#canadian solarpunk

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

The YouTube upload of Season Two Episode Five is here!

On today’s episode, Ariel talks to Lindsay Jane of The Solarpunk Scene where she showcases her solarpunk life in Toronto, as well as shining a spotlight on solarpunk projects locally and internationally. Lindsay tells us about how she discovered solarpunk and the ways that she lives a solarpunk life in the city - both the upsides (gardens! architecture! effective transit!) and the downsides (sky-high rent, expensive food, difficulty cultivating outdoor gardens). She also emphasizes the importance of getting involved in your local community and politics as a city-dweller, and lets listeners in on the behind-the-scenes inspiration for The Solarpunk Scene: tune in to learn more!

[rotteneldritchhorror]

I desperately need more botany/gardening/solarpunk/foraging posts that aren’t so fucking American-centric

“European plants are invasive” okay, in America— but which ones are invasive HERE, like are Spanish species invasive to England? Are French plants invasive to England??

[acomradea]

The euro-colonial nations must be dismantled: America, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Australia, Isreal, South Africa, ect. The only place for European nations is in Europe and it is rather silly that we tolerate such blatant colonialism that we know is bad.

It's not that all settlers need to move back to where they came from or anything like that, but Indigenous Nations, their people, and culture need to be at the forefront of politics on their land. When my ancestors moved to Canada, it wasn't Indigenous culture they assimilated into. It was Anglo-Saxon culture, and that isn't how it should be.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The new globalism is global labor

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

Depending on how you look at it, I either grew up in the periphery of the labor movement, or atop it, or surrounded by it. For a kid, labor issues don't really hold a lot of urgency – in places with mature labor movements, kids don't really have jobs, and the part-time jobs I had as a kid (paper route, cleaning a dance studio) were pretty benign.

Ironically, one of the reasons that labor issues barely registered for me as a kid was that my parents were in great, strong unions: Ontario teachers' unions, which protected teachers from exploitative working conditions and from retaliation when they advocated for their students, striking for better schools as well as better working conditions.

Ontario teachers' unions were strong enough that they could take the lead on workplace organization, to the benefit of teachers at every part of their careers, as well as students and the system as a whole. Back in the early 1980s, Ontario schools faced a demographic crisis. After years of declining enrollment, the number of students entering the system was rapidly increasing.

That meant that each level of the system – primary, junior, secondary – was about to go through a whipsaw, in which low numbers of students would be followed by large numbers. For a unionized education workforce, this presented a crisis: normally, a severe contraction in student numbers would trigger layoffs, on a last-in, first-out basis. That meant that layoffs loomed for junior teachers, who would almost certainly end up retraining for another career. When student numbers picked up again, those teachers wouldn't be in the workforce anymore, and worse, a lot of the senior teachers who got priority during layoffs would be retiring, magnifying the crisis.

The teachers' unions were strong, and they cared about students and teachers, both those at the start of their careers and those who'd given many years of service. They came up with an amazing solution: "self-funded sabbaticals." Teachers with a set number of years of seniority could choose to take four years at 80% salary, and get a fifth year off at 80% salary (actually, they could take their year off any time from the third year on).

This allowed Ontario to increase its workforce by about 20%, for free. Senior teachers got a year off to spend with their families, or on continuing education, or for travel. Junior teachers' jobs were protected. Students coming into the system had adequate classroom staff, in a mix of both senior and junior teachers.

This worked great for everyone, including my family. My parents both took their four-over-five year in 1983/84. They rented out our house for six months, charging enough to cover the mortgage. We flew to London, took a ferry to France, and leased a little sedan. For the next six months, we drove around Europe, visiting fourteen countries while my parents homeschooled us on the long highway stretches and in laundromats. We stayed in youth hostels and took a train to Leningrad to visit my family there. We saw Christmas Midnight Mass at the Vatican and walked around the Parthenon. We saw Guernica at the Prado. We visited a computer lab in Paris and I learned to program Logo in French. We hung out with my parents' teacher pals who were civilian educators at a Canadian Forces Base in Baden-Baden. I bought an amazing hand-carved chess set in Seville with medieval motifs that sung to my D&D playing heart. It was amazing.

No, really, it was amazing. Unions and the social contract they bargained for transformed my family's life chances. My dad came to Canada as a refugee, the son of a teen mother who'd been deeply traumatized by her civil defense service as a child during the Siege of Leningrad. My mother was the eldest child of a man who, at thirteen, had dropped out of school to support his nine brothers and sisters after the death of his father. My parents grew up to not only own a home, but to be able to take their sons on a latter-day version of the Grand Tour that was once the exclusive province of weak-chinned toffs from the uppermost of crusts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour

My parents were active in labor causes and in their unions, of course, but that was just part of their activist lives. My mother was a leader in the fight for legal abortion rights in Canada:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/8882641733

My dad was active in party politics with the New Democratic Party, and both he and my mother were deeply involved with the fight against nuclear arms proliferation, a major issue in Canada, given our role in supplying radioisotopes to the US, building key components for ICBMs, testing cruise missiles over Labrador, and our participation in NORAD.

Abortion rights and nuclear arms proliferation were my own entry into political activism. When I was 13, I organized a large contingent from my school to march on Queen's Park, the seat of the Provincial Parliament, to demand an end to Ontario's active and critical participation in the hastening of global nuclear conflagration:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53616011737/

When I got a little older, I started helping with clinic defense and counterprotests at the Morgentaler Clinic and other sites in Toronto that provided safe access to women's health, including abortions:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/morgentaler-honoured-by-order-of-canada-federal-government-not-involved-1.716775

My teens were a period of deepening involvement in politics. It was hard work, but rewarding and fundamentally hopeful. There, in the shadow of imminent nuclear armageddon, there was a role for me to play, a way to be more than a passive passenger on a runaway train, to participate in the effort to pull the brake lever before we ran over the cliff.

