JacobCoffinWrites

joined 1 year ago
[–] JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net 14 points 5 days ago

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.

There are some interesting projects turning them into pedestrian bridges and roofs for bike racks.

Seconding this - if I ever move back home I'll be looking for some kind of little electric kei truck for hauling trash and supplies. Most of my driving when I lived there was under 50mph and over fairly short distances.

[–] JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 month ago

Thanks so much, that's great to hear! And thanks for all your input! Sorry the text is small, I work on a knockoff wacom-style tablet so I get used to looking at it zoomed in and from pretty close to the screen.

Feel free to post it anywhere, I'm always delighted to find out when these images travel around a bit on their own.

[–] JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 month ago

Thanks so much! This was a fun one, I always loved these kind of diagrams/wimmelbilder type pictures and had a lot of fun trying to make one.

 

This is a little different from my other photobashes in that this one can’t really pass as a postcard. I ended up having so many things to include in the topic of flood-compatible cities that the only way to fit them all was to keep expanding the canvas. I think I have enough for a second picture (and possibly a third), but we’ll get to what’s missing in a moment.

So awhile back, I stumbled on to this discussion on reddit about what solarpunk might look like in a wetland area (and what it'd mean for cities built in wetlands). I very much believe that solarpunk will look radically different based on location, with infrastructure, routines, fashion, etc, being carefully tailored to fit climate, local weather, and the available materials, so this really caught my attention.

That discussion lead to this one, and this one, then this one as well as this conversation back over there plus several good chats on the Fully Automated and Solarpunk Hub discords.

I received a ton of awesome input which I genuinely couldn’t have made this without. Thank you! Most of the ideas here came from those talks. Even when people disagreed with each others’ suggestions, I tried to include them in the scene if I could make them fit.

The basic idea is for this to be a city that expects to be flooded regularly. One where, if the water rises a few feet seasonally, everything stays basically the same, and if a huge storm rolls in and swamps the whole area, people grumble about it, but can mostly still go about their day (using things like elevated walkways). The lower portions of buildings are used for third place activities that can be packed up and removed when forecasts predict bad weather (like marketplaces) or which use sturdy, permanent structures which can be hosed clean later.

There’s an argument to be made that the best answer to building cities in swamps is the simplest: don’t do it. And if you’ve failed that step, then you shouldn’t rebuild when whatever you build inevitably gets flooded.

I think there’s a lot of reasons to push back on that. Most major cities are already built on waterways or on the coasts due to the value of those locations for shipping and industry. Some are already below seal level, others are likely to be in the future as climate change worsens. These places house millions of people, they represent home, historical legacies, and preserving them helps preserve the cultures and communities of the people who live there. Lots of cities are looking for answers to rising water, and I’d love to see what solarpunk versions look like.

Sponge city tactics came up a lot in our discussions but we struggled to find ones that fit for a city (like New Orleans) which are at least partially located below sea level. If I expand the image to the left, I think I can definitely include a few, but generally, the water needs somewhere to go.

That said, I think this scene fits a tight shot of a much larger take on sponge city tactics of slowing water and absorbing it where possible.

Our current society has spent a lot of resources on straightening rivers for shipping and building dams and levees to shunt extra water downstream, to make it the next town’s problem, rather than suffer floods themselves. Farmers don’t want their fields washed out or polluted with debris so they build more levees and so on and so forth.

I think a solarpunk civilization might accept on some level that rivers are going to meander, they’re going to rise seasonally, and they’re going to flood the flood plains they’ve always washed over, and it might build with those expectations in mind. A solarpunk setting might adjust itself to coexist with the weather and floods rather than use huge infrastructure projects to try to keep them away.

The admittedly thin backstory I’ve got in mind is that this was a city which frequently flooded, and where some of its lowest areas (possibly mostly abandoned already due to uninsured damages and unlivable conditions near the collapse) were ceded to the water but not surrendered altogether. People built some structures higher than the water is likely to reach, and everywhere else, they float on it in boats, float houses, or even large rafts which contain small neighborhoods. They farm locally using floating gardens, hydroponics, Chinampas, and more. This isn’t a pristine wetland that’s been colonized, but a flooded neighborhood which has been partially rewilded.

