JacobCoffinWrites

I’m not sure why but I’ve always found the Civil Defense to be really cool, and I often try to work it into my stories in one form or another (though none of those have been published yet). When I was helping with reorganizing FA!’s box text on the military, I thought it’d be a good addition.

It fulfills the role of being an organized, primarily civilian, primarily voluntary disaster relief organization. It has a long history in dozens of countries, in one form or another, all around the world. Its provided training, search and rescue, preventative measures, emergency response, and recovery, in everything from wars, to natural disasters, and even the Chernobyl disaster. And the different formats used in all those countries give us a historical precident for almost any organizational structure we choose. Want to make it an auxiliary of a military branch? The US did that at some points. Directly part of the military? Some Soviet countries ran it that way. A purely civilian volunteer charity? Britain has recently revived theirs and is running it like that. They can even function as a volunteer militia, like the British home guard, or the American Civil Air Patrol who Wikipedia claims once dropped bombs on axis submarines.

And they have history. People like that kind of lineage, the sense of being part of something that dug people out of rubble in the blitz, that cleared radioactive debris in Chernobyl. There's a long history of sacrifice and service to draw on. And one with comparatively few atrocities on the record.

They're even pretty cool visually. They have the iconic blue triangle motif common in most countries, and a blue and white color scheme not really associated with combat.

Whether you need someone to respond to wildfires, to assist paramedics, to build levees in a flood, or to distribute and build tornado shelters, it's not a far leap from what they've already done. Like Noir said on the discord, given the scale of the Global Climate Wars in the game’s backstory, it seems pretty likely that every government on the planet would start handing out shovels and white helmets again.

And I think it fits the anarchist influences in solarpunk. Putting some of the responsibilities and capabilities for disaster relief back in the hands of the community. It's also a decent role for a varied cast of characters in a RPG. People with regular lives and skills who can be tasked with a quest and be granted some degree of official legitimacy.

When I wrote up the Civil Defense section for the game manual, I tried to provide enough flexibility to allow players and GMs the option to adjust the local Civil Defense chapter to fit their campaign. I like the idea of modern chapters tracing their lineage to different local groups, a postwar militia here, a wildland fire fighter unit there. Like the Defense served as a way to bring various factions (especially armed ones) into the fold, providing them with improved legitimacy in trade for increasing oversight and standardization. So while they’re supplied and trained by the same organization, at the unit level they have some leeway in how they operate and what they specialize in, which can conveniently fit any campaign that wants to use them.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/7767375

@sarenaulibarri@wandering.shop is teaching a seminar that looks very cool. I'm excited to hear what she's saying. Ticket start at $25, but are on a generous sliding scale.

I'm teaching a seminar for Clarion West on April 4th! Drawing on my experience as an anthology editor for World Weaver Press and a story reviewer for Imagine 2200, I'll go over some of the most common issues that I see in climate fiction slush piles.

#solarpunk #lunarpunk #ClimateFiction #ClimateWriters #ScienceFiction #SciFiWriters #ClarionWest #WritingClass #Imagine2200

https://clarionwest.app.neoncrm.com/np/clients/clarionwest/eventList.jsp

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.

These books (the first three, at least, skip the bonus fourth one) are a lot of fun. I come back to them now and then when I want a comfortable read and I’m always surprised by how good they are.

The trilogy is one of those larger-than-life, everything-including-the-kitchen-sink sort of cyberpunk stories that somehow manages to Gish Gallop right past its sillier parts as it careens through some absolutely great intrigue and action. Its perhaps not as intentionally silly as Snowcrash, but I think they’re somewhat in the same neighborhood and I’d feel comfortable recommending them to a similar crowd.

Its got just about all the big elements at one time or another – a surveillance state, yakuza/corporate conglomerations complete with company ninjas, a rogue artificial intelligence, nuclear terrorism, soviet-inspired organized crime, armed nuns, CIA assassins, an army of self-driving cars, a bunch of hacking. As it goes on, it does become clear that governments/states still play a fairly significant role in this setting, certainly still larger than corporations, but they do some cool stuff with it, especially with how things have changed in this postapocalyptic world.

