Thank you!
Such a great project!
Sounds like 'installed' might be overselling it a little unfortunately - given that jerks carried them off. There are a few types of epoxy that could help. Pretty sure even JB Weld will stick wood to concrete. And they make some amazing specialist adhesives. It won't stop the city but might delay the NIMBYs for a day or two. (Especially if they're as old as I am and they throw their back out trying to pick it up the first time).
We've been making good progress on the Buried Treasure Fully Automated campaign! The second test group finished their 14-session playthrough and had a blast. They were sad it ended but are looking forward to the follow-on story.
We've been making good progress on line edits and have talked out a lot of goals and changes in the weekly developer meeting. I need to work on the cover but haven't gotten to that yet. Andrew has been working on some additional, realistic watershed maps which I'm very excited about. Anything that presents realistic how-it's-done info is awesome and if they're a little complicated to understand, I think it's a good kind of puzzle. I can't remember if I wrote about testing the new soil testing mechanic last time or not but we did that too.
I've also reached out to a few more folks for input. I'd very much like to vet everything for accuracy, even the stuff I know.
I also had the great good fortune to make friends with some more writers, one of whom has published a Choose Your Own Adventure before. Long, long, long-term I'd very much like to make a CYOA version of this campaign. The more self-contained format really appeals to me as a way to present much of the same information. A reader can just pick up a solarpunk CYOA in a way they might not try to read a premade campaign for a specific TTRPG. It'll be a huge project, restructuring the open sandbox into branching storylines, but I have a lot of content already written so flowcharting it out doesn't feel as impossible as once it did. It's not something I'll start working on until the campaign is finished but I'm having some fun thinking on how to do it and what will go where. Like the campaign it'll be copyleft, with a free ebook and bookbinding version.
The reasons I've seen mostly have to do with upfront cost and convenience for maintenance. Support structures for solar panels can be pretty crude and basic if they're just sitting low on a field. For a parking lot you need a much taller structure which will likely deal with more wind, but which is also designed to minimize the number of support posts so it's not in the way, and to survive idiots running into it with their Ford fteen thousand.
If something goes wrong in a field the crew can just drive there and start working. If there's a problem with the panels over a parking lot they may need to clear part of the lot, bring in bucket lifts, etc.
It can definitely be done and I think it's a great idea all around but they're usually looking with an eye towards how quickly the project pays for itself.
That seems like it would work quite well! Especially if the patio screen guarantees other critters won't try to come in.
Not sure what tools you have access to but If you have a table saw you can cut a notch into the wood for the plexi before you assemble the frame.
I just helped my folks turn a porch into a catio - we used a layer of chicken wire on the inside with a layer of fabric bug screen on the outside. Years ago one of our cats got startled and ran right through a screen on our screen porch (fell one story into deep snow and kept right on going. He was fine, my dad was pissed). For this one we built wooden frames and stapled the screen and chicken wire on and attached those to the porch with wood screws. You could run slats from house to fence for support.
This sounds wonderful, I'd love to have that kind of network again. I'm curious about how they went about the technical side of things - if it's all tunneled together or if they're running cables to nearby houses and setting up wireless relays or something. There's so much cool stuff we could bring back if we weren't under constant attack from the internet at large.
This is my go-to solution - I personally prefer Linux Mint with MATE for a desktop environment.
But if you, like me, have relatives who flatly refuse to use anything but windows (even as they complain about having to relearn the operating system every few years anyways!) then this might be useful to you: https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/22/windows_10_ltsc/?td=rt-3a
Whatever it takes to keep working tech out of the landfill and the potential replacement computers sitting on store shelves.
I really do recommend trying Linux though, it's been my daily driver for years, including all through college when my windows partition died and I found myself making due with the mint partition I was testing out just to get assignments done. For older computers and Chromebooks Alpine Linux is great but a little more work.
I'm lucky Fully Automated's primary mechanic is both flexible and simple because I'm here to tell ya, I've played D&D and I don't think I could DM for that. Some folks are heavier on special game mechanics for each thing, and lots of rules, I treat my games more like collaborative storytelling with dice rolls just when the players want to do something cool or difficult. The big challenge for me is managing all the potential story paths on the fly and sort of adjusting what/when certain events outside the players' control should happen to manage the pace of the plot and keep things feeling cinematic. At this point I know my NPCs pretty well and can kinda ad lib reactions to the players just fine, so sessions where I'm just reacting to the players are kinda easy - but when they set big events in motion I need to quickly balance what happens and try to case out where those events end. Does this push the bad guy to try and confront them directly? Should one of their informants call in now with the information they asked them to find last session? Stuff like that where I know it'll adjust the course of their story. So I guess I'm mostly constrained by "what would happen" - what feels reasonable or believable for characters, some of whom the players don't even know about yet!
