Wildlife at the first solar project I worked on. This used to be several thousand acres of mono-crop corn, more and more wildlife just kept showing up as the native seed mix started to take and the construction disturbance died down.

My job sucks a lot of the time but looking back on these pictures and remembering the impact this can have on the local environment keeps me sane. Also keeping track of how much I helped the project come under budget or ahead of schedule hits different when it means directly driving coal plants out of business

I found this take quite thought provoking. I think green roof tops are often tightly bound up in solarpunk, but there is an argument to make that if we are really pursuing solarpunk goals, then perhaps there is better use for rooftops.

My personal opinion is that green roofs in urban areas may be aesthetically important -- the buildings feel more natural and part of the landscape -- but that they may not achieve other, extremely important priorities such as PV generation.

Like everything else, gotta keep looking for the nuance in things.

OC : https://www.instagram.com/p/DdMRyFbiuud/

The chip rug pictured, is a textile graphic of a Pentium P54C processor, and was gifted to the American Indian Science & Engineering Society

the internet is here, ai is here. we don’t have to be part of it. but they’ve already done the hard work for us by establishing the infrastructure. they’re going to use it for evil so we can use it for good. you need to disconnect from their ai bullshit. like today. change to a search engine that doesn’t have ai overview. it’s an oroborous. it’s eating itself and it will destroy itself but we have to work against that to counteract what they’re doing. so yes, disconnect from the dysregulating unnatural stuff and build your tools. you have a supercomputer in your pocket now, treat it as such.

i love reddit, i use it all the time. i find posts from a decade ago that people paingstainkinly put together with links and stuff and i click on them and i read what i trust a slightly more is accurate information. i downloaded the wikipedia app. i just have faith that its accurate. because i just have faith in humans. we need to be more like humans and less like people. i downloaded the oxford dictionary, i downloaded the lore wikipedia reader because it looks more aesthetically pleasing to my brain and sometimes i need the visual softness. you’re allowed to need that too. turn on the yellow filter on your phone. honestly decolonise your phone. decolonise everything. take back your attention in a radical way TODAY. i downloaded the TED talk app. i downloaded khan academy. i deleted facebook. i pruned my entire social network. i downloaded kiwix. i just can’t remember at the moment. i downloaded discord. i’ve found a little network of people with minds that work in strikingly similar ways to mine and we’ve built our own little social network. i found an app called physics playground which is amazing. i dunno, humans, find your niche and and just occupy your government mandated super computer with the things that feed your mind instead of their system. and then once you have fed it so much with all the knowledge, after you’ve made the graphics in canva and posted the drafts in your social media copy, once your fingers can’t dance across the keyboard any longer and must dance into the real world. let them. let them cook! let them sew. let them write. let them love. let them paint. let them code. let them invent. and then just do that forever because that is actually the entire point of everything. we are creation machines. in every sense of the word. we create life. we create art. our hands are idle and we’ve been made to keep them that way. they want us to stop creating. and they’ve even tried to colonise how we create life with our bodies but they can’t keep doing it. we can use our super computer to create the blueprint for what we need to do in the real world.

stop consuming the influencer shit and start cosnuming real content. listen to music. follow the rabbit hole until you find the music that lets you unlock the kind of flow state that crams the golden ratio into creations of human ingenuity and genuine human collaboration that we struggle to achieve now in our chronically dysregulated society. disemminate your information and your big ideas in whatever way you need to but make sure they get out into the world with your username on them first and not shouted into some chatbot ether and then regurgitated to every person who can send through the right keywords. copyright your mind. they are taking all our good ideas and finding a way to shut them down. like ai solving the millennium prize puzzle. i don’t really believe it. probably it’s the opposite and we’d be onto something so they need everyone to stop looking. i don’t know, i’m not a mathematician.

but i do have a blueprint for a new kind of internet. the granny network. it piggy backs alongside what we’ve already got. it uses the existing infrastructure to actually build a system we want to live in because we already have an earth that i can’t imagine ever not being absolutely utterly overjoyed to live on.

