JacobCoffinWrites

A heart with a smiling face drawn on tile with chalk

This will likely be my last winter solarpunk scene for a bit – I want to focus on library economies next. This one is based on two different ideas recommended for the village scene, which I decided to combine in their own photobash.

The first was to reconsider icehouses, not necessarily for storing ice for directly cooling food, but as part of a much larger temperature regulation system and meltwater reservoir.

They suggested creating buildings with flat roofs with hatches on top and earthen ramps up the sides, where snow could be hauled in from roads and walkways, pushed up the ramps, and down into the open hatches. They also suggested harvesting ice from a designated pond, which is why I added a pond to the small waterway in the village in my last photobash.

The cool idea (I thought) was that in the summer, the snow and ice can be used as centralized air or water chillers, part of systems for nearby apartment buildings, or, if the buildings are adjacent to barns (as in the village scene) then during deadly heat events the cooling effect could be used to protect the animals. The meltwater could also serve as an additional emergency water source for drought conditions if clean enough, and could even be misted around wilderness water sources to keep wild animals alive during heat disasters.

Otherwise, the meltwater would circulate into coolant loops then get discharged into algae farms or water treatment (because of road/path/roof/track matter scrapings.)

In my design, I decided to have these snow vaults dug as concrete pits in the ground, to make loading them easier. Roller doors and insulation, along with railings and gates, would hopefully make them fairly safe, while the roof would protect them from the sun and rainwater seeping in. This thing might make for snow removal easier in especially snowy years, as they’d have someplace nearby to put a lot of it. Hopefully when they’re filling the vault, an assistant is out keeping watch for pedestrians who might for some reason wander into the pit.

I’m not an engineer, and I know my limits in designing new structures. But I also know that in a lot of systems, cold is a resource, something you always have to create heat to produce. So a big reservoir of free cold has to be useful somehow. I also like the idea of turning a wintertime hassle into a resource, both for temperature regulation and for water supplies.

I decided to combine the snow vault idea with a possible use for some existing Internal Combustion Engine vehicles – conversion to run on woodgas. I think in rural areas, like this village, society will continue to need some independent vehicles. I think in this setting, that doesn’t mean everyone is driving around in personal automobiles, but that some are maintained for specific tasks, by hobbyists, and by farmers, forest managers, and others whose work takes them impractically far from public transit. I think woodgas is a good fit here. It emphasizes reuse of existing machinery instead of new manufacturing. It doesn’t require high-tech electronics like electric vehicles. And it’s less practical for the kind of quick trip to the store or daily commute which has shaped our current society. A woodgas vehicle takes awhile (ten to twenty minutes to start up), can’t easily be stored indoors, and because the fire needs to burn down, doesn’t make much sense for short trips. But in a solarpunk society, most folks shouldn’t need a car for that stuff – they’d be walking or taking public transit. So conversions like this would be used for special trips – hauling produce to town, supplies out to forest management camps, research sites, and other remote locations. And perhaps for road trips by campers and other people who might borrow one for an adventure. The wood can be sustainably sourced, using scraps from sawmills, harvested invasive trees, brush, and even dedicated coppiced plantations of especially fast growing trees like paulownia elongata. One of the byproducts of gassification is biochar, which can be tremendously useful in compost, and holds carbon for a comparatively long time. I also think its important to note that while this can be done well, when these vehicles were previously used in massive numbers (during WWII) they led to deforestation. They make sense in small doses, and with some careful management of their inputs.

Sorry if any details are unclear in the art, I’ve been looking at a lot of Christmas cards lately, and wanted to aim for that aesthetic with this one.

This image and all the other postcards are CC-BY, use them how you like.

I love wrapping Christmas presents. But I haven't bought wrapping paper in over a decade. Even before I found zerowaste as a concept, I enjoyed the thrift and challenge of reusing old paper, working around tears, tape, and crinkles. I've always been kinda weird so my family went along with it, until it's now part of our tradition and they help me gather up the big scraps after everything's been opened.

My advice, if you want to try this:

• Tape the paper to the present first so you can sort of cinch the paper tight. That pulls a lot of the wrinkles and folds out of it and makes it look nice.

• Fold it at the corners for a sharper look.

• Use the gift/name tags to cover any damaged spots. I use the ones charities send in the mail after you donate once five years ago. Or blank bits of the sticky paper from the sheets of mailing labels.

