#nerd ephemera

[tatianasy]

During lockdown I finally started digitizing my collection of printed matter which spans over 150+ titles in zines, artbooks, magazines, ephemera and more. Nothing lights me up more than talking about print and design and seeing all of the ways it comes to life in the home, the shop, and our lives. If you like a fun desktop experience or good chaos in your infinite scroll - follow along here: @printheaux <3

Alsooo on Instagram : )

[elancholia]

Nerds and pedants will assail me with cries of “the first year of the century was 1601!” Or “Jesus would have been born in like 6 BC!!!” Please imagine that this post includes a remarkably incisive and well-formulated soyjak addressing these points specifically

This is a Battle of Sekigehara appreciation post. Thank you to an era-defining historical event with the rare decency to happen in a nice round-numbered year. Even the birth of Christ happened in AD 1! So close. Better luck next time, big C. But our man Tokugawa was built different. Turn of the century, turn of the epoch, baby. 1600/1600 would divide history into before and after again. Thank you, Battle of Sekigehara.

[nauticaltrain]

what's your favourite thing about stex and what you got you into it? (i.e the music, costumes, characters) i discovered stex when i was in my first college 3 years ago, and in '23 is when i actually started looking into the wiki and the '84 soundtrack (which im so glad i did- i've seen wembley live last year on the 27th of september and it was so- so fun- love this train musical so much)

I first heard about stex probably about nine years ago from a tumblr post, completely by accident. It detailed the general plot and music but I didn't think much of it. Thought it was cool since I had only a cursory interest in trains at the time. Promptly forgot about it.

Then I rediscovered it a few months later, joined the original discord server (that is now resting in peace), and it proceeded to occupy a space in my head for nearly a decade. I've taken breaks from it here and there, namely between 2018-2020, but I got back into it in college (around the same time as you discovered it lol) and just really fell back in love with it.

My favorite thing about Starlight Express is how much there is to dive into with it. You can really just go down rabbit holes and find so many things. Costume bibles, forgotten tv spots, 30 year old bootlegs, backstage footage, paper ephemera, etc. Not to mention, the amount of versions the show has. One could make a whole career out of being a dramaturg for just this show alone.

Also, anyone that knows me, knows I am a complete nerd about the design. I could go on and on about the minutia of John Napier's work for stex. Really really wonderful stuff to pick through and study, especially as an artist. Unashamed to say, I have become very good at drawing the costumes. only took me 8 years lmao

Anyways, I love Starlight Express, like a lot. It's hard for me to pick out a single thing that draws me to it because the whole of it really just slots well into my brain. It pains me that I'll never be able to see it live in it's prime (80s-90s), but I'm determined to make it to Bochum at some point before I die!

[korva-the-raven]

I'm a Raven. I won't do minimalism.

I like collecting small shinee things and making weird little junk trinkets.

I collect curios and nature things.

I also collect trash and junk. And sometimes I find lucky treasure.

I collect Halloween loot and gumball machine loot. I have a pencil collection too. My inner child is alive and thriving.

I collect color too. I build a tiny color museum based on found objects. I also collect lots of nerd stuff. That's my model of a neuron (brain cell) I made out of pipe cleaners at the Science fair last weekend.

I collect ephemera too. My desk is always cluttered because it's where I empty my pockets, and I'm always busy with my adventures, so my goodies and swag always pile up.

I cover my walls with my favorite things and pay no mind to giving them an aesthetic treatment or design. They are there because I want them there.

I just like spooky, nerdy, witchy, colorful plastic Shiney shit. And I love cluttering my personal space with it. It only has to make sense to me.

Also, I have a pet rock now.

#my 5x7 feel of maximialism glory that is my little corner of the world #raven's lair

[noots-wears-blue-boots]

opening 1999 to try and summon the stupid onlyne techrot nerds again i WANT that DAMNED eye ephemera thing

and a 6 pack i still need one since i accidentally sold the one i was saving for my standing to lettie like an IDIOT /dramatic

[seefasters]

speaking of which, i love that its becoming more and more blatant that montrose is just a GIANT nerd about steeplechase, but only like. stuff that was popular like 30 years ago

justin is so blatantly setting up some backstory/narrative stuff for montrose im about to cry

[mrfengi]

This Jenny Nicholson video is amazing because it is a 4 hour deep dive on a niche topic which manages to explain why the topic is relevant and worth 4 hours of frequently funny rumination.

Part of what makes Jenny's videos work is anger - for the most part it's framed and sometimes obscured by quips, asides and carefully built deadpan arguments, but Jenny's deep nerd fondness for certain things does not ignore the ugly bullshit nor deny how it pisses her off. Her general affect seems detached but it's just speaking at one volume level most of the time, maybe cause she knows her core audience is not into frequently, randomly shouty essayists. Anyway, when she raises her voice it's a thought out choice and in this case it's often open anger (at least relative to her usual delivery). In this way Jenny reminds me of @twiststreet - because the primary tone is a naturally comedic and seemingly detached one, but that's just how the author processes things. When necessary he'll be more direct and it's pretty clear there's some kind of moral compass and a lot of bullshit pisses him off, even if he can also laugh about it. Some of my favorite posts are openly mad to a most vulnerable degree, but the reason they are powerful is all the prior posts making similar points in a more artful and humorous manner.

