#top wind and solar energy | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

cypherscript · 5 months ago

Text

Perpeptual

Some of Young justice are teleported/isekai'd during one of their battles to an underdeveloped world barely out of the iron age.

The planet confuses them, perpeptual night but the climate is warm and the flora abundant regardless of the missing sunlight. It has a single yellowy green moon that is stuck in orbit at the same point in the sky as the stars move around it.

Some of the locals have accepted them into their small village, their language is close to spanish; esperanto Wally says. Atleast they can somewhat communicate now. The people are unsettingly human with only slight changes to their body; lighter skin, pointed ears and glowing eyes.

They spend a little over two weeks helping the locals with their building some kind of stage for a festival. A large corridor of metal, spires of green crystal that Connor says make him woozy on top of his already low solar energy from the weeks stranded here and thick braided cord wound around the bases of the spires and inlayed into an intricate pattern winding their way to the corridor of metal.

The chief, Degelinta Stellumo, is happy to say the festival can begin early. When asked about the festival they cant translate much other than it's to thank their god for keeping them safe. About how thousands of years ago the day god Rox tried to consume their world, the night god Phan covered their world in protective night to protect it from Rox's anger.

The team is perplexed as the festivities begin, rhythmic chanting fills the air as one of their young men, that Megan recognizes as Stelo, walks forward dressed in furs and a iron crown upong their head. He steps into the corridor, the crystals glow brightening as he does so, almost alive in the perpeptual moonlight and the chanting getting faster and faster. Duh-duh-duh-duh-da-duh-duh-da-duh-da~.

There is a massive flare of light coming from the corridor, the crystals shatter and fly everywhere and the people cheer. Stelo steps, no floats from the now blackened corridor changed; his body glows in a pale white light, hair once black now pure white while his eyes are toxic green from his previously white and a cloak of stars floats behind him in an invisible wind.

He looks around confused, tired, until his eyes settle on the young superheroes going from Connor's house of El crest to Miss Martians skin to Robins stylized R.

Everyone is shocked as the being speaks to them in echoy but clear english, "You lot are a long ways from home, arent you?"

"Uhm, yes... sir," Tim hesitantly asks hesitantly unsure how to address this being? God? Entity?

"Right, well not to belittle your situation but we're holding up the festivities I'm certain the Sheo'lp people have been working on for some time. Let us celebrate a bit then we can talk about your situation."

"What are you," Megan blurts out, confused, "Stelo stepped into that corridor and his mind is gone and now theres just static."

"I suppose i can answer that easily enough. My name was/is Danny and I dont know what I am anymore. Once the festival ends, Stelo will return to himself. I promise."

The now named Danny stops floating and walks over to the tribespeople, stopping to hug and greet everyone by name and accepting food and drink happily. He cries as he eats the food and drink, thanking the people in esperanto repeatedly as he does so, this goes on for several hours before the partying starts to die down and Danny takes the group over to a dying bonfire.

"Right, I suppose you have questions but I would like some verification."

"Verification?"

"Yup, just need to know if you are who I think you are. It's been forever since I've been around earth but you look familiar.

He points at Miss Martian, "M'gann M'orzz?"

Pointing to kid flash, "Bart? No... Wally West."

Points to Robin, "Damian Wayne."

Points to Superboy, "and that would make you Jon Kent."

They partially confused, partial perturbed that this entity knows some of their names. Tim looks him square in the eyes, studying him, thinking about protocols for what to do when a godlike entity just namedrops your baby brother like its no big deal.

"Its just Robin as I am," Tim says, eyes never leaving Danny's.

"Shit right, apologies I forgot about superhero 101, no names. Its been a while since I had to worry about names, time is blurry these days to me. Now! What about those questions?"

"Can you get us home," Tim asks straight forwardedly. "We've been missing from earth for a few weeks now."

"Sure," he says nonchalantly, surprising the team, "Well yes and no. *I* can get you home but I know something who can but you need to Promise me that you'll follow my directions once you go home. Deal?" He holds out his hand to Tim, who looks at it before shaking it.

"So long as it doesnt endanger those i care about then Deal."

Danny nods before taking a deep breath and holding out a hand, a small crack running through the seam of reality as green light fills the area, from the crack a scroll flies through at high speeds as he catches it. "Hello old friend," he says tiredly, seeming to have dimmed greatly from that stunt.

"A scroll," Connor asks incredulously.

"A map," Danny corrects, "of everything. Take hold of each other before taking the Map, once you do take the map and say where you want to go." He looks at connor briefly, "it wont be a pleasant trip for Jon but it is nessesary for you to get home. Hopefully this trip should innoculate your biology against ecton radiation."

"Wait radiation," wally yelps.

"Its harmless to humans, mostly. Its the fastest way to get back to Earth, youre on the other side of the universe kids. Now, once you're back on earth tell the Map to return home and let go. So take the map, i need to go speak to the chief for a bit. Thank you for being here and letting me help." Danny groans as he slowly gets up and walks over to the chief's tent.

"Do you think he's okay," Megan asks the group as Tim looks the rolled up map over.

Connor watches as Danny leaves, "He's low on energy. Like how Kryptonians are without yellow sunlight."

"Unfortunately we cant focus that right now, grab hands its time to go." They each take the others hand as Tim holds up the map, "take us to the Justice Leagues Watchtower on Earth." The map unfurls as a blue energy grows over the group as they begin floating and the scroll begins to drag them across the sky, a similar crack as before opens before them and swallows them up and the next couple of seconds are filled with blurred visions of vast green voids, purple doors and massive beasts lurking in the distance, the eyes following the team as the fly past.

As quickly as it began its over as a final crack tosses them out at a fast speed into the Justice Leagues cafeteria, scattering on impact and flinging food everywhere as the security systems begin to screech as the team sigh in relief.

"We're home..."

***

"So you mean to tell us you've been trapped on another planet for all this time," Barry asks as the members of young justice sit at the conference table with the other adult members of the justice league.

"Yes sir."

Batman is pensive as hes thinking, "and this entity called you by your names?"

"Mostly, he thought Kon el and I were our younger counterparts."

"Hnn."

Kid Flash leans over to Megan and whispers, "that's bat for I dont like this." Barry cuffs him over the head.

"So should I return the map to Danny?"

"Did someone say my name," a chipper young voice says as he sticks his head through the table, familiar glowing green eyes and white hair who freezes at the sight of the map, "how do you have that? B What's going on?"

"The young justice team has been stranded on a distant planet for several weeks, they just got back with the help of this artifact. Do you recognise it?"

"Course I do, don't know how you have it because its supposed to be with FB in the zone."

"Wait a second," megan exclaims, suddenly recognizing the static she was getting from him "You're Danny! What happened to Stelo?"

"Who?" That takes the wind out of her sails, "oh... i get whats going on here. Classic time travel, don't tell me anything. If you have the map then FB or I gave it to you for a reason. You should send it back."

"Do as he says Robin," Batman says nodding in understanding.

Tim takes the map in his hand, "go back home, uh... map?" He drops it as it unfurls and zooms off through another green crack. "What's all this about?"

"Dunno," Danny says as he leans back as he floats through the table, "hasn't happened yet."

______________________________________________

Authors note:

Little more detail on what happened between the gods in the Sheo'lp's tale. Their sun was going supernova and Phantom in a last ditch effort to save the planet wrapped his being around the planet as the sun exploded around them. His ice core cooling the suns now explosive heat, his body giving them stars to look at and his core to give them light. Their planet is essentially a terrarium surrounded by a critical nuclear reactor. Due to time dialation from earth to there hes been holding back the sun for over a thousands of years by the point YJ arrive.

The festival is a recreation of the fenton portal that they offer one of their own for Phantom to overshadow to partake in their food and drink as thanks. Once he runs out of energy from the crystals his overshadow breaks and he returns to his duty leaving the host with memories to later become the chief and lead their people with their knowledge.

#dp x dc #dc x dp #young justice #kid flash #tim drake #conner kent #megan morse

511 notes · View notes

reasonsforhope · 2 months ago

Text

"India has reached a key milestone in renewable energy, with the country’s total renewable energy capacity exceeding 200 gigawatts as of Oct. 10, 2024, according to the Central Electricity Authority. The renewable energy-based electricity generation capacity now stands at 201.45 GW, accounting for 46.3% of the nation’s total installed capacity.

