I really enjoy these little comics whenever they appear

Plus there’s anything left worth taking over!

Also proplifting is easy as can be with succulents. You can pick leaves up off the floor around the display and just set them on some dirt at home. Next thing you know you have a new plant.

I’ve been making good progress on the Fully Automated! solarpunk TTRPG campaign! We got a group together to play it and we’ve done four or five sessions now.

At first I’d been thinking of the play sessions as the cost of getting the campaign guide finished and out the door but I’ve been having an absolute blast running it. It helps that my players are awesome - two are devs from the game, one is an experienced player, and one joined recently but has been great - their collective knowledge has basically allowed me to run the story and lean on them for the gameplay. It’s worked surprisingly well.

I’ve never GM’ed before, played a couple DnD sessions but that’s about it. But I’ve watched tons and tons of Actual Plays and read a lot of world building and session running guides because they were a good source for writing advice, so I guess I picked up some GM tricks a long the way. It’s so fun! And they seem to be quite enjoying it - it’s been lovely getting to watch them occupy this world I put together and we’re looking at doubling how often we meet per week.

The sessions have been a great motivation for making more content and an awesome way to find gaps I need to fill. It’s going to be a much more thorough document after the rest of the playtesting.

I’ve also made a lot of character artwork (in a kind of old comic book style) and an additional map for one of the main locations which has been very helpful.

It’s just been great and I’m looking forward to working on it more.

The ones in Outgunned were pretty cool

They’re doing their level best.

I don’t even know. I guess folks from the suburbs would call the cops and get an animal control officer to come out if they saw a bear in their yard? But my town was way too small to have animal control - theres like 2 cops and the emergency system switches over to the state troopers at night.

And again, bears live in the woods, of you build your house in their woods they’re gonna walk on your deck occasionally.

We get this in my hometown - people see the place, decide they want to live in the forest. They clearcut a chunk of it and build their house. Then when a bear wanders into their new yard (following the same territory it always has) they call the cops.

Seriously, is this sidewalk lousy with marketing execs at rush hour?

Actually, worse thought: perhaps it’s intended for regular people. The threat of AI scabs doesn’t work unless the workers know the AI exists, right? Putting this out there on street level makes people aware that their job is insecure and that might prevent them from trying to take PTO, refusing to work unpaid overtime, asking for raises, etc.

Part of the problem I think is that their whole way of thinking is to ignore any externalities (from the polution they produce but don’t want to deal with to the growing economic disparity undercutting their profits) as someone else’s problem. Most companies need employed consumers to exist but each one benefits individually if they fire all their own workers - as long as someone else pays enough workers so they can buy their products. The people in charge of each company are there because they’re good at making the line go up consistently quarter by quarter, no matter what that takes. I don’t think they have the capability to deal with big problems (like this, or climate change) any more than the inclination.

Basically nobody’s steering the ship because they’re all too busy disassembling it for parts.

He’d be an amazing Cain but they’d need to do a bunch of non-parody series first

Between the massive corporate wealth at stake and the millions of people literally addicted to the product, it’s hard now to imagine governments being able to ban them (and I lived through it).

Beets?

Thanks for bringing me in! Both these articles are great, and both are good additions to resource lists I’ve put together for solarpunk writers/artists - I’ve added the auto engine one to my list of alternative uses for car parts, and the battery ship info to my nautical solarpunk piece. Thanks again!

I’ve only ever bought one new computer in my life (I currently own like a dozen laptops) and I’ve never actually bought a TV. I’ve gotten them all from friends and relatives, pulled them from ewaste and picked them up off the curb. I’m sure this varys wildly but where I am it feels like working electronics are so common and available in our world we’re one step short of just picking them up off the ground.

I’m a huge fan of rom archives! A few years ago I built an arcade cabinet using as many secondhand parts and materials as possible and set it up to run a ton of games on an ewaste retropie. It took months longer to make than it would have if I’d just gone to a lumberyard but I had the space and time, and I was already on the local free groups daily so keeping an eye out for stuff from my parts list wasn’t hard.

Sure! Always happy to hear any recommendations!

Same! I think I’ve only ever paid for one computer, everything else has been hand-me-downs or ewaste. I’ve never had a top of the line machine but I don’t need one for my hobbies or work. Usually when I start a new project I take a laptop off the pile, install a fresh os, and set it up just for that.

The power draw is a good point and definitely something to consider - one of my neighbors recently put a meter on his old one and was surprised to find it drew as much power as his air conditioner. I’m not sure how to balance the higher draw against the environmental cost of manufacturing and shipping and disposing of the TV, but I’m doing my best to contribute as little to the economy as I can, so I’ve settled for being careful to just turn it off whenever I’m not actively watching something. My city has options for sourcing power from green sources so what I do use hopefully encourages more investment in wind and solar in my region. (It seems pretty legit from what I’ve been able to find anyways.)

For private jets you probably want some sort of MANPADS rather than a rifle