These days I've been thinking a lot about anger and the take, pundit, sharing thoughts business. Like if you get too into the "speaks truth to power" bullshit you end up a Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow or Dennis Miller or Ricky Gervais, smug assholes who are often speaking "truth" for power. And it's not just a lack of humor, but forgetting that Emily Dickson thing "success in circuit lies".

Jenny is obsessed with theme parks and other odd ephemera, like the pop culture Easter Shows of this one church, but through that she engages her fondness for research, journalism and larger themes. And she's amusing & has tight timing even when running 4 hours. Abhay has managed to be a snarky yet earnest casual blogger for over a decade (or is it two?) with a reformed interest in comics, certain youtubers, current events, dad TV shows like Will Trent through which he also confronts horrific BS that bubbles up everywhere. Both have been around and still sane much longer than when Olbermann's reheated "at long last have you no sense of decency" bit turned trite and then ugly (to be fair, that was less than a year). Part of it is they know their lane and stick to it while still noticing the entire world. Maybe it's also cause they are known but not mega successful so it's easier to remain grounded. Some big names manage that - Anthony Bourdain comes to mind but look how that ended. Okay this is now long and earnest and nowhere near as tightly edited as the two people I praise. If I have any conclusion it's this: look, so many of us are angry about the way things are going, right? Even if some are drawing wrong or evil conclusions, I get that rage. And I get the need to commiserate about that anger for solace and maybe survival. But if you have the rare opportunity for even one other person to read your words, it helps to be more than that. You can't cram every angle and tone into every post - especially microblogs - but overall be more, have a life and thoughts beyond those points and those points will be better made. Only a few preachers are actually good at it, y'know? The rest of us have got to have a sense of humor and doubt about ourselves in order to not go sour, I think. This applies to more than posting. It's a way to be in the world. It's a not entirely applicable to this long post, but gonna end with a Walt Kelly quote: "As our people move in all directions with great grim purpose the safety valve of humor seems to be missing. Humor is not escape. Sleep is escape. Humor is relief. The laugh of finding out the other fellow is funny because he is the enemy is not enough."

[thetwilightroadtonightfall]

blorboposting here

sometimes (and by sometimes I mean often) I laugh at how Michael Johnston was presumably casted as Ephemera because of his role as Mikleo

like the kh casting director really looked at Tales of Zestiria and saw this white-haired boy with a big plot role and an irrefutably strong bond with his friend the protagonist. They saw this tiny but mighty kid who constantly but lovingly gets picked on by the rest of the friend group. They saw this really passionate and inquisitive nerd with an interest in a special book.

They saw a character who was left behind in the wake of his friend the protagonist sacrificing his life for the greater good, and carried on the fight they started together in order to make the world a brighter place. (Maybe I should also mention that his friend the protagonist is implied to be reborn many generations later…)

The casting director saw all of this wrapped up in one jrpg twink and I can only imagine they did whatever they could to get Michael into kh immediately and honestly this kind of typecasting just goes to show how good they are at their job

[whimsy-of-the-stars]

whimsy-of-the-stars: a writeblr re-re-intro!

hey guys, it’s been a minute! I’m whimsy-of-the-stars, and since my main projects have kinda shifted around, I thought it would be a good time to update my intro! ngl it’s a pretty inopportune time to do a re-intro, since I’m close to the end of one draft and planning two more… it’s just overdue!

some info about me:

I’m gonna start college in the fall majoring in English with a concentration in Creative Writing! :D

learning languages is a passion of mine! I’m focusing on Spanish right now but I’ve dabbled in both Esperanto and Toki Pona (yeah I’m a nerd!)

I’m a video essay enjoyer and possibly maker, eventually

fiction podcasts and actual plays slap???

I have “I want to do too many things” disease and want to try making stories in many different mediums!

ttrpgs are really cool but I have yet to play them with other people! does that stop me from trying to make games… no

elements I like to write: Found family! Chosen ones (+ the subversion of)! Big Emotion™️! Organized crime (idk why it doesn’t leave me alone)! Gay people, of course!

genres I like to write (YA and middle grade): high fantasy, low fantasy, different -punk stuff, sci fi maybe, superheroes, fairy-tale esque, romance, coming of age

I also write poetry! You can find it in this tag: whimsy of the poetry

ALSO, I did DraftDash in January 2024, which was fun but I did end up petering out halfway thru. Follow my journey in the tag draftdash!

ok, now onto wips!

