#largely because you have to use some Imagination

[inspired-lesson-plans]

Well, since this blew up and became my most successful post, I'll add a few more things about Bordentown's MVP of AP Bio.

She's English, from England (Kent, I'm pretty sure), one of four sisters. Her accent has largely faded over the years, but her cadence never did. Imagine growing up where your mom talks like Ian McKellen.

I inherited some of that affectation, such that when I started teaching a lot of kids would ask where I was from. But I wish that I inherited her memory.

When she got her biology degree, there were only two kingdoms of life: plants and animals. Yet she still remembers more from her time in college than I do.

Has literally never been able to tell left from right. She would put transparencies on the projector backwards and the class would have to tell her that she was the only one who could read it.

One time some of her fellow teachers were discussing the boy bands they used to listen to in Middle School and how that made them feel old; i.e. NSYNC vs One Direction. She chimed in (read this with cadence) "When I was in Middle School, The Beatles were still together."

She once told me "I don't really like recorded music. It doesn't feel alive."

She made that lute to accompany her singing (which she does well but seldom), but she can't actually play it. This is not for lack of trying. More precisely, she learned how to play, but she was never physically able to. The third knuckle on each hand is slightly malformed, such that her ring fingers cannot put enough pressure on the strings, despite many hours of practice. So when the lute got damaged in transit years ago, she repaired it as best she could and then put it away for good. I never knew it existed until I was 18.

In the early 2000s she wrote a YA novel about a girl who gets sucked into the Fey and has to help save them from domination at the hands of Queen Mab. Too many plot points to summarize, neither can I share a link to it because it no longer exists, save for her and my memory. Imagine if your mom had written The Golden Compass, printed it at home, didn't bother publishing it, then lost both the manuscript and the floppy disk that held the only copy.

She also wrote a sci-fi novel about space-faring amnesiac vampires trying to find their home planet. The twist is that they were the products of a top-secret genetic engineering project headed by Dick Cheney during the War on Terror. When she told a colleague about it, he was so bought in that he asked, "Do you think this could be really happening?"

Very concerned that my mom has chosen the path of bioterrorism.

[chocodile]

Amaranthine Magic System PART I: Remedial Magic For Beginners

Okay so… weird starting point, but do you remember these jerks from middle school math class? Function graphs! (I hated these things so much) The simplest possible function is a basic straight line, but by modifying the function, the graphed line can distort and take on all sorts of new shapes.

Magic is a lot like that.

The best way to describe spellcasting would be “filtering waves of energy”. Imagine a sine wave, oscillating up and down in a simple, predictable pattern. That is magical energy in its default state. It exists as background radiation throughout the whole world and permeates all living things… though some things conduct magic better or worse than others. (Magic has a lot in common with the electromagnetic spectrum in the real world)

What wizards do when they cast magic is that they amplify and tweak this ambient background energy in just the right way to contort it into a new form (lightning, a shockwave, fire, etc). The core nature of the energy doesn’t really change, but by exaggerating, filtering, and suppressing that oscillating wave in just the right amounts, in just the right places, in just the right order, it can be transformed into something very different than its base form. You could also think of it a bit like a musician playing a wind instrument, modulating the tone by covering and uncovering holes, or a puppetmaster pulling strings of a marionette—you need to deeply understand the physics at play and give each string just the right amount of slack and pull to make it do what you want.

The most common type of magical energy is magic in a neutral, passive state, just sort of existing passively as background radiation. Like the electromagnetic spectrum and gravity, it is deeply intertwined with how life evolved in this world, but also is so innate as to be largely unnoticeable. It is energy without a physical form. However, it can be harnessed and stored, given the right conduit. Under these circumstances it behaves similar to electricity.

Certain types of physical material are better at holding and manipulating magic than others. Substances that hold or amplify magic work because something about their physical molecular structure bends and filters the magic “waves” in a way that “traps” that energy inside of them, or amplifies the frequency of the waves. Nearly all crystalline structures and precious gems have some sort of magic-amplifying capability, with the best ones being highly prized and fetching crazy prices for large, pure specimens. Skilled Old Kingdom wizards could engineer such gemstones into Catalyst Stones, a special type of battery/amplifier that wizards could use to cast spells beyond their normal limits. Gemstones and crystals have been traditionally associated with wizards for this reason. However, they are far from the only material with a magical affinity—just one of the most easily recognizable.

