JacobCoffinWrites

For a long while, I'd been picturing a society that handled reuse the way I do IRL - if you have a thing, you make it last as long as possible, fix it if you can, and when it's finally worn out you find another use for it (even if just as component parts). I'd imagined the transfer of usable items would be handled informally, through community networks or something similar to Everything is Free/Buy Nothing groups IRL.

But conversations awhile back got me imagining a bigger, community/societal-level focus on reuse. Perhaps a society where most people's first source for some household items or appliances or furniture would be some kind of community stockpile. I imagine warehouses where items are sorted and tested, fixed, and perhaps broken down to components for other repairs. Where they're catalogued and posted to some kind of library- or eBay-like website. I imagine community drop off and collection points, where someone who's downsizing might bring extra appliances, and young folks just starting out might pick their first furniture. I picture a separate refuse stream for things that are still good or could be fixed, emphasizing that there's a difference between something you don't need anymore, and something nobody needs (actual garbage). I could even see work crews combing through long-abandoned houses, hauling out items to put back into circulation, before disassembling the building, Habitat For Humanity -style, to use the lumber and counters and cabinets etc elsewhere.

I don't think this would be the only source of stuff, probably not even the primary one. If you want fancy furniture I figure you'd go to a local workshop and see what they've got, or commission something from an open-source design. But I could see this system of reuse taking the place of something like Walmart or IKEA. Sort of your default for cheap stuff (I'm weak on economic theory; I'd love a society where it's all free, but I don't know enough to describe that with confidence. Hopefully it'd at least be a government org, or a worker run nonprofit type thing where all profits go to the workers and continuing operation?). I like the idea of a society with an institutional focus on reuse rather than extraction and disposal.

Normally I don't start off with a whole chunk of world building like that, but I'm planning some photobash scenes around these ideas, and I'd love to work out some of the questions and discussions about logistics before I've made the things and done something wrong.

The first question I had was around collection of these items. I'd been imagining some kind of vehicle operating a bit like a garbage truck, making rounds through various neighborhoods collecting the things people don't want, but less frequently and with a slower pace because they have to be more careful with the stuff they pick up and have to make more trips back to the depot. I'd love to do a streetcar or something other than a generic box truck, but I think a truck makes the most sense. Streetcars were occasionally used to deliver the mail, but I've found no examples of them even being used as garbage trucks, which might be able to maintain a pace that wouldn't disrupt everything else on the line. Depending on the level of service offered, they could need a lot of flexibility - do they pick up just from community drop off points, or from the curb outside people's homes, or do they assist with moving things out of homes for those who are elderly or disabled? Maybe different levels of service for different circumstances?

I hope people would do their best to re-home items directly using the future equivalent of EIF or Buy Nothing, but it'd be nice if there was an option besides the landfill for items that don't generate interest in their immediate community, or where the person just wants it gone with the convenience of throwing it out. I feel like this could help with that.

Then there's the question of how do you get bulky items home in a society where almost no one drives? IKEA and Walmart design a lot of their products to fit, flat-packed, into your sedan or hatchback. And they offer delivery. This society would be handling a lot of already built items and have a lower reliance on personal cars. Maybe most street cars would let you lug a dresser onboard if they're not crowded? I've certainly done similar with the local trains, though the guy at the turnstile wasn't paying attention and probably would have stopped us. Maybe you'd use a cargo bike and trailer? Maybe you just have to hire a delivery service for big things? Is it abelist if the small storefront-style drop-off/pickup sites first answer is to hand you a push cart with your bulky item and send you down the street with it?

Do you have any thoughts on the idea of reuse at this scale?

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/3618799

Another glance at the more industrial parts of this solarpunk future. This one was inspired by the absolutely massive mountain of clothes which has been dumped, brand new and unsold, in the Atacama desert in Chile. The product of our society’s fast fashion industry and the complexities of our supply chains, a tremendous amount of energy and water is wasted producing these clothes, more energy is wasted shipping them, and then yet more is spent to haul them into the desert where they smother the landscape and ecosystem in cheap synthetic materials.

One of my overarching goals with this series is to show a society institutionally focused on reuse, rather than extraction and production. A society that thinks further ahead than we do, which produces what it needs, and thinks carefully about how to use and reuse and repurpose what it makes. A society where the wealth of usable product we currently throw away is treated like a natural resource to be found and traded between peoples engaged in the thousand year cleanup. I hope that in this future, the fast fashion industry is long dead, and that whatever demand for its products remains can be met using the absurd backlog of clothes produced unnecessarily and heaped in the driest desert in the world.