• Consider other sources of paper - I've also used posters that didn't print right and regular newspaper

Benefits/reasons my family puts up with it:

• It can be surprisingly nostalgic to see paper from last year and remember projects and things we gave back then. I've kept some pieces going, showing up again and again in smaller pieces for like five years now.

• Fancy paper: I try to prioritize the really fancy/pretty stuff from years past, the shiny foil papers etc. it's nice to get extra use out of that.

• Humor: most of us live separately now so everyone tends to wrap their presents with their own paper, which kinda indicates who it's from. Except me - my presents look like they came from everyone else, which is sometimes surprising or funny.

I've posted a few times around the instance asking for input on this one. huge thanks to everyone for their suggestions! I've tried to include all of them, and have done some others as separate scenes. I have more planned.

I’ve been thinking a lot about rural solarpunk lately. Idyllic farming scenes aside, there aren’t many depictions in solarpunk art of places that look like the towns where I’m from. But the towns where I’m from aren’t very solarpunk, despite being beautiful and full of nature. With cars, people have spread out in these sprawling bedroom communities that are becoming ever more dense with neighborhoods. Gas and groceries are easily a 40-minute drive away (more if you’re looking for a big box store), and I feel like most people I knew growing up drove at least an hour each way for work. When you live there, you’re completely dependent on your vehicles and you sometimes have at least one spare per household.

I’ve also been thinking about how these places might change with some of the societal crumbles and contractions I feel like are impending. Cars rely on a lot of infrastructure all over the world, from their manufacturing, to their maintenance, and fuel is a massive and complex tangle of technologies and politics, dependent on a ton of infrastructure for acquisition, refining, and transportation, and again, maintenance of all those systems. How would rural areas change if cars became impractical (due to shortages etc) and how could things be rebuilt better? Or what would they look like if cars had never taken off the way they did?

In my grandparents’ time, the region where I grew up was lots of small villages, usually bunched up around water and local industry, with farms and forests out beyond that.

So I decided to build this scene around a similar place. A small dense village, served by multiple kinds of public transit, and surrounded by multiple examples of agroforestry, and rewilded forests beyond that.

I realized pretty quickly that this is a bit bigger in scope than most of the things I’ve depicted before. In most of my scenes, I feel like you can usually assume everything else society needs is just out of frame, but with this photobash, aside from anything inside the buildings and under the canopy, you can see the whole place. So I had to try and make sure I included everything they’d need. I’m just one guy whose okay at cutting up images, and I don’t know much about community planning, so I reached out a few times for ideas:

https://slrpnk.net/post/2764472

https://slrpnk.net/post/4535056

https://slrpnk.net/post/4537582

https://slrpnk.net/post/2794425

https://www.reddit.com/r/solarpunk/comments/182w2vh/things_a_solarpunk_village_would_need/

https://www.reddit.com/r/solarpunk/comments/170etfr/what_would_you_like_to_see_in_art_of_a_rural/

And I received quite a few! I’ve tried to include every suggestion (assuming it would fit at this zoomed-out level). I’ve really enjoyed this process – I feel like any future worth building is going to be pretty collaborative and consensus-driven, so it makes sense to build our depictions of it the same way.

So what’s in this scene:

Housing:

• Apartment buildings: To get the density and walkability I've included a clump of four/five story brick apartment buildings (figuring brick can possibly be baked in solar kilns and transported by train) around an open common area near the train station. (I think it can probably be assumed that these are mixed use and the first floor of some are shops and third spaces).
• Multi-family homes
• Houses: further out on the edges of the village, and some along the farms
• Tiny homes: possibly some are used for visitors to the village, or just people who don’t need much space and want more privacy or a better location
• An abandoned McMansion left over from an earlier age, far enough out and in bad enough shape that its not currently in use. Perhaps it will eventually be restored for use, or, if the damage is bad enough or no one needs it, perhaps it will be disassembled for parts/materials.

