i got sleepy

From the article:

On his return home, Schreiber wanted to spread the word. The next year he held his first wind turbine-building workshop, founding PureSelfMade, a nonprofit to teach people how to make their own wind turbines from scratch. Ever since, Schreiber, who returns to Scoraig every year to see Piggott and other friends, has been offering courses, usually for groups of between eight and 20 people, on how to make wind turbines from scratch, including rotor blades and custom-made generators, and setting up the basic electrics. Although outputs vary depending on locations, most turbines could power several appliances, but not an entire home. Often they are connected to batteries to store energy for when it’s needed. In the context of volatile energy prices, the pressing need to shift to renewable power, the limits of centralized electricity systems and the risks of relying on foreign supply chains, there’s growing demand for communities to become energy self-sufficient. Until now, so-called “small wind” has been a relatively overlooked local provider. But for Schreiber, the “DIY approach” brings with it a level of reassurance and freedom. “Instead of big industry, I prefer the more grassroots way,” he says. “I like the idea of decentralization. With a lot of chaos in the world, it’s better to be self-sufficient, to have a reliable energy system at home.”

I have seen a lot of solarpunks ask about wintery/snowy areas, and I have seen a few posts about it in the solarpunk tags. Here are some things I’ve collected for you:

Whittier, Alaska is a town where everyone lives in one big building. This is a great idea in itself, and I feel like you could play with it a little more. It’s a great way to maintain a community, and I imagine it would also maintain a low environmental impact. Underground cities would also follow along those lines.

Jumping off of that, indoor farming. This farm boasts better productivity than conventional farming! That would be a perfect thing to have in your one-building town, or any town really. 

In places where the sun isn’t seen most of the year, solar energy won’t be of much use, so the main energy creation modes would be wind, waves, and human motion, with algae for light. 

Speaking of light, I think lights would play a big part of the fashion in places where the sun shines infrequently. 

Even incorporate it into accessible design

Or perhaps the citizens could celebrate the surroundings they have, and wear nighttime inspired clothes.

And if they celebrate their environment, of course ice would be included

This post has a lot of important notes about solarpunk fashion that apply here. 

Glowing sidewalks for navigation and comfy clothes for cold weather

Lantern and fire festivals to celebrate the return of the sun

The half-circles are called zaï! They're a traditional farming practice in the Sahel desert, and their introduction + reintroduction can be largely credited to Yacouba Sawadogo, the man linked above! He reintroduced and innovated on the zaï on his own farm in the 1980s, and did extensive outreach (along with scientist Mathieu Ouédraogo) to encourage other farmers to adopt them as well.

He also promoted the use of cordons pierreux, which are basically just lines of rocks to reduce erosion, preserve sediments, and increase water absorption.

www.paypal.me/jnwampler

V: KajiW

C: $kajiw

Do not doubt my power

One god, don’t play with any others.

Everything is God

One big god or small group of gods made everything but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other smaller ones that work for the big one(s)

There’s one god but all of these hundreds of gods are aspects of that one god and the aspects of the one god can absolutely marry each other and have marital squabbles

Individuality is an illusion and the universe is a series of vibes experiencing itself

The world used to be an egg but then that egg became a god and then that god made some other gods and then those gods became bored and made the universe and then they got to screwing each other to make even more gods and now there’s hundreds of them and exactly what gods are worshiped changes on who you ask in a particular region

Everything has a soul. Act like it.

Someone or something spoke the world into existence and we’ve been stealing other people’s stories ever since we’ll take whatever gods you have

A bunch of regional gods got smushed together and now there’s a state mandated religion that’s trying to make this smaller pantheon more popular than local folk religion

The difference between a god, a nature spirit, and a legendary person is extremely unclear even to worshipers but there’s shrines to all of them

A god chose these people to be their special guys and their special guys are gonna have a tough time. That god may be the only god or it may be one of many those people believe exist

Humans were kinda stupid until this one spirit or person showed up and taught them how to do stuff so now we do stuff to thank the person or thing that taught us how to do stuff

The world will keep on ending and being rebuilt it just does that sometimes nobody knows when it started or if it ever did

You can learn a lot from talking animals.

