The lack of official touchscreens/GPS/center console media etc seems like a good step - at the very least, unnecessary antennas and microphones should be easier to spot/replace with an old MP3 player with one annoying song.

So genuine question: are the parts like batteries/motors safe and otherwise good enough to be used in ICE conversions? Or is there some kind of software/network boobytrap to be circumvented? The car itself is a horribly flawed surveillance box, but it seems like the flaws I’ve seen are mostly a sort of problem by compilation, like the finished product is worse than the sum of it’s parts. Is there a chance at least that this overproduction could help provide parts for conversion vehicles?

Depends on the area but thrift stores can be great for toys - if only because survivorship bias says anything that makes it there will last a long long time.

Local free groups like Buy Nothing can also be great for sports equipment, school supplies, kid sized furniture etc.

If it works, I’ll share any designs and lessons learned here!

I was wondering if it was something like this, thanks! I’ll see if I can get enough of it off to see if the main sheet is a fresnel lens

I’m clear on the other side of the continent but I really appreciate it, thank you! I hope you can find someone who’ll use it! And I’ll definitely post my progress!

Thanks! I’m hoping to build a solar forge - I used to do some blacksmithing using coal, but some videos of these things show them burning through steel - if they can get that hot, I could even forge weld again. I’ve still got most of my tools, minus the forge.

Honestly a utility vehicle that isn’t a surveillance box is like all I want from an electric vehicle

We had a kitchen scale with a damaged control panel - the on/off button stopped working. I opened it up, cut one of the battery wires, and soldered in a switch. Cut a hole in the case with an xacto knife, glued the switch through it and put it all back together. Now it has a hardware power switch. If you’re comfortable with basic soldering, maybe that would work for you?

Genuine question: would fiberglass and resin adhere to this material? I’m familiar with it from patching up old boats and canoes and could see that being an easy weekend project.

It’s definitely getting harder and harder to draw genre boundaries - cyberpunk quietly infiltrated mainstream scifi to the point where you can find cyberpunk elements in almost any modern scifi. Not bad for a subgenre the corporations and marketers misused and overused until it crashed. I remember people talking about it like a joke in the 2000s so I’m very pleased it won in the end (though I wish people treated it more like a warning than a roadmap).

I can definitely see the inclination not to include Murderbot (I thought twice about including it on the list) mostly because it doesn’t feel cyberpunk. It’s very clean, there’s no sense of decline or collapse the corps are ruling over, and the locations by and large don’t fit the usual. Heck one area is lowkey solarpunk. I think it has a ton of cyberpunk elements, story beats, etc, but it’s almost fridge cyberpunk, you have to walk away and think about it before enough of them line up. And feel is a big part of the genre, I think.

I think Gibson stories are my main reread, partly because I think they work a little better when you already half remember what’s going on.

I also reread the Murderbot books quite often, they’re kind of comfort food stories for me.

I rewatch Cowboy Bebop sometimes for the same reason.

I reread the webcomic Black & Blue fairly often but that’s mostly because the person making it has been absolutely hammering out pages for years now and I almost always need to reread before I can catch up.

Sorry I’m late! I think I’ve made pretty good progress so far on the campaign - I’ve been spending most of my writing time on organizing the document, moving sections around, and getting the layout right. I’ve had some good suggestions on section additions from Andrew Gross, such as creating an Adversaries and Escalations subsection for each major part of the campaign. These consolidates information on the people who will (or might) try to interfere with the players’ investigation. Previously that information was sort of scattered across locations, character profiles, and assorted scenes. Getting it all in one place for each potential adversary and making their motives clear has felt good.

I’ve also continued running the second playthrough, and have had a great time making it a more cloak-and-dagger campaign for this investigator-heavy group of players. They uncovered the cold case murder mystery at the heart of the conspiracy to stop them much earlier than the first group, and there’s been some tense scenes even though I’ve been striving to avoiding any outright combat because I don’t think it fits this group.

This has been really helpful in planning and describing other ways the campaign can go, and TBH proving that the open world sandbox design is fairly solid! My goal was to make sure there was enough information, locations, and opportunities that you could spin a decent adventure out of it no matter how the players decided to pursue their investigation, and it feels like we’re pretty close to that! In terms of writing all this info into the guidebook, I’m trying to hit a balance between making the information available and not driving myself insane trying to write a choose-your-own adventure book. I’m recognizing that once they get to the main location, basically all bets are off and I’m making sure that any overarching plot and adversary tactics read as branching suggestions from that point forward.

I’ve also been working on adding additional Non Player Character profiles though there’s still a handfull left to make.

