Mandrake!

...andrake and the datura that the local Native Americans used for there spirit journeys, have a strange relationship to human culture, at once edible, sometimes poisonous, sometimes psychotropic. We think we can almost hear them talk....

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Build Your Own Furniture

...t of the plywood sheet once you cut it out? The same limitation applies to making furniture. Thankfully a generation of designers back in the 60s and 70s left a few highly useful and groovy how-to books on making your own suburban-workshop-modernist furniture with a humble 4 x 8 sheet of plywood. The amazing art/architecture collective Simparch tipped us off to the world of plywood modernism how-to books and we at Homegrown Evolution recommend the...

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William Morris is the Marie Kondo We Need

...slogan reminds me of David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs which shows in sometimes funny, sometimes gut wrenching detail how much of the work done in our time is meaningless, unnecessary and destructive of the planet and the mental health of so many people. A common misunderstanding of Morris message is that he thought that we should all go back to hand work. It’s clear from reading him that it isn’t a matter of machine vs. hand work but rather what...

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Busting Open an iPod Touch

...years we must crack, hack, split open and reprogram our tools so that they serve us. Special thanks to friend of the blog Michael W. who offered to help me with Linux and got me thinking about spending more time making these electronic tools work for me rather than me working for them. Micheal also tipped me off to a great post from Low Tech Magazine “How and why I stopped buying new laptops.”...

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Age of Apocalypse

...c of an apocalypse meme should be noted: the insistence that this point in time, this convergence of signs, portents and factors is unique in all of human history. That while sure, other apocalypses haven’t worked out, this time it’s different. One of the apocalypse memes at the conference varied from the classic “chosen survivors” variant, and it is reflect in the writings of Guy McPherson, the speaker who caused the most buzz. In his worldview,...

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