This is cool, kind of a small scale version of resin and fiberglass! Thanks!
Thanks! I don't think we've written about it elsewhere but it's a favorite rant of mine so I'm happy to talk about the gulf between self publishing as it is and what I think it could be if folks saw it as its own proud thing rather than a shameful admittance you couldn't get a big company to buy your story. I'll think it over and write more in another comment!
As for the bookbinding process I genuinely recommend anyone try it - it's so much easier than you probably think! Plus of all the hobbies I've picked up over the years, it has one of the lowest costs of entry - the starter tools are extremely simple and can be bought at a lot of thrift stores.
If you want to read an amature account of the bookbinding process and the various resources I use, I've posted about my own bookbinding projects a few times over on our movim microblog:
https://movim.slrpnk.net/blog/jacobcoffinwrites%40slrpnk.net/e0befe7b-8bb3-49d3-ae61-40926c330d2e
Fun fact! I actually learned about rough mounding here: https://slrpnk.net/post/2293073
It appears to be a large pink cat surrounded by hearts holding some flowers in one paw
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The anarchist literary journal Scrappy Capy Distro is open for submissions for their third edition
(en.scrappycapydistro.info)
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I've got a coat I wore every winter for like eight years but didn't use this fall because a rain of macroplastics would follow me wherever I go. I can strip the pleather, flaking-paint material off to replace it with something but the fabric underneath is sort of thin and stretchy so I'd need to find something that'll help seal it against wind and rain again. I know they sell pleather paint but reviews said it's short lived or meant for patching lesser damage. It's probably a long shot but is there another option for doing the whole outside of the coat?
Otherwise it's still in great shape.
I think I've mentioned before that rural cyberpunk is just about my favorite setting and I always enjoy it whenever we get a glimpse. Gibson books are great for that, from Turner's brother's farm and Dog Solitude in the Sprawl, to the trailer park in the Bridge books, and basically all of the stub in The Peripheral. I love the way cyberpunk (realistically) rejects clean, fresh-start architecture and instead layers new over old, and I think rural areas provide even better contrast for that than the cities, despite how old some cities are. I've done a few rural cyberpunk scenes before, mostly for a webcomic. I love looking around my hometowns and trying to capture a type of location - not a specific place, but like an amalgamation of a category like 'farmhouse,' or 'junkyard,' and then adding kludged-on tech.
I made this one as location art for a Solarpunk TTRPG campaign book I've been working on. My goal was to show a sort of old-fashioned for the setting design that used a ton of old, scrapped-together tech. The farmer who lives here was a fan-favorite with my first group of players – he does a lot of work maintaining the meshnet for the mostly-abandoned town where the campaign takes place and he became good friends with the group’s hacker character.
His farm is pretty conservative for the setting. I wanted to play with how perspectives would shift in this utopian solarpunk setting, to have a farm that would seem both futuristic and kinda crunchy-progressive by our standards that would still be pretty stodgy and conservative compared to his neighbors.
He’s relying on biochar, crop rotation, and pollarded trees providing radial chipped wood to replenish his soil instead of manufactured fertilizer, using alley cropping and a handful of other agroforestry techniques to shelter his crops. He cooks his food using a scheffler reflector, drives a woodgas truck he uses to produce his biochar, and generates his power with a mix of solar, wind, water, and woodgas.
But compared to the elaborate food forests of a nearby community, Bob’s open fields and heavy reliance on tech makes his farm look downright traditional.
One of my goals for this region of the map was to explore the different ways one can arrive at some of these practices out of necessity. The people from this abandoned, rural town aren’t likely to be solarpunk ideologues but when supply chains broke down, the infrastructure collapsed, and the population emptied out, those who remained had to adjust to keep going. They look out for each other, grow their own food and generate their own power, and adapt their lifestyles to the seasons because that’s what they had to do to get by when things were bad. Bob is a bit younger than many of the other ‘holdout’ characters, but he’s generally following their mix of goals and motivations.
I find the sort of cyberpunk mix of scavenged tech and a traditional-looking farmhouse to be both a lot of fun and pretty much in line with the farmers I’ve known and worked for, who were happy to bolt new stuff onto old if it got the job done. Bob’s farm is full of scavenged robotics, radio antennas, and other tech, mostly controlled using cybernetics linked to his brain. He’s added a drone hangar to his barn and his UAVs swarm into the skies like bats while robotic tractors and hexapod gardening robots patrol his fields and guard his goats. He bolts solar panels, vertical turbines, electrical boxes, and radio antennas to his buildings with an almost punk focus on practical results over aesthetics.
