Spending time with kids always reminds me how much I love the way they play. I’ll be like “hey kid look, this little bug is called an isopod it’s related to crabs and it eats dead plants” and they’ll immediately respond with something like “cool let’s play isopods we have to collect dead leaves as fast as we can and if we don’t get enough we die of starvation and have a bug funeral”

What an amazing way to process new information or explore an idea! It’s important to remember these kinds of games are not random or pointless; playing is how kids learn.

How many stand-alone works do you own written by a single author?

take "stand-alone work" to mean books not related as a series, the series can count as one work (ie me owning all of NK Jemisin's Broken Earth Trilogy and The City We Became would count as two stand-alone works, even though it's 4 books). Owning multiple copies also only counts as 1 stand-alone work, sorry edition-hoarders

horse: OH WE'RE GOING NOW? IT'S TIME TO GO? OKAY LET'S GO LET'S GO

I love Emet bc the first thing she asked when I shared this in the triad chat was, "Happy horses are very often very stupid. Do we know if the horse was okay? Was it shod? It could have hurt its feet very badly."

So here I am googling "horse runs with peloton" and yes, the horse was okay. This was the 1997 Critérium International. The horse was okay. :)

we've found it folks: mcmansion heaven

Hello everyone. It is my pleasure to bring you the greatest house I have ever seen. The house of a true visionary. A real ad-hocist. A genuine pioneer of fenestration. This house is in Alabama. It was built in 1980 and costs around $5 million. It is worth every penny. Perhaps more.

Now, I know what you're thinking: "Come on, Kate, that's a little kooky, but certainly it's not McMansion Heaven. This is very much a house in the earthly realm. Purgatory. McMansion Purgatory." Well, let me now play Beatrice to your Dante, young Pilgrim. Welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

It is rare to find a house that has everything. A house that wills itself into Postmodernism yet remains unable to let go of the kookiest moments of the prior zeitgeist, the Bruce Goffs and Earthships, the commune houses built from car windshields, the seventies moments of psychedelic hippie fracture. It is everything. It has everything. It is theme park, it is High Tech. It is Renaissance (in the San Antonio Riverwalk sense of the word.) It is medieval. It is maybe the greatest pastiche to sucker itself to the side of a mountain, perilously overlooking a large body of water. Look at it. Just look.

The inside is white. This makes it dreamlike, almost benevolent. It is bright because this is McMansion Heaven and Gray is for McMansion Hell. There is an overbearing sheen of 80s optimism. In this house, the credit default swap has not yet been invented, but could be.

It takes a lot for me to drop the cocaine word because I think it's a cheap joke. But there's something about this example that makes it plausible, not in a derogatory way, but in a liberatory one, a sensuous one. Someone created this house to have a particular experience, a particular feeling. It possesses an element of true fantasy, the thematic. Its rooms are not meant to be one cohesive composition, but rather a series of scenes, of vastly different spatial moments, compressed, expanded, bright, close.

And then there's this kitchen for some reason. Or so you think. Everything the interior design tries to hide, namely how unceasingly peculiar the house is, it is not entirely able to because the choices made here remain decadent, indulgent, albeit in a more familiar way.

Rare is it to discover an interior wherein one truly must wear sunglasses. The environment created in service to transparency has to somewhat prevent the elements from penetrating too deep while retaining their desirable qualities. I don't think an architect designed this house. An architect would have had access to specifically engineered products for this purpose. Whoever built this house had certain access to architectural catalogues but not those used in the highest end or most structurally complex projects. The customization here lies in the assemblage of materials and in doing so stretches them to the height of their imaginative capacity. To borrow from Charles Jencks, ad-hoc is a perfect description. It is an architecture of availability and of adventure.

A small interlude. We are outside. There is no rear exterior view of this house because it would be impossible to get one from the scrawny lawn that lies at its depths. This space is intended to serve the same purpose, which is to look upon the house itself as much as gaze from the house to the world beyond.

