happy polyam stuff

(not actually glamorous 😎) Nyles, they/them

[ceruleanheaven]

month starting on a monday we have no excuse guys lets get to work and lock the fuck in

[ceruleanheaven]

yk its actually very chic and avant garde to start on tuesday the second

[ceruleanheaven]

many claim theres nothing more subversive and revolutionary than starting on wednesday the third

[redgoldsparks]

Revisiting a few paintings I did back in 2017 for a Pride month comic

🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈

[makingqueerhistory]

Am I Blue? Performed by Ethel Waters (1929) | Making Queer History

Get more from Making Queer History on Patreon

“Am I Blue?” is a song composed by Grant Clarke and Harry Akst and performed by Ethel Waters in 1929. Waters was born in the Pennsylvania, United States on October 31, 1896. She was a well regarded singer and actress known for her jazz, swing, pop, and blues work. She made her way to Broadway and concert stages, and made a name for her self in film, television, and theatre. Her story is a remarkable one — the Black vaudeville circuit, a performer of the Harlem Rennaissance, the star of her own television show, and more. Waters identified as bisexual, and had both husbands and girlfriends, including the Harlem-based dancer Ethel Williams. You can find this and more works in our gallery!

[creatingblackcharacters]

Remember when Lil Nas X beautifully explored his sexuality, seduced and killed the devil to the banger of all time, and instead of cheering on this openly gay and proud Black artist for his artistry and fighting back against respectability politics, suddenly said respectability politics was all the Queerest Place on the Internet cared about? Hm. Wonder what happened there.

Anyway I miss him and hope he's doing better with his mental health 🙏🏾

[creatingblackcharacters]

Like say what you want about "bad queer representation", but this was the song that made me openly and happily accept that I was bisexual. To see him up there Black and beautiful, making music that I love, absolutely killing it? Yeah. You couldn't tell me shit. This man made me proud to be out. "This will make them think we're evil for being gay" hey newsflash dawg-

[marisatomay]

Happy Pride

[mcmansionhell]

mcmodernslopcore

Howdy, howdy, folks.

For many years (ten now, about which, more soon) McMansion Hell has featured many prominent and diverse atrocities from all over these great United States and sometimes beyond them. However, most of these posts have consisted of houses built during the McMansion Era proper -- from the 80s up through around the early 2010s.

This is for a number of reasons. First of all: I like these houses because they are insane. Second of all, they are indeed quite different from one another -- they represent the owner's idiosyncratic if poorly rendered desires and fantasies. They are heavily psychologically loaded buildings. One family dreams endlessly of Tuscany, another wants to recreate the mall. All interiorize previously exterior forms of consumption.

These houses were also very expensive to build compared to their contemporary iterations: all real, solid wood cabinetry and trim, wrought iron railings, marble floors, elaborate murals - none of this is cheap. This is not to say that I'm nostalgic for the classical McMansion (though many are) only that it, like, most other facets of architectural and everyday life, have become progressively cheaper and more bland.

The McMansion never truly goes away. It merely changes shape over time. One of the shapes it currently takes is a particularly loathsome imitation of contemporary high architecture (specifically the kind of houses architects love to build for celebrities in California) executed in the most wretchedly parsimonious manner possible. It feels cheap to use the word 'slop' but their indiscriminate nature - the way they have no regard for why or how the things they imitate even work - allows it. Of all the building forms that could be generated with AI, this is the most likely. At any rate, behold:

Yes this is a real house. Yes you can buy it for $6 million in, yet again, Barrington, IL. It has 5 bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms totaling 11,600 square feet. But most importantly, it looks like dogshit. Ten layers of Photoshop have been used to gussy it up which makes it appear entirely ersatz. Were it not for the interiors, I myself would have trouble trusting my own eyes. Part of the reason it looks so unreal is because the design itself is absurd, as though someone created four equally ugly vessels and threw them up one by one.

In 2017, in a now-deleted essay for Curbed (RIP - they destroyed the archive) I called these types of houses McModerns, simply because they were McMansions dressed up in modernist garb, which they wore no differently than they would Neo-Tudor or Mediterranean (broadly construed.) These houses don't warrant a new neologism, but they do feel like a degraded or perhaps even gonzo version of even that old concept. Slop works fine too, especially because half of what's in these images isn't real.

Much fascinates me about these houses, however one of the most unique elements vis a vis the last 30 years of building is how overtly and almost hostilely masculine they are. Anything that can be construed as feminized - color, softness, ornament - has been ruthlessly purged. They also rip off tech industry minimalism which only ads to their bro-ey nature. While previous iterations of McModernism (think new builds in Colorado with fake wood exteriors) scream dads with IPAs, these houses scream Reddit to me. They are Elon Musk-adjacent in sentiment.

By the way, this is what that room looks like without the fake furniture. It's basically a sunroom.

Whole Foods would like to call in a robbery.

Because these houses are designed by men, for men, no one involved has learned how a kitchen works. Many are calling this setup the "grindset tiktok video kitchen." This is the kitchen you see in those day in the life of an AI startup founder videos your algorithm forces you to watch against your will.

Virtual staging is actual literal slop. In fact, one can say that they were one of the first iterations of the ontological crisis we now face, one of the first instances where one is forced against one's will to question reality, what one sees with one's own eyes. Beyond that, I think virtual staging is literally a form of lying. You can use it to make a space look bigger or smaller than it is. In this it also has a lot in common with AI. This dining room has nothing to do with the world I'm living in. These chairs are not my problem.

It's actually AMAZING how much of what's in this house, beyond the furniture, is fake. Every single material is fake. The stone is aluminum paneling. The plants are plastic. The concrete is printed on some kind of surface (as evidenced through its repetitive pattern), though it's hard to say from just pictures. I don't even trust the floors!!

