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Why are the rooms so tiny in this mansion? Everything just seems so cramped, even the kitchen. If i'd buy a big house i'd want big rooms and big open areas. Not a row of cupboards to sleep in. Also, how the hell do you buy a mansion where the AC only works in one loving room?
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Jul 9, 2020 08:22
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That's called an incentive.
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Jul 9, 2020 09:11
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Why the gently caress is Kotaku so concerned about interior decor
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Jul 9, 2020 10:10
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Darth Walrus posted:https://twitter.com/benpershing/status/1280918225782538241?s=21 [screaming internally]
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Jul 9, 2020 13:33
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Why the gently caress is Kotaku so concerned about interior decor it's funny to see a bunch of young men with video game money playing house
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Jul 9, 2020 14:02
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John Lee posted:Which is so blatantly elitist I'm surprised it's not getting more pushback. "Only us right-thinkers, unlike the majority of people, know what looks good." Well, if the majority of people can't decorate, then this ain't exactly fuckin' news, is it? People are just flaunting their cultural capital OP
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Jul 9, 2020 14:04
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Shai-Hulud posted:Why are the rooms so tiny in this mansion? Everything just seems so cramped, even the kitchen. If i'd buy a big house i'd want big rooms and big open areas. Not a row of cupboards to sleep in. That's the American McMansion! Looks huge and expensive from the outside and brags about how many rooms it has, but all the rooms are cramped and shoved into odd spaces.
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Jul 9, 2020 14:17
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i appreciate that half of the front facade is garages and the other half is this massive foam portico meant to evoke an off-strip casino or something
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Jul 9, 2020 14:26
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Decorating a house properly takes a lot of thought and time, or just hiring someone do do that for you like they should have done. It's perfectly fine to do that and is even expected if you want the house to look the best it can be.
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Jul 9, 2020 16:14
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John Lee posted:Yeah, you're right. Can you even imagine caring enough about somebody else's loving home decoration style that you feel the need to drag on them in a published article? The video almost made me feel sorry for the guys, trying to sell having a modicum of living space and access to candy as living the dream. And I guess the whole streamer thing in general disgusts me on some level, like most things that mostly consist of artificial hype and marketing for its own sake. Life in tune with the algorithm seems dehumanizing.
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Jul 9, 2020 16:21
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It's a weird article about a weird situation. Any other context it would scream "new moneyed trash people!" but it almost reads on the side of incredulity that the scam housing market sold these guys a house furnished with a snack bar, wine rack, and a piano (played by Sinatra no less lol) as a grand most excellent mansion.
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Jul 9, 2020 16:43
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If they did another Cribz, but this time with Twitch/YT/video game celebrities, I might actually watch it to see what they thought was a good idea to have in their houses
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Jul 9, 2020 17:04
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zedprime posted:It's a weird article about a weird situation. Any other context it would scream "new moneyed trash people!" but it almost reads on the side of incredulity that the scam housing market sold these guys a house furnished with a snack bar, wine rack, and a piano (played by Sinatra no less lol) as a grand most excellent mansion. big rich people custom houses stuffed with symbolic displays of wealth are like a whole other world. the thing is that when it comes to expensive houses like this, you either get something that's designed and architected well like a finely tailored suit, or it's stuffed full of flashy but tacky design trends that age poorly. anyone with the cash to throw around to purchase a house in this market could just as easily build or remodel their own custom dream palace rather than inhabit someone else's custom dream palace circa the hottest new trends of 2010. so there's lots of these dumb dream palaces sitting around on the market growing moldy they bought this dream palace as-is, because it is just a platform to broadcast wealth, success, accomplishment, etc. fine. but then they had no need to change any of the silly decor (the white baby grand piano in its piano nook was never touched by sinatra, i guarantee it) because this is not supposed to be a house for living in or hosting guests or raising a family, it's just a backdrop for youtubing and instagraming. the funny part is the discrepancy between the image the house portrays and the image their personal spaces portray. the house is this giant statement of tastelessness which only broadcasts the wealth of the inhabitants as loudly as possible, using symbolic displays of wealth which are not just tacky but dated. their bedrooms, where they are certain to spend nearly all of their time, are cozier but decorated in a different awful way, more honest to the taste of young men who are professional video game streamers. it looks like some mix of aspirational cyberpunk with the neon annoyance of a 1950's diner. so it's like, two different layers of superficial displays of wealth. and this underlines the tension between "giant room full of bad design trends that is uncomfortable" and "my tiny gamer cave where i spend all my time basking in LED light" the wine wall is a good example. wine is classy, rich people like wine and have wine collections, so if i'm showing off how rich i am then i need a bunch of wine. i have a problem, though - wine properly stored in a cellar is hard to see and it's not immediately impressive. what if i take all the wine and hang it in front of my window? sure it will go sour and i can't actually drink any of it without ruining the effect, but still - classy wine collection! thus, the previous tenant of this home put up a symbolic collection of wine just to display wealth in an impractical way. now, what if we take this a step further, and we never even pretend that we are going to drink the wine - i mean, i have a personal overclocked cooler of soda pop in my bedroom, so...
