Brutalist mushroom.

Watched Lu Over the Wall last night and liked Lu's papa a normal amount

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.

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Here’s another ‘80s Space Crowd Saturday: David B. Mattingly’s cover art to “Desperate Measures,” by Joe Clifford Faust, 1989. I think we can add Bladerunner right alongside A New Hope when it comes to influentially seedy sci-fi bars.

Good Traits Gone Bad

Exploring good traits gone bad in a novel can add depth and complexity to your characters. Here are a few examples of good traits that can take a negative turn:

1. Empathy turning into manipulation: A character with a strong sense of empathy may use it to manipulate others' emotions and gain an advantage.

2. Confidence becoming arrogance: Excessive confidence can lead to arrogance, where a character belittles others and dismisses their opinions.

3. Ambition turning into obsession: A character's ambition can transform into an unhealthy obsession, causing them to prioritize success at any cost, including sacrificing relationships and moral values.

4. Loyalty becoming blind devotion: Initially loyal, a character may become blindly devoted to a cause or person, disregarding their own well-being and critical thinking.

5. Courage turning into recklessness: A character's courage can morph into reckless behavior, endangering themselves and others due to an overestimation of their abilities.

6. Determination becoming stubbornness: Excessive determination can lead to stubbornness, where a character refuses to consider alternative perspectives or change their course of action, even when it's detrimental.

7. Optimism becoming naivety: Unwavering optimism can transform into naivety, causing a character to overlook dangers or be easily deceived.

8. Protectiveness turning into possessiveness: A character's protective nature can evolve into possessiveness, where they become overly controlling and jealous in relationships.

9. Altruism becoming self-neglect: A character's selflessness may lead to neglecting their own needs and well-being, to the point of self-sacrifice and burnout.

10. Honesty becoming brutal bluntness: A character's commitment to honesty can turn into brutal bluntness, hurting others with harsh and tactless remarks.

These examples demonstrate how even admirable traits can have negative consequences when taken to extremes or used improperly. By exploring the complexities of these traits, you can create compelling and multi-dimensional characters in your novel.

Happy writing!

Texas Tech School of Law, Lubbock.

Vincent Price and friend on the set of House on Haunted Hill

I watche dthis movie this ovtober and was down with the whole thing but the moment this goofy as mfer popped up it was all over. There was no better way they could have ended it

had these drawings hanging around for a while actually, thought abt em because of a certain game release

more frux art, bit of roughed up fellows in here

bite this garlics 🧄🧄🧄🧄

spooky sona for @thatkidwhodoesstuff (from last october actually) 🎃🎃🎃🎃

Mdnfbfhd... Is em.e... is ME

sad, gross, floppy

Ists eme its eme its me im its mm imm