…Additionally, other materials might have the opposite effect. Iron is well-known for its wizard-subduing properties. Simply being in a room with a large piece of iron makes a wizard feel ill and weakens their powers. Iron manacles and chains are commonly used to imprison criminal wizards. Not only do they aggressively drain magic from the air, matter, and flesh around them, they prevent the hand gestures that might allow a weakened mage to do any magical manipulation at all.

Magical energy is distributed throughout the world unevenly. Occasionally, the concentration of magic in an area is so high that the environment itself becomes effectively enchanted. A certain range of mountains might be rich in magical ores that have a subtle effect on how water in the region behaves, causing strangely shaped caves and ridges to form in the region. A woodland might be home to a large number of mushrooms that have adapted to make use of magic as a defense mechanism, causing the glen to disorient travelers who walk through it. Magic is infamous for distorting compass readings, too, forcing travelers to carry protective charms to keep their tools usable.

There are all sorts of weird subtle little things like that that can be caused by high concentrations of magic, and magically concentrated areas often have very unique biodiversity that evolved to make use of that specific environment. Discovering, exploring, studying, and documenting these regions is of great interest to many magical scholars (as well as the state interests sometimes backing them, of course).

Magic can do a lot of weird stuff in Amaranthine, but it isn’t as open-ended as most other types of fantasy magic. Things like turning oneself into a dragon are no more possible than they are in real life (unfortunately for some who may wish otherwise). You can get pretty creative with it, and there are surely techniques yet undiscovered that even Hyden doesn’t know about, but no matter how fancy your spellcasting gets, it’ll always just be “manipulating waves of energy”.

(Part II and Part III coming soon!)

[eponymous-rose]

Some (many) thoughts on Arcane s2 while it's still fresh in my mind:

(tw: discussion of fictional depictions of suicide)

I'm gonna do some nitpicking here, but only because I really did like it overall - I think for me s1 was a solid 10/10 and this season was an 8.5/10, so I'm certainly looking forward to rewatching it! The animation was a big step up from s1's incredible work, the music was great, the performances were fantastic. I do think the overall writing/story fell down a bit, though.

It's weird, because my go-to when character arcs feel rushed is to want more episodes, but I don't think that necessarily would have solved my issues with this season.

Cait turned on Ambessa on a dime - we love to see it, but I think we maybe needed a few more overt hints of her discomfort with her position, maybe a sense of wrongness in their adoptive relationship and some parallels with Jinx & Silco given what Vi says early on ("why are you the one acting like her?"). Ambessa believes her daughter to be lost, and Cait has lost a mother - they were certainly playing on that substitution, but the eventual turn, while fun, felt a bit quick and unearned. I saw someone joke about the word "Cupcake" flipping Cait back like a sleeper agent, but that's kinda how abrupt things felt.

I think Mel's plot largely hung together okay, although it was pretty disconnected from everyone except Ambessa - would've loved to have seen some acknowledgement that Cait was filling her shoes as Daughter for a while there.

Isha was sweet and I liked the parallels with the Powder-Vi relationship (LOVED Jinx running with the pink chalk and Isha with the blue), but I think the sacrifice metaphor got a little muddled. The parallels with Powder charging in and killing everyone around her, versus Isha charging in and saving everyone but herself felt a little forced and I struggled to see how they served the greater narrative. The whole point of Powder's failure was a messy combination of bad luck, overcompensating for what she perceived as a lack of confidence in her, etc. Isha had Jinx's confidence on her side, I guess, and now of course we have the foreshadowing of Jinx dying to save someone else, which she's been trying to do since Act II.

Suicide was a pretty heavy concept throughout the first season. We had the parallels of Jayce and Viktor, we had the little-remarked-upon moment where Viktor hesitates before cutting the wire on Jinx's bomb. I actually think this season did pretty well with those two (although I'll talk about a couple things that irked me below), but the concept that we can't escape the things that we've done and we instead have to find salvation in those around us felt kind of contrary to Jinx's finally finding a way to die for her sister. I don't know that Jinx's story was necessarily supposed to feel satisfying or complete, but without another season there's not much to dig through there.