This milestone is the result of years of efforts to harness India’s natural resources. From solar parks to wind farms and hydroelectric projects, the country has built a diverse renewable energy base, reducing fossil fuel dependence and enhancing energy security.

India's total electricity generation capacity has reached 452.69 GW, with renewable energy contributing a significant portion of the overall power mix as the country continued to increase its dependence on cleaner, non-fossil fuel energy sources and push towards its sustainability goals.

When factoring in the 8,180 MW of nuclear capacity, the total non-fossil fuel-based power now accounts for almost half of the country's installed electricity generation capacity, signalling a strong move towards clean energy leadership on the global stage.

Renewable Energy

A variety of renewable energy resources contribute to this impressive figure. Solar power leads the way with 90.76 GW, playing a crucial role in India’s efforts to harness its abundant sunlight. Wind power follows closely with 47.36 GW, driven by the vast potential of the coastal and inland wind corridors across the country.

Hydroelectric power is another key contributor, with large hydro projects generating 46.92 GW and small hydropower adding 5.07 GW, offering a reliable and sustainable source of energy from India’s rivers and water systems.

Biopower, including biomass and biogas energy, adds another 11.32 GW to the renewable energy mix. These bioenergy projects are vital for utilising agricultural waste and other organic materials to generate power, further diversifying India’s clean energy sources. Together, these renewable resources are helping the country reduce its dependence on traditional fossil fuels while driving progress towards a more sustainable and resilient energy future.

Leading States In Renewable Energy Capacity

Several states in India have emerged as leaders in renewable energy capacity, making significant contributions to the nation's progress. These states are essential to advancing India’s renewable energy goals and fostering a sustainable energy future.

Rajasthan leads the pack with an impressive 29.98 GW of installed renewable energy capacity, capitalising on its extensive land and abundant sunlight.

Following closely is Gujarat, which boasts a capacity of 29.52 GW, driven by its strong focus on solar and wind energy projects. Tamil Nadu ranks third with 23.70 GW, leveraging its favourable wind patterns to generate substantial energy. While Karnataka rounds out the top four with a capacity of 22.37 GW, supported by a mix of solar and wind initiatives.

India's commitment to renewable energy is reflected in the annual electricity generation trends in recent years. The Government of India has introduced various measures and initiatives to promote and accelerate renewable energy capacity nationwide, aiming for an ambitious target of 500 GW of installed capacity from non-fossil sources by 2030."

-via NDTV, October 14, 2024

#india #renewables #renewable energy #wind power #green energy #clean energy #solar power #solar energy #climate action #climate hope #rajasthan #gujarat #tamil nadu #karnataka #south asia #asia #good news #hope

340 notes · View notes

windvexer · 2 months ago

Text

Six Directions Banishing for Removal of Malfeasance, and Protection Against Same

A version of a spell taught to me by the Beloved Goat, similar to other rituals that have been taught to me in the past. This spell requires no materials, but may take some playing around with it in order to get the feel of things.

The feel of things is the necessary component for this spell. We also need these definitions* to help feel out the right things:

Malfeasance: Wrongdoing against responsibilities and duties. Something should have happened according to honor and obligation, but instead something wrong was done.

Betrayal: Violation of trust.

Harm: Hurt, damage, unjust effects.

Identifying the problem

The first step is to conjure into your awareness the powers of malfeasance, betrayal, and harm that have been enacted against you.

OBFUK (observe, believe, feel, understand, or know) that within the universe are things harmful to you. Within the universe, malfeasance has been done against you.

Stay with this idea, considering that this is a force that exists in energetic form, and can therefore be manipulated and changed with energy. Play with the idea until you are able to OBFUK that malfeasance against you exists and can be dealt with.

Repeat this step with the concepts of betrayal and harm.

The more you understand and feel these ideas, the better. In this stage you are casting a net by defining what it is you want to deal with.

Contemplate what it really means to have your trust violated. Contemplate what it means for people to have responsibilities to you, and the debt that is created to your wellbeing when these responsibilities are ignored or neglected.

Dwell with these ideas until you have got a pretty good idea of what it is you want to banish and protect against. This stage may initially take several minutes, but with practice may be completed speedily.

Banishing

The second step is to banish malfeasance, betrayal, and harm in six directions. This step is the same for each direction, except you just turn in a circle and/or or re-envision the bisecting line.

Face north. Mentally bisect your body at the midpoint (solar plexus if lying down, middle of skull to top of feet if standing, etc).

OBFUK (observe, believe, feel, understand, or know) that this line of bisection extends infinitely across the universe. You will repeat this envisioning, so play around with it until you are comfortable with it.

Once you have gotten steady with the idea that a divide is going through your body that completely separates the universe into "the north," you are ready to banish.

Say, think, or sign, something quite like the following (note the four distinct sections; identifying problem, setting intent, commanding action, demanding results):

I see the malfeasance that is to the north of me. I see the betrayal that is to the north of me. I see the harm that is to the north of me. I revoke these things. I rebuke these things. I banish these things. They fade into the earth and into the blackness between stars. They turn to ash and dust and settle into the forest and into nebulae. They scatter to the winds and become the colors in the sunset. They sink into the waters and become algae the fish and frogs feed on. To the north of me, malfeasance, betrayal, and harm enacted against me are banished. They are no more.

It's best to stay with this portion until you are personally satisfied that you've said the right things. You may like to go on a diatribe about how the energies are burned by hellfire and consumed by demons, and so on.

The spell is all the better if you stay with each direction and gnash on the energies until you are satisfied that you have settled on the right words. Repeat sections as many times as you like, using any words that inspire you. Polish is less effective than conviction.

Protecting

After you have banished in one direction, re-focus on the bisecting line. In the middle of your body, on the axis of that line, is a core of power.**

OBFUK (observe, believe, feel, understand, or know) that this is your personal power.

That power is ready to flow around you in a spherical shield that protects you.

Say, think, or sign the following:

To the north, I am protected. I am protected from malfeasance. I am protected from betrayal. I am protected from harm.

As you intone this, OBFUK that an impermeable, impassable, perfect shell of protective power pours forth from you in a hemisphere, wrapping around you from east to west, entirely protecting you from what is in the north.

Repeat this portion as many times as necessary, or play around with it a bit, until you feel satisfied the protection has occurred.

Moving in 6 Directions

Repeat the Banishing and Protection step for each of the six directions (north, south, east, west, above, below).

You may go in any order you like. I move clockwise from north, hitting east, south, and west; then turning north again to finish above and below.

Each time you work in a new direction, adjust how you envision the bisecting line that goes through your body.

Your goal is to envision the line in such a way that all six lines intersect at the same point, if possible, marking a singular point. The banishing pushes everything outwards from this singular point.

In order to accomplish this, moving around or readjusting yourself may be necessary.

Remember that each time you conjure the Protection, it is a hemisphere. This means it necessarily overlaps the others. Half of the eastern hemisphere will overlap north, and the other half will overlap the south. The above and below hemispheres will encapsulate all for hemispheres before it.

You may find that banishment and protection are easier or harder in different directions, which is normal. Work in each direction until you are satisfied both with the banishment and the protection.

As you move through subsequent directions, you may find your hemispheres interlock or layer in ways you weren't expecting. Let the energy moves as it desires, as long as it conforms with your standards of protection.

When you have worked in 6 directions and laid down 6 hemispheres (to create 3 total overlapping spheres of protection), move to the finish.

Sealing

There are 3 complete spheres of protection around you; one created by the joining of north and south, one created by the joining of east and west, and one created by the joining of above and below.

Whether or not these spheres seemed to combine, or were combined, in earlier steps, seal everything now to properly finish the protection.

With your focus on yourself (not necessarily placed upon any direction), intone the following:

The protections to the north of me and to the south of me join together in perfect unison and perfect harmony. I am infinitely protected from all malfeasance, all betrayal, and all harm. The protections to the east of me and to the west of me join together in perfect unison and perfect harmony. I am infinitely protected from all malfeasance, all betrayal, and all harm. The protections above me and below me join together in perfect unison and perfect harmony. I am infinitely protected from all malfeasance, all betrayal, and all harm. I am infinitely protected from all malfeasance, all betrayal, and all harm.

