Shirari Industries :: Blog

I wrote an article about how to organize a community swap/barter meet for Shareable

2010-02-04T17:47:15Z

Shareable, a website that "tells the story of sharing,” invited me to write a how-to article for their site and I seized the opportunity in the hopes of inspiring similar efforts in other communities.

Read the article: How to Throw a Community Swap Meet

Information everywhere: Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry demo SixthSense

2010-02-03T01:30:11Z

Some updates

2010-02-01T12:49:40Z

Some quick updates...

I've been so busy. So busy. Oh my.

Our Share Tompkins Really Really Free Market this Saturday went really well - we had a huge turnout and a massive amount of stuff was redistributed! Mad props to Melanie, Greg, Cor, and the rest of our Freeskool friends for the awesome games and sports. And a huge thank you to Danielle and Wishing Well for making this thing happen!
Lily is going to stay with us for a while. Yay!
Shira and I are going to Mexico next week! For almost a month! By train and bus! We look forward to meeting up with Marina and Lea, finally hanging out with Emily in Oaxaca, and seeing Alicia and Max and their work at Guapamacátaro.
Check out Subcultural, a new blog by Lea and Danila.
I've been learning a lot about different insulation types and am posting the highlights to our Delicious links.
Also: I've been reading a lot of lefty sci fi. I've switched from caffeine to drinking grain coffee. Our kitty Snow is all healed up from her surgery, like a new cat. I dream daily of building an A-frame cabin.

New Ithaca Freeskool Mushroom Hunt Video

2010-01-12T16:58:46Z

Renowned local fungi expert Carl Whittaker led a Mushroom Hunt and Identification on August 30th, 2009 as part of the Ithaca Freeskool summer session, and I finally got around to editing the footage. Enjoy the beauties of the Danby State Forest while learning about many species of edible and inedible mushrooms.

Mushroom Hunt and Identification - Ithaca Freeskool Distance Learning from Shira Golding on Vimeo.

Bread and roses

2010-01-09T12:44:52Z

REAL communist revolutions must reject "efficiency" and nurture communalistic attempts to create a more humane society instead...
Che tried to set a different standard for Cuba, and for humanity in general. As Minister of Finance, he managed to distribute the millions of dollars obtained from the USSR to artists, and to desperately poor farmers who in the U.S. would have been considered, shall we say, "poor risks."

Revolution Guided by Feelings of Great Love: Learning from Che Guevara, by Mitchel Cohen

Radical thinking: How to solve the housing crisis

2009-12-09T14:58:26Z

There are many empty buildings, and ample building materials.

Also, there are a lot of people without homes, and a lot of people who are in danger of losing their homes.

If the two above items are true, what is keeping us as a species from all living in safe, secure homes?

Please leave an answer in the comments. Thanks.

It's the little green things

2009-12-06T21:25:44Z

Here are some things we've done in the past year to lighten our impact on the planet:

Began sharing our space with an awesome housemate, shrinking all of our footprints by sharing space and utilities
Grew some of our own food and traded design work and artwork for local, organic produce
Participated in local activism and volunteered in support of our environment
Threw out even less trash, composted and recycled and reused even more, saved and reused food containers instead of recycling them
Carried tote bags, water bottles, cutlery, and other things with us to avoid using disposable items and generating waste when eating out and shopping
Continued to use washable cloths instead of paper towels, handkerchiefs instead of paper tissues, loose tea instead of disposable tea bags...
Supported locally-owned and operated businesses and independent producers
Gave handmade or second-hand, locally-bought items as gifts
Made cat toys from recycled materials and grew our own cat grass
Joined a winter CSA (Community Supported Agriculture - a subscription-based bi-weekly farm share)
Made an effort to buy mostly locally-grown produce (bananas and avocados are rare in our kitchen now; coffee is still something I'm not ready to kick)
Picked a lot of berries and froze them so we could have them in the winter
Baked some of our own bread
Began drying our clothes on a clothesline (but stopped when it got cold)
Lowered the temperature settings on our washer and dryer
Insulated our hot water tank
Got better about turning off / unplugging unused appliances
Switched from using Seventh Generation housecleaning supplies to using ultra-cheap, non-toxic concoctions of baking soda, white vinegar, tea tree oil, hydrogen peroxide, Castille soap, and hot water
Bought even less and worked at being even more ethical, which for us means getting vegan things as locally and fairly as we can, including avoiding supporting capitalism when possible
Made less use of planes and trains, walked or biked more often

And here are some things we want to work on in the coming year:

We want to begin washing our clothes by hand or in a hand-cranked washer, spinning them, and then drying them on the line or on a rack (right now we're still using this building's electric washer and dryer)
Drying, pickling, canning, or otherwise preserving produce when it's in season
Reducing car and plane use
Buying fewer items that come in packaging, reducing packaging waste
Getting better about turning things off
Selling, trading, or giving away things we're not using

What are some things you've done, or plan to do, to make your impact on the earth a positive one? Please leave a comment!

