Hey readers!
This months band is SOHN.
London born and Vienna settled, SOHN is longing, brooding, and beautiful. Much like Toronto’s current state of anticipation for this winter’s eventual end. SOHN uses powerfully pulsing digital beats with spiralling layers of arpeggiating synth to provide an appropriately intense foundation for the mezmorzing, high tenor vocal harmonies.
Crank it while you look out your window and dream of the oncoming Spring.
It’s easy to acquire clothes nowadays and the consumerist society which we have created encourages us to continually update our clothes for the latest fad. This can be expensive and it has a negative impact on the environment. Reducing your wardrobe to only needed and fashionable items can reduce stress, but it’s hard to get accomplish. Luckily, Becoming Minimalist has a great guide!
- Embrace the idea of one. When one can be enough, embrace it – one black dress, one swimsuit, one winter coat, one black belt, one pair of black shoes, one pair of sneakers, one handbag… insert your own based on your occupation, lifestyle, or climate.
- Donate, sell, recycle, discard. Depending on the size of one’s existing wardrobe, an initial paring down won’t take long. Make a few piles – donate, sell, or recycle. Start with the clothes that you no longer wear. You’ll be surprised how much you can remove.
Reaction Call to Action from Reaction on Vimeo.
Reaction is a new company which recently crowd funded enough money to send a boatload of housing to help refugees fleeing the conflict in Syria. The company makes Exo shelters which are stackable and easily shippable emergency shelters that can be deployed to areas suffering a disaster. The design was created as a reaction to what the designer saw during Hurricane Katrina.
Eight years after his initial idea, he has come up with the Exo Housing Unit, which consists of a floor plate and an upper shell. The portable pieces can be transported easily; just one truck can carry over 20 units. Once at the disaster location, the shelter can be simply set-up by placing the shell on top of the floor plate. At $5,000, Exo shelters are also notably cheaper than the $20,000 trailers used for shelter during Katrina, according to Fast Company.
With the design finished, the company is now in production stage and can begin answering the multiple requests they have received for their shelters from around the world. First, they plan on sending their shelters to Syria in an effort to help some of the 7 million people who have been displaced due to civil unrest.
Thanks to Kathryn!
Ecosia is a search engine that is trying to make the world better. Every time you search the net on their site a good percentage of ad revenue is used to pay for planting trees in Brazil. Their goal is one million new trees in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest by August 2014 (as of posting they are at 219,695 trees planted).
It’s another Google competitor with a good focus. There is also Duck Duck Go which prides itself on its privacy policies as a reaction to Google’s pervasive reach.
Hopefully Ecosia and Duck Duck Go will encourage other Google competitors or perhaps even Google itself will modify its operations.
Kate Beaton of Hark a Vagrant fame once worked in the Alberta tar sands. She recently made a short comic about her time working there (which she did to pay off student debt) and it provides a wonderful human side to the tar sands narrative.
Read the comic here.