I suppose it is among the less painful ways to acquire some home ownership basic literacy but it is also normie hell
HGTV is Karen TV
Words/phrases I’d like to mute
Open concept
Island
Peninsula
Cabinets
Tiles
Tuscany
French
Farm house
Stucco
Colonial
en suite
Backsplash
Darker
Lighter
Double vanity
Words/phrases I’d like to hear but never do
Drone pad
Observatory
Laser defenses
Missile silo
Robot workshop
Secret passage
On-prem rack
Smart home system
I’m rarely conscious of race stuff, but damn this is the whitest channel ever, even more so than hallmark. Even though a lot of the people featured in the shows are not white, the content is like the Deathstar of white culture
More mute list
Space to entertain
Carrera
Grout
Gorgeous
Breakfast nook
It’s an unbelievably terminal-feeling monoculture
You could run a blockchain on homeowner consensus culture
End of history last man culture
I get that it’s a refined and evolved century old low margin construction culture that has made quality housing and convenience affordable for the middle class but damn is it tricky-tacky stepfordification
Houses in India are all over the place by contrast an architectural babel. Though I think American lifestyle monoculture housing us taking over the higher-end stock these days.
The worst thing about HGTV is that if you search for “HGTV” on twitter you’ll mostly find pure unironic fandom. Pure blue-pill haze.
You could reprogram the consciousness of America by figuring out how to increase the architectural variety, and somehow dampen the mutual-mimetic feeding frenzy.
Even the technical side which would normally interest me depresses me in this context… structural, electrical, material, chemical, hvac… there’s a lot of fun stuff there but here it somehow all just depressingly feeds the Stepford Matrix
Gotta admit it’s a beautiful economic machine though. Mass produced track housing drives down construction cost radically, feeds a Jevon’s paradox expansion in demand for square footage and features, and cycle repeats. It’s like a Moore’s law effect when you compare eras.
Modern American houses are masterpieces of functional density. They get bigger and bigger but also pack more and more functionality and convenience per square foot. Apartments too but less so. The US is a world leader in a certain pattern of single-family housing.
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If this launch goes well, best Christmas present ever… the photos should be unprecedented, since it’s an infrared telescope. Huge gas cloud panoramas and stuff. It will be bigger as when T-Rex got feathers… I think out view of a mostly “empty” sky will change…
I remember being super excited and then super disappointed by early Hubble years when the mirror defect came to light (heh!). There were lot of angry op-eds about $5b white elephant, bad big government mismanagement, etc…. and then they fixed it. The greatest comeback ever.
I admit I was small-minded enough back then to briefly join in the cynical nasa-bashing. Taught me an important lesson of some sort.
But damn, the deep field image alone is worth the whole Hubble mission
When people are bad at spending money it accumulates with people who are good at collecting it. Most people are very bad at spending money beyond the relatively low limit of personal hedonism. By about $4m, most people are out of ideas.
Almost everybody confuses categories of spending for spending ideas. Categories of spending ideas are nearly worthless. All creativity in spending lies in the specificity.
Imo average spending ideas are commodity instances of categories. “Artist collective” is a category of idea. “Artist collective in Austin” is an actual idea.
Good spending ideas are specific and “pop” from parent category.
Another top 5 shortlist. Many are coming up with vague versions of rewilding, but the wilderness corridors detail really levels up this variant. Internet of national parks!
You have a billion dollars. You are not allowed to spend it in any way that directly helps others like charity, gifts, scholarships/grants, or pure investments like in startups or stocks. You’ve also already exhausted all hedonistic desires of your own.
How do you use it?
I like both art and research but the dominance of those categories makes me super suspicious and a bit hostile to both.
Unless it’s a specific work of art or research you’ve conceptualized to the point that it’s more an execution contract/commision than an ab initio creative project, it’s not in the spirit of the prompt.