she/her; i love science (and answering questions about it that no one asked), listening to peoples' stories, wandering around in the woods, horror, sci fi, fantasy, and everything between. :)
INFORMATION I WAS NOT PREPARED TO LEARN. MAYBE WE *ARE* ALONE. BECAUSE WE ARE SO *EARLY*. IF THERE IS EVER GALACTIC CIVILIZATION THEY WILL NOT REMEMBER US AT ALL. BECAUSE WE ARE NOTHING. CELLS, JUST BEGINNING TO FORM LIFE. SORRY FOR SCREAMING. BUT ARE YOU LISTENING. ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT IT.
Well, there were some quirks. It was carbon-based, which was mildly interesting, and Arc’s shuttle readouts told her that it was the plants that had developed photosynthesis, weirdly. The atmosphere had a massive amount of oxygen, and there was all that water, too, more than she had ever seen in one place before. And every planet was, as her trainers had told her, its own unique jewel.
But one thing they had not told her was that all the jewels started to blend together after a while, and after a little longer each one became just another assignment. So the planet was just another assignment. A little ball of water and tumbled stone and flora in a cul-de-sac of the galaxy. One more stack of paperwork for Arc to get through before she could go home to her marital partners and offspring.
Arc aimed her shuttle in the middle of one of the larger continents, away from the mountain range and near a smaller body of (oh, gosh, more) water. As she got closer to the ground, though, her shuttle readouts changed. There were irregular smudges of radiation on the surface, and chemical evidence of constructed materials. Arc squinted, and her tertiary limbs started to shiver in frustration. There were ruins down there. Nobody had told her she’d be surveying a formerly inhabited planet. Great, she thought. Now I’m never getting home.
Arc sent a note by ansible to Ecba, her dearest marital partner. A few mins later, as her shuttle settled on the ground, she got back the image of a hand-sculpted message. “My little machine,” it said, Ecba’s sweetheart-name for her, and she could see all the love that went into the lettering. “Does it have to be you?”
Arc put on her enviro-suit and got her surveying monitor. “Maybe not,” she sent. She didn’t have the same skill in sculpting that Ecba had, so she just had to trust that her love was conveyed in the digital lettering. “Wish me luck. I’ll try to come home to you all soon.”
Then she stepped out into the world.
The first thing she noticed was that the sky was blue. It was disconcerting, to say the least. Blue was for water, and some crystal formations, and nebulae, not the sky. She wondered what it had done to whatever inhabitants used to live here, to have such a bright, unwieldy color as the backdrop of their days. If they used the light spectrum to see at all, that was. Well, she thought as she carried her surveying monitor away from the shuttle, she’d find out.
The second thing she noticed was that the ruins were invisible from the ground. All she could see for kiloms and kiloms was wildly ambitious vegetation, some rocks, and the melodramatic blue of the sky. The ruins must have been old enough that any wood or rock or even petroleum deposits would have broken down into microscopic pieces, from time or the weather, or been buried. Whatever she was dealing with wasn’t just gone, it was long gone.
Arc felt herself start to get interested, despite her desire to go home. Junior surveyors like her didn’t get mysteries like this. Ruins were one thing, the residue of a solitary existence before the inhabitants discovered, or were discovered by, other planets and polities, and they left to make a new life among the stars. But mysteries were something else.
She found a flat place to set up her surveying monitor, and set the aperture. Immediately she was surrounded by a hologram re-creation of her surroundings. She figured five thousand years was long enough, to start with. She flipped the dial back, clacked her secondary limbs for luck, and told it to go.
Nothing. The hologram was the same, just ruins and vegetation.
Arc checked the monitor. It seemed to be working fine. She turned it off and turned it on again just to make sure. Then she set it for ten thousand years.
Ruins. Vegetation. Nothing else.
Arc turned the hologram off, and sat back and looked around. The vegetation gave her no answers. She clacked her limbs in confusion, and then thought, Fuck it, and set the monitor for a hundred thousand years. Even if she missed the departure point, the thing she was always told to capture first, at least she’d get something.
