#climate story

[burr-ell]

What I love about Spy x Family's recent chapters concerning Martha and Henry—two secondary characters with little direct connection to the plot as we've known it—is that Endo's taking the opportunity to once again hammer home what the story's actual stakes are. The idea of potential conflict between Ostania and Westalis isn't just window dressing for a wacky wholesome badass family gimmick—the previous wars are real events that various characters lived through, and all of them are in some way affected by it and have good reasons to want to avoid another one. This is primarily an action-adventure/slice-of-life manga with a lot of sendups to spy movies and pop culture of the 60s, but I think those things hold much more weight with the thematic underpinning of the horrors of war and the ruin it leaves behind.

[ernstiggroteadelaar]

Saw someone on youtube open some Bloomburrow play boosters and when they pulled Ygra, Eater of All, they said: "Is this the villain? I don't actually know who the villain of the set is."

and now I cannot stop thinking about why people we see a wild animal that can be dangerous and immediately assume it evil and out to get the heroes. And how the story actually very much tells us that we should learn to see that some natural circumstances that at first glance seem just dangerous and unideal to live with are actually worth our protection

[innaturessilence]

I highly recommend seeking out websites and social media accounts that highlight good news.

It can really make the difference when it comes to having hope for the future

For example, did you know there are already 2 facilities dedicated to sucking carbon out of the air! We have that technology! It's not quite at a scale to stop warming yet. But think what it could do when combined with other efforts!

I've also learned recently that emissions per capita (that's emissions per person) is going down. While total emissions are still going up its still a good sign. This could be a sign total emissions will start falling soon.

While it's important to remember the climate is still in crisis. These nuggets good news remind us that all hope is not lost. That we still have a chance if we continue to work hard.

[alpaca-clouds]

An Overview Over the Solarpunk Anthologies

I thought, where I am already here, trying to get everyone to engage with Solarpunk as more than just an aesthetic and pretty flowers, I should give a quick overview over the Solarpunk antholigies, that have been released so far.

Note that so far most releases within the genre are in fact short stories. Though if anyone is interested, I can make a list of the novels I am aware of!

Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World is pretty much how the genre got its start. The book was originally released in Brazil and only recently had been translated into the English language. It only covers a few stories, but those are a bit longer than your average short story to make up for it.

Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation has been quoted by many writers in the genre to have been a massive inspiration to them. The stories are very diverse and cover lots of ground.

Wings of Renewal: A Solarpunk Dragon Anthology is probably the weirdest out of this bunch. While all of the other anthologies mostly focus on either SciFi settings or stories set in the here and now, Wings of Renewal mixes Solarpunk with Fantasy elements. At times those stories are SciFi, too, at times they are really mostly fantastical.

Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers explores a wide variety of Solarpunk settings, some hopeful, some less optimistic. It is mostly set in warm and hot scenarios, though those can also vary quite a bit.

Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Winters then went ahead as a "sequel" of sorts to explore the concept of Solarpunk in colder climates.

Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures has probably to be my favorite one from the anthologies edited by Sarena Udaberri. It explores how humans and animals can live together in Urban settings. And once again, the stories vary from those set in a more futuristic and a more present setting a lot.

Fighting for the Future is the most recent of those anthologies, as it has only released last month. (And yes, this also means: I have not yet read it at all.) It features stories of Cyberpunk and Solarpunk futures - as well as stories where both intertwine!

Bioluminescent: A Lunarpunk Anthology is exactly what it says on the cover. An anthology featuring Lunarpunk stories. So Solarpunk with a bit more mysticism to go with it. And as this also only has released earlier this year I admittedly also have not gotten around to reading it yet.

This does remind me though: Would anyone be interested in me writing mini reviews to the stories in those anthologies?

[flight-of-icarus]

Me spreading propaganda for everyone to read Absolute Superman 🌀🌀🌀

(There is something about this version of superman that really struck me and had such a big impact on my brain)

[crimeronan]

another Vital AU hunter-and-camila thought from this morning was a thought of, like. camila very very very gently and carefully explaining that she'd like luz to get a basic physical done by a doctor in the human realm, because luz has not been seen by a human doctor since she was four and is overdue for ten million vaccines and desperately needs bloodwork to check her vitamin and thyroid levels, etc, etc, etc, and hunter is like. visibly freaked out and upset by this. bc he is SO afraid of strangers hurting luz.

anyway. that's all pretty much expected, on account of The Horrors.

what got me in my feelings was the thought of camila telling hunter that she has a lot of the same worries, and that she Knows not all human healers have good intentions, and that she Promises she'll take that into account when finding one for luz. because she does not want luz to get hurt.

hunter, naturally, is like "how.... do you know that....?" and camila is like ay dios mio. HOW do i explain medical racism or the united states..... to a boy.... with no concept of racism or the united states.....

[secretmellowblog]

i just dont really understand why theyd target les mis? and like. its interrupting the work of actors and crew and house staff who dont have anything to do with fossil fuel corps. people who just paid to see the show who dont have anything to do with it.

i understand les mis is a show about rebellion and humanity but to me it doesnt make any sense.

