Tag: personality

Categories
House

Article pairing: houses as homes, not investments

Liberating Our Homes From the Real Estate–Industrial Complex: Having a personal aesthetic at home has become financially detrimental. By Kate Wagner

The home is no longer seen as a space of personal expression or comfort, or as the backdrop of everyday life, but primarily as an investment and as an asset—meaning that enforcing one’s aesthetics is a financially detrimental decision.

(When neutral / greige is what sells.)

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What makes a home feel good? By Ingrid Fetell Lee

If you see yourself in your space, it reinforces your identity, your sense of self. It helps you go out into the world feeling grounded and confident. When you don’t see yourself reflected in your space, a disconnect can happen — you feel like you’re living in someone else’s house.

Categories
Culture Technology The Internet

Personality shaped by the algorithm

Emphasis mine.

The blandness of TikTok’s biggest stars by Rebecca Jennings (Vox)

[P]op culture is being increasingly determined by algorithms… [W]hat we’re seeing is the lowest common denominator of what human beings want to look at, appealing to our most base impulses and exploiting existing biases toward thinness, whiteness, and wealth.

TikTok fame celebrates a different kind of mediocrity, though, the kind where “relatability” means adhering to the internet’s fluctuating beauty standards and approachable upper-middle-classness and never saying anything that might indicate a personality.

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What Works by Tara McMullin

Creators are basing their livelihoods on the performance of an identity through the expression of their knowledge, experiences, or talents.

As our actions are influenced by what Richard Seymour dubs the twittering machine, our identities are revealed to us by the algorithm. Not only does the machine tell us who we are and who we will become, it turns around and sells us the symbols of the identity. My identity is commodified in an instant. Who I Am and What I Do On the Internet can feel like an act of self-expression, but they are more likely artifacts of conformity.

Categories
Art and Design House Technology

Neutralizing reality to sell

Liked this house may or may not be real (Tumblr)

In my travels as McMansion Hell, I’ve increasingly been confronted with houses full of furniture that isn’t real. This is known as virtual staging and it is to house staging as ChatGPT is to press release writing or DALL-E is to illustration.

The better this rendering technology gets, the more it will rely on these totally neutral spaces because everything matches and nothing is difficult. You are picking from a catalog of greige furniture to decorate greige rooms.

This is where things are heading: artifice on top of artifice on top of artifice. It’s cheap, it’s easy. But something about it feels like a violation.

If neutrality makes a house sell, then personality – at all – can only be seen as a detriment.

So who’s doing this? The answer is real estate itself aided by their allies in mass media who in turn are aided by the home renovation industry. In other words, it’s the people who sell home as a commodity. That desire to sell has for some time overpowered all other elements that make up a home or an apartment’s interiority to the point where we’ve ended up in a colorless slurry of real and unreal.

Emphasis mine.

Categories
Society

Fabulous Villainesses We Want to Be Like

Liked In Defense of Villainesses by Sarah GaileySarah Gailey (tor.com)

She’s fabulous.
Her hair is done. Her makeup is flawless; her coat, luxurious. She’s single. She’s thin or she’s fat or she’s muscular or she’s old or she’s young but she’s never ever cute or soft or scared of you.
She’s hungry. She wants money, and she wants more luxurious coats, …

We look at thin-wristed shy-smiling nice-haired female protagonists and we see what’s expected of us: wait. Be patient. Be nice. Be happy with your lot, enjoy what you’re given, and don’t look for more. Make wishes, not plans. Have animal friends, never henchmen. No one should work for you, but everyone must love you. Look soft and small and breakable, and cry with your head flung into your arms so no one has to see your puffy eyes. Be afraid that no one will ever rescue you. Be afraid that you’ll have to live your whole life without adventure ever finding you.

We’re sold on the female protagonists, and I do mean sold. We admire their spunk and their tenacity, because it’s accessible—it’s rebellion in the form of wanting. It’s gazing at the stars at night after spending all day scrubbing the floors, and believing that wishing will be enough.

Categories
Entrepreneurship

Telling your story as an entrepreneur

Bookmarked Get More Attention For Your Creations By Telling Your Three Stories – For The Interested by Josh Spector (For The Interested)

The secret to successful promotion is to tell your story. Stories are powerful. Their unique combination of information and emotional hooks are the reason they’ve been around for thousands of years and are constantly passed on from generation to generation.

  • Tell The Story Of Where You’ve Been
  • Tell The Story Of Where You’re At
  • Tell The Story Of Where You’re Going