#human/environmental context

[is-solarpunk]

Solarpunk Writing Prompts #2

Here you can listen to original podcast

Here is the source of the podcast's transcript you can read below

Solarpunk Prompts - The Refugee Camp

Hello world. I'm Tomasino.

This is Solarpunk Prompts, a series for writers where we discuss Solarpunk as a literary, artistic, and activist movement.

Or, as RoAnna Sylva describes it: Solarpunk is a genre of ecologically-oriented speculative fiction characterized both by its aesthetic and its underlying socio-political vision.

In each episode we look at one story prompt using that genre lens, offering commentary on the prompt, some inspirations from the world today, and some considerations for writers.

Most importantly, we consider how that story might help us to better envision a sustainable civilization.

If this is your first time here, I'd recommend checking out our introduction episode first, where we talk about what Solarpunk is, why you should care, and why this series came into being.

This episode's prompt is titled: "The Refugee Camp".

There is a full-fledged town built from a refugee camp which was set up there two decades ago. The inhabitants speak their own creole, a mix of more than five languages, and have very shaky relationships with their neighboring communities or states, each of which considers it a lawless territory and might be plotting to take over.

I think the refugee camp is a fitting place to start our prompts. They are the standard setting in our world for communities just coming through tragedy. When there is war, famine, flooding, or any number of challenges to a people they often find shelters in foreign lands, sometimes thrown together with other groups fleeing their own hardships.

Refugee stories are also plentiful in science-fiction: Superman is a refugee from Krypton, The Doctor is a refugee from Gallifrey, or Arthur Dent, a refugee from Cottington in the West Country. These are all individual stories, though, and not the camp and community we are striving for. Instead we might look to Battlestar Gallactica, or Babylon 5, or the Nantucket trilogy for examples of entire communities of refugees. And, indeed, those are vibrant and capture a bit of the colorful characters and internal conflicts that arise in such places. But Solarpunk can depart from this view of refugee camps as places of despair.

In our prompt the camp has grown into a full-fledged town. That suggests a thriving regrowth emerging from this mixed culture and reflected in their creole dialect.

Is that a realistic vision to take, though? Is this just Solarpunk being naïve and blindly optimistic?

Let's take a look to real refugee camps in South Sudan and Uganda, where the r0g_agency, a Berlin-based nonprofit, has been working with communities to help them develop innovation hubs. Five of these communities have linked together to form #ASKnet, a program that offers training in open-source hardware and software, entrepreneurship, media production, gender equality, and financial literacy. They also run repair cafes, giving hands-on experience and learning, and reducing waste and preserving natural resources.

This is just one program that is built and run by small community organizations.

How about Communitere? It was founded by individuals who saw the amazing rebuilding efforts after natural disasters like the 2004 earthquake in the Indian Ocean which caused the deadliest tsunami in history. The world responded with one of the greatest relief efforts in record time, all at once. But then medicines spoiled before they could reach the sick. Food rotted before it could find the hungry. This failure of local logistics is what inspired the organization.

What do they do? Well, they don' “intervene”. Instead, they provide spaces where communities can implement their own plans and choose from a variety of tools and models that Communitere makes available. They provide training, processes, toolkits, and space. They empower the communities to build their own futures. And now they're up and running in Haiti, Nepal, Greece, and the Philippines.

These are both stories of information sharing and empowering local communities. They succeed by building together both local talent and infrastructure and focus on sustainability.

And they mean sustainability in many forms:

environmental sustainability - processes that work with the unique local environment

economic sustainability - processes that can continue without ongoing external funding

and cultural sustainability - respecting and empowering local cultures

When you start thinking of these refugee camps as places where people are building new things, new homes, new lives, new opportunities, then the writing opportunities open up for you as well. Gone are the two dimensional sketches of a dirty camp full of broken people. These people are alive and empowered!

In a different genre setting we might lean into the shantytown aesthetic, or the lawlessness of the area might become an easy setting for crime stories. I challenge you, with this prompt, to steer clear of those well trodden paths, and focus on the community as a vibrant, living thing.

Speaking of shantytowns, I'm reminded of Cory Doctorow's setting in the book, Makers, with it's unique community of hackers, and the unique way they used language… Which brings us to the next aspect of this writing prompt: Creole.

According to Collins English Dictionary: A Creole is a language that has developed from a mixture of different languages and has become the main language in a particular place.

These are fascinating growths of blending cultures and can powerfully illustrate the fundamental aspects of a community:

who they are

what they believe in

and how they respond to a changing world

Think of the unique flavor of the Belter language in the Expanse. Every odd word choice, or word borrowed from Chinese or Indic or Slavic, is a reminder of what these people are. In some cases this unique language use even extends to meaningful gestures.

The way these languages develop is so interesting in its own right that there is an indy card game where you collaboratively create one with friends. It's called Dialect, and it won IGDN's Game of the Year in 2019 along with a host of other awards. In that game you 2-4 of your friends will create what's called an Isolation, basically a community set apart from others for some interesting reason, and then play out their history across three different ages. The game then ends with the Isolation no longer being isolated, whether for good or for bad.

As the game descriptions says: "Dialect is a game about an isolated community, their language, and what it means for that language to be lost."

It's a fascinating way to spend 3-4 hours with friends, and incredibly insightful into this exact process.

Now, before we go let's take a look at that prompt one more time:

"The Refugee Camp"

There is a full-fledged town built from a refugee camp which was set up there two decades ago. The inhabitants speak their own creole, a mix of more than five languages, and have very shaky relationships with their neighboring communities or states, each of which considers it a lawless territory and might be plotting to take over.

Okay.

It's time to wrap up, but before we go, lets review our guidelines for Solarpunk writing one more time:

Community as Protagonist (No "Chosen One")

Infrastructure is Sexy (No simple solution)

Human/Environmental Context (Not Man vs Nature)

Thanks for staying with me today. I hope you'll join me for the next Solarpunk Prompt.

