#not Man vs Nature

[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

[triviallytrue]

we've had a lot of memes lately about like. math illiteracy

[totally-not-an-awkward-okapi]

Still thinking about that little angel I dreamt about a bit ago so I’ve been binging other angel stuff and felt inspired to try to draw him as @hoaxghost ‘s style of angel.

[novelconcepts]

In watching more interviews with Liv about Van and the escalation of Van's pragmatism to such dark degrees, I find myself genuinely baffled that anyone could ever think Van the bad guy. I mean, I'm perplexed at finding ANY of these girls The Bad Guy. The bad guy is the situation. It's being lost. It's freezing. It's starving. It's being scraped down to the barest bone of being alive. They make choices that might be snippy, or cruel, or hard-headed, sure--Shauna refusing to just hash it out with Jackie; Jackie being too stubborn to come inside; Taissa refusing to discuss her situation plainly; etc--but by the time we reach the end of season 2, it doesn't even matter. Petty bullshit doesn't matter. Jealousy doesn't matter. Those things are still going to be present and complicated, because--for all their choices, for all the distancing they're trying to do--these kids ARE still human beings. But it isn't the point.

The point is survival. Plain, simple, straightforward. Van's pragmatism is survival. It is the difference between living another day with blood on your teeth or dying pretty. It is the difference between fighting forward through the fire and the snow and the hell of it all, and laying down to die. Van knowing, in watching the ritual violence of Shauna beating Lottie nearly the death, that they will be killing and eating one another soon. Van coming up with the cards for the hunt. Van not blinking when the moment comes, Van choosing a weapon that doubles as a tool to bring the body back, Van refusing to apologize for staying alive--it's not evil. It's not Bad Guy behavior. It's purely about survival, because there is nothing else left to her--or to any of them. They can play the pretty little Sweet Angel Girl game and die, or they can get dirty, bloody, horrific and fight. Van chooses the fight. Van chooses to fight for herself, for her lover, for her team, even knowing not everyone is going to make it out...because the alternate path there is that no one makes it out. Van knew the baby wouldn't live. Van knows the rest of them won't, either. Not unless they start making the hard choices.

And, honestly, the fact that Van sees this narrative coming. Comes up with this plan. Brings out the cards. To me, that is the opposite of Bad Behavior. That is as close to justice as anyone can find in the wilderness. If someone else came up with an idea, maybe it would have come down to voting--but that would have had such a human element to it, with bitterness or hostility or whatever ultimately petty shit always comes of humans selecting who to Other. The cards don't leave room for that. It isn't fair, because the situation isn't fair, because Man vs. Nature isn't fair, but it's as close to a just system as they could possibly find. It's the kindest solution to an unwinnable game. Not to bring it back to American Gods again, but all I can think is "it's easy, there's a trick to it: you do it, or you die." Van gave them that.

[jerreeeeeee]

i don’t know if i’m ever gonna write the fic but i’ve been thinking abt like. the eternal stockade. the implications. lup, a lich who was trapped in a dark featureless cell for a decade completely isolated with nothing to keep her sanity but her own mind. she has to put people in the eternal stockade. how many liches does she see herself in. how many liches started out just like her. how many liches are truly too far gone. and the only liches we ever see other than her and barry are edward and lydia. they’re certainly evil, but mad? they seem pretty sane. they’re not, like, tattered echoes of souls, they’re definitely still people. even as much of a grudge as lup surely has against them, wouldn’t they remind her incredibly strongly of herself? do they deserve to be trapped just like she was? for eternity? isn’t eternity what turned john to existential despair in the first place?

[borgialucrezia]

THE BORGIA BROTHERS + putting the family's interest above their sister's concerns

"Everything I do is for the family."

[immediatebreakfast]

It's kinda fun, and all of that make jokes about how Van Helsing is probably shitting himself out of fear while Mina watches him without blinking a single time, but considering the whole picture between the two... Van Helsing is in a deeply fucked up situation straight up from a more horror like narrative than a gothic one.

