We're redoing our bathroom too. It's a pain because we have only one full bath.

Anyway, we're getting rid of the only tub and turning it into a big shower.

I never ever take baths, and would agree with you. Jammies would love a tub that's a touch bigger, because he does like a good soak. So we're leaving that alone, which is pleasantly cheaper as well.

I should say that we don't actually have space to increase the size of the bathtub anyway. Jammies' preference got ruled out logistically, not by me.

It's going to be such a pain. I guess we'll have to shower at the gym or something during renovation.

I'm not sure about the "market related gaze" but I'm pretty sure that having a house payment based on 2003 prices is responsible for our disposable income being disposable.

yep. I add "buying my house in the mid-2000s" to the massive list of chronological privileges that I lucked into.

There seems to be some of the cultural phenomenon with baby names where people assume the latest trend is their idiosyncratic taste. Or at least that happened with me: I was thinking I'd like a nice grayish wood floor, and then I saw it as the standard on all the remodeled houses in Other City for sale.

"The proliferation of home remodeling shows" - do these have purchase outside literally those people who go to such shows? I didn't know they were a thing.

I am thinking of someday adding wooden paneling to my walls, which I suspect would be a negative for the resale value. Unless it comes back.

There was an interesting Tiktok from a white home builder in West Africa whose theme was that build quality is far higher there than in the US, partly because land is cheap and you can build on as much of it as you please, so your money can go toward construction.

It may be because that one guy blessed the rain.

5 and 6: the thing to do here was buy a condo in 2009 or 2010 and if you needed a bigger place in the burbs you had goid urban appreciation to buy in 2016/17 before the run up and at hood rates.

I ran into a musician (a organust) who bought a condo in Harvard Square in 1986. He's still working and "poor" in that he does gig work without benefits but his property taxes are dirt cheap.

"The proliferation of home remodeling shows" - do these have purchase outside literally those people who go to such shows? I didn't know they were a thing.

TV shows, not trade shows.

I think they only appeal to people who watch them, until you go to renovate or buy or sell a house, and then you find yourself kerplunked into all these conversations with extremely confident people telling you what you have to have.

The problem is that the plumber telling you that you absolutely want this kind of pipe for longevity reasons sounds just like the contractor saying you want this color fridge for longevity reasons. Wading through what's aesthetic and what's economic is not necessarily clear and obvious.

Oh, right. Recently I looked to see if there were any cable shows about building ADUs, and there weren't. (Home extensions, yes; detached additions like mancaves, yes; ADUs, no.)

Houses only cost like $750/month. Why not just get a house instead of an ADU?

I am thinking of someday adding wooden paneling to my walls, which I suspect would be a negative for the resale value

You could go for the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino style.

we have only one full bath

Houses only cost like $750/month

Thinking face emoji!

I live in a very nice street.

If I really wanted to go all out, there's Venetian plaster. (There was a guy in the community college class I took who was in a family business specializing in that... unfortunately I didn't connect with him.)

On a nice street, even.

The home improvement shows also influence what's available to buy (I'm sure they feed both ways). We want to put cork flooring in upstairs and none of the hardware stores here (Canada) sell it anymore. I also want to do a Euro/1980's style kitchen and the only place that sells the kind of cupboard face I want is IKEA and they only have one colour. I mean I know it's all fashion cycles (see also trying to find primary or jewel tone clothes for adult women with or without ruffles) but what happened to the long tail I was promised?

I didn't know women had ruffles.

Here's that TikTok.

I guess you can blame remodeling shows a bit, or you can say "I'm going to make all these decisions through the warm gracious lens of home," but like the article acknowledges, there's a fundamental tension between the house as an item of personal use and the house as an asset. And it's a fact that a good designer or architect or builder is going to know more than you do about what will look good and what will work. Your oh-so-you idea for home design is probably bad.

Of course there's a lot of pointless trendiness in home design that rules out perfectly serviceable looks and options, but if you want a green bathroom, no one is going to stop you.

We had a green bathroom with green carpet. The 70s were weird.

16: I installed wood paneling in the front half of our house. I love it.

I saw a gorgeous old house in a fancy rural suburb that's for sale now. It was sold ten years ago and then 5. They want about double now, but they tore down all the walls on this 19th century house to make it open concept and it completely destroyed the character.

21: no one is stopping me, but it required a little extra assertiveness. If I hadn't had successful experiences flexing my muscles in the rest of the house, I would have been very intimidated by their skepticism.

Open plan interiors photograph/film well and are quicker to do than more internal walls.

They were literally falling as the mortar was crumbling, and we (okay my husband) re-did the mortar by hand, and limewashed them for that amazing weathered brick look. It took weeks but was so worth it because that's the first thing everyone notices.

"That's the first thing everyone notices" is IMO a very bad mindset. Houses that have made an impression on me have been pretty uniformly places that people have lived in for a long time, where the residents' history is part of the place; can't be imitated with storebought stuff. Also good light and of course level of cleanliness. Uncluttered places are absolutely more inviting on first approach but less interesting; looking good and being welcoming (to guests, to the residents) are all separate goals which require some compromise between them. My dad's second wife drew an outline of a person on the plaster wall of the living room of the villa they lived in together, she would attack it with a sword for self-defense practice. Now that, the scarred charcoal outline, that's the kind of accent decoration that really conveys personality.