Nothing. Even so far back, everything was exactly the same.
Arc started to get a bad feeling. She tried two hundred thousand years, and nothing. Three hundred thousand years. Then, feeling like she was losing her mind, she set it back five hundred thousand years.
And, there.
It wasn’t the inhabitants, but she could see traces of the buildings they had built for themselves, in the process of crumbling to nothing. She started creeping slowly back in time from there: year after year. The weather patterns on the monitor were very different from what she was experiencing now, with scorching heat and hurricanes, the air filled with ash. There was no vegetation. Arc’s bad feeling crystallized into fear.
Finally, finally, she found a living soul. Just one, wandering through the ruins, shielding itself from the blistering sunlight. It walked right in front of her on the hologram, and turned and looked straight through her. She stared at it, trying to understand.
It was a soft, squishy thing, bipedal and barely coming to half her height. It moved like nothing she'd ever seen, and she shouldn't have been able to read any emotion in that strange face and those alien limbs. But she saw grief there, she was sure of it.
Back, and back. The ruins rebuilt themselves, the weather patterns steadied. Arc saw more of those strange bipedal beings, and other squishy creatures that connected to the beings with string. She saw small fauna and stone roads, machines that moved and buildings so tall they blocked out the sky. She found a group of three, a taller being and two very short ones, and watched them for a long time, as they came and went from the image of the building in front of her. After watching them for a while, she realized that they were a family.
Arc found another being, and watched it making something out of wood: a little carving of one of the creatures that moved along on string. She saw beings creating machines that made images, and she saw beings painting colors on walls. She saw beings fighting each other, killing each other, mourning each other. She saw them raising each other, playing with each other. She saw them making and making: creating by themselves, creating together. And all of them so long ago, long before even Arc's people, the oldest civilization she knew, had begun to walk among the stars.
These beings, the ones that had lived hundreds of thousands of years ago, had spent the entire course of their existence alone in the universe. The ruins weren't ruins because they had left for better things. The ruins were ruins because they had died out, all of them, millennia before they could be found.
Arc felt grief well up inside of her, and she began to keen. This wasn't the way it was supposed to be. Life was meant to find other life; that's what life was for.
How lonely they must have been, she thought, singing her mourning song for them. All that creation, all that art and all that play, the machines that made images, the paint scrawled on walls, the carvings made with strange limbs but with so much love that Arc could feel it even now — and they couldn't share it with anyone. How impossible the galaxy, the universe, must have felt to them.
I’m sorry, she thought, and keened for them. I’m sorry you were all alone. I’m sorry we were too late for you, and that you were too early for us. I'm sorry for all of it. But we’re here now. We have you. You’re not alone anymore, and you’ll never be alone again.
After a while she calmed. The holographic images were still going, and she found herself struck by another family: this one had many large beings and a few small ones, and it was clear in their movements how much they loved each other. That was important, she thought. That love was what was left, after everything. That love was what she was here to preserve.
Arc got up off the ground on shaky limbs, still grief-stricken but feeling stronger. She went back to her shuttle and sent the images she had recorded to her supervisors, along with a note that they needed to send more of her colleagues, now, so that everything could be captured faithfully.
She also sent a note to Ecba. “My star,” Arc wrote. “I have memories I need to excavate here. I am sorry I will not be home soon. I will come back when I can, but in the meantime know that I love you, and our family.”
Then she got her carving tools, and her clay. She wasn't as good as Ecba, but this memory, these stories, deserved the work of her hands.
Arc went back to her surveying monitor. She turned it on, and wound it back and back, farther than she’d ever imagined it was possible for life to go. She braced herself for grief again, and for the love she was going to find. She arranged her clay, and picked up her tools. She let the monitor play, showing her the planet’s long, brilliant memory. And then she began to tell the story.