And that brings up the main reason I don't think more episodes would have resolved my quibbles with this season: it was pretty prone to overexplaining. To me, one of the most exceptional things about that first season was how little it explained. You had these gorgeous, evocative flashes of Vander trying to kill Silco, Silco stabbing him and fleeing into the night, and that's all we needed! That's it! We didn't need to know the specifics, we didn't need more backstory than that - the whole point of the season was that these kids are trying to make their own stories, and these guys have set the stage and are in the process of bowing out. Much as I loved the glimpses this season into the past generation's adventures, it felt like it was pinning something down that was more effectively left to the imagination.

There were also some weird fumbles with discussions of disability, especially in that last episode. I loved so much of what season one did with it - the older generation of Zaunites almost all had some form of disability due to the way they'd been systematically poisoned and their constant exposure to danger, and that was a really in-your-face way to challenge the early "why can't we all get along" stuff. And so much of Viktor's and Jayce's arcs are tied in with the sense of time running out and how Heimerdinger's long-term goals are incompatible with helping the people suffering right now. But instead we get this weird "you didn't like your imperfections so you tried to eliminate all imperfections", which doesn't quite ring true.

We just fundamentally didn't get to a resolution that I think was heavily implied, especially in Act II. "No one in power is innocent" is a great, raw line, but we didn't really see it play out. Instead, we have everyone stopping from othering each other in order to band together against an even bigger Other. As a side note, I don't think that Sevika's ending is meant to be a positive thing - we see from the skeptical looks of others that she's got a long road ahead. The revolution we saw coming just sort of fizzled out, and I think it's still on the horizon, which makes things feel incomplete.

There were also a lot of notes that repeated instead of echoing or harmonizing. We had variations on the theme of Vander dying three different times. We had Vi being unable to kill her sister several times. The repetition felt a bit like it was filling time instead of moving things forward the way s1's plot kept pushing.

This season is also the first time I felt the hand of League of Legends Canon shoving the plot into place. We knew Vi was heading for that enforcer uniform, but after the initial conflict it sometimes felt more like we just unlocked a new skin for the character. The Vander-as-Warwick stuff was kind of silly and out of left field, although it was executed pretty well and certainly pulled at the ol' heartstrings. Ekko getting his time abilities was fun and impacted the final fight, but I feel like we were missing something there as well that I'm having a harder time putting my finger on. Some of Viktor's lines felt designed to make the League players in the audience go "HE SAID THE THING". And I hate the feeling of setting up the Next Installment in the Cinematic Universe, probably just because I'm exhausted with Marvel stuff - I'd love for an adaptation like this to be able to really and truly stand on its own.

Overall, it just felt less like the characters were driving the story and more like they were ticking off boxes, which is just something that any good finale has to contend with one way or another.

Anyway, that's a lot of nitpicking. Fundamentally, this felt almost like it was a really strong fic that did a surprisingly good job of wrapping everything up and was stunningly put together in places... but still lacked the spark of the original.

Stuff I loved: Vi/Cait getting a pretty strong arc and certainly the first lesbian sex scene I've ever seen in a TV-14 cartoon. Animation and score was stunning. I did love the what-if of episode 7 - something I've been waiting for them to acknowledge is that literally everything that happens in the show follows from that one break-in during episode one. I actually think Vi and Jinx's reunion and reconciliation felt earned.

I'm curious how I'll feel on subsequent rewatches - the first time I watched s1, I remember being blown away but not in a "this is the best thing ever" way, and it wasn't until the second time that it really clicked for me.

[cube-cumb3r]

How did people answer the Dungeon Meshi question? (aka. how the Hell do you parse through free-form responses?!?)

(art by Ryokō Kui)

This first part is just going to be babble about google sheets and excel functions, feel free to skim or skip to the results.

Here's how the question was formulated: "Which Dungeon meshi character is objectively the best one If you are unfamiliar with dungeon meshi but still have an answer to this question, you can still answer (you don't need to know the character's name)."

As you can imagine, this made the responses exactly as creative as you'd expect. Which has made them both delightful to read through, but also painful to convert into usable data.

I started with making a list of the most frequently used words, excluding common ones. Here's an excerpt.