Also, commercial reproductions or worse graphic realizations of slogans or words on the wall in a personal residence are a complete abomination, as unacceptable as the bookshelves at Ikea. OK in hotels of course. Prints or magazine pages or album covers that someone's chosen are fine.

We recently learned Mark Ruffalo is a housing-destroyer, by the way. Probably a repeat offender if he did the same with his new digs in Manhattan.

(On topic because it was glossed as remodeling.)

My parents' neighborhood was devastated by wildfire so lots of houses were rebuilt from scratch. Some people built basically the same floorplan, lots of people maximized their space even at the cost of their yards, and some people took the chance to customize their home to their own specific tastes.

My parents' neighbors, who are retired and probably don't plan to sell anytime soon, created closets and cabinets specific to the sizes of various things they own or collect. They seem very happy with it, which is great especially because they'd lost everything in the previous house in the fire, but I assume the future owner will do a lot of remodeling.

Your oh-so-you idea for home design is probably bad.

People certainly have some idiosyncratic design ideas, but the thing that this article captures is how narrow and pervasive the current style is. So the issue isn't that ignorant homeowners want to install kitchen counters made of shag carpet, it's that the range of "acceptable" kitchen color palettes is from white with gray to gray with white.

The one that gets me most is wall color: unless you're literally painting as a prelude to putting a house on the market, why would you limit yourself to marketable colors? Because--spoiler alert--the new owner is going to repaint if the current paint is more than a few years old. Choose a fucking color you like! Don't act like a renter in your own home, forced to select from the colors that are premixed in 5-gallon buckets because it's a commodity for landlords and flippers.

I mean, I should hope paint is a commodity. But otherwise, yes.

||

heebie - sent you an Ask the Mineshaft bleg.

|>

27: I can't really get worked up about that since, AFAICT, his sin was returning a building that was built as a SFH to being a SFH. The solution to housing scarcity isn't maintaining apartmentized houses in that condition, it's allowing the construction of new housing.

Stigmatizing Rufalo for that is actually worse than the carbon footprint notion: in both cases, it's trying to guilt individuals for not singlehandedly solving systemic crises, but at least carbon footprint accurately reflects that addressing climate change will require everybody to, you know, stop using so much carbon. The housing crisis in NYC isn't because brownstones are brownstones, it's because they stopped building large scale apartment buildings* 50 years ago.

Mind you, Rufalo was in the wrong about that church, but the number of units in his building is IMO irrelevant to that.

*as opposed to the supertalls that have objectively small numbers of units. For the first 60+ years of the 20th century, buildings with hundreds of units went up routinely

21, 25: see, Heebie's terrible taste, which I was forced to include in my design for her addition, is exactly the sort of thing we're talking about. Do all right-thinking people recoil at gold-tone door hardware? Of course they do. But there are sufficient tasteless, or simply color-blind, people to ensure that the house will sell when the time comes.

I think a secondary effect of the renovation shows is that many of them are explicitly about flips, and I think it's seeped into popular consciousness that everyone is, or could be, or can be, a flipper. It's one of these insidious capitalist things where we stop thinking of ourselves as homeowners creating living spaces for ourselves, and begin thinking of ourselves as real estate investors, even though we don't have any plans to leave any time soon.

It's a bit like thinking of ourselves as taxpayers and consumers instead of citizens.

31: Most paint colors are mixed to order, though; that's the distinction I was drawing. It's obviously an industrial product, and the paint mixer is no artisan, but painting everything Decorator's White is a second-rate solution for property managers, not a sensible choice for home occupants.

So the issue isn't that ignorant homeowners want to install kitchen counters made of shag carpet, it's that the range of "acceptable" kitchen color palettes is from white with gray to gray with white.

This.

Also it makes me sad that the range of car colors has become half white cars, one third gray and black cars, and nearly everything else is one unique shade of red, green, and either lighter medium blue or darker medium blue.

I understand this makes it much easier to replace parts, and I sympathize, but it makes the entire traffic system much less pretty.

see, Heebie's terrible taste, which I was forced to include in my design for her addition, is exactly the sort of thing we're talking about. Do all right-thinking people recoil at gold-tone door hardware? Of course they do. But there are sufficient tasteless, or simply color-blind, people to ensure that the house will sell when the time comes.

What-ev. You know you love my whole aesthetic when it came together.

Stigmatizing Rufalo for that is actually worse than the carbon footprint notion: in both cases, it's trying to guilt individuals for not singlehandedly solving systemic crises

I agree the housing crisis isn't going to be solved by individual decisions like Ruffalo's, but I do think it is making the world notably worse at one's own personal scale to remove viable housing units (especially low-to-moderate-income ones) from the market when there is a crisis on. And yes, I would like him to feel shame for it, all things considered.

Most paint colors are mixed to order, though; that's the distinction I was drawing. It's obviously an industrial product, and the paint mixer is no artisan, but painting everything Decorator's White is a second-rate solution for property managers, not a sensible choice for home occupants.

OK. I just picked from a manufacturer's long sample booklet when I was on the market to repaint my condo; are those mixed as the orders come in?

