Adopting a scaredy-cat: a journey
Back in November, my partner and I adopted Nutmeg, a 4-year-old former feral cat who was completely terrified of humans and wanted nothing to do with us. A cat like Nutmeg most likely would have been written off as unadoptable and euthanized if she had been in a kill shelter, because she could not provide value to humans in that moment. It’s been about a year so far… head over to Patreon to read the full post* for free.
*Yes there are cute cat photos, what do you take me for?
New York as a Solarpunk City
Photos From Analog and Asimov Readers’ Choice Awards Evening
Come Hear Me Read!
Hope for the present, not the future
Given all of the strife that bombards my consciousness on a daily basis, why am I still writing hopelessly naïve articles about compassion and optimism et cetera on the internet? It’s a serious question, not really a rhetorical one. I wrote this article to see if I could come up with an answer; I think I recognized a few different factors, but I’m curious to know what you think after reading through the article. Let me know in the comments.
Is This the Last Dance Before the Lights Go Out?
AI in Publishing Is Even Scarier Than I Thought
Links Roundup
Welcome to another edition of links roundup. This week, Ariel’s been reading and thinking about the following articles, none of which are explicitly solarpunk, but all of which relate to the way solarpunks choose to interact with the world and their communities.
How Do We Power Down?
Happy Solarpunk Action Week
Review of The High Sierra: A Love Story
There Is No Perfect System
Hope, but not right away
As I’ve said before both here and on the podcast, I really do believe that solarpunk is about looking around at the detritus of the early twenty-first century, then choosing deliberately to roll up one’s sleeves and get to work making a better world using the materials at hand, despite all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. However, moving rapidly away from negative feelings does them a disservice, and more importantly, may be doing solarpunk a disservice. Let me explain.
Happy Spring!
Links Roundup
Here are some recent links from the interwebs that Ariel has been chewing over.
Pondering a Solarpunk Writing Group
Review: Animals in Translation
I (Ariel) recently listened to the audiobook version of Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson. It really shone a light on how far we’ve come both in our understanding of neurodiversity and language around it; it also caused me to realize how very little I actually know about animal behaviour. It’s free to read over on our Patreon; I’d really like you to go take a look!
Scrape
Today, Ariel considers the issue of data-scraping by companies like OpenAI - specifically in light of the recent news of Automattic being “in talks” to sell user content for LLM models to train on. She muses on the internet as an inherently (un)ethical enterprise, her own experience of social media and data scraping, and thinks a bit about what solarpunk internet use might look like.
It’s Time to End the Hero’s Journey
I don’t know about you, but I’ve absolutely had enough of it: the story structure known as the hero’s journey. While these stories make for great escapism, they’re not great for actually changing the world. Let’s let solarpunk stories dump the hero’s journey, even as a means to explore life in a solarpunk future. Let’s use all the other story structures instead.
Questioning the “survival” narrative
After studying Cold-War, Canadian post-apocalyptic science fiction, I have decided that I don’t want to survive the post-apocalypse.
Or at least, I don’t want to do what it takes to survive. Not according to the tenets of the classic non-solarpunk sci-fi narrative, that is…