From this we already can see some hints as to the character most frequently mentioned, but if I were to make a chart of this it'd be a zillion categories, when ideally the responses obviously referring to the same character should be in one group, so we can truely see how many times a character was mentioned, no?

Although I could individually read every answer and categorize them manually I am NOT going to do that because, 1. it's tedious 2. I don't want to 3. I won't learn anything

If I ever work with a dataset of 1000 observations, doing it manually is absolutely not even feasible, therefore it's good to already know a better way to do it.

I was initially hoping to utilize xlookup, but I realized that xlookup doesn't actually do what I think it did. What I was HOPING it would do was to be able to identify keywords within longer answers, such as "cat girl" or "beardy dwarf" and then match them to some sort of index, where it'd be like Oh "cat girl"? That's obviously "Izutsumi". This is not how xlookup works. Xlookup cannot pick out a keyword from a longer response, it can only identify a partial phrase (example, if the full index phrase was "Delicious In Dungeon", a response saying "Delicious" will match, but a response saying "My favorite anime is Delicious in Dungeon", will not match, because xlookup cannot match a PERFECT MATCH from within a longer chunk of text.)

So instead I had to rely on my long-time good-time pal Regular Expression functions and combine them with xlookup. With my reliable sunday lover Regexextract I can Extract keywords out of answers in one step, and then in the next step match said keyword to my index.

INDEX:

^here is the index. Any non-blank response that doesn't match these gets counted as "Other". I tried to make the keywords as short as possible, that way they'd catch as many alternate spellings as possible without me having to write every variation out myself (LAZY!). For example, "bear" and "beard" don't need to be separate keywords (if they like in this index, correspond to the same character), as the keyword "bear" will match both the word Bear and Beard. Though, and as you will see later, making the keywords too short will result in false matches.

I made some Liberal Assumptions as to who a responder meant, such as in answers mentioning 'lesbians' or 'elf', which could in theory mean many characters. I went back and checked and adjusted the index to see that every answer got coded reasonably, but this has resulted in an index that is extremely adapted to this specific dataset, and it would not be as effective or reliable on a different dataset of Dungeon Meshi Answers.

Also, if a responder mentioned multiple characters, the first match is the one they got counted as. This could also be incorrect, depending on the answer.

RESULTS!!!

Here are the results! The title of the chart is wrong, I was obviously asking about the objectively best character, not "favorite"! Oh well. According to 24.4% responders, the objectively best character is Senshi, which is the correct answer (<- JOKE) (<- actually answered 'Marcille' himself)

You might notice quite a large "Other" category of 21.3% too, this is every response that was difficult to match to a specific Dungeon Meshi character, for a variety of reasons. Check out this hideous pie chart.

I don't know who "the one with teacher vibes" or "the one who is secretly a neutron star" is. Sorgy. Some of these were also referring to characters from other media, which is allowed and I respect it, but none of them recurring sadly. Wouldn't it be crazy if like 4 entirely separate people independently answered Sans. What Would It Mean?

Full responses:

With every "identifiable" response just being coded into a category, you don't actually get to see the beautiful ways in which THOSE people responded this question. So, here they are, in ascending order.

Izutsumi (7.5% of responses)

I was expecting more alternate spellings on this one, I personally think her name is tricky to spell, but that didn't seem to be the case. Also, seems that many people who think she's objectively the best one also don't actually know her name.

Falin (9.4% of responses)

Two of the responses here contains the two keywords, "chicken"/"bird" (which would categorize it as "Falin") and "lesb" (Which would actually categorize it as "Marcille"). Luckily, chicken and bird happened to be written first, so those responses got correctly coded as Falin.

Chilchuck (10.0% of responses)

Nearly everyone who think Chilchuck is the best one also seem to know his name. Maybe you need to be familiar with the show to truely appreciate the Chilchuck?

Laios (12.5% of responses)

Here, due to my laziness of not wanting to account for every possible spelling of Laios, "Ludmila" gets miscategorized as Laios because it contains the keyword "la". However, "The paladin" (which I do think actually is referring to Laios) gets accidentally categorized as Laios for the same reason, correctly.