Which brings me to my other goal for this photobash. I’ve been wanting to do a scene with airships ever since the discussion we had here. In fact, I’ll probably do a few. Despite seeing relatively little use, airship design has advanced tremendously in the last hundred years. Improved materials have allowed them to take more effective shapes, and improved engines, motors, batteries, and computer systems, have made them much easier to control. While reading about historical airships, I was struck by the risk in doing almost anything with them, but especially by landing – which often required ground crews (‘landing parties’) of hundreds of men who would by strength of muscle, pull the thing down to the ground. By contrast, modern airships can land themselves right on the ground.

They also have pretty good potential as a sort of closed-loop system: If you covered the top of an airship with solar panels, you would have significant generation capacity, especially above the clouds (solar panels work better in the cold). You could use this to drive electric motors, and excess power could be used to generate hydrogen for both lift and fuel. This just needs water, which also makes an excellent ballast.

Helium is another option, but it’s a limited resource which, as I understand it, requires drilling to obtain.

Airships could open up some really cool possibilities: while they lack the speed of a jet, they have more capacity, and lower fuel requirements. While they lack the sheer capacity of a container ship, they're a lot faster and use way less fuel. They can also fly over land, meaning they can reach all kinds of places ships can't, and cut long detours around continents. Basically, container ships might be able to carry more, but they’re not as good at going from Boston to Seattle, and they suck at getting to Kansas City. What’s more, airships can act as flying cranes, lifting bulky objects like wind turbines or assembled buildings right over obstacles, and to places where roads or trains simply couldn’t carry them.

For the layout of this airshipyard, I decided that though modern airships can just land on the ground, the process of clearing and building a landing pad is environmentally destructive enough that this society would probably want to prioritize lower-impact mooring masts for waiting airships, and build just enough pads to match their loading capacity. This definitely wasn’t just because mooring masts, with the airships weathervaning around their tops in the wind, are tremendously cool. Or because the ugly metal towers reinforce some themes I've been playing with, trying to show that even in an aspirational solarpunk future, there are going to be places that don't look aesthetic but where utilitarian, practical designs make the most sense, and can have a beauty of their own.

I also included a massive airship shed, as I thought that even a smaller shipyard like this might need a maintenance capability and shelter for damaged airships grounded in bad weather. I’m not sure how well they could service the variety of craft currently moored, but hopefully with modern technology they can make it work. I imagine that the main airship yards would be located at major cities, and that these airships have already dropped off cargoes from their own points of origin, and are here to collect old world clothing and materials made from clothing.

The airships themselves are mostly pulled from modern designs and prototypes, with solar panels added to their tops. I’m particularly fond of ones like the Flying Whale on the top right, which can apparently work like a flying crane and winch cargo directly into the hold without landing.

Once this cleanup is complete, the mooring towers and buildings can be partially disassembled, and carried to the next place using the airships themselves. Hopefully all that will be left behind is the footings of the towers and a concrete slab in the desert with a plaque which reads something like ‘On this spot old world corporations made an ungodly mess. And generations of people worked hard to clean it up.’

This image, and the rest of the postcards are all CC-BY, use them how you want. Also: big thanks to @loopgru @Five, and @cynar@lemmy.world for telling me enough about airships to get started on this one!

My grandmother recently lost her vision. She wanted a sound recorder so she could continue writing/recording her stories, but she's never been comfortable with computers or small electronics, even when she could see them. One of the features she really wanted was automatic transcription voice to text. But all the voice recorders I could find online, even simple ones, seemed like they'd be hard for her to use. They had small buttons, recessed into the case (she has trouble feeling stuff like that), switches on the sides, multiple modes, screens she couldn't see, etc. After the last year of trying to find various devices for her, and of being frustrated at how overly complicated devices supposedly intended for the elderly and vision-impaired still are, I decided to just build something that would actually fit her needs. Unfortunately, I had just a week to do it in before I was heading up to visit.

The goals:

• It had to be aggressively simple to use. No modes, no settings, no buttons combos to remember.
• It had to support advanced features (transcription was one she really wanted, but just being able to get the voice files out to relatives easily was big)
• Sturdy design

I googled around and found this tutorial for making a spy device from a raspberry pi. It was pretty much perfect - when it detected motion, the device was meant to record audio, transcribe it, and then send the transcription out to the 'spy' as an email. That was perfect - email is a robust system all my other relatives are familiar with, figuring out what to do with the files, renaming them, forwarding them as necessary is well within their abilities. Plus the email account could act as a backup.

