#solarpunk presentations

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

In 2023, the inaugural Solarpunk Conference was held in virtual space, bringing together over 150 attendees, 18 presenters, and creating a palpable sense of the solarpunk community. This episode, Ariel chats with conference organizers Charles Valsechi, Lindsay Jane, and Kees Schuller about the genesis of the conference, the inspiration for its theme, as well as a little preview of what they are hoping to see at the 2024 Solarpunk Conference: Rays of Resilience.

You can go to https://www.solarpunkconference.com/ to check out The Solarpunk Conference, access The Solarpunk Conference Journal, and buy tickets. You can also check out the channel  @solarpunkconference  on YouTube for recordings of last year’s presentations, and stop by Lindsay Jane's channel  @TheSolarpunkScene  for more solarpunky content!

[roseredsnow]

Stitch 3 from the book.

Woven circle, not quite the right tension and uneven spacing but hey.

[cozymushroom13]

You can use fabric to wrap your gifts, especially if you’re there when they are opened so you can take the fabric back and reuse it again and again and again.

Yes, a pillowcase, a t-shirt or a scarf work perfectly for this if you don’t have fabric laying around.

(I’ll use a scarf I’m also gifting to my mom to wrap her main present this year)

[justalittlesolarpunk]

I’ve teased it. You’ve waited. I’ve procrastinated. You’ve probably forgotten all about it.

But now, finally, I’m here with my solarpunk resources masterpost!

YouTube Channels:

Andrewism

The Solarpunk Scene

Solarpunk Life

Solarpunk Station

Our Changing Climate

Podcasts:

The Joy Report

How To Save A Planet

Demand Utopia

Solarpunk Presents

Outrage and Optimisim

From What If To What Next

Solarpunk Now

Idealistically

The Extinction Rebellion Podcast

The Landworkers' Radio

Wilder

What Could Possibly Go Right?

Frontiers of Commoning

The War on Cars

The Rewild Podcast

Solacene

Imagining Tomorrow

Live Like The World Is Dying

Books (Fiction):

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness The Dispossessed The Word for World is Forest

Becky Chambers: A Psalm for the Wild-Built A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

Phoebe Wagner: When We Hold Each Other Up

Phoebe Wagner, Bronte Christopher Wieland: Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation

Brenda J. Pierson, Claudie Arsenault: Wings of Renewal: A Solarpunk Dragon Anthology

Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro: Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World

Justine Norton-Kertson: Bioluminescent: A Lunarpunk Anthology

Sim Kern: The Free People’s Village

Ruthanna Emrys: A Half-Built Garden

Sarina Ulibarri: Glass & Gardens

Books (Non-fiction):

Murray Bookchin: The Ecology of Freedom

George Monbiot: Feral

Miles Olson: Unlearn, Rewild

Mark Shepard: Restoration Agriculture

Kristin Ohlson: The Soil Will Save Us

Rowan Hooper: How To Spend A Trillion Dollars

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing: The Mushroom At The End of The World

Kimberly Nicholas: Under The Sky We Make

Robin Wall Kimmerer: Braiding Sweetgrass

David Miller: Solved

Ayana Johnson, Katharine Wilkinson: All We Can Save

Jonathan Safran Foer: We Are The Weather

Colin Tudge: Six Steps Back To The Land

Edward Wilson: Half-Earth

Natalie Fee: How To Save The World For Free

Kaden Hogan: Humans of Climate Change

Rebecca Huntley: How To Talk About Climate Change In A Way That Makes A Difference

Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac: The Future We Choose

Jonathon Porritt: Hope In Hell

Paul Hawken: Regeneration

Mark Maslin: How To Save Our Planet

Katherine Hayhoe: Saving Us

Jimmy Dunson: Building Power While The Lights Are Out

Paul Raekstad, Sofa Saio Gradin: Prefigurative Politics

Andreas Malm: How To Blow Up A Pipeline

Phoebe Wagner, Bronte Christopher Wieland: Almanac For The Anthropocene

Chris Turner: How To Be A Climate Optimist

William MacAskill: What We Owe To The Future

Mikaela Loach: It's Not That Radical

Miles Richardson: Reconnection

David Harvey: Spaces of Hope Rebel Cities

Eric Holthaus: The Future Earth

Zahra Biabani: Climate Optimism

David Ehrenfeld: Becoming Good Ancestors

Stephen Gliessman: Agroecology

Chris Carlsson: Nowtopia

Jon Alexander: Citizens

Leah Thomas: The Intersectional Environmentalist

Greta Thunberg: The Climate Book

Jen Bendell, Rupert Read: Deep Adaptation

Seth Godin: The Carbon Almanac

Jane Goodall: The Book of Hope

Vandana Shiva: Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture

Amitav Ghosh: The Great Derangement

Minouche Shafik: What We Owe To Each Other

Dieter Helm: Net Zero

Chris Goodall: What We Need To Do Now

Aldo Leopold: A Sand County Almanac

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stephanie Foote: The Cambridge Companion To The Environmental Humanities

Bella Lack: The Children of The Anthropocene

Hannah Ritchie: Not The End of The World

Chris Turner: How To Be A Climate Optimist

Kim Stanley Robinson: Ministry For The Future

Fiona Mathews, Tim Kendall: Black Ops & Beaver Bombing

Jeff Goodell: The Water Will Come

Lynne Jones: Sorry For The Inconvenience But This Is An Emergency

Helen Crist: Abundant Earth

Sam Bentley: Good News, Planet Earth!