Yes, there is a really good difference between the Gothic and Horror as literary genres. The Gothic genre uses amplified emotions such as terror as a response plot device to give commentary on any socio-political-cultural anxieties that were happening in the real time period which the plot is centered. More times than once it is also hand in hand with a personification of these anxieties in the form of the Monster or the Villain of the story. However, in the Horror genre this terror shapes itself in the front and center of the narrative as a way to explore the extreme of the darkness that lays within the human condition through emotions like disgust or the emotionally disturbing. By putting the characters in unsettling conditions, and against the inevitable grotesque, the Horror makes the readers have a reaction to its situation, and questions about said reactions as humans beings.

And what else to call this if not Horror? How does the character of Van Helsing, a man who thrived in the Gothic setting as the role of the foreign man of science with rational and cultural knowledge on his side, can defend himself against this change when the literary Horror declares that he can shifted from protagonist to victim whenever the narrative decides to inflict a new emotion to the reader?

Well, this sudden shift leaves Van Helsing utterly afraid.

She make no entry into her little diary, she who write so faithful at every pause. Something whisper to me that all is not well. However, to-night she is more vif.

There is nobody else but him, and Mina in this isolated mountain as winter falls down on the ground, absolutely nobody to turn for help.

At sunset I try to hypnotise her, but alas! with no effect; the power has grown less and less with each day, and to-night it fail me altogether. Well, God's will be done—whatever it may be, and whithersoever it may lead!

As Mina changes the closer she gets to Dracula's castle, it was never like this and never so unnervingly quickly.

I go to help her; but she smile, and tell me that she have eat already—that she was so hungry that she would not wait. I like it not, and I have grave doubts; but I fear to affright her, and so I am silent of it. 

With only his journal as a listening ear for his very justified worries, because Van Helsing fears that the questioning would finally break the very thin liminal feeling that is protecting him right now.

Madam still sleep, and she look in her sleep more healthy and more redder than before. And I like it not. And I am afraid, afraid, afraid!—I am afraid of all things—even to think but I must go on my way. The stake we play for is life and death, or more than these, and we must not flinch.

Right now Van Helsing is holding in his hands the promise that he made to both Mina and Jonathan before departing, he is holding onto that little ray of hope that tells him to ignore all of the warning signs all over Mina that any other character except Jonathan wouldn't have just ignored. All of these days Van Helsing is taking care of Mina while praying that she doesn't kill him if her transformation becomes complete before ever teaching their revenge, he has to write his "last" letter now before he can't ever write again.

[rush-the-stars]

perhaps it is time to dust off the western omegaverse au with wolfwood. perhaps.

[nicomoon69]

I need a fic where Cass and Jason are twins separated at birth and everything happens the same way except that now whenever they butt heads (and butt heads is to put it lightly) over their opposite morals they’re harshly reminded that they could’ve come out like the other had the switch been different

[bisexualjonahsimms]

Sweets trying to help Brennan recognize emotions is peak autism to autism communication

[is-solarpunk]

Solarpunk Writing Prompts #7

Here you can listen to original podcast

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

Solarpunk Prompts - The Great Infrastructural Project

Hello world. I'm Tomasino.

This is Solarpunk Prompts, a series for writers where we discuss Solarpunk, a movement that imagines a world where technology is used for the good of the planet.

In this series we spend each episode exploring a single Solarpunk story prompt adding some commentary, some inspirations, and some considerations.

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.

Today's prompt is: "The Great Infrastructure Project"

There is a small, rural town next to whom A Great Infrastructural Project was built. It was a dam, or a huge solar & wind power plant, or a gravitational battery, etc. Over time, the corporations and the government forgot about them and in order to avoid a catastrophe they need to work with unusual, driven activists who came from all over to help them.

This is a living reality for many small communities around the globe.

