Movim is awesome! PoVoq put a bunch of work into getting it set up and linked with Lemmy so if you have an account here, you can just start using the microblogging platform too! I use WordPress for my art and writing and Movim for my making-and-fixing-type projects, and I mostly prefer Movim - the interface is nice, it’s free, doesn’t spatter everything I write with gross ads, and it’s not corporate. I’d very much recommend it.

Thanks! I pulled it from one of the more popular solarpunk flags. Out of all the ones I’ve seen, many of which feature the sun-and-gear motif in some configuration, it’s my favorite symbol for the movement; It’s very simple and visually clear, and easy to render with one color.

A stack of ewaste laptops I’m fixing up to give away, and this jailbroken Chromebook I reinstalled with Alpine Linux which has become my writing computer whenever I’m out and about.

In the northeast there used to be a fair bit, but I think a lot has been torn up in the process of making bike paths. A lot of the small towns I grew up in still have intact tracks running between their centers, I’d love if these pods made an appearance, if only to show folks that trains can be useful to them.

Man I wish our trains ran anywhere near that constantly. They stop the public transit around midnight in my city, but that doesn’t stop it from being tremendously useful during the rest of the time. You learn to plan for it, and advocate for improvements whenever you can

Glad you like them!

Sorry, the ones I’m talking about are TV screen sized.

Like this:

I’ve seen them burn through steel, so it can get small stuff at least hot enough to work. Hopefully at least equivalent to a coffee can forge

Thanks for the info! Collecting the heat and regulating it for a job like printing makes a lot of sense to me. Similarly, there’s a bunch of other tasks that wouldn’t require the same kind of precision - smelting metal in a crucible, heating metal to forge it (I’m hoping to try to build a solar forge this summer if I can get a fresnel lense from a rear projection TV), maybe heating a glassblowing furnace. Those just looked kinda small in the big space I’d laid out.

And yeah, I know photovoltaics are more practical for most things since they line up with how we already do things. I mostly include what I think of as weird solar because solarpunk art is already lousy with photovoltaic panels but there are a ton of other ways to directly use solar for thermal and light. I really like the idea of using energy in the form we receive it to minimize conversion losses, and to put less strain on the grid/batteries. Sometimes the art goals scrape up against the other goals a bit.

Thanks again!

A lot of people have used time travel to steal Games Workshop’s IP

Thanks! And sure, I can do that.

Thanks! I’m glad you like it

I think so. I mean, I’ll agree that a lot of the art tagged as solarpunk is utopian, unactionable, and generally gives a poor first impression of the rest of the genre/movement. The chromed scifi megacities with trees stuck to the sides of skyscrapers are about as attainable as concept art of a flying city or a moon colony. If they never looked past the paintings on deviantart or artstation or whatever they’d probably get a pretty skewed perspective on it.

But I’d say the answer to that is just to make more art that reflects the rest of the movement better since the answers and discussions and real life projects are all happening

Yes, it’s a home for solitary bees. There are a bunch of species of solitary bees, who don’t live in hives or swarm with others. They’re still an important part of our ecosystem and play a big role in pollination but they don’t get quite as much attention as the honeybees.

They collect pollen to survive and to feed their young. Typically they find a hole of the right size, like the ones in these sticks, and make a bunch of compartments inside (out of mud or chewed plant fibers) where they lay their eggs. They give each egg some pollen they’ve gathered and seal them in for the winter. In the spring the eggs hatch and new bees emerge, eat the pollen, dig their way out, and start the cycle again.

It’s good to identify the kinds of bees you want, since they need different size holes, and to put the house somewhere the morning sun will hit it, near some flowers or flowering shrubs.

It’s a nice way to help provide habitats. Solitary bees are typically pretty skittish and won’t/can’t form angry swarms because of the whole solitary thing. Carpenter bees will sometimes fly close to humans, but mostly because they’re just big curious bumbling buddies and they’re nearsighted. Once they figure out what you are they fly away. I’ve never had any trouble with the residents of our bee house.

