JacobCoffinWrites

A flower with a smiley face has been drawn with black crayon(? charcoal?) on a granite wall.

Scrappy Capy Distro has released the first issue of Harbour, an anarchist literary journal. It has 7 pieces from 6 authors, poets, and artists. You can download it for free online, or get it on paper if you happen to live in Berlin and know the anarchist scene there.

Full Disclosure: one of those authors is me! My story Fair Game is the first prose story in this edition (on page 3 on both versions of the PDF). I'm very excited that they accepted it, especially because that means I can start posting a related comic/art project I’ve been working on in the background for several months.

In the beginning of the journal the editors say this on the subject of fiction:

Traveling to some anarchist book fairs, we noticed that most of the tables were filled with theory and there was very little fiction. This edition, and future ones, is an attempt to remedy this.

Theory is often placed above fiction as more important and serious, but we believe that fiction deserves just as much space. Not all critique of the world has to offer a complete or even partial alternative to the existent, but when we fail to tell a narrative of what possible anarchist futures could look like, it can be very hard to entice others away from the pull of capitalism.

If there ever were some collapse or successful insurrection, ideologies whose ideas were most digestible or had been most widely spread would win out. Following such change, we don’t want things to return to the way they were. We want anarchist ideas to ripple out across the populace, for them to be something easy for others to play with and understand. Stories are one way to do this.

We want to make a space — a space to imagine, a space to vent, where ideas from many different places can come together, a place where we can then leave with these ideas, to pass them on.

A harbour is a place from which to venture out.

I think there's a ton of overlap between that and solarpunk in general, and the ability to show positive, attainable futures, and to demonstrate the lived experience of those better worlds, how they work, is a big part of what draws me to the genre. Hopefully I'll have a more solarpunk story for them in the future.

Speaking of which, if you have a vision of the future you want to share, they're already planning for their Fall 2024 (Issue 2). Submissions will be open from September 1st to 30th: https://en.scrappycapydistro.info/submissions

I hope this is okay - normally when I post here I write up little book reports for cyberpunk stories and movies rather than post my own stuff. But one of my cyberpunk stories (told from the perspective of an AI weapons platform) just went live in a brand new anarchist zine called Harbour https://en.scrappycapydistro.info/harbour (it’s the first fiction story in the first edition, page 3) and I'm pretty excited about that.

I’m especially excited because that means I can start posting a comic/art project I’ve been working on in the background for several months. I won't spam this place up with it, but I might share a few of the still panels once its done.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/847900

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.

If you want to print it out, I uploaded the PDF here: https://jacobcoffinwrites.files.wordpress.com/2023/07/spice_list_printable.pdf

This was a pretty quick little project - some of my friends recently bought a house, it came with a shed, and the door of that shed was broken. The design of the door allowed it to swing open about 180 degrees, at which point it'd hit its own frame.The wind must have caught it one day and swung it open hard. When that big wide door hit the frame so close to its fulcrum, it just snapped right down the line. It also bent all the hinges.

The previous owners tried to fix it, it looks like by lifting the door back in place and driving some mismatched screws through some wood scraps and metal plates. That left the door drooping, hanging crooked in the frame, and flexing kind of alarmingly when it opened.

We'd talked about taking it down and fixing it properly, I even took some measurements.

Then one morning I got lucky, I saw a post on our local Buy Nothing -type page where someone was offering up some 1"x12" boards they'd been using as shelves in a shed. They were a bit weathered but otherwise in good shape (no cracks, warp, or rot). It was trash day in that neighborhood so I hustled out there and claimed the whole pile. 1"x12"s ain't cheap.

On the way back I picked up a shovel with a cracked handle which I fixed with a hose clamp and have been using for a couple years now.

We set a day, I packed the lumber and tools, and we started in on the shed. I think we also planted a peach tree (using my new shovel) that day.

We started by taking the door off the shed and setting it on some sawhorses I brought.

(Dog helping hold down the door)

This was where we made our first unfortunate discovery. The shed was older than we'd realized. The 1"x12"s the door had been made from were rough cut, not dimensional, so the boards I'd brought were about half an inch narrower, and a quarter inch thinner than the originals.