I started with setting up a button. I used this tutorial as my guide, and used an old arcade button left over from helping a friend build an arcade cab. I soldered a 220 resistor in line with the button per the tutorial. The arcade button was a good fit - it's designed for this kind of project and mounts easily to a hole drilled through a board, it's big and raised up, meaning its easy to find.

Then it was on to the python code:

The changes I had to make were mostly around the motion sensor. We were going to replace that with a single button. Push it once, it plays my voice saying 'recording' and starts recording. Push it again, it stops recording and says 'stop'. It's been years since I wrote python code, but all I really had to do with identify the parts relevant to my requirements and make changes. I ended up using this code for preventing button bounce, since the built-in GPIO features failed to prevent it. The only change was a minor adjustment to the end of look_for_triggers() (which will show up in my code,) because it was preventing the second button press from being detected. I basically just stitched the button_callback() function to start_recording() and replaced the for loop in audioRecording() with a while loop to support variable-length recordings based on the button press. And I used pygame to play my voice audio. The other change I added was to the email feature. I added some try and except error catching, so failing to send an email (like if her wifi goes down) won't crash the program. I won't be around to start it up again so I wanted it to be robust, and to degrade gracefully. I explained that if it says 'email error' after 'stop' that just means it couldn't send an email, but the file is still saved and the program still works.

After getting email to work, the next job was to make sure the program ran as soon as the raspberry pi booted up. My grandmother has lots of friends who love to help, which often means unplugging things, moving them around, losing them, finding them, reorganizing her house, and mailing back audiobooks she hasn't listened to yet. I needed this thing to be able to survive power loss and general curious fiddling. And if it crashed, power cycling would be an ugly but functional way to restart the program.

I used this guide and modified the line to say @reboot python3 /home/audio/sound_recorder_good.py

Once that was done, I found I had to replace the 'input("Press enter to quit")' line at the end of the main function with an endless while loop, because the program was no longer running from the terminal and couldn't use input.

You can find my code here: https://mega.nz/file/OJV1hZJB#pVeddKWKu6EwC6yxiMMsSVSCQdoTUkhtcfWM6ryAYIw

At this point, it was pretty reliable, so I started work on the physical case. It's basically just a wooden box containing the pi, a button, a speaker, the microphone, and built to keep people from opening it up, unplugging components, or fiddling with the speaker settings.

I wrote the woodworking part up with pictures here: https://imgur.com/a/xiVjvdQ

The last of the setup was just connecting it to my grandmother's wifi, packing it all into the case, and making sure it still worked before showing her how to use it. She was very pleased with the overall design, she's going to test it for a couple weeks while I'm away, and if she wants, I'll add transcription and urethane the case when I get back.

We've all seen articles about massive container ships of the future using kites to supplement their engines, but I suspect a really solarpunk future would look a bit further afield, or perhaps further back in time for their ship designs.

I think in any future with humans and continents, people are going to be trying to cross the ocean. There might be less shipping in a world without our abundance of cheap energy, or more of a focus on reducing consumption and producing necessities locally, but people will still trade goods and travel. So what might the ships look like? Return to tallships? Solar panels and electric motors? I love reexamining traditional technologies to see how they can fit with modern engineering and design principles, safety features, and electronics, but I don't know much about ships, and especially not much about modern sailing.

So what do you think will be bringing back holds full of old world fashions harvested from the Chilaen desert?

Hi, I've been working on a few photobashes lately, of different scenes in a fictional solarpunk future. I recently started a scene of a solarpunk village. I’ve been thinking a lot about rural places lately, since that’s where I’m from, and how they might change with some of the societal crumbles and contractions I feel like are impending. In my grandparents’ time, the region where I grew up was lots of small villages, usually bunched up around water and local industry, with farms spread out beyond that. With cars, people have spread out in these sprawling bedroom communities that are becoming ever more dense with people. Gas and groceries are 40 minutes away by car (more if you're looking for a box store), and I feel like most people I knew drove an hour each way for work.

I wanted to do a scene sort of showing how things might change in rural areas if cars became impractical (due to shortages etc) and how things could be rebuilt better.