Links mentioned:

r0g_agency

Communitere

Dialect

Music from:

ExMemory - Solar Grid

[plasma-packin-mama]

This is I think a controversial statement but I'm going to be honest I think 9 times out of 10 getting a nuclear warhead tattooed is a Questionable idea

[howdoesone]

How does one analyze the portrayal of nature in Middle Eastern landscape paintings?

Analyzing the Portrayal of Nature in Middle Eastern Landscape Paintings: Exploring the Beauty and Symbolism Introduction Middle Eastern landscape paintings offer a captivating glimpse into the region’s natural beauty and the artistic interpretations of its landscapes. From serene desert vistas to lush oasis scenes, these artworks depict the harmonious relationship between nature and human…

[crabussy]

this was about kākāpō originally (there are 247 kākāpō left, they have a super small gene pool and struggle to lay fertile eggs, and their offspring can't fend off introduced predators) but this is also about EVERY endangered species. this post also applies to people who think a species should go extinct because it's "useless", "ugly", "annoying" etc.

cockroaches are pollinators in the tropics and play a crucial role in recycling soil nutrients. exterminating ticks from ecosystems can cause super detrimental effects to the entire food web, affecting every trophic level. "pandas are lazy and useless" they collect seed and plant matter in their fur and disperse it throughout the forest, helping new growth. we can't just "replace" kiwi with a nocturnal mammal from somewhere else because "its bad at surviving", it's an extremely unique species and it is important to hundreds of thousands of people. the only reason it is "bad at surviving" is due to the threat of introduced mammalian predators that it has not evolved to fight. stop being an asshole about things you don't know enough about.

I have heard ALL of the above examples said with such confidence and it's just embarrassing. if you've shared these ideas in the past and are feeling upset, I used to as well!! I'm glad that you've been able to gain more knowledge about the importance of every species within its ecosystem. for those of you who STILL share these sentiments, please please PLEASE before you say "X species should just go extinct", do ONE search. "X species environmental niche". that's all you need to look up. read a bit about it. thank you

by the way if you think an endangered species deserves to go extinct because it takes effort to save them/they can’t look after themselves, you need to reevaluate the way you look at the world because that is an extremely flawed, messed up, and sad worldview.

[reasonsforhope]

"The Netherlands is pulling even further ahead of its peers in the shift to a recycling-driven circular economy, new data shows.

According to the European Commission’s statistics office, 27.5% of the material resources used in the country come from recycled waste.

For context, Belgium is a distant second, with a “circularity rate” of 22.2%, while the EU average is 11.5% – a mere 0.8 percentage point increase from 2010.

“We are a frontrunner, but we have a very long way to go still, and we’re fully aware of that,” Martijn Tak, a policy advisor in the Dutch ministry of infrastructure and water management, tells The Progress Playbook. 

The Netherlands aims to halve the use of primary abiotic raw materials by 2030 and run the economy entirely on recycled materials by 2050. Amsterdam, a pioneer of the “doughnut economics” concept, is behind much of the progress.

Why it matters

The world produces some 2 billion tonnes of municipal solid waste each year, and this could rise to 3.4 billion tonnes annually by 2050, according to the World Bank.

Landfills are already a major contributor to planet-heating greenhouse gases, and discarded trash takes a heavy toll on both biodiversity and human health.

“A circular economy is not the goal itself,” Tak says. “It’s a solution for societal issues like climate change, biodiversity loss, environmental pollution, and resource-security for the country.”

A fresh approach

While the Netherlands initially focused primarily on waste management, “we realised years ago that’s not good enough for a circular economy.”

In 2017, the state signed a “raw materials agreement” with municipalities, manufacturers, trade unions and environmental organisations to collaborate more closely on circular economy projects.

It followed that up with a national implementation programme, and in early 2023, published a roadmap to 2030, which includes specific targets for product groups like furniture and textiles. An English version was produced so that policymakers in other markets could learn from the Netherlands’ experiences, Tak says.

The programme is focused on reducing the volume of materials used throughout the economy partly by enhancing efficiencies, substituting raw materials for bio-based and recycled ones, extending the lifetimes of products wherever possible, and recycling.

It also aims to factor environmental damage into product prices, require a certain percentage of second-hand materials in the manufacturing process, and promote design methods that extend the lifetimes of products by making them easier to repair.

There’s also an element of subsidisation, including funding for “circular craft centres and repair cafés”.

This idea is already in play. In Amsterdam, a repair centre run by refugees, and backed by the city and outdoor clothing brand Patagonia, is helping big brands breathe new life into old clothes.

Meanwhile, government ministries aim to aid progress by prioritising the procurement of recycled or recyclable electrical equipment and construction materials, for instance.

State support is critical to levelling the playing field, analysts say...

Long Road Ahead

The government also wants manufacturers – including clothing and beverages companies – to take full responsibility for products discarded by consumers.

“Producer responsibility for textiles is already in place, but it’s work in progress to fully implement it,” Tak says.

And the household waste collection process remains a challenge considering that small city apartments aren’t conducive to having multiple bins, and sparsely populated rural areas are tougher to service.

“Getting the collection system right is a challenge, but again, it’s work in progress.”

...Nevertheless, Tak says wealthy countries should be leading the way towards a fully circular economy as they’re historically the biggest consumers of natural resources."

-via The Progress Playbook, December 13, 2023

[luxe-pauvre]

In that predicament, if I'm lucky, I'll remember the observation, usually attributed to Joan Baez, that "action is the antidote to despair." People tend to quote this in the context of political or environmental activism, but it applies to everything else, too: an overfilled inbox, a cluttered garage, an intimidating creative project or overdue tax return. If you can get yourself over the gap between knowing what you need to do and taking an action, things can only get better from there. Which means that at least the nature of the immediate challenge is clear: not to "become more productive" or "get motivated" or "make a plan for the month" or something like that, but just to do one thing to address whatever situation you're in. […] If you can approach your daily life in this way for a while – as a sequence of momentary, self-contained, eminently doable actions, rather than as an arduous matter of chipping away at enormous challenges – you might notice something profound, which is that, in fact, this is all you ever need to do. You can make your way through life exclusively in this manner. (As E. L. Doctorow said of writing, it's "like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.") And not just that: actually, it's all you ever could do. There is no achievement, in the history of human civilisation, that has ever been accomplished by any means other than as a sequence of doable actions. In the end, it isn't really a question of "breaking big projects down into small chunks." It's more a matter of seeing that "big projects" are nothing but psychological constructs, quasi-illusory entities summoned into existence by taking a particular view of what our lives really consist of – which is moments, and the actions that unfold in them. After all, in any given moment, we're never actually "working on a big project" or "addressing a major challenge" or anything similar. We're always just taking an action. And then another. And another.