People were made to do work the god(s) don’t wanna do

People were made because the god(s) were lonely/bored/drunk

This river in particular is the most important thing in the whole universe

https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polytheism-part-i-knowledge/

https://acoup.blog/2019/11/01/collections-practical-polytheism-part-ii-practice/

https://acoup.blog/2019/11/08/collections-practical-polytheism-part-iii-polling-the-gods/

https://acoup.blog/2019/11/15/collections-practical-polytheism-part-iv-little-gods-and-big-people/

'How Not To Fantasy Religion' https://acoup.blog/2019/06/04/new-acquisitions-how-it-wasnt-game-of-thrones-and-the-middle-ages-part-ii/

Actually his whole page of resources for nerdy worldbuilders is kind of awesome

once again i am begging you guys: make dandelion jelly this year. it's incredibly delicious.

Ingredients

2 cups dandelion petals, lightly packed

4 cups water

4 cups sugar (2-3 if using low-sugar sure-set pectin)

2 Tbs. lemon juice

1 box powdered pectin

Instructions

Cut the green part of the flower off and place the petals into a quart canning jar. (i have the best success cutting them in half with my thumbnail then slicing just above the seed line)

Pour 4 cups of boiling water over the flower petals. Allow them to cool and then place into the fridge for 24 hours.

Strain the flowers well and squeeze out as much dandelion tea as possible. Using a clean dishcloth is better than a metal strainer.

Place into a large pot 3 1/2 to 4 cups of dandelion tea, lemon juice, and pectin. Bring it to a boil.

Add sugar and return to a boil while stirring. Boil the jelly for 1 to 2 minutes.

Remove from the heat and pour into canning jars. Let the jars cool to room temp then pop them in the fridge to set overnight.

The Solarpunk "fantasy" that so many of us tout as a dream vision, converting golf courses into ecological wonderlands, is being implemented across the USA according to this NYT article!

The article covers courses in Michigan, Pennsylvania, California, Colorado, and New York that are being bought and turned into habitat and hiking trails.

The article goes more into detail about how sand traps are being turned into sand boxes for kids, endangered local species are being planted, rocks for owl habitat are being installed, and that as these courses become wilder, they are creating more areas for biodiversity to thrive.

Most of the courses in transition are being bought by Local Land Trusts. Apparently the supply of golf courses in the USA is way over the demand, and many have been shut down since the early 2000s. While many are bought up and paved over, land Trusts have been able to buy several and turn them into what the communities want: public areas for people and wildlife. It does make a point to say that not every hold course location lends itself well to habitat for animals (but that doesn't mean it wouldn't make great housing!)

So lets be excited by the fact that people we don't even know about are working on the solutions we love to see! Turning a private space that needs thousands of gallons of water and fertilizer into an ecologically oriented public space is the future I want to see! I can say when I used to work in water conservation, we were getting a lot of clients that were golf courses that were interested in cutting their resource input, and they ended up planting a lot of natives! So even the golf courses that still operate could be making an effort.

And here's a link to a:

Paywall-free version

I'm hoping to write a science fiction story about visiting Venus as part of the space race and I would love your input

Alright so the thing with Venus is that we're all very familiar with her horrible hell-death clouds and 900°F surface temperatures. We all understand the surface of Venus is not a fun place for humans to be.

But, nobody ever talks about the fact that ABOVE the hell-death clouds, Venus is a paradise. The most Earth-like environment we know of in the solar system, beyond Earth itself, is actually in the skies of Venus.

About 30 miles above the surface, the pressure is ~1 atmosphere, and the temperature ranges from 30 - 100°F, which is Happy Human™ standard pressure and temperature.