Other elements also show his involvement in his community. In addition to maintaining the local scrapped-together communications network, he plays a big role in maintaining the town’s network of trials. He’s parked an old snow groomer, of the type used by ski mountains, under a lean-to attached to the barn. He uses this each winter to pack down snow on the town’s roads and trails, as most of them are seasonal, and people here travel by cross country skis, snowshoes, snowmobiles, or use vehicles modified with skis and tracks in the winter.
edit: Also huge thanks to the ham radio subreddit and the community on lemmy for looking over the antennas for me and making suggestions!
I’ve been working on some location art for the Buried Treasure campaign. The farmer who lives here was a fan-favorite with my first group of players – he does a lot of work maintaining the meshnet for the mostly-abandoned town where the campaign takes place and he became good friends with the group’s hacker character.
His farm is pretty conservative for the setting. I wanted to play with how perspectives would shift in this utopian solarpunk setting, to have a farm that would seem both futuristic and kinda crunchy-progressive by our standards that would still be pretty stodgy and conservative compared to his neighbors.
He’s relying on biochar, crop rotation, and pollarded trees providing radial chipped wood to replenish his soil instead of manufactured fertilizer, using alley cropping and a handful of other agroforestry techniques to shelter his crops. He cooks his food using a scheffler reflector, drives a woodgas truck he uses to produce his biochar, and generates his power with a mix of solar, wind, water, and woodgas.
But compared to the elaborate food forests of a nearby community, Bob’s open fields and heavy reliance on tech makes his farm look downright traditional.
One of my goals for this region of the map was to explore the different ways one can arrive at solarpunk practices, either out of necessity or for goals like self-sufficiency - because in the end of the day, they work. The people from this abandoned, rural town aren't likely to be solarpunk ideologues but they work together as a community, follow permaculture practices, and adapt their lifestyles to the seasons because that's what they had to do to get by when things were bad. Bob is a bit younger than many of the other 'holdout' characters, but he's generally following their mix of goals and motivations.
I find the sort of cyberpunk mix of scavenged tech and a traditional-looking farmhouse to be both a lot of fun and pretty much in line with the farmers I’ve known and worked for, who were happy to bolt new stuff onto old if it got the job done. Bob’s farm is full of scavenged robotics, radio antennas, and other tech, mostly controlled using cybernetics linked to his brain. He’s added a drone hangar to his barn and his UAVs swarm into the skies like bats while robotic tractors and hexapod gardening robots patrol his fields and guard his goats. He bolts solar panels, vertical turbines, electrical boxes, and radio antennas to his buildings with an almost punk focus on practical results over aesthetics.
Other elements also show his involvement in his community. In addition to maintaining the local scrapped-together communications network, he plays a big role in maintaining the town's network of trials. He's parked an old snow groomer, of the type used by ski mountains, under a lean-to attached to the barn. He uses this each winter to pack down snow on the town's roads and trails, as most of them are seasonal, and people here travel by cross country skis, snowshoes, snowmobiles, or use vehicles modified with skis and tracks in the winter.
Huge thanks to the ham radio communities on lemmy and reddit for looking over the antennas and giving me advice!
Hi, I hope this post/question is okay - I'm doing some art that includes various radio antennas and I'd really like to run them past someone who knows more than I do to make sure they look okay.
I'm working on location art for a solarpunk TTRPG campaign and am doing a scene for a somewhat old fashioned (in this setting), heavily automated farm. The guy who lives here does a lot of the work maintaining a meshnet in the mostly-abandoned town where the campaign takes place. I figure he's also sort of generally a tinkerer and has probably amassed a decent assortment of old tech.
The last time I was working on a scene with antennas I asked the folks over on r/hamradio for advice and they were super helpful so I reused a lot of the antennas from before, and tried to scale them to match that scene and to photographs I've seen, but I'm definitely not knowledgeable on this stuff and am happy to make changes to get it right.
As before, I really just want to make sure it doesn't look offensively dumb to folks in the ham radio scene, and if you have any recommendations for antennas you'd like to see or that would say something interesting, I'd be happy to include them. Thanks for any advice you feel like giving!
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There are some interesting proposals for electric ships using containerized batteries which can be loaded/unloaded with the same cranes they use for shipping containers and charged in port. https://cleantechnica.com/2025/05/24/beyond-the-harbor-electrifying-short-sea-routes-and-hybridizing-blue-water-shipping/
It may not be suitable for transoceanic trips but a lot of shipping follows the coasts or even travels by river where this may be more practical.