JacobCoffinWrites

JacobCoffinWrites, 1 day ago

Or not enough. They need more feathers

JacobCoffinWrites, 2 days ago

I just helped my neighbor replace his front lawn with low growing roman chamomile and lavender. I’m hoping to rig up a little solar powered water feature using secondhand parts soon.

I have been cutting 6" sticks from storm damaged tree limbs, and drilling the various-size holes for the the solitary bee house I set up at my parents’ place. Need to replace the sticks every year after they emerge so we don’t propagate diseases or parasites in the solitary bees.

Once I find a couple 6"x1" oak boards (maybe when someone throws out a bed?) I’ll be able to cut the arching back pieces for a wood and cast iron park bench im trying to fix up. I need to take a wire wheel to the rust and paint it, fabricate the back (I already have the slats for the seat but they do need to be sanded, stained, urethaned, and attached). Then I can put it out near our local bike path.

Need to put a new tire and tube on my front bike wheel.

I’m working on some more photobashes too.

JacobCoffinWrites, 5 days ago

I mean, the place is so absurdly big and spans so much time there’s room for variances in procedure and tradition, even inside the same organizations. Especially the inquisition which seems to grant its members an unusual degree of autonomy (from the few books I’ve read that featured them). But even the guard fields a wide variety of regiments with different specializations and ways of doing things. I just sort of assume the mechanicus and administratum and others all see a fair bit of variety, if only because the empire is so huge and poorly coordinated. The variety of tones in different stories is also something I like, for some reason - it seems to help show the scale, I think?

JacobCoffinWrites, 5 days ago

I’d never really thought about the fact that museums doing photogrammetry to preserve artifacts could link up with the folks who 3D print their own Warhammer figures, but here we are

JacobCoffinWrites, 8 days ago

That was our guess but I wasn’t confident in it, thank you for the confirmation!!

JacobCoffinWrites, 9 days ago

Kind of. I’ll have to check out their shredder designs. I bought a filistruder for a local makerspace awhile back, because I wanted to be able to reuse my bad 3d prints and supports etc, but wanted it to be available to a wider community since I wouldn’t use it enough to justify the cost. Unfortunately, at the time, solutions for shredding/granulating solid prints were few and far between (and expensive to make or buy). And if you can’t get the plastic small enough, the extruder on its own isn’t terribly useful. I’d very much like to find a decent solution so I can get this going again.

JacobCoffinWrites, 9 days ago

Make things and fix things. I already do a lot of projects in my free time - I write science fiction, I paint, I photobash art, I do woodworking, furniture restoration, metalworking, repair ewaste to give away, and grow plants. I’d just do a lot more of all that with a bit less life stress around work. If that’s not enough, I’ve been looking at volunteering with the recycling center, and I’d love to go for more hikes with family (currently I only get out on weekends and that’s unfortunately rare, especially with everyone’s conflicting schedules and levels of energy).

JacobCoffinWrites, 10 days ago

Thanks! I appreciate it!

JacobCoffinWrites, 9 days ago

Thanks for suggesting temporary tracks, I definitely wouldn’t have thought of that and it’s a really cool idea! Ive updated my text on other sites to mention it and link back here.

And definitely agreed on deliberately rebuilding greenways and habitats. I imagine this could happen both automatically (wait and see where people resettle, and what areas are more deserted - probably there’s some deconstruction carried out at the local level, the same way the pyramids and roman roads were scavenged for building supplies) and deliberately (assess the abandoned areas, check their structures for occupancy, draw up community plans for rewilding, argue over it a lot, rezone some areas for greenways/conservation, and eventually bring in crews and volunteers to do the actual deconstruction).

JacobCoffinWrites, 12 days ago

They also have a whole section of nonfiction zines - I’d read a few before sending them Fair Game and found them very interesting.

JacobCoffinWrites, 13 days ago

Thanks! I just binged it and will check back for the updates

JacobCoffinWrites, 13 days ago

I’ve found mega.nz to be very easy to set up a storage drive account with. Alternatively (and we’d want to check with poVoq on storage space, but I think we have the option to set up a wiki for this community, which could also (eventually) become that organized resource for players and GMs.

