#what kind of presentations are at the solarpunk conference

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

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

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

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Lost Cause prologue, Part V

I'm coming to Minneapolis! Oct 15: Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Oct 16: Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

In my upcoming solarpunk novel The Lost Cause (Nov 14), we get an epic struggle between the people doing the repair and care work needed to save our planet and species, and the reactionary wreckers who want to kill the Green New Deal and watch the world burn:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

Amazon refuses to carry my audiobooks, which means that I make my own indie editions and pre-sell them on Kickstarter, along with ebooks and hardcovers. I narrated this one! It came out great! You can back it here:

http://lost-cause.org

This week, I've been serializing the prologue to give you a taste of what you can expect from the book, which Bill McKibben calls "politically perceptive, scientifically sound, and extraordinarily hopeful."

Here's part one:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/06/green-new-deal-fic/#the-first-generation-in-a-century-not-to-fear-the-future

And part two:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/07/met-cute-ugly/#part-ii

And part three:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/09/working-the-refs/#lost-cause-prologue

And part four:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#super-soaker-full-of-hydrochloric-acid

And now, part five:

Look, I had weeks to go until graduation. I had a life to live. I had stuff to do.

Gramps and his friends would stew and shout. Idiots on the internet would make dank memes out of Mike Kennedy and deepfake him into a million videos, turn him into a main character whose image would be around long after he left the world.

I just had to keep my head down, collect my diploma, and get the hell out of Burbank. I’d already been provisionally accepted for a Blue Helmets AmeriCorps spot down in San Juan Capistrano, helping to rebuild the city’s lower half a mile inland, up in the hills. I was going to do a year of that and then go to college: I had applications in to UCLA, Portland State (they had a really good refugee tech undergrad program), and the University of Waterloo, where my mom did her undergrad in environmental science. They’d let me declare my major in my second year, so I could take a wide variety of courses before settling on something, and if anything, Canada’s free college was even more generous than the UC system or Portland’s, with a subsidy for dorms and meals.

To tell the truth, I’d be glad to go. My senior year hadn’t been anything like I’d anticipated. Gramps’s health had gotten a lot worse the previous summer and his shitty sexist and racist remarks chased away any home help worker Burbank sent over within a week or two, so I’d been trying to keep my grades up while picking up after Gramps, getting him to take his meds, washing his sheets and cleaning his toilet—­not to mention making sure he made his doctor’s appointments and even bringing him into the office a couple of times a month for the kind of exams you couldn’t do by telemedicine.

I wasn’t sure what Gramps would do without me to take care of him, but at that point, I was running out of fucks to give. Let his asshole Maga Club buddies look after him, or maybe Gramps could figure out how not to offend everyone that came over to wipe his ass and do his laundry. He was—­as he was fond of pointing out to me—­a grown-­ass adult, and this was his house, and he was in charge. So let him be in charge.

I put myself to bed stewing about all of this, thinking of San Juan Capistrano. Some of my older friends had graduated the previous years and had gone down there and I’d followed their relocation of the old mission on their feeds. It looked like hot, sweaty, rewarding work, the kind of thing where you could really measure your progress.

For the second night in a row, I was woken up at 2 a.m. This time, it wasn’t my screen, it was Gramps, who’d stumped into my room with his cane, flipped my lights to full on, and started shaking me and calling out, “Get up, kid, get up!”

“I’m up,” I said, getting up on my elbows and squinting at him.

He was shaking, and he reeked—­of both booze and BO, and I felt a flash of guilt for not getting him in the bath that day.

“God dammit,” he said, and staggered a bit. I leapt out of bed, pulling the sheets off with me, and steadied him at the elbow.

“Calm down, okay? What’s going on? Are you all right?”