One thing to say for them, status quo isn’t really a thing in the books. The Metrozone setting changes pretty drastically throughout the series from a fairly standard cyberpunk London, to a warzone under siege, to a rebuilding independent state, but it always fits, has a wonderful sense of place, and I don’t think it loses its qualification as cyberpunk just because some of the neon lights stop working partway through.

The individual characters and the larger organizations tend to be painted in pretty broad-strokes sometimes veering into being caricatures and yet they’re legitimately loveable, easy to remember, and you get a good sense of who they are immediately. Looking back on three books I read in two days, the characters are what most stand out to me, and in a good way. The protagonist has some Mary Sue traits – I think they feel earned enough to give them a pass, some readers may feel otherwise. I do appreciate his growth and arc throughout the books.

(The writer/characters sometimes use some memes which aren’t super fresh here around the same year as the book is set.)

The one place where it perhaps edges away from cyberpunk is in the themes of hope. Throughout the series the main characters strive for and make real change in the world. There’s a sense that there’s still a messy, winding path towards utopia, that everything they need is there if only they can arrange it all just right, and keep society from imploding in the meanwhile. They’re not resigned, giving up, or accepting of the fucked up world as it stands. They’re not just trying to make their way or get by. In this one way, it feels almost closer to solarpunk than cyberpunk with its noir themes of apathy.

I'm not sure if all those qualifiers wreck the case I'm trying to make - these books are interesting and most of all they're fun, and how they do that, I think, is mostly in the delivery. All in all, I’d definitely recommend them.

Something neat I've discovered - you can repost the content of your movim blog straight into a lemmy post and it's all compatible, uses the same markup. I'll repost all this to imgur as a backup at some point but for now this is awesome.

This was an earlier project on my make-everything-from-junk adventure. I've actually built two arcade cabinets - the first with the goal of using only secondhand stuff, sort of sequestering various junk into something that would be around for awhile, and eventually gave it away on our local Buy Nothing -type group. It was unfortunately very poorly documented, I don't have many pictures of it.

This second one was a gift/reason to hang around in the workshop building something with a friend. They'd seen the first one, and we got talking about building an arcade cabinet custom for them. I like projects that cross a few domains, woodworking, painting, electrical, etc, and I really like reusing materials. Ad I love having a reason to hang around working on projects with friends, so I was excited.

I really like the archival efforts around old arcade cabs, but I generally think of new custom-built arcade cabinets as being kinda wasteful. They use lots of new material, particle board, etc, and take up lots of space, often for a luxury item that doesn't end up getting used very much.

But playing retro games was actually already a big part of this friend's mental health routine so I knew they'd use it - and I was confident I could find most if not all the material secondhand, which would save them a lot of money. (In the end, we did use one panel of storebought particleboard for the front plate/door just to get it finished. Otherwise, aside from the buttons and raspberry pi, we still managed to make it all from old stuff.)

I started with what we already had: various 2"x4" and 1"x2" boards, some particleboard and plywood cut to the dimensions of the previous cabinet which could work as shelves, and most of the particleboard from a big upright storage cabinet which would be perfect for the sides.

A year or two earlier, I'd spotted it disassembled on trash day on my way to work. I hate to pass up good material so I quickly hauled it home before getting back into my routine. When a different friend really wanted to carve pumpkins during the COVID times, I took the sides of the cabinet, screwed on four table legs I got from metal recycling and set it up as a long table on our porch.

We used that table for quite awhile, as a simple workbench, and a side table at friendsgiving.

The pieces I'd used as a tabletop were just about perfect, a good height and depth, if you stood them on end. Unfortunately some fool had driven a bunch of screws into them, but that's what bondo is for.