So we had a couple options here - all the boards were rotten for a few inches of the bottom. We could replace all of them with the new ones, which would be a close fit of all our materials, and would lose us a couple inches of width unless we added another board, or we could save lumber all around and change the design to keep most of the existing door but make it a little janky. They were good with that, so we did a kind of strange design.

First we removed the split board and it's support scraps and set them aside. Then we cut one of the new boards to the original/final height of the door.

Next we measured far enough up to catch all the rot, and we cut the door that much shorter.

We attached the new vertical board so it extended a couple inches at the top and bottom (it's on the right in the picture above). Then we added two braces across the face of the door, so they went across at the final height of the door/the long new board, leaving a bit of space above and below the old boards. These would add some extra ridigidity, by having pieces going across on the front and the back, and they'd hide the difference in length. Then we cut some pieces to go behind them, fitting flush above and below the old boards. These weren't structural, they just took up space so critters and weather wouldn't get in.

Once the door was made, we started looking at hanging it again.

Unfortunate discovery two: the doorway was crooked. Part of that was the fault of the badly rotted board which crossed the doorway under the door. It didn't seem to be doing anything but catching rain and soaking it up, so we pried it off and replaced it. Luckily it only crossed the doorway, it wasn't actually part of the building frame, which seemed to be in okay shape. The top of the doorway was also out of square, but not enough to be a major problem. As they reminded me a few times, it's a shed, not a house.

We straightened out the hinges by putting them on a brick and pounding on the high points with a small sledge (not ideal but it worked). Then we hung them back up and attached the door. From what I remember, it sat just above the new lower plate when it was closed, might have rested on it but I don't remember.

The last step was to cut a thin piece to attach to the inside of the door frame to make up for the width lost by replacing a roughcut board with dimensional.

From there, I think we called it good. It had rained on and off during the project, and we didn't want to re-attach the trim while it was wet for fear of trapping water between the boards.

We cleaned up the tools and had some pizza.

As a side project, I took the original, very rotted wooden door handle, and the scraps of the split board. From the dimensions of the original and the look of the wood, I figured they cut the original from scraps of the same roughcut 1x12s they built the rest of the shed out of, so I wanted to make the replacement the same way.

I traced the original onto the wood, flipped it end for end, and traced it again, and sort of averaged the two. The original wasn't actually symmetrical but my replacement would be much closer. Then I started sanding it down until it was comfortable to hold. I pre-drilled the holes for the screws, including space for the heads, so they wouldn't split the handle when it was attached.

I stained it, I think my usual mix of Gunstock and Red Oak, then applied a few coats of urethane, sanding lightly between coats. I even got the back, where it'd touch the door, and the holes for the screws. I figured they could paint it whatever color they painted the door, like the original, or leave it as-is, either way it'd be very waterproof and last a long long time.

All it needs now is a new coat of paint.

Last one for now, I think I'm done with trains for a bit, thanks for letting me share these here!

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/8581002

Another (very quick) take on the caustic soda locomotive concept based on this comment on my last postcard about what a version with swappable boilers might look like.

The idea is that instead of pumping out the caustic soda to dry it, they would instead unbolt and lift off the boiler, probably using an overhead or gantry crane, and replace it with an already-dry one. The dilute one would be inspected, and placed on a concrete containment pad where it could be connected to a solar steam generator, so the superheated steam could dry the caustic soda. This is actually pretty similar to how they apparently did it historically, except using a coal boiler and obviously without removing the boiler from the locomotive.

Ideally, this would be a bit safer as the boiling hot caustic soda would remain contained for the majority of the time, with less risk of spills during the drying process, and the extra boilers and frequent inspections could help prevent corroded parts from disabling a locomotive and stopping a train line. It might even be faster, depending on how complex the hookup process is.

In the end, it’s probably not a whole lot more practical, but I really liked the idea (suggested first by Carrier_Indomitable over on r/trains, and then with some cool visual details by @WaterWaiver@aussie.zone on the last post.