In hindsight, though, I can see that even as my activism intensified, it also got harder. We struggled more to find places to meet, to find phones and computers to use, to find people who could explain how to get a permit for a demonstration or to get legal assistance for comrades in jail after a civil disobedience action.

What I couldn't see at the time was that all of this was provided by organized labor. The labor movement had the halls, the photocopiers, the lawyers, the experience – the infrastructure. Even for campaigns that were directly about labor rights – campaigns for abortion rights, or against nuclear annihilation – the labor movement was the material, tangible base for our activities.

Look, riding a bicycle around all night wheatpasting posters to telephone poles to turn out people for an upcoming demonstration is hard work, but it's much harder if you have to pay for xeroxing at Kinko's rather than getting it for free at the union hall. Worse, the demonstration turnout suffers more because the union phone-trees and newsletters stop bringing out the numbers they once brought out.

This was why the neoliberal project took such savage aim at labor: they understood that a strong labor movement was foundation of antiimperialist, antiracist, antisexist struggles for justice. By dismantling labor, the ruling class kicked the legs out from under all the other fights that mattered.

Every year, it got harder to fight for any kind of better world. We activist kids grew to our twenties and foundered, spending precious hours searching for a room to hold a meeting, leaving us with fewer hours to spend organizing the thing we were meeting for. But gradually, we rebuilt. We started to stand up our own fragile, brittle, nascent structures that stood in for the mature and solid labor foundation that we'd grown up with.

The first time I got an inkling of what was going on came in 1999, with the Battle of Seattle: the mass protests over the WTO. Yes, labor turned out in force for those mass demonstrations, but they weren't its leaders. The militancy, the leadership, and the organization came out of groups that could loosely be called "post-labor" – not in the sense that they no longer believed in labor causes, but in the sense that they were being organized outside of traditional labor.

Labor was in retreat. Five years earlier, organized labor had responded to NAFTA by organizing against Mexican workers, rather than the bosses who wanted to ship jobs to Mexico. It wasn't unusual to see cars in Ontario with CAW bumper stickers alongside xenophobic stickers taking aim at Mexicans, not bosses. Those were the only workers that organized labor saw as competitors for labor rights: this was also the heyday of "two-tier" contracts, which protected benefits for senior workers while leaving their junior comrades exposed to bosses' most sadistic practices, while still expecting junior workers to pay dues to a union that wouldn't protect them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/25/strikesgiving/#shed-a-tier

Two-tier contracts were the opposite of the solidarity that my parents' teachers' union exhibited in the early 1980s; blaming Mexican workers for automakers' offshoring was the opposite of the solidarity that built transracial and international labor power in the early days of the union movement:

https://unionhall.aflcio.org/bloomington-normal-trades-and-labor-assembly/labor-culture/edge-anarchy-first-class-pullman-strike

As labor withered under a sustained, multi-decades-long assault on workers' rights, other movements started to recapitulate the evolution of early labor, shoring up fragile movements that lacked legal protections, weathering setbacks, and building a "progressive" coalition that encompassed numerous issues. And then that movement started to support a new wave of labor organizing, situating labor issues on a continuum of justice questions, from race to gender to predatory college lending.

Young workers from every sector joined ossified unions with corrupt, sellout leaders and helped engineer their ouster, turning these dying old unions into engines of successful labor militancy:

https://theintercept.com/2023/04/07/deconstructed-union-dhl-teamsters-uaw/

In other words, we're in the midst of a reversal of the historic role of labor and other social justice movements. Whereas once labor anchored a large collection of smaller, less unified social movements; today those social movements are helping bring back a weakened and fragmented labor movement.

One of the key organizing questions for today is whether these two movements can continue to co-evolve and, eventually, merge. For example: there can be no successful climate action without climate justice. The least paid workers in America are also the most racially disfavored. The gender pay-gap exists in all labor markets. For labor, integrating social justice questions isn't just morally sound, it's also tactically necessary.

One thing such a fusion can produce is a truly international labor movement. Today, social justice movements are transnational: the successful Irish campaign for abortion rights was closely linked to key abortion rights struggles in Argentina and Poland, and today, abortion rights organizers from all over the world are involved in mailing medication abortion pills to America.

A global labor movement is necessary, and not just to defeat the divide-and-rule tactics of the NAFTA fight. The WTO's legacy is a firmly global capitalism: workers all over the world are fighting the same corporations. The strong unions of one country are threatened by weak labor in other countries where their key corporations seek to shift manufacturing or service delivery. But those same strong unions are able to use their power to help their comrades abroad protect their labor rights, depriving their common adversary of an easily exploited workforce.

A key recent example is Mercedes, part of the Daimler global octopus. Mercedes' home turf is Germany, which boasts some of the strongest autoworker unions in the world. In the USA, Mercedes – like other German auto giants – preferentially manufactures its cars in the South, America's "onshore-offshore" crime havens, where labor laws are both virtually nonexistent and largely unenforced. This allows Mercedes to exploit and endanger a largely Black workforce in a "right to work" territory where unions are nearly impossible to form and sustain.

