@alxd@writing.exchange
@alxd@writing.exchange avatar

alxd

@alxd@writing.exchange

Programmer, hacker, #solarpunk, educator, activist and a wannabe writer fascinated by how technology is portrayed in culture - and how that affects human lives.

Co-author of https://podcast.tomasino.org/@SolarpunkPrompts #podcast , exploring realistic stories of our climate future with all their traumas and hopes.

Languages: 🇦🇺 🇵🇱

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Anaphory, to solarpunk
@Anaphory@wandering.shop avatar

When there's a new RPG on the block claiming to do , I'm obviously interested. Recently, @FullyAutomatedRPG made its way to me via @fiction so I'm giving it a look. What does it want to do? It wants to be a kind of D&D for Solarpunk – a big kitchen sink game that becomes a cornerstone for the genre. That's… Hm, I like my RPGs written with a lightning focus on telling specific stories, so I feel like I'll be biased against , but let's see. 1/8

alxd,
@alxd@writing.exchange avatar

@8petros @Anaphory @fiction @FullyAutomatedRPG I think you forget that a lot of Mastodon instances have a hard cap on character number and we would need to self-host or convince our admins to change the character limit for us ;)

alxd,
@alxd@writing.exchange avatar

@FullyAutomatedRPG @8petros @Anaphory @fiction thank you!

Speaking about a positive version of anarchy, have you read / played https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/dream-askew ?

I think especially Dream Askew, which brought us the original Belonging Beyond Belonging, is a really interesting inspiration / direction for such themes.

While it might not be a game for me, I loved the queer community roles for all the characters - and how their story beats function within the narrative.

alxd,
@alxd@writing.exchange avatar

@FullyAutomatedRPG @8petros @Anaphory @fiction that's an interesting take, because for me the Dream Askew setting is surprisingly hopeful, because you can feel the community is there behind you. I would feel much... wholesome? safer? hopeful? playing Dream Askew than any game where myself and the other players are not actively integrated within a community.

alxd,
@alxd@writing.exchange avatar

@FullyAutomatedRPG @8petros @Anaphory @fiction if we go into different meanings of communities and positive anarchy, maybe the Hard Wired Island ( https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/354684/Hard-Wired-Island ) would be an interesting direction?

It's a 90's retrofuture cyberpunk, but it goes back to the roots: it is about grassroots movements, social solidarity of the lower class, where the implants don't make you inhuman, they just make you dependent on the evil corpos which can ruin your life?

alxd,
@alxd@writing.exchange avatar

@FullyAutomatedRPG @8petros @Anaphory @fiction The Hard Wired Island, despite claiming to be , is almost a for me when it comes to presenting its world: it talks a lot about community (both on individual and societal role), infrastructure, non-trivial problems, complex identity, unions, grassroots...

Just read their mini-manifesto:

alxd,
@alxd@writing.exchange avatar

@FullyAutomatedRPG @8petros @Anaphory @fiction

Capitalism? No thanks. Good cyberpunk is anti-capitalist. It's about how technology without ethics can make social inequality worse. The wealthy use it to cement their power and perpetuate the status quo, while marginalized communities are kept that way. The PCs want to use it to break the current system. They work against their enemies, not for them.

alxd, to solarpunk
@alxd@writing.exchange avatar

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1989070/Synergy/ looks like a possibly intriguing with and in its !

EDIT: Originally linked to https://www.leikir-studio.com/en/ , but it got hugged to death.

alxd, to ukteachers
@alxd@writing.exchange avatar

What's up with projects wasting their grant money on ? I've met yet another educator, who against any advice decided to put a lot of the budget on a shitty unusable app with no UX or tests.

Is it a grant requirement?

Do people believe that apps will make their projects more attractive?

alxd, to solarpunk
@alxd@writing.exchange avatar

On the topic of / I recently played my first game of Daybreak, by the designer of the Pandemic.

https://daybreakgame.org/

There's a lot I could say about the mechanics and how it draws equivalence between "green capital" and activism, but there's something more jarring.

There are 4 factions:

Europe
US
China
Majority World

With the last one being the hardest to play, the least sustainable, the most crippled with emissions and population growth.

alxd,
@alxd@writing.exchange avatar

@Montag I have not!

I see as all the things happening between the depressing geopolitical processes, what we describe in the @SolarpunkPrompts podcast, local communities thriving despite the global systems failing. So it doesn't need to be so dreadful.

We need more games, more media to talk about the climate and what will be happening in the coming decades.

alberto_cottica, to sciencefiction
@alberto_cottica@mastodon.green avatar

I like doing economic analysis of work (man needs a hobby, I guess). Looking for advice: what do I read next? Preference for recent work depicting economic systems.