I pulled in a few different living-with-water concepts in for this one:

  • The lifted buildings are an upscaled version of the lifted houses you can find all along the US Gulf Coast, intended to survive storm surges and floods during hurricanes.
  • I based the covered upper walkway on the iron lace balconies found on some buildings in the New Orleans French Quarter. It’s not quite the ‘correct’ use of the design, since they don’t traditionally span from building to building, but I thought it’d be a nice reference. The goal here is that if the area really floods, and the ground level is unsafe to traverse, people still have a way to get around. For safety purposes, I figure each building needs a ladder on each road to access the upper level in an emergency. For accessibility, I included frequent, standardized elevators and 15 degree ramps.
  • I used this amphibious bus design because it looked more municipal than the DUKW style duckboats many cities have for recreational purposes. Credit to Cromlyngames for suggesting this idea (and then making this 3d model about it). I suspect the amphibious design would be harder to maintain than a normal bus because of the sealed hull, but perhaps some of the efficiencies and practice that come with a larger, standardized fleet would help.
  • Dutch-style floating houses (these exist all over the world but I referenced dutch ones while making this scene). These are just meant to be towed into place and parked. Unlike the houseboats which are more boat than house and can travel as they want.
  • A Bangkok-style water bus – the idea is that the flooded zone is likely somewhat shallow, with deeper waterways intended for transit between neighborhoods of floating houses, large rafts supporting small neighborhoods, and through rivers and canals in the dryer parts of the city. If I do another scene, I’ll try to include a transfer station where passengers can switch between boat and an elevated train.
  • Waterways with restored eelgrass for manatees. I wanted to show some of the work that’s been done restoring rivers in the US south.
  • Chinampa agricultural system (farming on artificial islands) this is a pretty ancient farming practice from Mexico and Central America, which is still in use in some areas, and I’m still learning about it. I’ve done my best to get the scale and composition of the design correct. Some of the trees might be a bit overlarge, but they wouldn’t be planted very densely.

Other notes/elements included:

  • There’s a Savonius wind turbine attached to one of the dolphins (poles) for the dock. I imagine this probably isn’t supposed to be there, since it could get in the way during a high flood, but perhaps there’s not much enforcement or its the subject of a disagreement.
  • Awnings and porches to shade windows and balconies and buildings. The simple solutions work.
  • The hospital in the background would need to be able to operate during a flood, and to have water access (possibly via canals) so that people with only boats can access it quickly, in addition to road access.
  • The climbing wall probably isn’t ideal, as you’d want open spaces between the pillars if the flood will have a current. This was kind of an art decision - I needed a type of tall, narrow third place to include that would demonstrate its use even with the bus in the way and that seemed like the best option I could think of. Climbing walls are often made with wood frames and plywood – this one would have to be able to survive submersion, so perhaps it’s made from thick sections of recycled plastic or something similar. My other plan was just some trees, to show that it was a park, but that wasn’t as clear.

Speaking of third places, here’s some other ideas we had for third places you could have under these buildings. Presented in no particular order:

  • Tide pools and natural landscape features
  • Parks
  • Dog Parks
  • Meeting rooms
  • Lecture spots (could double as a bring-your-own-movie movie theater)
  • Squash courts
  • Playground (depending on the design)
  • Planetarium?
  • Speaker’s corners
  • Booths for food trucks or downstairs seating for a lifted cafeteria
  • Parkour course
  • Roller rink
  • Laser tag/paintball arena
  • Fresh water reserve tanks (firefighting, heat sinks, municipal cleaning as well as last reserve drinking water post major floods
  • Possibly storage for flood-tolerant stuff like scaffolding

Things I’d like to include next time:

  • Floating neighborhoods in the style of the floating islands of the Uros on Lake Titicaca (this would take a fair bit of space and a lot more reading)
  • A transfer station where passengers can switch between boat and an elevated train
  • Amphibious emergency vehicles

This image, like all the Postcards from a Solarpunk Future, is CC-BY, use it how you like.

[–] JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Thanks, I appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions!

[–] JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

Thanks!! That's really good to know about Bald Cypress! That was my first guess for selecting trees. I ended up picking them and black willows, just based on range and look but I'll take your advice and leave the willows generic. I think these chinampas are kind of overgrown at the moment, but I figure the trees don't cover the entire thing, just the corners. I was able to find some roots to reference (mostly from washouts or other exposed roots) and tried to get the details right for cypress and willow (but I'm not an arborist and had trouble finding info on depth). Let me know what you think!

