#solarpunk group

[punkeropercyjackson]

I literally do not understand how most people perfer punk as just the aesthetic after knowing about the culture.Sickest music ever,learning to make your own shit,UNlearning internalized bigotry,helping people,being weird as fuck,breaking the law,sense of community and solidarity,kids looking up to you and getting them join in.What is the downside compared to looking cool with piercings and dyed hair but not even being willing to be rude to people who actually deserve it instead of trying to be Mcu quip-adjacent,it's like we're an entirely different species.Are you guys afraid to develop personalities?Is that why you kin Mcu characters?

[solar-sunnyside-up]

The amount of times I go to a community thing these days or a council meeting and this exact thing happens

Them: "Hey you helped make this event? What's your name?"

Me: "Oh hi I'm Sunny"

Them: *sees my bright pink hair, something clicks* "Aaah your Sunny! I should've known!"

Guys What Does That Mean

[solarpunkani]

me lying awake at night, low energy, no money, no knowledge: I wanna restore a goddamn creek or something

me the instant I'm more awake: how the fuck would I restore a creek IDEK where a creek IS--

[khanidae]

I worked on a visual novel with some friends / class mates a while ago, it's queer and solarpunk and furry and wholesome, I had a lot of fun with it 💛

Please do download it, I know it says it's playable in the browser but there's a couple bugs and it does not play the music properly 🥹

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

Christina is thinking about hosting a Solarpunk Writing Group, starting at the end of April, and she's looking for participants but also ideas for what this group should do! Comment on the blog post if you have thoughts or to let her know that you're interested!

[justalittlesolarpunk]

You're in the UK right? Wondering if youve heard about gnd rising, and if so what do you think? Thanks for all the resources!

Yes I have! I love them and I don’t know why I left them off my resources post! Will go back and sneak them in

[alpaca-clouds]

Solarpunk and Cultural Diversity

Continuing with the entire "Diversity in Solarpunk" topic, we get to the one, that Solarpunk as a community struggles a lot more with than the inclusion of queer voices. And that is ethnic diversity.

I kinda talked about it in the Solarpunk and colonial thinking post, but it is something that I generally notice.

Maybe I should not call it "ethnic diversity", but rather "cultural diversity" really. Because that is the thing everyone seems to be struggling with.

While the Solarpunk movement did originate in Latin America and is kinda intrinsically linked to Amazofuturism, at least in the Anglosphere it is primarily a white movement. And it is noticable in so many regards.

A big part of this is that white people have the tendency to assume that their experiences are universal. Which also makes them think that whatever worked best for them will work best for everyone culturally (and in any other area). There is a whole conversation to be had in the regard of this and religion. But it shows in many other areas, especially when it comes to Solarpunk or more broadly optimistic SciFi.

See, optimistic SciFi in general tends to feature a human culture based primarily in our western culture and western ideals. Even in stuff like Star Trek, that tried to question this, we see it still with the entire star fleet. Western culture + some spice seems to be the ingredients, there. When white folks imagine the future, they will always imagine a future based around white ideals, without even realizing it.

As such it obviously happens in Solarpunk. A really good example of this is science. See, western culture has this very specific idea how science is supposed to look like. We obviously could have a whole conversation about how much the islamic world has influenced the scientific methods... No, the point is, that other cultures did have science as well and their own scientific methods. And something that should happen is for western people to learn about this and understand it.

Instead of going ahead like "white science is best science" first try to see what you can learn.

And also (sorry, this is rambly)... when you imagine a Solarpunk world, allow for cultural diversity. People will still speak different languages and that is good. People will celebrate different holidays. And that is good. People might have their own rituals depending on culture around big family events. And that is good.

People should not be forced to adapt their lives to your culture. Even if they are living where you are living. It is okay for people to have different cultures. And to approach certain questions in a different way.

Instead of trying to imagine a homogenous world, imagine a world of differences. Because differences are good.

[bumblebeeappletree]

Recorded on April 20, 2023.

In this second part of our Grow Your Garden Group lunchtime series, we explore best practices and ideas for managing plot waitlists, and ways to keep members engaged in a variety of important garden tasks while they await a plot.

Facilitated by Erinn White and Hannah Wargo, NYC Parks GreenThumb

[lwoorl]

I'll say it: "Oh all AI artists do is write a stupid description and immediately get an image with no effort, there's no art in that" is the new "Digital painting doesn't count as art because it takes no effort"

[whatifsandspheres]

Some people sound a bit like luddites when it comes to using modern technology or fossil fuels in the contexts of sustainability-- as if they've only parroted climate change political propaganda and never seen the value of biofuels in a potential carbon sequestration scheme.

[southernsolarpunk]

I think we a group need to consider what the early “zero waste” movement did in the 2010s. You know. They’d keep “all” their waste in a glass jar, live in a nice apartment somewhere in LA where they had easy access to a refill store and didn’t stop to consider that just existing in the US creates waste they couldn’t see.

