When Mushrooms Attack

...ngerous, AI generated mushroom foraging books, this seems like the perfect time for this blog to point towards the Japanese kid’s show Ultraman Taro, specifically episode 31, “Danger! The Poisonous Mushroom of Lies”. The episode opens with a giant, ambulatory mushroom, named Mushra, destroying a Japanese city. Ultraman Taro, a sort of size-shifting superhero, defeats the monster but not without a release of spores. After the battle the main protag...

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Reject Modernity Embrace Post-Capitalism

...o be believed, there are always opportunities to be chased or created; any time not spent hustling and hassling is time wasted. The whole city is forced into a gigantic simulation of activity, a fanaticism of productivism in which nothing much is actually produced, an economy made out of hot air and bland delirium. Capital demands that we rip out a perfectly good 1920s bathroom and replace it with the latest stream of vomit from Home Depot. And wh...

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Plague Times

There are two images that keep floating around in my head in this time when we genuinely seem to have a worrisome contagion at the door. One is of the 17th century beak masks worn by plague doctors. The other is the plague infected ship in Werner Herzog’s version of Nosferatu. Thanks to a fascinating website called Vessel Finder, you can track the real life COVID-19 infected plague ship Grand Princess, which is just off the coast of San Francisco...

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Weekend Linkages: A Geodesic Thanksgiving

...It’s time again for my most cherished #Thanksgiving tradition: Revisiting the time millions of kids had to witness Barney the Dinosaur collapse to the ground and get stabbed to death by cops during the 1997 Macys Parade.💫 pic.twitter.com/doSv6xWMBW — Rob Sheridan (@rob_sheridan) November 25, 2021 A cardboard geodesic dome for your cat The true costs of driving Fall flowers: Which marigold is right for you?...

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Who Needs Windows?

...tories tall, depending on how you count the floors, and so it takes a long time to go up and down and grab records and bring them down. When people come to use the original records, they sit in our search room and we bring them the records they want, and they sit there waiting.” There are issues with climate control, exacerbated by the building’s shape. (Monoliths are great for catching the sunlight.) Temperature and humidity fluctuations are bad...

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