I wonder if all that airborne grit effects the windmills. Just the same, I’m glad for any green energy progress

It’s a tabletop role playing game - like a solarpunk scifi version of DnD (or the TTRPG of your pick). The rulebook and other resources available there enable people to play it. Specifically it helps one individual (the GM) run their own campaigns/games, by giving them a suggested set of rules and a vibrant setting they can use all or some of (or just take inspiration from), and it helps the rest of a group of players to create characters and interact with the setting. Together they do a sort of collective storytelling.

In the broader scope of what it does, hopefully it helps people who aren’t super familiar with solarpunk and it’s associated philosophies and movements to imagine a better world, other ways we could do things as a society.

Lots of folk punk type music, stuff drawing it’s roots from old protest songs, union songs, revolutionary stuff.

This would lend itself to stencils pretty well though (one color, no islands), especially with a touch of spray adhesive on the back. I’ve done the symbol from one of the more common solarpunk flags, and getting the blank spot inside the gear positioned would be a little finicky if doing graffiti.

You’d want to bridge the corners there, to make it all one piece, if you wanted to be able to put it up quickly. I was just painting a laptop so I had plenty of time to fuss with it.

I’d never heard of that, very cool!!

Glad you like them!

Sorry, the ones I’m talking about are TV screen sized.

Like this:

I’ve seen them burn through steel, so it can get small stuff at least hot enough to work. Hopefully at least equivalent to a coffee can forge

Thanks for the info! Collecting the heat and regulating it for a job like printing makes a lot of sense to me. Similarly, there’s a bunch of other tasks that wouldn’t require the same kind of precision - smelting metal in a crucible, heating metal to forge it (I’m hoping to try to build a solar forge this summer if I can get a fresnel lense from a rear projection TV), maybe heating a glassblowing furnace. Those just looked kinda small in the big space I’d laid out.

And yeah, I know photovoltaics are more practical for most things since they line up with how we already do things. I mostly include what I think of as weird solar because solarpunk art is already lousy with photovoltaic panels but there are a ton of other ways to directly use solar for thermal and light. I really like the idea of using energy in the form we receive it to minimize conversion losses, and to put less strain on the grid/batteries. Sometimes the art goals scrape up against the other goals a bit.

Thanks again!

Thanks! And sure, I can do that.

Thanks! I’m glad you like it

I think so. I mean, I’ll agree that a lot of the art tagged as solarpunk is utopian, unactionable, and generally gives a poor first impression of the rest of the genre/movement. The chromed scifi megacities with trees stuck to the sides of skyscrapers are about as attainable as concept art of a flying city or a moon colony. If they never looked past the paintings on deviantart or artstation or whatever they’d probably get a pretty skewed perspective on it.

But I’d say the answer to that is just to make more art that reflects the rest of the movement better since the answers and discussions and real life projects are all happening

Yes, it’s a home for solitary bees. There are a bunch of species of solitary bees, who don’t live in hives or swarm with others. They’re still an important part of our ecosystem and play a big role in pollination but they don’t get quite as much attention as the honeybees.

They collect pollen to survive and to feed their young. Typically they find a hole of the right size, like the ones in these sticks, and make a bunch of compartments inside (out of mud or chewed plant fibers) where they lay their eggs. They give each egg some pollen they’ve gathered and seal them in for the winter. In the spring the eggs hatch and new bees emerge, eat the pollen, dig their way out, and start the cycle again.

It’s good to identify the kinds of bees you want, since they need different size holes, and to put the house somewhere the morning sun will hit it, near some flowers or flowering shrubs.

It’s a nice way to help provide habitats. Solitary bees are typically pretty skittish and won’t/can’t form angry swarms because of the whole solitary thing. Carpenter bees will sometimes fly close to humans, but mostly because they’re just big curious bumbling buddies and they’re nearsighted. Once they figure out what you are they fly away. I’ve never had any trouble with the residents of our bee house.

I just make them available for free - the images with their text writeups are here: https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com/postcards-from-a-solarpunk-future/

And the full size versions are available here: https://mega.nz/folder/PA1XGQhQ#eXMPhzAwkv01_PQDINJvfw

If you wanted to own a physical copy feel free to get them printed

Sorry to hear that. I give them away whenever I finish one (these ones are already handed off to a refugee resettlement agency though I also sometimes offer them up on my local Buy Nothing group). If your old laptop still has its original OS working you might be able to do a factory reset, or worst case, as long as the hardware works, you could try to install Linux Mint on it, which is what I’d do. Best of luck!