“No, I’m not all right. No one is all right. Fuck all right and fuck you.” I’d had Gramps tested for early dementia the previous year, by showing his doctor videos of moments like these. The doc had run a battery of tests before pronouncing, “Your grandfather isn’t senile, he’s just ornery.” Which was undeniable, and also pissed me the hell off. “Ornery” was a polite word for “asshole.” What the doc was telling me was that Gramps didn’t have to be cruel. He was cruel by choice.

I untangled myself from the sheets and piled them on the bed.

“What is it?”

“It’s Mike Kennedy, that asshole. Someone shot him.”

“What?”

He shoved his giant screen into my hands. I tapped the video window. It was from the POV of a car cam, that weird fish-­eye view of a self-­driving car, split-­screen with the passenger in the front seat, and it was Mike Kennedy, looking even worse than Gramps, bloodshot and trembling, with that under-­chin camera angle that makes everyone look like they’re half dead.

I tried to watch both halves. There was Kennedy, whispering something to him. There was the cul-­de-­sac he was parked in, false-­lit with IR from the cameras. The timestamp was 1:17. Less than an hour before.

Then the external image flickered for a second and resolved itself into a man, who phased in and out. He was wearing a ghillie suit like the one Kennedy had worn on the roof, covered in telltale CV dazzle stripes, designed to exploit defects in the computer vision system. You had to wear a different specific pattern for every algorithm, but if you got the right matchup, the computer would simply not see you. The man was flickering into existence when his posture crumpled up the ghillie suit and made the pattern stop working, then out again when he straightened up.

He straightened and disappeared and Mike Kennedy’s eyes widened as he noticed the man for the first time—­computer dazzle worked on computers, not humans—­and he started to say something and then a round hole appeared in his forehead, his head snapping back against the headrest, then careening forward. The flickering phantom appeared again as the man in the ghillie suit turned and disappeared.

I dropped the tablet to my bed.

“Jesus Christ, Gramps, I didn’t need to see that snuff movie—­”

He tried to smack me then. I was ready for it. I was faster. I stepped out of his reach. I was shaking too.

“You don’t get to hit me anymore old man. Never again, you hear me?”

He was purpling now, and a decade’s worth of fleeing and defusing his rages rose in me, made me want to apologize. After all, I rationalized, he’d just seen a friend murdered.

But I’d seen that friend murdered too, videobombed with a snuff flick at 2 a.m. without warning or consent. It was a traumatizing, selfish, asshole move. I’d be watching that movie on the backs of my eyelids for years to come. And the friend who’d died? He’d been ready to kill me. Gramps had no right. He was a grown-­ass adult. He had no right.

“Listen to me, you little shit, you think you can live under my roof, take my charity, and talk to me like that? Now? With all the shit that I’m going through? No sir. No. Get out, you little bastard, get out now. Get out before I kick your goddamned teeth in.” He was vibrating with rage now, literally, actually shaking so hard his wispy hair swished back and forth across his forehead.

I didn’t say another word. I picked up some jeans and a jacket, put a pair of socks in a jacket pocket, and jammed my feet into a pair of sneakers without bothering to unlace them. I shouldered past him—­still vibrating, stinking even worse—­and banged out the back door and stomped through the nighttime streets.

My feet automatically took me up to Verdugo, and then across the empty road. I turned toward school—­as I did every morning—­and autopiloted in that direction. By the time I reached the Verdugo Aquatic Facility I had calmed down enough to realize that there was no reason to go to school at two thirty in the morning, so I stopped and headed for the playground in the park behind the pool. I sat down on a bench and kicked my shoes off and shook out the playground sand, pulled out my socks and put them on, then put my shoes back on properly. I was still furious, but now I could think straight and my hands weren’t shaking. Gramps and I hadn’t had a blowup like that in years, mostly—­ okay, entirely—­because I’d backed down every time we’d been headed in that direction. I wasn’t in any mood to back down. Not ever, to be fully honest.