Previously:
Recycling...The Least You Can Do
13 changes we've made to help the earth
Loving mama earth, one day at a time

Photos from NYC and Thanksgiving

2009-12-04T21:31:52Z

Meteor over Gauteng, South Africa

2009-12-02T00:56:21Z

YouTube link

Joy and delight!

2009-12-01T02:34:05Z

Thanks to Nate for the link!

Our 2nd Annual Shirari Week

2009-11-30T15:49:56Z

We took last week off from most of our regular work so we could focus on big and/or neglected projects. Here's some new stuff to check out, if you want to see the fruits of our labor:

Made and launched a site for Frac Attack and arranged our world premiere (Dec. 10 at Cinemapolis in Ithaca)
Event outreach and site updates for Share Tompkins (next swap is Dec. 12th at Southside)
Posted and tagged photos of natural gas drilling for Shaleshock
A new look for Shirari.com!! (Not done yet, but don't worry, there will be bunnies.)

Basically, we still worked the hard the whole time, and barely left our computers. Whoo! It wasn't all work though - we also went to NYC to hang out with Meg and Kevin and see Devendra Banhart, and we hosted a Dacha-licious mostly-vegan Thanksgiving. Shira wrote and recorded a new song which is not up on her MySpace yet but here's the link anyway, and I wrote 32,876 words in November - not a novel yet but it's on its way. And now that we're done with our working break, it's back to work again. Happy Monday everybody.

Fresh off the Wordpress: Frac Attack

2009-11-28T15:31:20Z

I'm sure Shira will post something more detailed later, but I'm excited about a new Wordpress site we just set up yesterday, so I'll write about the tech for now!

Frac Attack: Dawn of the Watershed is up at fracattackthemovie.com. It's an evolving site (the About page hasn't been made yet, for example!), so keep checking it if you want to see it grow. We'll be adding production info, credits and thank-yous, press coverage, and, after our world premiere at Cinemapolis on Dec. 10, the film itself, so people can watch the whole thing online anytime. It is, after all, an advocacy video, and we believe in free culture. This whole project is about getting the word out about natural gas drilling so we can protect New York state!

We set the whole thing up yesterday. We've been doing more and more Wordpress sites for clients and I wanted to do one for us and see how long it would take to put up something attractive and functional. Here are the features of this little site, built in one day:

It makes use of a partnership with a local, related advocacy organization (Shaleshock; I update their website, among other things) to provide maintenance-free Take Action and background info links.
This site has AddThis social bookmarking and send-to-friend functionality, and is already collecting stats via Google Analytics. We're also using a Facebook fan page and event listings (which we link to liberally) to help people get the word out about the film on Facebook.
It's serving up a trailer hosted on social networking sites, saving us bandwidth and providing a range of online viewing options.
Graphics, and the template itself, have been designed to not need updating: The left sidebar auto-updates as authors blog and add links and pages. The right sidebar is designed to not need any updates while sending traffic exactly where it's needed, though its auto-updating Flickr badge showing photos from the production (and soon, our Premiere, and house screenings!), which keeps it feeling fresh.
Applying our ethics to our tech choices, we chose the free, open-source Wordpress, which I installed on our MayFirst hosting account. (MayFirst is an affordable membership-based tech organization that's a great hosting solution for progressive folks with a lot of websites.)
To save on labor time (and, if this were for a client, costs), we used a free Wordpress theme by Eric Crooks, slapped a header on it that echoes our poster design (thanks to Joe Fisher for the amazing photography!), changed up the colors and fonts a bit to work with the film's look and feel, and put most of our efforts into careful content creation, fleshing out the site with essential pages and carefully-chosen, useful sidebar links. A few hours later: Presto, a website. Hardly any coding to speak of. We ♥ Wordpress.

Please help stop natural gas drilling

2009-11-21T13:11:02Z

Please take action now to help stop natural gas drilling in New York State. We need support. Thank you!

The world is changing: Gawker said something intelligent about animal rights

2009-11-16T16:48:43Z

I was just reading gossip over at Gawker (yes, yes I was), and I saw this:

Normally, whenever PETA opens their mouths, even if it's for a good cause, you're like OMGSTFU PETA, you guys are being crazy-obnoxious right now and a detriment to your cause. But I have to say, on this one, well played: they're asking US Marshals to donate Ruth Madoff's furs to the homeless to "highlight the difference between need and greed." Like, whoever made that PR play and got it in Page Six, smooth. Take the day off, PETAPerson.

Awesome observation, Gawker. It is very cool to see even a celebrity gossip blog publicly express frustration with PETA while making it clear that PETA and animal rights are not the same thing. Many of us animal lovers are getting tired of being lumped in with them, so seeing this kind of insightful response from someone outside of the animal rights arena is refreshing.

That said, I agree that PETA did right in this particular action. They're very good at getting media coverage and their hearts are in the right place, I just wish they could lay off offending people for a while.

My Life in Pictures

2009-11-14T06:59:45Z