The spell is complete.

[*The definitions are for the purpose of this spell, so we can sniff out what we are working on like a bloodhound sniffing out a rabbit. Dictionary definitions may differ.]

[**This is true for the purposes of the spell but not necessarily true in any other circumstance]

#spell #banishing #protection #banishing spell #protection spell #energy work

122 notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 7 months ago

Text

Real innovation vs Silicon Valley nonsense

This is the LAST DAY to get my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

If there was any area where we needed a lot of "innovation," it's in climate tech. We've already blown through numerous points-of-no-return for a habitable Earth, and the pace is accelerating.

Silicon Valley claims to be the epicenter of American innovation, but what passes for innovation in Silicon Valley is some combination of nonsense, climate-wrecking tech, and climate-wrecking nonsense tech. Forget Jeff Hammerbacher's lament about "the best minds of my generation thinking about how to make people click ads." Today's best-paid, best-trained technologists are enlisted to making boobytrapped IoT gadgets:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

Planet-destroying cryptocurrency scams:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho

NFT frauds:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/06/crypto-copyright-%f0%9f%a4%a1%f0%9f%92%a9/

Or planet-destroying AI frauds:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

If that was the best "innovation" the human race had to offer, we'd be fucking doomed.

But – as Ryan Cooper writes for The American Prospect – there's a far more dynamic, consequential, useful and exciting innovation revolution underway, thanks to muscular public spending on climate tech:

https://prospect.org/environment/2024-05-30-green-energy-revolution-real-innovation/

The green energy revolution – funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act and the Science Act – is accomplishing amazing feats, which are barely registering amid the clamor of AI nonsense and other hype. I did an interview a while ago about my climate novel The Lost Cause and the interviewer wanted to know what role AI would play in resolving the climate emergency. I was momentarily speechless, then I said, "Well, I guess maybe all the energy used to train and operate models could make it much worse? What role do you think it could play?" The interviewer had no answer.

Here's brief tour of the revolution:

2023 saw 32GW of new solar energy come online in the USA (up 50% from 2022);

Wind increased from 118GW to 141GW;

Grid-scale batteries doubled in 2023 and will double again in 2024;

EV sales increased from 20,000 to 90,000/month.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/blog/2023/12/19/building-a-thriving-clean-energy-economy-in-2023-and-beyond/

The cost of clean energy is plummeting, and that's triggering other areas of innovation, like using "hot rocks" to replace fossil fuel heat (25% of overall US energy consumption):

https://rondo.com/products

Increasing our access to cheap, clean energy will require a lot of materials, and material production is very carbon intensive. Luckily, the existing supply of cheap, clean energy is fueling "green steel" production experiments:

https://www.wdam.com/2024/03/25/americas-1st-green-steel-plant-coming-perry-county-1b-federal-investment/

Cheap, clean energy also makes it possible to recover valuable minerals from aluminum production tailings, a process that doubles as site-remediation:

https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/toxic-red-mud-co2-free-iron

And while all this electrification is going to require grid upgrades, there's lots we can do with our existing grid, like power-line automation that increases capacity by 40%:

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/13/1187620367/power-grid-enhancing-technologies-climate-change

It's also going to require a lot of storage, which is why it's so exciting that we're figuring out how to turn decommissioned mines into giant batteries. During the day, excess renewable energy is channeled into raising rock-laden platforms to the top of the mine-shafts, and at night, these unspool, releasing energy that's fed into the high-availability power-lines that are already present at every mine-site:

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/02/06/this-disused-mine-in-finland-is-being-turned-into-a-gravity-battery-to-store-renewable-ene

Why are we paying so much attention to Silicon Valley pump-and-dumps and ignoring all this incredible, potentially planet-saving, real innovation? Cooper cites a plausible explanation from the Apperceptive newsletter:

https://buttondown.email/apperceptive/archive/destructive-investing-and-the-siren-song-of/

Silicon Valley is the land of low-capital, low-labor growth. Software development requires fewer people than infrastructure and hard goods manufacturing, both to get started and to run as an ongoing operation. Silicon Valley is the place where you get rich without creating jobs. It's run by investors who hate the idea of paying people. That's why AI is so exciting for Silicon Valley types: it lets them fantasize about making humans obsolete. A company without employees is a company without labor issues, without messy co-determination fights, without any moral consideration for others. It's the natural progression for an industry that started by misclassifying the workers in its buildings as "contractors," and then graduated to pretending that millions of workers were actually "independent small businesses."

It's also the natural next step for an industry that hates workers so much that it will pretend that their work is being done by robots, and then outsource the labor itself to distant Indian call-centers (no wonder Indian techies joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians"):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds

Contrast this with climate tech: this is a profoundly physical kind of technology. It is labor intensive. It is skilled. The workers who perform it have power, both because they are so far from their employers' direct oversight and because these fed-funded sectors are more likely to be unionized than Silicon Valley shops. Moreover, climate tech is capital intensive. All of those workers are out there moving stuff around: solar panels, wires, batteries.

Climate tech is infrastructural. As Deb Chachra writes in her must-read 2023 book How Infrastructure Works, infrastructure is a gift we give to our descendants. Infrastructure projects rarely pay for themselves during the lives of the people who decide to build them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

Climate tech also produces gigantic, diffused, uncapturable benefits. The "social cost of carbon" is a measure that seeks to capture how much we all pay as polluters despoil our shared world. It includes the direct health impacts of burning fossil fuels, and the indirect costs of wildfires and extreme weather events. The "social savings" of climate tech are massive:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/climate-and-health-benefits-of-wind-and-solar-dwarf-all-subsidies/

For every MWh of renewable power produced, we save $100 in social carbon costs. That's $100 worth of people not sickening and dying from pollution, $100 worth of homes and habitats not burning down or disappearing under floodwaters. All told, US renewables have delivered $250,000,000,000 (one quarter of one trillion dollars) in social carbon savings over the past four years:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/climate-and-health-benefits-of-wind-and-solar-dwarf-all-subsidies/

In other words, climate tech is unselfish tech. It's a gift to the future and to the broad public. It shares its spoils with workers. It requires public action. By contrast, Silicon Valley is greedy tech that is relentlessly focused on the shortest-term returns that can be extracted with the least share going to labor. It also requires massive public investment, but it also totally committed to giving as little back to the public as is possible.

No wonder America's richest and most powerful people are lining up to endorse and fund Trump:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-05-30-democracy-deshmocracy-mega-financiers-flocking-to-trump/

Silicon Valley epitomizes Stafford Beer's motto that "the purpose of a system is what it does." If Silicon Valley produces nothing but planet-wrecking nonsense, grifty scams, and planet-wrecking, nonsensical scams, then these are all features of the tech sector, not bugs.

As Anil Dash writes:

Driving change requires us to make the machine want something else. If the purpose of a system is what it does, and we don’t like what it does, then we have to change the system.

https://www.anildash.com/2024/05/29/systems-the-purpose-of-a-system/

To give climate tech the attention, excitement, and political will it deserves, we need to recalibrate our understanding of the world. We need to have object permanence. We need to remember just how few people were actually using cryptocurrency during the bubble and apply that understanding to AI hype. Only 2% of Britons surveyed in a recent study use AI tools:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c511x4g7x7jo

If we want our tech companies to do good, we have to understand that their ground state is to create planet-wrecking nonsense, grifty scams, and planet-wrecking, nonsensical scams. We need to make these companies small enough to fail, small enough to jail, and small enough to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

We need to hold companies responsible, and we need to change the microeconomics of the board room, to make it easier for tech workers who want to do good to shout down the scammers, nonsense-peddlers and grifters:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

Yesterday, a federal judge ruled that the FTC could hold Amazon executives personally liable for the decision to trick people into signing up for Prime, and for making the unsubscribe-from-Prime process into a Kafka-as-a-service nightmare:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/amazon-execs-may-be-personally-liable-for-tricking-users-into-prime-sign-ups/

Imagine how powerful a precedent this could set. The Amazon employees who vociferously objected to their bosses' decision to make Prime as confusing as possible could have raised the objection that doing this could end up personally costing those bosses millions of dollars in fines:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

We need to make climate tech, not Big Tech, the center of our scrutiny and will. The climate emergency is so terrifying as to be nearly unponderable. Science fiction writers are increasingly being called upon to try to frame this incomprehensible risk in human terms. SF writer (and biologist) Peter Watts's conversation with evolutionary biologist Dan Brooks is an eye-opener:

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-collapse-is-coming-will-humanity-adapt/

They draw a distinction between "sustainability" meaning "what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it?" and sustainability meaning, "what changes in behavior will allow us to save ourselves with the technology that is possible?"