I am in a weird stage with a lot of my wips, but a re-intro was overdue so I decided to do it anyway!

wips I am currently writing:

apocalypse story!

status: first draft, 24k (almost done with part 1)

the basics: mg/ya apocalyptic + queer ?coming of age? story and its sequel, except they’re both short so they’re melded into one two-part book! it’s told thru diary entries with lots of extra ephemera glued in! part 1 of 2 is ALMOST done but I’m not inspired to finish it rn! ! I’m not gonna continue with part 2 right after, though, since I still need to plan it!

summary: stressed-out eighth/grader Allison goes to her old hideout in the forest to decompress, but one thing leads to another and she can’t find her way back home. the forest is seemingly ever-expanding, ever-changing, and even when she finds her friends who’ve come to rescue her, they still have to face the actual, real life botanical apocalypse that’s becoming more and more of an issue for the outside world. can they find their way home alive and well? and if they do get home, what will their home city even look like?

extras: fun fact I started this in April 2023 for camp nano and it has taken me this long to write the next 10k words! Also the main character is a bit of a self-insert, but of the person I was in lockdown in 2020!

um. That’s it for wips I’m currently writing rn lol

wips I am “revitalizing”:

(aka taking old drafts/concepts and turning them nice and new!)

Both of these have existed in different-ish iterations for years, however I am currently in the weird process of developing both of these into all-new things from an existing groundwork! Neither of them currently have “statuses” because it’s hard to explain where exactly I am right now!

heist story!

the basics: ya fantasy heist novel (maybe eventually a trilogy?) set in a faerie world that rapidly advanced not too long ago into a dieselpunk/decopunk society rife with corruption and crime!

summary: Logical and inquisitive teen Calliope is relatively normal. Her offbeat parents, however, have raised her in a house full of strange curios and old tomes of faery stories. But only when she starts to exhibit unwieldy shadow magic, and her parents invite a prim woman she’s never met before into their home do things really start to get strange. The woman whisks Calliope away through one of the aforementioned curios to a noir hubworld where ancient faerie bloodlines and newfangled magitech collide. Why? To take part in a high-stakes heist with a surprising trio of other teens who want nothing more than to take down the crime boss who runs their town.

extras: this one’s a weird one imo. it’s one of the oldest wips that I am still working on, tho this one had a break of about 3 years!!! also I originally wrote it in hot pink comic sans XD

new superhero story!

(I am also revitalizing this one, but it’s in a way less put-together state! not much to say yet lol!) (also it’s not very new I just call it that)

it’s a ya superhero thing that features teenage (often queer) antiheroes trying to balance their heroic + civilian identities!

featuring: the shittiest entertainment/hero management company you’ve ever seen, shared trauma, gray morality, two different rock bands, and heroes that are at once government agents, influencers, and corporate concoctions!

considering making a “help me name my characters” post because i desperately have to name/rename like 3/4 of all of these characters!!!

more ideas I have bouncing around:

(lightning round!)

old ya romance wip i need to revitalize about two teens enter a competition to make a demo album and end up falling in love in the process (also they’re lesbians XD)

offbeat, ya supernatural + historical fantasy about a girl university student who is buried alive, and upon getting rescued, starts to transform into a strange underworld creature. also features a cute gravedigger :D

a musical about standardized testing (yeah lol) that’s goofy and queer and explores how seniors + juniors are so freaking stressed out all the time lol

that’s all folks! :D

[adultswim2021]

Robot Chicken #73: “Maurice Was Caught” | August 2, 2009 - 11:30PM | S04E12

Sometimes I feel like my hatred of this show is thawing over time, but this episode really wore on me. The highlight of the episode was still a D+ at best. That was the Simon Belmont one, where the realities of using a whip as a weapon are highlighted. A fairly funny premise that didn’t overstay its welcome? Okay, fine. I’ll write about it semi-positively on my bad blog about cartoons. You win, Robot Chicken. You win. 

As for the rest: There’s an Annie (of old-ass comic strip fame) sketch where it’s like that MTV Program Super Sweet 16. I applaud Robot Chicken for not having the voice just be Seth Green doing his patented “stupid bitch” voice; they actually hired an actress for it. The writing isn’t much better than those other sketches where they make fun of teen celebrities. Could have been worse, I guess. 

There’s a sketch that’s like War Games, but it’s the Nerd playing a Lord of the Rings game. He nukes Canada trying to find a cheat code online. The government waterboards him until he finally implicates the middle east as a potential target. This technically qualifies as satire. It predictably ends with a prison rape joke, which technically qualifies as lame writing.

A lot of these sketches are fairly short, running around a minute each. Usually it’s easy to single out three “longish” sketches, and I guess I already have. There’s one where Sesame Street and Wall Street collide when Kermit the Frog’s cousin Gordon the Gecko shows up. There’s one where a scientist shows off a bunch of failed jetpack tests. There’s one where Petroleum Pete sings a song about the virtues of using fossil fuels. That last guy is sorta meant to resemble the Sinclair logo, I’m guessing. I thought maybe he was a real guy. That one hurts because it’s also musically bad. That was this one, goodnight! 

EPHEMERA CORNER: 

Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! - Season Three DVD (August 4, 2009)

The worst season of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job nevertheless receives as good of a release as any other season, with deleted scenes and extended sketches. The best bits on here are the half-hour version of the Muscles for Bones episode, and the complete Gettin’ It Dunn full-length ‘sode.