Mercedes just defeated a hard-fought union drive in Vance, Alabama. In part, this was due to admitted tactical blunders from the UAW, who have recently racked up unprecedented victories in Tennessee and North Carolina:

https://paydayreport.com/uaw-admits-digital-heavy-organizing-committee-light-approach-failed-them-in-alabama-at-mercedes/

But mostly, this was because Mercedes cheated. They flagrantly violated labor law to sabotage the union vote. That's where it gets interesting. German workers have successfully lobbied the German parliament for the Supply Chain Act, an anticorruption law that punishes German companies that violate labor law abroad. That means that even though the UAW just lost their election, they might inflict some serious pain on Mercedes, who face a fine of 2% of their global annual revenue, and a ban on selling cars to the German government:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/10/an-injury-to-one/#is-an-injury-to-all

This is another way reversal of the post-neoliberal era. Whereas once the US exported its most rapacious corporate practices all over the world, today, global labor stands a chance of exporting workers' rights from weak territories to strong ones.

Here's an American analogy: the US's two most populous states are California and Texas. The policies of these states ripple out over the whole country, and even beyond. When Texas requires textbooks that ban evolution, every pupil in the country is at risk of getting a textbook that embraces Young Earth Creationism. When California enacts strict emission standards, every car in the country gets cleaner tailpipes. The WTO was a Texas-style export: a race to the bottom, all around the world. The moment we're living through now, as global social movements fuse with global labor, are a California-style export, a race to the top.

This is a weird upside to global monopoly capitalism. It's how antitrust regulators all over the world are taking on corporations whose power rivals global superpowers like the USA and China: because they're all fighting the same corporations, they can share tactics and even recycle evidence from one-another's antitrust cases:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/05/big-tech-eu-drop-dead

Look, the UAW messed up in Alabama. A successful union vote is won before the first ballot is cast. If your ground game isn't strong enough to know the outcome of the vote before the ballot box opens, you need more organizing, not a vote:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

But thanks to global labor – and its enemy, global capitalism – the UAW gets another chance. Global capitalism is rich and powerful, but it has key weaknesses. Its drive to "efficiency" makes it terribly vulnerable, and a disruption anywhere in its supply chain can bring the whole global empire to its knees:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/21/eight-and-skate/#strike-to-rule

American workers – especially swing-state workers who swung for Trump and are leaning his way again – overwhelmingly support a pro-labor agenda. They are furious over "price gouging and outrageous corporate profits…wealthy corporate CEOs and billionaires [not] paying what they should in taxes and the top 1% gaming the system":

https://www.americanfamilyvoices.org/_files/ugd/d4d64f_6c3dff0c3da74098b07ed3f086705af2.pdf

They support universal healthcare, and value Medicare and Social Security, and trust the Democrats to manage both better than Republicans will. They support "abortion rights, affordable child care, and even forgiving student loans":

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-20-bidens-working-class-slump/

The problem is that these blue-collar voters are atomized. They no longer meet in union halls – they belong to gun clubs affiliated with the NRA. There are enough people who are a) undecided and b) union members in these swing states to defeat Trump. This is why labor power matters, and why a fusion of American labor and social justice movements matters – and why an international fusion of a labor-social justice coalition is our best hope for a habitable planet and a decent lives for our families.

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/2024/05/20/a-common-foe/#the-multinational-playbook

[arielkroon]

Hi there, I'm Ariel Kroon, and this is my Tumblr thing. I'm an independent scholar and a freelance academic editor, and so I'm going to be crossposting from my blog (when I blog). I'm hoping this won't take me down too many rabbit holes, but you never know.

I did my dissertation on post-apocalyptic Canadian science fiction published between 1948-1989, so expect me to post about obscure SF as well as my Opinions on apocalyptic discourse, the apocalyptic imaginary, cyberpunk and solarpunk. I use an intersectional feminist lens, as well as thinking with ecocriticism, affect theory, queer theory and gender studies, and I have a weakness for/history in feminist philosophical thought and also (xtian, protestant, crc, dutch-settler) religion.

I'm a third-generation Dutch immigrant, settler scholar on the trad. territory of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and Neutral peoples and it feels weird to disclose this because I'm also a millennial who grew up with LJ and non-anonymity online makes me feel really squeamish and vulnerable, but that's a privilege a lot of people don't get these days. Expect me to wrestle a lot with the discourse/idea of reconciliation in so-called Canada, cause I'm complicit as hell but I'm trying to do my best to be a conscientious race-traitor.

I also struggle with chronic fatigue, chronic pain, brain fog, short term memory issues, executive functioning, and I am on the road to figuring out what I suspect is the fact that I'm on the spectrum, so sometimes I don't really have the spoons or grace for being the best ally I can be. The discourse of the perfect activist is one I want to push back against, as someone with multiple disabilities; the excuse of being "too disabled" to ignore the suffering of others is, I think, a harmful myth that many of us - intentionally or not - tend to buy in to and I want to also push against that.

Disability studies isn't something I'm very familiar with at all, since my disabilities manifested after a car crash in 2019 (which exacerbated all the underlying issues I was busy masking / repressing while being in grad school, because I suddenly lost the ability to keep up my coping mechanisms). I look forward to learning more about pretty much all of these things, by the way.

Speaking of being very new to a field, I'm co-host of Solarpunk Presents Podcast (@solarpunkpresentspodcast); come along and learn with me and Christina De La Rocha about people doing their best in the present with an eye towards a better future world for all.

[skepticalmuppet]

It’s motherfucking December and there’s an onion coming up in the garden.

[keyboardandquill]

Introduction

Hello writeblr community! I'm Jade, I'm in my 30s, I'm Canadian, and I've been creating stories for as long as I can remember.

I currently have two WIPs which you can find here (mobile-friendly links below under My Writing).

In addition to writing, I love to draw, make handmade stationery and stickers, and create RPGs and board games.

I follow back from my main, @jadefyre.

My Writing

I love writing sci-fi, especially anything to do with space or futuristic technology. Some of my favourite subgenres include cyberpunk, solarpunk, and apocalyptic fiction. I also enjoy reading or writing a good science fantasy story now and then!

