We dropped all our streaming and a lot of other subscriptions and honestly haven't missed them. We changed how we did a few things, we buy less in general, and buy from more local places. And rely more on free groups and other similar resources. Mostly we've accepted a bit more inconvenience and delay (if I really want to watch something I'll see if it's easy to get online, otherwise we'll buy a dvd from a place, ask around on our free groups, or order it used on ebay (which is still bad for a few reasons but I'd say not as bad as amazon)). Sometimes it's annoying when we really want to watch something tonight and it's a week out at soonest but it's not a big deal.

I've put together a few book recommendations for lesser-known cyberpunk/tech noir stories:

The Other Kind of Life by Shamus Young - Cyberpunk / Tech Noir

The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth - Protocyberpunk

The Velvet Glove by Harry Harrison - Protocyberpunk short story

The Petrovitch Trilogy by Simon Morden - cyberpunk book series

Frontera by Lewis Shiner - Proto(?)cyberpunk Book

Between the massive corporate wealth at stake and the millions of people literally addicted to the product, it's hard now to imagine governments being able to ban them (and I lived through it).

Honestly watching people deny that COVID was real as it happened around them in real time kind of drove home to me that there was no way they'd recognize climate change. The longer time scale, and the fact that it's more difficult to link a specific disaster to a specific cause (vs uncle bob coughed on someone, then they went to the hospital and died) I think means climate change will be hard mode.

We get this in my hometown - people see the place, decide they want to live in the forest. They clearcut a chunk of it and build their house. Then when a bear wanders into their new yard (following the same territory it always has) they call the cops.

The temptation to mirror tint my rear windshield goes up every time I drive at night

This isn't the original, but I took the photo and cleaned it up a bit:

I use that thing a lot, but they usually drive close enough to get the side mirrors too, and generally light up the whole cab. So I spend however long they're behind me hunched forward to keep their brights out of my eyes, waiting for a passing zone. I'm not even a slow driver.

Recently I was listening to the podcast Knowledge Fight and heard musk speak for the first time on a twitter conference call thing with Alex Jones. I never knew how bad he is at public speaking

One thing that's probably worth noting is that duckweed appears to be a hyperaccumulator species for a bunch of heavy metals - that actually makes it additionally useful for phytoremediation, just watch where you're getting it from and what inputs it's receiving if you're growing it for food.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/....

https://www.sciencedirect.com/...

I don't think I can overstate how excited I am to finally share this thing. It's by far the largest solarpunk project I've finished - in fact it's the largest fiction project I've completed at all. At 300 pages it's longer than the game system's actual rulebook, and between the text, location and character art, maps, and paper evidence, it's pretty dang elaborate! In many ways, it represents a sort of amalgamation of all my rural solarpunk projects so far. If you like my postcard series, then playing this campaign should be the closest thing to stepping into that setting.

Personally, I also think it's a pretty solid introduction to solarpunk. My second player group were entirely friends from other parts of my life, none of whom were familiar with the genre beyond intuiting that it was similar to steam- and cyberpunk. Their investigation and the twists and turns of the mystery they were uncovering certainly kept their attention, but throughout the dozen two-hour game sessions, it was the chance to explore a grounded, optimistic future which seemed to really delight them. I ended up getting to share far more of my worldbuilding than I'd expected to just because they wanted to see more of the world, and the hopeful setting and the way it was influencing their real-life worldview came up several times when we talked about their experience.

It may be obvious from my other projects that worldbuilding is my favorite part of writing, and the TTRPG campaign format has allowed for an admittedly rather absurd amount of world - certainly more than I could have fit in a novel. After all, the players will determine which bits of the setting they'll engage with and dig into. That fact, combined with my preference for being able to play the part of a knowlegable character accurately, led to a lot of research and a lot of notes on everything from crop rotation to phytoremdiation.

The campaign provides dozens of locations to explore, from isolated homesteads and farms to deconstruction sites, rewilding/forestry camps, environmental restoration projects, and a modern agricultural village and food forest made from an abandoned development of McMansions around a golf course. You'll also find thirty-plus named NPCs with backstories and character art, maps with toggle-able layers for each discovery, evidence files, and location art.

It's also a sort of manifesto on solarpunk in rural New England: on the recent history of the region; how it looked and worked in the past; the changes which have shaped it into the sprawling, car-dependent, habitat-fragmented place it is today; and some of the ways it might change (good and bad) in a more solarpunk world.