38 A full floor condo/apartment in a brownstone in Carroll Gardens is far from low-to-moderate income.

40: OK.

I assumed you were referring to that rather than the church.

I was, my mistake. Doesn't change my view. Context on the brownstoner tradition he's part of.

I know a lot of brown stoners.

44: is that really heebie or Moby in pseudonymous disguise?

45: Mobly-Gobly.

All I'm saying is that when I was growing up it was vulgar to make your house look like a hotel. It is constantly weird to me that people want their houses to look like commercial space.

Amen.

I don't even know stoners. Not many.

Anyway, when we bought our house it was pink inside. We painted the whole thing in eggshell, because we only had a week to do it. Changing paint takes time.

could not agree more re paint colors! v happy with glorious paint we're rolling out in our flat ❤️. the ubiquitous magnolia is really a downer.

also recommend world of interiors for those that enjoy decorating, nice healthy balance of batshit, interesting (good) & interesting (hideous). so much better than ad ( zzzzzzz) or h&g uk (hi risk of asphyxiation by cushion & pelmet).

I had to google 'pelmet', but I don't think I'm tall enough to worry about one cutting off my oxygen.

We were just grousing about the state of our kitchen, which as far as I can tell was last remodeled in the early 1960s. Unfortunately, it feels like "doing it right" involves pulling on a lot of strings, like removing the chimney that runs through one wall (which then impacts the two rooms above it and the roof), or taking down the drop ceiling (which then extends to the rest of the first floor) it, and as a result all we've done is replace a few appliances in place. Next on the list would be the wall oven, which is a 1963 gas oven that is no longer legal to repair in Massachusetts because it uses a banned mercury flame sensor, but modern ovens aren't quite the right size for that space at all.

(It's kind of aesthetically garish, yellow walls and marbled green something floor and kind of whitewashed cabinets; I don't actually like white-on-gray or gray-on-white, but neither do I trust myself to make aesthetically pleasing choices.)

Go to Pinterest or find a kitchen you like at a friend's house, and copy that. Don't reinvent the wheel, but figure out a thing you like. Then send me your marbled green vinyl flooring please and thank you.

I forgot to say that I do disagree with one thing at the link: Zillow Gone Wild is not policing the market-gaze. They are absolutely relishing the most bonkers houses and promoting the notion that bizarre houses are a thing and you should let your freak flag fly however you want. I think the tone is way more liberating than scolding.

nw your kitchen sounds great! except for the odd size appliances that's a bummer.

if we ever redo our kitchen the first priority is recreating the cool cupboard - from the roof you can see the louvred openings all down the wall in everyone's kitchens. with one of those we could have a *much* smaller refrigerator. would also love to remove the (no longer used) trash chute but that's likely in the too expensive category.

i'm massively rooting for the ny gov agency running a competition to develop an induction stovetop that doesn't require an electric upgrade. the electric system in this building is ... not as old as the elevator!* but that's about all you can say for it.

* a 1912 steam punk marvel.

We had so much mouse poops under our stove when I moved it out to see how it was connected. I vacuumed them up, pushed the stove back, and decided that solved the problem.

||

Ok: Ace ran out of reading material early in this vacation. My mother in law supplied Harry Potter #1. Ace is really into it already.

On JK Rowling being canceled and Ace being nonbinary, what is the kindest way to proceed?
1. Tell Ace while they're partway through book 1, let them decide for themself whether to proceed.
2. Let Ace enjoy the books fully, give them a few months to get some distance, and then have a conversation about it.
3. Some other possibility?

|>

You could go on Twitter and try to get Rowling to change her views.

That sounds like fun.

Harry Potter gets a general caveat about the books being a retrograde-for-the-time product of a less enlightened era (the 90s), and Ace will no doubt find things in them that are unsettling or unsavory. My recollection is that there isn't too much weird gender stuff in the books, but the House Elf plot arc is completely fucked up, and like many people who are capable of spending years with their heads in a fantasy world, J.K. Rowling's next act was a rather imperfect engagement with the real world. I guess the live question is how much you'd ever want to spend on merch, of which there is a whole lot.

I'm extremely uncomfortable with books being "cancelled" or forbidden to kids for any reason, especially in this case where the content of the books themselves doesn't seem to be the issue. You can tell Ace whatever you want about JKR's stupid tweets and later bad writing, but I think it's good to make the general point that the series hasn't aged perfectly well and you have to read critically. (I mean, would I give a Muslim kid The Horse and His Boy to read? That would depend a lot on the kid, but also no, because that book sucked a lot and anyone of any faith can just read the three or four good ones. But then, I also don't like HP at all.)

* obviously telling kids not to read age-inappropriate books until they're old enough is fine, although that may be less "forbidding" than postponement. I was typing quickly; obvious sanity-check considerations apply. Kids are also differently sensitive to different things, and I'd believe that some kids, like some adults, would get completely distracted by taking offense at a text, while others would immediately put it in perspective. One response isn't necessarily better than the other, although the second one is more adaptive if you want to read a lot.

26: My dad's second wife drew an outline of a person on the plaster wall of the living room of the villa they lived in together, she would attack it with a sword for self-defense practice.

I like the way you just dropped that little depth charge casually into the middle of a comment on interior decoration.

