2022 in Review: Cats, Mushrooms and Politics

December 31, 2022

...raw cartoon characters. The instructor had us draw Spiderman. He did it by leading us though the abstract shapes that make up Spiderman’s mask. What’s funny is that I don’t really know superheroes very well and didn’t know what I was drawing until the end of the class. When we finished the drawing he had us all hold up our sheets of paper. That’s when I found out that everyone else in the class seemed to be professional animators. Kelly and I spen...

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William Morris is the Marie Kondo We Need

Mr. Homegrown

June 30, 2021

Design, Thoughtstylings

4 Comments

...serable trumpery, from the engineers who have had to make the machines for making them, down to the hapless clerks who sit daylong year after year in the horrible dens wherein the wholesale exchange of them is transacted, and the shopmen who, not daring to call their souls their own, retail them amidst numberless insults which they must not resent, to the idle public which doesn’t want them, but buys them to be bored by them and sick to death of t...

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Busting Open an iPod Touch

Mr. Homegrown

December 29, 2020

Design, Tools

7 Comments

...worry and exasperation is real. Apple’s minimalist design aesthetic, while making devices that are visually appealing, gets in the way of their use and function. This iPod is so sleek and slim that it just wants to slide out of your hand and break, which is how I came to this repair, of course. The funny thing is that in order to keep the thing from getting broken you have to buy a third party case. From a design perspective (not a capitalist one,...

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How FilmLA Blocks Bike Lanes

Mr. Homegrown

May 24, 2019

Bikes, Transportation

1 Comment

...lict of interest. If the choice is between the safety of bike commuters or making production companies happy, you can guess that FilmLA’s likely to opt for the latter. Previous attempts to address unsafe closures of bike lanes by myself and other bike activists have gone nowhere. Call FilmLA to complain and you’ll be greeted with either indifference or outright hostility. Call the police to complain and they’ll direct you to parking enforcement. C...

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The Year We Gave Up Our Smart Phones

Mr. Homegrown

September 3, 2018

Thoughtstylings

19 Comments

...ve to eat is freeze dried Beef Stroganoff in a Martian prison of their own making. We used their stranding as an opportune moment to rid our culture of the things that were holding us back. My own personal smart phone addiction recovery path began back in 2018. I was building the most complex project I’ve ever attempted, a chest of drawers. It required intense concentration and I kept getting interrupted by the ping of text messages, junk phone ca...

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