I’m Just Vibing

Washington Post is paywalling the article but it looks like Taylor Farms — a consumer bagged salad brand that also supplies produce to grocers and fast food chains like Taco Bell, Walmart, McDonald's, Chipotle, Burger King, KFC, and Meijer —may be at least one of the sources of the current cyclosporiasis outbreak.

Like this chick! A background character! She isn’t relevant to the story, and yet she has a design unique enough for me to remember her!

I also really love how the character designs aren’t cookie-cutter. Girls can look masculine, boys can look feminine, people can look genderless in general. It’s awesome, and I feel like it’s something I rarely see in a lot of media. Or, at the very least, to this degree.

It really makes the characters feel more like people, you know? People in real life have different eye-shapes, noses, and body types.

I guess it just makes me really happy not to see every girl with the same hourglass shape, and every guy with broad shoulders and tallness. I like characters feeling unique, and I hate how things like this are seen as going against 'the norm'.

I like seeing girls with muscle.

I like seeing boys that look or are depicted as skinny or weak.

I like seeing wrinkles, eye bags, and scars.

I like seeing different hair types, different nose shapes, different body types, and different skin tones (although that isn’t as frequent in tek).

I like that I can tell the characters apart by just their faces.

Things like this just make me so happy to see! I want this to be 'the norm'. I don’t want every character to look conventionally attractive!

I love the Ember Knight. It’s not perfect, but I love it.

I love love love love love tek.

If I could tie all of my friends down and force them to read and enjoy this story, I would.

God, I hope a new hyperfixation grabs me by the throat before tek ends. I’m concerned for myself at this point.

Anyways, that’s all the yap I have in me at the moment! Thanks for getting this far, reader! Don’t forget to do something fun today!

Sorry for any typos!

Death of the Author is a term coined by Roland Barthes for his essay of the same name in 1967.

In brief: death of the author is the concept that analysis of a work of art should not be focused on the artist's intent; the artist's intended reading of their own work is just A reading and no more valid than anyone else's.

A good straightforward example of this in practice is the response to Andy Weir and Project Hail Mary. Weir is adamant that his work contains no politics but I would say that PHM is pretty clearly a story about climate change.