The village of Xiananshen in southern Zhejiang, China, was an idyllic, historic location which had fallen into disrepair due to depopulation from 20 years of migration. It was chosen for a program called Adaptive Reuse because of its beauty and close location to Lishui city. Local government brought in sponsors and worked with the historical heritage group to update and renovate all of the original houses regardless of condition. Space was rented out from locals. A downtown set of homes were converted to a boutique hotel. Cafes, library, exhibition hall, restaurants fed by the local farms, public parks, and more were designed and built in a cooperative mode called "historic village plus crowd innovation". Employment rates increased, as did tourism. Farms were given a steadier income, especially during the off-season. Designers competed in house renovation competitions for public prestige.

This village may not be built atop a hydro plant, but it shares the experience set forth in our prompt. This type of infrastructure maintenance and revitalization was made possible by a combination of internal and external communities working together.

In their case the goal was the restoration of their infrastructure, but that won't always be the case. Your story may be about a town's need for the safe deconstruction of infrastructure.

The World Wildlife Fund has this to say about infrastructure:

Most categories of infrastructure aren't inherently good or bad—it's all about context. The right dam in the right place can provide benefits with minimal negative impacts to the environment. But the wrong dam in the wrong place can do considerable and far-reaching damage. For infrastructure to be beneficial, planners must consider the long-term impacts, risks, and trade-offs. They must take biodiversity and climate change into account, develop a plan for long-term governance and management, and engage local communities at the earliest possible stages of planning.

It should come as no surprise that many infrastructure projects today do not achieve all these goals. Without long-term governance and management accounted for at the beginning of the project, many projects are left to age, crumble, or fall as burdens to local communities whose survival depends on them.

As stated in an article from the Earth Law Center in 2017:

Due to the high cost of maintenance and safety, many of the world’s dams get more dangerous as they age. The Mosul dam in Iraq and the Kariba dam in Zambia rank among the world’s most dangerous. Should the Mosul dam fail, it could result in the death of 500,000 people and deprive millions more of power and water. The 58 year old Kariba dam could result in 3.5 million dead, leave 40 percent of South Africa without power and cause untold damage to surrounding wildlife, plus the destruction of another nearby dam, the Cahora Bassa. https://www.earthlawcenter.org/blog-entries/2017/12/dams-climate-change-bad-news

And according to a paper published by the International Institute for Environment and Development:

Disconnecting from government energy services to develop independent energy sources, such as micro-wind or biogas can help to build resilience for vulnerable groups.

The paper has a special focus on Vietnam, where fishermen face particular challenges when the electricity goes out. Lack of refrigeration and transportation options can cause great difficulties and losses getting their products to distant markets

The country's power grid as a whole is vulnerable to disruption and failure from extreme weather and flood events. This means that vulnerable populations are dependent on a system that is prone to collapse.

In Gorakhpur, India, and in the Philippines, local committees provide an opportunity for community participation in infrastructure design. After being left out of the conversations for so long and suffering the brunt of the consequences, these communities are eager to exert some control over their lives.

So what does that look like?

Kerry Scott, a social scientist, says:

The primary purpose of infrastructure and our built environment is serving the needs of communities, delivering better social outcomes and improving the quality of people’s lives.

He later adds:

Integrating social outcomes at the start is a must if we want to leave a social legacy.

Our prompt today deals with a legacy infrastructure project, one which clearly didn't take into account the present situation. It must either be maintained or decommissioned safely. It may require conversion to some new method or function. That may require technical skills they don't have, hence the need for outside help. But do these outsiders have an understanding if this place, this environment? Do they know the needs of this community?

One of our opportunities for tension and drama may lay between the community itself and the newcomers trying to fix the project. There may also be tension between these groups and the government or corporation originally responsible for the installation. This two-way or three-way intersection of communities can be very Solarpunk, but it can also easily fall into the style of other genres if we aren't careful.

If, for instance, the corporation responsible for the project is made to seem as an antagonist and the local community must throw off their oppressor in order to self-govern, that is just another form of cyberpunk. The struggle there is about technology being used for oppression rather than about it being used to find a sustainable civilization.