Maybe it seems counterintuitive to start with materials rather than a design, but that's a big part of how I've always made things. I take an inventory of what I have, figure out how it can go together, figure out what kind of designs we can make with that, and work out a list of what else we'll need. I should note we also already had a TV - it belonged to my friend and it was important to them that we use it since it had no input lag (apparently the TV I got secondhand for the previous cabinet did, and that was a problem). So we knew the measurements there and it was compatible with what we had. Maybe it's just where I am, but I've found TVs of an appropriate size for an arcade cab screen to be absurdly easy to get, either from Buy Nothing or my local swap shop.

We now knew the upper limit on the height of the cabinet (as set by the cabinet/table pieces) and the width we'd probably use (based on the shelf pieces). Those were our constraints, so we started talking requirements. My friend is very tall, tall enough that on my more traditionally-shaped arcade cab, the marquee/roof blocks their view and they had to hunch forward to see the screen. The control panel was too low, making the posture problems worse. This would have to be taller in order for it to be comfortable. They wanted to be able to use it at parties, so the screen couldn't be recessed too far into the cabinet (either we'd have to cut the sides away like a traditional arcade cabinet (difficult to get that just right, likely we'd mess up the plastic cladding on the particleboard) or it'd have to be close to the front. They also wanted it to be sturdy. Really sturdy. I really enjoy overengineering things, so I was looking forward to that part.

My first suggestion was that we do something based on this Gravitar 'cabaret' cabinet prototype.

I had a few reasons for this: the marquee was below the screen, so the screen and controls could be as high as possible. The screen was closer to the front, so it would be easy for spectators or groups of players to see it from an angle, and the overall adjustments to our side panels would be aggressively simple. Two straight line cuts at a matching angle, that I could do.

We talked design ideas a bit, as now was the time. We could do a specific game, or something generic (although I've always found the mame and other generic all-videogames themes to be really uninteresting, personally). Perhaps because we were basing our design on an abandoned prototype, they decided to aim for "like we found some weird pirate arcade machine out of time" and they picked the theme 'goblin dive bar' based on our shared love of warhammer.

I started drawing up a cabinet design, we talked about a logo and I made this from an old warhammer orks and goblins design:

Many thanks to them for pushing me to make it simpler and simpler. I think that was a good call.

Arcade cabs are a great project because they take at least a little of everything - I really enjoyed the graphic design bit and went on to make stickers to cover it with later. With that figured out, I added a couple other flourishes, the moons on the marquee plate and the yellow buttons. My friend picked the name of the arcade company and we tried some stencil fonts and a layout for the side art.

This is the mockup I gave them. It's pretty hacked together but I wanted to make sure we were working from the same plan.

Once that was done, it was time to start building. My original plan called for a frame of 2x4s forming a cube inside the structure, with 45 braces at every corner, with the sides attached like cladding. In the end that was mostly what we did, but we used some smaller boards for the frame and relied on the sides a little more for the structure.

I tried to find my original sketches, but wasn't able to. Either they were on wood I've since used in another project, or they're on some envelope or receipt mixed in with the rest of my detritus. Instead I drew this up from memory and the pictures I have:

This sketch shows all the framing without the sides, front, or control panel. All of this was scrap lumber. The uprights were mostly a 6"x4" pressure treated post we ripped lengthwise on my neighbor's tablesaw (wear a dust mask if you're going to do that), the supports for the TV were scraps of house siding, and the big board supporting the TV was I think a scrap of 2"x12" which had been used as a concrete form and was pretty much garbage as far as materials go even after I scraped off most of the concrete.

We wanted it sturdy, so it had to have an internal frame so it wasn't relying on the particleboard sides for structure. I wanted the control panel in particular to bear its weight through the frame right to the floor. We also screwed everything to the inside of the sides of course, and that on its own was surprisingly sturdy. Lots of 45 degree braces helped to ensure it wouldn't sway or twist at all.