[–] JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 month ago (5 children)

chinampas

Hi, I've been reading up on chinampas to try to get the details right and I was hoping to borrow some of your tree knowledge. Most sources mention a willow (Ahuejote (Salix bonplandiana)) and a cypress (Taxodium mucronatum) as the trees they used to reinforce/replace the underwater fences for soil retention. I'm sort of doing this picture as if its in New Orleans (for some of the buildings and other details anyways) and I think that's outside these specific trees current ranges. I was wondering: can I swap in any other cypress or willow since there are some native to Louisiana or would some cause problems?

Here's what I've got so far:

I'm probably not showing enough alternating layers of plant matter and mud, but I'm hoping it gets the point across. I've tried to find good sources, so far these diagrams are my favorites:

Some seem to show floating islands or like, a floating top layer with water underneath, inside the reed wall, which seems weird and inaccurate from what I've read. At this point, I mostly just want to get all the trees added, make sure they're realistic, and find some accurate roots to include to show how they reinforce the earthworks. From what I've read it sounds like willow and cypress just kind of put roots everywhere (I'm used to being able to find clearer diagrams for trees like pines and oaks, but have struggled to find good drawings for these. Also might add cypress knees in the waterways where they're really well established, we'll see. Then I'll start cleaning up the image and getting everything to match aesthetically.

[–] JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 month ago

Thanks, I'll definitely include that kind of dock/railings, still figuring out how to add greenery. I might shuffle the buildings around to make some room for a park

 

Hi, I just wanted to say thanks for all your help on my previous question planning art of a more flood-compatible city! I've tried to include everyone's suggestions from last time, plus everything from here, and discussions on reddit and discord.

I don't plan to clutter up the community with any drafts after this one, but I was hoping to get one more pass with my current sketch since its based mostly on your ideas. Is there anything you'd like to see added or changed in a depiction of a city that's built to flood? Thanks again!

[–] JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The question of how to make migrations as pleasant as possible and rebuild as much of the physically embodied culture that was left behind as possible is one that is very relevant right now, so I would love to see you make a postcard of a migrant town, if you don’t already have one. If you can show how even migration can be a place of solarpunk joy, then suddenly the people of New Orleans do have a realistic joyful future despite the bleak prospect of evacuation.

This is a heavy topic with some pretty high stakes but it's going on my list. You're right that it's something worth rendering, it's art we might need, though TBH I hope someone better qualified than me gets to it first.

If you'd like to discuss how these places and experiences should be represented sometime, I'd definitely be interested. I know I'm usually unqualified to make these scenes (aspirational fiction requires so much more knowledge to do well and solarpunk scenes often involve a terrifying mix of civil engineering, history, cultural knowledge, plant knowledge, city planning, accessibility outreach, vehicle infrastructure, and more) but I'm profoundly unqualified to say much of anything about the experiences of refugees and migrants. That'll be something to work towards through research and conversation, and perhaps to carefully reference in small scenes in prose fiction etc at first. References to Little New Orleanses and similar neighborhoods seem like a good place to start, with more detail in time.

Thanks for talking about this stuff with me. I really appreciate it!

[–] JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net 4 points 2 months ago

That's something I've been wondering about - I live in a place with lots of ledge to anchor foundations to (or to get in the way of basements, depending on your situation and budget). I know skyscrapers drive in huge piles for support which I think aims for that supportive material underground? I know from researching bunkers that in other places the ground is kinda moving steadily, which can roll or twist unprepared or poorly designed structures. I've seen that New Orleans for example has some skyscrapers but just having them doesn't necessarily mean building them is a good long term plan and that the ground will support those kind of structures.

[–] JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net 3 points 2 months ago

This is so cool! Thank you - this definitely gives me a place to start

 

I've been thinking about trying to depict some of the ideas from this conversation: https://slrpnk.net/post/12735795, using a sort of flat, diagram-like style similar to this old photobash:

Though a bit more complex. The obvious answer is 'don't build cities in swamps' but we already have a bunch of them, and though I don't live there I recognize that they have a lot of unique cultural and historical value and are peoples' homes, so I'm interested in what a solarpunk-adapted version of these would look like.

At the same time, I know basically nothing about New Orleans or similar areas, have no background in civil engineering, and no qualifications to make this except for the capability to do so using an old version of GIMP. So I'd absolutely love to identify issues, places to make improvements, and things that are missing now rather than once I've spent days chopping up images and finessing them into something coherent.

