im having an emotion

It is NOT escaping the third mom allegations 🚫

Edit:

specifically like. dazhis. did she know him? she must have - he knew cala seemingly well, and cala knew kiru well enough to vouch for her to the emperor. dachenmaza is a rank held by very few people so she must have been familiar with him. familiar enough to smile at him in the hall, maybe? familiar enough to sit with him at dinner, to pass the salt?

she wanted the role of nohecharis but was passed over because she was a woman. they bring in a new emperor - a skinny ragged boy of 18 - and she is passed over again. instead they pick cala and dazhis, who are a solid 15 years younger than her. does she resent that? or does she rededicate herself to her service in the hospital? the service for which she swore herself to celibacy?

and then the news: treachery. a coup. an attempted assassination by the boy she used to smile at in the halls. shock and horror and a kind of mass shame that seeps into the very fabric of the athmaz'are

but beside the shock and horror... hope? some sick seedling of hope, of the kind of ambition she has not allowed herself to nurse for years?

with dazhis gone, the emperor will need a replacement nohecharis. and there are no more dachenmaza to volunteer.

there is just kiru.

finally, after two decades of service, the adremaza comes to her to ask her to consider the position that she has wanted all along. but he asks her to conceal her gender, to which she says "you're stupid" but agrees anyway

the emperor sees through her in literally 30 seconds, which— well, it's unprofessional to say "i told thee so" but whatever, she's never really concerned herself with that stuff

the adremaza stammers and stumbles over his words but tells the emperor essentially "kiru is your last option"

and kiru cuts in and says "serenity you are my last hope"

she says "we have been in service to csaivo for as long as you have been alive but we have been passed over again and again. you are rumoured to be the kind of emperor who lifts up those who have been passed over. we would serve you if you would have us"

the emperor accepts. is she happy? is she triumphant? does this feel like the end of a chapter or the beginning of a new one? we're not told

she's paired with a shaken 20-something year old guy who is visibly traumatized from his last encounter with a dachenmaza - the same dachenmaza she used to rub shoulders with, the same one who is slated to die for his crimes, the same one to whom she owes this one perfect shining chance that she has been angling for her whole life

and then the emperor goes to the mazan'theileian

en route kiru tells him - this nervous teenaged boy to whom she's pledged her life - all about the maza. is he listening? maybe a little. maybe it's in one ear and out the other. she tells it to him with no expectation of response. probably just to save them both from the loaded silence that dogs their footsteps. telimezh certainly isn't about to make conversation

the emperor sees dazhis. dazhis apologizes in tears and snot and begs the emperor to come and watch his revethvoran. kiru stands behind the emperor and watches the boy she used to know and says nothing

and then the emperor agrees to watch him die, which means kiru has to watch him die as well

the emperor meditates. maybe kiru does too

and then they both stand, watching silently as dazhis kills himself

For one thing, yes, it takes her twenty years to get the money and then the gun. But I don’t know that Breq is used to considering things on a human timescale. Twenty years is nothing to an AI, that’s an eyeblink. Ships and stations are effectively immortal, unless they are killed in a battle or something. How many thousands of years old is Justice of Toren by that point? And it may be reduced to one ancillary, but that ancillary isn’t old; it’s got time. What else is JoT/Breq going to do with the ancillary’s life? She’s not expecting to survive, after all. She might as well put in the time to make it really epic.

She’s got the time. A few years here, a few years there, it’ll add up, but she’ll still be capable of carrying things out. There’s no rush. She can be patient, implacable. It’s a very AI/ship perspective, but I wouldn’t call it crazy or insane.

The other thing is, you have to consider her goals. Breq doesn't just want to kill an Anaander, she wants to kill her while all of Anaander is watching, so the divide between the two Anaanders can’t be concealed. (And thus, what Anaander--both of them--did to her can’t be concealed.)

There are many easy ways to kill an Anaander. There are a lot of Anaanders walking around, and if you pick an older one there won’t even be any bodyguards, we saw that on Shis’urna. Walk up, snap its neck, boom, done. Probably happens all the time.