Living in a city, I often think about exhibitionism. Living in a city is inherently exhibitionist. A house is a permeable visible surface; it is entirely possible that someone will catch a glimpse of me they're not supposed to when I rush to the living room in only a t-shirt to turn out the light before bed. But this is a space that is only exhibitionist in the sense that it is an architecture of exposure, and yet this exposure would not be possible without the protection of the site, of the distance from every other pair of eyes. In this respect, a double freedom is secured. The window intimates the potential of seeing. But no one sees.

At the heart of this house lies a strange mix of concepts. Postmodern classicist columns of the Disney World set. The unpolished edge of the vernacular. There is also an organicist bent to the whole thing, something more Goff than Gaudí, and here we see some of the house's most organic forms, the monolith- or shell-like vanity mixed with the luminous artifice of mirrors and white. A backlit cave, primitive and performative at the same time, which is, in essence, the dialectic of the luxury bathroom.

And yet our McMansion Heaven is still a McMansion. It is still an accumulation of deliberate signifiers of wealth, very much a construction with the secondary purpose of invoking envy, a palatial residence designed without much cohesion. The presence of golf, of wood, of masculine and patriarchal symbolism with an undercurrent of luxury drives that point home. The McMansion can aspire to an art form, but there are still many levels to ascend before one gets to where God's sitting.

If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams.

Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar! Student loans just started back up!

the man who owns and runs the thai restaurant in my town knows me by name. he is one of the kindest and most thoughtful men i know. i started ordering from his place back in january, which was when i got my fibromyalgia diagnosis. back then i was using a walker, had limited mobility in my entire body but especially my hands, and was very visibly in pain. i always ordered the same thing: yellow curry with no meat, potatoes and carrots only (i have texture and other dietary issues). he always made it a point to make sure i could get out the door and carry the food safely. he had his workers package the food so that it was easier for me to open. as i kept coming back and i told him a little bit about my health status, he would always encourage me to keep going. he told me about how the spices he used were good for inflammation and began to edit the recipe just for me so that spices that were even better for fighting inflammation were used. he’d give me extra portions and despite the fact that i would tip every time, i realized later that he never charged my card for them. as time went on and my condition began to get better, he would make encouraging remarks and tell me how happy he was for me. the day i came in without my walker, he practically jumped for joy, and despite my insistence, he gave me my meal for free that day. i continue to make progress with my conditions and i continue to go to the thai place. this man who does not know me personally and who i hardly know anything about is one of my favorite people. it’s interactions with humans like these that make loving life easier. and his curry really does help my chronic condition. it’s comfort food taken to the next level.

To The Bus Driver - Jordan Bolton

"Un-uhlaive? UN-UHLAIVE? Ma'am, that man has been killed. He has been MUHDUHED. To DEATH."

“Update: The student who wrote the letter has been found and we’re in the process of finding a way to reward her for her actions. Very grateful for what she did”

I love this mental image of this quietly horrified and righteous 6th grader just being like ma’am you can’t do that

6th grader:

#the drawing including kids in the bus windows going like :O kills me

who else up hurkleing their durkleing

literally my favorite type of tweet

Oh

The best part of the percy jackson books is that from percy's perspective hes just an easygoing funny cool guy who seems pretty harmless but the moment you see him from someone elses pov hes terrifying. Just a crazy good fighter, a force of nature killing machine, literally gets mistaken for a god in disguise. But he doesnt see that side of himself at all because hes too busy arguing with authority figures and respecting women. I love him

relatedly i'm not entirely willing to let go of the reading of tolkien as environmental, like i think there's a lot to be said for it i really like & would stand by. but at the same time i do think some of that reading has to be tempered with an understanding of how anti-industrialism can very much lead to or go hand in hand with a sort of idealization of pre-industrial (particularly rural) life in a way that's both ultimately conservative and overlooks a lot of issues, particularly to do with class. if that makes sense

I bring you… my silly little comics. Saw a tik tok this morning about British Museum recognizing emperor Elagabalus as a trans woman 🏳️‍⚧️, and I just had to draw this.

I honestly did not expect this to happen