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Jul 9, 2020 17:09
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I couldn't get past the abrasiveness of "look at our wealth" and "buy this stuff please!". I do feel bad for them. I'm sure they pooled all their money for the downpayment (I don't know how much streamers earn but I wouldn't think they each have millions in the bank to buy it outright) and when they start having falling outs it's all gonna be awful. Living with your friends is cool until your friendships are tied financially in a huge way.
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Jul 9, 2020 17:51
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the article says these guys formed a corporation to purchase the house. everything they're doing is part of a business, it's just portrayed as a bunch of cool gamer friends living in a party mansion. it's calculated
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Jul 9, 2020 18:45
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Shai-Hulud posted:Why are the rooms so tiny in this mansion? Everything just seems so cramped, even the kitchen. If i'd buy a big house i'd want big rooms and big open areas. Not a row of cupboards to sleep in. McMansions are literally the most shittily built dwellings in America, OP. There are more competently built sheet metal shacks in the most destitute corner of Mississippi.
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Jul 9, 2020 18:58
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Jul 10, 2020 02:13
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luxury handset posted:the article says these guys formed a corporation to purchase the house. everything they're doing is part of a business, it's just portrayed as a bunch of cool gamer friends living in a party mansion. it's calculated I wanna say they calculated wrong, but who the gently caress knows anymore. Trump is president, big time streamers make lots of money, etc. Also can someone explain McMansion beyond big expensive lovely house. Really get into the housing bubble and various grift involved with it. My theory is that America is a decaying nation, and the McMansions are just a symptom.
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Jul 10, 2020 02:48
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doverhog posted:
Nah, they're just a modern version of something that's been happening for centuries. The West Coast is booming (and other cities in the US, and suburbs being White Flighted to) so there's a crushing demand for housing, and a lot of wealth, back in the day this would've meant shanty towns and mansions for the wealthy andwhatnot, but we have codes and poo poo now, so instead it's tract homes and mcmansions, they are built to standard floor plans, out of the cheapest materials permissible, and codes are flaunted or skirted wherever possible. The luxury features of yesteryear are replicated through structural foam, because marble and hand carved hardwoods are ruinously expensive. Most of these developments have arrangements where 1 or 2 out of 100 homes are inspected, so code violations and poo poo abound, but it takes a few years to realize your outlets are melting, and the tar paper on your roof is run under the flashing, and by the time you do, the development LLC has dissolved, and there's no one left to sue. What makes these homes so attractive, is they're pre-built, all you have to do is plonk down a downpayment and take out a 30 year loan, and voila, brand spankin' new house. The irony is, for 20-30% more you can contract a reputable design-build firm, and have them build you an entirely custom, beautiful house that is inspected for quality building at each step. My buddy down in CA works for a firm that does this, they specialize in sustainably sourced building materials, and eco friendly construction (solar, great insulation values etc) but it's way harder to get this done, since you have to organize a temporary place to live, construction loans etc. It's by no means a new thing though, I've worked on houses built in Seattle from the Boeing Boom of the 50's all the way to the early 2000's that were just built like poo poo, usually we were remodeling them to a higher standard. I've seen a few on the East Coast that were falling down when they were built in the 1800s, and have been scabbed onto for over a century to keep them standing, barely, the Mcmansions of that era. My own, current house was built as a temporary logging shelter in 1911, and whooo boy it's been an adventure. E: this is meant specifically to place McMansions in a historical context, not to refute that America is a dying nation, btw.
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Jul 10, 2020 04:02
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after reading the headline I imagined a dark room in the middle of a factory. the factory is somewhere in a jungle. a chute drops coconuts into the room a throng of monkeys dives onto the fresh coconuts they crack them open, feasting on the fatty white coconut meat it is a wild frenzy. shards of coconut shell and splatters of coconut water smack the concrete walls and litter the floors outside the walls of this room, human workers try to ignore the muffled howls and shrieks eventually, when the monkeys are sated and resting, a man with a push broom shoves all the coconut debris into a floor grate all the effluvium of this primate/coconut war are funneled into a big machine beneath the Monkey Room and on the other side, conveyor belts spit out cans and jars of coconut oil. coconut milk. coconut water. bags of shredded coconut That is not what the news article is about. But now, I want to believe. That somewhere out there, in the dark corner of a jungle, there is a dark and damp factory. And in a dark corner of that factory, there is a monkey room.
