Learning to Draw Version 4.0

...teaches high school art about my revelation and he said that he has a hard time convincing his students that their blind contour drawings are better than their regular work. It’s a good thing, he said, that I know the difference. An art professor friend gave me another good tip, that I should look at the drawings of top shelf artists from all different eras. This was a reminder that drawings aren’t the same thing as art and that it’s important to...

Read…

Root Simple: 2015 in Review

...that I could do more how-to posts, but the fact is that they are the most time consuming. We did manage to do a few good ones: Stuff you Learn When the Power Goes Out (with El Niño storms approaching, it’s time to review this one), Restoring a Built-In Ironing Board, Three Things I’ve Learned from Baking Bread with Whole Grain and How to Make Hot Sauce. Podcast Comments Due to the nature of the medium it’s difficult for me to gauge the reaction o...

Read…

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...

Read…

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?...

Read…

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...

Read…