Marcille (12.5% of responses)

The reason I made the controversial judgement call that responses containing the word lesbian would be coded as Marcille, is because I made the very liberal assumption that anyone responding with just "The lesbian" probably did mean Marcille, anyone familiar enough with Dungeon Meshi to mean Otta is probably be familiar enough to know her name. There is one response here saying "Lesbians", and they probably meant both Marcille and Falin but responders only get one character, so it got counted as Marcille.

Senshi (24.4%)

(You might notice as I just did that a response clearly meaning Chilchuck got coded as Senshi because they happened to mention Senshi first. That's my mistake for not making "halfling" it's own keyword. Sorry!)

Similarly to Izutsumi and Falin, Senshi seems to be a character many responders don't know the name of, in fact it looks like he most out of any character had the most responses mention him without knowing his name. Given that, I would make the assumption that most people who are only vaguely familiar with Dungeon Meshi, and perhaps don't even watch the show, overwhelmingly think Senshi is the Best Guy. Does that make it more of a correct answer, or less?

Anyway,

That's that for Dungeon Meshi. Happy Meshing everybody

[LINK TO MASTERPOST]

Does anyone want to do my new google form

[writingwhimsey]

Whimsey's Naughty or Nice Winter/Christmas Event

Hello everyone! Inspired by a post by @candied-boys (as well as other various holiday/winter themed events going around tumblr at large). I've decided to host one myself (I've never hosted an event before, so I hope this goes well).

This event is open to all in the ikemen/otome fandom. And it will officially run from December 1st to December 31st with the deadline to have fics added to the masterlist be January 15th.

Now for the actual details of the event. I have compiled a list of 25 prompts to choose from. They have the ability to go in multiple directions. Naughty or Nice being the main themes. In this case Naughty will be for smut and Nice will be for fluff.

Here are the prompts below:

Meeting under the mistletoe

Warming up by the fire

The first snow

Warming up your cold hands

Baking cookies

Christmas lights

Christmas decorating contest

Secret Santa/gift giving

Snowball fight

Building a snowman

Christmas/holiday party

Sledding

Stuck in a snow storm

All I want for Christmas is you

Ugly Christmas sweater

Drinking a bit too much eggnog

Jealous of Santa

Wrapping presents

Working on Christmas

Christmas wish

Slipping and falling on ice

Matching Christmas pjs

Homemade gifts

Wearing antlers/Santa hat together

Not wanting to leave the bed because it’s warm

You can use the prompts how you see fit for your writing. Since we have the naughty side of this event, only participate if you are 18 or older. Minors DNI.

If you do participate tag me in the posts (there are no limits on how many fics you can post for a prompt or how many suitors, the only limit is your imagination). However you want to participate is fine.

Also use the tag #whimsey-naughty-or-nice

I hope we can all have some fun together :)

I'll be making a post later with conditions for making requests from me :)

[dangermousie]

I hate that the novel and webtoon are both not translated. The novel has Prologue + 6 chapters translated, while the webtoon has 3 chapters translated. Because I imagine some of the stuff will be watered down for TV and I imagine the novel in particular is even spicier.

But I can’t wait to see more of ML’s POV regarding his wife. Because the first ep showed something, but at the same time - in those 3 years he never bothered to learn sign language to communicate with his wife (when he talks to the UK Ambassador about his wife).

I think it’s clear that despite whatever he feels for his wife. He never had to change or do anything, and it’s not until now and he learns more about her, and realises there is another side he doesn’t see that will force him to change.

The first episode was great. It’s been a while since a kdrama has grabbed me, I’ve been in a slump cause only Perfect Marriage Revenge and Lovely Runner have stood out for me this year. And apart from Iron Family, there’s been no kdramas for me to watch. So I’m glad to add this on my list.

Just wish I could read the novel.

I never looked for the novel because I like going in unspoiled but perhaps it's somewhere in Korean and you can use google translate or deepl?

But yeah, I've had a great year with cdramas but kdramas have largely been lackluster. (PMR was actually 2023, that's how lackluster!) I've only loved Lovely Runner and Black Out this year. So this is quite exciting.

And yeah, he clearly likes her but he himself hasn't realized it and this is gonna drag him out of the rut.

The trailer shows him learning sign language. (But there is clearly more to her mutism, it's like she was ordered to be quiet, for some reason.)

THIS IS SO DELICIOUS!!!