What's more, a breathable mix of oxygen and nitrogen provides over 60% the lifting power on Venus that helium does on Earth. In other words, a balloon full of human-breathable air would float to the habitable range of Venus's atmosphere. We could float a ship with the very air we breathe.

The other great thing about this is that it avoids one of the big problems with Mars colonization. On Mars, any habitat on the surface full of breathable air is vulnerable to leaks and explosive decompression, a la the Martian.

Floating on Venus, a balloon full of breathable air doesn't have a significant pressure difference between the inside and the outside. Which means, any leaks or tears would be very slow and manageable. You could fix that shit with duct tape!

Similarly, because the environment outside the balloon is so Earth-like, humans living there wouldn't need any big fancy pressurized suits for extravehicular work. We'd need air to breathe, maybe some heat protection, and protection against the acid rain. That's it. 

Venus also provides the tools to keep us fed! It's atmosphere is made primarily of carbon dioxide, even above the dense horrible clouds. What likes carbon dioxide? Plants from Earth!! Lets grow FOOD on FLOATING PLATFORMS in the SKIES of VENUS.

This whole idea actually came out of a NASA effort exploring potential Venus colonization. The program was called HAVOC - the High Altitude Venus Operational Concept.

It hasn't really gone anywhere, and as far as I know there are no real plans to revisit it. Unfortunately, from a practicality standpoint, Mars is a much more viable target for human colonization. Not only is it better poised for outer solar system exploration, being farther away from the sun, but living on Venus would come with too many complicated contingencies. In the event of a major failure on Venus, you'd need to fly to another base, or fuck off all the way to orbit. I understand why people aren't really in a hurry to live somewhere where landing on the surface means certain death.

But that doesn't mean I won't be forever and always enamored by the skies of Venus. Here's one of the artist concepts to come out of HAVOC.

As relentless rains pounded LA, the city’s “sponge” infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of water—enough to sustain over 100,000 households for a year.

Earlier this month, the future fell on Los Angeles. A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped 9 inches of rain on the city over three days—over half of what the city typically gets in a year. It’s the kind of extreme rainfall that’ll get ever more extreme as the planet warms.

The city’s water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban areas around the world, in recent years LA has been transforming into a “sponge city,” replacing impermeable surfaces, like concrete, with permeable ones, like dirt and plants. It has also built out “spreading grounds,” where water accumulates and soaks into the earth.

With traditional dams and all that newfangled spongy infrastructure, between February 4 and 7 the metropolis captured 8.6 billion gallons of stormwater, enough to provide water to 106,000 households for a year. For the rainy season in total, LA has accumulated 14.7 billion gallons.

Long reliant on snowmelt and river water piped in from afar, LA is on a quest to produce as much water as it can locally. “There's going to be a lot more rain and a lot less snow, which is going to alter the way we capture snowmelt and the aqueduct water,” says Art Castro, manager of watershed management at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “Dams and spreading grounds are the workhorses of local stormwater capture for either flood protection or water supply.”

Centuries of urban-planning dogma dictates using gutters, sewers, and other infrastructure to funnel rainwater out of a metropolis as quickly as possible to prevent flooding. Given the increasingly catastrophic urban flooding seen around the world, though, that clearly isn’t working anymore, so now planners are finding clever ways to capture stormwater, treating it as an asset instead of a liability. “The problem of urban hydrology is caused by a thousand small cuts,” says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley. “No one driveway or roof in and of itself causes massive alteration of the hydrologic cycle. But combine millions of them in one area and it does. Maybe we can solve that problem with a thousand Band-Aids.”

Or in this case, sponges. The trick to making a city more absorbent is to add more gardens and other green spaces that allow water to percolate into underlying aquifers—porous subterranean materials that can hold water—which a city can then draw from in times of need. Engineers are also greening up medians and roadside areas to soak up the water that’d normally rush off streets, into sewers, and eventually out to sea...