The TV frame was an improvement over my last design. On that one, the flatscreen sort of just rested in place on some rails. This time I wanted it to be fastened in place - after all, we were going to have to move this to my friend's place, and then they'd be moving it from apartment to apartment (and they since have, with no problems!).

I don't have a ton of pictures from early on (I never think to take any until it starts to look like something). Here's one from while we were trying to make that 2"x"12" look better with bondo. Even once it was sanded smooth it still looked bad enough painted that I eventually cut a piece of plywood as cladding to cover it.

We made the control panel from a piece of 1"x14" composite pine I got from a disassembled ikea bookshelf I found on trash day. When I was working on the last arcade cab, I asked around on our Buy Nothing page and met a professional woodworker who had a large table router (this is before I got my little one). He helped me rout a round edge onto my control panel (plus a spare in case I messed up drilling the holes for the buttons) and to cut a slot I used for the marquee.

My friend and I used my spare to make their control panel. They picked the layout using some more lessons learned to improve on my first one, opted for the same sega layout I picked (found here) and we drilled the holes. They opted for a nicer set of authentic mechanical buttons and joysticks than the cheap kit I'd used the first time around, and I think that was a great call. Those buttons are also useful in other electronics projects.

We also filled in the front cut edge of the particleboard sides with bondo and sanded it smooth.

Once we had the basic structure and made sure the TV could fit, it was time to paint it (while the weather was good).

For this I printed out a large stencil at the local makerspace and cut it out by hand.

This was a large but simple four-layer stencil (black circle, yellow, red, white) so cutting it out took no time at all. Unfortunately, the only paper available for the plotter printer was super flimsy, and that would be a pain later on.

For the first paint session we only did the round logo. We weren't sure we'd be able to do both sides, so we started with the one which would face the room (this side also got the best particleboard). We had a bad combination of elements here - flimsy paper and because I couldn't find my good artist's yellow spray paint, we were stuck with some generic watery hardware-store-brand spray paint with the approximate thickness of kool-aid. We had to paint the black circle, paint the stencil of the moon with white, then use the yellow over that. By then the stencil had warped and in some places stuck, so the black layer was messed up with underspray and missing paint. Luckily we still had the 'negative' from the stencil, so I used that to protect the yellow while I fixed the black. Then we did the white and red.

All of that was a mess and I wouldn't recommend it as a strategy. It was one of the worst ways I've had a stencil project go, but the end result wasn't bad.

And in a second lucky break, because it was sprayed onto particleboard, it actually cleaned up pretty well with isopropyl alcohol.

The finishing touch for that side, the company name, was comparatively easy. dimensionally it just fit inside the laser cutter, so we used that to cut it out of cardstock.

I think we even painted this one on indoors (another bad idea but the cab was heavy).

We definitely weren't going to repeat all that for the side facing a corner, so we did a simple two-color racing stripe instead.

It's always nice when your stencil is just a length of painter's tape and some newspaper. Even that garbage yellow paint couldn't go too badly this time around.

We made another trip to the makerspace and cut out a couple more things. The first was the very basic phases of the moon template I'd bashed together for the front marquee, the second was a fake coin door and buttons I found online.

We thought about doing something fancy like getting a real coin door, wiring up buttons so you had to push them for the 'coin' button in the emulator, but it seemed like a wiring hassle and our plan was for the lower part of the cabinet to be storage, so it'd be better if there wasn't wiring hanging around in there.

Painting the stencil on wasn't hard because we didn't have to haul the whole cabinet outside, we just painted a thin strip of particleboard with veneer black and stenciled it, then attached it to the front above where the door would go.

Now it was time for wiring. We got the TV in place and fabbed and test fit its bezel. (The bezel was too big for the laser cutter so we had to cut it by hand with a box cutter and a straight edge.)

I marked the mounting holes for the screws in the back of the TV by putting in some screws, daubing black paint on the heads, and settling the TV in place against the back board. That got close enough, though it was always a pain screwing the screws in through crooked holes in a pine board. I don't think we usually had all four attached, but it didn't seem to make much difference, the weight was on the board underneath, the screws were just to keep it from falling out when it was moved.