Timothy Beal: When Time Is Short

Andrew Boyd: I Want A Better Catastrophe

Kristen R. Ghodsee: Everyday Utopia

Elizabeth Cripps: What Climate Justice Means & Why We Should Care

Kylie Flanagan: Climate Resilience

Chris Johnstone, Joanna Macy: Active Hope

Mark Engler: This is an Uprising

Anne Therese Gennari: The Climate Optimist Handbook

Magazines:

Solarpunk Magazine

Positive News

Resurgence & Ecologist

Ethical Consumer

Films (Fiction):

How To Blow Up A Pipeline

The End We Start From

Woman At War

Black Panther

Star Trek

Tomorrowland

Films (Documentary):

2040: How We Can Save The Planet

The People vs Big Oil

Wild Isles

The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind

Generation Green New Deal

Planet Earth III

Video Games:

Terra Nil

Animal Crossing

Gilded Shadows

Anno 2070

Stardew Valley

RPGs:

Solarpunk Futures

Perfect Storm

Fully Automated

Advocacy Groups:

A22 Network

Extinction Rebellion

Greenpeace

Friends of The Earth

Green New Deal Rising

Apps:

Ethy

Sojo

BackMarket

Depop

Vinted

Olio

Buy Nothing

Too Good To Go

Websites:

European Co-housing

UK Co-housing

US Co-housing

Brought By Bike (connects you with zero-carbon delivery goods)

ClimateBase (find a sustainable career)

Environmentjob (ditto)

Businesses (🤢):

Ethical Superstore

Hodmedods

Fairtransport/Sail Cargo Alliance

Let me know if you think there’s anything I’ve missed!

[ectoberhaunt]

Ectoberhaunt 2024: Past and Future

Y'all ready for this? Here is our prompt list for the event this year! (Please clap) What's this? A triple prompt for the first day? That's right! We're celebrating the Phandom new and old for our favorite ghost boy's 20th anniversary with a theme centered around the passage of time and what that could mean to Danny and his rogue's gallery. As always, our last prompt day is the 24th where we hand off to @ectoberweekofficial for their event. This makes our free days October 5th, 6th, 19th, 20th, and the 24th to Halloween this year. Please tag all prompt fills as "ectoberhaunt24" so we can find your posts, and follow the guidelines below the cut.

Posting for this event begins Monday, October 1st!

Down below are our written out calendar prompts (for accessibility) AND our posting guidelines. Check 'em out!\

The Prompts

Below are the listed prompts in date order, if it's blank it's a catch up day. First prompt is Past and second is Future.

Past, Present, & Future

Dinosaur & Robot

Archaeology & Meteorology

Came Back Wrong

-

-

Bury & Unearth

Pirate Ship & Spaceship

Rise & Fall

Creepy & Wet

Dark and Stormy Night

Isekai: Past Prompt (Here)

Isekai: Old Hero, New World

Cult Classic & Murder Mystery

Science Fiction & Double Feature

Bloom & Wither

Gothic Horror & Cosmic Horror

Mirror Image

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-

Analog & Digital

Steampunk & Solarpunk

Big Bang & Heat Death

Time Loop

Ectober Week: 25-31

Post Guidelines

The following are the posting guidelines. Please follow them so we can reblog and share your posts without issue. We will also have this as a post available on our blog separately.

Tag all posts with “Ectoberhaunt24” so we can find it. If you do not use this tag, we may not find you.

Tag which calendar you're pulling from (“EH Past” or “EH Future”), which day the prompt is for ("Day X"). You do NOT need to tag which prompt it is for, but PLEASE put it somewhere in the post so we know which prompt you are filling- if you do not do this we will likely not reblog it.

Put your fics under a readmore. Add a summary before the cut with a short preview, content warnings, and which prompts were used. Then, add a readmore no more than 150 words or 10 lines/groups of text under your summary. If you're using mobile, type :readmore: and hit enter to make a readmore. If you do not do this, we will NOT reblog your post.

Make sure to tag all common content warnings (blood, gore, death, drugs, body horror, existentialism, & vermin)

We will try to reblog every prompt we can. Feel free to @ us in the post too or send us a DM with the post!!

Here's a handy dandy google sheet to keep track of your own progress, simply make your own copy and mess with it -> LINK

Banner graphic by @kawaiijohn

Calendar Graphics by @ajitated (template) and @five-rivers (composition)

Google sheet by @ajitated and @jackdaw-sprite

Happy creating!!

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

In this episode, Ariel interviews Doug Jones from Waterloo Region Community Garden Network, and he discusses about how the Network was started, what it does, and the benefits of gardening for the health and wellbeing not only for you but for your entire community. We discuss gleaning, food insecurity, access to land, and much more; this is an episode you’re going to want to listen to, especially if rising cost of food and food security are concerns for you these days.

I (Ariel) have included some links to the local organizations he mentions, as well as some that expand on some of the topics we discussed.

*Carol Popovich was the public health nurse who worked with Doug to create the original Waterloo Region Community Garden Council.

Links:

Waterloo Region Community Garden Network official site: https://wrcgardennetwork.ca/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WRCGN/

“Cost of a Healthy Diet: A Population-Representative Comparison of 3 Diet Cost Methods in Canada” - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39270849/ “Every hour children spend on screens raises chance of myopia, study finds” https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/21/every-hour-children-spend-on-screens-raises-chance-of-myopia-study-finds

“Cura Annonae” aka grain dole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cura_annonae

“Addressing vitamin D deficiency in Canada: a public health innovation whose time has come” - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20413135/

Iodine Deficiency on the rise in Canada- https://blog.mdpi.com/2022/08/19/iodine-deficiency-canada/

The Raw Carrot: https://therawcarrot.com/

Eat With Afia: https://www.instagram.com/eatwithafia/

[rnope-c1e]

Hello everyone! I'd like to present to you:

Solarpunk daylight setting system!!!

What is this? This is a way of categorizing and defining solarpunk futures by how far in the future they are by using the natural daylight concept!