I think robogromo’s /c/pigrow might be able to help with this, though it has so many features it might overshoot what you need.

I just helped my neighbor replace his front lawn with low-growing roman chamomile and lavender. I’m hoping to rig up a little solar powered water feature using secondhand parts soon.

I have getting ready to replace the holes in the solitary bee house I set up at my parents’ place:

I’ve been cutting 6" sticks from storm damaged tree limbs, and drilling the various-size holes (I’ve got a set of 8" metric drill bits that get the full-length they need (some folk just use cardboard tubes or reeds, but this works fine for me. It’s important to replace the sticks every year after they emerge so we don’t propagate diseases or parasites in the solitary bees.

Once I find a couple 6"x1" oak boards (maybe when someone throws out a bed?) I’ll be able to cut the arching back pieces for a wood and cast iron park bench I’m trying to fix up. I need to take a wire wheel to the rusty metal parts, then paint it and fabricate the wooden parts of the back (I already have the slats for the seat but they do need to be sanded, stained, urethaned, and attached). Then I can put it out near our local bike path.

Need to put a new tire and tube on my front bike wheel.

One of my hobbies is fixing up ewaste laptops and giving them to an organization in my city that rehomes refugees. I actually do ewaste in general, mostly through our local Buy Nothing groups, (everything from HDMI adapters to space heaters) but the modern-ish laptops go to the charity. I was able to get three laptops ready to go recently, and I’ll be looking for more to work on for folks in my community next.

The Lenovo and MacBook Air came from a friend at the recycling center - he’s allowed to set computers aside for donation if he catches the people dropping them off and gets permission, otherwise they get sent away for secure destruction. He also gets me laptop chargers sometimes too, which saves a ton of money. The one in the middle I found in corporate ewaste (I got permission to dig through on occasion). Everything’s been tested and wiped and updated as far as it’ll go. This set was easy, they were all intact, so I didn’t have to get any replacement parts.

I’m also working on a set of photobashes, styled like postcards from a solarpunk future, that I’m hoping will help push the visual aspect of solarpunk art more towards the rest of the movement. I want people to see solarpunk art and think, “why aren’t we doing that?” or “could that work?” I think it should depict a more lived-in, human future and demonstrate possibilities, technologies, and alternative ways of doing things. I’m also trying to cover seasons, locations, and topics like industry that I haven’t seen in other solarpunk art to sway people’s first impressions from thinking it’s an empty aesthetic. I try to advocate for values like reuse I think fit the movement but are underrepresented in the visual artwork.

Or not enough. They need more feathers

I just helped my neighbor replace his front lawn with low growing roman chamomile and lavender. I’m hoping to rig up a little solar powered water feature using secondhand parts soon.

I have been cutting 6" sticks from storm damaged tree limbs, and drilling the various-size holes for the the solitary bee house I set up at my parents’ place. Need to replace the sticks every year after they emerge so we don’t propagate diseases or parasites in the solitary bees.

Once I find a couple 6"x1" oak boards (maybe when someone throws out a bed?) I’ll be able to cut the arching back pieces for a wood and cast iron park bench im trying to fix up. I need to take a wire wheel to the rust and paint it, fabricate the back (I already have the slats for the seat but they do need to be sanded, stained, urethaned, and attached). Then I can put it out near our local bike path.

Need to put a new tire and tube on my front bike wheel.

I’m working on some more photobashes too.

That was our guess but I wasn’t confident in it, thank you for the confirmation!!

Thanks for suggesting temporary tracks, I definitely wouldn’t have thought of that and it’s a really cool idea! Ive updated my text on other sites to mention it and link back here.

And definitely agreed on deliberately rebuilding greenways and habitats. I imagine this could happen both automatically (wait and see where people resettle, and what areas are more deserted - probably there’s some deconstruction carried out at the local level, the same way the pyramids and roman roads were scavenged for building supplies) and deliberately (assess the abandoned areas, check their structures for occupancy, draw up community plans for rewilding, argue over it a lot, rezone some areas for greenways/conservation, and eventually bring in crews and volunteers to do the actual deconstruction).