Escaping the AI Vampire Castle

February 23, 2024

...or Japanese movies and TV shows. Her work is beginning to be replaced with computer based translations. She expressed her frustration that the studio bosses don’t understand that the Japanese language is not in some kind of one to one relationship with English, that it carries cultural associations and subtleties that no computer will ever be able to parse. In short, that translation is interpretation and that human beings need to be involved in t...

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I Made an Enzo Mari Table and So Can You

Mr. Homegrown

October 24, 2023

Design

6 Comments

...sy hardwood arts and crafts stuff I usually make, which can take months to complete just one piece. You don’t need a wood shop to make Mari’s furniture. That said, John and I were able to reclaim some of his twisted 2x6s using my jointer, planer and table saw. But here’s where things get confusing. European readers please correct me if I’m wrong here, but when Mari calls for a 25mm x 50mm piece of lumber he means literally that, what would be 1-in...

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Does Facebook Actually Work for Promoting a Small Business or Non-Profit?

Mr. Homegrown

April 27, 2018

Thoughtstylings

14 Comments

...Facebook as a platform for your business and, like so many other internet companies of the past, Facebook goes out of business? To illustrate how social media companies exaggerate their advertising power Mendelson offers a personal example. He has 700,000 Twitter followers. When he sent out a tweet about his new book he sold, not hundreds or thousands of copies, but exactly 28. A tweet to his 700,000 Twitter followers asking for a donation to a b...

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Do I Need Books?

Mr. Homegrown

May 30, 2018

Domesticus, Tidying up

24 Comments

...desire to open any of those boxes and retrieve a book. Which leads to an uncomfortable question for an author: do I need to own any books? One of the extreme tidying methods suggested by Fumio Sasaki, author of Goodbye Things, is to box your possessions, wait for a reasonable period of time and if you don’t use any of those items, send them to the thrift store. If I were to use this method my entire library, with the exception of a few books I lef...

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How to Roast Coffee Photonovel

Mr. Homegrown

February 20, 2017

Food

6 Comments

...al format: the photonovel. It’s something you see more in Latin America and Italy than in English speaking countries. I thought I’d use this genre to tackle one of my favorite homesteading activities: stove-top coffee roasting. You can download my brief coffee roasting photonovel here (PDF). It’s a rough draft but if you like it I’ll do more, and maybe turn one into a telenovela. And, please, try roasting coffee sometime. It’s my favorite activity...

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