Writing about the Watts/Brooks dialog for Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith invokes William Gibson's The Peripheral:

With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before…. Ways to print food that required much less in the way of actual food to begin with. So everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05/preparing-for-collapse-why-the-focus-on-climate-energy-sustainability-is-destructive.html

Gibson doesn't think this is likely, mind, and even if it's attainable, it will come amidst "unimaginable suffering."

But the universe of possible technologies is quite large. As Chachra points out in How Infrastructure Works, we could give every person on Earth a Canadian's energy budget (like an American's, but colder), by capturing a mere 0.4% of the solar radiation that reaches the Earth's surface every day. Doing this will require heroic amounts of material and labor, especially if we're going to do it without destroying the planet through material extraction and manufacturing.

These are the questions that we should be concerning ourselves with: what behavioral changes will allow us to realize cheap, abundant, green energy? What "innovations" will our society need to focus on the things we need, rather than the scams and nonsense that creates Silicon Valley fortunes?

How can we use planning, and solidarity, and codetermination to usher in the kind of tech that makes it possible for us to get through the climate bottleneck with as little death and destruction as possible? How can we use enforcement, discernment, and labor rights to thwart the enshittificatory impulses of Silicon Valley's biggest assholes?

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/30/posiwid/#social-cost-of-carbon

157 notes · View notes

derangedhyena-delphinidae · 1 year ago

Text

URGENT! DO YOU WANT TO HELP THE SOUTHERN RESIDENTS? PLEASE HELP US WRITE, CALL AND TEXT!

A lawsuit, National Wildlife Federation vs National Marine Fisheries Service, may finally determine the fate of the 4 Lower Snake River Dams, the salmon who spawn there and the remaining 75 Southern Resident Orca who desperately need salmon to survive. Biden needs to know that we want those dams breached. He's broken enough of his climate promises - let him know that, and the extinction of these amazing animals, isn't an option!

Public comment is also being sought on the matter. Please visit our page, BidenBreachNow, for talking points, social media shareables, and extensive information about why the dams need to go. This is a critical time. Please call, text, write or email, every day if you can, until August 31st. Even if you already have acted and/or shared, please do it again. Please keep sharing because every voice counts! The Snake River was once one of the top salmon rivers in the world. That is sadly no longer the case. Four deadbeat dams on the Lower Snake River have cost an estimated 8 to 9 billion dollars in failed salmon recovery attempts - taxpayer money! - and they lose millions more every year generating unstorable surplus energy. What they do sell is often sold at a loss. The dams continue to get older and costlier to maintain, while solar and wind energy have replaced their power output; energy efficiency alone has done the same seven times over.

These dams aren't even clean energy! Their reservoirs emit huge amounts of methane, which contributes to the climate crisis. Please help spread this if you can, and join in. We have a real chance here to get this done - so let's do it.

As the late and great Ken Balcomb said: "We're at a point in history where we need to wake up to what we have to consider: do we want whales, or not?"

He never stopped fighting for the Southern Residents, and neither should we.

#srkw #bidenbreachnow #orca #salmon #orcanize #southern residents #snake river dams #killer whale #conservation

667 notes · View notes

probablyasocialecologist · 9 months ago

Text

Veiled by discussion of headline global trends in new renewables capacity investment is the fact that almost all the incremental progress is currently being made in one country: China. Trumpeting 2023’s 50 percent growth in annual global capacity installations as a global achievement is wrongheaded, given that China by itself delivered nearly 80 percent of the increment. And the IEA, for its part, expects China to continue to be the sole meaningful over-achiever. It recently revised upwards by 728 GW its forecast for total global renewables capacity additions in the period 2023–27. China’s share of this upward revision? Almost 90 percent. While China surges ahead, the rest of the world remains stuck. This raises a crucial question. What is different about the development of solar and wind resources in China from the rest of the world? The main answer is that in China, such development is capitalist in only a very limited sense. Certainly, the entities centrally involved in building out new solar and wind farms in China are companies. But almost all are state-owned. Take wind. Nine of the country’s top 10 wind developers are owned by the government, and such state-owned players control in excess of 95 percent of the market. Moreover, the state is far from being a passive shareholder in these companies. The companies are best seen as instruments wielded by the state in the service of achieving its industrial, geopolitical, and – increasingly – environmental objectives. The best example of this concerns the gargantuan ‘clean energy bases’ first announced by President Xi Jinping in 2021. To be built mainly in the Gobi and other desert areas by 2030, these new bases will have a combined capacity of in excess of 550 GW – more than Europe’s total solar and wind capacity at the time of this writing. Such development is as far from ‘capitalist’ as is imaginable. This is the state, in its most centralized and authoritative form mustering whatever resources it needs at its disposal to ensure that it delivers what it has said it will deliver. Add to this the fact that the banks financing all the new renewables development in China are generally also state-owned and directed, and a stark reality comes into focus. This is essentially central planning in action. Does the profit motive figure? To be sure, it does. But usually only marginally, and it is ridden roughshod over whenever Beijing deems fit.

#Brett Christophers #climate change #china #renewable energy #planning

111 notes · View notes

zvaigzdelasas · 4 months ago

Text

Solar panel imports to the US from Southeast Asia surged to an all-time high in the second quarter as manufacturers raced to lock in supply before expanded tariffs took effect in June.

Imports climbed to 17.4 gigawatts, led by shipments from Vietnam and Thailand, according to a report Tuesday from S&P Global Market Intelligence. That’s 36% higher than a year earlier, topping the previous record of 15 gigawatts in the fourth quarter of last year.

20 Aug 24

46 notes · View notes

kpgreenengineering · 10 months ago

Text

Discover the Best Wind Structure Fabrication Company by Unleashing the Power of Precision.

In the realm of wind structure fabrication, precision is not just a desirable trait; it's a fundamental requirement. Every component, every weld, and every measurement must be exact to ensure the structural integrity and longevity of these massive installations. When seeking the best wind structure fabrication company, precision becomes the defining factor that sets one company apart from the rest.

The Importance of Precision in Wind Structure Fabrication

Wind structures, such as wind turbines and wind farms, are exposed to extreme environmental conditions, including high winds and turbulent weather patterns. This makes precision in fabrication crucial for ensuring the safety and efficiency of these structures.

Why Choose a Company That Embraces Precision?

Precision is not just about accuracy; it's about efficiency and cost-effectiveness. A company that values precision in fabrication will minimize material waste, reduce rework, and ultimately deliver a superior product in a shorter time frame. This efficiency translates to cost savings for the client and a faster return on investment.

Key Attributes of a Precision-Focused Fabrication Company

Advanced Technology: Look for a company that invests in state-of-the-art technology for fabrication, such as CNC machining, laser cutting, and robotic welding. These technologies ensure the highest level of precision in every aspect of the fabrication process.

Skilled Workforce: A precision-focused company will have a team of highly skilled engineers, fabricators, and welders who are experts in their craft. These professionals understand the importance of precision and take pride in delivering flawless results.

Quality Control: Quality control is paramount in precision fabrication. Look for a company that has stringent quality control measures in place at every stage of the fabrication process to ensure that every component meets the highest standards of quality and precision.

Experience and Reputation: Experience speaks volumes in the world of wind structure fabrication. Look for a company with a proven track record of delivering high-quality, precision-fabricated structures and a reputation for excellence in the industry.

