I’d like to keep just one golf course but add giant versions of mini golf obstacles. Golfers would probably hate it but they need some more whimsy

If you’re using a chainsaw make sure you’re wearing chainsaw chaps, a face shield, gloves etc. The chaps especially can save your legs and your life when the saw kicks back (and it will at some point) - especially if you’re out in the sticks and alone.

The community chores category is really interesting! Do you remember what kinds of work would fall into that? Or have any in mind?

I completely agree! I have much the same sentiment in the section “The work people take on despite the conditions and poor pay”

This is so cool! I’m adding it to my list of ways people are restoring preexisting habitats

Reticulum is a decent candidate for this (in that it’s purpose-built for more than texting).

There’s a couple good beginner’s introductions here:

https://www.carstenboll.dk/reticulum-a-beginners-guide/

https://github.com/samuk/awesome-reticulum/

Reticulum is a whole cryptography-based network stack which feels like it was developed from the ground up out of radio networking protocols. It can run over the same LoRa radio devices Meshtastic and Meshcore can use, but it can also use ad-hoc WiFi, data radios, modems, serial lines, amateur radio digital modes, and it can even tunnel through the Internet (meaning you could set up a local mesh of LoRa radios, old personal computers and laptops, and whatever wireless routers and other networking gear you can find, connect a neighborhood together using Reticulum as the underlying network, then connect that through the internet to Reticulum networks anywhere in the world. You can write software to run on Reticulum, and it already has a bunch of programs like NomadNet which can do encrypted messaging (same goal as Meshtastic and Meshcore) but also host and view text-based web pages and I think some other stuff. In a lot of ways, this one feels like the meshnet you’d see in a scifi book, an all-encrypted network stack that allows you to just link together any old hardware you can scrape together and rebuild a decentralized version of the internet grounded in much more secure protocols. (I’ll admit I straight up don’t understand how a lot of this works on the network/cryptography level, it actually seems similar to Tor in some ways but I don’t understand that very well either.)

Worst case, it could make a pretty cool sunken greenhouse if it gets enough light

To quote the article:

There are still many human-powered carts in modern society: strollers, grocery carts, roller suitcases, and various utility and folding carts. However, these modern carts are to their predecessors what modern birds are to dinosaurs. They are small, often with very small wheels, and we use them for very short distances, usually inside buildings.

Just transporting my case of glass vials of Nitroglycerin like it’s the third act of a western film.

We’ve already got an ewaste pc set up for checking mice and keyboards and printers, I’ll see if I can find one of these on eBay. At the very least it’ll probably be useful to me.

Is there a project to send these codes to if we start recording them?

We’re an all-volunteer operation with basically no budget but recording that stuff could be doable eventually, if we had somewhere to send the info. Is there an IR receiver or something we’d need? Right now we’re a bit too busy just sorting ewaste, testing devices, and scrubbing the grunge off them.

So you can steer it with a ps4 controller?

Thanks! I really appreciate the thought so please don’t worry about text length!

I agree strongly on the level of separation - I think ideally the investigators should be there to do the research and build the case, but should be relying on a separate group for physical enforcement, and the community should have a separate system of restorative/rehabilitative justice which the investigative society reports to. On top of that, I think I want to convey that the investigative societies aren’t a monopoly or can’t monopolize an area/territory - ideally a given community has several (perhaps overlapping) options actively investigating crimes and other mysteries (not unlike having multiple newspapers all with their own investigative reporters), so they’re not locked in with a particular group. (Possibly same for enforcement, I’ll say more on that in a minute). I think that plus the lack of qualified immunity and other protections from consequences should help (I know licensed private detectives in some jurisdictions get some additional permissions, I might look into what that entails to see if its a better fit).

I really appreciate you pointing out the qualification process because you’re right that can be a lever for preventing scrutiny or limiting membership or otherwise used unfairly and I’m not sure how best to address it. I was actually planning to pin some of the protagonist’s motivations on wanting to ‘move up’ from the more general crowdsourced investigations (find this lost dog, help track the course of this buried river) to the level that requires more community trust (crimes where access to private information might be accessed or where there is a victim to protect). I think qualifications or demonstrations of capability are important but also very much agree that they can be implemented maliciously and unfairly, and I’m not sure how to square that yet, aside from a separate process of audits or perhaps cross-investigations.

As for the violence-doing side of things, thank you so much for introducing me to the concept of a consolidated Public Safety Department. I’d never heard of that before and I’m delighted to hear that it’s been implemented in the real world, because I would have thought it’d be a hard sell! I think that stands an excellent chance of changing the motivations around joining up, though I’ll admit I’d worry that it’d keep good candidates for fire and EMS out if they don’t want to have to be cops. It’d likely be a great fit for a solarpunk society where that stigma and isolation from the community has had some time to wear away due to programs like this though.