58: I'd say let the kid read the book. Don't tear it out of their hands just because you disagree with the author's political positions (positions which are AFAIK not expressed in any way in the books themselves, except maybe Hogwarts has single-sex dormitories for its pupils?).

39. Decorators' white/Ubiquitous magnolia makes sense if you plan to hang a lot of pictures. Some sort of neutral background, anyway. A shocking pink wall would distract attention from the artwork, which is presumably why galleries aren't painted in sharing colours.

61 and 62: I really enjoyed the movies, too much I'm sure.

I was also a huge fan of C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia as a kid. Relative to their respective eras which is less retrograde of the two.
The Horse and Hus Boy was hugely problematic. The Last Battle less so but still not so great.

58: I think it's less of an issue than you might be thinking because the HP books aren't a whole identity for kids anymore the way they were when the craze was hot in the 2000s. If it were 2006, getting into HP would mean having strong opinions about what house they were really a member of and wanting to play that stupid real life version of quidditch and all the nonsense, but I think now they're just kind of books to the kids.

At which point finding out Rowling is, to put it mildly, not well thought of by the trans community, shouldn't be a huge issue for them, any more than any other author with some issues would be. That was only such a huge shock because she was so important to so many people who were really committed to the books as an important part of their lives.

I'd mention something in passing about how Rowling's personal beliefs aren't great, and if Ace is interested talk through it, so it won't be out of the blue if it comes up for them later, but otherwise leave it alone.

Polyjuice! Literal gender fluidity!

"Harry, your eyesight is really awful, but this penis seems great. "

"...but now I'm on the broom, not so much?"

The wand chooses the wizard, Mr. Potter. Until the wizard learns the potion to choose the wand.

Do you mind? I was making penis jokes.

And gender fluid isn't the only kind of fluid. Rrrrrrr.

64: strong disagree that white is preferable/best for hanging art, we've a fair amount & it looks great on decidedly non white walls. also gallery white walls is a contemporary thing, not historically stable. also not saying art never looks great on white walls. it depends! on art, light, furnishings, room shape & size, people who live there ...

"Don't worry, I can fix that. You're not the first student to try Engorgio on your own penis. But we have to send an owl to your parents. "

61/63: to be clear, I'm not debating allowing Ace to read the books. Just when to be a downer and gently say that the author has since then become a real bummer - like, at what point is Ace entitled to know, and at what point is it just pooping in the punch bowl to tell Ace about JKR?

I'd mention something in passing about how Rowling's personal beliefs aren't great, and if Ace is interested talk through it, so it won't be out of the blue if it comes up for them later, but otherwise leave it alone.

This is a reasonable approach. I can do this. Thanks!!

How old is Ace again?

Context on the brownstoner tradition he's part of.

The penultimate paragraph of that article seems to make exactly the opposite point the author intends:

"For low-income people, rates of displacement and evictions are similarly high in gentrifying neighborhoods as in neighborhoods defined by concentrated poverty and disinvestment. Safety, health, and educational outcomes tend to rise for low-income people who remain in gentrifying neighborhoods"

That doesn't say to me that brownstone gentrification is pernicious, but literally the next sentence begins, "Most perniciously, brownstoners..." Talk about begging the question.

I take your point about the brownstoner tradition that prizes physical continuity over anti-displacement policies, but IMO the author is sucked into a false dichotomy between Jacobs and Moses, as if the only alternatives are stasis or mass redevelopment. That's precisely what's wrong with modern American urbanism. If you pay any attention at all to the built urban landscape, up through 1950 or so it's a constantly-changing patchwork, with most commercial buildings built by individual property owners*, not large scale developers. And when demand in a neighborhood went up, a property owner would literally replace his smaller building with a larger one to capture that demand. And so the neighborhood becomes a Ship of Theseus, individual bits changing over time without wholesale replacement. Humane, non-gentrifying, non-alienating.

One of my visions for reparations would be putting capital in the hands of Black residents of underinvested neighborhoods, enabling them to build wealth and capacity by literally constructing the communities they want to live in. It's what every wave of immigrants did (before they biffed off to the suburbs anyway).

*small scale housing--SFH and rows--were built by developers in a similar mode to modern tract housing, and major commercial construction tended to come speculatively from the already-wealthy. But corner stores with apartments above and 4-story apartment houses came from individuals & families

Ten.

OK. I just picked from a manufacturer's long sample booklet when I was on the market to repaint my condo; are those mixed as the orders come in?

Most likely. Both paint stores and big boxes have limited selections of premixed paints in a range of types--8 colors for porch floors, for instance. For interior walls, there might not even be that many. So unless you do one of 3 shades of white, a couple grays, and maybe 3 pale colors (possibly not even the colors anymore), it's mixed when it's ordered.

One practical thing to note is that mixed colors can vary from can to can*, whereas the stock colors are factory-mixed with every can exactly alike. So touch-up of a mixed color can be risky. That's one reason big landlords stick to the stock colors.

*I got screwed by this once when I was painting for (part of) my living. Job was almost done, I needed one more can, and the difference between the different parts of the room was readily visible. Paint specifications require painters to cross-mix between cans to avoid this--you're not supposed to work sequentially through cans

Nah. For ten stories you need steel. Beyond the credit of most households.