I've realized that this is a bit bigger in scope than most of the things I've depicted before. I'm trying to show most of a community in one shot here (albeit at a distance). And there's so much we could do differently, I don't really want to miss any ideas/opportunities.

I know I want to include the following:

• A dense village surrounded by farms and forest, an abandoned mcmansion or large house far enough out to be impractical
• High speed rail access to the village
• Solar panels
• Waterwheels
• Farms
• Algae farming
• Maybe a bit of an inside-out appearance where they've cleared farmland around the town but planted lots of trees between the buildings for cooling?

But when it comes to stuff like the layout and other societal-structure stuff, I don't really have any specifics in mind, which is why I feel like I should look for input from others rather than just drag along my own assumptions. As always I plan to emphasize reuse, so I can grab some existing bits and pieces of towns, but this'll be in the US where even the small towns aren't (in my experience) clumped this densely, so we have some flexibility with what the current residents have changed.

Here's the really rough version I currently have, so you can get an idea as to the general layout I'm planning for. The big green blank space and the surrounding woods etc is where the village and fields will go.

Sorry if I'm asking around too much, I posted to /c/farming yesterday for ideas for the fields (which I'm also happy to get) but I feel like a solarpunk society should be very consensus-driven, so it makes sense for depictions of it to be as well. I'll be doing smaller, simpler scenes for a bit after this one and should be more self-sufficient.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/2544266

I’ve been thinking a lot about how lifestyles, routines, and the overall pace of life might be different in a more solarpunk society. That, combined with some recent discussions and research into solar cookers made me want to try a scene of a solarpunk kitchen.

Specifically, I decided to render a summer kitchen, a fixture of old farmhouses around here, usually slung between the house and the barn, just a place where you could cook without heating up the rest of the house. They fell out of favor as stoves got more efficient, and they're a luxury for people with lots of space, but I think there's value in a spot where we can cook without making air-conditioning fight the oven. Seasonality may play a much bigger role in our lives in a more solarpunk world.

I pictured our summer kitchen as a kind of three-season porch or sunroom, somewhere you could grow herbs in the windows and overwinter less-hearty fruit trees. And maybe as we reconsider cooking around slower processes, in less hectic lives, add some seating for company (conventional wisdom has it that they're gonna hang around your kitchen either way, so we might as well build the space with that in mind). By building one wall mostly out of sliding doors (with bug netting I didn’t bother to show) we can open the space to cool it, and to reduce any risk of humidity building up from the greenhouse part and rotting the house.

There are a few benefits to this design, I think – in addition to cooling, by building the summer kitchen as an outcropping from the house, we add options for north-facing sides to point our south-facing Scheffler reflector at, making it easier to retrofit old houses. And if we have a south wall to work with, we can add a proper greenhouse wall to get the most out of our natural light. And if we’re building an addition anyways, we can add a root cellar underneath, for preserving vegetables and some fruits without the use of electricity. Once I had a basic layout in mind, I turned to the folks on the solarpunk community and included as many of their ideas as I could.

So, features of this kitchen of the future:

Solar oven: I borrowed the design (and the reflector) from Tamara Solar Kitchen. The big dish beside the house uses the curved, parabolic mirrors to concentrate light on a small opening on the firebrick north wall of the summer kitchen. This light bounces off an angled mirror so it enters the oven from underneath, allowing you to bake in the brick oven, or use the cast iron plate set into the top as a stovetop.

Several of these devices exist IRL and work just fine with only manual controls. But I included the computer control panel because I wanted to show that despite some of my other pictures and their emphasis on analog designs, there's a place for technology in a solarpunk society. Modern tech, without the corporate surveillance state, and focus on wasteful extraction, is a huge part of what I think can make solarpunk work. A lot of the older technologies I'm reexamining may benefit from or become viable with better sensors and automation.

For the screens, my head cannon is that they're old, out-of-support tablets, and the co-op that makes these setups flashed them with a custom ROM, essentially turning unsupported, insecureable tablets into secure, single-purpose devices. Making them less generally useful, perhaps, but still extending their service life far beyond what their manufacturer intended. A motoring system that helps you keep track of your mirror and makes sure it’s not cooking the wrong part of your house would be a good thing to have.

Solar hot water: on the roof, another opportunity to use sunlight directly, and to make the most of our south-facing roof.

