Inside the Internet Archive: A Meat World Tour

August 23, 2023

...he building, our tour guide showed us the contraption they use to digitize books. He noted that the majority of the books they digitize are sent to the Philippines and digitized with cheaper labor. You can donate books and other materials to the Archive. They have an app that will tell you if they need a particular item and will sometimes pay for shipping. The Internet Archive is a throwback to the heady, more optimistic days of the Internet famil...

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GM and the Red Cars

Mr. Homegrown

April 8, 2019

Transportation

2 Comments

...ing those streetcars. It reminds me of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, a book that haunts me every day. In it Fisher describes describes how we all seem to be unable to imagine a future that’s not some dystopian, privatized nightmare of the sort imagined in the 2006 film Children of Men. When I see charts like the one above, taken from a Los Angeles Department of Transportation report, I can’t help but think of Fisher’s book and what Nic suggest...

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Roots Simple’s Last Minute Gift Guide

Mr. Homegrown

December 23, 2013

Fermentation, Food, Food Preservation

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...’s the ones I suggested: Saving the Season by Kevin West. We reviewed this book a few months ago but I’ll say it again: this is my favorite book on food preservation. Excalibur dehydrator with stainless steel trays. Expensive, but this thing works a lot better than those cheap round dehydrators. Truly the Cadillac of deyhdrators. 1.5 liter lactofermentation kit. Yes, you can make one yourself, but this is a nice all-glass model. Plus, when you buy...

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Print and Internet Resources for Natural, No-Treatment Beekeeping

Mr. Homegrown

March 5, 2014

Animals, Bees

8 Comments

...aia Bees is the website of Michael Thiele, who we blogged about last year. Books The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Beekeeping – not to be confused with the conventional approach in the Dummies book. The Practical Beekeeper: Beekeeping Naturally – Michael Bush’s voluminous guide to natural beekeeping. You’ll find a range of ideas in these books and websites particularly when it comes to hive types–everything from Langstroth boxes to top bar hives to ho...

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Dystopia Report: The I-710 Corridor Aesthetic Master Plan

Mr. Homegrown

January 11, 2022

Design, Thoughtstylings

2 Comments

...may be the best ever proof of the thesis of David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs book, that perhaps half of all people in Western countries are engaged in useless, soul-sucking office work. I mean, spend a moment appreciating the visual chaos that is this image. Ask yourself if it has any purpose whatsoever other than fulfilling some checkbox on a list of meaningless public engagement metrics. What possible purpose does this slide fulfill? Then apprecia...

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