AU Where Dumbledore’s Army Uses The Chamber Of Secrets Instead Of The Room Of Requirement

we've found it folks: mcmansion heaven

Hello everyone. It is my pleasure to bring 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 yet remains unable to let go of the kookiest 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. Or so you think. Everything the interior design tries to hide, namely how unceasingly peculiar the house is, it is not entirely able to 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.

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.

Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar! Student loans just started back up!

Morfran

This is my try to make a dracula/vampire/monster The first version didn't have the dracula mostache but you know Those details are always a must 👌✨

Lestuck! It’s that detained Dracula! Double cursed and trapped in the body of a bat! Luckily, his team of engineers managed to manufacture a malevolent machination that gets all his vampiring done directly! Pneumatic fangs and a straw solves the blood sucking!

Reblog to kill it faster

this looks so sick

Epigenised (Opal-CT, Lussatite) Helix Ramondi snail fossil, from Dallet, Puy-De-Dôme, France.

they are so Shaped

dog

Based on @just-another-ghoul-lover 's post here, I wanted to throw in my two cents on ghouls, but I didn't wanna take over their post nor make it look like I think they're wrong, which they aren't canonically.

But, since when have I ever let canon stop me?

My HC is more like what we get in Fallout 4: ghouls are more like horribly scarred by the radiation, but not in a constant state of rotting. If their ability to heal is keeping them alive, then eventually that healing will win out. I figure ghouls are also prone to losing other bits of themselves when injured and such, and let's face it, in 200+ years a lot of injury can happen. And, I like that some ghouls keep their hair for whatever reason, or if they didn't, I mean, if Deacon can get surgery to change his face very other week, why not hair transplants for ghouls? Or just wigs, if you want. Either way, everyone is different and it stands to reason, at least in my HC, that ghoulification is different for everyone. With Hancock's coming from an experimental drug, I feel like his body is reacting a totally different way, just like I think that Eddie Winter probably should've looked a little more unique as well.

As far as being radiated, radiation degrades over time. Hence the whole idea that eventually you can actually leave a vault - even if Vault Tec never intended that to happen in some cases. I can see it being low level radiation in ghouls, but thing is at this point, they are either about the same as the background radiation that the whole world exists in - so not much of a problem to people around them who already deal with it daily - or it's just enough to warrant some worry and keep Rad-Away around.

I don't think the more intelligent ghouls smell awful more than intensely musky, which isn't a smell everyone likes. And, it's worse when they're wet. So, if you don't like wet brahmin smell, you probably don't like ghouls. Intelligent ghouls, I feel, probably try to take care of themselves as much as possible. I mean, Daisy, for instance, strikes me as someone who is probably rather fastidious about it. And, there are ways to mask smells.

Feral ghouls, on the other hand, do not take care of any hygiene and will eat anything that moves which means they are constantly covered in gore, so they smell absolutely like dead things. Bodies who exist in that manner absolutely will start to rot after a while. Especially if they injure themselves and don't tend it, which they won't, so they get infections which causes more rot. So, I mean, being around ferals will absolutely make certain people jump to the assumption all ghouls smell that way, especially if they're racist against ghouls to begin with.

And, hey, again, I know my HC isn't canon, and I'm okay with that. I am also okay with people preferring to stick with canon. That in itself offers some interesting ideas in ghoul/human relations.

What with bucket hats, bare midriffs, and flared jeans having been resurrected by some irresponsible necromancer with frosted tips, I figure there’s no better time to resurrect some of my favorite Y2K fonts. I typically only see the same three or four pop up in discussions on the subject, so maybe this will be helpful to nostalgic designers. Click though for links.

Keep reading

Life Story