Worst of NextDoor

...nity is somehow more “open minded” than other parts of the country or that urban people are more progressive than rural people. These are stereotypes that I’ve been guilty of harboring in the past. We are all, myself included, easily sucked into the sort of hateful trolling that Silicon Valley has found a way to monetize on social media. How do you keep people glued to a website like NextDoor? Just offer the spectacle of your elder neighbors teari...

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Weekend Linkages: Smoking Chickens

...anks Daniel for the link!) How To Build Your Own Trippy Meditation Pod Insects are vanishing from our planet at an alarming rate. But there are ways to help them Improving tiny urban greenspaces causes huge boosts in insect life If Hollywood Workers Strike, the Entertainment Industry Will Grind to a Halt...

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Life in a Pandemic

...future holds. There are simply too many variables to know what will happen in the coming months. Will we have another wave infections? Will governments bail out corporations or individuals? Will we have a recession or depression? Will there be a revived interest in urban homesteading or will we go back to shopping and consuming? I’m wary of suggesting a silver lining in this crisis. For many, around the world, it will just be awful. I’m curious ho...

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Wake Up and Fight

...I were chasing clicks, I would have given up long ago. Almost all of the “urban homesteading” blogs like this one disappeared years ago. That’s the result of many factors. One is the rise of social media, as capital found a way to monetize posting and shift the fruits of that monetization away from creators and towards large companies like Meta (gag) and all the others: Twitter, TikTok, YouTube etc. I’m sorry to say that I bought into the optimis...

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The Gathering Storm

...amage I’d be saddened but not surprised. But the fire reached deep into an urban area at a great distance from the wilderness, much further than I ever would have expected. That this fire hit a place where so many people are aware of and working to counter the dangers of climate change shows, as Peter says, that no place is safe. As an Altadena resident said on Reddit, “Losing everything is an abstract notion until you lose everything”. Here’s a h...

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