[swan2swan]

I love Bleach but the fandom is so ridiculous with their power scaling in regards to other mangas.

“Humans in the Bleach world can’t respond to Spirtual Pressure, so Naruto and Luffy would just get crushed by that” yeah, no, not how it works, guys. Spiritual Pressure is just Haki or Chakra. The Ki from Hunter x Hunter? Same stuff.

Watching Sailor Moon right now and Sailor Pluto just used an attack called “Kronos Typhoon” to make two foes disappear, in a manner that I have to assume meant they were erased from Time Itself. Just because she’s not making the screen shake with her power doesn’t mean she’s not demonstrating a power level at least on-par with a Lieutenant.

[joannerowling]

Take a look at this baby, it has EVERYTHING.

riddle was told to go home to his orphanage in london during what would have very much been the blitz? whatever.

"Harry Potter is bad because some arbitrary elements of real life i've got a personal interest in aren't part of the plot. Why aren't the books 1000 pages longer? I really wanted to read more of Harry Potter's really bad, terrible writing."

the weasley's are so strapped for cash that they're sending their son to school with a potentially dangerous broken wand? of course they're spending their lottery winnings on visiting their adult son in egypt

(CONTEXT : The Weasleys actually "win the lottery" the year after their son Ron broke his wand, and the win explicitly allows his family to buy him a new wand. So OP here is definitely talking out of their arse. Also,)

"JKR is a terrible writer because occasionally her characters aren't all good and make mistakes or bad decisions. Unlike real life, where people are always good and never make mistakes or bad decisions."

snape grew up in what was likely a dying northern industrial town with abusive/neglectful parents, largely cut off from the magical world? almost impressed you caught on to that, with how little it's expanded on.

"JKR's writing sucks because she can quickly and efficiently paint a picture for her young readers to understand a social context and develop empathy for her characters. Some would call her ability to do that in so little words impressive… Wait, what was i saying? Oh yeah, bad writing. Because reasons."

yes hermione has a supposedly good relationship with both her parents, no we're not going to show you it at all, yes she's going to wipe they're memories like it's nothing.

See first paragraph. (Also, CONTEXT : Hermione is very much distraught at having to - temporarily - wipe her parents's memories "for their own good". Hermione's willingness to do questionable but necessary things to protect people and win against the bad guys is built up throughout the series and is an established character trait at this point. Again, one wonders if OP has actually read the books.)

lily evans is the moral compass of james and basically the most important person in the series but fuck you if you want to actually know anything about her lmao

"I can't see the point of not knowing more about the main character's long dead mum that he never got to know. The tragedy of this fully escapes me. From a literary perspective i don't get the point of being put in the protagonist's shoes. As the reader i should be told everything, and never ever made to use my imagination and empathy."

thinking again about jk rowling being a bad writer. like, we all know about the massive flaws in her worldbuilding and i hope by now it's clear she's a bigot on basically every front. (hello, regular reminder that she doesn't even actually like women.) but like. she's especially good at dropping bits of lore and then those not being relevant in the fucking slightest. riddle was told to go home to his orphanage in london during what would have very much been the blitz? whatever. the weasley's are so strapped for cash that they're sending their son to school with a potentially dangerous broken wand? of course they're spending their lottery winnings on visiting their adult son in egypt, what else would they do. snape grew up in what was likely a dying northern industrial town with abusive/neglectful parents, largely cut off from the magical world? almost impressed you caught on to that, with how little it's expanded on. yes hermione has a supposedly good relationship with both her parents, no we're not going to show you it at all, yes she's going to wipe they're memories like it's nothing. lily evans is the moral compass of james and basically the most important person in the series but fuck you if you want to actually know anything about her lmao. even what little we see is wildly inconsistent.

[mantisgodsdomain]

On the rare occasions when we talk about the spectre of veganism you can probably physically tell the amount of psychic damage that we take from seeing people throw out any part of a carcass.

