kaleb-the-master-of-fate

[kaleb-the-master-of-fate]

Steam finally deciding to start curating user-submitted tags for popular titles is definitely a positive thing in terms of discoverability, but I'll be honest, I kind of miss the period where Doom (2016) spent several months tagged as an LGBT dating sim.

[kaleb-the-master-of-fate]

Generic Medieval Fantasy™ role reversal where the royal chancellor is a jocular goofball with a strange preoccupation with dad-joke-level puns and the royal jester is just intensely sinister in ways that only outsiders ever seem to notice.

[kaleb-the-master-of-fate]

ode to a faux grecian urn

Howdy everyone,

Today's house, built in 2001, comes to you from, you guessed it, the Chicago suburbs. The house is a testimony to traditional craftsmanship and traditional values (having lots of money.) The cost of painting this house greige is approximately the GDP of Slovenia so the owners have decided to keep it period perfect (beige.) Anyway.

This 5 bedroom, 7.5 bathroom house clocks in at a completely reasonable 12,700 square feet. If you like hulking masses and all-tile interiors, it could be all yours for the reasonable price of $2.65 million.

The problem with having a house that is 12,700 square feet is that they have to go somewhere. At least 500 of them were devoted to this foyer. Despite the size, I consider this a rather cold and lackluster welcome. Cold feet anyone?

The theme of this house is, vaguely, "old stuff." Kind of like if Chuck E Cheese did the sets for Spartacus. Why the dining room is on a platform is a good question. The answer: the American mind desires clearly demarcated space, which, sadly, is verboten in our culture.

The other problem with a 12,700 square foot house is that even huge furniture looks tiny in it.

Entering cheat codes in "Kitchen Building Sim 2000" because I spent my entire $70,000 budget on the island.

Of course, a second sitting room (without television) is warranted. Personally, speaking, I'm team Prince.

I wonder why rich people do this. Surely they must know it's tacky right? That it's giving Liberace? (Ask your parents, kids.) That it's giving Art.com 75% off sale if you enter the code ROMANEMPIRE.

Something about the bathroom really just says "You know what, I give up. Who cares?" But this is not even the worst part of the bathroom...

Not gonna lie, this activates my flight or fight response.

If you remember Raggedy Ann you should probably schedule your first colonoscopy.

Anyways, that does it for the interior. Let's take a nice peek at what's out back.

I love mowing in a line. I love monomaniacal tasks that are lethal to gophers.

Alright, that does it for this edition of McMansion Hell. Back to the book mines for me. Bonus posts up on Patreon soon.

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!

[kaleb-the-master-of-fate]

I was about to make a joke about an artist with lists of "Will Do" and "Won't Do" kinks on their commission sheet, except the "Will Dos" mean they will find a way to include those kinks in the finished piece, no matter what the spec is, like they'll figure out how to incorporate foot worship into a landscape painting or whatever, but then I realised that I was just describing H R Giger.

[kaleb-the-master-of-fate]

pre-recession, post-taste

Hello, everyone. I hope this blog can bring some well-needed laughs in really trying times. That's why I've gone back into the archives of that precipitous year 2007, a year where the McMansion was sleepwalking into being a symbol of the financial calamity to follow. We return to the Chicago suburbs once more because they remain the highest concentration of houses in their original conditions. Thanks to our flipping predilection, these houses become rarer and rarer and I have to admit even I have developed a fondness for them as a result.

Our present house is ostensibly "French Provincial" in style, which is McMansion for "Chateaux designed by Carmela Soprano". It boasts 7 bedrooms, 8.5 bathrooms, and comes in at a completely reasonable 15,000 square feet. It can be yours for an equally reasonable $1.5 million.

Every 2007 McMansion needed two things: a plethora of sitting rooms and those dark wood floors. This house actually has around five or six sitting rooms (depending if you count the tiled sunroom) but for brevity's sake, I'll only provide two of them.

With regards to the second sitting room, I'm really not one to talk statuary here because beside me there is a bust of Dante where the sculptor made him look simultaneously sickly and lowkey hot.

Technically, if we are devising a dichotomy between sitting and not sitting (yes, I know about the song), the dining room also counts as a sitting room. The more chairs in your McMansion dining room, the more people allegedly like you enough to travel 2.5 hours in traffic to see you twice a year.

Here's the thing about nostalgia: the world as we knew it then is never coming back. In some ways this is sad (kitchens are entirely white now and marble countertops will look terrible in about 3 years) but in other ways this is very good (guys in manhattan have switched to private equity instead of betting the farm on credit default swaps made from junk mortgages proffered to America's most vulnerable and exploited populations.) Progress!

Okay I really don't understand the 50 bed pillows thing. Every night my parents tossed their gazillion decorative pillows on the floor just to put them back on the bed the next morning. Like, for WHAT? Who was going in there? The Pope?