I just make them available for free - the images with their text writeups are here: https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com/postcards-from-a-solarpunk-future/

And the full size versions are available here: https://mega.nz/folder/PA1XGQhQ#eXMPhzAwkv01_PQDINJvfw

If you wanted to own a physical copy feel free to get them printed

Sorry to hear that. I give them away whenever I finish one (these ones are already handed off to a refugee resettlement agency though I also sometimes offer them up on my local Buy Nothing group). If your old laptop still has its original OS working you might be able to do a factory reset, or worst case, as long as the hardware works, you could try to install Linux Mint on it, which is what I’d do. Best of luck!

I think robogromo’s /c/pigrow might be able to help with this, though it has so many features it might overshoot what you need.

I just helped my neighbor replace his front lawn with low-growing roman chamomile and lavender. I’m hoping to rig up a little solar powered water feature using secondhand parts soon.

I have getting ready to replace the holes in the solitary bee house I set up at my parents’ place:

I’ve been cutting 6" sticks from storm damaged tree limbs, and drilling the various-size holes (I’ve got a set of 8" metric drill bits that get the full-length they need (some folk just use cardboard tubes or reeds, but this works fine for me. It’s important to replace the sticks every year after they emerge so we don’t propagate diseases or parasites in the solitary bees.

Once I find a couple 6"x1" oak boards (maybe when someone throws out a bed?) I’ll be able to cut the arching back pieces for a wood and cast iron park bench I’m trying to fix up. I need to take a wire wheel to the rusty metal parts, then paint it and fabricate the wooden parts of the back (I already have the slats for the seat but they do need to be sanded, stained, urethaned, and attached). Then I can put it out near our local bike path.

Need to put a new tire and tube on my front bike wheel.

One of my hobbies is fixing up ewaste laptops and giving them to an organization in my city that rehomes refugees. I actually do ewaste in general, mostly through our local Buy Nothing groups, (everything from HDMI adapters to space heaters) but the modern-ish laptops go to the charity. I was able to get three laptops ready to go recently, and I’ll be looking for more to work on for folks in my community next.

The Lenovo and MacBook Air came from a friend at the recycling center - he’s allowed to set computers aside for donation if he catches the people dropping them off and gets permission, otherwise they get sent away for secure destruction. He also gets me laptop chargers sometimes too, which saves a ton of money. The one in the middle I found in corporate ewaste (I got permission to dig through on occasion). Everything’s been tested and wiped and updated as far as it’ll go. This set was easy, they were all intact, so I didn’t have to get any replacement parts.

I’m also working on a set of photobashes, styled like postcards from a solarpunk future, that I’m hoping will help push the visual aspect of solarpunk art more towards the rest of the movement. I want people to see solarpunk art and think, “why aren’t we doing that?” or “could that work?” I think it should depict a more lived-in, human future and demonstrate possibilities, technologies, and alternative ways of doing things. I’m also trying to cover seasons, locations, and topics like industry that I haven’t seen in other solarpunk art to sway people’s first impressions from thinking it’s an empty aesthetic. I try to advocate for values like reuse I think fit the movement but are underrepresented in the visual artwork.

I just helped my neighbor replace his front lawn with low growing roman chamomile and lavender. I’m hoping to rig up a little solar powered water feature using secondhand parts soon.

I have been cutting 6" sticks from storm damaged tree limbs, and drilling the various-size holes for the the solitary bee house I set up at my parents’ place. Need to replace the sticks every year after they emerge so we don’t propagate diseases or parasites in the solitary bees.

Once I find a couple 6"x1" oak boards (maybe when someone throws out a bed?) I’ll be able to cut the arching back pieces for a wood and cast iron park bench im trying to fix up. I need to take a wire wheel to the rust and paint it, fabricate the back (I already have the slats for the seat but they do need to be sanded, stained, urethaned, and attached). Then I can put it out near our local bike path.

Need to put a new tire and tube on my front bike wheel.

I’m working on some more photobashes too.

I’d never really thought about the fact that museums doing photogrammetry to preserve artifacts could link up with the folks who 3D print their own Warhammer figures, but here we are

I mean, the place is so absurdly big and spans so much time there’s room for variances in procedure and tradition, even inside the same organizations. Especially the inquisition which seems to grant its members an unusual degree of autonomy (from the few books I’ve read that featured them). But even the guard fields a wide variety of regiments with different specializations and ways of doing things. I just sort of assume the mechanicus and administratum and others all see a fair bit of variety, if only because the empire is so huge and poorly coordinated. The variety of tones in different stories is also something I like, for some reason - it seems to help show the scale, I think?