literally not what I was talking abt in my last post but I forgot I started writing the cleo/pearl part of clover au and honestly. It's good

for the apparently like 3 people who've read clover on account of this au please understand that the absolute sole person who I haven't reassigned roles for since the first draft is I think that Martyn is Bols and cleo is kind of like Kazuhiko in that way. everything else follows from there

black captain alternate ending. does anybody ever think about this

what if you were my captain and you loved me and needed me and when your downfall came and everyone turned on you and said there were a hundred better men. and I saw how badly broken you were and prayed for you to drown where nobody will ever see or find you. and in an alternate version meant to raise awareness for a man jailed for protesting oil rigs instead I learned how much I needed you back.

also I realize that brother in the alt edition is comradely bc the end is now to a real human man separated from his wife and kids on account of being a political prisoner. how ever he left in the he loved me and needed line. the ability to fracture your own work in this way and recontectualize it without resolving or particularly caring about the contradictions produced is sooooooooo bpb homoerotic no homo classic

black captain alternate ending. does anybody ever think about this

what if you were my captain and you loved me and needed me and when your downfall came and everyone turned on you and said there were a hundred better men. and I saw how badly broken you were and prayed for you to drown where nobody will ever see or find you. and in an alternate version meant to raise awareness for a man jailed for protesting oil rigs instead I learned how much I needed you back.

It's almost Train Time. Next Create out today!

Sloy: Trains. *Clip of loud crowd cheering* For as long as man has walked the Earth, trains have walked alongside them.

so it goes. i have so much work to do to ensure that woaks becomes a thing

etho literally interrupting bdubs to make his joke abt making bdubs his slave before the conversation topic changes and then bdubs going I would do that. well it sounds like the sort of thing tumblr users would make up but I just relistened to that clip and it is just a real conversation. thankd

<3 it's so fucking awkwardly delivered I lose it every single time

OH MY GOD NEW PAINTINGS!!! BY ZETTERSTRAND!!!! WAAAAAA

we've found it folks: mcmansion heaven

Hello everyone. It is my pleasure bringing 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 while unable to let go of the cookiest 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. Yet all fits with what the interior design tries to hide, namely how unerringly peculiar the house is, yet it is not entirely able to do so 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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@bellshazes

bdubs. talking about being proud of his kids AND also thinking his forest would be ordinary to people who weren't him. exploding him with my mind

this dripleaf challenge is making me absolutely cackle. bdubs expressly going well i think this is impossible but i'm going to get the three big redstone guys to try and solve my problem bc i don't think they will TODAY but maybe eventually later they'll still be thinking about it, and so giving problem-solvers a problem to solve classically obsesses them works. and now he's got new dripleaf techniques. stinking conniver