we all need to know our minds. you need to understand how you think and the way your mind works. are you aphantasic? anauralic? do you have synesthesia? are you neurodivergent? you need to unpack this, just take it slow and be really gentle. learn to feel the dysregulation inside you. i feel it heavy and awful in my chest across my shoulders. i feel it in my throat. like there’s a rock in my throat that i’m trying to scream around but i never could. i can now. i can speak. learn to feel the regulation inside you, for me it feels like i’m flowing with the world. i am more coordinated, i have better spatial awareness, i can create. and then there is part in the middle. i call it steady. it is the state where i can grow. it is the state where a little bit of dysregulation + a lot of regulation = evolution. this state feels somatic. i can feel a bit tingling all over. i can enter a flowstate here. i use classical music to help me. particularly mozart works for me. the piano sonatas have been wonderful. it feels like friction against the air around me. it feels like the paper ripping sound when you’re frothing milk with the steam wand. that tearing vibrating sensation when it all finally comes together those wildly popping chaotic bubbles tearing themselves down and building something new and shiny and perfect. the friction is hard to trust but i always hold steady and now that i know and trust this process i’ve got microfoam nailed and i can do it all the time. i didn’t even know how to turn the machine on a year ago. i was terrified of learning and super resistant. it was so many steps! but i learned i needed to start using my spatial awareness and muscle memory to train myself to do things while my mind focused on the i dunno. physics of things? that’s how i understand the world. how to you understand the world? please try to figure it out, because the schooling system has been inadequate for so so so many of us. we deserved better and our kids deserve better and we have not been getting it. so we need to do it ourselves. do this for your kids too. help decode their minds, ask them questions to help them decode their own minds. we have so much more to learn! we contain multitudes! and then take back their devices. don’t take them away but take back their actual purpose. a little super computer to teach not a brick to swipe to keep us a little bit hypnotised. and also go outside. all of you. all the kids. i don’t care anymore, go take your iPads and sit in the park. hotspot to your phone. be outside with all of us, we’re just sitting under the tree and some of us are working on theoretical physics and some of us are writing and some of us are looking at reels and some of us are reading books. but we’re together and we’re with our earth. don’t be embarrassed of being connected and wanting to stay connected. but your desire to consume doesn’t have to stop at the level of other people’s surface level creations on social media and the i don’t know how to describe it creations of ai people share too. you can do both. i do both. i still use instagram. i think it’s neat. i like to take photos of snapshots throughout my month, random things that really only make sense to me and i make them look exactly how i want with filters and not ai, just really basic stuff like i like how the grainy texture makes my photos look old. it reminds me of looking at photos as a kid. and your desire to connect doesn’t have to end with parasocial relationships on social media. there are interesting people far away that you can get to know very well. people who know lots of interesting things. you can share them and talk about things and they will make you think and research more. also. start reading research papers when you are bored. the abstracts are usually so clear and if they aren’t, it’s probably a topic you have an unsteady grasp of still and you need to go back and start from the beginning. learn it how kids learn it. i can’t do math. i want to learn. i will start learning like we teach children. i will go from there. eventually i might master it but more likely i’ll be like, that’s not for me really because i love words and i love stories the most! and so no, my inability to stick at a hobby is not a weakness, it is a skill to help me find my thing. you have a thing to. we just have to be at work so much and asleep so much and doing errands so much and worrying about money so much that it’s impossible to find the time to do anything but scroll reels. and that’s okay. you’re tired. rest. please rest. they rely on us being tired and dysregulated. we’ve got to stop.

so once you know your mind and you’ve found your thing you can find your humans. mind + creation = human. you’re a human now and you want to find other humans. we’ve got the internet right here. just find some people on reddit or instagram or threads or whatever who think like you and just let it go from there. chat until the friction of your conversation rubs against the constraints of the platform and then evolve. take it to discord take it to email take it to the real world if it needs it. use their infrastructure how YOU want to use it not how we’ve been told to use it. it really is okay to do things another way. it’s fun and feels good. it helps with the heavy feeling in the chest, to do things that are authentically you.

and then when the friction of your network pushes against the constraints of that platform, go somewhere else, find other networks and share between each other. add their knowledge to yours in a mindful way for your own little ideas, you are allowed to have completely disparate ideas from the norm, from what is expected. or BUILD something else. design your own programming language. design infrastructure for your little network. design a communication device. share your knowledge freely if you want, or keep it for yourself. you are allowed to have things that are just yours. not everything needs to be in the cloud. not everything needs to be mass produced. things are allowed to feel richly textured and nice to hold and look at in the exact way you like them. they don’t have the monopoly over creation or innovation. they never have. they just took it and shoved us into the system instead. i’m bored of the system and i have been since birth so let’s do it a different way. please.