Oliver Burkeman, How to get out of a rut

[writingwithcolor]

Dark features/people as blessed, white and light people as sick

ladyoftheseastuff asked:

I'm writing a fantasy story where the world is permanently covered in snow & ice. The people share a common culture & are loyal to their city states, but they are not homogeneous in appearance; there will be many, many characters coded as PoC. The main religion centers on the sun, & those with dark features are 'favoured' by the sun god, while pale people or anyone who has white/blonde hair are thought vulnerable to "snow sickness", a disease caused by environmental factors (1/2) & have other rules and customs to gain religious approval. It's dangerous & infectious but not well understood. It affects social standing and opportunities, but it's meant to be tied with ideas of youth, vitality, & fear of aging & sickness: it's not limited to those coded as white. This is a cultural detail and not part of the main conflict, but I want to avoid unintentional allegories/parallels & fetishization. Is this a concept that's too close to crossing any of those lines? (2/2)

This feels less like a means to show dark skinned people in an empowering light and more like a weak attempt at subversion. My primary concern (which you have not specified) is how do the "blessed" class treat the "sickly" so to speak. We have fantasy stories like The Grisha Trilogy and Girls of Paper and Fire, which deal with magical ability/feature-based segregation and conflict.

In both cases there is a sense of entitlement which comes with hailing from the "favoured" class, quite obvious, since there will always be an inherent othering metaphor whenever you create such a division, whether it was meant to be a source of conflict or not.

However, the two mentioned series use the "magical people are blessed, non magical people are to be pitied" arc which is somewhat more subtle than divisions created just on the basis of skin colour.

Disclaimer as I do not have albinism or vitiligo: The latter can be extremely harmful, and not just in a racial context, but in cases of albinism, vitiligo etc.

~Mod Mimi

The pitfalls of subversions

While it is always lovely to see dark features considered in a favorable way, there are some issues you may come across. Such a story could easily end up dressing those you wished to uphold as bad guys in the readers' eyes, even if the story's society and the sun god etc. thinks they're amazing, and white and light people as the victims of dark people, deserving reader sympathy. This may especially be the case based on how these groups get treated in the story.

These sort of subversions lean dangerously into "reverse discrimination" plots which are not overall accurate or favorable allegories for your real, human audience. There being diversity on both sides doesn't necessary fix this issue or remove racial or ethnic implications. On that note, and as Mimi mentioned, being demonized and ostracized particularly for skin and genetic disorders like albinism is already a thing. What does your concept say of them?

I think Dark/Black as good and Light/white as bad is a doable concept. Your concept differs a bit from simply subverting black/white tropes. This is not just Black good guys and night skies being peaceful or neutral. It's not just white/light villains (as opposed to victims) or snow symbolling death or sickness.

White and light people are quite blatantly being declared as sick and unfavored and they may very well be victims in the reader's eye with the dark people being the villainous, unsympathetic bunch. Is this your intention?

More to consider

Such a concept requires thoughtful, careful planning and intentional writing. You should have an understanding of what your story implies to the readers and the real-life takeaways.

I think it's possible to make dark skin the favored skin of the sun god without it meaning white/light people stand in a negative light and are sick or unworthy.

Consider what it is that you like about the concept of your story. Can you keep the essence of whatever it is that excites you about your ideas, without denying a whole group of people favor? If not, how will you go about telling such a tale that is not meant to symbolize a sort of reversal of roles discrimination?

Why does the sun god get to determine what is good?

Are there other gods that might have different strong opinions? Perhaps who is favored varies by time of day, season, region, culture, god?

Can dark skin get its favor without white and light features being deemed unfavorable as a whole?

How big of a deal does this favor have to be? I advise reconsidering it being the point of discrimination to white/light people for all the reasons already described.

No matter the directions you go, please research and get the appropriate beta-readers for feedback on the in-depth concepts and story.

~Mod Colette

[makingspiritualityreal]

Moon in the Houses and What Your Mind has Adjusted To

Despite the Moon being such a basic placement in Astrology, it is still widely misunderstood and not taken for the role that it really plays in our charts. Luckily, Vedic Astrology gives us a better insight into the Moon's actual functioning, placing its importance as the number one placement to analyse when it comes to how the chart functions.

The Moon is the first thing to analyse in a chart because it is the basic mode of operation that we will use to exercise all of our planets. The Moon in a given house shows more precisely how our basic consciousness has adapted to the external world, based on the energies we received during our prime years of infancy. We are also born with individual karmas at the soul level that collide with our environment. As a result , the Moon becomes our subjective response to an equally subjective environmental pressure.

The Moon in Western Astrology is often confused with the Sun. However, the Moon is present with us our entire life and develops very early on. The Sun is our identity in the context of our immortal soul reflected in our mortal achievements in a given incarnation. That takes years to build up, and most of us don't really know what we're doing and what we are going towards until our so called mid-life crisis. That is why the classic Vedics start judging the Sun's performance in no earlier than our early 50s. The Moon, however, is like a filter that we approach the entirety of our life experience with, and so it appears the moment we ground into our body on this Earth and develop any human consciousness at all. Classic Vedic theory says the Moon is literally our mind, the Sun is our Soul's Earthly kingdom.

Naturally, planetary aspects will influence the state of the Moon and change its behavior in any given house. These aspects will show basic influences to our mind and ego, our knee-jerk reactions so to speak.