Check out my current WIPs below!

Intro post for Athenaeum, a distantly-post-apocalyptic solarpunk science fantasy story about mending the world with the power of friendship and also the lifeblood of the planet or whatever.

Intro post for Rocket Boosters and Other Things You Can Find in a Post-Apocalyptic Junkyard, another post-"apocalyptic" story about a grouchy wasteland survivalist who gets saddled with a 12-year-old and two grown-ass men on a trip to the coast in search of a doctor.

I also write the occasional fanfic. :)

Resources

One of my goals in creating this writeblr is to create a series of "craft of writing" guides to help both new and seasoned writers get even better at what they do.

You can find various resources in my tag directory, linked below!

Or check out the tag #resource by keyboardandquill for my original content resources.

Tags

I try to keep everything as categorized in the tags as I can! You can check out my directory here (and if you can't access that page for whatever reason, you can also see it in post form here)

Asks/Being Tagged

Feel free to slide into my asks to tell me about your WIP! Really, you don't need an excuse. I love hearing about what other people create. (I'm also open to talking about my WIPs and OCs at any time if any of them happen to interest you ;D)

I'm also happy to be tagged in tag games (even if we aren't mutuals/haven't interacted) and am happy to participate in sending/receiving ask games too.

(Just a note: I can be quite slow to respond to asks and I'll do my best to get to them! Tag games are a hit or miss for me because sometimes they don't apply well to my WIPs or I don't have the spoons, but please don't let that stop you from tagging me :3)

[ghostgetsablog]

I guess I should make an intro.

My name is ghost.

I use they/them, it/itself, and he/him pronouns, unsure of my preference.

I made this blog to explore finding joy in being a system.

Above all else, I am anti-harassment and pro-curating your own experience. Don’t be an asshole, and we’ll get on just fine. 

More info under the cut, including our other blogs, feel free to ask us questions.

Other blogs for our system:

@safety-net-did - our alternate subgroup

@snd-answers-things - tag games and surveys

@snd-things-we-like - little space

@snd-remember-positivity - mental health reminders

@snd-arts - our art

@snd-spirituality - magic and spirituality stuff

@snd-craft-hoard - inspiration for crafts we do

Other info you might care about:

@ghostlearnstech - my journey into software development

@someday-vivarium - invertebrates, reptiles, plants, tanks, etc.

I'm an alter in a DID system.

I'm syscourse-neutral.

My system generally sees itself as traumagenic, but some of us (like myself) would like to explore other origins as a way of finding frameworks to understand our experiences better.

I don’t think I’ll be posting much in the way of “syscourse”, but if I do it’ll be tagged.

Our body age is 30

I don't mind if minors interact with me, as long as they are respectful and take responsibility for their own experience. That is to say, I'm an adult who is going to talk about adult things. I am going to assume, if you interact with me, that you're okay with interacting as an adult. If you do not want to read about adult things/expect me to remember which blogs are adults or not, you should block me.

Our body is both mentally and physically disabled, as well as white and Canadian.

I don’t believe in thought-crime. 

Pro feminism, pro trans women, pro abortion, transandrophobia and  antimasculism are real. 

Strictly anti-TERF/TEHM/Whatever the current “trans folks are bad so believe in our very myopic view of oppression is”

I am queer. I talk about the Queer community. If you don’t ID as queer, you’re not a part of my community and I’m not talking about you. If you think that queer is an unreclaimable slur, fuck off.

ACAB, anti-capitalist, solarpunk

I dunno, I think that covers most of the tumblr-controversial opinions I have? I’ll probably add things as I find things.

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

Just gonna promote this again because it's ME IT IS MY RESEARCH ahem but also we talk about how it's related to solarpunk. I swear we get there, despite the super grim / totally generic and tropey cover image, there is solarpunk and hope. We just gotta get through the historical context first.

[imaginariumrpc]

imaginarium : a place devoted to the imagination, largely devoted to simulating and cultivating the imagination, towards scientific, artistic, commercial, recreational and/or spiritual ends.

Hello, bonjour and pusu’l, lovelies! My name’s Arcana, I’m twenty years old, a Canadian, a Solar Cancererian, a Lunar Sagittarian and a Rising Libra, according to the Western Zodiac, and a Dragon according to the Chinese Zodiac, Genderfluid, Multigender, Transgender, Non-Binary, Intersex, Queer, Autigender, Pearlian, Two Spirit, Androgynos, Draoidhe,  DemiOmniBiromantic/DemiOmniBisexual, Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent, ENFP, Ravenpuff, Thunderbird, Otherkin, Therian, an Animist, a Pagan and I’m intrigued in the occult and witchcraft and I am additionally a white passing mixed triracial multi-indigenous person of color or more specifically, of Mi’kmaw, Wyandot, Wolastoqiyik, Métis and Sephardi Jewish heritage! I like cuddling and playing with cats and dogs and animals, eating pizza, taking pictures, music, reading, writing, gushing about friends and helping others. So with that said, I’m here to present you guys my new rpc / rph / aesthetic / inspiration / resource / personal / edit blog ! It’s for my own use but it can also be for your use ( provided you don’t take any of my original content off of this blog without my express permission ), the rpc and anyone else who wishes to use it, too! It features musings, codes, psd’s, psa’s, memes and a LOT more sprinkled with the occasional original content from me.