I remember watching a video in 9th grade (around 2013) about a chick who did that and even then I was like “that’s bullshit” and it really turned me off the zero waste movement.

The inherent classism of a lot of zero waste purists created a wall between me and them, where instead of them admitting their privilege, they simply said “anyone can do this”. Most people can’t. A zero waste refill store does not exist in my state! Sure, I could try online but this is 1. More expensive- something my dirt poor family could not do at the time and 2. Creates more carbon emissions!

This isn’t to say zero waste is bad- it’s simply a standard most Americans can’t reach. I think this is why I’m so drawn to solarpunk, because I think solarpunk recognizes the classism that is in a lot of eco-friendly products and movements (something I do think is being addressed- I’ve seen more affordable products now than I did in high school). Solarpunk includes diy- reusing packaging that many of us still have to buy because we can’t afford the eco-friendly version.

Idk I just had some thoughts

[punkeropercyjackson]

Slytherin stans are objectively the worst kind of Potheads/Marauderers/whatever the fuck they call themselves because they're all like 'Slytherins are discriminated against for being ambitious uwuwuwu' as if thinking people being super hungry and very assertive over it is creepy and assholeish isn't like.A reasonable reaction to have Actually

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Against Lore

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

One of my favorite nuggets of writing advice comes from James D Macdonald. Jim, a Navy vet with an encylopedic knowledge of gun lore, explained to a group of non-gun people how to write guns without getting derided by other gun people: "just add the word 'modified.'"

As in, "Her modified AR-15 kicked against her shoulder as she squeezed the trigger, but she held it steady on the car door, watching it disintegrate in a spatter of bullet-holes."

Jim's big idea was that gun people couldn't help but chew away at the verisimilitude of your fictional guns, their brains would automatically latch onto them and try to find the errors. But the word "modified" hijacked that impulse and turned it to the writer's advantage: a gun person's imagination gnaws at that word "modified," spinning up the cleverest possible explanation for how the gun in question could behave as depicted.

In other words, the gun person's impulse to one-up the writer by demonstrating their superior knowledge becomes an impulse to impart that superior knowledge to the writer. "Modified" puts the expert and the bullshitter on the same team, and conscripts the expert into fleshing out the bullshitter's lies.

Yes, writing is lying. Storytelling is genuinely weird. A storyteller who has successfully captured the audience has done so by convincing their hindbrains to care about the tribulations of imaginary people. These are people whose suffering, by definition, do not matter. Imaginary things didn't happen, so they can't matter. The deaths of Romeo and Juliet were less tragic than the death of the yogurt you had for breakfast. That yogurt was alive and now it's dead, whereas R&J never lived, never died, and don't matter:

https://locusmag.com/2014/11/cory-doctorow-stories-are-a-fuggly-hack/

Hijacking a stranger's empathic response is intrinsically adversarial. While storytelling is a benign activity, its underlying mechanic is extremely dangerous. Getting us to care about things that don't matter is how novels and movies work, but it's also how cults and cons work.

Cult leaders and con-artists know that they're engaged in mind-to-mind combat, and they make liberal use of Jim's hack of leaving blank spots for the mark to fill in. Think of Qanon drops: the mystical nonsense was just close enough to sensical that a vulnerable audience was compelled to try and untangle them, and ended up imparting more meaning to them than the hustler who posted them ever could have dreamt up.

Same with cons – there's a great scene in the Leverage: Redemption heist show where an experienced con-artist explains to a novice that the most convincing hustle is the one where you wait for the mark to tell you what they think you're doing, then run with it (scambaiters and other skeptics will recognize this as a relative of the "cold reading," where a "psychic" uses your own confirmations to flesh out their predictions).

As Douglas Adams put it:

A towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Magicians know this one, too. The point of a sleight is to misdirect the audience's attention, and use that moment of misattention to trick them, vanishing, stashing or producing something. The mark's mind is caught in a pleasurable agony: something seemingly impossible just happened. The mind splits into two parts, one of which insists that the impossible just happened, the other insisting that the impossible can't happen.

You know you've done it right if the audience says, "Do that again!" And that's the one thing you must not do. So long as you don't repeat the trick, the audience's imagination will chew on it endlessly, coming up with incredibly clever things that you must have done (a clever conjurer will know several ways to produce the same effect and will "do it again" by reproducing the effect via different means, which exponentially increases the audience's automatic imputation of clever methods to the performer).

