Mercuryday Links: D.I.Y.

In honor of the new, radical to the max web-comic-blog howtoons, I thought I’d post resources to the other DIY (Do It Yourself) Movement resources.

We live in a society where producers tell us what we want, and too many of us surrender our individuality and get drawn right into their bullying tactics. The D.I.Y. movement seeks to transform America from a consumer-dominated society back to a producer-dominated society. It’s about empowering individuals, democratizing innovation, and freeing us from the materialist pushers that convince so many to spend their weekends at Wall Mart.

• Howtoons is the brand-spanking new D.I.Y. site for kids that suggests both it’s own projects and simple projects from other sources that are on a level that children, and myself, can master. Great comic art too.
• Instructables is “the brainchild of half a dozen or so MIT PhDs (Worldchanging, 95),” a community of DIY-minded folks who share their family secrets, personal discoveries, and inventions. The projects here run from the ridiculously simple to the advanced, but there are a lot of memes here beneficial to modern living. From Refrigerator Pickles, Geodesic Dome Greenhouse, How to Harvest Squid Ink, CD packaging into a flower pot, or the Headless Suzy Flashdrive doll. Also check out the 12 Volt Battery Hack that will save you $40 on button batteries for laser pointers and such.
• Makezine is indisputably the coolest of all DIY resources online, and their projects are the most advanced. With projects like DIY make a rubik’s cube out of dice, hand crank USB chargers, open source self balancing scooter, silver rings out of 50-cent coins, Solar Bags, Space Balloons, and Braille Graffiti. As you can tell from this last item, Makezine, like most DIY organizations, are also about making a statement with their work in addition to fun and independence.

I really wanted a picture of a fist with D.I.Y. tattooed on it for this post, but was unable to find any such thing online. So I wrote the acronym on my knuckles and snapped a photo of it with my cell phone real quick. I’m trying to rationalize this as being delightfully cheesy, rather than pathetically tacky… like most of my own DIY projects.

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World Changing, A User’s Guide for the 21st Century, Abrams, Worldchanging 2006, New York, NY.