Move Over Queen Elizabeth Let Some Real Royalty Have The Spotlight

And so the cycle continues

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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They're on sight

pjo text posts 21/?

AO3 IS DOWN!!!!!!!

Part 1 Part 2 <- this post Part 3

Doch - one of the best German words

"Ich habe deine Mutter nicht getötet" - Doch!

"Ich habe nicht gelogen" - Doch!

"Du wolltest doch nicht mitkommen" - Doch!

Doch has many meanings, among the best is used above. Duden calls this usage:

"als gegensätzliche Antwort auf eine negativ formulierte Aussage oder Frage in Konkurrenz zu „ja“ bei einer positiv formulierten Frage und in Opposition zu „nein“"

(as contrary answer to a negative statement or question..."

So what does "Doch" mean here?

You say doch when someone makes a negated claim (I didn't kill your mother; i didn't lie; you didn't want to come with) and you want to say that in fact they DID/you DID

-> it's negating a negated statement/question

Doch can also be used in different ways (though not as fun):

"Es wird doch nichts passiert sein?" -> strengthens the question, similar to "surely...?"

"Das ist doch nur dumm!" -> fortifies unhappiness or frustration in a Statement/question, similar to "straight up, simply..."

"Ihr kommt doch heute Abend?" -> fortifies hope in a statement/question, like "you ARE coming, RIGHT?"

(you tell the two apart by overall mood of the person speaking)

"Wie ging der Text doch gleich?" -> implies the person knows the thing they ask about but can't recall at the moment

"Sie kommt doch nicht mit" -> confirms something that had been a theory up until then, similar to "after all"

Gum.

batfam as things ive seen on twitter

German Resources

German grammar drills

ISBN: ‏  978-1260116250

https://amzn.to/37EkE5f

The everything essential german book

ISBN: 978-1440567575

https://amzn.to/3toUBaN

Barron’s German Grammar

ISBN: 978-0812042962

https://amzn.to/3wmLBEX

SparkNotes German Grammar

ISBN: 978-1411470408

https://amzn.to/37KQjCe

DW - Deutsche Welle - Germany’s public broadcaster

https://www.dw.com/de/

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dw-breaking-world-news/id498833085

The app will match the language settings of the phone, so you will need to change it to German manually

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.idmedia.android.newsportal&hl=en_US&gl=US

DW Learners - German resources for learners

https://www.dw.com/de/deutsch-lernen/s-2055

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dw-learn-german/id1224076534

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dw.learngerman&hl=en_US&gl=US

ORF - Österreichischer Rundfunk - Austria’s public broadcaster

https://der.orf.at/

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=at.orf.news&hl=en_US&gl=US - the website

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/orf-tvthek-video-on-demand/id452214869?l=de - TV component only

Deutsche Welle - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMIgOXM2JEQ2Pv2d0_PVfcg

Kurzgesagt - YouTube - edutainment YouTube channel with English versions of every video on another channel

https://www.youtube.com/c/KurzgesagtDE 

MrWissen2go - YouTube - German current events spoken by a man with clear pronunciation

https://www.youtube.com/c/MrWissen2go

Linguee - Dictionary - The most accurate one I’ve experienced with lots of example sentence so you can parse which similar word is the right one for you

https://www.linguee.com/

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dictionary-linguee/id338225335

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.linguee.linguee&hl=en_US&gl=US

Reverso - Conjugation

https://conjugator.reverso.net/conjugation-german.html

Wiktionary - Noun and adjective declension

https://en.wiktionary.org/