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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Paleo Grift

...eisure before the toil of agriculture is an idea that pops up often in the urban homesteading and permaculture scene. While I’m sympathetic to complaints about modern agriculture, I’ve long thought that this Golden Age narrative sounds too simple, too much like the “noble savage” archetype, the idea that if we can somehow just get back to “nature” all will be okay. This notion of a idyllic distant past was the subject of an excellent episode of th...

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Weekend Linkages: Floored

...hut-ins (Podcast) (@edburmila) May 17, 2021 City, Suburb, Server Farm: the Urban Geography of Amazon A private bar where you can drink, hug, and ditch masks? Welcome to Risky Business in North Hollywood Crime App Citizen is Driving a Security Car Around L.A. and Won’t Say Why Build your own bamboo dome-like structure with giant grass’s zome building kit Why are our cities built for 6ft-tall men? The female architects who fought back Narrative Napa...

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Learning to Draw Version 4.0

...and would like to do that again. The takeaway from those classes was the importance of setting time limits and doing sketches that are loose and quick as well as long and detailed. For architectural sketching I’ve been working my way through a new book, Sketch Club Urban Drawing. See above for my warning on shopping for art supplies, but I do really like my Rotring Isograph College Set. It comes with three refillable pens, a mechanical pencil, an...

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Saturday Linkages: Late Sunday Edition

...Kohlstedt) March 30, 2021 The ancient fabric that no one knows how to make Urban Fish Ponds: Low-tech Sewage Treatment for Towns and Cities Anywhere but Here: Ponte Tower More than 5,000 people attend illegal party at Tonto national forest in Arizona Weird Zillow listing of the week An internet mystery: someone built a copy of the Borgund Stave Church in Connecticut and the craftspeople weren’t happy with “bossman” Why This Historically Black Clin...

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