The Solarpunk daylight system is supposed to help define your setting, but it's not supposed to limit you in any way!!! It's also supposed to make it easier to search for particular settings in stories :D

🌱Morning Solarpunk 🌄

(Today or Seedling Solarpunk)

Morning Solarpunk resembles the world of today, it resembles the sprouts of solarpunk in societies and our current struggle under capitalism, it resembles the beginning of change.

Morning solarpunk can be happening in twenty-first century or prior.

Defining elements:

Everything you can do today to be solarpunk is what morning solarpunk is! Visibly mended clothing and tools, art on the streets in all forms, guerrilla gardening and permaculture gardens, communities uniting and people joining climate action.

Peaceful Anarchist, Violent World by kayas-kosmos

🪴Noon Solarpunk ☀️

(Tomorrow or Flowering Solarpunk)

Noon solarpunk resembles post-capitalist world or world where significant effort in abolishing capitalism is done. Things are already better, but the scars of the old world are still visible.

Noon Solarpunk is supposed to show us better times and answer the question, what happens on the next day after revolution and in the following years.

Defining elements:

Taking lots of stuff from morning solarpunk and making them more pronounced, repurposed old infrastructure, we can see new solarpunk architecture (sustainable and integrated into nature) appearing, all tech is powered by renewable energy and easily repairable, community gardens everywhere.

Art by mimiitambonne

🌻Evening Solarpunk 🌇

(The day after tomorrow or Ripening Solarpunk)

Evening solarpunk resembles late stage solarpunk world, pure science fiction! This is stories of our successors and how they are living in new refined world!

Defining elements:

Defined by being futuristic, practically unrecognizable from modern age, new hi-tech solarpunk technologies (low tech stuff still exists btw), go as CRAZY as you CAN to show marvelous bright future!

Art by thalieshelen

Things are bound to change and get more refined, please submit your ideas on how this system can be improved! :D

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

This is amazing. Also, we have an episode where we talk to Justine Norton-Kertson about Bioluminescent before it was released which, if you're interested, you can listen to here: https://shows.acast.com/solarpunk-futures/episodes/interview-with-justine-norton-kertson-about-bioluminescence-

(It was made when SP was still a bb spinoff of Solarpunk Futures pod ;) )

An Overview Over the Solarpunk Anthologies

I thought, where I am already here, trying to get everyone to engage with Solarpunk as more than just an aesthetic and pretty flowers, I should give a quick overview over the Solarpunk antholigies, that have been released so far.

Note that so far most releases within the genre are in fact short stories. Though if anyone is interested, I can make a list of the novels I am aware of!

Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World is pretty much how the genre got its start. The book was originally released in Brazil and only recently had been translated into the English language. It only covers a few stories, but those are a bit longer than your average short story to make up for it.

Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation has been quoted by many writers in the genre to have been a massive inspiration to them. The stories are very diverse and cover lots of ground.

Wings of Renewal: A Solarpunk Dragon Anthology is probably the weirdest out of this bunch. While all of the other anthologies mostly focus on either SciFi settings or stories set in the here and now, Wings of Renewal mixes Solarpunk with Fantasy elements. At times those stories are SciFi, too, at times they are really mostly fantastical.

Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers explores a wide variety of Solarpunk settings, some hopeful, some less optimistic. It is mostly set in warm and hot scenarios, though those can also vary quite a bit.

Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Winters then went ahead as a "sequel" of sorts to explore the concept of Solarpunk in colder climates.

Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures has probably to be my favorite one from the anthologies edited by Serena Udaberri. It explores how humans and animals can live together in Urban settings. And once again, the stories vary from those set in a more futuristic and a more present setting a lot.

Fighting for the Future is the most recent of those anthologies, as it has only released last month. (And yes, this also means: I have not yet read it at all.) It features stories of Cyberpunk and Solarpunk futures - as well as stories where both intertwine!

Bioluminescent: A Lunarpunk Anthology is exactly what it says on the cover. An anthology featuring Lunarpunk stories. So Solarpunk with a bit more mysticism to go with it. And as this also only has released earlier this year I admittedly also have not gotten around to reading it yet.

This does remind me though: Would anyone be interested in me writing mini reviews to the stories in those anthologies?

[half-fantasyfreak]

calling for the dismantling of the bad parts of our society and government is all well and good, but unless we come up with something to replace it with, something to fight for, as opposed to fighting against, we have no real standing and we are doomed to fail. I so far like the ideas presented by eco-socialism, and the possible views into the future that solarpunk lets us peek into. (just learned about these like. today. so I obviously do not know a whole lot, and these are not set in stone as what I for sure want for our society)

[simplydroid]

`` Long ago, two races ruled over Earth: Humans and Monsters... ``

ᡣ𐭩 Presenting Solartale! This is my own new AU/timeline of Undertale where, simply, the underground advanced into solarpunk technology to survive rather than how monsters live in the underground now. ⋆˚࿔

(Of course, this AU is still a WIP, so the storyline, character designs, worldbuilding, etc. is not near done, but I will update everyone with each new thing.)

ᝰ.ᐟ Solartale starts off normally, the human & monster war starts, humans are victorious, and monsters are banished to the underground. Through very strong attempts to break through the barrier, however, the king manages to make a strong blow and their efforts paid to make sunlight reach through the underground. No monster knew if they were open enough to actually fly through, but the royal scientists reused failing technology they had to both take the light sources for energy and to grow more food sources for each monster in the underground. As time went on, it advanced more each few years, creating a perfect environment for them. ᝰ.ᐟ Then, of course, the Human falls to this fresh underground from their harsh surface, and if they choose wisely, they'll soon learn more valuable skills for them that they've never even known..

^ Current designs for our beloved main characters so far ✮⋆˙

⋆˙⟡ Of course, any of these characters are available for ask no matter how much I work on this and the more designs I make, the more characters available! ⭑.ᐟ I hope you guys enjoy this AU as much as me, as I said, feel free to ask them anything, you're free to draw them, take inspo, just please be sure to give me credit ;}!