Then we added the buttons. Suddenly it was starting to look like something. I had to keep shooing my friend off the control panel (which wasn't currently doing anything) because they were so excited about trying out the joysticks and buttons. The verdict was good though, it was a comfortable height for them, even with shoes on. No carpel tunnel risk on this one.

Oh yeah, cable management is my passion. I think my friend eventually redid it so they looked nice.

I wired the cab up for power using some outlets and a lightswitch I got from our Buy Nothing Group, some spare wire, and a power I cord I ripped off a refrigerator someone was throwing out. (Don't worry, they'd already taken the doors off and dumped it in a pile face down on the curb). Learning from last time, I set it up so two sockets were switched and two were on all the time (so the TV could be left on). It's a fairly simple circuit, but just in case I took a ton of pictures and ran it past an electrician I know, who said it looked fine, asked if it worked, asked if it caught fire, and gave me their blessing.

I printed the case for my friend's raspberry pi. I know we could have used a regular old junk PC and still even been able to run retropie if we wanted, but they were planning to leave it running most of the time, and the pi has comparatively low power requirements, so that seemed like a good long-term plan.

It lives!

You might have noticed that somewhere in here the design had changed. My friend was worried the 'shelf' area for your hands on the original design would be too crowded, and the screen was a bit close. Considering that it was a widescreen TV which would only be showing a square game in the center, the cabinet sides didn't actually hide much. And standing the TV here simplified construction even further.

I cut a separate marquee piece for the bottom of the TV (I think because the design changed somewhere along the line?). It had a cutout at one end so the TV could see the IR light on the remote, and so the user could reach the buttons under the screen.

I glued the two pieces together, painted them, and worked out a way to attach it using hangers at the top. I remember it being difficult to attach it in a removable fashion, without anything showing on the front, and this is what I came up with.

The final design used wooden pegs to fasten it together for some reason, and I remember you could push them back out using a pencil which was handy during all the test fitting. There was probably a better way but this has held up fine.

The next step was finding enough flat, single panel material for the front panel/cabinet door. I watched our Buy Nothing and Everything is Free groups, and scouted around on trash days for months, looking for something big and flat enough (tabletops etc) and had no luck. A few house doors came up but they were like an inch too thick for how we wanted to do the hinges. Finally I gave up and bought a slab of particleboard. The home depot I got it from was able to use their fancy saw to cut straighter edges than I could have with my skillsaw, which was great. When he was done, the guy asked if I wanted the rest. I said they could keep it to resell, I was happy to pay for the whole thing to get the piece I needed, and he said they'd just throw it away. That's how I ended up with a (I think) four-foot by eight-foot piece of particleboard cut into two door panels and one long piece. The spare door eventually became the top of this table. The long piece hasn't found a use yet but it'll probably end up being a shelf. I haven't gone back to those stores since.

The last piece was a bit of cladding glued/screwed to the board under the TV. I honestly cannot remember why I did it this way, but I painted it black, glued it in place, and we only decided after to add labels to the buttons on that piece.

I took a bunch of measurements of the buttons, lasercut a couple very simple START SELECT stencils with various spacings, found one that fit well, stuck it in place (probably with easy-tac), masked the area with tape and newspaper, and gave it a couple quick hits with rusto white.

Considering the circumstances, I'm pleased with how they came out.

The last big task was moving the thing. That was a challenge as making it sturdy made it pretty heavy, though not as heavy as the real thing with the big CRTs would have been. We rented a moving truck, and used ratchet straps to fasten it to the back inside wall, standing upright, wrapped in blankets. As a bonus, we also delivered some speakers my neighbor wanted to give away.

My friend was planning to replace an armchair in their apartment with this cab. Their plan was just to throw it away, but first thing when we got to their apartment, I posted the chair to our local Buy Nothing page with the promise we'd deliver it. Then we set about hauling the cabinet inside, rearranging furniture, getting everything hooked up, cleaning off months of sawdust, and finally testing it out.