JacobCoffinWrites, 13 days ago

When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger is a kind of complicated recommendation for this. It features I think the most trans characters I’ve ever seen in one book, the main character’s girlfriend and most of their acquaintances are trans, and the story treats them decently as people with jobs and lives outside of that part of their identity. The problem, if it is one, is that they’re all sex workers. I can’t remember any trans character in the book who isn’t. This fits the story decently as they’re all living in the Budayeen, the entertainment and criminal quarter of an unnamed Middle-Eastern city, the only place where they, and small-time criminals like the protagonist, can exist with a minimum of hassle. But there’s some complicated history and pop-cupture entanglements around being trans and being a sex worker (and the limited other roles historically available to them) which might change how audiences read this forty years later. I honestly have no idea. I quite liked the book, it’s weird in places (for other reasons) but that’s what I read cyberpunk for, and it has a bunch of awesome cyberpunk concepts, a unique setting, and some creative misuses of technology.

The Murderbot books feature a pretty diverse spread of characters, gay, nonbinary, and also people in polyamorous relationships, though that stuff usually doesn’t impact the main plot. Murderbot itself is about as asexual as it’s possible to get which probably explains that a bit. Their tone isn’t super cyberpunk but the themes and concepts very much are.

I think the Gibson short story Johnny Mnemonic or Burning Chrome has a pair of guards, one of whom is trans, but it’s clearly been awhile since I read it. Gibson’s Sprawl books all had a kind of fascination with extending cosmetic surgery past sex and race, identity being as changeable as hairstyle, so it comes up in passing occasionally.

JacobCoffinWrites, 12 days ago

That beats connecting the speaker jack to the mic jack and recording with audacity.

JacobCoffinWrites, 15 days ago

Tools! With the exception of a few big power tools like a table saw or miter saw, where the new safety features make it worthwhile, I get everything I can used. I prefer stuff passed down from family with sentimental value, but I get a lot of my tools from Everything is Free, junk stores, yard sales, estate clean outs, swap shops etc.

Older tools tend to be simpler, easier to fix, and remarkably sturdy. I’ve read that the metallurgy wasn’t as good sixty+ years ago so they overbuilt them a bit to compensate, and then decades of use weaned out the weaker ones, so anything left still working is basically survivorship-bias guaranteed. I’ve got a drill press that’s been in the family for four generations and will probably outlast my grandkids.

They’re cheaper, sturdier, easier to fix, generally well-documented online (sometimes better than the new stuff), and they don’t come with sheaves of unnecessary styrofoam and plastic packaging. And they have history and stories in them, even if I don’t always know what those stories are.

JacobCoffinWrites, 14 days ago

There’s also local Buy Nothing/Everything is Free groups which may be more active depending on where you are

JacobCoffinWrites, 15 days ago

Just wanted to say I really like this idea, especially as mixed with local mesh networks. I agree with the point about storage, and mostly I’m just really looking forward to reading about some of these services, and seeing what this could look like in the future.

Good luck!

JacobCoffinWrites, 17 days ago

This looks great! I think I also like the cover with the text split up, but both look polished to me.

JacobCoffinWrites, 17 days ago

And the ones from trigun

JacobCoffinWrites, 19 days ago

Thanks! We were thinking about getting a set of oyster spawn plugs to try later in the summer - I have relatives who log for firewood, I think we might be able to convince them to let us plant mushrooms in the stumps. Otherwise we’ll wait and see how these go! Now that we know how to start these, we can keep an eye out for future opportunities.

JacobCoffinWrites, 18 days ago

There was a brief window where ICE cars, electric cars, and steam cars existed simultaneously and all sucked just about equally

JacobCoffinWrites, 18 days ago

I did, his prediction about conflict over water was obvious yet prescient. I suspect the train company’s theory of hydrology was presented along with stacks of green paper but maybe that wasn’t necessary