To exploit all that free water falling from the sky, the LADWP has carved out big patches of brown in the concrete jungle. Stormwater is piped into these spreading grounds and accumulates in dirt basins. That allows it to slowly soak into the underlying aquifer, which acts as a sort of natural underground tank that can hold 28 billion gallons of water.

During a storm, the city is also gathering water in dams, some of which it diverts into the spreading grounds. “After the storm comes by, and it's a bright sunny day, you’ll still see water being released into a channel and diverted into the spreading grounds,” says Castro. That way, water moves from a reservoir where it’s exposed to sunlight and evaporation, into an aquifer where it’s banked safely underground.

On a smaller scale, LADWP has been experimenting with turning parks into mini spreading grounds, diverting stormwater there to soak into subterranean cisterns or chambers. It’s also deploying green spaces along roadways, which have the additional benefit of mitigating flooding in a neighborhood: The less concrete and the more dirt and plants, the more the built environment can soak up stormwater like the actual environment naturally does.

As an added benefit, deploying more of these green spaces, along with urban gardens, improves the mental health of residents. Plants here also “sweat,” cooling the area and beating back the urban heat island effect—the tendency for concrete to absorb solar energy and slowly release it at night. By reducing summer temperatures, you improve the physical health of residents. “The more trees, the more shade, the less heat island effect,” says Castro. “Sometimes when it’s 90 degrees in the middle of summer, it could get up to 110 underneath a bus stop.”

LA’s far from alone in going spongy. Pittsburgh is also deploying more rain gardens, and where they absolutely must have a hard surface—sidewalks, parking lots, etc.—they’re using special concrete bricks that allow water to seep through. And a growing number of municipalities are scrutinizing properties and charging owners fees if they have excessive impermeable surfaces like pavement, thus incentivizing the switch to permeable surfaces like plots of native plants or urban gardens for producing more food locally.

So the old way of stormwater management isn’t just increasingly dangerous and ineffective as the planet warms and storms get more intense—it stands in the way of a more beautiful, less sweltering, more sustainable urban landscape. LA, of all places, is showing the world there’s a better way.

there are palestinian kids who should be in school, getting ready for a new semester. they should be procrastinating their homework, texting their friends. they should get to go home when they feel unsafe or upset.

instead, the school year was suspended on november 6th. over 200 schools have been bombed. more than 7,870 children have been killed. kids do not have a safe place. anywhere. their homes are being destroyed and their schools are being destroyed and the places they used to hang out at and eat at and shop at and pray at and mourn at and live at are actively being destroyed

people of palestine, of all ages, should be living their lives. they should be having normal experiences. they should be going to the movies or redecorating their rooms or celebrating birthdays or scrolling their phones for no reason. but they’re not. they’re not allowed to have the comfort of mindless human joy without constant threat and fear and bloodshed, and it is the fault of israel, the united states, and other fucked corrupt governments.

there have been close to 20,000 palestinian deaths, almost 2.2 million people displaced, and an estimated half of those people face starvation.

we need to fucking do something. the fact that the US still refuses to support a ceasefire is disgusting and evil. the claim that all anti-israeli statements are based in antisemitism is hurting both the people of palestine and jewish people worldwide.

here’s some things you can do:

-donate if you can or ask someone you know to donate

-sign a petition to demand a ceasefire

-fill out a form to email your representative. then do it again. then do it again. then do it again.

-boycott and avoid all companies on this list that you can (especially now that the holidays are rolling around: buy from independent stores, non-big name brands)

-spam text your friends and family with this post and these links

-reblog to spread awareness, interact with other posts that give instructions for direct action, follow palestinian voices

-instead of feeling guilt or denying yourself personal happiness, do all you can to make a difference. it doesn’t matter if you don’t have money to donate or if you’re a minor. you can always contact representatives or sign petitions

If you enjoyed this, consider checking out my Ko-Fi for a printable zine version (or just to support my art :))