Pedal-powered appliances: This was a recommendation from the instance which would not have occurred to me, though I’ve used old pedal-powered grindstones before. I built these ones into the bar both because it made for easy access/maintenance, and because I wonder what 'keeping up with the Joneses' looks like in a solarpunk future, I think in any society, no matter what its values are, there will be people who go way out of their way to demonstrate those values, and I could see things like this being used as statements. This is largely remixed from a real thing a design student made, though I modified the pedal system so it would use a step set under the counter, rather than the version that stuck out the side, as I felt like I’d kick that thing whenever I walked past the bar.

Root cellar: another idea from the group, and something the people living here could benefit from all year long. You might notice that the refrigerator is missing. We talked a bit about perhaps modifying a propane-driven camper fridge to run off a solar cooker, but ultimately I decided they probably have one refrigerator, maybe set up like a chest freezer for maximum efficiency, back inside the winter kitchen.

Fermenting kit: another option for preservation and a fun hobby and another idea from the group. They might be making beer, or soy sauce, or any of a bunch of things. Similarly, I included a shoebox tempeh incubator on the counter as well.

As for making the image itself, these more realistic-looking ones take a lot more time as I can’t rely on filters or other stylizations to hide details. But I wanted this one to be detailed. While I was planning this one, I referenced some of the AI art out there of solarpunk kitchens for visuals I liked – the very fancy dark wood, red accent walls, and bright sunlight streaming in were elements I reused here. But one thing I think that sets this apart, besides the ideas I want to demonstrate, is that you can zoom in on this and really look at the bits and pieces, and they hopefully make sense. Someone (me) had to find and cut out all the jars and plants and nicknacks. There’s a reason that they’re there. Hopefully the version of the image you’re seeing still has enough detail to allow you to do that, if not let me know and I’ll find a way to send the high rez version.

I’ll say here that the stained glass windows and the carved wood panels were contributed by a friend’s midjourny bot.

One last note: buildings in a solarpunk world are going to vary drastically based on local conditions. Building in cooperation with our surroundings is one way to really cut our consumption of resources. This kitchen is built for North America because that’s what I know. Other continents, other longitudes, other climates, will call for much different designs. I’d love to see those if anyone can depict them.

And, like the other Postcards from a Solarpunk Future, this image is CC-BY, meaning you can use it for whatever you like. I'm not sure how, in-world, this ended up as a postcard, maybe the homeowners won a contest or made it to the cover of a homesteading zine or something.

I'm sketching another photobash, this time a scene of a solarpunk kitchen, and I wanted to make sure I didn't miss an opportunity to include something cool.

My current plan is for this one to be a kind of summer kitchen (like old farmhouses around here used to have) which doubles as a three season porch. I think a lot of the elements could fit a normal kitchen, but some will compliment each other well with this design so it might be a good place to start (and it fits my theme of reexamining older ways of doing things for opportunities to reuse).

My current list of elements:

• a Tamara Solar Kitchen -style oven cooker

• A glass wall (and bit of roof) for growing plants and overwintering sensitive fruit trees

• A solar hot water rig on the roof

• Some sort of plan for compost (currently just a resealable bucket on a counter, but for those of you who know more about composting, I'm happy to build in your dream system)

• A sitting area since people always hang out in the kitchen while you're cooking anyways.

• Maybe a parabolic grill set up outside, we'll see if that feels redundant.

I feel like I'm missing a bunch of opportunities, so if you have any ideas, now's a great time to add stuff

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/2234684

There's a few things I'd change now that I've looked at it for a few days and had some discussions - I think I'd rearrange the site for a few reasons around safety, though I do think they wouldn't want the crucible to have to travel too far, maybe I should have sunk the factory bunker-like into the ground, with only the doors at ground level. Maybe a different design entirely as I mentioned below. Either way, I think this might be relevant here, even if it isn't real yet.

So this one is kind of different from most solarpunk art, but then I suppose that’s the goal of this series. It’s not a scene of a farm, or a homestead, or a city full of people gardening. But I think scenes like this might be necessary. One thing I've noticed about solarpunk art is that the societies it depicts are usually pretty developed, plenty of concrete and refined metals in many of the scenes. But there's almost no scenes of solarpunk industry.

So where do all the tools, vehicles, and building supplies in the happy pastoral scenes come from? If we never show it either we've got no answers or we're might be implying that there's an underclass off-screen somewhere bearing all the costs (pollution, habitat loss, dangerous labor) of producing these goods so the people in the pictures can LARP as self-sufficient farmers. I want solarpunk art to be punk, not solarneoliberal so I want to make it clear that this future is genuinely equally distributed. I want to imagine the industry of a society almost obsessed with internalizing externalities. I want to see "but what happens with the waste?" and "where will the power come from?" affecting their every decision.