The Moon also has the unique quality of having no enemies and being malleable in nature. As a result, it is the most prone to planetary influences, for better or for worse. It becomes a malefic if it's conjunct with any malefic influence. The moon is a benefic if conjunct with a benefic planet. Phases of the Moon also have a lot to do with its nature. A person born on a Full Moon or close to it will naturally be more energetically abundant than someone born on a New Moon.

The Moon will naturally produce and provide if conjunct Mercury, Venus or Jupiter. The best conjunction for the Moon is Jupiter as these planets are mutually friendly. Venus and Mercury don't like the Moon, so while it's a benefic conjunction for the Moon itself, these other planets suffer as a result of Moon's presence, viewing it as a burden.

The Moon will automatically have to develop its character through struggle if conjunct Sun, Mars, Saturn, Rahu or Ketu. Sun, contrary to what pop astrology sources tell you, is a malefic, as it rules authority and burning away disobedience. When too close, it shames the Moon, and so does Saturn, another authority figure of a different kind. Rahu and Ketu give extreme biases in thinking to the Moon, making it unstable and lacking in perspective and objectivity. The "best" malefic for the Moon is Mars, as the two are friendly and give the native a goal oriented nature, if the conjunction is without further affliction. It is most easy to channel this conjunction productively as it busies itself turning challenge into an opportunity.

Moon in the 1st house represents the mind, that has grounded securely into a sense of self. Anything in the 1st house has a very strong influence on our sense of identity, as it is directly in line with the life karma of our Ascendant. As a result, even if one is not a spiritual person, they will be thinking strongly about the meaning of their life and their personal destiny. Since the mind grounds so surely in the self, there is a certain egoism and self interest present, and one may easily attract people's attention and support regardless, but also suffer blame for one's action.

Moon in the 2nd house gives the mind a pragmatic nature. They will take action based on where their interest is placed in a result of that action. They will root into what they perceive as their support system with unrelenting stubbornness, which can make them inflexible. However, if the Moon doesn't suffer from afflictions, they are also an excellent support system to others themselves, associating their sense of self with being a wellspring of stable nourishment.

Moon in the 3rd house is said to be the peak placement for the Moon. The reason for that is that the Moon here becomes very proactive. One's mind is adjusted naturally to making the most out of every day by creating the life they want from themselves through their own power and effort. As a result, this is someone who can go very far, because they know what they want and don't hesitate to get it. It results in peak productivity in life, whatever that means personally for the native, in a well oriented direction decided by the inner compass of one's happiness and achievement. Malefic influence can make it ruthless, but the good gains will still be there.

Moon in the 4th house is another placement where the moon feels very comfortable, as the mind is naturally attached to one's emotional idea of personal happiness and personal creativity. One is fundamentally synchronised with the landscape of their heart. One's mind basically exists to make one happy, which makes for a very balanced mental health perspective. If afflicted however, it can lead to self delusion, one telling themselves whatever they want to believe, choosing to think whatever is comfortable even if it loses all realism. This placement needs a serious reality check to compliment it, but has a lot of potential.

Moon in the 5th house is another peak of personal activity, where the mind attaches to going forward with one's personal ideas and sharing them with loved ones. The expression of personal identity here is strong and leads to creativity, but also to selfishness. This can be a mind that is used to having its own way and bossing people around if afflicted, yet they still manage to take everything personally. External self expression shines its light on others if it flows well here, but can become a detriment if not paired with self reflection.

Moon in the 6th house is a difficult point, as here the mind thrives on competition and constant problem solving. That can make them very successful in their goals, but can give a life full of stress and pressure if the Moon is afflicted. Afflictions also can result in an illusion of productivity, while in reality one gets nowhere with their efforts, but simply wants to feel like they're doing something even if it has no use. However, if strong that Moon is someone who doesn't mind getting their hands dirty performing confrontational tasks that make other people uncomfortable and their practical streak can be unmatched. It is one of the worst placements for one's peace of mind however, as they are inherently unable to relax, since the mind finds peace in conflict and problem solving. Doing physical tasks or working out to release excess energy is a must.

Moon in the 7th house is an energetic struggle, as here the Moon is the lowest energetically. The mind can be lethargic and clingy, as is fundamentally adapted to external companionship and serving their internal polar opposite and they can lack self awareness. Independence here is a struggle too, and if afflicted this Moon can make the mind treat people instrumentally for their own peace of mind. This Moon thrives in productive partnerships and finds its bliss over time in those, as they mature and develop with age.

Moon in the 8th house is said to be the lowest point of the Moon. The reason for that is that the 8th house is a point of stagnation and sorting out between what is true and not. It's the point of the highest pressure in the zodiac, which seeks for extreme release. As a result, the mind here is tormented, constantly in motion trying to let go of some burden and find something of value. If that is well placed, it can be excellent for goal setting, handling business and high pressure situations that come with success, if Jupiter helps this moon they can have a strong gift for speculation and being able to predict business tendencies. Think of a Christian Grey personality profile. If afflicted, there is a lack of clarity on what to do and what is valuable and important in one's life, and in situations in general, which leads to blundering, stagnation and serious personal losses, as one doesn't value what is good for one's happiness or a productive contribution, until they suffer a loss of it and see results by contrast, at which point it is too late. Turning to spirituality and meditation for clarity of mind and direction is necessary.

Moon in the 9th house makes for a mental adaptation to expansion, from any life situation, happy or painful. This is a mind that was taught to learn something from every experience, good or bad, and share that wisdom with others. That can be both theoretical and practical, depending on how the Moon is aspected. As a result, they grow into a natural teacher or guide, because they have an ability to process everything, both positive and negative, into a lesson through apt conclusions. The capacity for universalizing here is very powerful, as they turn even the most personal experiences into a parable, being able to see them through the lenses of emotional pattern recognition and fluidly turning them into conclusions. Once they get the opportunity to adapt their experience and talents into a successful day to day routine, they give a lot to the world.

