ylkhana - Tumblr blog

[ylkhana]

He’s so right actually

[ylkhana]

fantasy characters: “Geez”

me: who the fuck spread Christianity there

[ylkhana]

The divine right of kings but it's a curse

[ylkhana]

Consider:

You died with a remarkable fortune and no heirs. You grant your wealth to two rivalling schools in the same city, under one condition: One of them must always keep your preserved skull. They may keep it on display (therefore attracting interest and potentially fame to the school) but that always raises the risk of students of the other school stealing it. The students and staff of the other school have not only the right, but the duty to do so at any opportunity. Nobody can be arrested for this unless they're caught breaking some other law.

Ideally, the students of the two schools keep stealing your skull, back and forth, forever. The culture of both of the schools is enriched by this activity, the students are too busy engaged in these harmless shenanigans to drift into worse habits and behaviours, and you get to be included in countless nonsensically frivolous heist operations whose sole purpose is to bring more fun into the world.

[ylkhana]

Another worldbuilding application of the "two layer rule": To create a culture while avoiding The Planet Of Hats (the thing where a people only have one thing going for them, like "everyone wears a silly hat"): You only need two hats.

Try picking two random flat culture ideas and combine them, see how they interact. Let's say taking the Proud Warrior Race - people who are all about glory in battle and feats of strength, whose songs and ballads are about heroes in battle and whose education consists of combat and military tactics. Throw in another element: Living in diaspora. Suddenly you've got a whole more interesting dynamic going on - how did a people like this end up cast out of their old native land? How do they feel about it? How do they make a living now - as guards, mercenaries? How do their non-combatants live? Were they always warrior people, or did they become fighters out of necessity to fend for themselves in the lands of strangers? How do the peoples of these lands regard them?

Like I'm not shitting, it's literally that easy. You can avoid writing an one-dimensional culture just by adding another equally flat element, and the third dimension appears on its own just like that. And while one of the features can be location/climate, you can also combine two of those with each other.

Let's take a pretty standard Fantasy Race Biome: The forest people. Their job is the forest. They live there, hunt there, forage there, they have an obnoxious amount of sayings that somehow refer to trees, woods, or forests. Very high chance of being elves. And then a second common stock Fantasy Biome People: The Grim Cold North. Everything is bleak and grim up there. People are hardy and harsh, "frostbite because the climate hates you" and "stabbed because your neighbour hates you" are the most common causes of death. People are either completely humourless or have a horrifyingly dark, morbid sense of humour. They might find it funny that you genuinely can't tell which one.

Now combine them: Grim Cold Bleak Forest People. The summer lasts about 15 minutes and these people know every single type of berry, mushroom and herb that's edible in any fathomable way. You're not sure if they're joking about occasionally resorting to eating tree bark to survive the long dark winter. Not a warrior people, but very skilled in disappearing into the forest and picking off would-be invaders one by one. Once they fuck off into the woods you won't find them unless they want to be found.

You know, Finland.

[ylkhana]

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!

[ylkhana]

Starting a collection

[ylkhana]

I’m gonna be honest, people pretending Bruce has an adoption addiction Is funny and all, but it’s starting to trick people into thinking he goes out searching for and wanting to put all these actual children in the line of danger when in reality they just sorta latch onto his leg while he stands there trying shake them off screaming “NO, I’M NOT DOING THIS AGAIN” ‘till he caves and teaches them jujitsu

[ylkhana]

So recently I went camping with my sister and I had a Linguistic expirience.

We were in Yellowstone being excited about geothermal features and generally enjoying ourselves becuae turns out Late September is the best time to hit up the Colder national parks- the only other people there was a family with matching windbreakers speaking german with Swiss accents and the Park Ranger patrolling around to make sure we weren’t planning on skinny dipping or the other bonehaded things tourists do.

As we’re on the way back to the car we see a woman in Bright Red Pants in the parking lot looking both lost and near tears.  She sees us and practically sprints over to ask us

“Parlez-vous français?”