I think that society might be proud enough of whatever solutions they come up with to put them on a postcard.

I decided to start with steel recycling - steel and concrete production are both incredibly fuel-heavy industries, and society needs a certain amount of both to work, especially when rebuilding. Both take tremendous amounts of heat to produce.

I decided to try a scene where that heat was provided by a solar furnace using a ton of computer-controlled mirrors arranged stadium-seating style on the walls of an old pit mine, and a massive parabolic concentrator focusing the light on something like a blast furnace. I know almost nothing about steel manufacturing or solar furnaces so I'm certain my attempt to smash them together gets a lot of details laughably wrong (ironically steel can be smelted just fine using an electric arc furnace, so it'd probably be easier to just use existing industry technologies and hook it up to a green grid. I might try another junkyard someday scene showing that someday.) Perhaps cement production would have been a better fit for a solar furnace but I think that would require even longer stretches of heat.

I chose the design of the solar furnace with the giant parabolic mirror because they’re an established technology – several of these things exist in real life, and that seemed like a safer bet. Perhaps a better design would have been to do the scene in reverse, without the parabolic concentrator. Place the furnace up on the cliff, looking out over a massive, rising field of mirrors, all aimed at the furnace like a solar collection tower. Maybe I’ll do that one someday too.

Possibly these folks would use an electric arc to get the furnace primed in the morning, and the solar furnace to heat it through the day. I imagine the place is just as busy at night, with crews cutting and sorting scrap and preparing the mix of metals in the skip cars for the day shift.

One thing I really like about solar furnaces (and the reason I wanted to use one in a scene of heavy industry, even when I’m not sure about the practicality of the idea) is that they’re so simple. Mirrors, framework, and established formulas for overall shape, and you can produce incredible heat - up to 3,500 °C. The materials are commonly available, and require very little tech base to produce or assemble, and they can take some of the highest-resource-consuming tasks off the grid. They’re not as reliable as electric power, and that’s a trade-off, but the right combination of technologies, and some adjustment of expectations and schedules, could significantly drop the overall, societal requirements for the collection and storage and distribution of electricity.

I think it’s very much worth considering all sources of power, but also reconsidering some ways we’ve industrialized around profit motives and while ignoring externalities. A lot of technologies were in use recently (last 100 years) that might be a better fit for a more solarpunk world, but were dropped because they weren’t as fast at making product, or because modern power or fuel are so cheap.

And I think there are some cool old designs with potential (and, as always, tradeoffs). For example, in all the scenes I’ve done and have planned, you’ll see cable-powered streetcars and trains, rather than battery-powered electric busses. I’m not against batteries by any means, but they’re a limited resource. Streetcars worked fine for decades long before batteries were anywhere near efficient enough to move a vehicle they were onboard, and having the cars powered directly by grid the means more batteries available for other tasks, or simply less need to destroy habitats mining for the materials to make the kind of maximum-efficient batteries needed for onboard vehicles (and fewer to recycle after they’ve been used and reused long past the end of their functional life).

As for the negatives of a solar furnace, for one, they’re absolute hell on local birds. They’ll burn up anything that flies through the solar flux. (I’ve got a workshop design in the works where the dangerous parts are indoors, which I actually prefer). They depend on clear skies, not just of clouds but airborn dust, smoke, and haze can severely impact their effectiveness. Perhaps a more solarpunk world would have a different pace of life, less need to grind. Maybe the workers would be essentially on-call and if weather is good enough that day, they get on a train to the site, and if it isn’t, they get the day off, work at a different site, or perhaps the steel co-op pays them to help with other work in the community. A place that prioritizes minimizing harm over profits would likely be a very foreign country to all of us.

I know dams can mess up habitats, cutting fish and eels off from their full range or from their spawn points. But I'm also a big fan of using energy in the form we receive it (use solar light/heat for machining with focusing mirrors and lenses, use kinetic energy from windmills or water wheels to drive tools industrial revolution style, skip the lossy conversion into electricity and back again. I've got a workshop design in mind, what can I do to make a water wheel more okay?

I'm asking mostly because I want to include them in some solarpunk art I'm planning, but I can see building one at some point - it lines up well with my interests in making things and getting more self-sufficient - I like the idea of being able to cook without fuel.