Boss makes a dollar…

That’s awesome! I’ve enjoyed the stuff you’ve shared on Mastodon

Thanks for working so hard to keep the community going! I really like this place

Seconding all of this - these are great recs for drop-in replacements for regular meat. Going vegetarian is a heck of a lot easier than it used to be; we cook a ton of meals right out of my grandmothers’ cookbooks using meat substitutes.

Especially for processed meats like sausage, chicken nuggets, hamburgers, or those premade frozen chicken cor don bleu things, I’d say I prefer the meatless alternatives on taste and texture - even aside from wanting to reduce the harm I cause.

I think things are going to get a good deal worse in the next few years, but also that the old systems crumbling could make space for something better. But if we want better things to grow, people will need hope and roadmaps. They need to know that things could be done differently and those solutions have to feel reasonable. And I think that’s where solarpunk media comes in.

I think fiction has an incredible ability to make these potential realities feel familiar and comfortable and attainable, to wear off all the rough edges and propaganda. Solarpunk settings can help people tour their options, and see what library economies, public transit-heavy cities, and robust systems of support and mutual aid look and feel like, how they might work (and problems that might arise and how they could be solved). So when someone starts trying to scare them about the dangers of socialism or anarchy they already know better because, in a way, they’ve been there.

When I work on solarpunk art, write solarpunk fiction, my research is mostly around rebuilding. What practices, technologies, infrastructures make sense for a society that’s trying to rebuild better. My hope is that we can speak to this generation and the ones that follow it, provide big dreams and suggestions on techniques, and hope they’ll recognize opportunities to improve things when they see them.

I don’t have access to a marketplace like this but I do a lot with our local free groups. Between my household and helping some neighbors cleaning out their homes, and relocating a fair bit of corporate ewaste, we’ve given away thousands of items. We’ve also obtained quite a bit of stuff we would have otherwise had to buy.

We’ve definitely run into resellers a few times, especially with electronics and big-ticket items. With an online group I can vet them if I’m really worried about the fate of the item - sometimes for something really nice that a lot of people want, I’ll check someone’s profile and if it’s nothing but them claiming expensive electronics, I might pass it to the person who gives at least some stuff away. But I also recognize that the folks who are asking for lots of stuff and aren’t offering up much might just be in hard times and need groups like this the most. So I try to err on the side of giving stuff to whoever can take it.

Most of the time I just want the thing gone and as long as I’m not worried they’ll throw it out themselves, if a reseller will take it and find a home for it, that’s fine by me. For a handful of items, like special brackets for wireless access points, I deliberately gave them to someone I suspected was reselling because I knew they’d do a better job finding a destination for them on eBay than I would in our local free group.

In the end of the day, my goal is to keep stuff out of the landfill, and I suppose resellers are a just a scammy, middleman part of the stuff-moving ecosystem that gets these items to someone who wants them. Even at a reseller’s markup, having this stuff circulating in communities instead of sitting in a landfill reduces demand for new products and hopefully diminishes - even just a little - how much has to be extracted.

It hasn’t been especially difficult but I think I’ve got a huge advantage this time in that I’m writing a premade campaign guide for a TTRPG rather than prose fiction. When I’m writing prose I definitely struggle with how much information to include and how to fit it in so it feels natural and doesn’t mess up the pacing.

With writing this campaign, I know from the outset that the players are going to miss huge swaths of the content. But the upside is that because they’re the ones driving the plot and deciding what to focus on, I’m free to provide as much information as I feel would be useful to the GM and if the players want to engage with it, they will (sort of like side quests and optional audio logs in video games).

I’m definitely a worldbuilding-first writer and I love the fiddley little details that make a place work so this has been an absolute blast. I keep the ‘box text’ narration stuff short and descriptive but I provide all kinds of information so if the GM has to play an expert on something like a farmer or deconstruction worker, or environmental restoration tech, they’ll hopefully have enough to sound like an expert.

The other advantage I have is that the plot (a quest to find thousands of tons of illegally dumped industrial waste in rural New Hampshire) aligns well with my goals.

Basically I wanted to write out how I think rural New England might look in a solarpunk future (a lot like a modernized version of how it did a hundred years ago) and to introduce some practices like ice harvest, spring houses, etc that predate modern tech but align well with solarpunk ideals. I wanted to write some more grounded solarpunk with a lot of emphasis on reuse and salvage. And I wanted to talk about watersheds, groundwater, and how pollution moves through them, and various practices used to remediate different contaminats.

I stocked the game with locations and characters that address one or more of those themes, in various ways. The players’ search for the waste is almost bound to bring them through a bunch of these places and to start conversations thatdevelop on those themes.

I hope some of this is useful, I think this is the biggest fiction project I’ve worked on, and I’m surprised to find that it’s going much better logistically than previous attempts at writing prose novels. I think the worldbuilding-heavy structure and lack of a single set plotline just worked really well with how I write.