Meet our book & web designer: Roman Jaster

March 14, 2014

Roman Jaster is the gifted designer who designed both Making It and this very website for us. He recently gave a Visiting Designer talk about his work at his alma mater, CalArts and made that lecture public on YouTube. In it, he talks about his childhood in East Germany, the decisions he made early-on which determined his career, his working methods (which are really interesting, combining coding with design) and talks about the concepts behind s...

Read…

Everything Must Go: Tidying Up at the Root Simple Compound

Mrs. Homegrown

January 9, 2015

Cleaning, Domesticus, Tidying up

36 Comments

...s. Our new mantra became Everything Must Go. At this point we remembered a book one of our readers mentioned, and which has been making the publicity rounds of late, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by the tidying consultant Marie Kondo (aka KonMari–her method is called the KonMari Method). She’s from Japan, where people have the same hearty consumerist impulses as we do here in the U.S., but considerably less space for storage. When I first...

Read…

Disaster Nationalism: A Politics of Cleansing Violence

Mr. Homegrown

November 28, 2024

Reviews

...er, in turn, guided me to the writing of Richard Seymour, specifically his book The Twittering Machine. The central thesis of that book, that we think we are “tweeting” when we are, in fact being tweeted is something I think about as I, and I’m sure many of you, struggle with the amount of time we are captured by the algorithms. Seymour has a new book out, Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization that grapples with our present co...

Read…

Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land

Mrs. Homegrown

June 19, 2013

Miscellaneous

10 Comments

...from the publisher because we’ve met Gary and like his work. Getting free books once in a while is one of the perks of blogging. This book, though, I would lay down cash for in a heartbeat. At the time I made the request, I merely though it would be an interesting read. In the wake of the Age of Limits Conference, and my subsequent reading about climate change–and the depression that resulted from that–its fortuitous arrival this week has given m...

Read…

Urban Homestead Wins Book Award

Mr. Homegrown

April 22, 2009

Events

11 Comments

Our book, The Urban Homestead just won a gold medal in the Independent Publisher Awards. To celebrate we’ll throw in a back issue of Ripples magazine for the first twenty folks who buy a copy of our book off of this website. Ripples is, “A Revolutionary Journal of Seasonal Delight” published by the nice folks at www.dailyacts.org. Now that’s enough tooting our own horn. We’ll get back to posting when the dust settles after Earth Day and talk abou...

Read…