Here's a fun one for your liminal spaces moodboards. (Speaking for myself.)

Yes, I know about skibidi toilet. And sticking out your gyatt for the rizzler. I wish I didn't. I wish I couldn't read. Literacy is like a mirror in which I only see the aging contours of my face.

When your kids move out every room becomes a guest room.

Anyway, let's see what the rear of this house has to offer.

The migratory birds will not forgive them for their crimes. But also seriously, not even a garden?

Anyway, that does it for this round of McMansion Hell. Happy Halloween!

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!

[kaleb-the-master-of-fate]

Environmental storytelling toilet skeleton with the obligatory ominous personal journal lying on the floor beside it, except the journal entries continue beyond the writer's death, with periodic updates describing events occurring in and around the abandoned restroom where the skeleton is located and offering wry observational humour about the process of decomposition, all in the same highly distinctive authorial tone as the entries from life. Following several large time skips owing to nothing interesting happening during the omitted spans, the final entry ends with a notably uncomplimentary description of the player character entering the restroom.

[kaleb-the-master-of-fate]

You know, watching Batman The Animated Series for the first time since I was a child, I literally can't get over the gulf of characterisation between that Batman and current day iterations. He's still dark and brooding and powerful but he cracks wry jokes and he's compassionate to his villains and he feels so much more compelling.... idk maybe I'm just tired of people saying that present day Batman is "realistic" when they mean "joyless and brutal"

[kaleb-the-master-of-fate]

Level 1: Characters in a fantastical setting with no clear analogue of any real-world culture or religion celebrate Christmas; the implications of this are never examined

Level 2: Characters in a fantastical setting celebrate a secular, non-denominational mid-winter holiday which just coincidentally involves many of the same rituals and observances as Christmas

Level 3: Characters in a fantastical setting celebrate a mid-winter holiday commemorating an invented folk-hero whose mythos furnishes elaborate alternative explanations for various Christmas observances

Level 4: Characters in a fantastical setting celebrate Christmas because in spite of the setting's history otherwise bearing no resemblance to that of Earth, for some reason Catholicism still exists

Level 5: Whatever C S Lewis was on

[kaleb-the-master-of-fate]

I don't think I posted it to tumblr but here's a comic I made a few years ago for Jigen's birthday.

Fun fact: A few days after I posted this to Instagram in 2020, GKIDS (one of the official distributors for Lupin stuff in the US) reached out to me and sent me a free BluRay of The First as part of a promotion. To this day it's one of my crowning achievements.

[kaleb-the-master-of-fate]

My cats have this meow that means "please come with me to fix this" after which they'll lead me to the problem in question, usually a empty (or 'empty') food bowl or a closed door they want open. They look at the 'problem', they look back at me, clear message.

What fascinates me is how this illustrates what they percieve as being in the realm of my 'power.' I control the food, I control the door, sure, but my cats love to sit on the balcony in the sun, and it has happened plenty of times that on a rainy day they come get me, go to the balcony and show me... the rain. "Please fix this" they say. "Please get rid of the wet"

"Silly kitty," I say, "I can't control the rain." I then walk into the shower and turn on the rain.

[kaleb-the-master-of-fate]

On the one hand, yes, there's no obligation for an artist to have a "style", but on the other hand, if you're planning on drawing shit for money, taking the time to cultivate a handful of a specific styles for your portfolio can be hugely useful – not even in terms of giving people a clear idea of what exactly they're paying for (though there's definitely that), but in terms of managing your own workload.

The exact same composition drawn to the exact same spec could easily take ten times as much time and effort in style A as it does in style B, often for reasons that won't be obvious just from looking at the finished piece, and if you're winging your stylistic choices as you go, you'll have no idea which of those scenarios you're in.

Having an identifiable "style" isn't just a personal branding thing: it also makes it much, much easier to correctly assess what you're getting into with any given piece. Heck, I know a lot of artists who've taken the time to develop multiple distinct portfolio styles and charge different rates depending on which one the client wants.

[kaleb-the-master-of-fate]

a small sketch of Olga

[kaleb-the-master-of-fate]

I really need to work on not getting annoyed when rec lists and reviewers cite completely the wrong games as influences when discussing this or that indie retro title – half of them can't even correctly identify which console generation a given title is name-checking, so expecting them to get specific influences right is just a recipe for ruining my digestion.

[kaleb-the-master-of-fate]

[kaleb-the-master-of-fate]

Like to charge reblog to cast

Count your fucking days Devil

[kaleb-the-master-of-fate]

Yes, next question please.

am i even an artist

[kaleb-the-master-of-fate]

7:30 AM Wednesday morning, insomnia making days and weeks blend together.

#playlist #mood playlist