branwendaughterofllyr

[branwendaughterofllyr]

Romantic Lined Envelopes on Etsy

#ohhhh these are so nice #I want

[branwendaughterofllyr]

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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[branwendaughterofllyr]

a song of fashion | house targaryen

Like their dragons the Targaryens answered to neither gods nor men.

[branwendaughterofllyr]

alacrán y pistolero

#I love this piece so much

[branwendaughterofllyr]

your rhaenyra is biblically accurate canon milf

thank u i wanna scissor the sadness out of her so bad it makes me look stupid

[branwendaughterofllyr]

hotd fandom but also like fandom spaces in general have made me notice is it not normal to like villains for being villains anymore. this used to be the ‘the villain is always sexier and more interesting than the hero’ website now you need a paragraph explaining that obviously you dont condone or approve of irl child abuse before you say a villain is hot or funny. lukey velaryon sweetiepie dead baby should not be beating otto hightower in best character polls bc people vote based on moral purity. weve gone backwards

[branwendaughterofllyr]

What is honor compared to a woman’s love? What is duty against the feel of a newborn son in your arms… or the memory of a brother’s smile? Wind and words. Wind and words. We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.

Jon Snow - and family that haunts him, because sometimes ghosts make for the best love stories.

[branwendaughterofllyr]

christina’s world, andrew wyeth, 1948

il demonio/the demon (1963) dir. brunello rondi

#Sybelle fic

[branwendaughterofllyr]

i just wanted to draw head accessories but it turned out prettier than i expected lol

[branwendaughterofllyr]

⚽️ for sybelle 👁️👁️👁️

⚽️ Soccer Ball- Who is someone that your OC believes in and roots for? Are they private about their admiration or do they make it well known?

So, as I’ve been working on the unnamed Sybelle fic, I’ve been developing the character of Sara Snow, and I think that Sybelle develops a genuine admiration for the girl, who has had a complicated life as I have been imagining it. I think Sybelle admires her for the quiet strength that she wants but struggles to obtain, and general “grace under fire.” And while I think this admiration begins quietly, Sybelle will gradually become more of an advocate for Sara and her future (until…. Ya know…. The events of the story interrupt lol)

#branwen answers #Sybelle fic

[branwendaughterofllyr]

🟣 Purple- What is something that your OC could not live without? What keeps them grounded in the worst of times? - FOR THE NEW BABY GIRL!!

For Sybelle Ryswell, the OC I’ve been cooking up.

Hmmm, this is perhaps a basic answer, but I do think this is the most true: her daughter, Robyn. For the purposes of the story I’m planning, I do think that Sybelle’s kid is going to be the one thing that forces her to keep it together as she falls apart. She’s undergone some tragedy in her life already when the story starts, but she is able to keep ahold of herself as she keeps in mind the fact that she is now a parent with responsibilities far greater than herself.

On another level, I think in terms of more material things, Sybelle can’t live without her hawks and falcons. She has a long standing passion for hawking, which she shared with her first husband, and caring for his birds after he died was one way she was able to stay close to his memory. Hawking in the real Middle Ages was also considered a meditative sport, often solitary, and it was noted that many nobles turned to hawking after experiencing tragedy in their lives. It’s a practical hobby that was approved of for both men and women, and one that Sybelle genuinely finds enjoyable and almost therapeutic, along with the intense bonds that falconers often form with their birds. (It’s also full of metaphors, which is great for me as a writer lol)

#branwen answers #Sybelle fic

[branwendaughterofllyr]

why does theatre provide insights into the past? sorry if this is obvious

(re: this post)

so I’m mostly jumping off of Edith Hall, who talks in the intro to her book suffering under the sun about how greek drama is located in the distant (mythical) past and treats stories and characters that were familiar to the audience despite their temporal distance and says “greek tragedy therefore involved a form of communal ghost raising— bringing famous but long-dead figures back to life”. (I think this holds true for the Persians as well even though Xerxes was still alive when it was produced, since it quite literally resurrects the ghost of Darius on stage, but it’s also more generally about people and events that live on in athenian collective memory despite temporal and physical distance.) everyone gets together at the theatre to remember the past together by watching the past enacted on the stage. That all becomes a lot more vivid when actual ghosts appear on stage (clytemnestra in the Eumenides, Darius in the Persians).

I think this holds true for theatre more generally, not just greek tragedy. Partly because of how many plays are still set in the past, but mostly because everything you see on stage has been acted out before, rehearsed before, performed before, written before. Theatre is a repetition of what has already happened and what has already been determined. Its purpose is to play that out again in a way that makes sense and to make it possible to understand what has happened. Theatre puts it into the structure of narrative, and narrative is a way of making sense of things.

I talked some about it on this post

I have yet to read Marvin Carlson’s the haunted stage: the theatre as memory machine but a couple of the articles I read about the oresteia cited it to talk about production history and how the theatre is also filled with the ghosts of every production that has ever taken place there and damn. That’s something. The articles I read pointed mostly to aeschylus’s agamemnon (both the character and the play) haunting sophocles and euripides’s plays on the house of Atreus which is SUPER cool.

[branwendaughterofllyr]

Édouard Sain (French, 1830-1910)

Portrait d’une jeune femme

[branwendaughterofllyr]

Romaine Brooks, Femme avec des fleurs (1912)

[branwendaughterofllyr]

Take the Fair Face of Woman, and Gently Suspending, With Butterflies, Flowers, and Jewels Attending, Thus Your Fairy is Made of Most Beautiful Things, 1869 by Sophie Gengembre Anderson (French-born English, 1823–1903)

[branwendaughterofllyr]

[branwendaughterofllyr]

emily henry was so evil for writing this and then leaving it in her silly little romance novel where i read it and then realized things about myself 🔪🔪🔪🔪