No, the series is not ten stories long.

It probably will be by the time they finish. Acehilles and the terfle.

More dreary architecture! JRoth, what do you think of massive precut stone?

I'm not debating allowing Ace to read the books

Oh I know. I just have knee-jerk reactions to the ongoing moral panic over children's books, and over education in general. Subject for another thread. (Not because my views would enlighten anyone, but other people's contributions might be valuable.)

I'm not about to become informed about education. I'm fine with copying your views. I'll change the words if there's a test.

I'm uninterested in flipping and ignoring suggestions for an open floor plan and other ways to maximize the economic value of our house. I had thought those preferences were just idiosyncrasies or even personal weaknesses, e.g. some form of laziness. What a relief to learn that it's actually just right-thinking counter-cultural independence!

AISIMHB, we're planning to renovate. I figure we need at least one more bathroom before we have a teenager (Atossa is 8 years old at the moment, so that's a time limit), and more space in general would help with all the clutter I'm always complaining about.

I suspect the biggest factor will be cost. When a contractor reviewed our architect's "deluxe" plan, the "full" option, he said it would be about $525,000. That's about $100,000 more than the estimate for what we had originally asked for, and I suspect what we want could be done for less than $300,000, if we're willing to do some/most of the finishing ourselves. But we aren't great handymen. (I suspect what we need could be done for less than $200,000, but Cassandane would hate it and I wouldn't really be happy with it myself.) A lot of aesthetics might be sacrificed to get the bottom line down, and we're currently planning to retire in this house, so we're OK with that.

massive precut stone

Not sure what you mean. The pyramids seem nice.

Oh, no - Sinead O'Connor.

Oh, no - Sinead O'Connor.

I'm really sad to see that news.

I'm about 90% certain Mitch McConnell had a ministroke in the middle of a press conference today.

It could have been the aliens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_precut_stone

I was expecting a link to that Stone Age dildo being passed around on x earlier today.

Maybe that's just my feed.

88 that really sucks

"I'm about 90% certain Mitch McConnell had a ministroke in the middle of a press conference today."

No facial asymmetry, no arm weakness, and he's able to walk (slowly) immediately afterwards. He's retained grip strength in both his hands, you can see him hold on to the railing thing and to the lectern. A few minutes later he was walking and talking normally. I'm not a neurologist but that doesn't look like a stroke, it looks like some kind of seizure. (And if it was a stroke, if they even thought it might be a a stroke, wouldn't his staff have put him in hospital?)

The chatbot daemon crashed, but the McConnellbot's OS and the control systems app for the robotics did keep going, as evidenced by the fact they were able to lead it away to log in and restart the inference service. You'd think they've have put in a cellular modem for out-of-band management so as to cover this sort of thing.

Oh, no - Sinead O'Connor.

Chilling to look at the obituaries and see the flak she got for being prematurely anti-child-abuse. Death threats, violent threats in public from people like Joe Pesci and Frank Sinatra.

And so it went on for another full generation of kids - they helped it go on when they could have helped stop it.

(I didn't really register the story when it happened back in the early 90s. I'd heard of her, and I think I was vaguely aware she'd torn up the pope's picture on TV, but I didn't know why.)

92: Don't know much about it--I've seen the British building shown in the article--but I have to say that I'm underwhelmed by the energy efficiency claims from uninsulated thermal mass. As somebody who lives in a house with 9" solid masonry exterior and no insulation whatsoever, I can say the thermal lag is great during temperate weather, but it only takes 2-3 days of persistent heat/cold for the walls to become massive sources of discomfort.

Possibly a very suitable product for the right climate, but certainly not for humid, temperate ones that get real winters.

98: She was a premature anti-pedophile.

If Pittsburgh got a real winter again, I'd be a bit relieved.

99: Thanks.
Humid a concern because condensation?
Could one insulate the stone and use it actively as a sink for heat pumps?
Seismic resistance?
Do you buy the carbon saving versus concrete argument?

If you want a heat pump, couldn't you just use the ground?

Some buildings are further from the ground than others.

I guess. I would like a stone house, for aesthetic reasons. But not stone clad. Too fake.

Cob-clad stone?

Possibly a very suitable product for the right climate, but certainly not for humid, temperate ones that get real winters.

The article makes it look like it's London, Marseille, the Middle East... so all of those would work I suppose?

As is well-established, architects (present company excluded) give zero shits about suitability for a climate, so the existence of the buildings doesn't tell us much.

Steel can warp in hot conditions, while concrete becomes difficult to work with and sets much more quickly -- leaving it more prone to cracking and affecting its strength and durability. There is also the risk concrete will spoil before it can be poured.

That's why you have to sniff in the cement mixer. You can't just go by the expiration date.

I just ran into this French architect who developed a whole method for building really fast (and up to 70m high!) out of pre-cut stone and was bowled over by his perfectly post-war French life, including being busted for funding de Gaulle's political party with fraudulent receipts from his development company and escaping from prison hospital with the help of an Algerian resistance network despite being a Gaullist, as well as writing a novel in jail, starting an art book publishing house, and being mysteriously pardoned and decorated by Francois Mitterrand:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernand_Pouillon

As is well-established, architects (present company excluded) give zero shits about suitability for a climate,

You're telling me. I live in a town where some lunatic decided that the right design for low-rise flats, here, in one of the wettest bits of Knifecrime Island, includes a flat roof. Naturally it leaks like a son of a bitch.

