akkhima

[akkhima]

Waffles and peanut butter sandwiches.

Yeah, I'm gonna be ok.

You can only eat 2 foods for the next 2 years (with no health repercussions)

Spin this wheel twice to figure out what they are!

[akkhima]

Today, I remembered that I actually *do* know my way around the plumbing in the back of a toilet pretty well and I *can* fix the issue causing the water to run after flushing--unless you jiggle the handle just right. I remembered that I already had narrowed the issue down to one of two specific things just by the way the handle resisted the jiggling. I fixed the toilet.

[akkhima]

Today, I paint-dyed the shaved part of Katy's hair! I've been wanting to try it for a couple of years now.

[akkhima]

Based on the comments, this is an unpopular take: but this isn't really about AI. AI is just a tool, and it's everywhere already. It's already has and will continue to solve so many problems that humans don't have the capacity to solve. It's capable of automating tasks that are mind numbing, repetitive, and stressful. It'll probably allow for unheard-of medical breakthroughs that will save lives. AI isn't inherently evil.

But people can be. The problem with AI is not that AI finished Keith Herring's unfinished work. The problem with AI isn't that it did it badly. The problem with AI is that people are using it for tasks that it's not appropriate for. A person decided to finish Herring's painting, they just chose AI as the toll to do it, without training the AI on relevant data and without checking the results for suitability. Would the reaction be different if they painted it by hand and made the shapes make sense? Somewhat, but the outrage here is about how this misses the point of the painting. The painting was intentionally left unfinished, the problem is that a person violated that. The AI didn't make that choice.

We shouldn't be scared or angry at AI, we should be scared and angry at the people, companies and corporations that are implementing AI in places it doesn't belong. We should be angry at the people who built their AI on stolen data. We should be scared when people use AI to replace the activities that make us human.

Rage. In my heart. All-consuming. FUCK AI.

[akkhima]

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.

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[akkhima]

I did exactly this last night. I could have sworn I took screenshots, but it will have to exist only in our memories.

Also, Wyll's staying a bard.

Also, I definitely did not try to move the camera in this video as if it was the game. Nope.

Gripping Withers firmly to spend 300 gold so I can make my funny band of weirdos be a Band as a Treat as a break from experiencing The Horrors.

[akkhima]

I had a dream where I worked for a company called "We're all in this together." In thier industrial meat processing plant.

Woke up to a lot of unanswered questions, but it explains why Human Resources was the most important branch of the company.

[akkhima]

I found this product: https://a.co/d/hhB9eRO

The reviews say the printing is pixelated up close. Oof.

You could theoretically do this for real by wrapping all your books in white paper... I remember in middle school they gave us textbooks we kept all year, so we had to put a book cover on them to protect them a bit. They had some pre-printed sheets with something on one side, but I flipped mine over so the white side was out and just doodled on it all year.

But why would you do this?!?

“It’s great to have somewhere for our books, and it’ll be even better once we’ve written them”

[akkhima]

Ok, ok, I’m totally with you on the performative masculinity arguments and I think each and every one of these guys look amazing... but... the argument against boringness falters a bit when 9/17 of those men are wearing the same style of hat. 

I think one of the reasons drag kings aren’t as popular as drag queens, aside from the fact that straight women don’t like us, is that people are uncomfortable acknowledging masculinity as a performance. Like we as a society know that femininity is a performance, with its own costumes and rules. Masculinity is also a performance, and nothing makes that more clear than someone making an exaggeration of it

[akkhima]

Sailor Moon, 1992 — 1997

[akkhima]

[akkhima]

Not even joking, my wife makes up her own name for Pokemon when she plays Go, and Bulbasaur is "Cabbagepug"

cabbage boy..

[akkhima]

Disney’s Beauty and the beast cast → Is Gaston a villain or misunderstood?

I see him as the biggest villainous threat in any of the Disney films. He has no special powers. He’s not Jafar, or Ursula, or Maleficent. He’s a human being! He’s an arrogant, narcissistic, bigoted, chauvinistic, self-absorbed man who, once he’s told no, is driven by jealousy and revenge to fuel the fear of quite an idiotic group of villagers to go kill something they’ve never seen before. I mean, it resonates massively to what’s happening in the political climate throughout the world now. Luke Evans

[akkhima]

So my boyfriend was playing around with songs to see if he could find one that absolutely did not match up with Beyonce’s Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It) music video.  And in the process: he accidentally created this.

It’s All Stars by Smash Mouth mixed with Beyonce’s Single Ladies video.  And it matches PERFECTLY.

[akkhima]

I think I’ve got to disagree. The ponies in the episode are going for equality by way of stifling uniqueness. Nobody is treated better than anyone else because nobody is allowed to stand out in any way, even if it would improve quality of life for all.

Whereas SJWs seem to be more about equality by allowing everyone to be as unique as they damn well want to be, and we all have to accept/embrace/coddle that uniqueness no matter what.

One is bringing everyone down to a 1, one is bringing everyone up to a 10, we really need to just hang out at like, a 7.

The My Little Pony Season 5 premiere is a biting criticism of SJW behaviour. The ponies go to this village where cultural marxism is in full effect; all differing ideas, all diversity and all individual merits are suppressed in aid of uniformity and bastardized equality. Sound familiar? Also their leader is doing it all for her own gain. Sound familiar? That’s right, MLP explains in a kid-friendly manner what SJWs seem to have incredible difficulty grasping. Y'know what? You bony fuggers are alright. :^) Well played, MLP:FIM. Really stuck it to those ideologues. 

[akkhima]

My puppy is a pretty pony princess.