I'd rather be in outer space šø

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Cosmic Funnies
Cosimo Galluzzi

JBB: An Artblog!

titsay
Acquired Stardust
todays bird
šŖ¼

ā
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Not today Justin

Product Placement
RMH

pixel skylines
cherry valley forever
Jules of Nature
$LAYYYTER
styofa doing anything
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seen from Germany
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seen from Malaysia

seen from United States

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@messingwithvampires
I've never actually read Wizard of Earthsea and I'm reading it now and it's so funny. Sparrowhawk is like "oh man I fucked up, what horrible evil thing have I summoned, what will it do, how can I defeat it" and all the master wizards are just like "I don't fucking know. That was super weird, I'm an ancient wise archmage and I've never seen anything like that in my life. You did evil shit and now there's evil shit out there. Good fucking luck I guess."
I finished the book and you would not believe how much trauma Le Guin can fit in this one fucking wizard
Man notices an Eagle eyeing the fish he just caught
*gets back to the nest* baby you are NEVER gonna believe how i got this fish
this site gets accused of being way too usamerican a lot but i wonder what the actual proportion is
are you usamerican
yes
no
some other nuanced answer (pls elaborate in the tags iām nosy)
"Why do you buy books when the library is right there?"
Because publishing houses will not continue printing paper books if libraries are their only customers.
Also, I like being able to read at my leisure and generally have books at hand.
#public libraries are good because they let people access books they might never otherwise read#private book ownership is good because it's Yours#physical books are good because they last a long time and again it's Yours#ebooks are good because you can fit a whole library into the physical space of a single book and they're cheaper to produce#audiobooks are good because they're accessible to people with eyesight or visual reading issues and leave your hands free#in conclusion: all books are good and people should enjoy them however and whenever they can#(lest it be misunderstood I agree with you completely OP I just also really like books in general and it got away from me)
YES. all books. every kind
She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.
Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesnāt sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.
Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. Sheāll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.
The record label will never put her name on the album.
Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crewāelite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.
The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldnāt read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didnāt get called for the next session.
Carol could do it on the first try.
She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldnāt pay the electric bill. Music wasnāt a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a jobāfactory work with better acoustics and lower pay.
But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.
That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boysā āWouldnāt It Be Niceā? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of āThese Boots Are Made for Walkināā? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to āLa Bambaā? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.
She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.
Bassists spent yearsādecadesātrying to crack the secret of the Beach Boysā gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.
She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When āYouāve Lost That Lovinā Feelināā hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.
The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didnāt fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.
For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musiciansā anonymity betrayed them.
Think about it. Every time you heard āGood Vibrations,ā āRiver Deep ā Mountain High,ā the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generationās youth.
And yet the records still say nothing. Sheās now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.
But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the āBeach Boysā were, in fact, Carol Kayeās.
Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.
And the world didnāt know her name.
She was admitted to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2025 but refused, fuck yeah, Carol. Her official website is incredible.
@demilypyro
tfw some idiots have Fucked Around⢠and are about to Find Outā¢
I just laughed for one year watching this. The casual walk-off is just deadly.
went to a new optometrist today wearing my squid facts āsave our freaks dont mine the deepā shirt from @sarahmackattack that has a strawberry squid on it. and i wasnāt even thinking about it but the optometrist walked in and he was like āoh what does your shirt sayā so i showed him and he was like āoh thatās neat!ā and then i thought he might like to know about strawberry squid eyes since they have weird eyes and he is an optometrist and all. so i was like āyeah itās actually a real kind of squid called a strawberry squid, their eyes are really cool because they have one big yellow-green one and one small blue oneā and he kind of gasped and went āoh my god thatās so interesting i wonder why they have that. do you know what their retina composition is like?ā and i watched as he minimized my chart on the computer and started looking up images of strawberry squid and then he googled āstrawberry squid retina compositionā and he was like āsorry weāll get to your eye exam in a moment i just really want to find outā LMAO 10/10 optometrist experience will be returning
You shouldnāt date or become serious friends/partners with someone if you canāt stomach the thought of being stuck in a car or train with them for 16 hours.
Hereās my logic:
You should be able to work together to solve unexpected problems like fixing a flat tire or getting lost in an unfamiliar station
You should feel comfortable and safe enough around this person that you can sit in comfortable silence
You should be able to keep each other interested and deal with each others boredom in a healthy way
If youāre gonna form a long term partnership with someone you should probably be able to tolerate each other while locked in a small box for a few hours
These tags are hilarious even though I donāt think you intended them to be.
*pulls European closer* The most populous countries in the world are China, India, the United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Brazil in that order, with these seven nations alone making up 48.16% of the world population. You may note with the aid of a map that many of these nations are quite large, and would take several days of travel to go across either in cars or on boats. Almost half of the world's population lives in places where you can travel in a cramped vehicle for days and still be within the country. Your worldview is limited and Europe is a tiny outlier in travel time and standards for international relations.
Every so often I catch a glimpse of the book drama going on over on the Insta/Threads sphere of the Internet, and it makes me so glad Iām considered too Tumblrina to sit at their tables.
What do you mean an author is railing against people using libraries/the Libby app because itās āfreeā (itās not. you as the author get money from the library purchasing the digital lending license) and meanwhile their book is on Amazon for free to try and get readers??? Hello????
āBut if people read it for free they might like it want to buy the rest of my work!ā
You mean like how people read books at libraries, and end up buying them if they like them?
āThatās not the same š”ā
Correct! Because again, libraries pay us. You putting your books up on Amazon for free means you get nothing.
Human relationships are not transactional but they are reciprocal, which I think many of you with your āi donāt owe anyone anythingā shtick are too happy to forget
Transactional: everything has to be exactly 50/50 all the time, pay me back for the Ā£5 sandwich or buy me something worth exactly Ā£5, I refuse to make an effort for you if thereās nothing in it for me
Reciprocal: you were there for me when I needed help, and Iām going to do the same for you, it doesnāt matter if one of us needs more or is capable of less, because the point is not equivalent exchange but mutual care
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.Ā (Donāt worry! This doesnāt adjust for inflation! Nowās 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!Ā (I would seriously appreciate any and all tips because I am in the process of moving house!)
yes... ha ha ha... yes!