Yeah, peaked roofs are great.

111: Thanks for sharing! Fascinating individual. One small correction -- he was pardoned by Pompidou.

The guy who designed the Pompidou Center?

111: thx! he certainly cut the swathe through 20c fr & algerie. faint scent of the scene in the english know wool, a super entertaining novella for a lazy afternoon read - highly recommend. a couple of months later i'll randomly think if it while biking across town, cooking dinner or dealing with work admin & reliably brings a smile.

102: In order

No, bc humid places don't cool off (much) at night, so the masonry gets to 80º during a heat wave and just sits there
I think, once you're insulating the stone, you're losing a big part of the appeal (as a system, not aesthetically). Related or not, back in the '70s there was a passive solar concept called a Trombe wall that placed a large thermal mass (originally concrete or stone, later water tanks or barrels) behind south-facing glass, so that the wall would temper the space temperature while the heated air between the glass and wall would passively circulate through vents to directly heat the space. Ultimately an eco-dead end.
I'm fascinated by the claim that they have seismic resistance, and it's plausible (after all, lots of seismically active regions have old masonry buildings in them), but I happen to practice in a seismic dead zone, so I really don't know much about it
100% believe it's much less carbon intensive upfront. The non-US world uses staggering amounts of concrete in construction, and it's really the worst aspect of the industry. People attack it from 2 sides: low-carbon concrete and low-concrete design, and both have advanced, but I don't know how far/how fast they'll get in terms of need. My philosophy has always been that using however much concrete you have to is tolerable as long as it's part of a building that's energy efficient and will last a very long time. If we had the industry to support it, all I'd spec would be gravel-supported walls and slabs with mass timber construction, using straw insulation panels. But there would be literally no way to get that built here except on a high-cost, experimental basis. Just zero support, even though it's standard in Germany and has been done in a few North American places.

How do you support a wall with gravel?

118: Didn't the Romans do that for you?

The Romans didn't get this far west.

Wait. Like gravel for a foundation or footer? That I get. Though I like having a basement.

121: Correct. I don't know if there's a viable design for basements without concrete--I don't recall seeing one. But there are systems that use very little concrete. Superior Walls, for instance, are prefab concrete panels that are only 3-4" thick and sit on gravel footers. Although I think they require basement slab floors to work. But it's faster/less material than other traditional options. I don't know which uses less concrete/sq ft, Superior or insulated concrete forms, but the former is winning in the (local) marketplace.

I bought a wool felt hat (with retractable ear flaps) for winter. I wanted to look like a Canadian, but I think I look Lubavitchy instead. I should get a green one instead of black.

I wanted to look like a Canadian

Then my research suggests you should call it a toboggan, bobble hat, or sherpa.

I bought it used from REI, so I feel virtuous, but I didn't get a choice in color.

I should get a green one instead of black.

Green or red buffalo plaid, right?

It's a fedora, not the plaid thing. I want to look like a Canadian, not a Canadian with a personality disorder.

A fedora with ear flaps? This sounds dorky.

Right. Very much so. But not dorky in a "I'm hunting wabbits" way.

But the ear flaps fold inside the hat, so hidden when not used.

Oh, felt wool, not knit.

Re: another kind of flap on a fedora.

I should just get a fur felt hat.

Be sure to get one with a feather.

You mean my macaroni?

Keep it up.

Thanks JRoth! Would you still spec massive timber once the wildfires get to your craton?

So weirdly, professionally, "what ought I, a socially conscious college student whose formative years were about Harry Potter, do about JKR?" Is a question I get with some regularity, and my usual answer is that the best thing to do is to talk about it. This is with people who are older, though, and for whom e.g. going g to see the latest Harry Potter movie was a feature of friendship, childhood, etc. The Calabat is ten and has read Harry Potter and it's just not as much of a thing among his friends. They've read it, and some of them like it a lot, but they're not as crazy about it.

Ace's case is different but I think it likely won't be a big deal as it would have been 20 years ago.

When my son was like five, the Harry Potter nerds playing quiddich were very nice to him. But I was leery of having him talk to adults who played a game while holding a stick in their crotch.

137 seems about right. If you want to cancel literature on the basis of the authors' broader opinions you can say goodbye to pretty much any fiction written before about 1990. Do JKR's unpleasant views actually impinge on her world building and story telling? Not as far as I can see? Certainly not as much as Aristophanes' or Shakespeare's, and their stuff is routinely given to YAs in the name of education. My quibble with Harry Potter is that JKR is a terrible writer, but it never occurred to me that she had any views on gender identity until she made them public.

JKR is an interesting case because so many fans took her as being socially progressive, and a lot of them cared about her in addition to merely loving the books. And of course many fans are trans/enby/etc or friends with people who are. So for Gen Z it was a pressing question-- can one in good conscience see the newest Fantastic Beasts film? How ought one to react?

On houses: I would distinguish between things like painting and decor which either don't remain or are easily undone, and permanent things that are going to be sticking points with future buyers (e.g., needing the master bedroom wall to be glass so to be able to watch one's wife shower -- shiv used to work construction) that are also hard to fix. There's also things that are just hard to guess. We just xeriscaped our front yard and it is already fabulous even without plants. But will future buyers worry about it? Hard to say.