WHAT I DO:

a discord server affliated with this blog.

faceclaim help. ( poc, lgbtqia2+ and underused faceclaims included! )

alternate faceclaim suggestions ( send me a faceclaim that you don’t want to use and I’ll make a list of alternates. )

fancasts ( send me a character and i’ll make a post of potential faceclaims. )

name help.

label help.

plot help.

admin advice.

url help.

muse help. ( i.e names, concepts, character creation, worldbuilding, lore, etc. )

guides &&. tutorials.

general advice and being here to talk to.

rp advice.

opinions. ( depending on what it is. )

memes.

musings.

muse inspo.

base icon batches ( uncommon, but will open on occasion. )

psd recommendations.

shoutouts.

masterlists.

promo’s. ( provided you submit it to me as a photo. )

psa’s.

unpopular opinions.

character metas. ( occasionally, depending on the muse and on the fandom. )

positivity. ( muses — be they canon or original, fandom aligned or otherwise, and muns. )

venting. ( nothing hateful or discriminatory ! )

rants. ( nothing hateful or discriminatory ! )

first look reviews. ( on occasion. )

critiques. ( on occasion. )

in-depth blog reviews. ( on occasion. )

muse archetype aesthetic edits / moodboards. ( i.e the artist, the femme fatale, etc. )

dynamic / bond / family / friendship / squad / ship edits / moodboards ( poc, interracial and lgbtqia2+, polyamorous, m/m / mlm, f/f / wlw and nblnb included! )

faceless muse edits. ( muses of color and ships included! )

character emotional traits.

multiple genres, time periods and settings. ( i.e: historical, antiquity, medieval, vintage, modern, supernatural, fantasy, apocalypse, action, horror, science fiction, etc. )

aesthetics. ( i.e dark academia, solarpunk, retro, goth, lovecore, etc. )

theme recommendations.

template recommendations.

family templates ( occasional. )

fandom lists ( eventually. )

masculine, feminine and nonbinary.

cultural awareness.

locations ( including but not limited to interiors, exteriors, homes, and all the continents. ).

scenery.

nature.

animals.

mythology.

weddings.

religion ( specifically for muses from certain religions i.e jewish and muslim muses, etc. )

disabled and neurodivergent muse representation and resources.

resources and representation for the lgbtqia2+ / mogai community and its muses, i.e lesbian muses, gay muses, bi muses, trans* ( including nonbinary, genderfluid, genderless and other non-cisgender ) muses, queer muses, intersex muses, aromantic / asexual muses and two spirited muses, among other muses that are considered queer.

resources and representation for all muses of color, including black muses, indigenous / native muses, latinx muses, asian muses ( all asians, not just east asians ! ), pasifika muses, jewish muses, etc., that overpower than that of white muses, there are still resources for white muses, though muses of color will always be a priority on this blog.

resources for portraying pregnant muses ( will be tagged! ).

resources for portraying muses who practice witchcraft.

resources for portraying muses who are sex workers.

resources for muses of all ages, including children, adolescents, adults and elders.

resources for animated muses.

resources for nonhuman muses.

cuisine.

makeup ( for muses of all genders ! ).

tattoos.

nsfw. ( will be tagged ! )

pride flags.

texts.

userboxes.

seasons.

colors.

zodiac.

typography.

concepts.

plots.

imagine your otp/ot3/etc.

“make me choose” events.

confessions.

wardrobe.

physique ( friendly to all skin tones, body types, shapes and sizes! ).

wishlist.

faves.

crack.

shitposts.

mun stuff.

music playlists ( including my own spotify playlists ).

aesthetics and edits of my own muses.

resources and character tags for my muses.

stimboards.

occasionally post some of my fanfiction / drabble works.

occasional drabble / fanfic requests.

occasionally post some of my music works.

possibly post specific music edits when i figure out how to do so.

more to be added when i think of something.

WHAT I WILL NOT DO:

callout posts.

drama posts.

get involved in discourse.

flame other people.

bash on characters, fandoms and/or ships.

post recent spoilers of a series without tagging it.

tolerate bigoted, homophobic, lesbophobic, biphobic, omniphobic, panphobic, aphobic, arophobic, transphobic, enbyphobic, queerphobic, racist, colorist, sexist, exorsexist, intersexist, heterosexist, anti-polyamory, anti-mogai, anti-neopronouns, anti-nounself pronouns, anti-emojiself pronouns, anti-self diagnosis or mental health gatekeeper, victim blaming, gender/orientation/mental health gatekeeping, anti-otherkin, anti-feminist, ageist, speciesist, ableist, fatphobic, anti-black, anti-native, islamophobic, antisemitic, antiromani, xenophobic, exclusionist, transmeds/truscum, terfs/swerfs, radfems, heightist, sizeist, discrimination on cultures and subcultures, discrimination on religion or lack thereof, mysogynist/misandrist, white supremacist or any kind of supremacist honestly, nationalist, linguistic discrimination, or otherwise hateful, discriminatory, derogatory, vulgar and just overall dumb language, speech, behaviors and attitudes.

gif requests.

gif hunts.

manips.

textures.

crackship edit requests ( unless stated otherwise. )

edited icon batches ( unless if i’m releasing my own that i no longer use. )

theme / page / code making.

psd making.

more to be added if i think of something.

So, with that said, PLEASE like and/or reblog this if you’re interested in using it or at the very least spread the word! I really want to try and help people and have fun with you guys, but I can’t do that if this doesn’t get any notes. You can find out more information by reading my F.A.QHERE! Thank you so much for reading, I hope you all have a wonderful morning/day/evening/night! Yours truly, with all of my love, Arcana.

[hydralisk98]

Opinions over Trudeau’s double standards

So on Thursday morning there were quite a few radio news that I deemed interesting to discuss some about. Especially concerning First Nations’ issues.