Thank you and goodnight ᯓ★

[auntieashleydark]

I like solarpunk as a theme or concept, but most solarpunk art doesn't quite work for me. For the most part, you've got Manhattan, But With Lots Of Trees or Happy Cottagecore With Robots.

What's missing, for me, is a sense of connection with where we are now. Both of the standard solarpunk visions present a world that has already been completely transformed. There's no hint of what it took to get from now to then, no evidence of what people had to overcome, to sacrifice, to pull humanity out of its ecological nose-dive.

I'd love to see a solarpunk city depicted in the process of being rebuilt. Show me old buildings being torn down, and new ones being built from the salvaged materials. Show me a tower with hanging gardens and wind turbines that's clearly a modified, pre-existing structure. Show me a lovely green zone that's still expanding into a reclaimed industrial park.

Maybe it's just me, but depictions of good futures fell like pure, unattainable fantasy without a connection to the present. For me, hope comes with imagining the path that gets us there.

[the-bramble--patch]

:0 @solar-sunnyside-up I don't want to assume but I think you meant to tag me? V glad you like my work :). Yeah I've been seeing a lot of this type of complaint in the tag recently. It's crazy because I feel like most of the stuff I end up reblogging from the solarpunks I follow is political! We're posting about strikes and the climate and social services etc. Just because it's not the most philosophical tag doesn't mean politics aren't happening. I think some people fail to see the political power of a garden.

i think solarpunk is too much of an aesthetic. that tag is full of pretty photos of flowers. isn't it supposed to be an anarchist movement? the anarchism tag has actual deep conversations about politics and protests. the solarpunk tag is just 🌼🌻🌴☀️. where is the anarchy? you can do more than plant things. thats great and all, but few people seem to remember that its a political movement. put the punk back in solarpunk

[punkeropercyjackson]

hey hey just out of curiosity what are all your Percy Jackson hcs? (Gender, sexuality, and otherwise)

Percy's full name is Perseo Isadore Jackson.Perseus dosen't roll off the tongue in spanish and Isadore is both a greek name and a black name

Multietchnic but monoracial.Poseidon is a black greek,Sally is a second gen dominican inmigrant with two black parents and Percy considers himself american out of New Yorker pride

He's darkskinned with a blue undertone that glows in the moonlight,really strong and regal facial features and such afrotextured hair it can't be silkpressed thanks to a literal black god for a dad.He was on the scrawny side in Tlt from being underfed(blame Smelly Gabe restricting Sally's african/latina diaspora mom urge to stuff her kids beyond full) but chunked up as the series went on as visual character development and a healing journey.By his twenties,he's got a dad bod and he's been hairy his whole life and dosen't even own a razor and he's 6'4 and he's more gruff yet sweet dad-shaped than ever

He's actually not adhd-He's audhd.The autism is undiagnosed due to higher stigma around it than adhd and he was called the r slur a lot growing up,hence why he repeated it so easily and so defensively to defend Tyson when he was called one in Som(speaking of which........i think we all know in-charactely and realistically he would've stood by him after he was claimed.It is Percyish in prostect though he was perfectly okay with Tyson when he thought he just had Down Syndrome but got grossed out when he found out he's a monster.Reverse ableism).Blue food is his safe food,Riptide is a comfort item,he wears loose clothes as he needs room to breath,his special interests are blue,kidcore,anarchy,child care,the sea,cats,video games,the Superfam and energy drinks,half the time he's standing it's in raptor hands,he meows as his main vocal stim and when he was nine,Sally intended to enroll him to a Special ED School but he overheard her on a phone call with the staff and melted down so hard she never brought it up again.They both regret it to this day and wonder what could've been

He also has bpd and bipolar disorder to go with the ptsd(he's still dyslexic too,dw).I've been considering schizophrenic Percy too for a friend of mine who's schizophrenic and headcanons it on love towards Percy and reclaiming it from Dark Percy hoes turning him into a demonized stereotype of her disorder

Transfem bigender.Masc Percy isn't real,in the books she never shows any liking towards masculinity and manhood and she gives me big time femme vibes.Her pronouns are he/she/they and a hoard of Percycore neos(blue/cookie/lego/dude/paw/scale/meow/sparkle/pix/wave/stitch)and she looks perfectly androgynous through a mix of natural genderqueer swag and only bits of physical transition i.e she was on estrogen for a while but decided to not get any surgeries.Her presentation is only feminine but she likes masc terms almost as much as fem terms and hates being seen as just a feminine guy rather than a feminine guy who's also a feminine girl.Call her a f*mboy and she'll drown you on land.She's bidemi too and fw's queerplatonic dating

Her aesthetics and subcultures are afropunk,solarpunk,kidcore,mermaidcore and black indie.Meaning she dresses punk but like irl punks and not the posers on tv created by normies on deliberate innacuracy,in earthy black girl styles but almost exclusively using blue clothes,wears things like decora-y pastel/girly y2k fits,mermaid inspired and sea based clothing items and outfits you'd see on manic pixie dream girls denifers.Waterproof glitter is a Percy trademark and so is somehow black lipgloss and she only wears revealing clothes if it's an alt thing,including swimsuits.She had different hair per book too:Baby breads(tlt),wicks(ttc),twists(tlo),an afro turned into dreads with muscle memory during the climax and added sea material diy'd beads in the next book(som and moa),locs from growing so long she needed to switch(post-Hoo)and dying yellow,aqua,pink and purple streaks in them(egg crack at nineteen).Percy's piercings are a standard double eyebrow piercing,a spider bite,forward helix on both ears and a tongue ring and were done at home