I read a review of this to remind me what was on it and was reminded that C.O.R.B.S. received a video commentary on adultswim.com. I also remember Jim and Derrick getting the same treatment, which I touched on in that episode’s write-up. It’s a shame those commentaries are lost to time. Dino’s Moral Orel commentaries made it to the Australian DVD for Moral Orel, but the rest are fucking toast.

MAIL BAG

Hey leave Wil alone! If you play nice with him he might send you a free case of Stone Farking Wheaton W00tStout.

Jesus fucking Christ, man. You made me look this up to see if it was real and I was very disappointed at what I found. Everything that turd does makes me want to you-know-what (TOILETFLUSH.ogg)

[gorogues]

What issue was it where Sam first actually was named "Sam"? I assume it had to have been before Flash #119 (where Cary Bates mistakenly called him "Joe"), but for the life of me I can't seem to find an earlier issue where his first name gets mentioned. Was it in some sort of letter column or something, or I am just missing things?

An excellent question. To the best of my knowledge -- I could be missing something -- it was either Flash v1 #239 (1976) or the 1976 DC calendar, and the calendar probably came first since it would likely have been prepared earlier. What probably happened was that some nerd at DC decided to establish factoids like the names of previously-unnamed characters at around the time they gave them birthdays and ephemera like that…it may have even been for the early stages of the Who's Who guide. This came after the Joe Scudder issue (1973), so I guess that one wasn't strictly an error on Bates' part unless Sam's name had already been established internally within DC (which it may have been, TBH).

It's possible his name appeared in a letter column before 1976, but if so I'm not aware of it. Does anyone else know of something published earlier?

[a-summer-soul]

look what I found at my local nerd ephemera store besties!

[talenlee]

Story Pile: Person Of Interest, Season 1

Story Pile: Person Of Interest, Season 1

In my teenager years, I came to appreciate the block of TV shows I thought of as ‘good shows’ in the 7:30 to 8:30 bracket. This typically took the form of a pair of back-to-back sitcom episodes, or, as I got older and the options got better (and my bedtime crept back), an hour long dramedy TV series, often built around a single high-concept hook, or even taped from late-night TV. A lot of these shows were, to my mind, ‘American Shows’ (and therefore good shows), were typically high-concept shows with sci-fi ideas in them that could be executed on cheaply with a small special effects budget, and included things like Time Trax and Pointman and, strangely important in my mind, a series called Fortune Hunter. I liked to refer to Fortune Hunter as a sort of example of forgettable 90s TV ephemera, a low-budget story about a wannabe James Bond type who was relaying everything through super-technology contact lenses to a nerd in a chair who could instantly relay everything to him. I, at the time, thought that Fortune Hunter was a great reference to make, like Street Sharks, which would make people in the same age range as I go ‘oh, yeah, that show, I remember that, kinda.’

Turns out that this was a terrible idea because, at the time I did not know, that Fortune Hunter aired for all of one month in America and only played out the full run of its episodes here in Australia because we were a dumping ground for failed attempted TV series that relied on high-concept sci-fi ideas that could be executed on cheaply with a small special effects budget. But those shows had some common traits, like Time Trax with its decreasing list of villains to apprehend, or Pointman with the fantasy of a strange billionaire appearing out of nowhere to save ordinary people, or Fortune Hunter with its gimmick of a super-nerd teaming up with a terrifying badass super-spy to save the day for single individuals.

I bring up this meandering reference to 90s television because these different stories with their modest production budgets and mediocre executions through actors who never quite got the respect they deserved are presented their absolute apotheosis in the form of the 2011-2016 sci-fi action series Person Of Interest.

Person of Interest is a sci-fi crime drama series that started airing in 2011 and that should make it hilariously dated except it’s not because it’s about the idea of a mass surveillance state and predictive models of human behaviour which is kind of a thing we’re talking about a lot right now.

Your basic structure is that our heroes are composed for John Reese (probably not his name), a probably-CIA super-badass who goes around kicking ass against criminals that are typically, grossly outmatched against him, with a shockingly abrupt combat style (that films very, very quickly and easily) and a love for shooting people in the knee (you know to show how good he is with guns but also to not run the risk of killing people), teaming up with Harold Finch (probably not his name), an awkward gonky weirdo billionaire with supertech (that films very, very quickly and easily).

But really, it’s about The Machine.

The Machine is the core of this series in this season; it is the impetus for action and the establishing presence of the myth arc that the narrative runs on. In simplest terms, the Machine is a surveillance program that observes everything in the attempt to pre-emptively detect terror attacks made in the wake of 9/11 paranoia. This is a fun concept to work from because it’s a real thing that people tried to do, and it ran into all sorts of problems with how they got made, what they could try to do, and the limitations of publically available, legally actionable information. In this case, the conceit of the universe is that the device could be built and operated entirely discretely, and as long as nobody knows it exists and nobody knows what it could do, it’s just the same as a machine that makes anonymous tips to the authorities that happen to have a 100% reliable hit rate at detecting conspiracies for terror activities.