Moon in the 10th house creates a native who very much can feel like a public property. Their personal desire is linked strictly to social contribution and having a practical daily schedule. The mind is attuned to routines and social involvement, more for the sake of order than personal fulfillment, making this a difficult place for the Moon as it can become a very impersonal placement of someone who "doesn't have a life". In reality, the mind here doesn't know what to do with one's personal life as they feel like their public life is their personal life, and if they establish any intimacy, it will be in that context. The mind naturally cares more about their image then the raw personal truth.

Moon in the 11th house gives a mind adapted to an extremely extroverted, goal oriented nature. This can be the kid that was always taken to several different extracurricular activities after school by their parents. As the 11th house is the height of Jupiter, there is an internal pressure for the height of achievement. Personal goals here always involve large scale contributions and social climbing in the context of social success. If the moon is in a good condition, it will make the native versatile and successful, if it suffers any afflictions it will create a feeling of extreme pressure and struggle with patience necessary to achieve one's goals.

Moon in the 12th house is a placement of a native whose mind naturally adapts to extreme sensitivity to one's environment and gives the ability to be in tune with the ebbs and flows of the entire universe. There is an inherent openness and a tendency to automatically create space for the energy for other people's vibrations. While it is a good and healing placement for the environment, it can be hard for the native itself. They can feel lost within themselves, not knowing how to self define and they tend to bend over backwards in front of others, not necessarily out of genuine caring but because they're only at peace when they make others feel good. It happens because due to their upbringing they were trained to find fulfillment in everything but their own selves. Meditation, spirituality and extreme boundaries are necessary for them to find any peace of mind, as their mind can't tolerate anything external that pollutes their energy field.

[sporesgalaxy]

Pacific Rim isn't anti-nuclear in the same way Kaiju movies usually are. The resolution is facilitated by the detonation of a nuclear warhead and a nuclear reactor power core. So........what's up with that?

I mean, it's deeply American, obviously, but what else? Why does it not feel particularly pro-war in the same way, say, a typical MCU does? What does it mean that the Kaiju are prompted by human activity (carbon pollution "practically terraformed" Earth for the invading aliens), but are ultimately not a true manifestation of Nature's Wrath (not even from Earth)?

What arguments is Pacific Rim making in the place of the typical kaiju movie anti-nuclear-pollution, wrath-of-nature fare?

I stream-of-consciousness rambled about this for multiple paragraphs and don't feel like cleaning it up much. Basically: I think Pacific Rim is a commentary on the myriad problems with political responses to climate change over the years.

•••

So, in the Great American Kaiju Movie, two nuclear blasts save the day rather than creating all the problems. Despite the fact that at least one of those nuclear blasts still probably did a lot of collateral.... I do wish Pacific Rim had focused a bit more on collateral, and the environmental damage caused by both the Kaiju and, inevitably, the Jaeger project AND Wall of Peace. Food rations are mentioned once-- but surely metal and construction equiptment rationing must also be in place to allow for wall construction! I want my environmental messages shoved violently down the audience's throat, damnit! But I digress

I think an important detail to consider in the Kaiju/Nuclear discussion is how Mako and Raleigh's Jaeger's nuclear power generator is what really allowed them to save the world, multiple times.

The history of politics around nuclear power plants vs nuclear warhead production is interesting, especially in the typical kaiju movie thematic context of man carelessly abusing nature. The argument in defense of nuclear power plants is that, despite the need for extremely rigerous and long-term nuclear waste disposal considerations, there is a lower volume of waste created by nuclear power plants in relation to the energy provided by them, when compared to other modern methods of energy generation like coal power. So, in theory, nuclear energy could be a beneficial power source for minimizing environmental impact.

In the Kaiju movies I've seen, nuclear power is only ever addressed as an extension of the inherently unnatural and harmful abomination of the invention of.the nuclear warhead. It's understandable, the environmental devastation caused by radioactive pollution is massive, and its something a nuclear power plant is very capable of doing if enough goes wrong.

So, what do the Jaegers represent within this conversation? what does the Wall of Peace represent? Here's my thought: they represent (more) active versus passive solutions to the growing threat of climate change. Jaegers represent the way that active work against climate change is only funded as far as it is beneficial to the image of the government.

Yes, the Rift was found to be impossible to blow up with nukes, but it's pretty clear that the world governmemts were putting more money into the publically popular and flashy Jaeger program than they were putting into researching the increase in Kaiju frequency and a permanent solution to the issue. Because of the complicity the world fell into once Kaiju and Jaegers were Rock Stars, the root of the issue with Kaiju goes unadressed for an entire generation, in favor of defeating each Kaiju in impressive and propogand-izable ways.

Only once the problem becomes too big for the propoganda-friendly Jaegers to manage do the world governments start looking for alternate solutions, and the Wall is immediately shown to be too little too late. As soon as it stops being useful for propoganda, the government loses interest in truly solving the problem, and begins investing in moving itself inland and leaving poor coastal populations to die.

The kaiju are only able to be defeated in Pacific Rim because a group of people separate from the government comes together and searches for a solution to the root of the issue-- the Rift being open in the Pacific at all.

Nuclear power is therefore not posed as a solution to war against fellow humans, but is used as a solution to a collective human effort to fight the exponentially speeding destruction of the Earth. The Jaeger pilots and everyone else working in the resistance HAVE to be willing to do anything, willing to take drastic active measures, in order to stop the destruction of the Earth's climate. Yay :)

[ckret2]

Ages ago I made a post about what Ford thinks about Bill (in a billford context), and I've had an infodump on what Bill thinks about Ford floating on discord for months, and an ask finally prompted me to post it, so here ya go:

If asked why he likes Ford, Bill himself claims that Ford overthinks everything, but in such fun, interesting ways, and Bill likes the way Ford thinks about things.

But really, Bill overthinks everything too; it's just he overthinks social things. He's always calculating how to persuade, control, manipulate people. He never has a conversation that isn't a chess game, it's exhausting and he won't even admit it's exhausting. When's the last time his top priorities weren't either "how do I convince some sucker to make a portal" or "ugggh I'm so SICK of the PORTAL I'm gonna THROW A PARTY and NOT THINK AT ALL"

Whereas Ford is guy who'd hear someone say something incorrect and bluntly go "no you're wrong" and accidentally offend the hell out of them because he's SO excited to share this fantastic information they don't know. The social world DOES NOT EXIST for him until he's reminded of it.

