andrewrgross

It's got little instructive explainers worked into the story. Good art, too.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/16264721

I'm looking for a GM and players for a post-capitalist scifi adventure game.

The game setting and system are from an indie RPG called Fully Automated! (We have a community: c/fullyautomatedrpg )

I'm one of the developers, looking for a GM and possibly players on behalf of some other players who don't have quite enough people to start a new group.

The Game

The game takes place 100 years into our post-capitalist future. It's cyberpunky in style, but with an optimistic, earthy flavor. It uses a custom 2d10 system, but it's very flexible and modable if you prefer something else. The GM is welcome to use the rules as described in the manual (which are very straightforward) or just graft the campaign onto their preferred system.

We're currently playtesting a new campaign and we've got a few too many players for one play group. The extra players asked if I could look for a GM and a few more players to make a second group. I'm actually a player in the first test group, and we're 5 weeks into what is really a helluva campaign. It's a lot of fun and very well written. I expect it to be about 10 sessions, but don't really know.

The Campaign

The campaign is called "The 1000 Year Cleanup". The players are sent to the backwoods of New Hampshire by a supply chain specialist who thinks that they've found indications of a long-buried toxic waste dumping site. Salvaged records suggest that a local landowner helped a chemical corporation illegally dump tons of toxic slag during the later years of the Global Climate War. Sixty years later, the slag is now sought after by a company that recycles toxic waste into useful, non-toxic industrial products. But the whole area is in in the process of being rewilded. Deconstruction crews are dismantling what's left of some largely abandoned ghost towns. If the players don't find the waste, soon there'll be no one left to ask and no roads by which to remove it, and the toxins will simply leach into the surrounding hills in slow silence for centuries to come.

(There's also a little twist! I don't want to reveal it to anyone who might want to play, but if you're interested in running the game (or just curious), message me and I'll clue you in.)

In terms of play, it's a bit like an extended Star Trek away mission if it took place amidst a big ecological restoration project. It's a very cool vibe that most players will find surprisingly easy to get into. Let me know if you'd like to play!

I'm looking for a GM and players for a post-capitalist scifi adventure game.

The game setting and system are from an indie RPG called Fully Automated! (We have a community: c/fullyautomatedrpg )

I'm one of the developers, looking for a GM and possibly players on behalf of some other players who don't have quite enough people to start a new group.

The Game

The game takes place 100 years into our post-capitalist future. It's cyberpunky in style, but with an optimistic, earthy flavor. It uses a custom 2d10 system, but it's very flexible and modable if you prefer something else. The GM is welcome to use the rules as described in the manual (which are very straightforward) or just graft the campaign onto their preferred system.

We're currently playtesting a new campaign and we've got a few too many players for one play group. The extra players asked if I could look for a GM and a few more players to make a second group. I'm actually a player in the first test group, and we're 5 weeks into what is really a helluva campaign. It's a lot of fun and very well written. I expect it to be about 10 sessions, but don't really know.

The Campaign

The campaign is called "The 1000 Year Cleanup". The players are sent to the backwoods of New Hampshire by a supply chain specialist who thinks that they've found indications of a long-buried toxic waste dumping site. Salvaged records suggest that a local landowner helped a chemical corporation illegally dump tons of toxic slag during the later years of the Global Climate War. Sixty years later, the slag is now sought after by a company that recycles toxic waste into useful, non-toxic industrial products. But the whole area is in in the process of being rewilded. Deconstruction crews are dismantling what's left of some largely abandoned ghost towns. If the players don't find the waste, soon there'll be no one left to ask and no roads by which to remove it, and the toxins will simply leach into the surrounding hills in slow silence for centuries to come.

(There's also a little twist! I don't want to reveal it to anyone who might want to play, but if you're interested in running the game (or just curious), message me and I'll clue you in.)

In terms of play, it's a bit like an extended Star Trek away mission if it took place amidst a big ecological restoration project. It's a very cool vibe that most players will find surprisingly easy to get into. Let me know if you'd like to play!

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/16130943

My mom was complaining that the city has limits on how many leaves that they'll pick up, and she's got bags and bags of leaves stuffed into black garbage bags. This seems like a problem that should have some kind of backyard solution.

I've done a cursory search, and see that leaves are very compostable. They can also apparently be turned into "mold", though I don't fully understand what this means.

But I also see that there is a lot of variety in compost bins, and they're quite expensive. So I'm wondering: what's the best strategy for making leaves go away? She's not specifically interested in the product of the leaves, she just wants to find somewhere to put them after she rakes them up. Any ideas?