Recreation:

• An open common area/farmer's market/sometimes sports field
• The top of the train station is an open park and set of community gardens Some rooftops are community gardens
• Pond and surrounding park, possibly stocked with fish for the meat eaters, possibly used for ice harvesting in the winter.
• The river below the village (I'm trying to make it clear the main river swings below the village and there's a bit of a riparian buffer around it)
• Public amphitheater – one of the only man-made structures on the flood plane.
• The billboard in the foreground is part of a project inside the setting, where they’ve replaced any advertizements on the remaining billboards with artwork, just as a sort of public outdoor art gallery.
• Under the tree canopy there’d be parks, playgrounds, and other third places.
• Public workshops/makerspaces

Public transit:

• Train/train station
• Ropeway to a nearby village not directly served by the train

Agriculture:

• Agroforestry: in the foreground we mostly have alley cropping, in the back it looks more like strip cropping or wind breaks. There’s a riparian boundary around the river, and the forest in and around the village is a food forest where people can forage (in addition to sheltering parks, playgrounds, and other things). I’m not any kind of expert on agroforestry, sorry if my depictions have issues.
• A small paulownia elongata pollard plantation (tucked between the barn/recycling warehouse and the biogas generator and algae farm because the wrong type of this tree can be invasive) which are used for woodgas, and also for shelter for animals, possibly goats, who would also help prevent invasive shoots from spreading.
• Solar panel farm with crops planted underneath
• Algae farm (for nutrients or biodiesel?)
• Greenhouses/Walpinis set into the south-facing hillside
• Compost windrows with negative pressure airflow pulling CO2 into the greenhouses/algae farm.
• Grain bins for storage

Industry:

• Workshops/factories: some have waterwheels (fed using a levada style stone channel split from the main river), others are set up on higher ground.
• Road leading down to town, with a work crew hauling back an old car for recycling. Perhaps there’s a bounty type system in place, and this will be loaded on a train to be melted down in a solar furnace further south.

Power sources:

• Solar farm and rooftop solar
• Windmills (though these may belong to the next village)
• Anaerobic Biogas Generation from sewage
• Gas generator converted to run on woodgas

Not visible from here:

Under the canopy/ -Food forests -Parks -Playgrounds

Inside the buildings: -Places of worship -Cafeterias -Other third places

Thanks again for all your help!

Earlier today I posted to the farming community to ask about a photobash of a village I'm working on. One of the suggestions I'd received in my last search for inputs was a centralized composting solution, which I think makes sense for a solarpunk community. Everybody contributes organic waste and everyone benefits.

I started doing some reading about options from a random state website so I guess you can assume that's the absolute upper limit of my understanding of composting at this time. I just want to represent it well and if there's any good talking points that could go into the picture's text write up to drive discussion, I'd love to include them.

One thing I saw was that with aeration, you can do negative pressure systems which suck air from the compost windrow to pull in fresh air - if you did that, could you divert the compost offgassing (which should be a decent amount of CO2 right?) into the greenhouses to boost the plant growth without burning fuel?

Thanks for any input

I've been working on the photobash I posted about apparently two months ago (jeez) and I think I'm getting close to being able to stop working on layout and start working on details. The problem is that the scope of this scene involves a lot of stuff, like agroforestry, that I only read about for making this picture, so I know I don't know enough to render it accurately.

So I thought I'd post again and basically ask what did I mess up? I haven't really started locking stuff down yet so it's a good time to make changes.

The basic goal was to show a small, dense village surrounded by different types of agroforestry, power generation, and agriculture. I'm happy to identify anything that's unclear

I'm especially interested in info on the overall layout. Like, I haven't settled yet on where in the dirt patch the greenhouses will go, and I'd like to add a centralized composting facility, wastewater treatment, possibly some animal barns/grazing areas, possibly a grove of coppiced trees for wood gas/biochar. I'll be adding more houses to both the village proper and the outskirts of the fields in some places.

I'm just a guy who's okay at cutting up photos, so any advice on making the farming more practical/realistic would be a huge help.

This is a quick one, not an impressive repair, but maybe a nice demonstration of the perks of keeping stuff until its useful. I found a multi-socket extension cord/usb charger while digging through ewaste (I fix up laptops and give the stuff I find away on my local.Buy Nothing -type group).

Someone had really yanked on it (probably the plug was stuck behind something heavy) and when it came free, two of the prongs were bent, and the ground prong was ripped out altogether.

I had a spare 120v plug - about a year ago, I took some old extension cords from an estate cleanout. Awhile later, while helping a friend build an arcade cabinet, I dug one out and cut the socket off it to wire the cabinet up for electricity. Unfortunately, the sheathing around the individual wires inside the cord had crumbled away to almost nothing, and it wasn't safe to use. I gave the copper to a friend who sells metal to a junkyard, and kept the plugs from either end.