[dashiellqvverty]

calling myself a former rpf fan is so misleading bc “fiction” had nothing to do with it. even when i did read fic i was never even all that into it and i didn’t really get much out of it it was ALL about reading those primers and manifestos and analyzing lyrics and watching videos/interviews/etc

[arolesbianism]

Why would I draw or further flesh out the other members of Chou's party when I can instead think abt how all of them play in game and spiral out into making up a shit ton of other game mechanics that do not matter to the actual story

[mcmansionhell]

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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[swagging-back-to]

started my period in thw middle of my shift yesterday and boy oh boy do i love having giant dried globs of blood in my pubes and pain and stomach issues and acne :) mammals totally arent fucking stupid :))

[fingertipsmp3]

Another thing that’s happening is my ankle decided to grow a bone spur. So that’s fun

[brownbitchshit]

I currently have 700+ followers. And I will urge all of you to read about what is happening in Bangladesh. What has happened in Bangladesh. I am adding irrelevant tags of the fandoms I follow to garner more attention. I apologize in advance.

The government of Bangladesh killed pressumably 950+ people, innocent people, students, all because they demanded a system that will give them government jobs based on merit rather than quota. To suppress the students Sheikh Hasina and its government imposed 5 days of total internet blackout. While imposing this blackout they killed off anyone of the streets. They killed people from helicopters by shooting and throwing grenades. Many kids died in their own homes as the bullet shot them through their window.

Sheikh Hasina and its police took away all the dead bodies and the death registries from the hospital. The official death toll is 200. But various journalistic and medical staff sources confirm the death toll is over 950 in Dhaka alone.

That monster of a PM didn't acknowledge the death of the students. Instead she is crying over the infrastructure vandalism. I request you,rise up and speak out about this. Educate yourself and let other people know. The internet blackout have suppressed the truth at large. The Bangladeshi people are in deep surveillance and the government have made 2000+ arrests on false charges just because they have shared the Information. There is mass fear mongering. I know most of you people are not Bangladeshis and that's why you need to help us and speak up about it. Join your local protests, share the news in your social media, twitter Instagram. I beg you, don't let my people's murderers get away with it. Don't let my people's death be forgotten.

I am attaching some links for you to understand the horror of it all.

This Facebook page Bringing justice to you has documented all the horrors and the massacres that happened on Bangladeshi people. TW : all kinds of blood, gore, death bodies, every single horrible things imaginable but shows what went down.

This ig page is also another page that brings you the horror stories.

https://www.instagram.com/thebangladeshivoice?igsh=YXBpdzQyem54cmZj

Al-Jazeera has been a very credible news source while the Bangladesh was under blackout. They have made several segments. I am attaching the latest one.

UN Human Rights have called out Bangladesh for explanation regarding the crackdown

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by United Nations Human Rights (@unitednationshumanrights)

Amnesty International's report of Bangladesh government using lethal weapon against its people and mass murder

There are many more contents, proof and videos to show you the horrors that was unfolded in the crackdown. Sheikh Hasina killed her people like insects and violated every single human rights imaginable. Please share these. Support us. Help us. I beg you all.

[proxycrit]

If this man has to haunt me, he has has to haunt you.

Meet Sweaty. He’s a 42 year old absol and lives with his human mom in Castelia, Unova.

Some Absol headcanons:

I do think part of why Absols have such a bad rep among people is partially due to folklore of them appearing before and after horrific disasters, but also because they have such a human face. Imagine seeing this mf in the dark woods watching you. Something that looks human, but is not. Something that sounds human, but is NOT. Follow this by a horrific landslide.

Do you see the problem. Humans remember human faces. Predators sometimes mimic their prey. Absols have the truly unfortunate evolutionary quirk of falling into both categories.

So yes, there was a huge stigma against absols which led to a pretty severe population decline.

In modern day (much like wolves), Absols have become media darlings, in large thanks to a the help of pokemon rangers who utilize Absol’s ability to sense weather as an indicator when to evacuate. They are a very long lived species and need lots of intense exercise, often declaring huge swaths of land as their personal territories. Absols also tend to get very anxious when they feel they do not have enough space, so keeping them with other pokemon’s usually a no no.

Sweaty’s mom used to be a pokemon ranger and found Sweaty stuck in a refrigerator. Nowadays, she lets him free roam—much to the chagrin of every other person in the area. Sweaty in turn makes himself a nuisance to the local icecream store, begging for treats.

(The kids love him. He comes home with ink and paint stained everywhere and it’s a nightmare to clean.)

Hate my human faced monstrosities? Thank @tjs-stuffs for this. Ciao!