Raw Pork Sandwich Anyone?

Image: Nize from Wikipedia. Our web and book designer Roman Jaster dropped by the Root Simple compound for an annual look under the hood at our website’s internal workings. After spending most of the meeting calming me down over my existential crisis relating to the troubles of running a blog long past when blogs were still a thing, Roman mentioned an unusual sandwich called Hackepeter that he ate on his last trip back to where he grew up in East...

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A Great New Resource for Preserving Your Analog and Digital Memories

...t Migration Home Movie Project that, if you are African-American, will digitize and preserve your family’s home movies and audio tapes for free. If you’re in Los Angeles you really should check out the new Octavia Lab at the Central Library. Library card holders can book a 2 hour session once per week. Jump on this opportunity early as I suspect it’s going to be popular. If you’re not near one of the cities with a memory lab, I’d suggest having a...

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Relax and Enjoy the Soft Caress of the Fun Fur

...I’m just old enough to remember the era from whence these photos from the book Creating modern furniture : trends, techniques, appreciation (1975) originate, they seem like artifacts from some alien planet, perhaps the one depicted in Barbarella. Water damage from the Los Angeles Central Library fires of the 1980s only adds to the otherness of these images. At the risk of sparking inter-generational snark warfare, let’s take a look at some more:...

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Digital Götterdämmerung

...arters for the right moment to get the torches lit. The cornerstone of his book Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (Amazon, library) is the suggestion to take a one month break from addictive apps, websites and other digital media. Use that time to figure out some life goals. At the end of the month carefully add back the digital tools you find useful. I just started the one month digital fast and, already, I feel like I’...

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No Tweets Just Cats

...an experimental one month digital detox as suggested by Cal Newport in his book Digital Minimalism. During this period I’m giving up the Twitters which usually forms the basis of a set of links I post on Saturday. Twitter has devolved into a way of monetizing people yelling at each other and I’m not missing it. I may look at it again, or I may figure out another way to do the link feature. At this point, I don’t know. But I’m happy to report my at...

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