Not for nothing, Jim Macdonald advises his writing students to study Magic and Showmanship, a classic text for aspiring conjurers:

https://memex.craphound.com/2007/11/13/magic-and-showmanship-classic-book-about-conjuring-has-many-lessons-for-writers/

There's a version of this in comedy, too. The scholarship of humor is clear on this: comedy comes from surprise. The audience knows they're about to be surprised when the punchline lands, and their mind is furiously trying to defuse the comedian's bomb before it detonates, cycling through potential punchlines of their own. This ramps up the suspense and the tension, so when the comedian does drop the punchline, the tension is released in a whoosh of laughter.

Your mind wants the tension to be resolved ASAP, but the pleasure comes from having that desire thwarted. Comedy – like most performance – has an element of authoritarianism. You don't give the audience what it wants, you give it what it needs.

Same goes for TTRPGs: the game master's role is to deny the players the victories and treasure they want, until they can't take it anymore, and then deliver it. That's the definition of an epic game. It's one of the durable advantages of human GMs over video game back-ends: they can ramp up the epicness by "cheating" on the play, giving the players the chance to squeak out improbable victories at the last possible second:

https://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2009/03/behind-the-screen.html

This is so effective that even crude approximations of it can turn video-games into cult hits – like Left4Dead, whose "Director" back-end would notice when the players were about to get destroyed and then substantially ramped up the chances of finding an amazing weapon – the chance would still be low overall, but there would be enough moments when the player got exactly what they'd been praying for, at the last possible instant, that it would feel amazing:

https://left4dead.fandom.com/wiki/The_Director#Special_Infected

Critically, Left4Dead's Director didn't do this every time. As any showman knows, the key to a great performance is "Always leave 'em wanting more." The musician's successful finale depends on doing every encore the audience demands, except the last one, so the crowd leaves with one tantalyzing and imaginary song playing in their minds, a performance better than any the musicians themselves could have delivered. Like the gun person who comes up with a cooler mod than the writer ever could, like the magic show attendee who comes up with a more elaborate explanation for the sleight than the conjurer could ever pull off, like the comedy club attendee whose imagination anticipates a surprise that grows larger the longer the joke goes on, the successful performance is an adversarial act of cooperation where the audience willingly and unwillingly cooperates with the performer to deny them the thing that they think they need, and deliver the thing they actually need.

This is my biggest problem with the notion that someday LLMs will get good enough at storytelling to give us the tales we demand, without having to suffer through a storyteller's sadistic denial of the resolutions we crave. When I'm reading a mystery, I want to turn to the last page and find out whodunnit, but I know that doing so will ruin the story. Telling the storyteller how the story should go is like trying to tickle yourself.

Like being tickled, experiencing only fun if the tickler respects your boundaries – but, like being tickled, there's always a part where you're squirming away, but you don't want it to stop. An AI storyteller that gives you exactly what you want is like a dungeon master who declares that every sword-swing kills the monster, and every treasure chest is full of epic items and platinum pieces. Yes, that's what you want, but if you get it, what's the point?

Seen in this light, performance is a kind of sado-masochism, where the performer delights in denying something to the audience, who, in turn, delights in the denial. Don't give the audience what they want, give them what they need.

What your audience needs is their own imagination. Decades ago, I was a freelance copywriter producing sales materials for Alias/Wavefront, a then-leading CGI firm that was inventing all kinds of never-seen VFX that would blow people away. One of the engineers I worked with told me something I never forgot: "Your imagination has more polygons than anything you can create with our software." He was talking about why it was critical to have some of the action happen in the shadows.

All of this is why series tend to go downhill. The first volume in any series leaves so much to the imagination. The map of the world is barely fleshed out, the characters' biographies are full of blank spots, the mechanics of the artifacts and the politics of the land are all just detailed enough that your mind automatically ascribes a level of detail to them, without knowing what that detail is.

This is the moment at which everything seems very clever, because your mind is just churning with all the different bits of elaborate lore that will fill in those lacunae and make them all fit together.

SPOILER ALERT: I'm about to give some spoilers for Furiosa.

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FURIOSA SPOILERS AHEAD!

Last night, we went to see Furiosa, the latest Mad Max movie, a prequel to 2015's Fury Road, which is one of the greatest movies ever made. Like most prequels, Furiosa functions as a lore-delivery vehicle, and as such, it's nowhere near as good as Fury Road.

Fury Road hints as so much worldbuilding. We learn about the three fortresses of the wasteland (the Citadel, the Bullet Farm, and Gastown) but we only see one (The Citadel). We learn that these three cities have a symbiotic relationship with one another, defined by a complex politics that is just barely stable. We meet Furiosa herself, and learn something of her biography – that she had been stolen from the Green Place, that she had suffered an arm amputation.

All of this is left for us to fill in, and for a decade, my hindbrain has been chewing on all of that, coming up with cool ways it could all fit together. I yearned to know the "real" explanation, but it was always unlikely that this real explanation would be as enjoyable as my own partial, ever-unfinished headcanon.