Conclusion

In conclusion, when seeking the best wind structure fabrication company, precision should be your guiding principle. Choose a company that embraces precision in every aspect of its operations, from technology and workforce to quality control and reputation. By unleashing the power of precision, you can ensure that your wind structures are built to last and perform at their best for years to come.

#best wind structure fabrication company #top wind and solar energy

0 notes

rjzimmerman · 7 months ago

Text

Mexico elects climate scientist as next president (Heatmap AM)

Mexico resoundingly elected Claudia Sheinbaum as its next president over the weekend. Sheinbaum, 61, is making headlines for becoming the country’s first female president, as well as its first Jewish leader, but she is also a climate scientist, and her landslide victory “could mark a turning point from the current administration’s pro-fossil fuel policies,” as Climate Home News explained. Sheinbaum studied physics and then received her doctorate in energy engineering. She spent four years at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab studying Mexico’s energy consumption, and had a brief stint on the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). She was tapped as secretary of the environment for Mexico City before being elected as the capital’s mayor in 2018. During her tenure she was an advocate for rooftop solar and better public transportation infrastructure.

On the presidential campaign trail, Sheinbaum promised to “accelerate the energy transition” by boosting wind and solar, installing new transmission lines, and improving the country’s hydropower stations. But she has also backed the “energy sovereignty” policies of her predecessor and mentor, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He built an oil refinery, funneled support into an indebted state oil company, and failed to set a national net zero target. Under his leadership, private investment in renewable projects has slumped. Energy policy may be on Sheinbaum’s to-do list when she takes office in October, but tackling crime is likely to be top of the agenda.

#Mexico #Claudia Sheinbaum #climate scientist

59 notes · View notes

aperture-hag · 3 days ago

Text

Lady of the Underworld

Happy Holidays, @the-comedy-formula!!! I'm your Secret Santa for @portal-secret-santa! I completely relate to having a reborn Portal obsession and I am honored to have been selected to make your gift this year.

I was inspired by your prompt for a story about what happened to Chell after the events of Portal 2, and what kind of world she walked into. I hope you enjoy, and wish you a wonderful winter season.

Lady of the Underworld

Word Count: 6,490

She lifted her hand to block the brightness, her blue-gray eyes barely able to process anything aside from blinding white light.

For the first time in what felt like months, Chell felt the warm sun on her cheeks and the wind in her hair. At first it brought a rush of vigor, like she could do anything. She was free. She had won. And the sun was shining down on her, welcoming her to the surface!

After a minute of just soaking in the solar rays and being one with the world, Chell felt a bead of sweat run down her back. Then both her jumpsuit and tank top felt stuffy, her lips cracked and dried. She ran her sandpaper tongue over the roof of her mouth, suddenly realizing just how desperately she needed a drink of water.

Chell whipped her head back and forth, looking for some sort of water source. A convenience store, or office building. Heck, she’d even drink out of the sink of a public bathroom. But instead of any mark of civilization, all Chell saw was countless strands of wheat in the field, lazily waving and bending in the breeze.

Oh, wait. That’s right, she had no idea where she was. This wasn’t the typical exit route from the building she would take as an Aperture Science test subject.

Chell stole a quick look at the rusty shack behind her and felt a magnetic pull to it. At least in the underground, it wouldn’t be so hot. And so unfamiliar with her surroundings.

Maybe she could try and go back down. At the end of things, GLaDOS did seem to have a change of heart (or programming, whatever was the robotic equivalent of a heart). Maybe she would let her back in, and things could be better this time. Curiosity continued to nibble at Chell, making her wonder if that “Caroline” woman truly was deleted. Maybe she was still there, having an influence on GLaDOS’s decisions. Maybe, deep down, the entity that was GLaDOS or Caroline (perhaps both) actually cared for Chell and wanted what was best for her.

Chell’s tan arm reached out for the shed.

But before her fingertips could graze the rusty metallic surface, she trembled. Her throat felt thick and her stomach churned with nausea as she remembered everything else in the underground. GLaDOS’s taunts and death-threats. A mausoleum of a thousand dead test subjects and scientists. Test chambers with toxic waste, lasers, and bullets around every corner.

Chell retracted her arm, rubbing it against her torso. If GLaDOS or Caroline truly did care about her, then she let her go so that she could find freedom and safety elsewhere. Maybe they wanted her to be back with her own kind. A world where Chell belonged, beyond the field of wheat. Yes, could have been the exact life GLaDOS and/or Caroline wanted for Chell.

Before she went off – she frowned at the toasted companion cube. Without her zero-point energy feature of her portal gun, it would be completely unreasonable to carry the cube around.

Oh well. Alone again. At least without the cube, she would be unencumbered, and would be able to find her fellow humans faster.

After an hour and a half of wading her way through the bronze fields, Chell’s entire body was dusted with pollen and plant fibers. She could hardly breathe through her nose and resorted to wheezing in and out of her throat.

Wheat wasn’t even supposed to grow in this area of Michigan. Or was it? Michigan wasn’t supposed to be this hot, either, even during the summers. Chell heard rumors of “global warming” during her early days working as a test subject of Aperture Science. Maybe it was actually true and really did start to happen in the past nine years she was stuck in stasis.

It was only nine years or so, right?

That’s what the Announcer’s voice had alerted her of the day she woke up.

You have been in suspension for NINE – NINE – NINE – NINE – NINE…

Chell shook away the foreboding feeling that came with the memory. Surely the Announcer must have glitched. Nine years was a long time to be away, but Chell could figure her way through it. After surviving a fight with Wheatley once and GLaDOS twice, Chell was confident she could do anything.

So she kept her head swiveling, hoping to find one of the main roads that she and all the other Aperture personnel took to get to and from the nearest towns. Wherever GLaDOS spat her out was not a common exit route for Aperture personnel, but she was confident she’d spot a familiar landmark at some point.

She traveled through the tundra of endless wheat and grass for hours.

As the sky began to turn purple with the sunset, and darkness chased after Chell, she could not shake the feelings of fear that came with it.

What had GLaDOS told her, during their first showdown?

Things have changed since the last time you left the building. What's going on out there will make you wish you were back in here.

At first Chell believed that was just another string in the tapestry of lies that GLaDOS wove for her. But the further that Chell trudged on without a sign of life, or even a bent and rusted highway marker, the more she fantasized that something did happen beyond her wildest expectations. The hunger and dehydration made her head simultaneously dizzy and pounding with a headache.

Deliriously, she began to imagine something insane. Maybe she would find no people, because there weren’t supposed to be any people here. Maybe the world had ended, or was taken over by aliens. Perhaps she was just a little insect skittering at the bottom of someone else’s terrarium.

Chell’s fists curled around her eyes as her mind ran wild with these frightening possibilities.

“No, no, no,” she thought. “GLaDOS would not have done that, she wouldn’t have kicked me out just to die like this. Caroline for sure wouldn’t have. They saved me…they had to have cared…”

Chell spent that first night curled up in a long patch of grass, her throat parched with a lack of any moisture. There were no walls to shield her, and her only ceiling was the intangible night sky. She had never known the sky could carry so many stars. The light pollution Chell was used to only left a few hundred stars at night, in the Michigan she remembered.

---

When she felt the soft dirt around her grow heavy with footsteps, Chell’s mind was torn completely from sleep. Eyes still closed, she kept as motionless as she could, trying to analyze her options. But the panic that flooded her system erased any possibility of making rational decisions.

She just hoped that when she opened her eyes, she would see some humans in familiar flannels or puffy jackets. Just some local farmers looking to help out a lost trespasser. Not any screen-faced androids or shapeless aliens.

The footsteps in the earth around her felt like megalith stones gathered in a fairy ring.

Chell couldn’t take the tension of not knowing what they were doing any longer. She ripped her eyes open and sat up on her legs, ready to run if she had to.

Her body immediately loosened with relief - she was surrounded by human faces after all. Five of them, all crouched around her in cautious stances. The tallest among them carried a flickering light source, so Chell could just barely see some detail in their features.

The source of light came not from a flashlight – it came from a wooden torch that crackled with fire. And these humans weren’t dressed in plain clothes like she idealized.