Except that won’t get the attention Breq wants. It will be absolutely useless. She’ll just be “random person snaps, gets re-educated.” It won’t get her Anaander’s attention.

If she wants to get the attention of multiple Anaanders, so that they’re both paying attention and it can’t be hushed up, it pretty much has to be on a palace station in a temple in a formal audience. And if you want to kill an Anaander there, that is much harder. The station will see everything, it will see any weapon you bring on station, so you can’t use a weapon. And there are guards at the beck and call. Even an ancillary might not be able to kill an Anaander in the middle of a Palace temple without a weapon, and you can’t get a weapon.

Unless you get a weapon that station can’t see.

Also, while Breq is affected by Garsedd, we know there is someone who is far more affected by Garsedd, and that is Anaander Mianaai. All the trouble, all the conflict, all the internal fighting that is becoming a civil war, it all starts there. Anaander became a house divided against herself because of what she did at Garsedd. If you want to absolutely rivet the attention of all Anaander segments out there, pull out the missing Garseddai gun.

And with that gun, you might even be able to kill multiple Anaanders before they take you down, even in the middle of a palace temple.

and if you saw that meteor tonight then no the fuck you didn't

we observe no fucking omens we heed no fucking signs

there is no fucking destiny at play

we are going to have A NORMAL FUCKING WEEK so help me physics

the city of los angeles

the city of new york

sex

how drinking alcohol works

how getting high works

how a child of any age speaks

how nuclear physics work

how [my job] works

how debilitating being shot in the shoulder is

how hypothermia works

things I have never before seen someone fake their way through writing about, until today:

SHRIMP COCKTAIL:

banahbanah: #flashback to that one fic where Peter Parker frets about drinking shrimp cocktail because of the alcohol

generaldeliciousness: adding: what a prawn/shrimp cocktail is

#why is your character turning it down because they're under 21 #do you think prawn cocktail is a cocktail #this lives in my brain rent-free constantly #the rest of the fic was so normal #and good enough that i'll still re-read it #but bro

And then many, MANY, people wondering if this was actually authour mistake, since Peter really would do this!

POMEGRANATES:

zhajhassa: #haha where's that post that was like someone describing someone eating a pomegranate but they ate it like an apple

thornhands: #once someone wrote persephone biting into a whole Pomegranate #had to stop and stare at a wall for a minute

sungsingsanguine: I once saw someone very confidently write about a character eating slices of pomegranate.

FRUIT TREES:

zagreuses-toast: #given a very endearing glimpse into a writers blindspots by seeing them describe someone sitting under a ''pineapple tree''

salatrash: I remember something about picking watermelons... OF A FUCKING TREE

baander: #cranberry trees

DOUGH/BATTER:

maycelium: #I'm a chef so I'm really used to people not accurately describing how to cook food #But I was surprisingly flabbergasted when someone was writing making a cake and was kneading it. Which uh #Not necessary for cake. It was interesting for sure but just bizarre

livebloggingmydescentintomadness: #the one that drove me nuts was when a character set aside a batch of PASTA DOUGH 'to rise' #pasta doesn't have yeast!! #it does need to REST but it will never RISE #you do not want an airy crumb on your noodles

lovesodeepandwideandwell: #THE ONE WHERE THEY MADE COOKIES BY LADLING BATTER INTO A TRAY

Some other topics:

Howdy, howdy, folks.

For many years (ten now, about which, more soon) McMansion Hell has featured many prominent and diverse atrocities from all over these great United States and sometimes beyond them. However, most of these posts have consisted of houses built during the McMansion Era proper -- from the 80s up through around the early 2010s.

This is for a number of reasons. First of all: I like these houses because they are insane. Second of all, they are indeed quite different from one another -- they represent the owner's idiosyncratic if poorly rendered desires and fantasies. They are heavily psychologically loaded buildings. One family dreams endlessly of Tuscany, another wants to recreate the mall. All interiorize previously exterior forms of consumption.