With the full context of the previous news segments about worker rights and employee shortages, I felt like what the Amerindian representative, Michelle Baudet, was describing very precisely what I felt was wrong about the current government of Trudeau’s. I mean, the long lasting issues for both Natives, Immigrants and European-descent Canadians made me feel heard in this NeoLiberal sea of Wilsonists. Not that they can’t do anything good but like most Wilsonist ideology descendance they fail at implementing much good as of their cursed systems and tools. (Neo-Conservatives, NewLeft, Leninisms, NeoLiberals, Stalinisms, Maoisms, woke SJWs...)

Beyond nuances though, I think most of those Wilsonist types of people haven’t gotten properly formatted memos to explain what’s wrong and to do instead. I would be happy to provide my advice and knowledge to those willing to enact such change and which won’t do any backstabbing. I am not perfect but you know, there are several good arguments to be expressed and enacted over many things that went horribly wrong ever since Woodrow Wilson got elected in 1912.

And for those of whom fights back against such constructive attitudes similar to Libertarians, Republicans before 1912 and Solarpunk folks, I am sorry to address it to you but if you don’t change course towards that constructive direction I am talking about, you are very likely some of the reasons why this entire world is falling from the quality-of-life grace which started back ~500 years ago. The world has not always been this high in terms of living standards for quite long historically speaking but that ain’t a excuse to not work towards that grand dream unless you have a fair share of arguments to convince me.

For those curious enough, the USA (and the things that could be done fast enough for the rest of the world) was going in a fairly grand direction after the assassination of McKinley in 1901 thanks to the famous Theodore Roosevelt’s terms and to a degree William Taft’s. But as soon as Woodrow Wilson got elected, which was a lost-cause revisionist historian supported mainly by the same types of people that made McKinley a undecisive corporate piece of meat (religious fanatics/institutions, corporate magnates and wrong-minded powerful individuals), the grand majority of 20th and 21st century problems came from such a root and amplified ever since.

Espionnage Act, Sedition Act of 1918, segregation of the US Government, massive levels of foreign countries’ ill-fated diplomatic interventions, wars upon third-world countries for “Holy Democracy”, up-bringing of Nazism, Leninism, Wilsonism itself, blatant racism upon Japan leading to the Second Sino-Chinese war, Executive Order 9066, massive surveillance actions by governements, the wrong-doings of Vladimir Putin (it ain’t all bad I think but there are some things that originate from global Wilsonism), massive internet censorships since at least the mid-2010s, the midigations of the US military into fiction productions to muddle anti-war messages... These are just a few of what Woodrow Wilson and his collaborators did to the world.

I am sure there might be some good things behind the curtains but you have better show me strong evidence for it because what I appreciate of this Earth seem to have next to no positive link with these Wilsonisms and often it goes the other way around. Computers, the World Wide Web, the popularization of Internet access, social welfare policies, small use of Land Tax in a few instances, the rare regulation of big businesses, worker rights, smart tools and all those nice things I strongly appreciate are not the result of the misery induced by Wilsonism, but by dreams slown down as much as possible by Wilsonist details from what I can tell.

Let me just clarify though that not all powerful people are bad, not all billionaires are wrong-minded and not all Wilsonist-minded people are cursed forever. As long as the people get the right tools with a proper mindset and that make a significant effort to fight that inner and outer battle for the well-being of all sapients/humans, yourself included, I will see the value that are behind the eyes of such comrades. You still have value without but you know, it ain’t much positive/ethically-valid value as far as I understand right now but more like a “They did the opposite of what should be, let’s see together what we can learn from this”.

Not gonna lie here, I am preparing a escape from this world because with my personal (and of several people in fact) values don’t align with the coming of ever stronger dystopic burdens to me and especially to the generations born after myself.

Climate change, ecologial collapse, diminution of new specific niche services ny new-comers in the sea of obligarchic capitalisms, total mind control, propaganda everywhere, corruption of fairer alternatives like Linux and soon BSDs, unavoidable online advertising by big corporations with little considerations for the fairness of the entire experience, the ethically-doubtful corporate influence of big banks over society, the ill-fate of Desjardins from a fair cooperative to a toxic corporation, constant puchasing of indie companies innovating enough into big corporations to profit from the product and not enhancing it much after the buying, the search engine bubble of promoting less than ethically relevant bodies and pages, the closing of indie local companies to a bigger multinational brands that won’t serve much of what was good about the local versions, the monopolistic-like behaviors of Government & Big Companies, the lack of skilled works and employees because of alientating work conditions and corporate social ecosystem, the ever-growing gap between the rich and poors, the sponsoships of strong violence in third-world countries, proxy and civil wars, the use of human links by the sides of the corporate state apparatus like the CIA’s hidden courts to exploit good-willed individuals worldwide, the YouTube’s rise of censorships and shutdowns among all creators, the repression of quite a few esoteric good-willed sublimninal makers and overall promotion of twisted esoteric gurus for as long as possible, etc...

I truly dislike having to tell such strong words in the light of some great things I have on this planet. But as I wanna feel safe, closer to happiness than existential dread and avoid most massive issues of this world, I am gonna flee in a similar way to Snowden as far going away from the core of the mess goes. Not even to fight back at all as it ain’t my priority right now, but as a just memo of “letting you all know” about truths I emotionally feel are relevant to me and to several more people thinking similarly to me over these topics of key importance truly.

