Designing the World’s Most Pretentious Garden Shed

...ties. Nevertheless, I came up with a few scribbles: Thankfully, most of my thoughtstylings stay in the sketchbook like the idea of a 20-foot tall observation chair on top of the shed. Kelly pointed out that the neighbors might not like that idea. After dashing off a few sketches I created a Pinterest board to gather more notions, mostly from Ian Hamilton Finlay’s garden, Little Sparta: The garden shed design I settled on is a kind of mashup of Ian...

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In Defense of Theory

...ghts it’s Mark Fisher. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about Fisher’s thoughtstylings. I’ll have to devote a longer blog post to why I think Fisher’s work is important for me, a lowly homesteading blogger. But let me just say that he does a better job than I did of explaining why theory is important to consider rather than dismiss. It turns out that the most rarefied and abstract theories of your Deleuzes and Foucaults can, paradoxically, tur...

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There’s No Such Thing as a Free Watch

...after being produced, it is reviled, doomed to live out its stainless steel life, less a teller of time than an incarnation of petty deception. In that sense, it may be the best artifact of capitalism one could ask for. You almost need to go back to Thomas Aquinas’ complex Aristotelian thoughtstylings about transubstantiation to wrap your head around the story Odell tells. While we’re on the topic of transubstantiating things, the Church of Engla...

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Sensuous Space: How to Create Romantic, Seductive and Sensuous Settings

...ific color, form texture, musical and even scent suggestions over the many pages of charts, spreadsheets and graphs. We’re 30 pages in by the time we see our first hot tub. The power nexus of the erotic panopticons in this book are, naturally, your disco control centers because your house must have its own private discotheque. I don’t know how you keep the blow from gumming up the electronics. Of course, such idiosyncratic spaces are the domain of...

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How To Freeze Fruits and Vegetables

...reak them out of a solid mass. To do this you’ll individually quick freeze IQF them. To IQF: Wash, blanch (veggies) and cool . Spread in one layer on a cookie sheet and place in the freezer for four to six hours. Pack in sealed containers or in freezer bags. Label with date to avoid freezer mystery bag phenomenon. Now when the zombie apocalypse arrives and everything goes Beyond Thunderdome, freezing will not be the best option (unless, like Tina...

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