And so he's free to turn all his brainpower instead to. Like. The environmental impact of barf fairies on fern fertilizer or whatever.

Bill knows Everything™ but he's gotten tired of doing anything with that knowledge. They're all discrete points of information to him. He doesn't have time to muse over things, he's got an inventor to manipulate at 11pm and then a party to get to at midnight. He's never once in his life thought about the impact of barf fairies on the local flora. But he does happen to know the plants in that part of the woods are more acid-resistant and wow is that why???? He's never even thought to think about that before. Thousand year mystery that Bill didn't even notice has been solved.

(On the other hand "Ford doesn't think to think about the intricacies of social interaction" is also part of what makes him so easy to manipulate, he's so much more inclined to just accept at face value a friendly offer of assistance on a big academic project. Sure Bill's helping for the sake of scientific advancement in and of itself, why wouldn't he?)

Bill wants to just, fling random facts at Ford and see if he can think up connections between them. Go nerd boy go nerd boy go

"... So there you have it Ford, that's the problem you'll have to overcome with adapting alien machinery to human fuel sources, now I wanna hear YOUR thoughts on how to overcome that problem." "Well—" talks in an uninterrupted stream that by thirty minutes in has drifted over to the history of kerosene production, which he read an interesting book about between semesters in college— "... I've gotten off topic, haven't I?" "No no, I think you're on to something. This is how brainstorming works, free association of concepts. Keep going."

Ford in the morning: "... oh no I didn't let my muse get a word in edgewise for the rest of the dream, i didn't bore him did I?" Bill: "damn, I never noticed the patent process for hurricane lamps was so contentious. There's little dramas everywhere"

When things are going well, their relationship is,

Ford: "I just wanna hear Bill teach me things about the multiverse forever."

Bill: "I just wanna hear Ford think deeply on any topic that crosses his mind forever."

Both of them when they're in peak harmony: excitedly jabbering at each other at 200 words per minute about the stupidest topic you've ever heard, but you'd need a phd in at least two fields to comprehend it

That's love!!!

Ford, having historically been socially shamed: "... am I being weird?"

Bill: "💕❤️💓yeah❣️💖❤️‍🔥"

Sometimes I think about Bill watching Ford in his sleep and being in awe at this human-shaped genius: you with your beautiful electric mind, packed into this soft flawed uneven body. one would never know it from the outside—but you're in there. This genius with a mind like a galaxy. ... and he's like, growing hair and stuff. wild.

[is-solarpunk]

Solarpunk Writing Prompts #1.3

Human/Environmental Context (Not Man vs Nature)

Just because we're creating stories of an optimistic future that doesn't mean we're without conflict. There's probably plenty of interpersonal conflict both within and without the community. What's in harmony, at least for the protagonist community, is the relationship between the humans and their environment.

Here you can listen to the original podcast

Here you can read the podcast's transcript

[loquora]

I'd like to take a couple of minutes to talk about NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writers Month) and their terrible, very bad, no good stance on genAI (generative artificial intelligence) and why I won't be writing anything for this challenge again.

I'm very aware that I am an active and vocal genAI hater. But I am willing and open to hear about positive and useful things LLMs (large language models) can do. There are valid scientific uses for the technology and some really fascinating medical and academic breakthroughs that come from LLMs. But the use of genAI in creative writing context is complete bullshit.

Come with me for the breakdown.

The first part of their statement:

NaNoWriMo has made it clear they are not just tolerating genAI in their month long writing challenge, but that those of us who don't are 'classist' and 'ableist' because we don't.

The post was later amended with a list of reasons why they make each of those claims. We'll start from the top.

GenAI uses the technology in a way that is morally, ethically and environmentally bankrupt. See, all LLMs have to train on something. When you're using it to, say, detect cancers you can feed it images of cancer scans so that it builds up a dataset of what those look like to predict future scans. But when you want to generate text, images and video you have to feed it text, images and video. Those things came from people, actual people and actual artists who overwhelmingly did not agree to train anything with their work and can no longer wrest their work from the machine now that it's been stolen from them.

It also isn't 'intelligent' at all, considering it has that word in the name. Think of genAI like an alien learning our language with absolutely no frame of reference for what it's learning. It can predict that the letters "w-e" and "c-a-n" often come after the letters "y-e-s" because the phrase "yes we can" will come up often in training data, it's a common phrase. But it doesn't actually understand what any of those words MEAN. Just that they often follow one another so that when prompted it will, statistically, try put those letters and words together again.

So when it comes to actually writing or responding to prompts what you're getting is the most likely outcome based on a massive amount of data input. It is not actually giving you feedback on what your writing looks like, it's giving you the most statistically possible response based on input. It's fake feedback, a thousand other feedbacks crammed together and extruded into a goo that looks and sounds like feedback but is actually meaningless. ChatGPT doesn't understand your writing sample anymore than a phone tree understands your anger and desperation when you continue to say "OPERATOR" as clearly as you can to try to get through to a real human. Both understand you input a word and will output based on that, but context, emotions, cultural mores etc. are all beyond it.

This is why AI is so absurdly shitty at things like math, counting letters in words and identifying words that start with the same letter. It's mashing together a million math problem answers betting on the likelihood that statistically someone has already answered that question enough times in the training data that it can spit the correct answer out at you.

TLDR: If you're using genAI to get feedback on your writing you're not actually getting feedback on your writing at all, but the most statistically probable set of words that relate to feedback. So right off the bat the idea that genAI is going to help you be a better writer is just flat wrong. It doesn't know how to write, it doesn't even know how many Rs are in the word 'strawberry'.

