L. Rhodes @lrhodes@merveilles.town

Tip:

1. Keep heavy cream and confectioners sugar on hand like, hey, those are just staples.

2. Put some cream and a little sugar in a jar. No measurements, this is art.

3. Screw the lid on tightly. Not so tightly you can't get it off again, but we're not trying to clean the kitchen today, right?

4. Shake vigorously until you no longer hear any sloshing. VOILA! You now have fresh-made whipped cream.

5. Put it on stuff. Preferably beverages and desserts, but hey, I'm not judging.

Repurposing EV batteries to store solar energy for lighting and appliances in off-grid RVs: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/interactive/2021/climate-solutions-electric-batteries/

I'll need to see how well it works over the long term, but I may have finally figured out a (slightly unorthodox) pen grip that meets my goals of:

1. fluid, legible handwriting
2. that doesn't ruin my hand or wrist and
3. doesn't slow my writing to a crawl.

My handwriting woes have been putting a serious cramp (har har) in my work for a long time now, so this is a potentially major breakthrough.

I have belatedly realized that the printer I bought midway through the pandemic means I can print out pamphlet- and zine-sized RPGs from itch.io, if anyone has any recommendations.

"The Beauvais Cathedral in France, for example, or that of Palma de Mallorca are impressive buildings; they are mountains of stone laid in a stable form, but we do not really understand why they are so stable. The digital tools that we have don’t work on them." https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/wisdom-hewn-in-ancient-stones-in-conversation-with-john-ochsendorf/

"The Californian Ideology, through its 'bizarre mish-mash of hippie anarchism and economic liberalism,' celebrated the rampant commodification of digital networks as a force for personal liberation. […] Drawing on various contemporary anti-capitalist currents, from the anti-globalization movement to Italian autonomism to Berlin's lively squatter movement, Nettime aimed to synthesize an alternative to the techno-determinist optimism oozing out of Silicon Valley." https://logicmag.io/commons/specter-in-the-machine/

Anyone know of a way to exclude particular domains (e.g. amazon.com) from the result in DuckDuckGo searches?

Search term syntax is fine if that's the best way to do it, but if anyone knows of a setting to make the exclusion persistent, that would be preferred.

On the whole, it seems like our society has largely regulated the introductory text as a form to a disreputable niche market, e.g. Post-Structuralism For Dummies, and the like. A really useful, elegant introductory text is a thing of beauty, though. They should be more highly valued than they generally are.

As an example: Taking another stab at reading a big analysis of the Vietnam War (or Second Indochina War, if you prefer), I realized that I had absorbed a lot of piecemeal facts and impressions about the war over the years, but didn't really have a grasp on the basic steps in the progression of the conflict from start to finish. So I gave the big, sweeping book to a friend, did some internetting, found a short, solid introductory text, and now I'm reading that.

Lately, I've grown increasingly deliberate about identifying the subjects that I sorta know something about, and trying to build a more systematic framework of basic knowledge on which to build in the future.

The latest issue of Loading is all about Animal Crossing: https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/loading/2020-v13-n22-loading05832/

パン作ったことある？ On Japanese puns, both literary and paternal: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2021/02/05/language/japanese-puns-dad-jokes/

"Words precede and surpass me, they tempt and alter me, and if I am not careful it will be too late: things will be said without my having said them."
— Clarice Lispector, "The Disasters of Sofia"

Much of the Southern United States' communications infrastructure is nearing the end of its life span. Without serious intervention, these systems may not hold up to extreme weather events as they grow in intensity and frequency due to climate change. https://southerlymag.org/2021/01/08/the-souths-communication-infrastructure-cant-withstand-climate-change/