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/2023/10/11/equal-opportunity-class-war/#part-v

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[solarpunkaestheticweek]

Other Events During Solarpunk Aesthetic Week (Winter Solstice Edition)

As you can imagine, there's a good deal of events happening during Solarpunk Aesthetic Week this season! We wanted to highlight just a few other things that are happening, so they can maybe inspire some of what you do for Solarpunk Aesthetic Week!

Arabic Language Day is on December 18th, and aims to promote and recognize the importance of the Arabic language, encouraging linguistic and cultural diversity and foster understanding. There's often conferences, workshops, and cultural performances held on this day.

It's important we consider the important role and contributions of Arabic people on history and the world, as well as the present and future of Solarpunk! It may also be a good day to jumpstart a new language learning adventure, if you want!

International Migrants Day is also on December 18th! It's a day that seeks to promote the well-being and rights of migrants worldwide, dedicated to recognizing the contributions and achievements of migrants and raising awareness about the need to improve conditions, safety measures, and social acceptance for migrant individuals and families.

Many of us like to imagine solarpunk societies as being entirely or semi-nomadic, traveling to different places depending on the seasons. But an important part of living solarpunk is supporting people right now. How can we support migrants in our communities and improve relations between Indigenous communities and immigrants in a solarpunk future? How would a solarpunk future welcome migrants while protecting and supporting indigenous communities and land? How does the reality of climate refugees in particular impact the development and ideals of a solarpunk future? How would a solarpunk society migrate across the land, and what would it look like?

International Human Solidarity Day is on December 20th, and serves as a reminder to the importance of unity in diversity and the need to work together to address global challenges. There may be various events and activities to mark this event.

Solidarity is an important tenant of Solarpunk, and of activism in general. Consider ways you can show solidarity through art, writing, music, or more. A story about people working together towards a common goal, of supporting one another in the face of a difficult obstacle? An illustration to support a current cause, or of a distant future's fight? Can you do a craft to show solidarity with others?

Winter Solstice is on December 21st in the Northern Hemisphere! It's the astronomical start of the winter season, and symbolizes the death and subsequent rebirth of the sun--the shortest day and longest night of the year.

Often when visualizing Solarpunk, we think of lots of plants and greenery on a bright sunny day. But this isn't what Solarpunk would look like everywhere, or all the time in most places. Let's visualize what we think Solarpunk would look like in fall and winter! How do you solarpunk in the colder months, what kind of crafts do you pick up when things get chilly? What do you imagine a solarpunk society's infrastructure and fashion would look like when the temperatures dip low? What would change and how when our current society is reborn into a more solarpunk one?

Summer Solstice is also December 21st in the Southern Hemisphere, marking the official beginning of the summer season! This is the zenith of the sun's position in the sky, and the longest day of the year.

While things are getting cold for some of us, the temps are just ramping up for others! Let the sun and its energy inspire your works, imbue yourself with the bright and blazing energy of our brightest star!

December 24th is Christmas Eve for those who celebrate! Many people celebrate by gathering with friends and family to enjoy feasts, exchange gifts, and generally enjoy time together.

In a consumerist society, there's a lot of emphasis placed on the gift-giving part of Christmas celebrations--how would it look in a Solarpunk society focused on community building instead? Are you doing anything Solarpunky this Christmas? Let us know!

Is there more we're forgetting? Want to share the way you celebrate a particular event? Sound off and let us know--we'd love to hear about other related events and how you're taking part!

[sometimesrosy]

Ok so apparently the 100 is building a castle set w/a fancy staircase. And theres a few small red and yellow flagposts outside w/some christmas like trees. Wtf is going on?!? Lol the first thing that popped into my head when I saw it was the King/Knight and Queen/Princess reference for Bellamy and Clarke. Lol. I have no idea what's going on in this new planet. Or is a ball really happening like everyone is saying? Maybe like a peace conference ball type thing between Eligius and Earthlings? Lol.

OK, I wish y’all would post a link or site or search term when you come yelling about new information so I know where to go look and I’m not just going off second hand information. But I did find the bts pic.