So what'd I get wrong? What's unworkable, out of scale, or dangerous? What style of buildings or cultural touchstones would you like to see? What kind of plants are missing?

 

I love systems that turn a problem into an asset. It's the kind of balanced improvement we're almost taught is impossible. So cities capturing storm water, effectively turning floodwater into drinking water they can use by allowing it to filter back down into the aquifer, seems like a great move. Especially when it comes with green areas that improve city life, lower daytime temperatures, and reduce the heat island effect.

 

I'm not sure if this is a good fit for this community, but I've read enough to know there are some very knowledgeable folks here, so I thought I'd give it a shot. Feel free to remove if it's off topic/too specific.

This umbrella pine has been here for around 60 years, and recently started having some trouble. I know a certain amount of yellowing and seasonal needle drop is common, but it seems like this one's been hit especially hard, and there's a companion tree on the other side of the house, same age, which is still deep green. I'd really really love to keep it going, and I'm hoping it's not too late.

We had a bad summer, unusually wet, and I think it stressed this tree - the other one is on top of a hill so it must get better drainage. There was also some construction somewhat nearby, and uphill, which might be causing more water to enter the yard - the basement flooded for the first time in awhile. Also a road crew cut some trees that might have been shading it occasionally, I'm not sure. They might have been too far away to make any difference.

I'm planning to improve on a drainage ditch which runs along the driveway between this tree and the wettest areas, hopefully before snowmelt. I guess my questions are is there anything else I can/should do? Soil test in case it needs something? Can this tree be saved? It's yellowing but it still has some deep green in places (mostly on the shady side).

I have some closeups too if that would help.

 

Drugs and Wires is a cyberpunk webcomic set in a fictional post-soviet, eastern European country in the 1990s. It primarily follows cyborged members of a now-collapsed scene for VR junkies, and the woman who runs an unlicensed chopshop, and a conspiracy around a worm that's been killing cyborgs. It's on hiatus at the moment, but it still has eight chapters of excellent content worth checking out.

 

I honestly can't believe I didn't think to recommend this comic earlier. It's an awesome cyberpunk tech-noir tangle of crime and revenge and plots in a very cyberpunk city just loaded with awesome visuals. It's gritty and dark and sometimes funny, and I have no idea how the author is managing the update schedule he's been doing for years now. It's got over 600 pages and just updated three days ago. I have no idea the size of their audience, there aren't often tons of comments on the site itself, maybe a bunch of you are already reading it, but if anyone's missed out, take a look!

 

The next Protocyberpunk story I wanted to recommend is a bit more of a stretch than The Space Merchants but I'm prepared to argue for it. It's a short story called The Velvet Glove written by Harry Harrison (the prolific author behind the Stainless Steel Rat, Deathworld, Make Room Make Room, Bill the Galactic Hero and like a hundred other stores) in 1956.

It's short, it's available for free on Project Gutenberg. I think I'm going to spoiler-tag the rest of my case for this being protocyberpunk because it's a fun little piece and even the premise is a little bit of a spoiler that wouldn't ruin it for you but might change the reading experience.

spoilerThe story focuses on Jon Venex, a robot and second class citizen in New York, who gets dragged into a criminal enterprise and escapes using his wits and by exploiting some of the features of his mechanical body.

It has a few of the common cyberpunk elements - the technology, and the way it's fallen into the hands of common people is a big one. 'The street finds it's own use for things' I think applies both to the robots themselves, who now own their own bodies along with the responsibility for their maintenance, and to the criminals who have found a way to exploit the robots' hard-coded drive to protect humans so they can use them in their heist.

There's a class divide, both by wealth and between humans and robots that leaves an underclass of people like the protagonist. This divide is pretty much the primary element of the setting, the bigotry against machines is a major factor in the plot, setting up the characters' circumstances and vulnerability, and also paving the way for Jon to escape when the criminals underestimate him. The scene where the black man saves him from a quickly-forming mob might read as a bit trite now but it was written in 1956. The civil rights movement was very much underway, sundown towns still existed. Emmett Till had been lynched only a year before and similar murders would continue for decades. I've seen it argued that in the early days, the 'punk' in cyberpunk referred more to the authors and their rejection of mainstream trends in science fiction than to their characters, who tended towards being more common criminals than revolutionaries. I figure writing scenes like this one at that time would qualify, though I'm not sure what Harrison would have thought of the title.