From the torch’s weak orange glow, Chell saw that the people all around her were dressed in simple tawny-colored cloth, looking like they were made of animal furs. Their hair was unwashed and matted, and lines of mud were painted across their skin.

Chell scrunched her eyebrows. Were these cavemen?

The silence lasted a full three minutes of Chell staring and blinking, and the cavemen blinking and staring back, their curiosity mutual. Chell thought to herself that if these people were this quiet all the time, she at least might get along with them.

Finally, one of them spoke. The tall woman who held the torch stood up to her full height. In her other hand was a long wooden spear, tipped with a sharpened stone. Draped across this huntress’s torso was the fur of a deer, as suggested by the white speckles and the loose antlers hanging as ornaments. Chell guessed that was their leader.

“Who are you?�� the Huntress spoke. She had dark skin and hard brown eyes like stones. The language she used was without a doubt English, but there was a thick accent that clouded it. Slow and syrupy like a western drawl, but the vowels sounded twisted, like a foreigner just learning how to speak the language.

Moving slowly so they could hopefully follow along, Chell pointed a finger at the leader. Then with her pointer finger extended on each hand, her two hands chased each other in a circle.

“Do you sign?”

The five humans in their animal-skin clothes exchanged confused looks.

Chell tried one last thing. With one hand, she fingerspelled the letters: “A. S. L.” Her eyebrows lifted upward, pushed her lips upwards, expressing the question.

No, these people did not sign.

One of the males of the group turned to their leader and asked, “Ya think she understood you?”

Chell nodded rapidly and pointed at the man who just spoke. Yes, yes, she did understand what they were saying. She tapped her throat and shook her head.

“You can’t speak?” The Huntress tilted her head, continuing to watch Chell carefully.

Chell shook her head.

The Huntress took a step closer, drawing the torch light with her.

“Wait, she could be dangerous!” one of the strangers hissed.

“Look at those strange clothes. I’ve never seen an animal so bright of color,” another added.

“And what are those strange…bones that she wears on her legs?”

Chell looked down to her orange jumpsuit and Long Fall Boots. Even though her outfit was smudged with dirt and leaves from the day’s journey, the manufactured nature of her clothes still made her look out of place.

“Where do you come from?” the Huntress asked.

Chell reflected on the question for a second. Then, she took a finger, and pressed it into the dirt.

“Are you saying you come from here?!” the Huntress asked in disbelief. “We’ve never seen anyone wear clothes like yours before.”

Chell shook her head and kept pressing her hand into the dirt. Then she thought of a better way to express it, turning her hand into a shovel and scooping out several handfuls of dirt.

“You come from the underground?”

Oh, that was actually correct! Chell tapped her nose and pointed at the woman in excitement, like she was playing charades.

“She comes from the underground?” someone whispered.

“Is she a god?” another asked.

“Silence,” the Huntress said, swaying her torch around. Everyone else went quiet. “We will take her to camp. Perhaps the Elder will understand her purpose.”

“But what if she is a god, and she has come to crush us?”

The leader fixed her dark eyes on Chell, studying her. Then, she gave her a relaxed smile. “She looks human to me. Let’s take her back to the cave.”

Chell released a taut breath she did not realize she was holding onto. Her head still throbbed with the lack of food and water, and now the lack of sleep. The weakness in her body took over her and she trembled, barely leaving her brain any space to try and comprehend why she had come across a pack of cavemen in the State of Michigan.

Still, one clear feeling flickered in Chell’s chest as she looked at the Huntress in the deerskin cloak. Chell didn’t realize how nice it would be to be seen by a human, and be called human again.

---

The group of pseudo-cavemen escorted Chell through another long stretch of grass, not once threatening her with the spears or axes they carried. Instead, they offered her water, and a few bits of dried meat from hidden pockets sewn into their animal-skin cloaks. Her belly felt full, and her head began to think clearly.

They treated her so decently, Chell’s heart felt bursting with relief. Finally, she had found humans to help her, even if they wore strange clothes. GLaDOS and/or Caroline would have been so happy for her.

Then Chell saw their “cave” in the distance.

A massive rectangle, half-swallowed by a mound of dirt. It had the size and the sharp corners of a building, like an office or an apartment complex. But a tangle of lichen and ivy coated it several times over, like the vines of the earth were forcing the building to merge and become one with nature. All around the main building were other lumps in the earth covered by green foliage, no doubt more human structures fallen down, reclaimed by the earth, and forgotten.

Chell’s legs gave out and she fell to the dirt. Not even her Long Fall Boots were able to support her. The group of humans dressed in animal skins were one thing, but the dilapidated building confirmed the worst.

It hadn’t just been nine years.

She had been gone for a very, very long time.

Tears blurred her eyes as it all became truth in her mind.

Chell didn’t think she would miss the world so much. She didn’t have many friends, as her muteness isolated her, and people rarely put the extra effort to become acquainted to her.

But now she knew she never would have the chance to go back to the life she once had or the few people she did know.

The Huntress put her arm around her shoulders and helped her up to her feet. Normally Chell would have shrugged away from being ushered around like a child, but the despair sunk in. She allowed herself to be herded inside the building.

Chell was sat down near a crackling fire. Her eyes drifted downwards and did not focus on anything else, even as her hands were fitted with a pouch of water and a bowl of a warm earthy soup.

Her old life was further from her than she had ever imagined. And the only other being that was “left behind” with her was miles down deep in the ground and had quite coldly told her –

Don’t come back.

The clan of cavemen looked at Chell, chattered among themselves, but did not engage with her outside of handing her food. Maybe they were frightened of a stranger, or did not want to waste words on someone who could not return them.

As the voices of the people died down, they moved to their own little corners of the “cave,” huddled into groups of sleeping blankets.

Chell only had the dying embers of the fire to keep her warmth or company.

When she finally did lift her head up from where it hung, it was to follow the trail of smoke, which twisted upwards through a collapsed hole through the top of the building. From the open space, Chell could see a limited view of the same night sky she fell asleep under.

That, and she saw drawings all over the mossy-green and gray concrete walls of the building. Stick figures of humans and their spears and bows, chasing after herds of deer, all around her head. Cave paintings from ancient times, fresh and brand new, just for Chell’s eyes. As if the scientific evolution of humankind never happened at all.

---

When the sun rose, the tribe of humans resumed their seemingly daily duties. Some adults got up and left the shelter in the fallen building to go hunting or gathering, while others stayed behind to wash old clothes, stitch new outfits, or make future meals out of burrowed food. The dozen or so children got busy either helping the adults with their chores, or looking after the youngest as they played games in the sun.

Chell sat still, watching them, like it was a TV documentary on the Stone Age. In a similarly curious way, the people of the tribe stepped close to Chell, then backed away in distrust of whatever she was. An outsider in freakishly pure orange and white clothes.

When Chell couldn’t take her role as an observer anymore, she buried her face in her hands. Betrayal burned in her chest. She thought being among people again would bring her some sense of belonging. Even though GLaDOS didn’t seem to know when to shut up, the robot still spoke to her like a person, even knowing she would never respond.

Chell did not lift her head up again until she heard soft shuffles on the dusty floor and clinking stones. Approaching her was an elderly woman, with pale skin pocked by freckles and sunburn scars, wrinkled like the bark of a tree. The old woman’s back was hunched over as if she had spent a lifetime being beaten by the wind. But she was cloaked in an elaborately woven shawl of brown and white, tied off with beads of turquoise and snail shells. Nobody else in the tribe was dressed like that.

“You are the one who came to us last night, the one with no voice.” The Elder’s voice was ancient yet sturdy.

Chell didn’t respond. Would nodding her head “yes” change anything? Her blue-gray eyes dropped down, away from the elder’s scrutinizing gaze.

Then, steadying herself on her walking stick, the Elder knelt down to the ground, and pressed her arms out on the ground before Chell.

It took a few moments for Chell to understand what was happening.

The old woman was bowing.

“I apologize for my people’s arrogance in not recognizing what you truly are. Please, Great Goddess, have pity on my tribe.”

Chell slapped her hand on her face and launched to her feet. No, no, no. If she couldn’t be seen as one of the tribe, she couldn’t live with being idolized as some sort of deity, either.