On Percy's twelfth birthday,Sally bought her a blue nintendo ds she saved up for for months as a complete surprise and it was Percy's only console for the longest time so she used and cherished it greatly and hunted down obscure cartridges for it and stacked it in personalization.Nowadays she has a tamagotchi collection and her own at home gaming setup but she still has her precious first gamer device tucked away in her closet and breaks it out when she's feeling extra sad or wants to be sappy with someone important to her

Her favorite music genres are post-hardcore,nu-metal,lo-fi chiptunes,rap and bedroom rock.Her favorite blue flavors are blue velvet,bubblegum and cookie monster.Her favorite sea animal is sharks and she also hates dolphins.Her favorite disney princess,male character,movie and show are Cinderella 1997/Brandy Cinderella,a tie between Oswald The Lucky Rabbit and Max Goof,Big Hero 6 and Phineas and Ferb but she actually hates Ariel,Eric and The Little Mermaid as a whole and finds Finding Nemo an overrated cornfest and the constant in-universe jokes and assumptions aimed at her over them are the root along with them just not appealing to her.Her favorite superhero is Clark Kent and she never watched Mcu movies as a kid as she was too busy reading comics she bought at the local comic book shop near La Residencia Jackson and thinks Bruce Wayne is a chump and sometimes went on forums to spite oldhead poser comics nerds with citations and facts and she owns a mountain of squishmallows that include some scattered dc and marvel heroes and Starfire half defined her taste in women,the other half of that honor going to Brandy Cinderella(she had Cinderella 1997 on DVD too!!).Her favorite toy and favorite book series are Polly Pocket and Warrior Cats

Loves stop motion movies,roguelike rps,time management games,weird ceramics,magnetic hairclips,unusually shaped candles,aquatic life taxidermy,vinyl records,glow in the dark stickers,affectionate nonsexual bites(giving and recieving + hard enough to leave a mark but not enough to draw blood)and dipping burgers in milkshakes

Potty mouth or should i say,swears like a sailor.Percy's also vulgar but not a pervert i.e her humor dives into dirty jokes sometimes but purely for the bit, she's not a horny person nor does she like flirting for the sake of it

Rachel was an autistic black girl✋🏼Her and Percy were the real deal,queerplatonic black love and unpalpable symptoms frightens the normies and yes i mean Percy proship stans.They caught up on childhood together by doing kid stuff they didn't get to when they were younger and experiencing teenagehood together as alternative teenagers specifically.Rachel is an actual art hoe,a black woman dedicated to her crafts and anti-capitalism/anti-consummerism,and her and Percy started their punk studies as a team leading up participating in the culture as a team too and she hangs out at Percy's me place regularly and they're thee red-coded/blue-coded duo of ever and share clothes and Rachel beat people up for sexually harassing Percy over her apperance and Percy doodled them together a lot

Nico and Hazel are her platonic soulmates in every universe.It literally dosen't matter who you(general you!)ship Percy with,seperating the Dead Sea Siblings is infuckingsane and the worst characterization dynamic possible.Nico and Percy spent the year gap inbetween botl and tlo reconnecting and bonding as they should've so Sally adopts Nico once Percy convinces him he deserves better than Hades and this happens with the final nail in the coffin of Hades insulting Percy and Nico going off on him so while his father is in shock,Nico frees Percy from his trap and Persephone prevents Hades from intervening further in their lives on wanting to be freed from Hades herself.Persephone does a slow gambit of becoming the queen of the underworld without a king and part of it is asking Nico and Percy to ressurect Hazel so she can be part of the Second Great Prophecy and Hazel lives as part time Camp Jupiter black sheep,part time 1930s New Orleans girl living in a 2010s Manhattan world.Life level two is easier on her than her starter,albeit Marie was a good mom to avoid misogynoir and the voodoo bits are totally cut to avoid even further stereotyping,and she has two of the best brothers anyone could ever ask for and who she never knew she wanted,her adultification trauma not letting her dare to dream of a real childhood.Percy functions as a dad to her too and Sally stays beating the deadbeat parent allegations and Hazel learns to form her own self of entierly her own will,wishes,whimsy and worthiness

Rather than Toa/Trials of Apollo,the third and final greco-roman core series is Tods/Tales of Dead Seas,titled after and starring your favorite siblings' favorite siblings!!It takes place one year after Hoo and spans over four years in four books ft.a Hazel sidebook 'Hazel-Blood' and the plot is kicked off by Percy killing Zeus because he tried to hurt Hazel for talking back to him.Thus happens a revolution fixing the system to turn it into a good one and give everyone a better world and the gods and other oppressors consequences for their actions.Nico and Hazel attend the Special ED School Percy was supposed to and are known as the nerdgy cringe goth activist boy(affectionate)and the cool popular pastel goth IT girl with her shit together who's nice to everybody and encourages them to be who they are and when her first art showcase comes,Percy powers through to go and support her and brings a bag of blue marshmallow cupcakes,blue food sticks and ensure bottles for them and their classmates like a PTA mom.All the kids admired him so much it cured any ill feelings he had on the place so he shows up regularly and the teachers at it are the only ones he's ever respected

Also in Tods,Hestia gives him The Backhomepack-a blue backpack containing infinite supplies she crafted for him to help on his journey as she thought it suited him better than a weapon.He's a lover,a fighter and a father so it was perfect for him.In Tods too,Sally opens up Familia Jackson Beach Shack as a family bussiness and Percy NEVER goes to college and works for her Mamí because going to college isn't nor does it need to be everyone's endgoal.......especially not someone who was suicidal before they were even thirteen purely on how the school system treated them(have a concious,eggheads).And in Hoh,him and Hazel swapped plots-Hazel fell into Tartarus in Moa so she was fleshed out as an underworld kid and earned the nickname The Princess Of The Underworld And The Unknown and Percy was chosen by Hecate so he made his own path as a conclusion to his narrative dooming by destiny.On Nico,no retcons for gay torture porn,he's accepted at Camp Half-Blood just like we literally saw at Pjo's end and him and Hazel are the other mcs' baby brother and baby sister and him and Leo in particular share a braincell and with Hazel too as their own subtrio/mini trinity(shorties squad!!):The Gummies Trio.Leo is cursed with Best Friend's Brother and Stacy's Brother applicability(Thalia is Stacy.Leocentric Valgraceson #FOR DA WIN).And Tlo Percy wasn't robbed so she became the Hero Of The Great Prophecy as she killed Luke and put the ball in the court of the roll up to The First Last War aka Tods

Percy moodboard right here

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Real innovation vs Silicon Valley nonsense

This is the LAST DAY to get my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

If there was any area where we needed a lot of "innovation," it's in climate tech. We've already blown through numerous points-of-no-return for a habitable Earth, and the pace is accelerating.