Over on the FA discord, there was a great conversation around the enforcer side of this triad(? of investigators, enforcers, and justice system) and some interesting points were brought up which I’ll try to convey. One of the devs listed four keys of locking away the modern power of the police:

• Civilian Panopticon - I think this is a bit of an answer to PunkIsUndead’s question about what information is stored and revealed to the investigators on a case by case basis - the idea that public areas are surveilled more or less constantly at a low level (I suppose not unlike now), and most moderately dense areas have more surveillance which might be building-specific and not shared normally, or secretly. So when the investigators are looking for evidence they might ask a neighborhood for the security footage from the park or street, and then have to work with certain households or condo associations or what have you to glean more than that. I was leery about this one but I also considered that most of the scant accountability we see these days comes from regular people’s cell phones, so it could very well work both ways if the community are the ones who control this information, rather than corporations hoarding and selling it. Presumably that’d extend to communications records, GPS and other similar information which is currently available if you spend a few bucks or wave a badge around.
• Overlapping Authorities - I think this covers situations where one organization or sheriff etc is effectively answerable to no one.
• Multiple Independent Militias - I think this applies just as well to the investigators but we were thinking kinda small with having multiple overlapping groups, I really like the idea of rotating the members of those groups (especially the designated violence-doers) through other professions. I think that is a great addition.
• Societal Intolerance for Professional Murder

Interestingly, there’s a couple of these (overlapping authorities and Multiple Independent Militias) that kind of match the how-to-survive-as-a-dictator playbook: never let any of your armed forces get individually powerful enough to oppose you.

As a last note, I’m quite content to write the investigators as being unarmed in this story, two of my favorites (Lt. Colombo and Hercule Poirot) both declined to carry firearms, content to let the uniforms do that work.

Thank you! I’ll take a look!

I realized I never shared the resource page I ended up putting together but here’s what I made with the links and info provided: https://wiki.slrpnk.net/writing:exurbs_in_the_solarpunk_transition

It’s an ongoing project so we’re always happy to add more content

I appreciate this write-up - you’ve done a good job of identifying the problem and I’d very much support the policy solution you’ve come up with. The electronics section of the swap shop I help with has a filing cabinet full of ziplocks of old remote controls that come in (tested with a camera to see if the IR light comes on, and sorted by brand). It’s a kinda brute-force solution dependant on having a bunch of space and a steady flow of ewaste but we’ve been able to pair a lot of TVs with their missing remotes (and hand remotes out to people who need a replacement). I think it’s one of those things that becomes somewhat practical at the community scale. If a city of hundreds of thousands has a filing cabinet of old remotes that’s not that bad. If I have a filing cabinet of old remotes I’m a hoarder. It still doesn’t really answer the weird one-offs and no-nanes very well, though we’ve had a couple one-in-a-million matchups

Edit: I’d also favor requiring the device have some way to do every feature without the remote.

Thanks!

your example sounds more like current day private investigators / investigative journalists, who occasionally get tasked by their community to do police investigator things

I actually think of them that way too.

As for information, in Marling’s stories the settings are still quite high tech so more information is retained than might be ideal. I think it was stuff like GPS and similar movement records. The improvement over our present is that they don’t just ask a corporation for the info because there are some apparently functional protections in place, and I think at one point they’re temporary stymied when a community tells them to pound sand because the local council is concerned the investigative society has been overreaching lately. I don’t have specifics in mind for the temporary powers/accesses as they won’t really come up in this story but it might be equivalent to the stuff police forces just request/buy from companies today. The protagonist could just as easily be a private detective or reporter but I’ll admit I do like the concept of these investigative societies and the changes they demonstrate in the setting.

The Alien v Predator arcade games are surprisingly cyberpunk in the level art at least. It seemed to pull a lot of aesthetics from the Aliens series.

I’m not certain of the timeline but my impression was that cyberpunk was mostly limited to books during the arcade era. Like, they made tons of scif arcade games but they were generally inspired by the earlier stuff cyberpunk was also riffing on/rebutting.

It is funny that both genres were big at the same time but I wonder how much crosstalk there was between the two groups. Cyberpunk authors were definitely inspired by arcades, arcade culture, and the games themselves but I’m not sure if they’d hit the level of cultural suffusion necessary to reach the inside of the game companies before the industry started to shrink.

Hydrogen could/can be done greenly but there’s a reason the oil and gas companies push it as the green option of choice when they’re not trying to stop any transition at all: hydrogen keeps them relevant longer - most of it is obtained and transported through their systems. They’d love if we spun our wheels investing in a precarious energy transition into a new tech on the promise that the generation of hydrogen will eventually become green - they can draw that out for years.

Electrific cars are still basically the same thing for auto companies - keeping the car relevant, but there’s value in the comparative mechanical simplicity and the fact that the electric transition has already made significant progress and is hurting oil and gas sales now.

Full agree that public transit would be a significant improvement, especially improvements in coverage area

Like the satellite

It reminds me of similar work with beaver dam analogs.

The small dams they’re using sound like check dams, which apparently can do some damage if they’re not maintained but I don’t know enough of the history there to know how different this is.