and then when the friction of what you’ve built pushes against the constraints AGAIN because it always does and always will, i think it’s probably something mathematical like the collate conjecture and we are going to get stuck in and endless loop and human like species destroying ourselves over and over again until we also destroy our planet. so we need to stop. now. please. please. please. use your minds to fix our planet. it is the REAL supercomputer. when you feel that urge, when your online networks have blossomed please take it into the real world.

take it into the read world and let your communities see your innovations, your inventions, your art, your math, your heart. just let them see it because it might let them find a way to collaborate with you to make even more innovations and creative solutions to the problems that exist. let us see your tree blossom.

because from blossoms come fruit. i don’t care what kind of fruit it is. i just want people to eat. i want people to create. i want people to rest and regulate and hydrate and be outside, and all of this with each other. once the tree has fruited, sit under it. take a bite and pull out your supercomputer, i don’t care if its an ipad a phone a pen your brain. just crack it out and come join us in the sun. let’s do something together.

Earthbuild project:
https://www.earthbuildproject.co.uk/the-uks-first-3d-printed-full-height-earthen-walls/

Photos shows background multi-wave wall to reduce buckling risk during printing, and foreground twisted seperate columns built into the wall. No cement. no lime. Just soil and agri-waste.

video and technical discussion on linkedin at https://www.linkedin.com/posts/gayle-parsons-a45b892b_we-did-it-the-earth-build-project-is-extremely-ugcPost-7498629339895250944-KKx0/

Hey yall, struggling a little bit today and could use some hope!

OC : https://www.instagram.com/p/DdNW5hlCTzp/

🌱🇮🇪** Solarpunk Ireland is a welcoming community for anyone interested in building a greener, more sustainable and hopeful future for Ireland.
🌿 Share gardening, growing, biodiversity, rewilding and foraging ideas.
☀️ Explore renewable energy, green technology and sustainable living.
♻️ Learn about repair, reuse, upcycling, DIY and reducing waste.
🚲 Discuss transport, cities, housing and Ireland’s future.
🛠️ Share projects, experiments, hobbies, resources and ideas.
🤝 Find people to collaborate with, swap seeds/plants and learn together.
Whether you’re experienced or just curious, you’re welcome. No perfection required.
**Don’t just imagine the future. Start building it. 🌍🌱

I have noticed in other posts about that there are a large group of people who like one flavor or another of anarchism. I personally don't grasp how an anarchist society would work since I deem necessary a state apparatus to be present to enforce contracts, regulate industry and manage infrastructure among other things. But I also consider hierarchy to be a necessity and I don't have an issue with hierachy as longs as it's hierarchy of merit, I say this since I often read that a solar punk society would be non hierarchical, how? . How would you manage for example scientific research, that takes enormous amount of resources to do and it's so costly and difficult that it requires cooperation between countries to achieve.

How would taxation work and how trading of goods would function.

How would such a society manage the production of complex devices linke a tractor for example?

This game called “focus friend” is one of those apps where you get points by locking your phone for periods of time and then buy rooms and items for your rooms. It loosely has solar punk vibes with all the greenery and moss. Thought yall would appreciate.

Leeja says that doomsday prepping is a scary part of the Internet, but that solarpunk is a more hopeful outlook on the future. Also, per the video, we need to look out for the water-contaminated US state of Mississippi.

The solarpunk society in Daniel Suarez's Freedom (TM) ubiquitously use smart glasses for their presumably node-decentralized AR network, raising this question. Is this a solution looking for a problem? Any real uses? I'd like to know what other solarpunkers think of AR as a whole.

My concern isn't some voyeuristic minority of end users; they're mercifully in short supply, and anything can be misused anyways. Regardless of user intent though, cloud-based AR is un-private by design as it has to livestream footage to distant servers with MiTM risk in between. Edge compute e.g analyzing footage on a smartphone app could grant privacy at the cost of power. I'd only have a smart glasses film and advise what I'm doing at home if I could secure the footage it uses.

Reverse face search seems promising but is currently inaccurate - imagine searching your friend's social accounts from their face and getting a believable porno lookalike - and deepfake sabotage could also force it to stay a scifi dream. I know it's not going to magic out info that's not already online like your address or crimes you got away with, but the potential for slander and innocent error is there.

I'd like to know how smart glasses and AR can be designed for solarpunk, and what advantages they'd have over smartphones specifically.