House That Other Houses Built

main blog of Lucille "Lucy Walter" Black, indie ndn author and dyke extraordinaire aesthetics // commentary // fashion

[lucillewalterblack-main]

welcome to the haunted house

call me Lucille or Lucy (she/her); I write under the pen name Lucy Walter and go professionally by Lucille Walter Black

I am Native. I will sometimes talk about being a Native fantasy writer or a Native existing in fan spaces. my opinions on those things are my own, and if any white people take them as justification to ignore other Native opinions or perspectives I will come into your dreams and haunt you.

conversely, sometimes I just want to Be On Tumblr. Be A Fan. Be A Normal Person. I am profoundly disinterested in education of the masses about Native identity through Tumblr as a medium. I have other physical in-person spaces where I can do that.

disabled. don't be weird about it.

dyke feminist. “women” includes trans women. no TERF will never get me to turn on my sisters.

leftist, but intensely pragmatic about it

writing blog - posts, moodboards, aesthetic and fashion photos, edits, and commentary pertaining to my original fiction

bluesky - book promo, off the cuff thoughts

linktree - other socials and personal links

[iftadwascool]

[golden-reedwolf]

F1 grey wolf x poodle crosses bred by Erik Zimen as part of a study on dog domestication. 

Footage from BBC Horizon, 1969

[thecryptkeeper]

Stills from Mārama, a “Māori gothic horror film” directed by Taratoa Stappard (2025)

[avercc]

Since releasing Male Validation and Other Drugs, I’ve been everywhere INCLUDING THE STUDIO, hard at work on my debut album!!! I could not be more excited to share the first single of the project “Toy Gun, “which will be out 9/9 🔫 🫧🩵🩷 This album is such a special body of work to me, and following all the love for the EP/Shapeshifting and all the new fans who came over from Off Campus, I wanted to wait until I had the perfect song 🤭 You can presave the song now in my bio (and you should 😻💋😏😏) I am so grateful for all the support Oh! And… for any of you who didn’t get a live show when my EP came out, I just might be coming to a city near you 😏🐔🚌 Sign up for pre-sale HERE.

Welcome to AC1 🫧🩵 Cover shot by @saaaaamk Directed by @marlenarayne Creative producer @its_emmabrooke HMU @tatiyanaelias

[jeyneofpoole]

nolan’s odyssey is such a textbook study on the idiocy and dangers of presentism. yes of course penelope is a modern day feminist who wants to rule ithaca by herself. they make telemachus say that GREECE IS THE GREATEST CIVILIZATION IN THE WORLD as if the entire point of the massing of achaeans at troy for one unified cause isn’t spectacular precisely because THERE IS NO CONCEPT OF A UNIFIED GREECE NATIONS DO NOT EXISTTTTTT YETTTTT. literally 101 on historical writing is making sure that you’re avoiding strict periodization because the people living in a “period” will not identify themselves that way. ever. five million cheeky nods to “the sea peoples” but we’re being cute and coy and calling them “the people from the sea.” the obsession with xenia but refusal to call it xenia yes let’s say “zeus’s law” a hundred times and reduce it to the literal expectation that any stranger could be a god in disguise. how was penelope just hanging out in the main hall of the palace with her husband’s dinner guests while they were playing with weapons with her HAIR COMPLETELY DOWN no veil no nothing just chilling casually. comical. stoppppp making movies that engage in historical viewpoints if you’re going to slather a modernized coat of paint over the top. “the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” or fucking whatever.

[lucillewalterblack-main]

look.

normally I am historical accuracy's strongest soldier.

but.

if you are watching Nolan's Odyssey and you are failing to understand that the entire film, including dialogue style (modernisms like 'daddy', 'okay', 'yeah') and costumes (purposefully anachronistic!!!) and metatextual asides alluding to real-life events, is itself a commentary about how we have preserved and retold and continued to adapt the epic cycle, about how there is no such thing as an accurate adaptation and therefore all previous adaptations are exactly as historically grounded as his work (because, as I have repeatedly said, authenticity and accuracy does not exist when adapting Homer and Hesiod!!!!)? you completely missed the point.