Hanging out, finally playing games on the arcade cab, in the place where it was supposed to be, was awesome. It's since seen a lot of use at parties, and it gets a lot of attention from newcomers to their apartment. We still haven't gotten around to stickerbombing it yet.

By the time we were done and the celebratory snacks had been eaten, we had a taker on the chair. We drove it to their apartment and carried it upstairs on the way back to the rental place.

This is my second step-by-step post using our local movim microblog platform rather than imgur. I've also done an imgur post as a backup but I’m seriously impressed with movim, very glad to have a noncorporate place to centralize my projects. Let me know if there’s any issue with the link.

A few months ago I discovered the Shōwa era Gamera movies and I gotta say: I love this goofball. I love that he's a giant turtle who stomps around on two legs. I love that he eats fire and screams constantly, no matter what he's doing. I love that he dances when he defeats an enemy. I love that he is, canonically, a friend to all children. And I love that he flies through the sky by retracting his legs into his shell, shooting fire out the openings, and spinning through the air like a frisbee.

Every year I try to make a new Christmas ornament. We normally add a few as souvenirs from that year (keychain from a place that was significant that year etc), but I always like to add a little carving if there's time. This year's pick was Gamera (flying). Due to life stuff, it took longer than I'd expected, but here it is.

I started by looking for suitable models (in real life or printable) and quickly decided it'd be easier to just make it from scratch. I've made cravings of animals before so a turtle shell was doable, especially if I cheated and used power tools.

I sketched the shape using different movie stills and posters as references. His design, both in the art and even the costume, sometimes varies, so I picked whichever features I liked best or were easiest. Unfortunately, for as long as this ended up taking me, I took surprisingly few pictures along the way. So I guess I'll paraphrase my dad's favorite unhelpful carving advice: picture a turtle shell inside your block of wood, then remove everything that isn't part of the turtle shell.

I started by sketching the shape top-down onto a piece of scrap pine and cutting it out on the band saw. Then I used the belt sander to rough it down to a turtle shell-ish shape. It's important to oversize it, because if you're like me, you'll need room to correct mistakes. And you do that by removing everything else around the mistake until it's gone. Here's an early rough version of it

I kept sanding it down, consulting occasionally with images from the films to make sure the overall shape was correct (or at least not mutually exclusive with the material I had left).

Eventually I got it smoothed down and could start positioning legs, tail, and head holes in the shell. Unfortunately, this is apparently where I stopped taking pictures. I can tell you that I needed to make this much thinner, and took a lot of material away from his belly, and flattened the shape of the shell. I cut in a pattern of the underside armor, and then removed a bit between it and the upper shell to make it more distinct. I cut the holes into the sides, but left a sort of volcano shape inside for the four limbs, so it would look like the jets from one of the movie posters. I did a similar thing for his head and tail, but didn't add a hole in the middle for fire to come out of. I also carved his head kind of pointed, with the ridges which run from snout to eye (though the eyes are hidden) and removed some material around his tusks.

On his back, I drew a scale pattern, and the worked from the tail end to the head with a dremel, cutting away the 'top' end of each scale, just below the next one, so it would look like they're overlapping. On a big animal carving, I probably would have done this more carefully, but this is kinda just a silly ornament for the two of us, so I wasn't stressing getting the scales perfect.

Once that was all done, I drilled holes into the 'volcanoes' sticking up from the leg holes. I hadn't decided how I'd do the fire yet at this point, but I was thinking sprigs of painted wire.

The next step was painting. All the costumes and even in the art have Gamera looking pretty one-note, color-wise. Just sort of a blue-green-grey color. I started with flat black spray paint, getting it pretty thoroughly, but in many light coats (so as not to raise the grain from the wood), then hit it with with lighter coats of brite blue from an angle, to try to preserve some of the darker color in the nooks and crannies. Then I mixed some green and blue acrylic paint and did a sort of drybrush all over. I painted black into some of the nooks around the jets, and head and tail. I painted his tusks white.