In the end, I think it's the way Jon exploits both the criminals' low expectations of him and the technology of his own body to escape and call for help that pushes it towards feeling proto-cyberpunk to me.

Beyond that, I love the little details of the setting - the robot family names being the model or class of robot, the decrepetness of the hotel, even the detail of the power line executions, Alec Digger hiding a diamond, stolen from the mining company, inside his eye. I have a special fondness for the rusted-out robot built of cheap parts by a cheaper company. There's even a hint of the kind of corporate espionage and sabotage we expect in modern cyberpunk, which they use to trick Jon into taking an off-the-books job.

 

A few months back, one of my favorite let's play channels introduced me to Shadows of Doubt, a procedurally-generated cyberpunk detective game that plays like an immersive sim. I find it kind of fascinating, and love the look, the crowded, densely-packed setting, and the depth of the simulation, where it maps out stuff like every NPC's routine whether they're relevant to a case or not, where they live, even where they leave fingerprints.

I don't play many games, mostly for lack of time, and tend to avoid proc-gen stuff that relies on emergent gameplay and emergent storytelling (I guess I have an easier time justifying a story-based game as it's more like reading a book or watching a show? I don't know). But I keep thinking back to this one and wanting to give it a shot because the cyberpunk immersive sim thing is very much my jam. I thought I'd see if anyone else has played it, and if you've had any good adventures in it.

Here's an article I stumbled onto while gathering links, in case you want more info: https://www.pcgamer.com/this-procgen-cyberpunk-detective-game-is-like-an-endless-deus-ex-and-it-could-become-a-stone-cold-classic/

 

I have a kind of specific fascination for proto-cyberpunk, generally stories that preceded the cyberpunk genre's start and have most of the elements but aren't quite there for one reason or another. I think it's fascinating to see how these things form, to try to find strands of DNA through fiction. Writers, sometimes decades earlier, voicing the same complaints, identifying the same problems I associate specifically with cyberpunk.

The first one I thought I'd mention is a pretty safe bet: Frederik Pohl and C M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants

Written in 1952, this book has everything but the 1980s feel of a cyberpunk story: Megacities, corporate-states, corporate espionage, addiction-based-marketing, subscription-based-police, corporate citizenship in layers right down to indentured servitude, ecological collapse and a society that doesn't care. Even the visuals of layered, overcrowded, continent-spanning cities.

But it feels like a 1950s science fiction story. It's great; very slick and steeped in the language of marketing. That works really well for it. But it doesn't feel like a cyberpunk story.

I think that's part of the reason I find looking at these precursor stories so fascinating. Cyberpunk discussions often fold in on 'is this even cyberpunk?' and it can be really interesting to see something that has so many of the elements but is still something else.

Obviously these are all just my opinions, and I'd love to hear anyone else's on this book.

Oh, one last opinion: If you're going to get a paperback, get the 1976 version, it looks great.

 

Most of the ones I knew about, like Neon Dystopia, seem kinda dead these days, and I was wondering if anyone here knew of anything active, especially fiction zines.

 

A few years ago, while we were cooking, my SO showed me a blog post about common spices and their substitutions. I thought it’d be cool to use that to make a chart we could hang on the wall. It turned into a fun light research project, then a fun art project.

I started reading various blogs and realized that while many covered the same core spices, there were a lot of others that only one blog or another mentioned. So I started gathering them all up. As I read about them on Wikipedia I’d stumble into their histories, and scope creep hit. I decided to add a column for interesting facts about each. (While gathering those, I was kind of struck at the disparity between them - some spices, have centuries of warfare, murder, and espionage wrapped around them, while others are so common or easy to grow that nobody seems to have stabbed anyone at all for it.)

I built it first as a spreadsheet in Google sheets while I was researching, pasted it into a poster-size libre office writer document for layout and font changes, exported that as a pdf so I could import it into GIMP. That let me make more detailed changes and add the flourishes that hopefully make it look like something that might’ve hung on the wall in your grandparents’ kitchen.

This was a pretty casual project spread over seven months. It’s got forty-some spices with descriptions, fun facts, and substitutions shamelessly plagiarized from cooking blogs and Wikipedia.

I’ve learned since that several spices are actually really unspecific, like what’s sold as oregano apparently may come from several different plants. So I’ll say it’s useful for cooking and accurate to the best of my ability, but I wouldn’t reference it as a historical or scientific resources.

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