One of my main goals was to explore various ways rural solarpunk could look, including questions of what makes for a genuinely sustainable community, what sort of tradeoffs and sacrifices a degrowth-based rural community may need to accept, and how towns and industries might look if they were to accept that they live in a world without limitless resources. It collects a lot of my thoughts on how the exurban "bedroom communities" I grew up in would change in a world where endless growth and a total reliance on cars are no longer the societal default. It examines various lifestyles and technologies that make sense in that context, as well as the kinds of people the area might attract. Along the way, it explores some of the aspects of life where people can independently arrive at solarpunk practices out of necessity or goals like individualist self-sufficiency.

In contrast to some of Fully Automated's Los Angeles setting, the campaign generally aims for a lower-tech, slightly more grounded look at rural areas.

It's also got some heavy environmental themes around conservation of wild land and watersheds: The primary setting is actively being deconstructed and rewilded, essentially being turned into a large natural park. The players can visit deconstruction sites, an unlined town dump in mid-excavation, a once-badly-damaged rewilding zone, phytoremediation sites (including one where they're rebuilding a wetland contaminated by cheap fill), beaver dam analogs on rivers, an enclave of fuel-engine mechanics, former sandpits, and more. Watersheds play a fairly large role in the story - the main map aims to show how old world borders split watersheds so they couldn't be managed effectively, treating rivers as boundaries rather than as shared resources. The town itself is divided into three watersheds which merge downstream. Only one has been poisoned, which can help the players isolate the source, but if they fail to find it, the poison will eventually follow the rivers as far as they go and contaminate everything downstream.

I'm very glad to have made this thing, and I really hope you'll check it out! And if you like it and would like to support us, please share it around! Email it to your friends, upload it to a file share site, leave it somewhere on a USB drive, whatever works for you!

I'm working on an interposed, bookbinding-ready version for anyone who wants a hardcopy version, but I need to make it myself before I'll know how tall the book block will be, and thus how thick to make the spine in the cover file. I also need to make a rear cover as my original plan had a different front (which never got finished) and would have used the current one as the back.

I've got a few other projects lined up to start once this thing is officially launched. I'm actually working on a gamebook version but, to my surprise, it's already becoming a distinct project, sharing a setting, some characters, and the broad strokes of the mystery and some of the plots from the campaigns but adding new characters and events. I'm interested to see how far it'll diverge from the campaign. Some of the changes I can spot from here - more built-out scenes, fewer charts and blunt chunks of worldbuilding - but a lot of the shifts are subtler and come from thinking about this place and events in a different context. I really hope it works out.

I'm also excited to get back to smaller-scale projects like the postcards, some bookbinding work, and some tech restoration.

Congrats! Sounds like a tricky fix and I'm glad you could get it to work!

Is disagreeing with the point really off topic? perestroika's comment looks well thought out it just doesn't agree. And frankly I'm ... skeptical of the argument that we can't stop a genocide because we'll be just as bad as the perpetrators.

We haven't found the upper limit yet, but with more research funding we can get closer

I guess I'm glad they did it this way. The ants got it way worse

Seems like local industry only wants to focus on ICE vehicles so there's not much to protect

I'm told by formerly-immune relatives that repeated exposures to poison ivy can make you start reacting to it. I'm not sure how that works or if something changed in their bodies as they got older but a few of them were certain it happened (they were older state workers and landscapers so they'd had plenty of contact and know how to identify it).

Like the satellite

I don't even know. I guess folks from the suburbs would call the cops and get an animal control officer to come out if they saw a bear in their yard? But my town was way too small to have animal control - theres like 2 cops and the emergency system switches over to the state troopers at night.

And again, bears live in the woods, of you build your house in their woods they're gonna walk on your deck occasionally.

Tools! With the exception of a few big power tools like a table saw or miter saw, where the new safety features make it worthwhile, I get everything I can used. I prefer stuff passed down from family with sentimental value, but I get a lot of my tools from Everything is Free, junk stores, yard sales, estate clean outs, swap shops etc.

Older tools tend to be simpler, easier to fix, and remarkably sturdy. I've read that the metallurgy wasn't as good sixty+ years ago so they overbuilt them a bit to compensate, and then decades of use weaned out the weaker ones, so anything left still working is basically survivorship-bias guaranteed. I've got a drill press that's been in the family for four generations and will probably outlast my grandkids.

They're cheaper, sturdier, easier to fix, generally well-documented online (sometimes better than the new stuff), and they don't come with sheaves of unnecessary styrofoam and plastic packaging. And they have history and stories in them, even if I don't always know what those stories are.