A William Morris Pilgrimage

...ievalism, attempts at wall murals as well as Morris’ greatest gift–pattern making. Webb had much to learn. The roofs are at a bad angle for the rainy climate of England and, as a result, there’s been a lot of leaks over the years. That said, the house is a masterpiece. You also can’t get more cottagecore than this. Just outside the Red House is a landscape Morris would, no doubt, be disappointed with. A few blocks down this prosaic road is the Can...

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I Spent 11 Months Building an Uncomfortable Couch

...houses, somehow just need to get built. Such was the case when he proposed making two reproductions of the obscure Gustav Stickley Divan #165, one for his house and one for ours. The couch dates from the summer of 1900, when Stickley employed, at great expense, the architect Henry W. Wilkerson to design a line he called “The New Furniture.” Wilkerson is probably best known as the architect of one of New York City’s few Arts and Crafts style apartm...

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Reject Modernity Embrace Post-Capitalism

...a YouTuber who goes by the name Skeleton88 whose hobby seems to consist of making high res videos with a GoPro mounted on top of a car while driving around Las Vegas and other western U.S. cities. His videos, as bleak as anything in the horror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft or Thomas Ligotti, have no narration or music. I don’t know Skeleton88’s motivations. Sometimes I think these sorts of videos are about blaming homeless people and sex workers for...

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Is it Cake?

...In the penultimate show, you’ll find out that the final bake-off involves making a cake that is a simulation of cake, which leads the contestants in the show to question if everything is, in fact, made of cake, that we’re living in a vast cake simulation. In the the last episode the losing contestants, angry at missing out on the $10,000 prize and driven mad with their epistemological cake crisis, set out to slice the meta-obnoxious host in half...

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