the costumes are anachronistic because we cannot truly know how these people dressed. the dialogue is laden with metacommentary about the entire field of classical studies because we cannot accurately depict the Mycenaean past when we retell these stories, and each adaptation is itself more reflective of the people doing the adapting than the cycle itself. xenia is simplified and flattened both for the purposes of telling the story to an audience who shouldn't have to have a history lesson full of context to enjoy a version of a tale we've had for thousands of years and again because we cannot know what actual Mycenaean religious practice was like to a degree that would lend accuracy.

this was not trying to be a historically accurate movie, it was trying to be a high-concept staging. think "community theater production of Camelot that models Arthur and Guinevere on JFK and Jackie", or "the 2018 Royal Shakespeare Company staging of Troilus and Cressida where everyone's an escapee from a Mad Max installment and there are guns". and it's written and directed by someone who does understand both the poems themselves and the culture around them - he's commenting just as much about the societies these stories have impacted as he is about the text! And you can disagree with that as an adaptational choice but I am so tired of takes that hinge upon the idea that Nolan is ignorant when the fact that he is talking about xenia, about the Sea Peoples, about the Bronze Age Collapse, means that he knows enough to have made these choices on purpose!

[monstrousgourmandizingcats]

For people obsessed with something that's literally called Epic: The Musical, a lot of this site's contingent of Classics Understanders sure can't stand anything more Brechtian than a Merchant-Ivory production.

While I don't agree with them, there are people here whose opinions I respect who either hated the movie or aren't seeing it because they've made an educated guess that they'll hate it and don't want to waste their time (shoutout to my friend @staghunters, just to name one). However, their problems with it tend not to revolve around the idea that an "historically accurate" adaptation of the Homeric epics, of all source materials, is either normal to want or possible to achieve.

Also, people in the nineteenth century absolutely used still-extant periodization terminology like "Age of Steam," and I'm sure there are other examples too.

Also I think "such-and-such a character wouldn't be a Modern Feminist" criticisms are starting to verge into uncritically accepting historically-prevalent forms of misogyny, but that's a whole other can of Scyllae.

[lucillewalterblack-main]

I’m also going to open myself up to quite a lot of racist harassment by saying that most of the people objecting to this film on the premise of “no historical accuracy” are wide open to being radicalized into right wing nationalism and Segregation But Woke arguments. I’ve already seen a lot of people falling into the trap that the only people who should star in or make movies about the epic cycle are Greeks, with no awareness of things like the history of Greek xenophobia and nationalism and racism that make those kinds of points really fucking fraught. This is ultimately a story that has proven to be foundational to what we now call the West, and every generation will revisit it in ways that reflect contemporary anxieties and positions. Nolan isn’t failing to be authentic or accurate, he’s making an artistic statement.

[thenaturalistlibrarian]

Stop having a bitch fit about "historical accuracy" when what you really mean is you think "Black people weren't invented, yet."

Will I see the Odyssey? No. But that's because I have beef with Nolan for consistently centering men in stories about violence (particularly sexual violence) against women, and treating women's trauma as a plot device to advance the male character's development. That's not a unique complaint to him, just the existence of Memento will keep pissing me off.

[ndnbutch]

I feel like there’s also a racialized element haunting the conversation around shaving that I haven’t yet seen anyone really address (at least on my dash, I’m sure people ARE talking about it in general because I cannot possibly be the first person this thought has occurred to). there’s like the very basic point that if you are someone who grows thicker, courser body hair then you will be more prone to painful ingrowns and shaving regularly will absolutely exacerbate this, it was a thing I dealt with for years when I was still shaving my body hair and having stopped doing that has been tremendously helpful for my bodily wellbeing. but also overall I do think racialized people (obviously especially racialized women) can be more heavily targeted by the pressure to shave. not even necessarily because of the claim that we are “naturally hairier” or whatever because that’s really not universally true and I don’t think it’s super helpful to parrot that. but in my experience our body hair, largely regardless of its appearance or quantity, is frequently treated as more unsightly and less acceptable than that of our white peers for any number of reasons. and I do think that should be part of the conversation around abolishing a culture of shaving. it was something that impacted my life from a very young age in a way that was markedly different from and often actively enforced by my white friends and classmates.