Be wary of blending genres in these stories as well. The atmosphere and aesthetic of Solarpunk can easily be diluted by other genres until it's unrecognizable. A cyberpunk/Solarpunk hybrid will just look like cyberpunk.

As a writer you may want to use that style of relationship between the communities, but be wary of how you frame it. Is the community your protagonist? Are they achieving their goals through Solarpunk ideals?

There is drama inherent to the infrastructure as well. Adding a time limit on action immediately increases tension, so maybe the infrastructure project has an imminent failure coming. The outsiders and the community must work together to save it from disaster even though they don't trust the other fully. The point here is to show some hands-on work with social stakes greater than just us vs them.

We can also zoom in on the specific dynamics of the incoming activists and engineers a bit more. Are they strictly a professional bunch? Do they set up a separate camp with their own rules, schedule, and daily order? Or is it a hodgepodge assortment of skilled people without a prior relationship who move-in to whatever is unoccupied? Perhaps they must stay and board with the locals in their homes. Or perhaps the outsiders are a sect of their own determined to save the locals even if they don't want it.

These decisions will affect how your communities must interact, especially if there's a higher need at stake. Naturally antagonistic relationships could be forced into reluctant collaboration due to circumstance. Such a story would be more difficult to align to the Solarpunk aesthetic, but if well done could act as a moral lesson and strengthens the ideals.

Finally, we should consider what daily life looks like in this small town. Is life oriented around the great infrastructure project or is it a backdrop? Perhaps the boom of construction jobs is over, the children left elsewhere. Is it one of dying cities, where people want to be left alone? Have they been asking for help but no one has answered so far? Are they already self-reliant and happy or working to get there?

One of the most difficult aspects of speculative fiction is the imagining of how everyday life might change due to some unrelated technological advancement. We'll discuss this concept more in further episodes, but for now, try to consider the great infrastructure this town is dealing with and what it does. Is it a power generator, or does it make goods, provide a service, or ease a difficult task. Then, take that purpose and scale it up in your mind. If it was a power generator, now it makes unlimited free power. If it eased a difficult task, now that task's time is reduced to zero. And finally, try to think about how that change would affect the unintentional, everyday things.

When the airplane was invented and fast travel between continents became a reality, nobody ever envisioned a future where you could pop off to London for a stag party weekend.

What is the equivalent mundane change in your world?

Have an interesting idea? Share it with me. This podcast publishes on Mastodon, a federated social network. Our address is in the show notes. Come join us and lets start a conversation.

Until then, I'll talk to you soon on the next Solarpunk Prompt.

Music in this recording is New Unity Dawning, by Bathroom Plants from Global Pattern's compilation Solarpunk: A Brighter Perspective

[weneedatdcharacterwho]

We need a Total Drama character who packed a bunch of relatively obsolete, but still used in specific situations, things (like a compass, mini flashlight, pocket watch, polaroid camera) which only comes in use one episode where no one has their (airplane mode) phones which can do those exact things. The camper goes on a huge tangent about modern tech not being as reliable as the 'good ol originals', which in turn means nothing because their talking caused them to lose the challenge by a close margin anyways

[purgaytorysupremacy]

friend who is watching Supernatural because I won't shut up about it: I dunno, the episode "It's a Terrible Life" feels kind of empty and doesn't really make a lot of sense. Like, the message is just "ghost hunting is mad fun, bro"

me, buzzing with murder board energy: no, no, but you see... *writes hundreds of words about how this is one of THEE Dean Studies episodes, especially when paired with the season two djinn episode and endverse, and builds important parts of the angel's lore and plans, and is a meta example of the show's creators misunderstanding their own characters and stories*

[bonefall]

longtime dc fan and i think a lot of people are angry because alex is obviously one of the most culturally relevant instances of misogyny in media. that being said being more culturally relevant doesn’t mean it’s the worst instance of misogyny and i think bumble definitely experiences more profound misogyny in the way the actual content is presented, if that makes sense

I get you, and that's a charitable way of looking at it.