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Jul 10, 2020 06:27
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What a delightful animal abuse fantasy.
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Jul 10, 2020 07:50
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Elviscat posted:Nah, they're just a modern version of something that's been happening for centuries. Also thank you for this post, very informative.
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Jul 10, 2020 09:10
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Elviscat posted:The irony is, for 20-30% more you can contract a reputable design-build firm, and have them build you an entirely custom, beautiful house that is inspected for quality building at each step. My buddy down in CA works for a firm that does this, they specialize in sustainably sourced building materials, and eco friendly construction (solar, great insulation values etc) but it's way harder to get this done, since you have to organize a temporary place to live, construction loans etc.
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Jul 10, 2020 11:52
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doverhog posted:I wanna say they calculated wrong, but who the gently caress knows anymore. Trump is president, big time streamers make lots of money, etc. kate wagner has a good breakdown on the aesthetics of mcmansions and how to identify just bad, lazy architecture https://mcmansionhell.com/101 regarding why houses like this exist, i don't want to fill up this thread with words but i'll +1 elviscat on the whys of cheap tract housing. to put that into historical context, basically the dependence on automobiles as a major method of transportation has made a lot of cheap land accessible historically through the 20th century. in very populated places with difficult geography or high population we have mostly exhausted the supply of cheap land for suburbs. but even if you live in a place where land is scarce or land is plentiful, there is still incentive to build a lot of cheaply made housing. over the last five decades houses have tended to get bigger and more ostentatious as an empty signifier of wealth and this is generally what creates mcmansions - people wanting maximum house volume for maximum flash, and gluing on all kinds of things that seem to indicate "my house is expensive!", basically the house equivalent of wearing three or four watches on your wrist this isn't a symptom of america's decay, it's just more people being able to afford giant dumb houses as the use of cheaper materials and a supply of cheap land you have to drive an hour to get to continue to make houses cheap. american wealth generation was largely fueled on overconsumption of land by unsustainable use of automobiles, and it can't really be decay in the same sense that cancer is a form of growth
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Jul 10, 2020 12:43
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John Lee posted:Yeah, you're right. Can you even imagine caring enough about somebody else's loving home decoration style that you feel the need to drag on them in a published article? Especially poo poo like this: Yeah honestly this is what I got out of it. Although I don't think the motivation was really elitism, it was just a salty Kotaku writer who's jealous their writing isn't paying them enough for a lovely McMansion or whatever filled with the most tasteless and tacky poo poo. Maybe there's a bit of the former too, I guess.
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Jul 10, 2020 13:15
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it's fun to make fun of people who do something embarassing, even if the embarassing thing is not obviously embarassing to everyone regardless, when it comes to a video of young men showing off all of their very expensive things, the people criticizing that video are not the elitists in this situation
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Jul 10, 2020 13:29
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I'll be honest: if I won the Eurojackpot I'd be very, very tempted to build the tackiest looking "mansion" and decorating it with items in increasingly lovely taste. Something about having more money than you'll ever need makes the leap of logic to "buy ugly trash" far more acceptable to me. Like, I'd never spend money on gamer RGB cases or whatever the gently caress if I actually don't have so much it literally doesn't matter.
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Jul 10, 2020 13:45
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If it stopped at making fun like "this is what passes for luxury these days hehe" it'd be a better article but to be fair he absolutely veers into signalling that this is extra hilarious and bad because he could do better. "Of course, the whole mirage works a bit better when the lives of the rich and famous you’re subscribing to don’t look like they were rented from a Target catalog." -Extremely not an elitist grinding an axe that rich people aren't doing it right
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Jul 10, 2020 13:52
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luxury handset posted:it's fun to make fun of people who do something embarassing, even if the embarassing thing is not obviously embarassing to everyone It's 100% showing off that you're a member of the cultural bourgeoisie with the right tastes, values and preferences. Like middle-class people making fun of rappers' golden chains. But also who cares, they don't know about our posts, and even if they did they wouldn't care in their expensive mansions, they can let us have this
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Jul 10, 2020 13:58
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Phlegmish posted:It's 100% showing off that you're a member of the cultural bourgeoisie with the right tastes, values and preferences. making fun of young people with too much money: guillotine!