Second point has the same issues as the first:

I actually agree with them on the point that if your brain doesn't handle certain writer activities well it's perfectly okay to use an outside source for help with it. GenAI isn't actually helping you be a better writer, though; it can't. It doesn't understand anything you write nor can it provide meaningful feedback when it's just spitting out statistically probably words to you based on your input. So while the point here is actually good on the surface, the solution of using genAI to help people who have trouble with certain aspects of writing is still not correct.

The final point:

Again, this is a very good point... if it wasn't being made in conjunction with a defense of generative AI WHICH DOES NOT HELP OR SOLVE THIS ISSUE. In fact, because of the known issues of bias in how genAI LLMs are built they can make issues for marginalized writers worse.

I genuinely have no idea how this very true paragraph about people who are routinely pushed out of traditional writing spaces is helped by genAI. Their entire point thus far seems to be that genAI is a 'cheap' alternative to some traditional writing aids but considering genAI doesn't work like that it's all dead in the water as far as I'm concerned.

If NaNoWriMo was actually concerned with solving these access issues to things they consider critical to writing in general, why not offer a place for real people to read and critique one another on their platform? There are myriad other technological solutions that don't cost huge amounts of water AND actually help aspiring writers!

All of this to say that you should write for yourself, write what you enjoy and get better the same way generations of people before you have: by reading other people's work, talking to and exchanging time with other authors and writing and rewriting in your own words until you're satisfied.

Wasting water asking genAI to do things for you that would make you a better writer to do yourself or with trusted allies is just that, a waste.

[hyperlexichypatia]

I don’t actually hate sports. I’m not interested in them myself, either as a player or a spectator, but I think sport is a part of a thriving social ecosystem. Humans like running and throwing and stuff. Humans like teams and fandom and competition. It’s not my thing, but I’m happy for you. So no, I don’t hate sports. But I love human rights. And in any context in which human rights have to be negotiated or weighed against the good of the sport, well, bluntly speaking, fuck the sport. 

If the good of the sport requires that people be discriminated against or subjected to body-policing for being disabled or intersex or transgender, the sport is what needs to change. 

If the good of the sport requires that children be abused, or seriously injured, or denied opportunities, the sport is what needs to change. 

If the good of the sport requires that cities displace poor people, enact gentrification, build environmentally unsustainable venues, deprioritize academic learning in public schools, or otherwise harm communities, the sport is what needs to change. 

I’m not going to try to argue on grounds like “Oh, actually, trans athletes don’t have ‘an unfair advantage’ if they’re on HRT” or “Oh, actually, that woman you’re body-policing for ‘looking too masculine’ actually ‘passed her gender test’” or “Oh, actually, ADHD medication isn’t performance-enhancing if used medicinally” because none of those are the point! What in the Harrison-Bergeron-ass biopower dystopia even makes “testing” for “unfairly advantaged bodies” a reasonable-sounding and non-horrifying concept? 

See, I don’t actually care whether a trans or intersex or disabled athlete has """an unfair advantage””” over a cis perisex abled athlete, because gender discrimination and disability discrimination and body policing are just inherently wrong, and full social and legal and cultural inclusion of trans and intersex and disabled people in every aspect of society is more important than who wins a game, actually. 

And I appreciate that some people are pointing out that when an abled cis man like Michael Phelps has unusual physical traits that make him better at his chosen sport, that’s perfectly acceptable, and since no two people have the exact same body, the entire concept of a a """fair””” physical competition is nonsensical. “Unfair advantage” is just code for “Such a freakish body should not be allowed to exist.” I don’t care about “unfair advantages” because I don’t accept the premise. What is a “fair” advantage? It’s not about the integrity of the sport, and if it were, I still wouldn’t care, because human rights are more important than sports. I am not going to pretend that trans/intersex/disabled equality has to be in any way “balanced against” the equally valid concern of “the sport.” 

[reasonsforhope]

"Clothing tags, travel cards, hotel room key cards, parcel labels … a whole host of components in supply chains of everything from cars to clothes. What do they have in common? RFID tags.  

Every RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tag contains a microchip and a tiny metal strip of an antenna. A cool 18bn of these are made – and disposed of – each year. And with demands for product traceability increasing, ironically in part because of concerns for the social and environmental health of the supply chain, that’s set to soar. 

And guess where most of these tags end up? Yup, landfill – adding to the burgeoning volumes of e-waste polluting our soils, rivers and skies. It’s a sorry tale, but it’s one in which two young graduates of Imperial College London and Royal College of Art are putting a great big green twist. Under the name of PulpaTronics, Chloe So and Barna Soma Biro reckon they’ve hit on a beguilingly simple sounding solution: make the tags out of paper. No plastic, no chips, no metal strips. Just paper, pure and … simple … ? Well, not quite, as we shall see. 

The apparent simplicity is achieved by some pretty cutting-edge technical innovation, aimed at stripping away both the metal antennae and the chips. If you can get rid of those, as Biro explains, you solve the e-waste problem at a stroke. But getting rid of things isn’t the typical approach to technical solutions, he adds. “I read a paper in Nature that set out how humans have a bias for solving problems through addition – by adding something new, rather than removing complexity, even if that’s the best approach.”   

And adding stuff to a world already stuffed, as it were, can create more problems than it solves. “So that became one of the guiding principles of PulpaTronics”, he says: stripping things down “to the bare minimum, where they are still functional, but have as low an environmental impact as possible”.  

...how did they achieve this magical simplification? The answer lies in lasers: these turn the paper into a conductive material, Biro explains, printing a pattern on the surface that can be ‘read’ by a scanner, rather like a QR code. It sounds like frontier technology, but it works, and PulpaTronics have patents pending to protect it. 

The resulting tag comes in two forms: in one, there is still a microchip, so that it can be read by existing scanners of the sort common within retailers, for example. The more advanced version does away with the chip altogether. This will need a different kind of scanner, currently in development, which PulpaTronics envisages issuing licences for others to manufacture. 

