W48: Selling Myself, Short

The time has come, as it does for all desperate bloggers, for me to gum up my site with stupid cafe-press products, amazon book lists and all that other crap.

Weekly Laundry List for Week 48:

1. Teach rewilding to teenagers at the Pacific Crest Community School.

On Thursday I went into the Pacific Crest Community School here in Portland and chatted with the students about rewilding, collapse, civilization, agriculture, etc. I had a great time. Many of the students seemed engaged in the talk (of course others looked bored as hell, but possibly stayed out of politeness?). The teachers (or facilitators?) seemed the most engaged. They had great questions that I felt really engaged me and made me sweat a little. Especially around the topic of strategies of dealing with collapse. Hopefully I’ll do a field day with the students in a few weeks.

2. Hike Multnomah Falls.

My friend Martha canceled, so I didn’t go. I don’t feel too bad about that because Penny got a job out near Molalla, which means we will move back into my motorhome this weekend! She got her wish.

3. Work on horticulture article.

I worked on it a lot and posted it. It needs a lot of work for sure, but I just wanted to get at least the first draft out there. I actually added it as a second half of my Agriculture Vs.Rewilding article. It fits nicely in there I think.

4. Look for work (and apartment/house/land) in the country outside of Portland. (Rural Scout?)

Well, yeah. My moho will inhabit me again… Though I don’t think Penny will want to live in broken down motorhome in my moms driveway for very long!

5. Have someone donate 100 million dollars to me, buy land, horticulture it, stockpile weapons, survive collapse, thrive in a hunter-gatherer-horticulture tribe. (Have I set myself up for a feral failure here?)

Thank you Brian and Sarah for your tips! Though I didn’t receive 100 million, obviously …So now you’ll notice a bunch of gimmicky shit on my sidebar. Yay! Though I have to say, I do like my t-shirt ideas (‘kill your civilization’) and I do want more people to read my recommended reads, I just hate having quasi-ad shit on my page. Whatever.

Urban Scout’s Weekly Laundry List Week 49: (only four weeks left!)

1. Move into motorhome. Assess situation. Generate repair/move plan.

2. Come up with random money making plan.

3. Work on book.

4. Get Urban Scout Movie on site.

5. Generate garden plan with Mom.

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Posted: March 3, 2008 by

Category: Weekly Laundry List

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10 Comments on “W48: Selling Myself, Short”

  1. Google Ads are also pretty good for bloggers trying to get some additional cash flow. I would recommend it. I am working on that millionaire thing. I am involved with something, that if it gets bought out by large company in a few years, I think you could get that 100 million dollars.

  2. I don’t know how he does it, but the cat over at cryptogon.com brings in a pretty penny through donations and other means. Here’s a recap of his Feb. coinage:

    http://cryptogon.com/?p=2149

    (He posts too much financial crap for my liking…but sometimes he has good stuff)

  3. I am the last person who would condemn you for monetizing your blog in any way. Writing in this thing is work, and we have a money-based economy. It is not unreasonable to want payment for your efforts even if it is not specifically a wage or a direct pay-for-service arrangement.

    I have a blog (not the one in the website link, LJs aren’t generally considered “blogs”) and am tweaking the ad situation with it right now. I use Google AdSense and some other Google-related webmaster stuff as well. Also, you might want to visit the WordPress.org page and their plugin section (under the “Extend” link) because they have plugins there that help with search engine optimization (SEO).

    If you get the SEO thing figured out then you can get away with having fewer ads because they’ll bring in more revenue. Good luck.

  4. Oh, and hey, with the CafePress thing? Maybe you could get people to donate artwork for it. Something with a rewilding theme. I bet it would do better if you offered designs that had a broader appeal rather than something that had most of your store visitors going “WTF is ‘rewilding’?” Nature themes? Backhanded environmental slogans? I dunno.

  5. Ain’t nothing wrong with cash money. You deserve more of it, imho. but you gotta believe that too. times like this, being stuck between two paradigms (aka civilization and living like a human being) can cause us to shoot ourselves in the foot. You should be proud of the work you do here. Now go buy yourself something nice and help out the economy while you’re at it.

  6. I understand your decision to put ads on the site and to be honest the ads dont really bother me. What does concern me though is that we dont have any alernative to our current way of life to offer. As someone that does a lot of activism I struggle when people ask me “what can I do?” and normally talk about gardening, working less etc. I am able to devote a lot of my time to learning to grow food and other useful techniques because I’m living at home and working 5 – 10 hours a week. Most people though can’t do that.

    As your experience has shown its virtually impossible to survive outside the system at the moment and even finding the time and peopel to develop long term alternatives for when this system crashes is very difficult. I think that your message and similar messages will become very relevant in the next 5 – 15 years but spreading the message and not participating in the current system will be very difficult until then.

  10. God- my first cameo on your blog and it’s as a flake! Oops. Seriously we should hang out. You and I and lisa doing something fun?