HOLY SHIT GUYS, I WAS INSPIRED BY THIS POST TO TRY MAKE THE SONG AND YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE THE SCREAM I SCRUMPT WHEN I DRAGGED THE TRAINING AUDIO OVER THE BACKING TRACK AND IT LINED UP PERFECTLY
It took me about 15 seconds in to realize what was happening in this vid, but the second I did, I legit came. This is… I got chills and got so much validation for my theories about tap and pretty much any genre of music here…
They’re tap dancing, a kind of dancing typically associated with being old-fashioned and kind of silly. Personally, even tap dancing to old music is awesome in my eyes, but this is on a totally new and exciting level
The thing about tap is that it’s so often seen as a fancy, old-fashioned dainty dance that only posh (and generally white) people do in tuxedos but it didn’t used to be the case.
Way back in the early days, it was where black performers in Vaudeville were legendary for it in Jazz and Jive routines. At about 1:37, this is where the Nicholas brothers go off.
It’s such an expressive and joyful kind of dance and matches so well with hip hop beats and rhythm, which is why the modern reworking of it is so awesome.
Im sure a lot of people also watch the op video and they assume that “clap” sound is part of the music just because a LOT of modern music samples that sound and in some music it is just the sound of hands clapping, but no that is a sound being made by all their shoes at once.
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.
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One of my favorite things about biology is that there are so many diagrams like this that look like shitposts if you remove any and all context from them
Imagine you're coming home after a long day of hunting, and the first thing you hear is your seven shitty kids screeching at you for no reason, how pissed off would you be, I'd immediately fly away too
Imagine you're the oldest of seven and a fucking HOA member broke into your HOUSE and SHIT AN EGG and is BITING at your siblings, but your dad shows so you try to tell him the problem but you're very little and you don't speak English and he doesn't speak English either so you can't communicate that a fucking GOBLIN is in your HOUSE and the only reason he doesn't know is cause his ASS was on that bitch's HEAD and he must've assumed it was one of your brothers and sisters but it was actually that FREAK WOMAN who got in, and now your dad is flying away 'cause he has no idea what's going on
Imagine you're a parent and you've calmed down and gone to get McDonald's for your seven kids, and you come home expecting to get cheers because you know the D's are always a winner, but when you fly back in through the door the kids are all still screaming, and it's not even excited screams but you don't know what's wrong so you just look into the camera like you're Jim from the Office
Imagine you're one of the small middle children and probably the one that this HOA WITCH was BITING after she broke into YOUR HOUSE and SHIT an EGG and you tried to be a good host by cuddling with her to congratulate her on her egg but then she started BITING and taking over your ROOM and threw out all your GOOSEBUMPS books and your eldest sibling couldn't call dad so you all just had to wait, and then dad comes home but your STUPID FAMILY won't stop SCREECHING to explain what's going on so your dad leaves but then comes back and he's brought McDonald's which is like yay but there is an INTRUDER, and finally your dad looks around the house and notices BITCH BIRD KAREN IN YOUR BEAN BAG CHAIR, and you're like ok dad can handle this but then you learn he's more scared than you?????
Imagine you're a dad and you just got home with McDonald's and WHO THE FUCK IS THAT IN MY HOUSE but luckily you have seven children and the mean one is willing to fight this bitch and you're just gonna chill in this corner until this problem is resolved even if your other kids are straight-up judging you
Imagine you're Kevin McCallister and you're doing Home Alone except you're not home alone 'cause your dad is home too but he's not helping, he's just holding a bag of McDonald's, so you have to be the head of this house at eight years old 'cause you're home alone emotionally but this FREAK ON AN EGG isn't leaving so you decide to screech at your dad and he's more scared of you than she is
Imagine you're a dad and your child has publicly shamed you in front of your other kids and this ASSHOLE KAREN and you decide you're not gonna take this shit anymore so you tell your kids that you paid for this McDonald's with your hard-earned bird money and they're gonna damn well eat this, so everybody stop looking at that side of the house and just eat your fucking french fries but then that fucking MONSTER starts BITING your only child willing to go into battle so you recognize this is a lost cause and throw the burgers on the counter and you remember you're an ADULT so you grab your car keys and fly the fuck away
Imagine you're all seven children and dad left you with the pigeon again
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