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Jul 10, 2020 14:07
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Phlegmish posted:But also who cares, they don't know about our posts, Sorry, wait. What do you mean? They can't see what we write? Who have I been posting for all these years? Just... other goons?! Oh god, I think I'm going to be sick.
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Jul 10, 2020 14:08
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luxury handset posted:making fun of young people with too much money: guillotine! No, it's a form of classism that is mostly ignored by the people who constantly talk about guillotines, partly because they don't recognize it and partly because they're (we're) nearly all 'guilty' of it. It's OK, I do it all the time as well. A lot of the behavior and aesthetics that is codified by society as being 'low-class' or 'tacky' really is undesirable. poo poo on the garbage mansion all you like. It's just good to take a critical look at the way we view social reality. And with that, I'll stop rehashing Bourdieu.
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Jul 10, 2020 14:17
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The division between old and new money has always been there. That said I would never buy a mansion of any kind if I won the "jackpot". It would be a network of luxurious apartments with almost no furniture or signs of life, in the centers of cities like London, NY, Prague, etc.
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Jul 10, 2020 14:31
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Elviscat posted:Nah, they're just a modern version of something that's been happening for centuries. Someone on these forums somewhere said they used to work in some housing construction for one of these massive housing companies and since insulation was required and inspected it worked like this: - Build house - Put in installation - Call inspector, have him sign off - Wait until inspector leaves - Yank out insulation and take it over to the next house in order to improve profit margins
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Jul 10, 2020 14:40
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doverhog posted:The division between old and new money has always been there. The big problem with winning the lottery, especially since people that buy lottery tickets are disproportionately from lower socio-economic backgrounds, is psychological/social. That's why I don't find the often-repeated claim that they tend to be unhappy difficult to believe. After the novelty of being able to buy what you want wears off, you're left alienated from your former peers due to your sudden wealth, and you don't quite fit in the fancy new neighborhood that you moved into. You were raised differently, you don't have the right tastes/aesthetics or say the right things, you don't have the same education or cultural background, you're not familiar with all the little social cues, signs, and shibboleths, etc. They will never truly accept you no matter how much money you have, and said money will likely run out at some point since you were never really taught how to manage it. Add to that the fact that they didn't actively earn their wealth, not even in the way that a hedge fund manager has 'earned' his wealth, and it's a recipe for dissatisfaction.
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Jul 10, 2020 14:55
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People with a lot to lose also tend to worry a lot about losing it. You don't just go back to the same apartment complex you were living in. You go somewhere isolated, you wall it off, you pay for security measures, etc.
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Jul 10, 2020 15:21
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doverhog posted:The division between old and new money has always been there. Owning that shits for the birds. Buy a bunker in the mountains and just visit cities.
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Jul 10, 2020 15:31
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zedprime posted:Because I'm not immune to aspirational wealth stuff and I actually hate the video game article for hitting too close to home, I ran the numbers on owning a network of studio apartments like that after winning the lottery. For the huge capital cost and ongoing costs of a luxury studio, you need to turn it into your job to administer them if you want more than 2 or 3. I.e. spend time and effort running them as AirBnBs or getting stuck in to real estate to buy in bubbling spots and sell before it pops. Your residuals from investing the lottery money elsewhere isn't going to cover more so you need to put the capital to work if you want to own more. Fair point, so just one in Helsinki and hotels for the rest of the world.
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Jul 10, 2020 15:57
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So I actually watched the video and yeah, that mansion is really lovely. They paid God knows how much money for this place and all of the bedrooms are decorated in the worst "streamer aesthetic" possible. Neon LED lights everywhere (even on the window frames and in random hallways), a bunch of computers with transparent cases and even more LEDs so the rooms all look like a lame rave, cheap mini fridges (at least one of which is already broken), and dumbass decisions like mounting a TV in a way that permanently locks the closet door open because the screws went through it. Like these guys are actually bad at homes in a way that isn't "We're not millionaires that everyone should aspire to."
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Jul 10, 2020 16:02
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Ruflux posted:I'll be honest: if I won the Eurojackpot I'd be very, very tempted to build the tackiest looking "mansion" and decorating it with items in increasingly lovely taste. Something about having more money than you'll ever need makes the leap of logic to "buy ugly trash" far more acceptable to me. Like, I'd never spend money on gamer RGB cases or whatever the gently caress if I actually don't have so much it literally doesn't matter. No joke, if I suddenly won a ton of money, I'd very heavily consider having a replica of the mansion from Resident Evil made, complete with silly-rear end keys, emblem puzzles, and traps.
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Jul 10, 2020 18:30
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