Now, my sister is fluent in spanish, ok at pourtugese and italian and even has a good chunk of Japanese under her belt.  “yo hablo español!”  She offers.  Then offers the other three languages.  Madame Red pants shakes her head at all of them.

I have a dubious grasp of English, but I know enough German to navigate a major metropolitan area if everyone is real patient and repeats things three times for me. “Sprechen Sie Deustch?” I try.

Madame Red Pants (I can see her husband in the car looking equally bewildered. I cannot see the color of his pants. I assume they are equally Rhodacious.) looks crestfallen but tries anyway.  She takes out the park map and indicates the Norris Junction, while speaking French faster than I understand English, but it’s apparent she doesn’t know where she is currently, and needs to get to Norris Junction.

We know where she is and how to get to Norris but can’t convey this via pointing at the map and waving our arms. I feel genuinely bad, and she looks near tears with frustration. 

Then I remember. The matching Swiss Family.

I jog back into the geyser complex and find them excitedly taking pictures of a chipmunk while the Ranger watches them suspiciously from behind a pine tree.  

“Sprechen Sie Französisch?” I ask, and they collectively turn towards me, freeing the chipmunk from thier gaze as it sprints off into the underbrush.

“Ja, bitte.” Says thier Matriarch and leader.

“Eine Frau is Veeeeerlos- no, Verloren! Kann Sie- aw crap what’s the word? Translate?”

“Oh, Ja!” Frau Windbreaker speaks Idiot Tourist too, apparently.  The Swiss collective follows me back to the parking lot and and Frau Windbreaker and Madame Red Pants have a very animated conversation in French that I understand exactly none of.  My sister, feeling left out, offers various memebers of the Swiss Collective trail mix.  some of them even take it. Frau Windbreaker turns to me.

“Wo ist Norris?” She asks, looking mildly embarassed.

I end up having to convey the directions to Norris in German, which Frau Windbreaker translates to French, hindered slightly by the fact that neither of these women know how to read a map, but eventually Madame Red Pants comprehends, thanks us profusely, gets in her car, and manages to turn the correct direction out of the parking lot.  Frau Windbreaker and I shake hands and all of us part ways with the feeling of a job well done.

Before my sister and I can get in the car, the Ranger appraoches us.

“Thanks for that. I’ve felt bad all summer that all I’ve been able to do is turn on google translate for people.”  he said, shyly.

At that moment my sister and I both realized that Madme Red Pants had both a GPS in her car and an Android phone in her hand.

Hopefully the next person to help her was more technologically literate or generally observant than we are.

[ylkhana]

[ylkhana]

[ylkhana]

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[ylkhana]

firefox just started doing this too so remember kids if you want to stream things like netflix or hulu over discord without the video being blacked out you just have to disable hardware acceleration in your browser settings!

[ylkhana]

I know nothing about the MTG ravnica murder mystery set yet but the only two endings I'll accept is:

Every single guild had a hand in killing whoever it is. They were poisoned, but also there's a knife in their back, and also they ate something they're allergic to, and also they were pushed down the stairs, and also-

Jace returns desparked for the murder mystery party and is like "NOW LET'S SEE WHO THE KILLER WAS" and pulls off a rubbery scooby doo mask and the whole assembled crowd gasps before jace cries "NICOL BOLAS??" (important distinction: Nicol Bolas was disguised as Just Some Guy and was the same size as everyone else but maskless his head is Nicol Bolas sized)

[ylkhana]

best way I have found to comfort people who are endlessly apologetic of things outside their control (often as a result of shitty relationships) is the jokingly hyperbolic accusation of [gasp] "so you're behind it all!"

like someone giving me directions who starts apologizing profusely when I miss a light as if it's their fault--[gasp] "it was you who petitioned city council to build this intersection in 1893!!" because it snaps them out of it and they laugh like. oh yeah. that's a ridiculous thing to blame someone for. I'm not that guy. you're not that guy. it works.

[ylkhana]