Bonfire of the Billys

January 27, 2020

Design

...uthor and woodworker Christopher Schwartz’s said in The Anarchist’s Design Book that, “it annoys me when I see an IKEA Billy bookshelf in a woodworker’s house.” Schwartz goes on to explain why, Yes, you get about 15 linear feet of shelving, plus a carcase that is ridiculously unstable. Only two shelves are fixed. So unless you secure the Billy to the wall (or other Billys), it will rack in short order . . . I say this with experience. When my wife...

Read…

How to Cook Perfect Scrambled Eggs

Mr. Homegrown

January 4, 2013

Food, Recipes

3 Comments

...led eggs? Two words for you: double boiler. It’s a method I learned from a book I had out from the library, Ruhlman’s Twenty: 20 Techniques 100 Recipes A Cook’s Manifesto . I can’t say that I read the rest of the book, but the double boiler egg method sure works well. You melt some butter in a double boiler first to help keep the eggs from sticking. You can also use a pan held over (but not in) a pot of boiling water if you don’t have a double boi...

Read…

Inside the Internet Archive: A Meat World Tour

Mr. Homegrown

August 23, 2023

Thoughtstylings

...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...

Read…

Sorting the Digital Photos of a Digital Pandemic

Mr. Homegrown

December 8, 2023

Thoughtstylings

...t fondling. Unlike the Matrix there’s no neat way out of the mirror house postmodernity of the eXistenZ universe. Ariadne has left no thread to escape the maze. The best you can do is to map the territory. Towards that end, instead of a photo sorting app, I’ll leave you with two book recommendations: K-punk : the collected and unpublished writings of Mark Fisher which contains the essay on eXistenZ that inspired this post (I’d recommend reading hi...

Read…

Escaping the AI Vampire Castle

Mr. Homegrown

February 23, 2024

Thoughtstylings

2 Comments

...AI generated children’s stories. This is just part of a flood of scammy AI books on Amazon. The AI children’s books advertised on my Kindle combine titles that have an English-as-a-second-language vibe, vaguely Manga style cover illustrations and author names such as “Leanor Varelade” that either yield no search results or are close to the names of real people (Leonor Varela is a Chilean actress). In short these books are what you would get if you...

Read…