That’s super interesting, and they talk about ways this conceit is interesting, in ways that we aren’t grappling with perfectly right now. And since the conceit of the Machine is about taking care of terrorism, it generates a lot of false positives that don’t care about that primary goal. It finds crimes that are going to happen, deaths that are going to occur, and it then, if it can’t link them to mass casuality terrorism events (which we kind of get an indication disappeared in this universe because of the Machine), it discards them.

This is the story of our two protagonists as they try to address those numbers before they’re discarded. To answer a question ‘what would you do if there was something you could do?’ And the answer to that question is a lot of beating up baddies and cool car chases as the machine spits out weird cases, in no small part because the kinds of things the machine can detect are about isolating seemingly impossibly unrelated pieces of data. It’s a successful formula, of a crime-of-the-week hour-long series like your Blacklist and NCIS and CSI and BPA and IPL and you know I’m just making those up at this point.

It’s a cool hook for this season and I get the vibe that there’s a lot of storytelling space that’s being built out and not used. It’s shown in this first season that the story of these characters can do things like show up for a second appearance, that solutions and resolutions are being held back so that the story can do more with them later and that there is something of a conspiracy at work that doesn’t feel like it’s just using the same central thing as an excuse the whole way along, laying out track in an inward spiral.

Of course, the Machine is horrifying, and its appearances – the origin story for it, and its perspective – are both shot like a horror story and conceived of as like a horror story. There’s a long rolling background to the Machine that’s told in coldly lit, stark background stories that even when they’re trying to be told in ways that are funny or cute, are still all done as starkly and remotely as you might imagine archival footage of a tragedy happening.

Towards the end of the first season, Finch says he doesn’t regret making the machine, but he didn’t realise what it would cost him. The personal cost of the machine is manifold, and it means the whole machine is effectively running on human suffering and it’s all generating dreadful, painful guilt on every single intervening step, guilt that Finch and Reese spend their lives trying to dilute.

There’s no way for this kind of thing to exist, no way for something so powerful to work, without it being fundamentally, a structure for compromising. Compromising people, compromising security, compromising our ethical framework, our standards for legal strictures, and all of those things are necessary for something like The Machine to exist. What good is it doing? it’s saving a small number of people, every day, and it’s preventing international terrorism, but surely, is it the best way to do that? International terrorism happens because of causes and effects, it doesn’t run based on bad meals.

This first season feels like a prequel. It feels like a series that maybe wants to do something else, that there, like Fringe is going to be a conceptual escalation from season to season. It’s got some good names involved, and it ran for five years, so I’m genuinely wondering what I’m going to see as the series moves forward.

In the last episode of the first season, an antagonist, in response to Finch’s admission that he is okay with having made the machine, it’s in response to an antagonist asserting angrily to him that you have made god.

It’s an odd way to describe having constructed a kind of Laplace’s Demon.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Media #StoryPile #PersonOfInterest

[a-girl-called-bob]

I originally wrote a whole thing about how the lack of founding texts makes it hard to pin down what types of stories Are Told in a Solarpunk setting, but I got to a point where I had to look up some other recent/lesser known 'punks to form a more coherent argument and uh, Solarpunk is actually kind of unique in its lack of founding texts. Most of the 'punks people talk about exist largely because one or two works of fiction had some really striking aesthetics and then someone published a tabletop RPG or something, but Solarpunk is not really like that.

Cutting here because I ended up rambling for a long time. Read more if you want to hear my critique of the origins of Solarpunk, a bit of discussion around social media ephemera, and a few thoughts on the kinds of stories that Solarpunk allows.

From what I can tell, Solarpunk was kind of made whole cloth on Tumblr. The original post actually turned ten years old like, a week ago, and it's. This is not to be mean, I do like it quite a bit. But it's exactly what I'd expect from something on 2014 Tumblr. It's mostly aesthetic touchstones, with the interest in renewable energy and a better relationship to nature less as an ideological line and more as a guide for the aesthetic. There are some interesting things with how the touchstones include a lot of public transit and community-centered things, but there are also a fair amount of things that just, don't seem very thought out. Just to pick at one thing, if one of the core focuses is 'Less corporate capitalism, and more small businesses' (which, the small businesses line is already just, so 2014 liberal), if we take that at face value, then quick question: who the fuck is making all of these solar panels and streetcars?

And I mean, to be clear, 'plot holes' in a few-hundred-word aesthetic post aren't a reason to throw out the entire thing - if anything, answering those questions could lead to some interesting storytelling. The original post wasn't meant to be anything in entirety, I think it was meant to invite others to play in the aesthetic space and use some of the elements to craft their own settings.

One of my more direct criticisms of that original post, though, is the way that it pulls on Steampunk aesthetics. I have a number of issues with General Steampunk Aesthetics that I'm not going to get into here; my issue has more to do with how it, kind of doesn't really mesh well with the rest of the Solarpunk vibe? Like, if we've got solar panels baked into every window and electric cars and such, is there any non-aesthetic reason why we're still using airships? The art nouveau revival stuff is like, it's fine if you aren't a giant nerd who thinks about things like the cultural influences behind art movements, and old cars do have a certain look to them, for sure, but like, the rest of the aesthetic is so grounded in (2014) contemporary desires for a utopian society that all of the retrofuturism stuff pulled from Steampunk feels a bit out of place.