Another (very quick) take on the caustic soda locomotive concept based on this comment on my last postcard about what a version with swappable boilers might look like.

The idea is that instead of pumping out the caustic soda to dry it, they would instead unbolt and lift off the boiler, probably using an overhead or gantry crane, and replace it with an already-dry one. The dilute one would be inspected, and placed on a concrete containment pad where it could be connected to a solar steam generator, so the superheated steam could dry the caustic soda. This is actually pretty similar to how they apparently did it historically, except using a coal boiler and obviously without removing the boiler from the locomotive.

Ideally, this would be a bit safer as the boiling hot caustic soda would remain contained for the majority of the time, with less risk of spills during the drying process, and the extra boilers and frequent inspections could help prevent corroded parts from disabling a locomotive and stopping a train line. It might even be faster, depending on how complex the hookup process is.

In the end, it’s probably not a whole lot more practical, but I really liked the idea (suggested first by Carrier_Indomitable over on r/trains, and then with some cool visual details by @WaterWaiver@aussie.zone on the last post.

This is the only other train art I've done that would fit this community, but I'm hoping to make one more somewhat soon. I hope it fits okay!

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/1997731

The second photobash in what I hope will be a series; a bit larger and more visually interesting than the first. I've started thinking of these as 'postcards from a solarpunk future.’ They might not show the width and breadth of this world, but nice scenes of what this fictional solarpunk society would consider aspirational, or values worth showing off.

I feel that for a genre/movement with such a focus on intentionality, there's a lot of AI art setting the tone online, along with a tendency to accept anything that looks partway futuristic and green, even if it's a massive cityscape or sort of generically utopian. I want to try to pull the visual aspect towards a more lived-in, human future that sets out to show possibilities/options.

My goals for this one were pretty simple: I wanted to show a setting where cars are no longer the priority, and to show that a solarpunk society will embrace new technology and infrastructure where it's a good use of limited resources (in contrast to the focus on reusing what’s here that I'm trying to include in other images). I also wanted to show that there’s room for more than one solution (and more than one kind of lifestyle) as with the bicyclist towing a kind of traditional-looking wagon.

As with the other photobashes, there are ruins in this scene. One of my overarching goals is to keep these pictures from looking utopian or like some kind of scratch-built future. Things will be messy, resources will be scarce, and tasks will go undone. As in our world, the debris of abandoned projects will pile up around human society, no matter how good its intentions are. I’m pessimistic enough to see bad times ahead, but I want to emphasize in these that that doesn’t mean giving up. For me, that’s a big part of the appeal of solarpunk, that the people in it keep working to mitigate the damage at any level they can access, and will try to rebuild more deliberately, carefully when they can. So these scenes are a little postapoclyptic, with hopefully a more inclusive, vibrant, and colorful society on the other side.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/8409948

One of my goals for my postcard series is to show a rebuilding society that prioritizes reducing waste and externalities, and examining what weird technologies might appeal to them because of those goals/limitations. So I've been wanting to do a scene of a caustic soda locomotive ever since I first heard about them.

Soda locomotives were a type of fireless steam locomotive that barely made it out of the prototype phase, where the boiler is surrounded by a tank of ‘caustic soda’ (usually one of several possible chemicals), which generates heat when mixed with water. The heat produces steam in the boiler, which is used to drive the pistons, but instead of being released, its condensed and added to the soda to create more heat. This goes on until the soda gets too dilute to produce more heat, but it can be 'recharged' by drying it out again.

These never really took off because it took more coal to dry the soda at the station than to just run a conventional steam locomotive, and electric trains quickly came into their own and filled the niche of quiet, low-pollution trains for inside cities and tunnels.

But I feel like these could pair well with solar steam generators (another late-1800’s design) stationed along the tracks, to create analogue, solar-powered trains. These could run on existing unpowered tracks, without requiring any new electrical infrastructure, just the isolated drying stations.