But if I'm going to show them, I want to make sure I'm depicting them accurately and doing my world building decently. I'm hoping someone here has some experience with them,

I have a few scenes in mind where I'd like to include some form of solar cooker or smelter:

• A work crew outside, possibly people salvaging cars, fixing a road or track. They'd probably be using a small, foldable parabolic cooker to make tea or heat soup?
• A cookout with a bunch of different people making different things
• An offgrid homestead (possibly combined with above)
• A scrapyard which is smelting for large projects (it sounds like some very large reflector projects can get this hot but I'm not clear on how to turn that into molten metal yet)
• Small workshops using some kind of reflector or concentration lens to smelt for sand casting.
• Maybe just a kitchen.

My questions:

• What's the best design for different jobs? It sounds like the functionality of these cookers varies pretty heavily by design, so a scene of a cookout would probably have different ones doing different jobs - maybe one or two bigger ones built in to the yard or house, and portable ones people brought? A small workshop can probably build a good enough lens-based solar concentrator or reflector (not sure which would work best from what I've read yet) but the junkyard would probably need the giant reflector setup, right?

• How do you picture changes to cooking infrastructure? At least around here, kitchens are kind of built around gas or electric stoves, and woodstoves before them. A solar cooker would need to be close enough to be practical (I'd currently be carrying whatever I'm working on down several flights of stairs to reach good sunlight) Would we see more kitchens with attached decks? Built at least partially in glass sunrooms? Built on the roof or with some kind of rig that lifts up through the roof? Or just more cooking outdoors? Maybe these would be closer to a grill, where taking your food outside is part of it, and how often you use it depends on household

• What safety mechanisms can I show? It sounds like depending on the design, it wouldn't be hard to accidentally point the light at something flammable (even if it's not at the ideal focal length could it still ignite?) Is there a risk of eye injury, sunburn, or anything else I should add precautions for?

• It sounds like these take longer, and are perhaps closer to a crockpot, where you just leave them cooking for a long while. Worldbuilding-wise, how different would the cooking experience be, and are there any interesting impacts on a solarpunk society (which might already be lived in at a different pace, or placing emphasis on different things).

Thank you very much for any input!

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/2137460

Another postcard from a solarpunk future. Leaning in on the postcard thing this time. This is kind of a mix of a traditional photobash and the style I’ve been using/making for a rural cyberpunk comic I’ve been working on. The difference is that this time I kept the source images underneath the line art, and used them for the color, whereas with the comic, I convert each element to lines individually, then combine and draw over them, and then color by hand underneath. As with the rest, it’s collaged together from images from all over the place, mostly textures.com, pexels, freepik, and of course, the lowes, amazon, and home depot websites, plus some screenshots of 3d models. I’ll disclose that I did use AI art for two elements of this one, I asked a friend’s midjourny bot to make the deer spraypaint mural, and the colorful mandala I used on the street car.

This was a scene I’d been picturing for awhile, I started building a more dynamic, two point perspective, but kept coming back to this flatter version whenever I thought about this building. I got talking with my SO about the streetcar in that scene, and realized that’s what I could put in the foreground here. That, and the simplicity of the design and the fact that I could bang it out in a couple days, convinced me to just go ahead and make this one too. It’s brighter, and different than most stuff I’ve made, but I’m pleased with it just the same.

I imagine this building is somewhat well known in this fictional place. I think it was probably converted into living space while the world was busy being a little more postapoclyptic than solarpunk, with new residents just scavenging materials from whatever they could. It’s since grown into a sort of community art project, proud of its history, squatters rights, and the reuse of its materials. The first floor is mixed residential/commercial space (you’d almost have to go out of your way to keep a former parking garage from being handicapped accessible, but I figure some first floor places would make things much easier). The roof is covered in a fruit tree orchard, I used apple, pear, and peach trees, all carefully found and cut out in detail before completely blasting them to get them to fit the style I was picturing. I figure these are planted in big planters, rather than directly on the surface of the roof. The building can support it, but standing water, especially in places that freeze, can be really bad for buildings, and tree roots can crack concrete just as well as ice.

As I said, I thought a lot about the design we'd use for the streetcar. My SO and I had some good conversations about aesthetics and what they implied because of genre conventions, down to real world infrastructure, maintenance, and the role of community in a project like this. We considered cyberpunk designs, with all kinds of planes and angles and sleek black coatings, to things that looked halfway like boats or other weird contraptions.