Despite my quibbles with the original post, the core concept of an optimistic speculative future based in renewable energy and the creation of communities is overall very appealing, and the aesthetics that people who like that concept have honed in on are definitely neat. I think it says something that a cursory scroll through the Solarpunk tag is almost exclusively like, things in the world now that folks think could bring us closer to that idealized future, developments in clean energy and degrowth and all that good stuff. People have mostly latched on to the parts that make sense for current contemporary futurism and left the parts that are more based in retrofuturism behind.

On the other hand though, the Solarpunk tag doesn't have a ton of like, Solarpunk fiction in it. There's the occasional bit of art or comic page, but like, people aren't in the Solarpunk tag talking about movies and books much. The most common example people give of Solarpunk media is Pokemon, and like. I love Pokemon, don't get me wrong, but there are only some parts of the setting that are really Like That, like earlier gens had stuff like Sunyshore City and all but Gen 8 was basically about an exploitative megacorp that doesn't change at all after you fight its CEO.

Of course, that's a pretty limited slice of what people have written and said about Solarpunk. A cursory scroll in the tag is not rigorous reading. The thing is, though, it's kind of hard to track down the origins of many of the later ideas in Solarpunk because most of it comes from other Tumblr posts, and Tumblr's search function is... notoriously broken. Most of the criticisms I'm laying (and will continue to lay) on Solarpunk based on a small subset of people in the space have probably already been answered by someone or another, but the issue is that there isn't really any kind of unified canon in the way of Cyberpunk. And this, once again, goes back to how the foundational texts of the genre are almost entirely contained in blog posts and social media ephemera.

So, what do we do? How do we tell stories in this space that has essentially become the past decade's idea of an actually possible idyllic future? Well, I hate to say it, but the best way I can think of to write in this space is to drill in on its flaws. Solarpunk's ideas of what a good future looks like are deeply liberal, deeply middle-class, deeply first-world. It imagines an urbanist utopia of perfect little clean cities, poverty eradicated through means best left as an exercise to the reader. Some individual folks have more global perspectives on what that looks like, but at its core within our current systems a mass solar transition for the first world is built on the back of exploitation of the third world. Fundamentally, it imagines solutions to the problems of today that allow us to mostly live undisturbed consumer lives. Tackling and addressing these criticisms could be the thematic driver for stories in a solarpunk setting.

It always comes back to the age-old question: utopia for who? If the eventual end state is 'utopia for ALL', then the story of how we get there, how we tackle the complicated problems, how it's just plain not as simple as 'everyone has clean energy and the climate is saved', that's where the story is, at least in my opinion.

Or, we could actually lean *more* into the less futurist and more speculative/fantastical aspects of the setting. Solarpunk has largely morphed into a genre that wants to explore the near future of today, but like. The alternate history Solarpunk novel where Al Gore became president in 2001 and that didn't fix everything but it sure did move the needle on the climate would be interesting. Solarpunk would work pretty well as a basis for some kind of noblebright urban fantasy as well; imperfect utopia, utopia at the fringes, burgeoning or in decline, there are stories to tell here. It's a bit harder to find things to tell stories about at the height of a proper utopia, but like. A villain can be anywhere. Solarpunk would have its opposition, does have its opposition. It's not terribly hard to imagine what types of internal threats might challenge the utopia.

And like, I'm not a terribly creative person, and I came up with this shit just spitballin'. There are stories to be told here. In my opinion, the most interesting ones would be challenging some of the setting's core assumptions and resolving the challenges in a way that still maintains the core optimism, but like, that's not the only way to tell the story by a long shot.

I think a lot of the reason there's not been a ton of big solarpunk-style media is because it's inherently utopian and that leads to a real lack of conflict. Which is a shame that there's not a lot, because I LOVE how Solarpunk looks! But A lot of it is very big-scale from what I've seen; theorizing about ways man can integrate technology with nature, but not really what man is actually doing after that. What are the kinds of lives people would live in a solarpunk city? Surely actual human stories don't simply end because a lot of our needs are met. There's gotta be something!!

[thoughtportal]

During his month as a writer-in-residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut, in 2022, Chris Spaide’s favorite place to spend time was the Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s office. Merrill, who died in 1995, had designed the cozy nook so it was easy to move from working on his latest poem at one of two desks to playing Solitaire or reading on the burnt orange daybed. And, in a playful nod to childhood fantasy, the whole room was tucked away behind a secret door masquerading as a bookcase, its own hidden world. A critic and poet in his own right, Spaide spent some days writing at one of the desks. But mostly he contemplated the contents of the room itself, looking through Merrill’s prodigious postcard and record collections or lounging on the daybed.