The actual rewiring isn't difficult, just stripped the wires and attached them to the correct terminals. I used an old neon tester my neighbor gave me to check my work. It lit up just fine and I didn't trip the circuit. Later I plugged a bricked, ewaste 1st gen ipad into the usb socket and it started charging just fine. So it looks like this worked out

So there's my excuse for why I keep all these odds and ends.Even when it's something as simple as this, there's something wonderful about being able to take multiple pieces of junk, combining them, and suddenly having a useful item.

So I was finally able to get back to work on the sound recorder. The general gist is that this is meant to be an audio recorder with transcription and email capabilities, which is also ruthlessly simple to use. There's one button. You push it, a recording says "recording" and it starts recording. You push the button again and it stops recording and says "stop". It now runs the audio file through a speech recognition program, and then creates and sends an email with the transcription in the body and the wav file as an attachment. Relatives can figure out what to do with the content from there.

Progress so far:

I'd planned to follow step 3 of the Pi Spy tutorial but found that DeepSpeech was no longer supported(?) and hadn't really been made with anything less than a Pi4 in mind (I'm using a 3b). Luckily, a bunch of other speech recognition options are available, and I settled on spchcat mostly because it was the first one I found that fit my use case.

If you're going to install it on a raspberry pi, I very much recommend their issues page for getting through dependency hell. Especially if you put a 64bit OS on your pi. (Remember to get the :armhf version of whatever library it needs.) Pulseaudio also seems to help.

This is a pretty short post, I mostly just wanted to make my updated code available. It's... not great. I'm not a programmer by trade, and I'm a strong believer in 'finished not perfect' even when I know what I'm doing. It seems to be functional, that's about all I can promise. Maybe don't let anyone shout bash commands around it. There's also still no error catching around the length of the recording, or the transcription, though that at least doesn't seem to cause any issues when it fails.

This is definitely more of a jumping off point than a proper finished product, but hopefully it'll be useful to someone who's trying to make the same thing or something similar. Even if it's not perfect, maybe it'll save you from repeating some of the work I've done so far.

We're going to do another trial run, see what her feedback is, and update from there.

The updated code is here: https://mega.nz/file/LQlz1BjQ#3R6E9_k1jfmjzFUcBXq_Qi3IGf46iuYtZ95fQlAO-HI

A cute cartoon fox/wolf/coyote drawn in brown marker with eyes drawn in black. Above it there is some text which looks like 'Jonxiety'

A small drawing of two small aliens(?) Surrounded by excitement lines, in white paint marker on brick

I'd read you could transplant them in the fall, after they've died back a bit but before the ground freezes. I finally dug a few out of two local groves and it turns out they're different varieties! My neighbor gave me the okay to plant them (I've been helping him replace his lawn with local plants, and we're emphasizing local food plants in the back). I know they can take over a space a bit, but he seems excited at the idea. He has just about the only bees I've seen in our neighborhood, so he's happy to give them more flowers. And if the sunchokes go too crazy I have a friend who knows how to cook them.

Tucked one in to a sunny spot where someone clearcut along a bike path too. Maybe it'll take off. I've been thinking about trying a little guerilla forest gardening along the path, perhaps starting with edible mushrooms next. I guess they make plugs - you drill holes in dead logs, tuck the mushroom plug in, and you get mushrooms. We'll see.

I'm thinking about my next photobash. I've seen photos of projects turning old, likely nonfunctional swimming pools into walipinis, but conventional wisdom has that there's a big difference between an empty concrete swimming pool and a proper foundation. That the sides will collapse without the support of the pool water, or the water table in the ground will lift the thing like a concrete boat and break it. Just the same, it's not uncommon to see abandoned swimming pools laying empty, looking more or less foundation-shaped. It seems like a very solarpunk thing, to turn an expensive-to-maintain luxury into something practical, a greenhouse that takes less energy to keep it warm.

So my question is: can it be done, especially if the pool is already nonfunctional and you're not worried about returning it to its original use? What steps/precautions should you take to make it last and safe? Reinforce the sides? Cut away part of the bottom? Add drainage around it?

Thanks for any thoughts