These houses were also very expensive to build compared to their contemporary iterations: all real, solid wood cabinetry and trim, wrought iron railings, marble floors, elaborate murals - none of this is cheap. This is not to say that I'm nostalgic for the classical McMansion (though many are) only that it, like, most other facets of architectural and everyday life, have become progressively cheaper and more bland.

The McMansion never truly goes away. It merely changes shape over time. One of the shapes it currently takes is a particularly loathsome imitation of contemporary high architecture (specifically the kind of houses architects love to build for celebrities in California) executed in the most wretchedly parsimonious manner possible. It feels cheap to use the word 'slop' but their indiscriminate nature - the way they have no regard for why or how the things they imitate even work - allows it. Of all the building forms that could be generated with AI, this is the most likely. At any rate, behold:

Yes this is a real house. Yes you can buy it for $6 million in, yet again, Barrington, IL. It has 5 bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms totaling 11,600 square feet. But most importantly, it looks like dogshit. Ten layers of Photoshop have been used to gussy it up which makes it appear entirely ersatz. Were it not for the interiors, I myself would have trouble trusting my own eyes. Part of the reason it looks so unreal is because the design itself is absurd, as though someone created four equally ugly vessels and threw them up one by one.

In 2017, in a now-deleted essay for Curbed (RIP - they destroyed the archive) I called these types of houses McModerns, simply because they were McMansions dressed up in modernist garb, which they wore no differently than they would Neo-Tudor or Mediterranean (broadly construed.) These houses don't warrant a new neologism, but they do feel like a degraded or perhaps even gonzo version of even that old concept. Slop works fine too, especially because half of what's in these images isn't real.

Much fascinates me about these houses, however one of the most unique elements vis a vis the last 30 years of building is how overtly and almost hostilely masculine they are. Anything that can be construed as feminized - color, softness, ornament - has been ruthlessly purged. They also rip off tech industry minimalism which only ads to their bro-ey nature. While previous iterations of McModernism (think new builds in Colorado with fake wood exteriors) scream dads with IPAs, these houses scream Reddit to me. They are Elon Musk-adjacent in sentiment.

By the way, this is what that room looks like without the fake furniture. It's basically a sunroom.

Whole Foods would like to call in a robbery.

Because these houses are designed by men, for men, no one involved has learned how a kitchen works. Many are calling this setup the "grindset tiktok video kitchen." This is the kitchen you see in those day in the life of an AI startup founder videos your algorithm forces you to watch against your will.

Virtual staging is actual literal slop. In fact, one can say that they were one of the first iterations of the ontological crisis we now face, one of the first instances where one is forced against one's will to question reality, what one sees with one's own eyes. Beyond that, I think virtual staging is literally a form of lying. You can use it to make a space look bigger or smaller than it is. In this it also has a lot in common with AI. This dining room has nothing to do with the world I'm living in. These chairs are not my problem.

It's actually AMAZING how much of what's in this house, beyond the furniture, is fake. Every single material is fake. The stone is aluminum paneling. The plants are plastic. The concrete is printed on some kind of surface (as evidenced through its repetitive pattern), though it's hard to say from just pictures. I don't even trust the floors!!

Ok if you haven't read Kelly Pendegrast's amazing essay "Merchandizing the Void" about how houses are all like stores now, HERE IS THE LINK. Some ideas never die, they just evolve, king. Like you.

Please, I'm very cold.

Unfortunately there are no pictures of the rear exterior of this house, so this is where we will have to conclude for today. That being said, these houses and their antecedents are developing a design language all their own that will, in time, be as culturally rich to us as the houses of yore. The problem is they are less visually interesting. They are houses made to scroll in and scroll right by. Expect to see more of them here, but only if they have something, anything to say.

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. (Don’t worry! This doesn’t adjust for inflation! Now’s the perfect time to join!) By the way: new subscribers can buy a year of McMansion Hell for just $12!