ghost-in-the-machine-blog

[ghost-in-the-machine-blog]

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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[ghost-in-the-machine-blog]

"NO, im not a vampire. Stop asking!"

Vampire shaped living room:

Sucks to see someone else living your dream.

[ghost-in-the-machine-blog]

I started listening to the adventure zone again and am thinking of doing some art to really finalize what I think the main party looks like. This is my second time listening to the adventure zone and it reminded me how cool the gauntlet of Phoenix flame (idk if that's what it's call that is what I remember). Does anyone have any other good podcast recommendations dnd or other?

[ghost-in-the-machine-blog]

I love this self image is something I struggle with. I used to tell myself "it's your vs you man. Your fighting yourself" and more often than not it's true.

If you are feeling good about yourself or situation and then your mood suddenly shifts leaving you feeling insecure, unsure, etc. try to remind yourself that nothing has truly changed but your perception. Your cute outfit did not suddenly become horrid. Your delicious meal did not tranform into a terrible one. Your peers perception of you has not radically transformed over a social misstep. Everything we experience is put through it through our mental filter, and that can convince us that everyone else sees us with the judgement we have for ourselves. Be kind to yourself.

[ghost-in-the-machine-blog]

I dont post online. I like to be a ghost in the machine (therfore the name), but because of this, I have zero community. So, this is my attempt to reach out for some sort of human connection. If anyone has any good blogs or hashtags, i should follow LET ME KNOW. Thank you for your time.

I put some of the things I'm interested below so more people can see this.

I work with computers I'm going for my associates in networking right now. I work as a tutor supporting professors for a college. In my free time I started painting warhammer figures (skaven if your into that kinda thing). I am really into interior design and plan to use this blog as a Mashup between technology and design. I am going to start small and make a door sensor and chime first. I'm starting with this not only cause it's easy but because my desk faces away from my door and I am sick of people thinking I am dead lol.