I don’t know if that’s a castle, but the flags are banners and they are norfolk pines, not christmas trees.There does seem to be some pageantry involved with the banners and landscaping, which doesn’t fit either the wilderness or the high tech aesthetic, so it’s something DIFFERENT from what we’ve seen. There’s also topiary on the balcony.

 What I find interesting is the organic details on those stairs and backdrop, and I do not understand why the center of the set is orange while the outside of it is brown, which makes it look fake. So the conclusion I am coming to is that they will add special effects to it to make it also look…idk, more organic? Some sort of vines or lights or alien unusualness.??? There’s a bluescreen at the top, but the top edges are NOT finished and have no detail, especially not like the detailed organic shapes of the railing, which looks sloppy to me and will probably be fixed in post production. Which means to me, again, special effects. Also, there’s no place for anyone to stand near that bluescreen, so it’s just background. Maybe just the two suns, but maybe more. 

TBH, I don’t understand how any of you get Bellarke out of that. 

it’s a BUILDING. It’s worldbuilding, not character arcs. I wouldn’t use this to figure out an emotional narrative. I feel like this fandom wants to make everything about a clue to ships and that isn’t what everything IS. Sometimes a building is about…the setting. It gives us some aesthetic. Some background. Maybe history, mood. Relationships are details that exist WITHIN the world they build, but the background doesn’t tell us about relationships.

To me, with the late timing of that, this to me says alien society, or the hidden part of the Eligius society. Otherwise we would have seen this early on in the filming. But no, this isn’t part of the peaceful society we’ve heard about?? Or it’s a new part of it. I think it will be the strange part of it.

I’m still on the aliens thing. This is what we’ve been told would be happening. Whether that is alien world or alien planet. Eligius has been there about 200 years, and this building seems to have been there a while, right? Or I’m assuming it’s an established place, but it doesn’t look like something a technologically advanced culture post earth apocalypse would build, style wise. It’s slightly organic/gothic…. oh, maybe we’re going SOLARPUNK.

IDK. People’s frame of reference seems to be “prom,” or maybe Cinderella, but I have questions and thoughts about this all.

If it’s a ball or prom that they need a choreographer for, although unless it’s highly stylized group dancing (and why hire a choreographer who does contemporary/broadway numbers instead of a folk dancer or something?) then why hire only FOUR dancers for it?

Four dancers + choreographer makes me think more along the lines of performance, meeting, presentation of characters who are utilizing the dance to tell part of the story.

The choreographer and many of the dancers seem to have a strange element to their work. The choreographer has a straight up WEIRD alien like dance number on her website, one of the dancers dances off the ground. One of them DOES have a ball number in OUAT though. Yes I googled the dancers and choreographer.

Why is dance part of the story when it never has been before? That makes it strange to this kind of storytelling, which fits, as we’re on an alien planet.

Why is it introduced so late in the season? Again it is another unusual thing that our heroes haven’t seen yet. That makes it, to me, part of a revelation of story. Not actually about Bellarke, but about the planet, the alienness, the mystery of what happened to eligius 4, and the main plot and possible big bad.

This set is also introduced late in the season at the same time as choreographer, so the dancing and set seem to be connected. 

Perhaps there is a fairy tale element, or a dream element. They HAVE brought in fairy tales before, as early as the linctavia beauty and the beast storyline. BUT JR has referenced all movies and books that have an element of unreality, altered perception/time/reality, possible hallucination, dream or vision, so I find that just as likely as a ball. More likely. Do fairy tales have to be about princesses and balls? No. They don’t. Often they are about the deep dark woods, mystery, danger and magic. Even Disney does that. Fairy tale =/= romance.

What is with that weird orange color? At first I thought it was a sheet of plastic, but upon close viewing, there is a lot of textural and tonal detail IN the orange. However, the orange makes it look fake. Therefore I think it is one layer of what eventually will be some sort of digital effect. Maybe it’s like layers in a painting. Maybe that orange color is supposed to give the impression that the castle is GLOWING. ohhh. that would make sense.