Ok if you haven't read Kelly Pendegrast's amazing essay "Merchandizing the Void" about how houses are all like stores now, HERE IS THE LINK. Some ideas never die, they just evolve, king. Like you.

Please, I'm very cold.

Unfortunately there are no pictures of the rear exterior of this house, so this is where we will have to conclude for today. That being said, these houses and their antecedents are developing a design language all their own that will, in time, be as culturally rich to us as the houses of yore. The problem is they are less visually interesting. They are houses made to scroll in and scroll right by. Expect to see more of them here, but only if they have something, anything to say.

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. (Don’t worry! This doesn’t adjust for inflation! Now’s the perfect time to join!) By the way: new subscribers can buy a year of McMansion Hell for just $12!

Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar! (I would seriously appreciate any and all tips because I am in the process of moving house!)

[tjalexandernyc]

Picture of ramen dot jpg (it's May!)

Hello darlings. This month I’d like to talk a little bit about social media and why I’m leaving it. I know this is tedious. We all have that

In this month's free newsletter, I say goodbye to social media for the most part.

This wasn’t an easy decision for me. I was there, Gandalf. I was there when the BBS message boards were owned by a single person who was just really into an obscure TV show. When we had to email our fanfiction to one of the handful of people who ran their own website on a themed webring, hoping they would allow our one-shot to be hosted in their online curio cabinet so other people could read it. When it took up to an hour for a jpg of the X-Files cast to load on a monitor that conservatively weighed 200 lbs. I joined Twitter when it was still possible to grab a first name as a handle. I LOVE talking to other nerds, and for much of my life, the internet was the place to do that. But that’s no longer the case.

[sashayed]

has anyone figured out how to turn off the thing where you love your pet so much it slides inexorably into grief-borrowing

[boomstab-papa]

[loveletters2myself]

[nudibutch]

working from home + windows open + can hear front porch wind chimes + sunny and warm

[marxisforbros]

Conversation with a Native Son: Maya Angelou and James Baldwin

[kimchicuddles]

HAPPY PI DAY!!!!!1 Here are 2 slices from the past. May all your love be sweet and irrational 😁

Thank you so much for supporting my work! PATREON patreon.com/kimchicuddles

[apocryphics]

anne sexton

[tjalexandernyc]

Hello people of tumblr, this is me doing some book promo. It will all be over soon.

I wrote this thing! TRIPLE SEC is a (deep inhale) queer polyamorous cocktail bar romcom that somehow got traditionally published (phew)! It comes out June 4 but I'm giving away 3 advance reading copies right now.

You can enter here. Open internationally! Rules at the form, not affiliated with tumblr, etc.

And please share with the polycule (or whoever, I won't judge) to boost my little threesome 🍸🍸🍸 Thank you for your time, I will now resume reblogging weird looking cats.

[weltenwellen]

Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours

[weltenwellen]

May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

[tjalexandernyc]

Say hello to Triple Sec, out June 4, 2024 from Simon & Schuster! (Art by Petra Braun.)

It’s queer! It’s poly! It’s cocktails!!! Official synopsis below the cut.

A jaded bartender is wooed by a charmingly quirky couple in this fresh and sizzling polyamorous rom-com, set in the exclusive world of high-end cocktail bars—from the acclaimed author of the “tender, decadent, and sparklingly funny” (Lana Harper, New York Times bestselling author) Chef’s Choice. As a bartender at Terror & Virtue, a swanky New York City cocktail lounge known for its romantic atmosphere and Insta-worthy drinks, Mel has witnessed plenty of disastrous dates. That, coupled with her own romantic life being in shambles, has Mel convinced love doesn’t exist. Everything changes when Bebe walks into the bar. She’s beautiful, funny, knows her whiskeys—and is happily married to her partner, Kade. Mel’s resigned to forget the whole thing, but Bebe makes her a unique offer: since she and Kade have an open marriage, she’s interested in taking Mel on a date. What starts as a fun romp turns into a burgeoning relationship, and soon Mel is trying all sorts of things she’d been avoiding, from grand romantic gestures to steamy exploits. Mel even gets the self-confidence to enter a cocktail competition that would make her dream of opening her own bar a reality. In the chaotic whirl of all these new experiences, Mel realizes there might be a spark between her and Kade, too. As Bebe, Kade, and Mel explore their connections, Mel begins to think that real love might be more expansive than she ever thought possible. With TJ Alexander’s signature “witty and insightful voice, complex characters, and full-throated celebration of the joy of queer community” (Ava Wilder, author of How to Fake It in Hollywood), Triple Sec is a passionate, thirst-quenching love story that will have you asking for another round…or three.

You know the drill, folks!! I am asking/begging you to please spread the word and help me out. This book is a VERY different kind of romance and I am desperate for it to find its audience. Here are some ways you can help me:

Pre-order. I know, I know, June 4 is forever away but it really is the biggest thing. Pre-ordering is a gift to yourself and to authors who would really like to hit some kind of bestseller list some day. If you don’t want to pre-order now, consider putting a note in your calendar to buy it on June 4?

Add the book to your GoodReads or Storygraph TBR.

Share my pinned posts on Instagram or tumblr once they go up today around noon.

Tell your local bookstore or library (or both!) to stock this book.

Thank you, thank you, thank you! Next round’s on me.

[tjalexandernyc]

This book's got a lot more going on than tropes and tags but if this convinces even one polycule to do a group read it (hours lost to Canva) will have been worth it.

[aridante]

Mahmoud Darwish (trans. Mohammad Shaheen), Like a Hand Tattoo in an Ode by an Ancient Arab Poet