But also: down with greige. We had the hardwood floors refinished and the dude visibly sagged with relief when I said I wanted to keep the natural color.

The first Fantastic Beasts isn't bad, but the second one is really incoherent in terms of plot. But I did experience a brief urge to dress like early middle-aged Dumbledore.

I don't think there is a single person even lurking here on unfogged who is remotely censorious about books, so we're all addressing a straw man. Meanwhile, and maybe more germane to the other thread, I can't stop cackling about Arthur the aardvark damaging souls.

Someone should ban Caillou. That was just unwatchable.

I don't think there is a single person even lurking here on unfogged who is remotely censorious about books sounds like something I ought to agree with, but then I imagined what I would say if my kid wanted to read Battlefield Earth.

It wasn't nearly as bad as the movie was supposed to have been. I read it because I read most of the science fiction in my town's library and it was there. Maybe they considered him a "local author".

Not that it was a good book.

Just that I managed to read it, but not notice anything Scientologist about it. I didn't connect the two until years later.

But also: down with greige. We had the hardwood floors refinished and the dude visibly sagged with relief when I said I wanted to keep the natural color.

See also

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/04/18/metro/interior-designer-world-has-turned-gray-what-finally-killed-color/

This made me smile, because my MIL adores grey - even her Christmas tree was decorated silvery//gray. I actually made a comment once about how you could tell that someone was trying to flip a house when everything was grey (you usually see it was sold a year or two before) and she snapped " you can't tell that; that's just the style that a lot of people like."

". If you want to cancel literature on the basis of the authors' broader opinions you can say goodbye to pretty much any fiction written before about 1990."

And quite a few since. In SF alone, Cixin Liu is a vocal supporter of genocide and Nnedi Okorafor hounded a trans woman author to the point of suicide by loudly refusing to accept that she was a woman (based on Okofafor's interpretation of a single story that she had not in fact read). I'm sure they'll get cancelled any moment now.

Nnedi Okorafor hounded a trans woman author to the point of suicide by loudly refusing to accept that she was a woman (based on Okofafor's interpretation of a single story that she had not in fact read).

When was this? I'm not finding that story.

Isabel Fall. It wasn't one person's deliberate campaign, it was a big scrum of people assuming without reading it was a right-wing meme amplified as short story, rather than as jumping-off point.

Yeah, that took a lot of googling to get anywhere near what he was referring to. (None of the big articles or the Wikipedia article about that story mentions Okorafor!)

152 was my experience as well.

I could be wrong, but my guess is that Ajay is confusing N.K Jemisin with Nnedi Okarafor.

154: I think I said that backwards.

Today I learned that my brain is incapable of distinguishing between authors whose names start with N.

Ah, good, 154 is surely what's going on. I was very confident that there should be some record of the controversy at least on the wikipedia talk page, if not the wikipedia page itself, and indeed there's lots of arguments in Jemisin's talk page about this.

No one read any books by Ajay!

there is a particularly hideous variety of vinyl fake wood flooring in a remorseless gray that is often installed in sf rentals & invariably described in listings as "luxury vinyl flooring". if the place is for sale, it's a sure tip off of a prior rental status. just horrendous.

Re: greys and neutrals, my MIL has a home basically devoid of color; rooms are either pale beige or pale grey. I took her to an IKEA (she had never been) to shop for some colored accessories for her aggressively neutral home. She keyed in on a patterned grey throw pillow, saying it was just what she was looking for. Confused, I said something like, "Oh, I thought you were looking for some 'pops of color.'" She looked crestfallen and placed the pillow back on the shelf. She left empty-handed. Oops.

Grey is a color.

160 Only in the UK and other Commonwealth countries.

7 to 158.

And about half the time wherever I'm writing it.

158: it's a common flipper flooring, here, too.

158: I actually chose to install some of that stuff (not fake wood) in my basement office, i.e. over mastic-coated concrete, when we took out the asbestos-filled flooring of yesteryear. "Luxury vinyl" is a term that (note: link best with adblocker) seems to have some specifications attached around thickness, but it conveniently doubles as marketing hype. I'm happy with mine, which is a random shade of brown meant to look like a Richard Serra sculpture surface or something -- I just wanted something functional, waterproof, not fake wood, not full of asbestos, and vaguely soothing to look at. I think the boring palette is driven by people's digital sensory overload plus literally borrowing from Apple aesthetics.

Our house, and the duplex we rented before this, were both semi-derelict rentals that hadn't been redecorated in decades, and I really cannot overstate how much uglier cheap interior decoration used to be.

151: I wonder how major social media overhauls are affecting stuff like this -- you've always been able to start major wars in tiny forums, but I don't know how much contentious communities have been coalescing around particular new Twitter alternatives (and Twitter was the Tumblr alternative, right?).

We are having built, at this moment, a stand-alone 6x8 foot "zoom room" designed in the manner of a tiny house. Purple clapboard walls, pine shiplap interior, vaulted ceiling, grey luxury vinyl flooring, butcher block desk, and a five-window panoramic lake view.

It will be my wife's summer office.

