Bastard. Harlot. Fluke.

There's a certain poetry to finishing this right as it's getting dark and blue outside.

Certainly!

I was loosely following a wassail recipe I found but made some substitutions, and this might be closer to a mulled cider than a true wassail, but either way it's delicious.

Ingredients:

-64 floz (~2 litres) of apple cider

-5 mid sized oranges

-1 regular or 2 small lemons

-1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg

-3 or 4 cinnamon sticks (I used three since one was chonky)

-fresh ginger root (or 1/4 tsp ground ginger)

-15 whole cloves or 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

-1 Tablespoon of honey

Optional: your choice of rum or brandy

Preparations:

Juice four of the five oranges and your lemon(s). Slice the fifth orange and poke the whole cloves into the slices.

Thinly slice the ginger root. I ended up only using one of the two pictured, and each of those were about 4 inches long or so.

Add all of the ingredients to your cooking vessel and bring to a medium heat. You want to see a bit of bubbling in the liquid (not a rolling boil) and a froth/foam will form on top. This is fine!

Reduce to a low simmer (around a 3 out of 10) for 30-40 minutes. Stir everything in the pot in about five minute intervals.

Storage:

heart locket gif maker

minecraft advancement maker

minecraft logo font text generator w/assorted textures and pride flags

windows error message maker (win1.0-win11)

FromSoftware image macro generator (elden ring Noun Verbed text)

image to 3d effect gif

vaporwave image generator

microsoft wordart maker (REALLY annoying to use on mobile)

And now, everyone is panicking.

Which really shows.

These past three or four days, multiple countries have reached the threshold. Even more notably, the number of signatures in total, the ones that we need to get one million of, are growing rapidly. There are only 400'000 signatures missing. Two days ago, it was closer to 600'000.

You can see the progress here:

and another species called the splendid fairywren

...and one called the lovely fairywren

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. 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.

The strike was initiated by IF Metall after five years of Tesla refusing to negotiate a collective agreement.

It is the first formal labor conflict called against Tesla anywhere in the world.

The National Mediation Office summoned both parties, but Tesla's representatives quickly withdrew from negotiations.

The strike was then extended to include all repair shops servicing Tesla vehicles in Sweden.

Swedish employer unions have also pressured Tesla to cave and align with the country's labour model.

Strikebreakers have been sent in, a tactic forbidden since the 1930s by agreement between the Swedish unions and employers. (Ie. not illegal but liable to make the entire country hate you.)

As noted by Atle Høie, general secretary of IndustriALL, an industrial union confederation representing 50 million workers in 140 countries: “Elon Musk’s business model is to avoid respecting human rights. Now he is taken on by one of our strongest unions. We must defeat the Tesla business model, and Sweden is the best place to start.”

Sweden has one of the highest rates of unionization out of the Nordics (which have the highest rates of unionization globally alongside Cuba and Vietnam) and the thing about that is you get sympathy strikes:

There's already talk of launching similar strikes here in Norway if the Swedes aren't heard. For an idea of what happens if they keep this up, let's look at the time McDonald's tried these kinds of tactics:

Or Toys R Us:

Tesla's presence in the country is limited compared to those, but I think it's fair to say their choice is going to be between pulling out or caving to their demands, because these kinds of threats to union power are not tolerated.

The import blockade began in select cities today, and Tesla has already tired to get around it. The unions have responded by extending the blockade to every port in the country, with further measures in the works if Musk refuses to budge.

With Musk controlling Twitter/X now, discussions about it on there are predictably filled with trolls and detractors. The workers at Tesla could all be tremendously happy with their jobs and it would not change the fact that this is an attack on the entire labour model that gives other workers decent conditions. This is not just about Tesla, it's about preventing it from setting a precedent for other employers.

IF Metall have asked people to talk about this on social media, particularly on X, to counteract Musk's army of trolls and build awareness and support for the strikes, so please do if you can. Here's an up-to-date (Nov 7th) article in English which you can share:

So far I’ve got

ladder letters: A, E, F, H, T

humpback B’s and P’s get as many bumps as you think they need

circle O’s, you just keep spiraling in til you feel like you’ve made your point

tree letters branch into smaller versions of themselves ad nauseum: X, Y

spider Q’s, so many legs

New alphabet dropped!

But I think i’ve taken a real shine to it! 

Captions added by for your reading pleasure