Silicon Valley claims to be the epicenter of American innovation, but what passes for innovation in Silicon Valley is some combination of nonsense, climate-wrecking tech, and climate-wrecking nonsense tech. Forget Jeff Hammerbacher's lament about "the best minds of my generation thinking about how to make people click ads." Today's best-paid, best-trained technologists are enlisted to making boobytrapped IoT gadgets:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

Planet-destroying cryptocurrency scams:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho

NFT frauds:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/06/crypto-copyright-%f0%9f%a4%a1%f0%9f%92%a9/

Or planet-destroying AI frauds:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

If that was the best "innovation" the human race had to offer, we'd be fucking doomed.

But – as Ryan Cooper writes for The American Prospect – there's a far more dynamic, consequential, useful and exciting innovation revolution underway, thanks to muscular public spending on climate tech:

https://prospect.org/environment/2024-05-30-green-energy-revolution-real-innovation/

The green energy revolution – funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act and the Science Act – is accomplishing amazing feats, which are barely registering amid the clamor of AI nonsense and other hype. I did an interview a while ago about my climate novel The Lost Cause and the interviewer wanted to know what role AI would play in resolving the climate emergency. I was momentarily speechless, then I said, "Well, I guess maybe all the energy used to train and operate models could make it much worse? What role do you think it could play?" The interviewer had no answer.

Here's brief tour of the revolution:

2023 saw 32GW of new solar energy come online in the USA (up 50% from 2022);

Wind increased from 118GW to 141GW;

Grid-scale batteries doubled in 2023 and will double again in 2024;

EV sales increased from 20,000 to 90,000/month.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/blog/2023/12/19/building-a-thriving-clean-energy-economy-in-2023-and-beyond/

The cost of clean energy is plummeting, and that's triggering other areas of innovation, like using "hot rocks" to replace fossil fuel heat (25% of overall US energy consumption):

https://rondo.com/products

Increasing our access to cheap, clean energy will require a lot of materials, and material production is very carbon intensive. Luckily, the existing supply of cheap, clean energy is fueling "green steel" production experiments:

https://www.wdam.com/2024/03/25/americas-1st-green-steel-plant-coming-perry-county-1b-federal-investment/

Cheap, clean energy also makes it possible to recover valuable minerals from aluminum production tailings, a process that doubles as site-remediation:

https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/toxic-red-mud-co2-free-iron

And while all this electrification is going to require grid upgrades, there's lots we can do with our existing grid, like power-line automation that increases capacity by 40%:

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/13/1187620367/power-grid-enhancing-technologies-climate-change

It's also going to require a lot of storage, which is why it's so exciting that we're figuring out how to turn decommissioned mines into giant batteries. During the day, excess renewable energy is channeled into raising rock-laden platforms to the top of the mine-shafts, and at night, these unspool, releasing energy that's fed into the high-availability power-lines that are already present at every mine-site:

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/02/06/this-disused-mine-in-finland-is-being-turned-into-a-gravity-battery-to-store-renewable-ene

Why are we paying so much attention to Silicon Valley pump-and-dumps and ignoring all this incredible, potentially planet-saving, real innovation? Cooper cites a plausible explanation from the Apperceptive newsletter:

https://buttondown.email/apperceptive/archive/destructive-investing-and-the-siren-song-of/

Silicon Valley is the land of low-capital, low-labor growth. Software development requires fewer people than infrastructure and hard goods manufacturing, both to get started and to run as an ongoing operation. Silicon Valley is the place where you get rich without creating jobs. It's run by investors who hate the idea of paying people. That's why AI is so exciting for Silicon Valley types: it lets them fantasize about making humans obsolete. A company without employees is a company without labor issues, without messy co-determination fights, without any moral consideration for others. It's the natural progression for an industry that started by misclassifying the workers in its buildings as "contractors," and then graduated to pretending that millions of workers were actually "independent small businesses."

It's also the natural next step for an industry that hates workers so much that it will pretend that their work is being done by robots, and then outsource the labor itself to distant Indian call-centers (no wonder Indian techies joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians"):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds

Contrast this with climate tech: this is a profoundly physical kind of technology. It is labor intensive. It is skilled. The workers who perform it have power, both because they are so far from their employers' direct oversight and because these fed-funded sectors are more likely to be unionized than Silicon Valley shops. Moreover, climate tech is capital intensive. All of those workers are out there moving stuff around: solar panels, wires, batteries.

