I’ve watched this specific one! The rifftrax actually made for a pretty great time - from what I remember the movie had some cool ideas (and the jokes kind of filled in for the rest).

GraphineOS seems to set the benchmark for secure de-googled android phones and has a very short list of supported devices. I think I’d suggest starting with one of those, and once support eventually drops, if you’re comfortable with a reduced security capability, looking to lineageOS or similar. I think if Graphine supports a phone, it’s pretty much guaranteed to have support on the more general OSs.

For a while I looked at ruggedized smartphones (some with removable batteries!) that were supported by lineageOS and others. I didn’t find one I was convinced would hold up as long as I wanted, and I had security concerns so I ended up getting a decent secondhand phone with guaranteed security support for a few years and putting it in a good case.

Sometimes I check in on various raspberry pi smartphone projects. I love the idea and think it’d probably be able to last the longest (or be turned into something else after an upgrade) but I don’t think any feel reliable enough to me yet.

That’s a good idea! I do that with peanut butter at a fancy grocery store - I wonder if there’s one around that does juice

I hadn’t realized how lucky we were - we have one of those crunchy refill stores in town, where you can bring your own containers and buy various powders and liquids (primarily cleaning supplies though they do some seasonings as well. I wish I could buy orange juice that way (I basically gave up on drinking it because I didn’t need any more plastic bottles). We switched to various dilutions of castile soap for most things, and a generic dishwasher powder for our little countertop rig.

I figured it was in response to people using the ships as a gotcha. Pointing out that solar panels are manufactured using power that, itself, isn’t green yet, and are shipped using non-green methods. If done in good faith, I’d suspect the were unfamiliar with using one existing process to bootstrap a new one, but it’s usually just another way of saying we should maintain the status quo (however bad) until its replacement is absolutely perfect.

A few folks I know switched smoothly from “climate change is fake” to “maybe it’s real but there’s nothing we can do about it at this point. Might as well live it up.” Basically anything to avoid change at any level.

I think that’s the defeatism they’re talking about here, not people pointing out the issues.

Electric Arc Furnaces are probably our best bet for that - they’re an established, proven technology and can be swapped over to a green power source without any other changes (assuming the society has the energy capacity). I think I remember reading that a factory somewhere in Europe had already done that but a quick search has failed me.

Thanks!

I do have thoughts on that! This might be a little jumbled as it’s mostly off the cuff, but I think how much a society can be run only on renewable materials will depend on how much they’re willing to change their whole default framework, and what they’re prepared to give up in the short and long term to do it. Degrowth and library economy concepts would certainly apply. (I really like library economy stuff because I really like reuse).

I think there’s an abundance of resources, from existing usable items to raw materials which have already been extracted already accessable to us out in the world.

Right now there’s this default pipeline from extracted raw material to new (ideally fragile/flimsy/disposable) products to landfill. A library economy on steroids might include both tons of long-term reuse of whatever’s already been made, but also recycling of available materials that have already been extracted. There’ll always have to be new manufacture but ideally it’d be much reduced and anything made new would be designed to last and to be fixable. But that takes a ton of commitment on a societal level to using less and to sorting and distributing everything that already exists. It means mining junkyards and landfills for already-extracted raw materials and generally changing how we do things.

When it comes to energy, I think there’s a sort of hurdle we have to get over - first we need to get most of our energy to renewable, then we can optimize for long term repairability. There’s a lot of interesting recycling processes ramping up for solar panels, and as I understand it, there are less-efficient designs that are more fixable. So for the short term, I suspect whatever designs get the job done we use, and after that, we can start adjusting for long term.

My art tends to be of a society that’s as obsessed with reuse and externalities as ours is with money. They’re a society of scavengers and fixers and makers. That handwaved cultural change is sort of what I’ve chosen for my spec fix suspension of disbelief. Most of the tech I include already exists, but examining what a society that makes all its decisions around reducing harm would do with them is what I really enjoy.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6j8jMn2Kcgs

They’ve been doing a bunch of cool solarpunk art for a bit, and they’ve started releasing it CC-BY (I think) including on wikimedia commons, which is great because otherwise the solarpunk category over there was mostly a bunch of AI art and proposed flags. (I’d added some of my photobashes so it wasn’t just AI representing the genre, but I’m very glad to have them contributing art with a lot of intent behind it.) I think a lot of the planning for their scenes comes from the solarpunk prompts podcast these days.