Then I got some breadbag ties, the wire and paper kind. I was going to do a small bouquet of them sticking out of each jet, but the first test actually looked quite good on its own. I cut four of them (tapering it a little so it'd go into the hole better, and so it'd look more like flame on the other end) gave them each one twist, and painted them yellow-orange-red with a bit of flame pattern. They fit in tight without any glue.

Finally I drove a little eye-loop into the top of the shell and tied an old clothing tag string through it.

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.

This is my first step-by-step post using our local movim microblog rather than imgur. I'll upload it to imgur later as a backup but I'm seriously impressed with movim, very glad to have a noncorporate place for my projects. Let me know if there's any issue with the link.

This is another quick one but at least I remembered to take pictures for most of it. I don’t enjoy oil painting as much as I do photobashes and other digital art, but it’s still a lot of fun in the right moment. I needed a picture frame for a recent one, to complete a gift to a relative. It was on a stretched canvas, rather than canvasboard, so the frame had to be deeper than normal. So decided to just make it from scrap lumber I had squirreled away.

I started with this stuff. These 1 ½” by 1 ¾” boards were part of a kind of disappointing haul I got from my local Everything is Free page. I don’t remember what it was I thought I’d find there, but by the time I got to it, all that was left was this tangle of busted-up boards from inside some kind of homemade builtin cabinet. They were cracked from their demolition, and full of wood screws, but I took them because there was still plenty of good material and I think I wanted to justify the trip.

I pulled all the screws and used them in another project, and when I went looking for material for the picture frame, they were pretty much perfect. Plenty of material, and I didn’t have to worry I’d use it for something better. The painting was of a rustic cabin, so the frame was going to be a bit rustic anyways, so a little battle damage was no big deal.

I measured and marked them based on a picture frame my grandfather had made (I would have used it instead but it wasn’t deep enough for the stretched canvas). I cut them to length, then down to 45 degrees on my miter saw (it makes squaring up lumber and doing corners absurdly easy, I used to do them all by hand and getting them to fit was much more art than science back then.)

Once I was looking at it, I realized the frame was a bit too thick, and decided to remove about half an inch in depth from the four pieces. This would be quick work on a table saw, but I don’t have one, so I marked a line and used the band saw. Then I sanded up all the sides on a belt sander until they looked good. There was a bit of stain left in deep spots from the original project, and I tried to keep some of it – I like a little character and history from the life of the piece. This wood was a part of someone’s home, they knocked it out with a sledge hammer, a weird goblin man came by on trash day and took it, now it’s a picture frame hanging on a wall.

Then I had to use the router to notch the back of all the pieces to hold the actual canvas. My router was a recent junk store find, it’s the old craftsman kind that’s a hand router bolted to the underside of a little fiberglass table. I screwed it to the workbench over the lathe, down on the far end, since its out of the way and that’s my heaviest workbench. I have plans to rewire the router, so you can turn it on and off with a proper tool switch, like I did for the drill press, but I haven’t done that yet, so turning it on meant reaching underneath, feeling for one of the handles, finding the trigger and the locking button, and setting them, at which point it begins to spin. It’s awkward and I wouldn’t want to have to do that in an emergency.

This was my first time really using a router on my own projects, so it wasn’t quite as pretty as I’d like, but overall it looks fine. I definitely want to replace the small, two-part fence with a taller one that runs end-to-end and gets closer to the blade. That would reduce the piece’s ability to wobble when its only braced against one of them.

Once the notch was cut I found the 45 clamp didn’t work that well so I stuck each joint together with a big dab of wood glue and a couple small dabs of super glue. The super glue gives you just enough time to get the pieces where you want them, and sort of acts as the clamping force for the wood glue, which takes much longer to dry.