Ok. The orange part of the castle kind of centers on that pretty organic archway with the kind of half mandala in it, that looks like a stained glass window, but it is not a perfect mandala or circle and the center of it is DEFINITELY organic like a tree root or octopus. AND the stone around it kind of warps like it is wrinkled or there is something growing under it. That shape is echoed in the bannister. Top edge of the castle also shows this wrinkle/warping, which is maybe why I thought it was a sheet of plastic at first. It’s not. It was designed to look like something organic, but in stone. where we can SEE the stone building blocks.

The castle is human sized. The steps are human sized so are the doors. This is a building for humanoids. However there are super tall archways that are NOT human sized. Why build an archway that tall when the others are human height?

A thing growing through a stone castle is not humanoid. 

A thing growing through a stone castle and then echoed in the architecture of said castle is not an enemy, but something that is honored or worshipped or followed. 

You know how Avatar (the movie with blue people) had that mother tree that was, like, the center of life and spirit?

Binch. If the alien on this planet is THE ACTUAL PLANET someone needs to come over here and do an exorcism to get Jason Rothenberg out of my head because I wrote this in a novel 12 years ago, which was ALSO about cryo sleep, which was part of how they got to the new planet to colonize it, which just so y’all know, I suggested as a way to be saved from praimfaya before season 4 started. BEFORE. In january. Also, my current series based on the same universe as that space colony one is called The Mandala Series. The first one was The Mythos Series. That thing in the center looks like a mandala. 

If the alien beings on this planet are actually part of the planet, or a non human entity, AND we get choreography that is weird and dancers that can dance while hanging in space off of poles or ropes or vines or tentacles, then I suggest that there is a hybrid human/alien element, and the dancers will represent that new hybrid. Again, another idea from my novel. I might just be too deep into my novel to separate, and am reading into it, but that is how I came up with cryo theory and it turns out I was right. 

JR is in my head. 

Honestly, I don’t know how you guy come up with Bellarke and commence freaking out. I come up with living alien planets and hybrid alien/humans and commence freaking out. No offense, but my idea is more interesting than a ball. I mean. Maybe it’s a ball. That would be…. fun. 

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Lost Cause prologue, part 6

I'm coming to Minneapolis! Oct 15: Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Oct 16: Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

For the past week, I've been serializing the prologue of The Lost Cause, my solarpunk novel of a post-Green New Deal backlash that comes out on November 14:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

The occasion is a crowdfunding campaign for the audiobook – because Amazon won't carry my audiobooks on Audible, I self-produce them and pre-sell them on Kickstarter. The campaign is going brilliantly, and there's still time to back it:

http://lost-cause.org/

Usually I hire voice actors like Wil Wheaton to read my audiobooks, but this time, at the urging of director Gabrielle de Cuir, I read it myself. It came out great:

Today is the final day of the serial. I hope you enjoyed it!

Here's part one:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/06/green-new-deal-fic/#the-first-generation-in-a-century-not-to-fear-the-future

And part two:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/07/met-cute-ugly/#part-ii

And part three:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/09/working-the-refs/#lost-cause-prologue

And part four:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#super-soaker-full-of-hydrochloric-acid

And part five:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/11/equal-opportunity-class-war/#part-v

And now, the thrilling conclusion!

“Hey,” someone hissed from beneath the climber and I nearly jumped out of my seat.

“Jesus,” I said, and it came out as a loud bark that echoed down the empty street.

“Shhh,” the voice said. “What are you doing out there, man?”

“I’m sitting on a bench. What are you doing in there?”

“Wait, Brooks?”

“Yeah. Who’s that?”

A person climbed out of the climber, then another. As they drew closer to me, I recognized them as Dave and Armen, two goofballs I’d known since grade school, and I knew exactly what they were doing.