The train crew would just exchange wet soda for dry and start again (looks like that took about 45 minutes). The cool thing is that this arrangement could be asyncronous - the station can dry out the caustic soda, then store it for when the train shows up. The train can run on cloudy days or at night, as long as they get enough sunny days to dry out big batches of soda at the stops along the way. And the solar concentrators can be huge and optimized for their location because they don’t have to move.

The focus of these postcards isn’t on technological utopias so much as on societies that are reexamining how to do things as they rebuild, anachronistically combining all kinds of tech. So trains and solar concentrators built with 1800’s technology seem like an easier starting place.

The concentrators require fairly simple materials (mirrors or polished metal) and math to make (plus some simple mechanical timing or basic motors/electronics to get them to follow the sun without a human turning a crank).

Most of the descriptions I've seen of drying the caustic soda mention pumping superheated steam through the dilute mix from another (coal) boiler, so it seems like you could use almost any design from the earliest solar steam generators to something like these modern ones depending on the society’s manufacturing capabilities. The solar concentrator/boiler I referenced for the art is a design from 1901.

(The most common modern design for solar steam generation I've seen is that sort of mirrored-trough-and-vaccum-lined-tube system. I mostly went with the big round reflector because I was worried the trough design wouldn't read as distinct from photovoltaic panels in this art style.)

The trains could run with minimal pollution using these simple technologies, and even if their range is lower, or they're not as fast, that might be a trade off this society would accept.

Ideally they would use existing tracks and passenger or freight cars, and only need new infrastructure around whatever station fueled them up on their route (or at a destination). I think this applies to the compressed air locomotives just as well as the caustic soda ones.

(If you don’t like the idea of caustic soda locomotives, but you still want this idea to work, another option with a shorter range is compressed air locomotives. Instead of drying the soda, the station would be using a solar steam engine or windmill or water wheel to run an air compressor, steadily filling a tank which would be used to top up locomotives on their route. This would still allow for isolated infrastructure to power a train along unpowered rails. IRL these mostly saw use in mines.)

The locomotive in the scene is based on a real-life fireless locomotive. They’re similar, but filled with super-hot steam by external sources. They seemed like a good reference for what a caustic soda locomotive might have looked like had the concept reached a more polished, production format. But they don’t really fit my goal for tolerating intermittency as they’d need the heat source to be going when they stopped for a refill.

One of my goals for my postcard series is to show a rebuilding society that prioritizes reducing waste and externalities, and examining what weird technologies might appeal to them because of those goals/limitations. So I've been wanting to do a scene of a caustic soda locomotive ever since I first heard about them.

Soda locomotives were a type of fireless steam locomotive that barely made it out of the prototype phase, where the boiler is surrounded by a tank of ‘caustic soda’ (usually one of several possible chemicals), which generates heat when mixed with water. The heat produces steam in the boiler, which is used to drive the pistons, but instead of being released, its condensed and added to the soda to create more heat. This goes on until the soda gets too dilute to produce more heat, but it can be 'recharged' by drying it out again.

These never really took off because it took more coal to dry the soda at the station than to just run a conventional steam locomotive, and electric trains quickly came into their own and filled the niche of quiet, low-pollution trains for inside cities and tunnels.

But I feel like these could pair well with solar steam generators (another late-1800’s design) stationed along the tracks, to create analogue, solar-powered trains. These could run on existing unpowered tracks, without requiring any new electrical infrastructure, just the isolated drying stations.

The train crew would just exchange wet soda for dry and start again (looks like that took about 45 minutes). The cool thing is that this arrangement could be asyncronous - the station can dry out the caustic soda, then store it for when the train shows up. The train can run on cloudy days or at night, as long as they get enough sunny days to dry out big batches of soda at the stops along the way. And the solar concentrators can be huge and optimized for their location because they don’t have to move.

The focus of these postcards isn’t on technological utopias so much as on societies that are reexamining how to do things as they rebuild, anachronistically combining all kinds of tech. So trains and solar concentrators built with 1800’s technology seem like an easier starting place.

The concentrators require fairly simple materials (mirrors or polished metal) and math to make (plus some simple mechanical timing or basic motors/electronics to get them to follow the sun without a human turning a crank).