( i say this as someone whos probably very unaware and very slow to realize the deeper meaning of things so i apologize if it comes off snobby i am just confused !! /genuine )

I'm very sorry if this comes off as rude but like.... "I don't understand why people would use Les Mis as the symbolic centerpiece of an act of protest/rebellion against the government" is just a very strange thing to say, and I'm genuinely not quite sure how to begin to respond XD. Like....it's literally Les Mis. It is Do You Hear the People Sing. The original novel was written to be a political rallying cry, it was written to bind together activists, and it has been used that way thousands of times since its publication in 1862. It's Les Mis, I don't know what else to tell you XD. Also I know this next comparison isn't perfect, but:

“I don’t understand why Les Amis interrupted Lamarque’s funeral.  Obviously I agree with Les Amis’s goals, but was this really the right way to protest? Obviously the government is doing something bad— but was this symbolic event really the right place to talk about it? Why even choose to interrupt this event, and the lives of the workers leading it and everyday people attending it? It wasn’t responsible for what was happening! 

Okay, yeah, I get the funeral is ‘symbolically significant.’  I get that Lamarque has become, in popular culture, a symbol of rebellion and resistance against a government’s unfair policies.  I get Lamarque’s funeral is a pretty big public event that has a lot of symbolic significance ties to ideas of rebellion against the state.

I get that Lamarque’s words are often seen as a rebellious call to action, so illegally interrupting his funeral could be a statement about resisting tyranny. It could be a call to action playing off the popularity and symbolic role that Lamarque has in the public consciousness.

 But at the same time— shouldn’t Les Amis have just gone to the palace and attacked the king directly? Why disrupt this symbolic event instead? They’re not really going after the people responsible! 

After all, there were so many people there who just wanted a normal day. They weren’t responsible for what the government was doing and had nothing to do with it.�� They wanted to see the procession, to hear Lafayette’s speech and grieve a political figure they cared for. They wanted to hear people praise ‘resistance’ in the abstract, without actually doing it.

 Weren’t Les Amis disrupting that?  

Aren’t Les Amis bad activists? Isn’t disrupting people’s everyday lives for the sake of 'activism' always inherently a bad thing? I’m not against activism, but isn’t doing that kind of disruptive activism rude? Isn’t disrupting the lives of ordinary people just doing their jobs or going out for a special event evil— no matter why you’re doing it, or what your goals are, or whether the government actually is doing something vile that we should start to stage great events rallying against?

Even if this Lamarque's funeral has special significance because of its symbolic pop cultural ties to rebellion against tyranny—shouldn’t they have just avoided rudely interrupting some regular people’s everyday lives? 

Protests shouldn’t disrupt things. they should be big parades that don’t make anyone uncomfortable, don’t interrupt anything, and don’t disrupt any aspects of ‘normal people’s daily life.’ No one should ever target symbolic events— like a funeral for a political figure or a musical about revolution—  to make a political statement. Protests should be little quiet festivals that cause absolutely no interruption in everyday life so that we can all just safely ignore them, until the climate catastrophe they’re warning us about arrives.”  

[greensaplinggrace]

the darkling says “fine, make me your villain” because he is. what’s not clicking

[bowenoke]

during Tubbo's cabinet era i wrote like 30k words of a fanfiction where when they tried to resurrect c!wilbur they accidentally sent tubbo back in time and it becomes increasingly obvious that wilbur never existed, and its a little fun because you get to see all the tubbo pov things from wilbur's pov + get more information, but tubbo gets more and more frantic and machiavellian as he realizes the only way he can guarantee the people he cares about survive his war is by following in "wilbur's" footsteps. obviously i never finished it for a lot of reasons (ambitious but not actually very good) but i need you to understand that despite being like. A Beeduo Artist for a year there. that nothing in the world caused me more despair than when they got married. what was i supposed to do there. mcrp hell on earth for me. he goes back in time and becomes an adult man and his husband stays a teenager??? the thing you don't realize walking into mcrp fanfiction is that sometimes the story you're writing gets fucked by acts of god

[guildling]

i appreciate him very much

[soliusss]

what the fuck is up with Reyna. who tf is she. how did she become this crazy crime overlord. who was she when she was a child. is she single- [gunshot]

(Seriously tho this ur excuse to tell me absolutely anything you want about her bc I am Obsessed)

childhood lore is secret right now (I cooked really hard with it tho believe me I want to share but I'm storing it for the future) but she grew up on a farm in a village in the American Midwest. (the main story takes place in an alternate timeline where the world's structure is similar but slightly different to reality) How she got the international criminal empire is uhhhhh scratches head not sure the mechanisms of how exactly she did that for now but she was very very motivated about scouring the world for evil and forbidden information. crime empire is simply the most efficient way of going about her plans. The short explanation of her motives is that she wants to starve gods.