148: my grandfather (not the commie sailor, the conservative master builder) used to say all the time that "whatever they say, what they want is....Magnolia"

Alex is Paul Thomas Anderson's grandson!

I don't know how much contentious communities have been coalescing around particular new Twitter alternatives (and Twitter was the Tumblr alternative, right?).

Some of the right-wing social media sites (Trump's thing, I think also Gab, maybe others) are running on customized versions of open-source twitter alternative software (mainly mastodon). But they've been cut off (blocked, essentially) from what you could call the mainstream "mastodon" world. Unless you're joining another right-wing community yourself, most of the sites that run mastodon software that you'd be likely to join will have already blocked all the accounts on the big right-wing and Nazi sites.

That said, there's still harassment on mastodon. But it seems harder to see unless you or someone you know is the target. [further comments on federation/decentralization omitted]

Like three guys at the bar drank all the cold Bud heavy. I guess it's not commonly ordered here.

If Bluesky is believable, Paul Reubens has died.

NMM with Pee-wee Herman.

WHAT!! I actually follow him on IG, where he posted lots of great stuff, so I feel weirdly connected to him. Dang.

173: According to the NY Post, there's a statement on his official IG account. Fricking non-chronological...

Looks like cancer. Dang.

Dammit

165: I think it can be great -- we may put it in our basement when we redo the floors -- but one ought not to stain 60-year-old oak flooring to look like LVT, which is what our flooring guy was worried about.

Would you still spec massive timber once the wildfires get to your craton?

Mass timber is considerably less fire-prone than standard US construction. And building with fireproof concrete construction makes those wildfires only more likely, so...

Echo 178. It's not wood in the sense of planks cut from trees, it's cross-laminated timber which fire has a much harder time with. Put a flamethrower to it, and the building will stay up for over an hour.

Also "mass" is not short for "massive".

My flamethrower doesn't even have enough fuel for five minutes.

To be clear, I'm not complaining that I have a bad flamethrower. Just pointing out that it is a very fuel intensive process and anything you can carry yourself is going to have a pretty short use period.

165, 177: agree with cala, it's the gray (grey? who knows) faux wood that is outrageously hideous to me. in other colors & in the right place would be fine or even maybe great.

in other space news, after months & months of ridiculous delay & fuss we have received, installed & populated the wall mounted modular book & drawer & cabinet system in our dining room & it is so wonderful to have a good chunk* of our books in our living space again!

* poetry, non-genre fiction (definition fuzzy & loose**), art/design, fr & uk history.

** straight up mysteries, adventure stories & the like go in the guest room along with travel & other books most likely to appeal to a guest looking for light reading late at night or during a lazy lie in.

||
I endorse this re Bloodlands.
|>

I've not read Bloodlands, but Evans closes with "we know about the events Snyder describes already, despite his repeated assertions that we don't." It seems to me that Snyder reached a much larger audience that did not, in fact, know about the events that Snyder described, or only knew about them in the vaguest possible way.

Evans is using a specialist "we" while Snyder is addressing a far broader public, and in that sense they're just talking past each other.

I've read about half of it a year ago until I got too busy. I've been meaning to finish it, it's very good.

184 is fair. But I didn't come here to be fair.

Are you coming in here to be fair
Bloodlands book, T. Snyder, Unfogged
Don't read the books just share all your thoughts
Tell us why analogies are banned

Evans is using a specialist "we" while Snyder is addressing a far broader public, and in that sense they're just talking past each other.

Evans has written for a broad public as well. My skim of that (mostly if the letters) is there's a generational divide there plus a difference in perspective between being focused on German history or East European history.

I haven't read Snyder so I don't know what he claims to do in terms of being groundbreaking. My guess is he overstates the claim, as many do.

183 is an odd review in many ways (and also 13 years old).
It makes some really striking assertions: "Anne Appelbaum records that a total of 2,750,000 people died in the camps and exile settlements under Stalin, again most likely an underestimate. The vast majority of these, as of the more than 28 million Soviet citizens subjected to forced labour in Stalin's time, were Russians."

Really? The vast majority of those who were sent to the camps, and who died there, were Russians? I find that unlikely, because only just over half the pre-Terror population of the USSR were Russians. For Evans to be right, the USSR would have had to disproportionately pick on Russians rather than minorities. And that doesn't sound likely. Even very pro-Russian sources give a peak of 60% or so for the Russian share of the Gulag's population, in the late 30s - hardly a vast majority.

Reading the letters, and Evans' response, is painful - he completely misses the points that some of his critics are making, preferring instead to invent different points for them to have made, and then point out why they're wrong.

And his "it's not the same, lots of non-Ukrainians were starved too" argument comes a good 30 years after Robert Conquest raised it, discussed it and dismissed it in "The Harvest of Sorrow".

This, meanwhile, is insane: "The starvation policy of the early 1930s was directed not specifically against Ukrainians but against kulaks, allegedly well-off peasants, who included many inhabitants of Soviet Russia."

I have no idea how you square this with the contemporary reports of food stores being seized en masse and hauled to Russia or the cities, or even with common sense. How the fuck do you implement a policy of starving only the slightly richer people in a village, and not the slightly poorer ones? This leaves a very nasty taste in the mouth.