Once it was dry, I stained the frame with Sedonia Red, it came out a sort of pink color but I think it’ll be a good fit for the white cabin with red trim in the painting, and the recipient can always hit it with a second coat of a darker stain if they choose.

The last step was to add a cable to the back. They make little metal picture frame hanger things, and I thought about just cutting and bending one from a soda can, but to be honest, I kinda hate those hangers. I don’t think they work well and they feel unreliable to me. Usually I just use a strand pulled from some damaged CAT 5 wire, but this time I happened to have this metal cable left over from… somewhere? I honestly can’t remember what it came from. But it’s the sort of thing I keep because it doesn’t take up much space and it’ll be useful eventually, and sure enough it was! The loops had already been cut, so I just drilled a hole through the little aluminum clamps at either end, used the vice to squeeze them down on the wire a little extra, and used them to attach the cable to the painting. I measured both holes from the top, and predrilled them with a thin bit to make driving in the nail easier (since I didn’t want to break the picture frame.

As a very last touch, I cut a tiny sliver of wood and glued it into a notch where the miter saw ripped out a bit of wood at the top left corner. A little stain blended that back in nicely.

Overall, not bad for my first picture frame. It’s a little rough, but it’s supposed to look that way.

This is I think the third time in my life I've made a character sheet for a tabletop RPG so I've probably messed something up, but I thought I'd share it just the same. I tried to focus on making someone who is good at fixing and making things, and who only has some basic recreational sport fighting knowhow which he'd be very reluctant to use (and which might be dubiously useful anyways). I'm not sure how well he'd fit action-heavy campaigns - he's almost closer to a ship's engineer kind of role, and I'm not sure how that'd fit an investigation, for example. But I wanted to do something different, and emphasize other kinds of problem solving, so here's what I came up with:

I might change his origins based on where the next campaign I can join takes place. I feel like he'd fit just as well in another city, or even in one of the orbital or martian locations.

I think this one is a pretty safe recommendation. I found it on a list of protocyberpunk stories a few years ago, and it looks like it shows up on similar lists fairly often, but I think it better qualifies just as early cyberpunk. It was published a month after Neuromancer, and Shiner thanks Gibson and Sterling for their help in the author’s note at the end. The setting, though distinct, feels very similar to the Sprawl books. It has not just the usual elements (a dying world with megacorporations ruling over the ruins of nations and governments as it all slowly collapses into disrepair and apathy, corporate soldiers and a chaotic war with ever-changing alliances where the killing was done more for boardroom dealings thousands of miles away, stolen wetware, heck even mirrored sunglasses, but it also has a lot of the same feel, the vivid descriptions, and a similar kind of dreamlike tone in places. I’d say Frontera somehow feels a little less steeped in the 1980s, and might be missing some stuff like AI, but if you like Gibson’s sprawl books, I think it’s about as close as you can get in terms of tone and feel.

So what’s it about? When things got bad and the governments collapsed, Earth abandoned the colonies on Mars. The corporation that ended up with NASA’s property on the ground and in orbit decides to finance a sketchy trip to mars using old equipment on a rushed timetable. Their reasons are kept secret even to most of the crew but even the back of the book will tell you the colonists are still alive out there, and they have something multiple corporations, including the ones who obtained the remnants of the soviet space program, want very badly.

Overall I quite like it, I think it fits nicely into the early days of cyberpunk, and it’s a fun story. I’m not super into the science of colonizing Mars, but I suspect some stuff has been figured out since the book was written. Still, it’s a great story, and I very much recommend it.

This is the last of my crossposts, I'm writing up a new book recommendation right now. cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/1381483

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.

spoiler

The 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 fairy 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.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/14508843

Here is a map of current free stores in New York.

https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1LiHVRiKFOtkx0LwDIczp4KoseLhdDg9n&ll=40.75095081144914%2C-73.95967585&z=12

Also a similar project called the freecycle network lists towns across the world.

https://www.freecycle.org/find-towns

There's also Buy Nothing and Everything is Free