Climate tech is infrastructural. As Deb Chachra writes in her must-read 2023 book How Infrastructure Works, infrastructure is a gift we give to our descendants. Infrastructure projects rarely pay for themselves during the lives of the people who decide to build them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

Climate tech also produces gigantic, diffused, uncapturable benefits. The "social cost of carbon" is a measure that seeks to capture how much we all pay as polluters despoil our shared world. It includes the direct health impacts of burning fossil fuels, and the indirect costs of wildfires and extreme weather events. The "social savings" of climate tech are massive:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/climate-and-health-benefits-of-wind-and-solar-dwarf-all-subsidies/

For every MWh of renewable power produced, we save $100 in social carbon costs. That's $100 worth of people not sickening and dying from pollution, $100 worth of homes and habitats not burning down or disappearing under floodwaters. All told, US renewables have delivered $250,000,000,000 (one quarter of one trillion dollars) in social carbon savings over the past four years:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/climate-and-health-benefits-of-wind-and-solar-dwarf-all-subsidies/

In other words, climate tech is unselfish tech. It's a gift to the future and to the broad public. It shares its spoils with workers. It requires public action. By contrast, Silicon Valley is greedy tech that is relentlessly focused on the shortest-term returns that can be extracted with the least share going to labor. It also requires massive public investment, but it also totally committed to giving as little back to the public as is possible.

No wonder America's richest and most powerful people are lining up to endorse and fund Trump:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-05-30-democracy-deshmocracy-mega-financiers-flocking-to-trump/

Silicon Valley epitomizes Stafford Beer's motto that "the purpose of a system is what it does." If Silicon Valley produces nothing but planet-wrecking nonsense, grifty scams, and planet-wrecking, nonsensical scams, then these are all features of the tech sector, not bugs.

As Anil Dash writes:

Driving change requires us to make the machine want something else. If the purpose of a system is what it does, and we don’t like what it does, then we have to change the system.

https://www.anildash.com/2024/05/29/systems-the-purpose-of-a-system/

To give climate tech the attention, excitement, and political will it deserves, we need to recalibrate our understanding of the world. We need to have object permanence. We need to remember just how few people were actually using cryptocurrency during the bubble and apply that understanding to AI hype. Only 2% of Britons surveyed in a recent study use AI tools:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c511x4g7x7jo

If we want our tech companies to do good, we have to understand that their ground state is to create planet-wrecking nonsense, grifty scams, and planet-wrecking, nonsensical scams. We need to make these companies small enough to fail, small enough to jail, and small enough to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

We need to hold companies responsible, and we need to change the microeconomics of the board room, to make it easier for tech workers who want to do good to shout down the scammers, nonsense-peddlers and grifters:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

Yesterday, a federal judge ruled that the FTC could hold Amazon executives personally liable for the decision to trick people into signing up for Prime, and for making the unsubscribe-from-Prime process into a Kafka-as-a-service nightmare:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/amazon-execs-may-be-personally-liable-for-tricking-users-into-prime-sign-ups/

Imagine how powerful a precedent this could set. The Amazon employees who vociferously objected to their bosses' decision to make Prime as confusing as possible could have raised the objection that doing this could end up personally costing those bosses millions of dollars in fines:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

We need to make climate tech, not Big Tech, the center of our scrutiny and will. The climate emergency is so terrifying as to be nearly unponderable. Science fiction writers are increasingly being called upon to try to frame this incomprehensible risk in human terms. SF writer (and biologist) Peter Watts's conversation with evolutionary biologist Dan Brooks is an eye-opener:

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-collapse-is-coming-will-humanity-adapt/

They draw a distinction between "sustainability" meaning "what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it?" and sustainability meaning, "what changes in behavior will allow us to save ourselves with the technology that is possible?"

Writing about the Watts/Brooks dialog for Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith invokes William Gibson's The Peripheral:

With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before…. Ways to print food that required much less in the way of actual food to begin with. So everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05/preparing-for-collapse-why-the-focus-on-climate-energy-sustainability-is-destructive.html

Gibson doesn't think this is likely, mind, and even if it's attainable, it will come amidst "unimaginable suffering."

But the universe of possible technologies is quite large. As Chachra points out in How Infrastructure Works, we could give every person on Earth a Canadian's energy budget (like an American's, but colder), by capturing a mere 0.4% of the solar radiation that reaches the Earth's surface every day. Doing this will require heroic amounts of material and labor, especially if we're going to do it without destroying the planet through material extraction and manufacturing.

These are the questions that we should be concerning ourselves with: what behavioral changes will allow us to realize cheap, abundant, green energy? What "innovations" will our society need to focus on the things we need, rather than the scams and nonsense that creates Silicon Valley fortunes?

How can we use planning, and solidarity, and codetermination to usher in the kind of tech that makes it possible for us to get through the climate bottleneck with as little death and destruction as possible? How can we use enforcement, discernment, and labor rights to thwart the enshittificatory impulses of Silicon Valley's biggest assholes?

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/30/posiwid/#social-cost-of-carbon

[alpaca-clouds]

Childhood in a Solarpunk Future

Two weeks ago I went to a book presentation of a book that basically tackles how freaking child-unfriendly our modern society is. And yeah, that is a good point. The modern world hates children - while obviously complaining constantly that there are not enough of them. So basically they want kids to exist (obviously preferably white, middle-to-upperclass kids, not those poor kids or non-white kids). But they also want them to exist somewhere where they cannot be seen and heard and do not bother adults. Outside of it being financially nearly impossible for many of us to raise children (I for one really want one or two kids - but I cannot afford it), the world out there really is not made for kids. The expection is basically that we put kids for the whole day into the "kid-holding-system" that is mainly designed to keep kids out of the world. KIndergarten at first, then school, that also has the second goal of somehow creating little worker drones for the economy to grow. No wonder that kids these days do dream of becoming Youtubers, Twitch Streamers or Tiktokers.

But the thing about Solarpunk of course is, that it is meant to be an utopia, where things would not have to be that dire. So, how would a childhood in a Solarpunk world look like? Or rather: How could we improve childhoods. Because let's face it, we have the ability to do so today. We just have a bunch of politicians who do not want that.

Now, one thing first: I am always going to assume that a Solarpunk future is being run under the communist principle of "from each, according to their ability; to each according to their needs". Meaning, that you do not need to worry about getting your family fed, warm, or houses. That will just be provided. So first of all the issue so many of us face right now of not really being able to afford children would just not exist anymore. Society would take care of itself in this regard.

