The Sad Zone

it’s okay to use your turn signal when you’re changing lanes

it’s okay to use your turn signal when you’re taking an exit

it’s okay to use your turn signal when you plan on turning (can even be done sooner than 2 seconds before you’re about to turn)

you have a turn signal. in your vehicle. two of them in fact.

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.

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.

But all it takes is one time for you to slip up and suddenly the grinder disk that would have gotten stuck in your safety glasses is in your eye, or you're getting treated for lung cancer because you didn't want to wear your respirator while you welded. These are decisions that you were free to make, but might seriously regret later on.

People will scream until they're blue in the face about how oppressive it is to have to wear a safety vest and hard hat on a construction site, but do you really think that the hammer that slipped out of your buddy's hand is going to take that into consideration when it collides with your skull?

• every safety rule is written in blood

• OSHA exists so the boss can't force you to die for their profits. it was started as a result of union action, as a direct response to the triangle shirtwaist factory fire. OSHA is constantly fighting for worker's rights and protection. whistleblower laws protect any employee who makes an OSHA complaint against their employer, and anyone who reports is guaranteed anonymity and aggressive legal support against retaliation. there is also a separate health and safety administration for miners in the USA called MSHA.

• the people most likely to get hurt on the job are not apprentices or senior workers approaching retirement. the new hire is careful because they're green, and still learning, and still unfamiliar with the tools and the work. the old hand is careful because retirement is within sight and they want to make it there. the person who gets hurt is usually the journeyman at the peak of their career—in their 30s-50s, an expert at their trade, their tools feel like an extension of themselves, and they're so comfortable they forget to be careful. they've gotten lucky cutting corners or using something incorrectly or taking off a guard or leaving off some safety equipment 1000 times but one day they're tired or distracted or too comfortable or too confident and the luck runs out.

• some accidents you cannot just avoid with skill, or you have no personal control over them. sometimes you have to trust your coworkers with your life. the big blue crane collapse killed three ironworkers who were on an observation platform, doing other work, far from the crane, with no ability to prevent or escape the collapse. the crane collapsed as a result of being operated despite adverse conditions, despite the normal crane operator refusing to run the crane due to adverse conditions making it unsafe, and was filmed because a safety inspector was recording the violation and attempting to stop it. the operator of the crane got out safely, but three ironworkers who were hundreds of feet away, who didn't know the crane would be operating despite unsafe wind speeds, and who were trapped in midair anyways with no way to avoid or escape the collapse, and who above all just had to trust that everyone on the job site would be working safely and doing their jobs correctly, died. that footage has been used in every OSHA training i have ever been in.

But all it takes is one time for you to slip up and suddenly the grinder disk that would have gotten stuck in your safety glasses is in your eye, or you're getting treated for lung cancer because you didn't want to wear your respirator while you welded. These are decisions that you were free to make, but might seriously regret later on.

People will scream until they're blue in the face about how oppressive it is to have to wear a safety vest and hard hat on a construction site, but do you really think that the hammer that slipped out of your buddy's hand is going to take that into consideration when it collides with your skull?

• every safety rule is written in blood

• OSHA exists so the boss can't force you to die for their profits. it was started as a result of union action, as a direct response to the triangle shirtwaist factory fire. OSHA is constantly fighting for worker's rights and protection. whistleblower laws protect any employee who makes an OSHA complaint against their employer, and anyone who reports is guaranteed anonymity and aggressive legal support against retaliation. there is also a separate health and safety administration for miners in the USA called MSHA.

• the people most likely to get hurt on the job are not apprentices or senior workers approaching retirement. the new hire is careful because they're green, and still learning, and still unfamiliar with the tools and the work. the old hand is careful because retirement is within sight and they want to make it there. the person who gets hurt is usually the journeyman at the peak of their career—in their 30s-50s, an expert at their trade, their tools feel like an extension of themselves, and they're so comfortable they forget to be careful. they've gotten lucky cutting corners or using something incorrectly or taking off a guard or leaving off some safety equipment 1000 times but one day they're tired or distracted or too comfortable or too confident and the luck runs out.

• some accidents you cannot just avoid with skill, or you have no personal control over them. sometimes you have to trust your coworkers with your life. the big blue crane collapse killed three ironworkers who were on an observation platform, doing other work, far from the crane, with no ability to prevent or escape the collapse. the crane collapsed as a result of being operated despite adverse conditions, despite the normal crane operator refusing to run the crane due to adverse conditions making it unsafe, and was filmed because a safety inspector was recording the violation and attempting to stop it. the operator of the crane got out safely, but three ironworkers who were hundreds of feet away, who didn't know the crane would be operating despite unsafe wind speeds, and who were trapped in midair anyways with no way to avoid or escape the collapse, and who above all just had to trust that everyone on the job site would be working safely and doing their jobs correctly, died. that footage has been used in every OSHA training i have ever been in.

if you see this man in your server kill him

Here is an article from Discord about this thag updated about an hour ago

Aside from that I was able to go into permissions and make it so nobody in my server could interact with Clyde. I still do not know what information Clyde and by extension OpenAI has from what it might have taken from my server to “make Clyde better” there was no warning and no message despite how discord had pitched this. It says in this article that it will notify users but Discord did not do that at all.

I already did, myself.

This has to violate some privacy laws- and definitely some copyright laws if the bot learns from writers- not to mention EULA laws.