The old woman lifted her head, her beads shimmering in the light streaming from the ceiling. “No? You’re not a god?”

Chell pulled her face into a large frown and shook her head sharply from one side to the other.

The wrinkles on the elder’s face doubled in quantity as made a disappointed frown. “Oh. Very well, then.” She shuffled away, her shawl hanging low and leaving a tiny cloud of dust in the path she walked.

Chell crossed her arms and huffed, hoping that was the end of their interaction. Then, the Elder looked back, and gestured her to follow.

They walked to a perfectly flat wall towards the furthest end of the cave, before the entire structure succumbed to the earth and the ceiling merged with the ground. Chell imagined the flat wall was once part of someone’s office space, eroded of every detail except the basic shape of the building. Maybe if she started to dig in the soft dirt floor, she would find some plastic desk toys that had not biodegraded (and never would).

At the wall, some children doodled spirals and clouds using sticks of charcoal from last night’s bonfire. At the approach of the Elder, the children bowed respectfully and scattered, leaving their drawing utensils behind.

The old woman picked up one of the burnt ends of wood, and offered it to Chell. “Why don’t you tell your story, then?”

Chell took the charcoal. She looked at the blank wall. She knew what her first instinct was – she just wasn’t sure if it would resonate.

She pressed the burnt end to the wall and dragged it, leaving behind a trail of black markings that read:

h e l l o

Chell checked for the old woman’s reaction. Her beady eyes squinted, trying to find a possible image in the letters Chell had written.

So, humanity had lost the power of written language. This meant that drawing was Chell’s only method of communication. And the people around her had to guess, like some bad party game.

Sighing, Chell tapped the stick to her chin, wondering how to even begin.

She drew a line. Above the line, she drew basic rectangular shapes of buildings and trees, and the sun. Below the line, she drew a large circle with basic shapes and scribbles. She tapped her finger in the heart of the scribbles.

“Ah, so you have come from a world beneath ours - the Underworld?” the Elder ventured, rubbing her fingers down her chin.

Chell shrugged and gave only one nod. The old woman wasn’t technically wrong, but she had the right idea.

Next, Chell tried to think of some way to explain how she became from a time long in the past. She tried drawing before and after pictures of a building fallen down, but the old woman did not make the connection that the fallen building in the picture was the structure they were currently standing in.

Chell took a moment to massage her wrist, sore from all the drawing. She was reminded of the mysterious test subject or scientist back in Aperture Science who left behind messages for her. Whoever they were, they were talented, not only in their quick and efficient scribbles, but with their colorful, meaningful murals.

Chell’s heart ached. She wished they were here, whoever they were. They would never know just how grateful Chell was that some messages were there, to make her feel a little less alone in her blind fight against a monster.

The unknown artist of Aperture was a messenger, and Chell would honor that by doing the same.

She went back to the wall, rubbing her forearm across the failed drawing attempts to explain her time travel situation, bringing it back to a blank gray wall. She began drawing again, this time trying to draw a picture of herself. Granted, a stick-figure version of herself, but she made sure to give herself her signature ponytail to make her a bit more recognizable.

Then what? What else about Aperture should she draw? Chell drew a large box full of cubes, platforms, and buttons.

“Were you trapped underground, in a maze?” the Elder asked.

Chell nodded. She doubted the woman would understand what a “test chamber” was, so a maze would be the next best descriptor.

What next...? Oh. Chell knew what to draw.

On another blank space, Chell drew a flat horizontal line, then several large circles dangling from it. She made sure to give the small circle at the very end one giant eye right in the center. Next, she drew robotic claws and wires all around the series of circles.

The old woman’s eyes widened. “You were trapped in the Underworld, by a god.”

By this point, some of the children returned, curious of the little game Chell and the Elder were playing.

Chell crinkled her nose. She thought GLaDOS might find too much gratification in being called a god. Chell shook her head.

“Not a god?”

Chell shook her head even harder.

“A monster!” one of the children jumped and shouted. “A cyclops!”

Chell nodded and pointed to the child.

“How’d you escape?” a little boy asked, running up to Chell and tugging on her orange jumpsuit.

Chell cringed at having a snot-nosed child so close to her. The boy was no doubt full of germs. But at least he wasn’t afraid to get close to her. His eyes were wide with curiosity, enthralled by the story. Encouraged, Chell patted him on his greasy blond hair and went back to the wall.

She took her time drawing this next scene. Her own memory of it was foggy, clouded by all the fear she experienced when she was there in the moment.

The same figure of GLaDOS, constructed of massive circles and claws, this time accompanied by a tiny figure of the rocket turret. Chell knew they wouldn’t understand what a rocket was, so she drew it with long, sharp flames spitting out of its face. Next, Chell drew her stick-figure self jumping over the fire, and tearing out a personality sphere from GLaDOS.

Stepping back and seeing it in full, Chell wasn’t happy with how this drawing turned out at all. It was quite dramatic and not at all like it actually happened. Stick Figure Chell wasn’t even holding a portal gun. How could she ever explain that to these people? Ironic, because the damn portals were technically the only reason she was ever there in the test chamber in the first place.

Despite her own self-doubt in her art, the children eagerly jumped in with guesses. The Elder silenced them all with a hiss.

“Settle yourselves, young ones. Clearly, she fought the cyclops and pulled it into pieces before it could burn her alive,” the elder said matter-of-factly. All their eyes, young and old, looked to Chell and awaited approval.

For once, Chell chuckled. She nodded, agreeing that that was indeed what happened.

The same little boy from earlier went back to Chell. “And then you escaped?”

Chell clucked her tongue and shook her head. No, it was never quite that easy.

She went to drawing again.

---

As the day went on, a crowd grew around Chell’s black-and-gray mural. When the hunters returned with a rope strung with dead squirrels, one of them poured their blood into a bowl and offered it to Chell. Repulsed by the sight, Chell refused to take it, until the hunter dabbed his fingers in the squirrel blood and used its color highlight the drawings she made. The blood was joined by more offerings of shades of paint: deep browns from rich dirt, blues from crushed flower petals, and even yellowish-orange from citrus peels (and what unfortunately smelled like urine).

Chell made sure to go back to each drawing and paint blue and orange circles everywhere.

By the evening, the entire tribe gathered to watch Chell put the finishing touches on her work.

Picking up from defeating the “cyclops,” Chell drew herself being dragged back into the underground, then sleeping for a long time – as indicated by many cycles of moons waxing and waning above her head.

Then a drawing of Wheatley (in the shape of a simple blue-eyed orb) waking her up and leading her back through the underground maze. There was some debate among the tribe at exactly what the blue orb was, with most agreeing that it was either a demi-god, or a fallen star, or a lost spirit.

Then, the revival of GLaDOS. Chell drew the figure of the massive AI rising from the dark murk that became of her central chamber.

“The cyclops came back to life?!” the little boy from earlier had exclaimed when Chell’s drawing came to fruition. “After you killed it?!”

Chell nodded and gave her crowd an exaggerated, exhausted frown. It earned her a few laughs. The little warmth of making others laugh was enough to motivate Chell to keep drawing. Even if the story wasn’t being perfectly interpreted, the people of the tribe were invested in understanding her.

The second defeat of GLaDOS and transformation into a potato was tricky to pull off. Chell drew herself and Wheatley controlling the claws to tear GLaDOS apart. She hated how violent it looked, reminding Chell of just how terrible it was to witness and hear as GLaDOS’s core was cannibalized by the rest of her own body.

Then, a drawing of Wheatley’s blue orb in the body of GLaDOS, using a large claw to send Chell and GLaDOS’s isolated core down deeper underground.

“The demi-god betrayed her?” someone gasped.

“Perhaps it was a trickster god,” another person whispered. “Let’s learn more – perhaps the trickster is still out there!”

The next part was probably the easiest to draw: Chell holding GLaDOS’s core, walking through halls in a deeper layer underground. Chell framed that drawing with jagged lines, trying to depict the broken machinery that littered the older sections of Aperture. Maybe tomorrow, she would go back and add more details to the picture.

“There is a land even further from the Underworld?” someone asked.

“A land of vengeful spirits and ghosts,” the Elder concluded, as if she had been there herself.