“Are you assholes out here in the middle of the night tripping balls?” I couldn’t help but smile, though. It was so them.

“No,” Armen said, and then Dave spoiled it by dissolving into giggles.

“Just some shrooms,” Dave said. They were everywhere, whenever the rains came, all over the hills and even on the verges between the sidewalks and the roads, popping up faster than the city could send out workers to pick them and destroy them (or, rumor had it, to dry them out and offer them for sale, if you knew the right person).

“On a school night?”

“Yeah. Only a month to graduation. What’s it matter anymore? The dire is cast.”

“The die,” I said.

“Die,” Armen said. “How morbid.” They both dissolved into more giggles. These guys. I mean, they were high af, but they had been like this since the third grade. They were silly, and not all that smart, but they were nice, never mean to anyone, never on anyone’s side in any kind of feud, even the ones where everyone took a side.

Armen and Dave were like goofball Switzerland, neutral and always in a corner making each other laugh. To be honest, they were exactly the guys I needed to see at that moment.

“Got any more shrooms?”

We stayed up all night tripping balls and eating more mushrooms whenever we started to come down. About three thirty in the morning Armen suggested we walk up to Brace Canyon, which is a long-­ass walk, but Armen insisted that the sunrises from Brace were incredible so that’s where we went.

It turned out he was wrong. It was sunsets that were great from Brace Canyon. The sun rose behind us, staining all of Burbank—­ the airport, downtown, Magnolia Park—­pink as it crested the hill behind us, and Armen was embarrassed to have gotten it backward and tried to convince us to climb farther up, try to get over the hill and see the sun rise on the other side before it was fully up, but Dave pointed out that the last time they tried that they got stuck because of the monster houses on top of the hills with high fences, and then I pointed out that he was talking about a thirty-­ minute run and the sun would be over the hill in five minutes, and then Armen pointed out that we’d been tripping and walking all night and we were all tired, so we lay in the grass and watched the city brighten by degrees.

Then it started to get hot, and we were coming down and dozed a little, but then the mosquitoes came out, and then the dog-­walkers, and so it was time to drag our asses back down out of the hills.

They walked with me down to Glenoaks, then we split up. There was no way I was going to school that day. I knew the guidance office would give me an excused absence after my traumatic events and all, so I bumbled home slowly, my legs filled with lead, my eyelids drooping. People passing by on bikes or on foot gave me a wide berth that let me know I was giving off walk-­of-­shame vibes.

I got home and paused in front of the back door. Did I dare go inside? Would Gramps still be awake and “ornery”? Would he be out with his Maga Club buddies planning Mike Kennedy’s wake? Or would they be in the living room, ready to give my ass the beatdown Gramps could no longer administer himself?

Hell with it. I was so tired I was about to fall over. If Gramps hadn’t calmed down by now, then he and I could just have another fight. I’d let him win. Why not? I was tired and graduation was weeks away.

I let myself in. The house was spooky-­quiet. What was spooky about quiet? It was always quiet when Gramps was out, or when he had his headphones on to listen to his podcasts, while he played large-­format solitaire on his huge tablet.

But it was spooky. I think I must have known. Otherwise, why wouldn’t I have just gone to bed? I mean, I was really tired. I didn’t go to bed. I called out “Gramps?” as I moved from room to room, and I saw that his keys were on the kitchen table and that his shoes were by the door, so I went to his bedroom and whispered “Gramps?” and knocked softly, as though he was asleep.

But I think I knew, even before I opened the door. Otherwise, why would I have peeled back the covers? Why would I have reached out to touch the exposed skin of his neck, felt how cold it was? Why would I have turned him over, boneless and limp, and put my ear next to his mouth, knowing there would be no breath sounds?

I called the nonemergency number and told them my grandfather was dead, that he had died in his sleep, and then I filled the biggest glass in the kitchen with cold brew. I was going to need to stay awake for a while yet.

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/2023/10/13/pour-encoragez-les-autres/#fin

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!