Most of the descriptions I've seen of drying the caustic soda mention pumping superheated steam through the dilute mix from another (coal) boiler, so it seems like you could use almost any design from the earliest solar steam generators to something like these modern ones depending on the society’s manufacturing capabilities. The solar concentrator/boiler I referenced for the art is a design from 1901.

(The most common modern design for solar steam generation I've seen is that sort of mirrored-trough-and-vaccum-lined-tube system. I mostly went with the big round reflector because I was worried the trough design wouldn't read as distinct from photovoltaic panels in this art style.)

The trains could run with minimal pollution using these simple technologies, and even if their range is lower, or they're not as fast, that might be a trade off this society would accept.

Ideally they would use existing tracks and passenger or freight cars, and only need new infrastructure around whatever station fueled them up on their route (or at a destination). I think this applies to the compressed air locomotives just as well as the caustic soda ones.

(If you don’t like the idea of caustic soda locomotives, but you still want this idea to work, another option with a shorter range is compressed air locomotives. Instead of drying the soda, the station would be using a solar steam engine or windmill or water wheel to run an air compressor, steadily filling a tank which would be used to top up locomotives on their route. This would still allow for isolated infrastructure to power a train along unpowered rails. IRL these mostly saw use in mines.)

The locomotive in the scene is based on a real-life fireless locomotive. They’re similar, but filled with super-hot steam by external sources. They seemed like a good reference for what a caustic soda locomotive might have looked like had the concept reached a more polished, production format. But they don’t really fit my goal for tolerating intermittency as they’d need the heat source to be going when they stopped for a refill.

Soda locomotives saw very limited use, and though I've found some awesome photos and descriptions thanks to the research of enthusiasts online, I haven't really found anything describing what exactly the process of draining the probably-boiling-hot caustic slop from the locomotive and refilling it with water and fresh caustic soda looked like. Soda locomotives saw very limited use, and though I've found some awesome photos and descriptions thanks to the research of enthusiasts online, I haven't really found anything describing what exactly the process of draining the probably-boiling-hot caustic slop from the locomotive and refilling it with water and fresh caustic soda looked like. 

So I thought I'd reach out to another community of enthusiasts and see if you might be able to extrapolate from the other ways they did things (or how it could be done now). 

Sorry if this is obvious to or kind of a trivial question, I'm not super familiar with the logistics around normal trains. 

The reason I'm asking is that I'd like to feature these in a story I'm working on, and maybe some art, but I want to make sure it's reasonable, even if it's not how things shook out in real life. 

Mostly I'm wondering: if these locomotives had obtained mainstream use, what would the station where they swap wet soda for fresh look like? (A water stop and some kind of screw elevator or rig for blowing in the powder/granules?) I don't necessarily need to write an engineer-level description so much as something a casual observer would see, but if you have that knowledge I'd be thrilled to read it and use as much as possible. I'd also love any suggestions about how you might modernize the design or the processes of filling it, especially for safety. 

I really like the idea of a (sunny) place using big solar concentrators to dry the soda essentially for free. It seems like it could be very efficient in terms of using heat in the form we get it, and the simpler analog tech appeals to me since I'm often writing about rebuilding societies. 

Thanks very much!!

Apologies if this doesn't fit the community

I've been helping my neighbor replace his lawn with a garden - last summer our project was building a terraced raised bed thing with secondhand soil and secondhand cinder blocks, and some new pavers in the front. I'd very much like to set up a water feature on that raised bed. He spends most days sitting on his porch, reading scifi novels and talking to folks walking by, so he could hear it while he's out there. I know it's kind of a silly luxury so I'm trying to use used components and I'd really like to set it up using a solar panel to power the pump.

I can handle the wiring and electronics with some guidance, but I know very little about pumps and solar panels for finding something that'll fit our use case. I think ideally it'd be a secondhand panel a few feet in size and a pump that can handle a varying amount of power based on the time of day. I'd like to move more than a trickle of water, and I'll make sure there's some shade plants so we don't lose much water to evaporation, though we don't get many droughts where we are.