goddess beneath our oceans, would we hate her? Would we blame her for what we did? Grand Mother Silk, to me, is not a villain as much as she’s Silksongs most interesting tragedy: a beast desiring of love, whose mind does not permit it to work right. In her daughter’s rightful usurping of her they created a nexus of torment far beyond the crime, creating a world that subjugated bugs as much their Mother ever did. In the end, the only possible good outcome could be death. Hornet’s birth was always intended as a vain wish to end their nightmare.

The reason why I like the true ending so much is hidden in this crunchy, complex, gray area lore. If you think Grand Mother Silk is just the villain, it might seem odd that her final act is to free Hornet and Lace. But, if we see her as a victim as much as her victims were, then her final act being to grant Lace, this embodiment of eternal servitude and forced love, a chance at freedom, then it reveals something tragic and beautiful: did she perhaps have the ability to change? Does she have the right to after what she did, ensnaring the Weaver’s victims with her control of Silk in pursuit of her potentially just but impossibly cruel revenge? Does the Citadel, now missing the entirety of its purpose and built on the memory of its crimes, have the right to persist? In a world of endless revenge that warps under our senseless pollution and hatred, do we?

I explained very clearly to the manager my issue with the meat section not having the price tags listed, and they claimed it was only going to be for the meat, since meat is by weight, and the price of each item is printed on the packs of each item.

Sure. That’s how they get their foot in the door. Fast forward not even two weeks, and here we are:

Bar codes. No prices, no item descriptions. No price stickers on the individual items. Heck, not even the name of the item that is SUPPOSED to be there.

No. The only way to see the price is to scan it on your phone app, which is also recording what you looked at recently, as a way of gauging what you might be looking for in the future.

So here’s what we’re gonna do gang:

Every time you go into a store that has implemented these price-less tags:

Take 1-3 items up to the cash register. Ask the cashier for the price, or hit the price check item on the self checkout, which will likely call over the attendant.

Express that you didn’t actually want it, you just couldn’t see on the shelf how much it was.

POLITELY, AND WITH A THANK YOU FOR THE PRICE CONFIRMATION, Give the items to the cashier or attendant to put back.

When they inevitably try to push the app, politely decline. If pressed for why not, say you don’t want to have to carry your phone in-hand the whole time you are shopping in order to see how much things cost. (Not having cell service or data to use the app is NOT a valid excuse, as stores already often have complimentary WiFi AND more stores will provide WiFi rather than give up on this push for surveillance pricing)

If it’s a shelf-stable item, the cashier will have to set it aside, taking up room in their limited operating space, and eventually pass it off to someone to put in a holding area to put back later. If it’s a fridge/freezer item, it might have to get tossed due to food product sale regulations.

In either case, you are making it a pain in the ass for them to have these digital bar codes. Tie up the checkouts. Give the employees more busywork that the company has to pay them to do. Hurt their bottom line having to toss the pint of ice cream you carried around in your cart for 20 minutes before giving it back to the cashier.

They wear suits, but they don't even know basic etiquette.

but it's an entirely new level of tragic when somebody you've actually spoken to gets turned into a bot account. it's like peeking at a zombie apocalypse through the window and realizing one of the shambling corpses was your friend.

and then the zombie catches sight of you, lurches up to your window, and shouts through the glass that they accidentally reported your account to tumblr and you'll be deactivated unless you click this link.

if you get something like this ↑ they're gonna follow up by instructing you to contact tumblr support on discord and give you contact info; or they're gonna link a website that looks sort of like tumblr support and say you have to email them; or any variety of "you must now contact tumblr, here is how you contact tumblr."

whatever they send you, it Does Not lead to tumblr. it leads to the master zombie that bit them and inducted them into the ranks of the undead, and will bite you the second they have your email and password. i might be confusing zombies and vampires. anyway,

it's easier to fall for these messages because the blog doesn't LOOK like a bot blog, because it ISN'T a bot blog. it's a normal person's blog that got accessed by a bot, meaning the blog's content CLEARLY looks like a real active user when you click on it. and yes—it might even be a blog you already know. sometimes bots like this go down a blog's DMs or reblogs and message people they've previously interacted with.