I was torn between wanting its purpose to be visually clear at a glance, and wanting to show something genuinely strange or futuristic.

I settled on a 1910s-ish streetcar for the base both because it's visually clear, and because I think it might be a practical starting point for a society that's trying to rebuild from scratch using entirely local manufacturing. The design is kinda crude but it's proven - streetcars like this were ubiquitous in the US once upon a time. And they used 1910s-era motors, controls, metallurgy, and manufacturing. It feels like this would be a reasonable starting point, especially with a ready supply of scavenged components and high quality metals laying around above ground in the form of existing vehicles (even wrecks).

I like to imagine that this is a newer phase in this citys' public transit infrastructure, that they're starting to standardize their vehicles to simplify things. I like the idea that the first generation of these streetcars were genuinely a community project, that the city/public transit folks settled on some specifications and devoted their limited budget and manufacturing to producing standardized bases, (basically the bottom frame, wheels, motors, and pantograph rig) and that people built the carriages out of whatever they had access to. Each streetcar would be a unique, craft-built contraption, sort of 'public transit by way of Weekend Wasteland.' All kinds of crazy streetcars made from campers, boats, old school buses, whatever people had access to. City safety inspectors and a committee of local people with an emphasis on the disabled, would review each one and specify any necessary changes. This got them a fleet of ready streetcars quickly, allowing them to start providing services while more slowly manufacturing standardized ones to replace the most problematic of the home-built machines.

The slow standardization would be somewhat contentious within a community that took pride in building it's own infrastructure, and in the art-like variety. They might chafe at standardization and formalization, like it's a sign that society is stratifying again. Though the convenience of a more reliable transit network might help balance it out. As a nod to the artistic spirit and history of the fleet, the new vehicles are painted uniquely by members of the community.

Previous postcards:

https://imgur.com/gallery/BJHdVTP https://imgur.com/gallery/hefGfW6

I'm planning out a photobash (hopefully part of a set) showcasing options and possibilities for a more solarpunk world. My goal for these is for them to be a more practical and actionable view of a solarpunk society, more than just green skyscrapers or super scifi-looking places. I'm mostly setting these in a post-crumbles setting, with a focus on rebuilding in a more thoughtful and inclusive way. I want to try to illustrate solarpunk concepts and themes directly. 

I've done a co-op salvaging technology for reuse, and a high speed railway, and I'd like to take a shot at showing the places where people live next - just a street at a time, so not every scene will check every box, but I'd very much like to source ideas to include while I'm still planning layouts.

I've got a few different elements I'd like to include already (again maybe not all in one scene):

• More colorful buildings, emphasizing buildings as a canvas for art from graffiti to commissioned murals
• Lots and lots of trees. I like the idea of a street/path layout that provides each building with some kind of vehicle access (for firetrucks and ambulances and handicapped people, along with day-to-day things like moving trucks, large items deliveries, construction vehicles) while converting many roads to forested bike and pedestrian paths. At the very least, more tree-lined streets
• Streetcars/streetcar cables overhead (emphasizing public transit)
• options for a Third Place, where people can be outside home or work without having to be customers or tresspassers (I really don't have any of these yet)
• Alternate uses of existing structures and resources; I want to avoid the feeling of a scratch-built or utopian future. I'm currently working on a parking garage converted to living space with colorful facades between the concrete, and a farm, park, or forest (I haven't decided yet) on the roof
• The tech salvage co-op from last time delivering a laptop or running wires, building a meshnet
• Green energy, solar and wind in realistic locations (so not much wind in the cityscapes, I suspect) especially in a setting where infrastructure has been neglected and rebuilt
• Alternatives to corporations, and an emphasis on society being run by and for regular people
• Alternatives to cars; bicycles, rickshaws (pedal-powered and electric), 
• Fruit trees, public gardens

If you have any additional elements, ideas for scenes/combos of elements, or specific ways you think things should be shown, and especially practical considerations, please let me know. It's a lot easier to work those in while I'm planning rather than trying to work on it once layers are all tangled and perspectived.

It's been awhile since I did proper full colors and textures photobashes, and I'm still working on the more loose/casual style, but I'm getting a bit better as I go, I'm happy to take ideas.

Also, I'd also like to do some more non-city scenes, rewilding, smaller communities linked by public transit, but don't have any specifics yet.