The James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut. (Credit: Rise Media)

When he wasn’t in the office, Spaide pored over the rest of the eccentrically decorated apartment, seeking crumbs of understanding. A self-professed “true nerd” of Merrill’s work, who has taught a six-part course on the topic, Spaide took this endeavor seriously. In the kitchen he browsed the cookbooks and admired Merrill’s madeleine pan (“he was a great fan of Proust”). Examining the board games, Spaide found old scorekeeping notes stashed in the Scrabble set. And he made it a project to flip through every single one of Merrill’s books during his stay, looking for scribbles. “I really went in to do fieldwork, to live in his house and life,” Spaide says. Some days he spent sixteen hours straight exploring the apartment.

This kind of deep immersion into a literary hero’s everyday world is possible only for participants of a particular kind of program, one that has become increasingly popular in recent years: the writer’s residency at a famous author’s house. At some of these residencies, writers cook, sleep, and work in the historic location. In others (like the Merrill House) they stay nearby but are given remarkable access to the home. Regardless, these programs offer both the luxury of space and time to write and the chance to have a close-up encounter with a writer they’ve long admired—sometimes so close it can feel a little uncomfortable.

Many of these residencies bolster attendees’ work in the same ways more standard programs do. They offer much-needed financial support for struggling writers, organize small cohorts that become close friends, and provide key opportunities for cross-pollination among fellows. Residencies at Millay Arts, run out of the classic Sears-kit barn that Edna St. Vincent Millay erected with her husband next to their home in upstate New York in 1926, have been nurturing artists and writers for a half century. Because the residency is open to writers across genres and artists across disciplines, visiting fiction writers are often moved to write poetry, and playwrights are inspired to pen essays. “You feel this presence of fifty years of other people putting their creative work in; you feel the energy,” says Calliope Nicholas, the Millay Arts codirector and manager of residency programs. The program also features the services of an on-site chef who does the grocery shopping and prepares communal dinners.

At the residency offered by the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum, writers stay on the town square in tiny Piggott, Arkansas, where Ernest Hemingway often visited the family of his then wife, Pauline, beginning in the late 1920s. In one program highlight, participants are invited to write in the studio where the author worked on A Farewell to Arms (1929). They also receive a $1,000 stipend and teach a workshop for local writers during their stay. Adam Long, executive director of Arkansas State University’s heritage sites, says many visiting professors find the workshop to be a refreshing escape from the insularity of MFA culture, especially since participants tend to focus on memoir or Southern-style family storytelling over literary fiction. Still, some people struggle with the isolation of staying in an unknown small town and the practicalities of rural life. With their needs in mind, Long has assembled a set of survival tips and advice he tries to give fellows as they arrive. Lesson one: Forget at your peril that Arkansas restaurants still close on Sundays.

Other challenges associated with this type of residency are less mundane, involving the quirks of working in historic homes. Residents at Hemingway-Pfeiffer must schedule time in advance to work in Hemingway’s office, for example, “as opposed to if we were on an academic campus and I could give them a key,” Long says. There they work at a nonarchival desk within the author’s studio, to avoid damaging the historic item. And they are permitted to bring only water inside—a challenge for the many perennially caffeinated writers who visit.

Elsewhere, residents at the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, a museum devoted to the writer in her childhood home in Columbus, Georgia, must contend with occasional tours and events in their space. Nonfiction writer Jennifer Hope Choi, who completed a residency there in 2017, remembers finding it unsettling to wake up to strangers in the yard or rummaging through the fridge. “I wasn’t quite sure who would show up, if they’d have access to the house,” she says.

To many fellows these complications are a small price to pay for the chance to uncover some deeper truth about beloved writers—to sit where they sat, touch what they touched. “When you’re walking through the property, you can imagine how it looked through her eyes when she was around,” says Nicholas about Millay. That sense of place, built through the prosaic detritus of an author’s life, can inspire feelings of deep connection, Long adds. That’s what brings tourists to the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum, he says, “and I think that’s also why writers want to come. Place helps us to connect with stories.”

For program participants in Piggott, that might mean working in Hemingway’s studio, surrounded by his personal effects. (Long’s favorite is the unopened box of clay pigeons addressed to the author.) It also might mean exploring the area, which Hemingway loved for its nature and quiet. For residents at Millay Arts, it might mean wandering in the author’s gardens, which are otherwise closed to the public; imagining her hosting wild parties on the property (no clothes allowed in the pool); or visiting the family gravesite where her ashes were scattered. For Spaide at Merrill House, it meant an unprecedented opportunity to dig for morsels of insight into the writer and his work. Having previously authored an academic article about Merrill’s relationship to Asia, Spaide found it enlightening to sift through the books and souvenirs Merrill had brought home from his travels there. He especially loved stumbling on an accordion-folded Japanese notebook inscribed with his poem “The Summer People.”

Similarly, when writer and archivist Jenn Shapland spent a month at the McCullers Center as she researched the author’s unfinished biographies—a sort of unofficial residency—she sat at Carson McCullers’s desk, soaked in the upstairs tub, and watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the (slipcovered) couch where the author wrote the 1961 novel Clock Without Hands. Spending time among the ordinary trappings of McCullers’s life, she says, “I was able to see Carson as just a person and see myself trying to inhabit her life and understand her. And perhaps most importantly, my time in the house showed me the limits of my ability to know her.”