[nonbinary-wrath-month]

People who say "Society loves tomboys! Society has no problem with women embracing masculinity!" have never spoken to an (ex-)tomboy about what people started saying to them at puberty.

[theinternetarchive]

'woman in black taffeta dress and lace shawl,' daguerreotype; albert sands southworth and josiah johnson hawes, united states c. 1850.

[chroniccoolness]

racist white canadians and europeans want you to believe the slave trade worked like this

it did not. it is public knowledge the slave trade worked like this

and in fighting antiblackness within canada and europe it is so so so important to acknowledge these places's participation in and benefit from the transantlantic slave trade. Slavery is not just the US's dirty past, it is a triangular industry lasting centuries that white people in the united states, canada, and europe benefitted from and continue to benefit from to this day. Slavery was good for white canadians and white europeans. They liked it. they encouraged it. they had slaves, they profited from the slave trade, and they used products grown from US slave labour in every day life. The slavery of Black people would not have been possible on the sheer scale at which it happened if it were not for active, consistent participation from europe and canada.

[glintglimmergleam]

The Met’s next fashion exhibit spotlights John Galliano, and will confront his troubled past

The next Met Gala fashion exhibit will focus on John Galliano. The British designer is known for both his talent and the scandal in which he

I'm sure most of you saw this news while I was away but here's more proof cancel culture is a lie. It doesn't work. White men who are somebody's favorite always float back up to the surface, like pond scum.

Fuck this racist antisemite but also fuck Anna Wintour and Andrew Bolton and everyone at Conde Nast and the Met for throwing him a Most Special Boy party at a time when bigotry is openly cheered in the public square. I don't care how many tears Galliano has cried or how many rabbis he's personally apologized to. Penance does not mean he deserves a reward, not when there are hundreds of designers the Costume Institute could have chosen.

I will not be blogging the Met Gala in 2027. It's so over.

[spin-the-wheel-polls]

You have just lost use of this random kitchen item/ implement how screwed are you in terms of cooking?

https://wheelofnames.com/ry4-3s4

The wheel is completed but if you the mod want to change it at all feel free and I couldn't figure out how to get the link to work properly even un-anoned.

Thanks, have a nice day and drink some water

You have just lost use of this random kitchen item/implement!

how screwed are you in terms of cooking?

I'm not screwed at all surprisingly!

I'm fine because I never use this

It'll be annoying but I'm fine

I'M SO SCREWED. SO SCREWED.

results/other

Remaining time: 1 day 13 hours

[larkandkatydid]

A funny, bordering on charming example of people knowing about Octavia Butler but not actually reading her is that I saw a picture of a book display labeled, “they saw it coming” with several of her books on it, including the one where earth is taken over by tentacled aliens who make humans be in polycules with them. And friends, either we were, in creating this display, working off of a vague sense of what black ladies write about or there’s something I’ve missed about modern family structure since I have noticed zero tentacled throuples in my day to day life.

[piratedragqueen]

Murder For Dummies, a horror comedy webseries satirizing the "true crime" genre by the showrunner of Dogs In Space and Jentry Chau Vs The Underworld who also wrote episodes of Gumball, is by far the tightest comedy writing on the entire internet, and it's not even a close competition Plus the mystery is ACTUALLY solvable, but boy did it stump me But the real crime is that it has only 5,000 views Watch all six episodes and just make your night better

This is like Good Place/30 Rock levels of joke density And this is level of production quality not otherwise found outside of paid streaming services

[prokopetz]

We used to treat Guys Who Think All Romans Lived In Collonaded Temples And Exclusively Built With Stone Because That's What The Ruins Look Like as freakish outliers, but thanks to the rise of AI aesthetic blogs we now know that a. this is actually a widespread belief in certain circles, and b. the "certain circles" in question are Nazis.

[feminist-space]

[johanna-swann]

[everydayconman]

The ancient texts were true… They DO have a reaction image for everything…

[lucillewalterblack-main]

is this anything