#BE UGLY

[silverspleen]

Every time I see that G--gle phone photoshop commercial my heart is filled with infinite sadness, like, yeah it's cool you can have a good family photo, it's cool you can do that, but god, there is something to be said for the honesty of a family photo where you're blinking, or crying, or have ugly wrinkles.

What is too unsightly for you? Would you swipe-click-replace out the image of my cousin crying on our Florida trip family reunion photo? Would you remove the plastic snake I have clenched in my grip, which I still have to this day? Would you scoff at the wrinkles around our eyes and the strands of hair on our faces as we squint into the wind, the day before the massive storm? Would I remember it if I didn't have these reminders, if the picture was perfect and clean, all children in a row with perfect gleaming white tombstone tooth smiles? No tears. No plastic snake.

Everyone is beautiful and no one looks genuine.

[camaybotanica]

i am tired of whiteness im tired of thinness arent you tired too? dont you realize theres so much more to beauty?

[lary-the-lizard]

You don’t need to be hot, cute, pretty, sexy, beautiful, or attractive in any way. Ever.

You can be ugly, plain, lopsided, weird, glaring, tacky, messy, and disfigured. Anytime, all the time.

And still be lovable, valuable, wanted, appreciated and treasured.

What matters ISN’T that you think you’re sexy, or beautiful. What matters that you LIKE what you look like. You might think you look ugly and LIKE it. You might think you look downright REPULSIVE and LOVE it. Not because you LOOK good but because you FEEL good. Maybe you WANT to look pretty but pretty to you looks tacky to someone else. Maybe what beautiful to someone else looks weird to you. What I’m saying is that you belong to yourself and you are allowed to call something what it is and feel what you feel about whether that lines up with society’s definition or your community’s or not. Beautiful doesn’t fit everything and that’s because it shouldn’t. Ugly fits lots of things but that doesn’t mean that’s worthless or bad. Maybe you really, truly are ugly and maybe you’d love yourself a lot more if you stopped trying to be pretty. Maybe you’d find friends you actually felt comfortable around if you are what you wanted and started wearing crocs with socks. Maybe you ARE society’s standard of beautiful and would feel more comfortable being plain. Maybe you just want to be weird and would feel more inside your body if you started wearing teal eyeshadow and layered your clothing a lot more. The goal should be that YOU LIKE HOW YOU LOOK, not that you look “right”.

[library-of-everything]

It's okay not to be beautiful.

It's okay to look tired, especially if you actually are tired.

It's okay to look sick, especially if you are actually sick.

How dare anyone, especially yourself, revoke your permission to be human.

[mcmansionhell]

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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[danteobonfis]

The ugly ass bride and groom

[madisockz]

The bride and the ugly ass groom

[goldiipond]

if there's anything i've learned from the current state of social media it's that this is one of the worst possible notifications you can receive upon opening an app

[gummygoblinn]

My favorite thing about “the bride and the ugly ass groom” tweet is that it is very indicative of their real relationship.

[epicsauce]

learning that self deprecation isnt cool and just makes the people around you uncomfortable unironically improved my mental health a lot. like if you just stop saying negative shit about yourself you will genuinely like yourself more and other people wont be repulsed by your attitude and you will have more friends. it's true.

[nat-20s]

HUGE shout out to purple for being the only color that has like no losers. Deep purple royal purple bluish purple redish purple pastel purple dusty purple lavender periwinkle violet like. Banger after banger after banger!!

[catskullery]

[hantu-burung]

every image of a tawny frogmouth is perfection. i've never seen a single picture of a tawny that dissapoints.

[markodragic]

I dont think anything on this earth tickles me so hard as how busted white people look in the yakuza franchise

its so dhsjdjfjxjfjgk

[skellydun]

I don't think I'm meant to be employed. It really cuts into my goofy silly haha time. and it makes it nearly impossible to have any wow life is beautiful let me take it in time.

[browsethestacks]

Arthouse Muppets

Art by Bruce McCorkindale