I think what's rustling my jimmies is that like, there was a couple of WC fans being mildly dismissive of Alex in that note minefield, after dozens of comments of "fuck you how could you let the fridge woman lose" and "Bumble didn't deserve to win ANY rounds" and "how could A CAT experience misogyny." But then WE get blamed for the toxicity because THEY were butthurt that the Funny Cat People have the 'audacity' to win something they feel entitled to.

Like, we've gotta be endlessly charitable as we get openly insulted because they're upset about Alex losing, a very well-known and culturally relevant character with a legacy so massive we have a whole term named after her. But condemnations of "She's just a cat, letting WC into this poll was a mistake, Bumble can't even be a victim of misogyny" only started coming around once I started talking about it.

as if it's OUR fault people got passive-aggressive or even OPENLY aggressive towards us, and that we're "just as bad" for retaliating

But like you said, it's not a "Most Culturally Relevant Misogyny" tournament, it's a "Canon Misogyny Victims" tournament. And you're not even supposed to give a shit that Bumble died. The fat, woman abuse victim is beaten to death by a dictator, and your takeaway is meant to be, "It's so sad that Clear Sky is being blamed for murdering her, now they're all preparing for self-defense against a homicidal maniac, oh nooo :("

And I think that DOES make her deserve the win here! Alex is a MARTYR. Everyone with a brain agrees what happens to her is bad. It happened in her canon because it was bad. We talk about her and keep her memory alive. Bumble gets dismissed entirely out of hand because she's "just a cat in a kid's book" as if that doesn't make it worse, and as if the kid's book didn't treat a domestic abuse survivor like a moron for even asking for help.

Anyway, just to reiterate, I love DC fans. It's not all of you guys. Alex was done dirty and deserves justice-- and it's even kind of a shame that all she became is "The Fridge Woman." I haven't even heard people talk about how she was a wary, responsible person who was still ready to rock with Kyle's new weird glowstick powers, or that she was a journalist, or that she just got brought back in another edition as a Green Lantern only to be revealed as an illusion and re-absorbed back into Kyle's mind. Nope. Even her fans just remember her as The Fridge Woman.

[historianofgalar]

Hammerlock & Their Views on Dragons

Old Hammerlocke Galarian views on Pokemon are so interesting to me. While many cultures of Galar viewed Pokemon as a part of nature and something to live side-by-side with, Hammerlocke Galarians believed that they were above pokemon; that they were something to be controlled. It's the entire reason they used pokeballs.

In the Hammerlocke Empire, killing a dragon was seen as the highest honor a knight could receive. Combine this with the fact they were living in a kingdom that saw themselves above pokemon. A lot of it adds up. Many knights would go out of their way to actively hunt dragons, which, in turn, would make dragon types more defensive and weary of humans. These dragons would now become defensive or aggressive to any human they saw, which would give the Hammerlocme Empire more reasons to hunt them. Pokemon like Dragapult and Noiverm were greatly affected by overhunting, and their populations still haven't fully recovered. Salamence in Galar went completely extinct, and pokemon that were hunted by dragons would now be overpopulated and eat all the crops, leaving nothing left for the other pokemon.

Anyways, the defensiveness of dragons over the centuries would end up leading to Hammerlocke Galarians being weary of all pokemon that wasn't a Wooloo or a Purrloin or anything like that. It's why Hammerlocke has an entire wall around it; to keep pokemon out. And while the dragon head today is used a symbol letting people know that Hammerlocke is "The Dragon Capitol of Galar," it's original purpose was meant to scare dragons off.

It's difficult to explain Old Hammerlocke's views on other pokemon, other than "We are above them and they need to be controlled." That's pretty much the gist of it. That belief has died out a lot today, but their old worldview definitely affected Galar's history.

(I have just realized I've been spelling Hammerlocke wrong this entire time. I'll fix that later)

[yandere-writer-momo]

I’m leaving both creatures’ intentions ambiguous since I see the entire internet in disarray over this question. It’s up to the interpreter to decide which would be safer for them. Personally, I’d pick the bear