I really enjoy reading about the investigations that follow any big crypto heist, where they track the stolen money through various exchanges etc. The Swindled podcast just did one about a pretty poor attempt to launder crypto (see Razzlekhan) and Darknet diaries did one on the much more competent (suspected North Korean) heist of eth from Axie Infinity and their various laundering efforts including through Tornado cash. It’s surprisingly transparent in a lot of ways. It seems like stealing the money is often the comparatively easy part, and getting their huge sums out of crypto and into something they can use (while thousands watch the money like hawks) is much harder.

Hugely in favor of helping solarpunk concepts reach people across language barriers! And very interested to see solarpunk stuff from DACH. Having a community here might help ease them into the rest of the instance too

Best of luck!

Oh, one more to consider: Reckoning Press is more climate fiction than explicitly solarpunk, but it was one of the things that got me to give solarpunk a chance.

Ecotopia is a fun one because it hits all the notes but predates the genre.

Murder in the Tool Library is a favorite of mine because the setting is awesome and aspirational while feeling real and human, and because the murder mystery plot is a change from the usual ecofiction.

The solarpunk TTRPG Fully Automated! is free (libre and gratis) and has several sections devoted to its setting and worldbuilding that helped me understand a bunch of solarpunk concepts by seeing them in practice and to start thinking much bigger with my own fiction. It also has some good advice on creating engaging plots in an aspirational solarpunk setting where a lot of the usual problems have been solved.

That’s interesting, even going with modern tech, it’s a neat answer to preserving darkness. Military-grade passive night vision with the analogue tubes are ridiculously expensive but you wouldn’t need them just for walking around - simple infrared spotlight goggles are way cheaper, and probably lighter, especially if you remove extra binocular features. They could also be assisted by infrared streetlights if those wouldn’t mess up other animals. Downsides: I don’t think walking while wearing them would be fun, your depth perception and field of view takes a hit with most designs, and slow update of the screen can be disorienting. They’re also more complicated to make than flashlights.

That’s an interesting idea - instead of carrying a flashlight you might carry an RFID transponder. They’d need to not be linked to any personal records (such as purchase) to protect anonymity and prevent tracking. And a personal flashlight might still be useful.

I’m not sure I love the idea of lights flicking on, identifying where I am to someone waiting in the dark. Maybe it would turn on lights for a block length on the street or something? I’m also wondering if the reduced on-off cycling would wear out lights faster and, if so, how replacing them more often stacks up to more energy spent running them all the time.

Still it’s an interesting compromise position on the light pollution situation.

That is very cool!!

These are all awesome! You’ve given me a bunch to think about

I’ve seen the clipper ship Grain de Sail II, and I’ll definitely check these ones out too! I really like seeing some proof that modernized sail (with fairly traditional-looking rigging) is viable, and especially seeing which cargoes and routes make it viable. I think that might be a good look at what makes for worthwhile shipping in a solarpunk setting (high value goods, ingredients that only grow effectively in certain areas, humanitarian aid, etc). I think some takes on adding sails are perhaps too unwilling to compromise on the massive container ship design, grasping for how to keep that format running rather than examining if we should.

I wrote about this on the photobash I mentioned, but I genuinely like the optimization and logistical advantage of using standardized, stackable shipping containers which fit on ships, trucks, and trains without the need to load and unload the cargoes by hand at each transition in their journey. That’s great stuff, no complaints. What I wonder about is if that cost efficiency has caused other problems. We ship cargo all over the world but much of the time, we do it because it’s so cheap to do so. We ship raw material from one continent to process it on another, we ship that material again so we can shape it into parts, which are shipped back to the second continent for partial assembly, and then for final assembly on a fourth. Is that efficient? It’s cost efficient. But we burn terrible amounts of fuel each time we do it, and we do it for so many things. I’m not sure if there’s a green stand-in for that kind of dirt-cheap bulk shipping.

The Passat, the steel-hulled barque I borrowed parts from to make my last image (and its sibling ships) hauled nitrate, grain, concrete, and other stuff using a pretty traditional-looking hull (and loading it was apparently an important process which could and did lead to issues if done poorly. Like I said, most of the designs I’ve seen for container ships look a lot like regular ones with masts added on where they won’t get too in the way. I’d like to find or work out a design that starts with a viable sail ship and tweaks it towards modern features, like a way to somehow still load cargo in shipping containers, without messing up its form/function.

So thanks for the link (and for reading my rant)!

I like both of those ideas! I’ve seen a few cool takes on repurposed oil rigs, I’ll have to read up on them a bit to see what kind of resources they offer to long term residents, but I’d enjoy doing a take on it - maybe a ship charging station from windmills plus merchant hub/repairs like a bartering outpost from waterworld?

Nuclear powered ships are definitely proven and it’s be cool to see the tech put to a nonmilitary use - though the regulation/control aspect would be challenging to do safely.

Thanks!