If you really want to get me back to work for you all on the long run, you have better send somebody honest and humane to convince me and get fixed several of such details in a pretty significant fashion, along with several proof pieces to assure me it has been done or at least on-going well enough. Which is very hard I know it is but as far as I can attest, the consequences for fixing those issues (or not doing anything constructive about it all) is gotta be tremendous. And before somebody asks, yes it is hard in a similar fashion than how I feel about this entire problematic series of world instances that had continued to pursue the nightmare-ish details and policies it naturally goes up to by path of non-resistance. Many minds have already travelled elsewhere by many means and I am gonna be among them because that deeply-rooted feeling of existential dread that Wilsonism amplified by a crazy factor ain’t gonna be fixed in time, even with a righteous use of esoteric and secular methods combined.

I don’t expect anything much here as far as the probability of those getting a fair chunk fixed (also in time) goes is really minuscule so perhaps before I say a final goodbye (as I am exactly not gone away just yet), may your definition of God bless you with understanding and empathy to let me go and contact me when it is gotta be a way fairer trade on my end.

Good luck for those who follow in my footsteps in this path for a honorous existence beyond the (some are truly illegitimate really) chains of this planet.

Cordially yours comrades of this Earth.

Olyvier Klara Bouchard, the lady baby-witch which is autistic, non-binary, transfeminine and definitely a kind-hearted honest INTP-T individual.

[acomradea]

The Umbilical, Capital Ship of Oskinehiyawpwat aka. the New Iron Confederacy (Science Fiction). A future where the nation of Oskinehiyawpwat have taken over northern plains of North America after climate change induced societal collapse. The Nehiyapwatak traverse the skies in floating in air ships over the plains where grains and buffalo are cultivated for food and materials. The majority power is gotten from solar panels on aircraft and biofuels from alge farms which are some of their only permanent structures. The umbilical is the largest ship with 60 000 people, most ships carry anywhere from 1000 to 20 000 people. The only ground city is their capital of Amiskwaciy with 100 00 people however the majority of their population of 2 million live in the skies. Any materials that can't be grown or synthesized are recycled, scavenged, or bought.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Electrons, not molecules

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then SAN FRANCISCO (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

When hydrocarbon barons do their damndest to torch the Earth with fossil fuels, they call us dreamers. They insist that there's a hard-nosed reality – humanity needs energy – and they're the ones who live in it, while we live in the fairy land where the world can run on sunshine and virtuous thoughts. Without them making the tough decisions, we'd all be starving in the frigid dark.

Here's the thing: they're full of shit.

Mostly.

Humanity does need energy if we're going to avoid starving in the frigid dark, but that energy doesn't have to come from fossil fuels. Indeed, in the long-term, it can't. Even if you're a rootin' tootin, coal-rollin' climate denier, there's a hard-nosed reality you can't deny: if we keep using fossil fuels, they will someday run out. Remember "peak oil" panic? Fossil fuels are finite, and the future of the human race needn't be. We need more.

Thankfully, we have it. Despite what you may have heard, renewables are more than up to the task. Indeed, it's hard to overstate just how much renewable energy is available to us, here at the bottom of our gravity well. I failed to properly appreciate it until I read Deb Chachra's brilliant 2023 book, How Infrastructure Works:

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

Chachra, an engineering prof and materials scientist, offers a mind-altering reframing of the question of energy: we have a material problem, not an energy problem. If we could capture a mere 0.4% of the sun's rays that strike the Earth, we could give every person on the planet the energy budget of a Canadian (like an American, only colder).

Energy isn't just wildly abundant, though: it's also continuously replenished. For most of human history, we've treated energy as scarce, eking out marginal gains in energy efficiency – even as we treated materials as disposable, using them once and consigning them to a midden or a landfill. That's completely backwards. We get a fresh shipment of energy every time the sun (or the moon) comes up over the horizon. By contrast, new consignments of material are almost unheard of – the few odd ounces of meteoric ore that survive entry through Earth's atmosphere.

A soi-dissant adult concerned with the very serious business of ensuring our species isn't doomed to the freezing, starving darkness of an energy-deprived future would think about nothing save for this fact and its implications. They'd be trying to figure out how to humanely and responsibly gather the materials needed for the harvest, storage and distribution of this nearly limitless and absolutely free energy.

In other words, that Very Serious, Hard-Nosed Grown-Up should be concerned with using as few molecules as possible to harvest as many electrons as possible. They'd be working on things like turning disused coal-mines into giant gravity batteries:

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

Not figuring out how to dig or flush more long-dead corpses out of the Earth's mantle to feed them into a furnace. That is a profoundly unserious response to the human need for energy. It's caveman shit: "Ugh, me burn black sticky gunk, make cave warm, cough cough cough."

Enter Exxon CEO Darren Woods, whose interview with Fortune's Michal Lev-Ram and editor Alan Murray contains this telling quote: "we basically focus our technology on transforming molecules and they happen to be hydrogen and carbon molecules":

https://fortune.com/2024/02/28/leadership-next-exxonmobil-ceo-darren-woods/

As Bill McKibben writes, this is a tell. A company that's in the molecule business is not in the electron business. For all that Woods postures about being a clear-eyed realist beating back the fantasies of solarpunk-addled greenies, Woods does not want a future where we have all our energy needs met:

https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/the-most-epic-and-literal-gaslighting

That's because the only way to get that future is to shift from molecules – whose supply can be owned and therefore sold by Exxon – to electrons, which that commie bastard sun just hands out for free to every person on our planet's surface, despite the obvious moral hazard of all those free lunches. As Woods told Fortune, when it comes to renewables, "we don’t see the ability to generate above-average returns for our shareholders."

Woods dresses this up in high-minded seriousness kabuki, saying that Exxon is continuing to invest in burning rotting corpses because our feckless species "waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets terms of what we need as a society." In other words, it's just too late for solar. Keep shoveling those corpses into the furnace, they're all that stands between you and the freezing, starving dark.