[pvrrhadve]

speaking of arthuriana, if anyone's looking for recommendations, these are some of the best books i've read in the past few years

[bleue-flora]

tbf its hard to tell whats lore in exile and what isnt cuase it was the ccs having fun like tommy making fun of dream eating ice cubes, and talking about fanta and dreams merch. also kinda related but isnt it funny that cdream canonically taught ctommy about climate change like did that converastion happen off screen in exile lmao

I mean I take as much of it as canon as possible, because I think the fourth wall breaking and the silliness at times is part of the lore. It’s impossible to entirely not accept the two. In addition, regard of cc reasons for things I like to look at why it might make sense for the cs. Like I said in a different response, I have a feeling Dream coming up and hanging out is for the audience. It’d be very boring to watch Tommy mope around and Dream is obviously going to make excellent thumbnails lol. But story wise, unless specifically retconned, in my mind it should still be considered lore in some sense. Sure maybe it doesn’t make sense for Dream to be selling merch, but them talking and bonding I think should still be canonical. The fourth wall breaking ya know is just kinda apart of the story.

Does Techno actually play golf on the dsmp? No. But that doesn’t mean that that conversation isn’t canon if that makes sense. Did they mean for the cat or dog to magically appear in the cell? I don’t think so, but it became apart of the lore. The Prime Church is a canonical place so can we really write off that stream? Getting primes or subs or members ended up becoming so canon they had to get a god to give them a bell in prison…

Anyways… see now you got me thinking about Dream in Exile just standing there with a cup of ice in his hand, munching away while watching Tommy lol XD… Look lets be honest climate change is super depressing, are we sure he didn’t build the tower because of that ;D lol

[alpaca-clouds]

Solarpunk Game Ideas: Shooter/Action

I will very openly admit something that is going to be quite hard to do in Solarpunk is a shooter or an action game (like hack and slash). Which is kinda ironic, because some of the other ideas I spoke about this week involved action and fighting.

A while ago someone made a asset flipped bioshock. They used the mechanics from Bioshock but put the assets of a Solarpunk world over it, making it all look quite solarpunk, but of course it did not feel Solarpunk at all. This lead to a discussion on how a Shooter could never be Solarpunk - but I disagree with this.

The Issue:

The main issue is fairly clear: A lot of people see violance as something very much apart from solarpunk, while shooters and hack and slash games pretty much thrive on violence. And while I think I made a good point in my blog this week that a Solarpunk game can absolutely feature violence, I do understand why especially something like a shooter, that feels often more real, is a bigger issue for many. It feels a lot more intimate, because compared to let's say a metroidvania, it tends to be more real in terms of graphics and perspective.

So, let's talk about this.

Idea #1: A Guerilla Gardening Game

Let me start with what might be the most creative (?) idea I had on this topic. A Guerilla Gardening Game, where instead of bullets you shoot seed bombs. My vision for this kinda goes in this direction: You do not have classical enemies, but you have areas that are "corrupted" by pollution in some way or another. Maybe it is not gonna fight you, but you might take damage through environmental hazards. And you can remove them through gardening. And you will do that through a bit of hack an slash (gardening scissors) and shooting (seed bombs). Maybe you'll have to do some stealth as you are doing Guerilla - so illegal - gardening, and there might be cops trying to stop you. But yeah, something... different with the mechanics.

Idea #2: Fighting Robots with Robots

Look, I know that I already had mentioned this in terms of the Metroidvania. But folks, this idea would also work fairly well within either hack'n slash or shooter. Again, there is a good chance that we might have some sort of AI that takes care of robots for certain manual tasks or some governmental tasks. You could play this either as "this kind of AI is a good thing, if people work less because of it" or "this is still bad, because people rely too much on it". Either way, AI gets somehow corrupted or something along the lines and you have robots running amok. We all have seen those Cyberpunk things that run on similar ideas, right? And yeah, use that as a basic for an action story.

Hell, if you do not want to make it that dire: You could also make a rogue like action game where within the game it is some sort of game or training rather than an accute situation.

Idea #3: The War for a Solarpunk Future

To bring in one idea where the fighting is a bit more dire... Make a shooter where we atually have a scenario where the people are rebelling against the capitalist entities and the neocolonial empires - and there is an rebellion or an all-out war, where basically everyone who is not the top 3% is trying to rise up, because they know that the alternative is dying a slow drawn out death. Maybe some catastrophe has happened that made people rethink and mistrust the Status Quo.

In my own pure SciFi Solarpunk world, the entire thing starts, while more and more of the former colonies that are still controlled start rebelling, because too many people are in a situation where they are gonna die either way, so they might as well fight.

And hence we can go in a war scenario, where we can also bring in politics, and maybe some roleplay aspects. Possibly even multiple endings?

And if you are interested in creative Solarpunk endeavors, I would love to invite you into the Solarpunk Creatives community! :)

[justalittlesolarpunk]

Heyo, saw your recent post suggesting reading the Positive News and I was wondering if you happen to know any other sites similar to it, or solarpunk adjacent, sites that offer newsletters?

Yes! Good news network, Solarpunk Magazine, Sam Bentley, outrage and optimism, etc. Comment if you know others, people!

[natolesims]

Winter's finally here

And so are the winter shenanigans. Bash is adjusting to his new life, and Ella keeps on working on her studies. She nailed her first term and we're proud.