Chell pointed at her and nodded. There was so much about the world and its past that these people would never understand. But they understood tall tales, so that was what Chell would give them.

Next to the drawing of her and GLaDOS in Old Aperture, Chell drew a picture of a man in a suit and a woman in a dress. She wished she had taken a longer look at that old portrait of Cave Johnson and his assistant Caroline, as she barely remembered what the pair looked like. To emphasize their importance, Chell tinted brightly colored circles around their heads, like crowns, or halos.

“She met the Lord and the Lady of the Underworld,” one of the tribe guessed.

Chell shook her head rapidly, and corrected herself by drawing a picture of what she imagined had happened all those years ago before GLaDOS’s activation. The lady in the dress standing next to the form of the GLaDOS, framed by a larger drawing of the man in the suit, moving them together like pieces in a game.

The people of the tribe were stumped, until Chell drew a third drawing of Caroline – just a full-body picture of her standing still. Then, Chell took her arm and erased half of her body, and filled in the other half with the shape of GLaDOS.

Finally, the message was parsed out by the Huntress who discovered Chell the night before. “She was once a god of the Underworld, before the other god transformed her into the cyclops.”

Not the most accurate interpretation, but perhaps the only one they would understand. Chell pointed at the Huntress and nodded. The Huntress smiled, and Chell held her gaze in appreciation for just a few moments longer.

“And what became of the other god, the god with the long beard?” someone asked.

Chell didn’t know what the “beard” referred to, until she looked at her Cave Johnson drawing, and realized that the tie she drew him with looked more connected to his chin than his neck. Her face burned a bit in embarrassment, but didn’t take the misunderstanding too harshly. None of these people had ever seen a necktie, after all.

To answer the original question, Chell wiped her hand across the face of the man, until it was a smudge of charcoal.

“He died? Then he was no true god,” the Elder concluded.

---

Everyone took a break for supper, eating quickly to sooner return to Chell’s storytelling. Belly full of sweet, greasy venison and tart fruit, Chell felt recharged and ready to return to her drawings.

Where did she leave off? Ah, yes, escaping the lower levels of Old Aperture and returning to her final showdown with Wheatley. Chell had to run back and forth from her first drawing of defeating GLaDOS as a reference.

And that was the resolution of the story. Despite the impossible odds, Chell triumphed against the powerful being that betrayed her, working alongside her displaced former enemy. Her audience understood the message, made obvious by them nodding along, whispering excitedly among themselves, and looking at Chell with a new respect in their eyes.

To mark the occasion – to truly express what Chell felt at the moment of victory – she drew a picture of herself, standing proud and triumphant, with a halo over her head and wings at her shoulders. And above that picture of her, Chell also drew another picture of GLaDOS restored, and her own respective halo and wings. Because Chell hadn’t won on her own – she had help from an unexpected source. GLaDOS, or Caroline, or both – they cared about Chell and wanted her to succeed and be happy.

Then Chell’s heart sank. That’s exactly what she thought when she first stepped away from the rusty shack. But so far, being outside had brought her nothing but more heartbreak and trouble. Had GLaDOS or Caroline really wanted this for her? Did everything they had gone through together mean nothing?

Or maybe either of them did not know what became of Earth, and were just as clueless as Chell was.

Chell’s eyes locked in on her last drawing of GLaDOS, restored in her body, haloed with her power.

Who even was she? What did she mean to Chell, at the end of everything?

As the mute woman contemplated, the men and women of the tribe talked to themselves behind her.

“She is a monster-killer. Have you ever heard of someone who strong?”

“I always knew she must have been powerful.”

“Should we invite her on tomorrow’s hunt?”

The sudden popularity made Chell a bit bashful, a thankful distraction from her ruminating over GLaDOS. She soaked in the attention, until she realized that despite everyone talking about her, no one was talking to her.

Ah, yes, the fate that Chell would never seem to escape: being an object of study.

Chell signed, not knowing what else to do but return to her wall. She had graffitied the events of the last few days of her life, but defeating Wheatley was not where the story ended.

Because despite everything - or maybe it was because of everything that had happened between them, before, after, and always – GLaDOS and/or Caroline chose to save Chell’s life.

Her hand curled into a fist over her chest. Closing her eyes, she could still feel the firm clasp of GLaDOS’s pincer over her wrist. She could still hear the robot’s words in her mind with such clarity she might remember them forever.

Being Caroline taught me a valuable lesson. I thought you were my greatest enemy. When all along you were my best friend.

The surge of emotion that shot through me when I saved your life taught me an even more valuable lesson: where Caroline lives in my brain.

How could Chell draw, where Caroline lives? What even was this feeling it seeded in her? How could Chell transpose the feeling of at long last being understood, valued, and seen, by a monster with a human’s heart?

And what if it was a lie? What if GLaDOS or Caroline never cared about her after all? Was it wrong of Chell to try and interpret comfort from these final moments? Because despite the warmth, it still made her frightened to think of it.

Chell returned to the wall, fresh stick of charcoal in hand, and began to draw. Slowly.

Chell scratched out a picture of herself, floating as if suspended in space. Opposite of her she drew GLaDOS, and emerging from GLaDOS’s torso came the lady in the white dress.

The two women reached out to each other at arm’s length, hands just barely touching. Two entities in time, so close to seeing each other, achieving an instance of miraculous unity despite everything between them.

Then Chell dipped her finger into yellowish-brown paint, and drew a sour-smelling lightning bolt between the sliver of space between the two humans in the drawing. Striking down their bridge before it could be complete.

Stepping back, Chell examined the full mural of her adventure, spanning several meters of the wall’s surface. Despite the project being finished, she felt emptiness in her chest, like some part of her had been scooped out and splattered onto the wall.

She didn’t like this story. She hated what had happened to her.

Then, Chell felt a warm hand on her shoulder. She smeared her tears away and looked at the Huntress, who was giving her a kind smile.

Oh, that was right. Chell wasn’t alone. Viewing the entire piece was the people of the tribe, sitting in engrossed silence like theatergoers.

This story did not just belong to Chell anymore – it was part of their home, now, too.

All that was left for Chell was to wait quietly and hear what they all thought.

---

With nowhere else to go, Chell remained with the tribe.

She lived to see several generations born and interred into the soil, like the cycle of the seed to the fruit.

She became one of them, but nobody forgot where she came from.

During their nomadic journeying, the tribe often crossed paths with other groups of humans. They would trade stories about ancient monsters deep underground or soaring above the sky. Chell’s people would boast about her, telling and re-telling her story on her behalf, as a lesson to keep an eye out for more people (or monsters) who emerged from the Underworld.

Despite a deep and secret hope that Chell might cross paths with other survivors from her time, she never did.

The tribe learned to value Chell, beyond her status as a monster-killer from the Underworld. She taught them a few basic things that any kid from her time period learned in grade school, like how dung could be used as fertilizer for plants, or how to follow the never-changing North Star. What was basic knowledge to her was a gateway to innovations for her new people. Chell often wondered if GLaDOS would have been proud of her work. For science.

Chell would learn some of the tribe’s legends, as well. While she never knew the full story of how humanity was essentially de-evolved and forced back into the Stone Age, she did figure that some ancient and terrible outside force must have ruined the planet. Something extraterrestrial.

And at the twilight of her life, when Chell was a hunched-over, gray-haired old woman, she began to realize that she was the one that the young people of the tribe called “Elder.”

Chell would sit by the family fire, flames and shadows animating the paintings on walls, hearing the stories of her own life told and re-told. The tale of a human from the Underworld who battled demi-gods, befriended monsters, and emerged victorious to the surface.

And as the years went on, the stories became less and less familiar, the details changing slightly more with each time, becoming more myth than history.

The cave paintings remained preserved on the walls. But the details would be forever lost. The endless corridors once populated with cutting-edge scientists. The supercomputer that powered the entire facility like one body. The haunting melody of the turret’s farewell song. The tiny ghost of a human inside the machine, alone forever, waiting for another human to drop in and resume the precious testing that everything was sacrificed for.

#portal secret santa 2024 #chell #fanfiction #portal #also special thanks to sciencewife for beta reading!

20 notes · View notes