Acedia Part II: An Internet of Narcissism

June 21, 2024

...ures, of style without substance” thinking of, I imagine, moments like the time the Yippies cast a spell to levitate the Pentagon or, in our time, throwing soup cans at paintings. He also targets therapeutic culture (much like Mark Fisher) and delivers a spot-on evisceration of New Age and Gnostic spirituality all of which he considers as support structures for a narcissistic ideology. I couldn’t help thinking about Lasch as I viewed the new Max d...

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A Three Step Strategy for Curing Internet/Smart Phone Addiction

Mr. Homegrown

March 8, 2017

Thoughtstylings

4 Comments

...Silicon Valley elite who profit from our distraction. Still, there will be times that problem #1 gets the best of us. We won’t always succeed in avoiding the interweb hole and we might, as Newport suggests, even schedule some time to mindlessly surf just to get it out of our system. But the more we get out and just do stuff the less we’ll end up internet surfing and the better we’ll feel. In short, schedule a time to surf a real wave rather than a...

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Loquat Season

Mr. Homegrown

April 8, 2007

Food, Foraging, Gardening

3 Comments

...of these trees live in public spaces, the parkway and people’s front yards making them prime candidates for urban foraging i.e. free food. The tree itself has a vaguely tropical appearance with waxy leaves that look like the sort of plastic foliage that used to grace dentist office lobbies back in the 1960s. In short it’s a real tree that looks fake with fruit that nobody seems to care about. The loquat tree invites considerable derision from east...

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In Praise of Disorder

Mr. Homegrown

March 29, 2008

Thoughtstylings

7 Comments

...club presents just the right level of civic inattention to allow the urban homesteader to get away with many of the illegal projects profiled in this blog: greywater, backyard poultry, and front yard vegetable gardening, to mention just a few. Ideally you have a balance between order and disorder–neither gunfire nor the prying eyes of city inspectors. Where I’m staying in Houston, with its flocks of loose chickens, packs of feral dogs, and broken...

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New Sill Plate and Joists

Mr. Homegrown

May 28, 2018

Design

13 Comments

...ld have spent doing the things that normally take up the time of glamorous urban homesteading bloggers in the big city such as pondering avocado toast recipes or dehydrating loquats. After much all caps thinking, I came to the conclusion that we need a kind of time traveling Dr. Who character whose sold mission would be to stop misguided remodeling projects in the past. He’d spend a lot of time in the 1960s and 70s halting bad patio pours, stoppin...

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