Shapland found living in a functioning museum to be “unsettlingly material,” somehow simultaneously uncanny and homey. But for some writers that mix of material intimacy and otherworldliness can be thoroughly discomfiting. Though she was deeply grateful for the time, space, and support the residency provided, “when you’re surrounded by a deceased person’s belongings, it’s not exactly joyful,” Choi says. She found the house’s main exhibit room, which features photos of McCullers, along with her glasses, cane, and tea set, “incredibly creepy” and avoided it when she could. “Generally speaking, living there alone was very scary,” she says. She acknowledges that the feeling was compounded by the project she was there to research, which focused on a Georgia serial killer. But Choi has heard other former fellows express feelings of unease as well, including whispers about encounters with ghosts.

Even Spaide, with his exploratory zeal, felt that chill. Some early fellows stayed directly in Merrill’s apartment, rather than in the current designated lodgings at his partner’s next door. “I was never tempted because I would have been too spooked out,” Spaide says. (Still, that didn’t stop him from using the home’s resident Ouija board; Merrill was a famous enthusiast.) Beyond supernatural concerns, Spaide also sought not to cross the subtle line he saw between enthusiastic visitor and something more invasive. Peeking at Scrabble scores and inside books felt like friendly inquiry; sleeping in Merrill’s bed felt, somehow, very different. “I wanted to be a good guest; I didn’t want to do anything I wouldn’t do with a generous host,” Spaide says.

At Millay Arts, the writers tend to take any inherent spookiness in gleeful stride. Sure, the metal fruit baskets that hang in the kitchen might occasionally move when there’s no breeze. But that doesn’t stop residents from watching scary movies together or conducting midnight rituals by the family gravesite, imbibing Millay’s favorite liquor, Nicholas says. “Millay loved gin, so they’ll do gin libations and start feeding each other ghost stories, and it starts to build up from there.”

Though she didn’t take issue with the eerier aspects of staying in the historic home surrounded by the belongings of a long-dead family, Shapland did find the experience remarkable. “The rest of the house, apart from the kitchen, was museum territory, and it was hard to distinguish what was house from what was museum,” she says. “I ended up getting a lot out of this liminality.” That experience eventually played an important role in her genre-bending book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (Tin House, 2020).

In many cases, that strange magic of the in-between, combined with the intimacy of submerging so fully in an artist’s material life, seems to affect residents in unexpected ways. Writers frequently report newfound clarity and insight, as well as productivity that takes surprising forms.

At Hemingway-Pfeiffer, residents “seem surprised a lot of times by how rewarding that workshop is,” Long says. At Millay Arts, Nicholas finds it “fun to watch people coming in who have a set objective of what they want to accomplish from their time here, but they end up having paradigm shifts.”

And despite Choi’s discomfort with her surroundings at the McCullers Center, her experience there figures significantly in The Wanderer’s Curse, forthcoming in 2025 from W. W. Norton. Before she arrived a friend advised her to be gentle with herself and flexible about the idea of how working there might look. “Reading is something; sitting there is something,” the friend told her, adding, “What comes from it all might not be what you expect.”

Seven years later, the little details and offhand observations Choi began writing down in an attempt to record the textures of her experience at the house—one favorite example is the industrial carpet mailers that arrived addressed to “Mr. Carston McCuller”—have taken on greater weight. With enough hindsight those notes became an essential resource, a contemporaneous reflection of what “ended up being incredibly crucial and actually a significant turning point in my life,” she says.

Spaide similarly struggled with productivity anxiety before his stay at the Merrill House. But once he arrived, it became clear that the exploration of Merrill’s belongings was the work—that “sifting through his board game collection and looking at his fancy wooden dominoes gave me important information,” he says. With that approach in mind, watching sunrises or sunsets through the apartment windows as Merrill once did, finding unexpected annotations in his books, and daydreaming at his desk behind that remarkable hinged bookcase became just as worthwhile as sketching out new poems or essays. “It was incredibly productive and enlightening, and I hope to never forget what I learned there,” he adds, “and I hardly wrote anything.”

Alissa Greenberg is an independent journalist based in Boston and Berkeley, California, who reports at the intersection of science, history, and culture. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Smithsonian, National Geographic, and elsewhere. If she could be a resident at any author’s home, she would choose that of Nellie Bly.

[kneesntoess]

new year, new nerd shelf photos

the first shelf sits to the immediate right of my desk, roughly at eye line when sitting. I try to fill it with things that make me happy, things I want to keep safe & things that precious to me

the second shelf is lower down & holds all of my ttrpg supplies. notebooks, dice & other ephemera live in the storage bin. handbooks, rule sets & my d&d tarot deck live on the shelf, guarded by Vax. they're perfect to swivel around in my chair & access easily

I'm sure in 2024 some things will change around & get added or put into storage. but for now I love my little collection