Furiosa is a great movie, but its worst parts are the canonical lore it settles. Partly, that's because some of that lore is just stupid. Why is the Bullet Farm an open-pit mine? I mean, it's visually amazing, but what does that have to do with making bullets? Sometimes, it's because the lore is banal – the solarpunk Green Place is a million times less cool than I had imagined it. Sometimes, it's because the lore is banal and stupid: the scenes where Furiosa's arm is crushed, then severed, then replaced, are both rushed and quasi-miraculous:

https://www.themarysue.com/how-does-furiosa-lose-her-arm/

But even if the lore had been good – not stupid, not banal – the best they could have hoped for was for the lore to be tidy. If it were surprising, it would seem contrived. A story whose loose ends have been tidily snipped away seems like it would be immensely satisfying, but it's not satisfying – it's just resolved. Like the band performing every encore you demand, until you no longer want to hear the band anymore – the feeling as you leave the hall isn't satisfaction, it's exhaustion.

So long as some key question remains unresolved, you're still wanting more. So long as the map has blank spots, your hindbrain will impute clever and exciting mysteries, tantalyzingly teetering on the edge of explicability, to the story.

Lore is always better as something to anticipate than it is to receive. The fans demand lore, but it should be doled out sparingly. Always leave 'em wanting more.

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/2024/05/27/cmon-do-it-again/#better_to_remain_silent_and_be_thought_a_fool_than_to_speak_and_remove_all_doubt

[bugsoda]

solarpunk club/community group?? fun. im planning on starting one at my school so i thought i would share some ideas :] Club Activities

learning to mend

make patches

zine creation

graffiti stencils (careful.)

stamps! flower pressing! book binding! paper making! screenprinting! really just a ton of craft shit

repurposing household items

LEARNING! (importance of community, native vs invasive plants, walkable and green cities, sustainable fashion, capitalism/rapid consumerism, grass lawns, book talk, solar energy, current climate efforts, local small businesses, public transportation, sustainable living…)

Potential Events

no-buy market

student/local artists craft fair

collab with library

host nature walks

walk around our city to see areas of improvement

community garden/fridge/cabinet project

solar energy speaker / local environmental groups

if any of yall have other ideas i would love to hear them!!

[ectoberhaunt]

Ectoberhaunt 2024: Past and Future

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

Posting for this event begins Monday, October 1st!

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

The Prompts

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

Past, Present, & Future

Dinosaur & Robot

Archaeology & Meteorology

Came Back Wrong

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Bury & Unearth

Pirate Ship & Spaceship

Rise & Fall

Creepy & Wet

Dark and Stormy Night

Isekai: Past Prompt (Here)

Isekai: Old Hero, New World

Cult Classic & Murder Mystery

Science Fiction & Double Feature

Bloom & Wither

Gothic Horror & Cosmic Horror

Mirror Image

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Analog & Digital

Steampunk & Solarpunk

Big Bang & Heat Death

Time Loop

Ectober Week: 25-31

Post Guidelines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Banner graphic by @kawaiijohn

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

Google sheet by @ajitated and @jackdaw-sprite

Happy creating!!

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

Pondering a Solarpunk Writing Group

Lately, both my thoughts and Ariel’s have turned to what to do for the Solarpunk Action Week that will be kicking off on Earth Day. She’s got tons of super ideas for her actions, but, so far, the only solarpunk thing I can think of to do that would be more than just stuff I do anyway, would be to kick off a solarpunk writing group. Call it The Solarpunk Writing Group, maybe, although that smacks most unsolarpunkly of exclusivity.

Whatever. The point is that I am now enthusiastic about kicking off a solarpunk writing group during Solarpunk Action Week that would meet online (over, say, Zoom). But to do that, I NEED YOU. Or at least enough of you to fill up a writing group.

I’m hoping that the number of people who commented on the hero's journey just needs to end already post means that there are lots of you out there who’d be interested in joining a solarpunk writing group… for whatever you’re writing… fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and whatever else there is that qualifies as writing.

If you’re interested in joining a solarpunk writing group, drop me a comment on this post.

In fact, tell me more than that you’re interested. Because, not only am I trying to figure out if there is enough interest to found a solarpunk writing group, I’m also trying to figure out how often to meet, for how long, and what would the structure be. This, of course, depends upon what YOU want out a writing group.

Would you want meetings that are just quiet time to work? Would you want meetings where I’d provide writing prompts or other exercises? Or would you want just to meet so we can all read our work out loud and give each other encouragement (here’s what is good about the work) or perhaps even constructive criticism (here’s how the work could be improved)?

Once I figure out if there are enough people for a writing group, what the meetings would be like, and how often we would meet, then we can sort out the trickier issue of when we would meet.

So, please, let me know in the comments if you’re interested and what you’d be looking for in a solarpunk writing group that would kick off during Solarpunk Action Week (and then keep going)!