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Lemons! Limes! Oranges! You can do this with pretty much all citrus! Candied Lemon Peel 2 cups water 2 cups white sugar The peels of 3 lemons

{watch}

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we've found it folks: mcmansion heaven

Hello everyone. It is my pleasure bringing 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 while unable to let go of the cookiest 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. Yet all fits with what the interior design tries to hide, namely how unerringly peculiar the house is, yet it is not entirely able to do so 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!

#rebloh #long post

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I know this isn't ninjago guys but I finished this 17 hour painting for my art class and I was proud of it so...enjoy.

I love Egypt fun fact about me. :)

#rebloh

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"A cishet person must have made this, no queer person would ever portray queerness in this way."

"This artist must be white."

"No SA victim would ever handle the subject in this way."

"No woman would ever write women like this."

"This creator is obviously neurotypical. Everyone with autism/ADHD/depression understands-"

Nope.

People who make these blanket statements are very frequently proven wrong when the creator comes out as a member of that group. And even when they aren't proven wrong, even in cases where the creator isn't from the group in question, actual members of the group who don't fit whatever arbitrary criteria are being expressed will see these statements and feel excluded and erased.

Not everyone in your group is going to share your experiences. No single individual gets to personally decide what does or doesn't count as a "valid" expression of trauma or being part of a particular group, and creators are also not obligated to out themselves in order to "prove" their validity.

If something doesn't resonate with you, all that means is that it doesn't resonate with you. You don't have to like it. But you don't get to decide what it means to someone else.

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collection of posts for a very specific dynamic

#rebloh

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This isn't aimed at any one person, more of a general observation from my comments/inbox over the last few years, but the number of people who say things like "but that's normal" when I describe hypermobility compared to the number of times healthcare providers look at me like I'm a glitch in the matrix is a Ven diagram made up of a single circle at this point.

Like I feel like some people just aren't envisioning the things I'm describing properly and are imagining a normal range of motion, but I also think some of you might want to consider getting evaulated.

Especially when you send me messages like, "There's nothing wrong with me except for my debilitating joint pain, crippling exhaustion, and the fact that blood shoots out of my eyes once a month, but isn't it normal to be able to do X?"

#rebloh

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"I would die for you, I would kill for you" okay but would you live for me. Would you go outside and watch the birds go by for me. Would you breathe in the air and savor it and think about how it tastes just that little bit sweeter for me. Would you stop self deprecating for me. Would you love yourself for me.

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i love resentment i love holding grudges i love justified rage 

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When I say I want to meet my future spouse the "old fashioned way" what I mean is: I wish to be in a shipwreck caused by the creature (presumably some unnaturally large narwal) I have been searching for, only to discover that it is in fact the most incredible submarine(!!) and then get saved from the icy waters by it enigmatic captain with whom I fall desperately in love despite knowing it can never be for I am their captive in all but name.

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rain photo study

#rebloh

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"Would you change your genitals if you could" yeah, make it Bluetooth enabled.

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Asheville, North Carolina | Photo by @aroundq

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I laughed so fucking hard at this

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FundsForGaza is a page of a rotating list of fundraisers for Gazans - individuals and families who are in Gaza right now and facing genocide.

It is explained in more detail in this post from the official instagram account, but to quickly summarise, six verified fundraisers are highlighted at a time, allowing you to provide direct support without being overwhelmed by the amount of fundraisers, worrying about outdated information, or falling for scams.

Sharing this link and, if you are able to, donating even one dollar to one of the fundraisers listed will make a direct difference.

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my little brother & i are having a scholarly debate about mornings

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aroace flag but it's colorpicked from this image of tintin :)

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which is definitely not an omen