Cian Gregory Accuardi Shelley's Blog – March 2010 Archive (15)

the first Anniversary part will be rageful (the good kind). we'll have my friend's band and half priced drinks and tons of food from local gardens (the only cheap and delicious source of food in 2020) some of the drinks will be home distilled as well. it will be another oddly sunny globally warmed February in Portland, but it is night time now and we are all inside now, the light and heat coming from dim old tungsten filament light bulbs (retro, for style) and the wood stove in the… Continue

living in Portland most of my power comes from the hydro electric dams that line the Columbia river. these dams have destroyed fish habitat and making salmon fry easy targets for predators. when i was in kindergarten i had the obvious solution: "we have to blow up the lights!" i said. when asked why i said: "because it kills salmon!"



Bonneville dam was built by the army Corp of Engineers during the new deal along with several other dams. among the many people provided work by this… Continue

last year in blacksmithing class, while everyone else was making a cool knife, i made gardening tools. don't get me wrong, i love knives, but my grandfather has an extensive collection of them and gives them to me when he has too many. so i made tools. i made two hoes and a trowel.



today i used my hoe to weed a patch of garden and make furroughs for a patch of peas that my housemate Joel and his son planted. so by making that hoe i increased my own food security and that of everyone… Continue

tell us what is the greatest thing you've ever made. of all the things you've ever created, worked on, or participated in, tell us which one are you proudest of, why, and what it's like. please give as detailed description, picture, or video of your masterpiece as you can.



tag it MASTERPIECE and i will give you a power vote.



example:



my masterpiece is the forty page graphic novel that i made for 20th century history instead of writing essays. i worked on average an… Continue

I just learned that my Home state of Oregon is the second least food secure state in the union. the amout of hungry people in my state has increased drastically in recent years with the increase in unemployment caused by the economic crisis.

i've lived in an unemployed household but we never went hungry and it shocks me that over six percent of the people in my state don't always have enough to eat. the oregon food bank is of course very concerned about our lack of food security, but… Continue

we are eating soup. we aren't out of the winter yet and all we have stored up are beans and lentils and potatoes. so we eat soup. we buy the celery and carrots from the store (our carrots haven't come up yet) but the meat and the the chicken stock come from one of our hens (may she rest in peace)



we are those who come to community dinner at the sparrowhaus which is a sort of community residence/homestead in Milwaukie that was once my home and… Continue

drawing is alot easier than people make it seem. everyone should know how to weild a pencil just like everyone should be literate and know what a scale is, so i'm going to teach you how to draw, and since i don't have a scanner i'm going to do it blind.



there are three basic kinds of drawing all of which can vary greatly in detail or style depending on the mood of the drawer or the demands of the pencil. the three types are:

• drawing from reality; copying real things,…

Continue

one of the things my friend Joel has taught me is the importance of letting things adapt to their environment naturally. the last two winters here in Portland have been hard. last year we had more snow than i ever remember seeing in the city, this year the ground was frozen solid for a week in November.

these are not great conditions for a startup urban farm; last year we lost some two thirds of our fava beans to the cold and this year i think we lost even more, but this years crop was… Continue

if there are any other cartoonists, graphic novelists, or comic book artists of any kind out there i'd like to challenge us to build on Alchemy's base concept with comic art of our own about the year 2020. i for one do not want to wait an entire week to see new comic art on this site so let's get started!

so i'm in highschool and the class i'm most interested in right now is global economy. my class has been assigned to research one trade object (where it goes and how it's made and who makes it), one Corporation (what they do and what they sell) and one resource (where it comes from and who uses it)



the problem has been that doing research on how things are made and by who is difficult because the companies that make things rarely want to tell you.

i am a fundamentally lazy… Continue

Mother Earth has been very active the last few months and my home town: Portland Oregon is due for an earthquake. by 2020 we will almost certainly have an earthquake here and will be in the same boat as Haiti and Chile. my family and a friend of ours outlined a (still primitive but growing) disaster safety net for our neighborhood.



in my neighborhood: my nextdoor neighbor has chainsaws, their neighbor has a hand dug well, the house across the street has a huge supply of food in the… Continue

So we know that Japan doesn't have enough food, what do we know about it's capacity to produce food? i assume it rains enough there, but there are alot of people in Japan in 2020. is Japan importing drinking water as well as food? i'm really asking this because i don't live in Tokyo and i don't know, but we should be conscious that a localized urban farming infrastructure in Tokyo might require a supporting localized sustainable water infrastructure. i know there's alot of new moisture… Continue

Paul Hawken gave me some much needed hope. i still haven't read any of his books but i will have by 2020, and just hearing excerpts and seeing him do interviews after Blessed Unrest came out helped me to establish faith in humanity while growing up, powerless and blind in Bush's America.



the knowledge that there are thousands of orgonizations in the world that are working towards positive change just like i am trying to do is more or… Continue

this is one of the most useful ideas i have encountered, because i believe that people are generally conservative, and it seems like radical change is both more expensive and more risky than the gradual development of existing systems. i mean this from the standpoint of tools (using local resources, making the tool easy to replace or repair) but also from the standpoint of society and social structures, there is a localization of societal resources i.e. culture that should be considered so that… Continue

In ten years i will be working as a freelance translator between English and German, and trying to get a studio to produce one of my TV pilots. i will not drive a car. I will live a house with a bunch of other young people. I'll still be running my website about the global economy. i'll be involved in the urban gardening movement in Portland, trying to live as much as possible on food that me and my friends grow out of the ground. i'll spend most of my money on pens and parts for my computer. i… Continue