And of course I am also going to assume that a Solarpunk future will break out of the nuclear family in a bunch of different ways. Be it with more polyamorous families being around, be it with people living in thier chosen families, or be it in more traditional, but still very valid multi-generational households. Which for children will mean one thing: There will be more people they can rely on than just two parents.

There definitely also needs a better supported version of youth social workers. Right now, the entire youth social work thing is a pure nightmare in most countries, that in the end mainly exists to make it harder for marginalized folks to have kids, as their actions often get harshly judged by those organizations, while the very rich can and usually will abuse their kids to no end, but never once be challenged by any agency meant to protect kids, forcing those kids to either try and basically sue themselves out of the family, or just... accept abuse for their life.

Now, obviously in a Solarpunk world, we would not have "very rich people" anymore - but no matter how utopian a world will be, some kids will still be abused. Not because people are evil, but because some families will be for one reason or another overwhelmed with their kids. Be it, because the family has struggles with mental health, or be it because the kid has. And there needs to be a more solid system to protect children - and especially more systems where kids themselves can be empowered to go, while not fully ignoring that not all children might have the ability or courage to do this.

Ironically, school is one of those things I had a lot of discussions about with other folks in the Solarpunk community, because I met a lot of folks who think that school itself should just be done away with. Mainly because they associate school with authoritarianism and think folks should be able to learn what they want.

While I agree with the second part - I do not agree that this means doing away with schools. Because for one, leaving children to their family, can still mean others will make decisions what a kid can and cannot learn. (Just think of the entire homeschool debacle in the US caused by parents not wanting their kids to learn about evolution, biology and LGBTQ folks.)

I just do think that schools should be less structured around what children should learn, and more structured around what they want to learn.

Sure, there is some stuff I think every child should learn. Basic reading, writing, math, and some general knowledge about history, biology, and the environment. But I do think outside of the basics, school should generally be made in a way that kids can focus more on what they actually want to learn. Rather than having classes based on age, allow kids to just join learn groups based around topics. A kid is interested in history? Yeah, let the kid do a lot of history. A kid is interested in mechanics? Sure, let the kid do that. A kid just cares about nothing but art? Then just let the kid do art.

There is no need to force kids into this very tiny mold - let them jsut do what they want to do. Kids are naturally curious. They will want to learn. And also, do not grade them. We know for a fact that grades harm kids and don't say shit about what they can and cannot do. Let it be.

And if a kid has a bad day, let them just have their place in that school, where for a day they can just hang and relax. No need to put on so much pressure.

Mind you, there are a very few schools right now that work like this, and we can see that the children there tend to do better both academically and psychologically. This is how school should work. And folks who do those concepts have been pretty sure about that for the last 120 years.

And there is of course also the food. Due to a Solarpunk world not being capitalist, there would be less junk food and more open kitchens where everyone could just have the food they wanted - well sourced and prepared. With an ability to participate in the cooking, making kids less alienated from their food. This is another thing we know from psychology. Kids who participate more actively in cooking will eat more and more varied food. No, they will not eat all the vegetables, and that is okay. If a kid does not like brussel sprouts or some other vegetable, that is fine. Don't force them to eat that. Please. You do more harm than good.

Which also brings me to something else: Kids, yes, even younger kids, absolutely do need to spend time unsupervised by adults with their friends. Bonus points if it is outside in nature. Yes, that is dangerous. Yes, sometimes people die because of it. But kids that get to do this will be more confident in themselves. Kids need their little adventures.

But speaking of dying... I am just going to assume that in a Solarpunk world, kids would be vaccinated.

And of course, those places for children, will be all accessible. Kids should not be segregated in any way. Not between ethnicity, not between sex or gender, and definitely not between abled and disabled. It is fine. Kids can deal with this.

Something I do wonder about though - and this is something that people love to ignore in worldbuilding - is the media that children consume in those worlds. Because yeah. Kids will consume media. Obviously. Everyone will. And this is were I am standing there is a bit of an issue. Because I kinda fear that in a Solarpunk world, adults might care a bit too much to produce super valuable content for kids. But, like... I actually think that some medial junk food is quite okay. Don't overdo it and stuff, but let the kids have some stupid annoying cartoon that parents don't get. It is fine.

Partly, also, because I think folks can just create some really good stuff if you let them.

And while I am not quite sure how to think about stuff like merchandise in a Solarpunk world - because we do not want capitalism after all... I cannot help but think, that there certainly is some joy in collecting stuff like figures or cards. Not just because it can allow kids to develop other creative skills through play, but also because there is a lot of community to be found in this. But, again, I am not fully sure how this will work without capitalism driving it. I mean, I have no doubt that if you let artists run wild, someone will definitely produce some kids show based around a card game, even without the goal of making millions in card sales. Never forget, YGO exists mainly because the mangaka was a probably autistic, anarchist-leaning guy with a hyperfocus on the history of games and gaming in general, who kinda accidentally invented a card game that now has been around for a quarter century. While yes, he originally wanted to use Magic for this, chances are that he might have invented that card game just for the fun of it. It never had been about making a lasting franchise.

So, I guess it would still work, eh?

But yeah, I do think kids deserve a lot more control over their lives in general. I do think kids deserve to be outside a lot more. I do think kids want to learn, but they want to play. Some might be totally fine playing outside and running through a forest all day. But some kids might prefer to play with action figures or cards or stuff - and that should be fine as well.

Just... Leave kids more freedom to do what they want - as long as it does not do harm. And value children more as members of society. As people. Because that is a thing that society today mainly tends to forget: Kids are people too.

[cognitivejustice]

Wow! solarpunk reaches the Indian Express newspaper. (itself a solarpunk publication with a long history of resistance)