My mom was complaining that the city has limits on how many leaves that they'll pick up, and she's got bags and bags of leaves stuffed into black garbage bags. This seems like a problem that should have some kind of backyard solution.

I've done a cursory search, and see that leaves are very compostable. They can also apparently be turned into "mold", though I don't fully understand what this means.

But I also see that there is a lot of variety in compost bins, and they're quite expensive. So I'm wondering: what's the best strategy for making leaves go away? She's not specifically interested in the product of the leaves, she just wants to find somewhere to put them after she rakes them up. Any ideas?

During a gameplay session last week my character left a message on the Wood Wide Web for some local wildfolk. I was just improvising in the game, but I love the concept and I think it'd be nice to develop the concept a bit and share to make it easier to use in games.

The concept of the Wood Wide Web is currently understood strictly as a mycorrhizal network for coordinating interactions between fungal communities and plants across forests, but within the game I'd like to establish that these existing networks are used as a backbone for sending messages across forests by humans.

I don't want to go too deep, but what should the player experience of using this be like?

In my head, I'm imagining this as an organic version of a wireless ad-hoc mesh network. One project in particular, diaster.radio, is designed to set up a system for Twitter-like microblogging that is geotagged across a decentralized mesh of nodes. I think this is a good framework. Users access the Wood-Web by plugging a small electronic spike into the dirt, and it lets them browse recent posts like you do on Mastodon, but perhaps with low character limits and no multimedia. Does that sound good? What do folks think of this interface?

Also, I'd like a basic overview of how it works. It doesn't need to be highly technical. But just as one might try to hack a network and we all understand what a WiFi router is, I'd like for there to be a basic understanding of how this is managed. I'm thinking that it's primarily based on the naturally occurring mycorrhizal networks, but with a series of low-power router nodes that allow humans to interface with it.

What do folks think? As a player, if you went into a forest and plugged in to this, what would you expect to see? How fast and far do you think messages should go? What kind of maintenance would you imagine sysadmins needing to perform? Thanks!

I think this is a glimpse of both our present and near future. Companies failing without an end-of-life plan, and hackers swooping in. It's fascinating. I wonder what it might tell us about more extreme examples, like major power and fuel infrastructure.

These aren't the kind of election results that lead in the news, but Alaskan natives recognizing the importance of a rule that obstructs the two major parties from gatekeeping voters abilities to express choices that don't align with party line issues is exactly the kind of change in politics that might save us.

A few of us just started a new campaign! We might have room for one or two more people if anyone has been looking for an opportunity to join in a game of Fully Automated!

I'm not the GM, fyi, so participating is contingent on the preferences of our GM. But I'm excited to finally be trying this game as a player!

I volunteered to present a talk on Robot Operating System (ROS) to the Open Automation Club. Details can be found here: https://www.autobio.blog/robot-operating-system-with-andy-gross/

If you want to join, this is the link (although I added the word "POTATO" to prevent bots from doing anything weird. Remove the word POTATO to access the meeting).

https://us06web.zoomPOTATO.us/j/85686205319?pwd=QUuCxqbbfYb3xhjf8X3Nqrn9VGVxHy.1

I gotta say that I feel weird reading this examination of Octavia Butler's notes.

I'm reading Parable of the Talents right now, and I had to stop. It's gotten too fucking dark. It's about the fascist takeover of America by Christian Nationalists, and a major character just died, and there is sexual exploitation of children... I really like Butler and Parable of the Sower, but this just got so dark I decided to read the summary and find out if I wanted to read more, and I don't think I can read this, at least not right now.

Reading about the unpublished sequels feels even worse. It seems like Butler had a head full of so much darkness and cynicism, and her published works were just the processed output after she managed to find the least brutal version of her thoughts. These books were her at her most hopeful! YIKES.

I like her and these books, but I just had to vent about some of this.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/14202920

There was a post on Reddit that praised the ubiquitous "Dear Alice" commercial, and inevitably a comment criticizing praise for a commercial. This led to me to wonder more about who it was that made this famous solarpunk advertisement. The answer is an animation studio called The Line. I went looking at some of their other work, and came across this interesting demo short for what appears to be a proof of concept or pilot for a solarpunky animated monster hunting series.

I don't love the heavy use of guns. But setting that aside, I think the art is interesting. I'm fascinated to see what people are doing with the artistic and conceptual toolset solarpunk offers, and I think this is a use case that I wouldn't mind seeing more of.

Unfortunately, this demo is as far as the project went. But I'm happy to see that the folks at The Line appear to have some broader interest in solarpunk, and I hope they keep putting it into practice in unique ways.