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Unmute !

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Something that I think should be an important part of solarpunk aesthetics is screws.

Look at your smartphone. No screws. You've got to have specialized tools to get inside your phone to repair something. There are certain pieces of tech that are glued in place and glue can't be undone without permanently breaking the bond.

But screws!

You can take apart a broken old radio, repair what's broken, and, if you were careful in taking it apart, you can put it back together and have a fully functioning radio and all you need is a common screwdriver!

It's hard to build screws and other mechanical fasteners because it requires more planning than clamps and glues, but isn't that what solarpunk is all about‽ It's about care and sustainability and and a radio or a computer built carefully with repair in mind is a sustainable computer that stays out of landfills and in use.

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Another walk through the countryside. 💚🌿

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Casa Milà (Barcelona) by Architect Antoni Gaudí

Wikimedia Image Sources: Image 1, Image 2, Image 3, Image 4, Image 5, Image 6, Image 7

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the older I get, the more the technological changes I've lived through as a millennial feel bizarre to me. we had computers in my primary school classroom; I first learned to type on a typewriter. I had a cellphone as a teenager, but still needed a physical train timetable. my parents listened to LP records when I was growing up; meanwhile, my childhood cassette tape collection became a CD collection, until I started downloading mp3s on kazaa over our 56k modem internet connection to play in winamp on my desktop computer, and now my laptop doesn't even have a disc tray. I used to save my word documents on floppy discs. I grew up using the rotary phone at my grandparents' house and our wall-connected landline; my mother's first cellphone was so big, we called it The Brick. I once took my desktop computer - monitor, tower and all - on the train to attend a LAN party at a friend's house where we had to connect to the internet with physical cables to play together, and where one friend's massive CRT monitor wouldn't fit on any available table. as kids, we used to make concertina caterpillars in class with the punctured and perforated paper strips that were left over whenever anything was printed on the room's dot matrix printer, which was outdated by the time I was in high school. VHS tapes became DVDs, and you could still rent both at the local video store when I was first married, but those shops all died out within the next six years. my facebook account predates the iphone camera - I used to carry around a separate digital camera and manually upload photos to the computer in order to post them; there are rolls of undeveloped film from my childhood still in envelopes from the chemist's in my childhood photo albums. I have a photo album from my wedding, but no physical albums of my child; by then, we were all posting online, and now that's a decade's worth of pictures I'd have to sort through manually in order to create one. there are video games I tell my son about but can't ever show him because the consoles they used to run on are all obsolete and the games were never remastered for the new ones that don't have the requisite backwards compatibility. I used to have a walkman for car trips as a kid; then I had a discman and a plastic hardshell case of CDs to carry around as a teenager; later, a friend gave my husband and I engraved matching ipods as a wedding present, and we used them both until they stopped working; now they're obsolete. today I texted my mother, who was born in 1950, a tiktok upload of an instructional video for girls from 1956 on how to look after their hair and nails and fold their clothes. my father was born four years after the invention of colour televison; he worked in radio and print journalism, and in the years before his health declined, even though he logically understood that newspapers existed online, he would clip out articles from the physical paper, put them in an envelope and mail them to me overseas if he wanted me to read them. and now I hold the world in a glass-faced rectangle, and I have access to everything and ownership of nothing, and everything I write online can potentially be wiped out at the drop of a hat by the ego of an idiot manchild billionaire. as a child, I wore a watch, but like most of my generation, I stopped when cellphones started telling us the time and they became redundant. now, my son wears a smartwatch so we can call him home from playing in the neighbourhood park, and there's a tanline on his wrist ike the one I haven't had since the age of fifteen. and I wonder: what will 2030 look like?

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Single-Use Coffee Cups Made of Clay ☕️

Gaeastar is a company which uses sustainably-sourced clay to create thin coffee cups that can be reused or disposed of. The clay will break down naturally, so there is no need for recycling.

“We believe we have a responsibility to eliminate the negative impact of single-use products as we know them. That’s why our products are geo-neutral and plastic free, and eliminate the need for recycling entirely. What does this mean? We use only clay, water, and salt. Our materials are environmentally inert. They come from the earth and return back to earth without causing any harm. Just engineering from nature, for nature. That’s the promise of our drink to dust technology.” | Gaeastar

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Let’s Bring Back Color

When seeing the colorful buildings commonly found in coastal communities, people say things like “the street looks cheerful.”

Psychologically, having positive associations to colors makes sense. A forest full of color means it is flourishing and full of resources for us humans.

Burano, Venice, Italy. Calle di Ghiando

In comparison, a modern building might get descriptions like “it looks sleek” or “it looks futuristic,” but nothing to do with possitive associations. The buildings are almost completely restricted to greys, blacks, and whites, and tend to be boxy with a lot of sharp edges.

Calgary, Alberta(Canada)

They are the buildings that are common where I live, and in the winter when the sky is cloudy and snow covers the ground, the only color you might see are on advertisements. It’s a bleak grey nightmare, which is not ideal considering grey has a direct relationship with depression.

It is not just our building exteriors, either. It’s also clothes, interiors, and everyday objects that are losing color.

Graph 1 showing colors trends for objects, Graph 2 showing color trends for clothes

Can we reject the black, greys, and white trends and bring color back to our world?

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One of my partners works as a child minder, and shares anonymized stories about the adventures they get up together. Reading this brings a tear of joy to my eye and makes me so happy.

To be fair, when he's with his kids, I think he's the superhero. The kids certainly seem to think so.

You’re a daycare worker, watching over toddlers, when the imminent end of the world is announced. It becomes increasingly clear none of the kids’ parents are going to show up as the end inches nearer.

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I feel like more people need to know that one of the artists from the very popular Dear Alice commercial is on ArtStation.

Introducing: Jessica Woulfe.

I suggest visiting their page to see their beautiful other art as well.

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I'm sorry I didn't sign up to be emotionally eviscerated by Sam Vimes reading to his son.

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Sam Vimes-core

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#Potential job skill and something my partners would benefit from

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-Dukat believes he is justified about something he did. He's not, but he continues to believe it anyway.

Every DS9 plot, sorted by which character is the focus:

-O'Brien believes there is something which cannot be taken away from him. It is taken away from him.

-Dr. Bashir believes he won't fuck something up. He deals with the consequences of fucking it up.

-Odo believes he has no feelings about something. Everyone around him deals with the consequences of how strong his feelings are.

-Dax believes that the bad decisions she made in the past won't blow up in her face. They blow up in her face.

-Kira believes that she can no longer be disappointed by the people around her. She is.

-Sisko believes that he can solve something in the normal, intended way and not a horrible, fucked up way. He solves it in a horrible, fucked up way.

-Worf believes that he has finally found a problem which can be solved with force rather than feelings. He solves it using his feelings.

-Quark believes that he has a remaining shred of dignity. He loses it.

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Do you think that Jadzia would be at Quark's playing tongo and during one of the games that she won she'd be like "I guess I'm one step closer to becoming a TRILL-ionaire. Eh? Eh????" and absolutely nobody would laugh but she'd have this stupid big grin on her face like the whole station heard and thought it was the funniest thing ever

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I love you tailors, I love you recycling center employees, I love you jewelry repair people, I love you tech repair people. I love you plumbers, I love you electricians. I love you all maintenance workers, who make it so things don't have to be fully replaced when they break.

There are so many ways to contribute to the climate movement.