Now, this is self-serving nonsense. The problem of renewables isn't that it's too late – it's that they don't "generate above-average returns for our shareholders" (that part, however, is gospel truth).

But let's stipulate that Woods sincerely believes that it is too late. It's pretty goddamned rich of this genocidal, eminently guillotineable monster to just drop that in the conversation without mentioning the role his company played in getting us to this juncture. After all, #ExxonKnew. 40 years ago, Exxon's internal research predicted climate change, connected climate change to its own profits, and predicted how bad it would be today.

Those predictions were spookily accurate and the company took them to heart, leaping into action. For 40 years, the company has been building its offshore drilling platforms higher and higher in anticipation of rising seas and superstorms – and over that same period, Exxon has spent millions lobbying and sowing disinformation to make sure that the rest of us don't take the emergency as seriously as they are, lest we switch from molecules to electrons.

Exxon knew, and Exxon lied. McKibben quotes Woods' predecessor Lee Raymond, speaking in the runup to the Kyoto Treaty negotiations: "It is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now."

When Woods says we need to keep shoveling corpses into the furnace because we "waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets terms of what we need as a society," he means that his company lied to us in order to convince us to wait too long.

When Woods – and his fellow enemies of humanity in the C-suites of Chevron and other corpse-torching giants – was sending the arson billions to his shareholders, he held back a healthy share to fund this deceit. He colluded with the likes of Joe Manchin ("[D-POLLUTION]" -McKibben) to fill the Inflation Reduction Act with gifts for molecules. The point of fantasies like "direct air carbon-capture" is to extend the economic life of molecule businesses, by tricking us into thinking that we can keep sending billions to Exxon without suffocating in its waste-product.

These lies aren't up for debate. Back in 2021, Greenpeace tricked Exxon's top DC lobbyist Keith McCoy into thinking that he was on a Zoom call with a corporate recruiter and asked him about his work for Exxon, and McCoy spilled the beans:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/01/basilisk-tamers/#exxonknew

He confessed to everything: funding fake grassroots groups and falsifying the science – he even names the senators who took his bribes. McCoy singled out Manchin for special praise, calling him "a kingmaker" and boasting about the "standing weekly calls" Exxon had with Manchin's office.

Exxon's response to this nine-minute confession was to insist that their most senior American lobbyist "wasn't involved at all in forming policy positions."

McKibben points to the forthcoming book The Price Is Wrong, by Brett Christophers, which explains how the neoclassical economics establishment's beloved "price signals" will continue to lead us into the furnace:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3069-the-price-is-wrong

The crux of that book is:

We cannot expect markets and the private sector to solve the climate crisis while the profits that are their lifeblood remain unappetizing.

Nearly 100 years ago, Upton Sinclair wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Today, we can say that it's impossible to get an oil executive to understand that humanity needs electrons, not molecules, because his shareholders' obscene wealth depends on it.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

[colourblindhedgehog]

every one of the WIP's, spill

You say Spill, Bitch, and so I will.

SeaShallow has a slightly longer name but it’s basically the same thing. Selkie love story! Likely there will be very sappy pining and falling in love over books and poetry because I am Weak, and minor cultural misunderstandings because I am terrible at manufacturing tension because I don’t understand why people don’t just talk it out or be nice to each other. There will likely be a dog involved because Why Not. It’s my way of easing into the fucking massive amount of worldbuilding I want to do in Monstrum, which does include a Huge spreadsheet for keeping track of linguistic, cultural and environmental differences between races/cultures/worlds. I am a fool who does not learn. One of the subsequent Monstrum will heavily focus on the idea of being asked to do something by people who have never done anything for you and even fear and hate you or people like you. There will be many cheerful, boisterous werewolves and at least one asshole professor, and discussion of what bathrooms look like for centaurs.

Glitter is my extremely indulgent fantasy. Late 1980s/Early 1990s rockstar excess, low-key saving the world and hollowing out capitalism from the inside, with a side of profiting off the stock market and so much found family. Also a touch of time travel.

Aliens is another 4-volume Project that is an ethnography thinly disguised as an actual story. 1-3 each focus on a different planet/species/relationship, #4 brings them all together and lets the characters cause chaos together. I have to design 4 completely different alien languages, species and cultures for this, someone kill me why do I do this to myself. And yes, there is a spreadsheet.

Mudlark is long-dormant, high fantasy style thing based around a very deliberate miscommunication that bites someone(the antagonist) in the ass in a big way. Dwarves feature heavily because I love them, and it has all the arranged marriage tropes because I love them too.

Equipped: Apocalypse is ‘what if the apocalypse happened and one person was left behind’, kind of. I am seriously considering having only one character for the whole thing, which will be.... interesting. It has also just occurred to me that I could technically possibly also write this AS a spreadsheet.... intriguing. But it’s mostly an excuse to loot canadian tire. Soft apocalypse/solarpunk/back to basics but with modern plumbing and a stockpile of toilet paper. Also dogs and possibly a llama.

[skepticalmuppet]

Today’s radish harvest. We’ve been getting two or three a day and I’ve been planting a new seed every time I pull up a radish, so if the weather stays fairly cool we’ll have radishes most of the season.

[sunflower-avenue]

At the Dyke March last week I found the Canadian Union of Postal Workers. And I've been obsessed with them ever since.

They got this big project to reinvent the post office to provide fair financial services and internet access. To connect remote communities. To check in on disabled and elderly folks. To work on food delivery. To move to electric vehicles. To work with indigenous communities to acknowledge the colonial past and present of the postal service and reinvent themselves to provide the services and support those communities want

Essentially, the postal workers union wants to build the solarpunk future.

www.deliveringcommunitypower.ca/learn_more

✉️🌻☀️🌈