Crucially, the cost of both versions is significantly cheaper than existing RFID kit – making this a highly viable proposition. Then there are the carbon savings: up to 70% for the chipless version – so a no-brainer from a sustainability viewpoint too. All the same, industry interest was slow to start with but when PulpaTronics won a coveted Dezeen magazine award in late 2023, it snowballed, says So. Big brands such as UPS, DHL, Marks & Spencer and Decathlon came calling. “We were just bombarded.” Brands were fascinated by the innovation, she says, but even more by the price point, “because, like any business, they knew that green products can’t come with a premium”."

-via Positive.News, April 29, 2024

--

Note: I know it's still in the very early stages, but this is such a relief to see in the context of the environmental and human rights catastrophes associated with lithium mining and mining for rare earth metals, and the way that EVs and other green infrastructure are massively increasing the demand for those materials.

I'll take a future with paper-based, more humane alternatives for sure! Fingers crossed this keeps developing and develops well (and quickly).

[machinesonix]

Somehow I have made it this long without realizing that none of the screen adoptions of Dune so much as mention the Butlerian Jihad. Like I guess it's burned into my brain so hard I sort of assumed it was part and parcel of the universe. Don't get me wrong, I think that's probably the first thing you learn if you want to dive deeper into the setting, but it still hits me like if the LotR movies showed us the big flaming eyeball tower and was like ‘Oh, that's why there are bad things, but don't worry, that's just background stuff.’ Yeah, you can understand the movie, but if the story is just like Frodo vs. The Witch King you are losing out on any of the conversation about the corruptive allure of power or theological undertones. So without further ado let's pretend this is for the benefit of interested new fans roped in by the movies and not part of my desperate attempt to silence the howling specters of literary analysis that live in my blood.

The Butlerian Jihad is an event set ~10k years prior to the events of Dune in which humanity won their freedom from the machines that they had enslaved themselves to. As a result, it is a religious taboo to create a machine that thinks like a human. That's frankly the bulk of the information presented by Frank Herbert in the text without dipping into books 7+, but whether or not those are canon is frankly an enormous can of worms, which really makes sense when you consider the size of the worms. But boy howdy, Frank loved his subtext and parallelism. Everyone has a foil character, every theme is hit from multiple angles, and Villinueve has been doing an excellent job of capturing a lot of that in repeated imagery and dialogue. The Butlerian Jihad happens off camera, but it's themes are absolutely critical to the big picture.

The Butlerian Jihad was a holy war. It was not merely a rebellion against the machines, it was a crusade against them. The prohibition against thinking machines isn't just a law, it's in the pan-universal Bible. Absolute psychopath Pieter DeVries himself claps back at the Baron for insinuating he might have a use for a computer, and this is a guy who has been hired specifically for his preternatural absence of morals. Let's hold onto that idea for a minute. 

Probably my favorite scene in the first book is the one where planetologist Liet-Kynes is dying out in the desert. As the last of his strength fades to dehydration he hallucinates conversations he had with his father concerning terraforming Arakkis for human habitability. He's told that the means are not complicated. There is already enough water on the planet, the Little Makers just have it all trapped deep underground as part of the sandworm reproductive cycle. You just need to isolate enough water to start irrigating plant life, and once it's established that'll keep the water on the surface on its own. The hard part is making sure everyone on the planet is environmentally conscious enough to foster a developing ecosystem. Nobody can drink any of that water while it's being collected, because they'll just introduce it back into the water cycle where the Little Makers are. It's going to take generations, so that sort of water discipline is going to have to go above and beyond a social convention. People need to be willing to die before they'll take a sip and compromise the plan. Ghost Dad Kynes concludes that the only mechanism in the human experience to enforce this consensus is religion. 

In the context of this whole parallelism thing, you have probably noticed that the Butlerian Jihad is not the only holy war in the narrative. Paul sees a new jihad as the only way of creating a future where humans can flourish. Now you might be saying ‘Wait now, Machines. I thought the point of Paul’s holy war was to avenge Leto and disempower established power structures by taking away the control of the spice!’ And you’d be right. The thing is, without getting into spoiler territory, Dune Messiah is not going to be about how everything just gets so much better now that Paul has destroyed the economy, government, and untold billions of human lives. This isn’t the endgame. Dude can see the future and the way he does it involves looking into the past. Paul lives in a society defined by a holy war and his goal is to redefine society. 

Putting it all together you can see what I mean about the Butlerian Jihad being essential to the themes even though the story never shows us a thinking machine or a narrative beat where the absence of computers changes the outcome. It helps us see the big picture. I’ve seen a lot of dialogue lately on whether Paul is a tragic hero or a consummate villain and I’m not here to answer that, but I am here to underline the critical detail. Paul intends to be seen as a tyrant. Just like Kynes’ hallucination says, religion is the lever to make a value stick around forever. He wants to traumatize humanity to hate chosen ones and emperors the same way the machines traumatized humanity to change them forever. The Water of Life ritual doesn’t invert his values, it lets him realize these visions of war are the means, not the ends. He is absolutely not happy about it, but this is Paul’s terrible purpose. 

[ratsoupee]

Do you have headcanons on how the other five kids died? (Aka the ones besides chara and clover) Or just headcanons in general

We know, through environmental context clues, where the five children could've died in where you find their items. I assume those children died somewhere close to when they discarded their items

We know that the children fell after Toriel left the castle and went into hiding in the ruins. We also know that until Frisk fell, monsters hadn't seen a human in a long time. Most monsters you interact with don't notice you're a human, so monsters like Undyne or the other gaurds may not have even encountered a human before.

Patience's Soul most likely died just after leaving the ruins. They wanted to leave and so patiently waited until Toriel was not looking before leaving the ruins, only to meet their end in Snowdin.

Bravery's Soul fought back and died in Snowdin, and their items were subsequently found by the shopkeeper.

Integrity's Soul tried hiding in the tall grass in waterfall, shedding their ballet clothes maybe as a distraction, but ultimately got caught.

Perseverance's Soul persisted all the way until the near end of waterfall, succumbing to injuries.

Kindness's soul managed to get through the underground with kindness, until a royal guard stopped them in Hotland, unable to be swayed by their kind words.

Justice's soul would the one to make it the furthest. I'm very married to Undertale Yellow's pacifist version of events.