Background: I am part of a collective, the Science Fiction Economics Labs. We maintain a list econ-sci fi work here: https://edgeryders.eu/t/economic-science-fiction-a-selection-of-works-and-authors/8582?u=alberto

Illustration by Nadia E. Alter

alxd,
@alxd@writing.exchange avatar

@alberto_cottica Solarpunk books which mentioned economies (even if not fully fleshed out) that I know:

  • LX Beckett's Gamechanger and its sequel, Dealbreaker (the latter is more sci-fi) - several different currencies "multiplying" each other values, carbon-based pricing (flights more expensive than human labor etc)

  • Ruthanna Emrys' "A Half-Built Garden" - mostly negotiations and civilizational specializations between high-tech capitalists and sustainable anarchists

alxd,
@alxd@writing.exchange avatar

@alberto_cottica some of our @SolarpunkPrompts podcast episodes specifically mention economies, like the Community Center - https://podcast.tomasino.org/@SolarpunkPrompts/episodes/the-community-center - where people go to respecialize after losing their old, non-sustainable jobs,

https://podcast.tomasino.org/@SolarpunkPrompts/episodes/the-miners the Miners, about a collective who reclaimed the mine they worked in and is trying to negotiate supply and demands with other communities.

A few mentions in other episodes as well!

alxd,
@alxd@writing.exchange avatar

@alberto_cottica @SolarpunkPrompts we're planning one more which focuses on LCA-based economy, but it will take a few months to get to it. If you're interested, I could share my notes on it so far ;)

alxd,
@alxd@writing.exchange avatar

@alberto_cottica on a separate note, I should finally finish writing a review of Kim Stanley Robinson's economical fiction "The Ministry For The Tourism in Zurich".

I hate it wholeheartedly for completely ignoring fascinating changes in India, in the Global South, and violently masturbating to Swiss blockchain which Will Magically Make Everything Work™

alxd,
@alxd@writing.exchange avatar

@alberto_cottica the book is its own parody, doesnt need to be parodied further :P

alxd,
@alxd@writing.exchange avatar

@alberto_cottica I have a few threads bashing it mercilessly, but my criticism boils down to:

It's a book which aims to absolve neoliberals allowing them to wash their hands. It's enough to be happy that they pushed IMF towards sustainability with Magical Blockchain. They don't need to look critically at their own lives, careers and societies and imagine them working differently. Let's not even look at how the world is changing to accommodate, we can stay in the Eternal Switzerland.

alxd,
@alxd@writing.exchange avatar

@alberto_cottica for bonus points, all the violence is done by the Brown People™, because Europeans, Americans are just too good for that.

We not only can't see what India is doing, how their society is restructuring, we don't even see groups working towards sustainability in other places. The very essence of what I consider Solarpunk to be - is absolutely absent from The Ministry, which instead showcases another cafe in Zurich and praises its landlords and architecture.

alxd,
@alxd@writing.exchange avatar

@alberto_cottica there's a whole example where KSR put a list of "organizations that helped change the world", but it's just a list of names, with absolutely nothing between them. I really struggled to read it as anything but really bad satire. "Hey, The Ministry & IMF is seeing your sacrifice". Now go be non-capitalistic somewhere else please, we have some more blockchain to implement.

alxd,
@alxd@writing.exchange avatar

@alberto_cottica
Also: infrastructure and disasters. Every time there's an environmental disaster in the Global South, EVERYONE DIES.

Every time KSR puts a disaster in the Civilized West™, everyone survives, the infrastructure proves superior yadda yadda.

There's a whole chapter of how a completely flooded Los Angeles was Not A Big Problem because Americans Help Each Other and their (as we know, crumbling) infrastructure is superior.

How is that not a painful sarcasm?!

lex, to mastodon
@lex@floe.earth avatar

So , what's your favourite hashtag on here that hits the sweet spot between weird and amazing?

alxd,
@alxd@writing.exchange avatar

@lex has both the programming language and artsy photos of oxidized metal. I leave it to you which to consider weird and which amazing.

alxd, to solarpunk
@alxd@writing.exchange avatar

Finishing the research for the next episode of the , the I realize that it is a really good topic for an or a full-fledged on.

The Tower is a residential high-rise aiming to be sustainable both technologically and socially. A mixed-use development, with a grocery shop, a community center, laundromat, library, kindergarten.

A slice of a Solarpunk city, a neighborhood in itself.

More on Friday!

alxd, to solarpunk
@alxd@writing.exchange avatar

In the last episode of #solarpunkPrompts , the #solarpunk #writing #podcast we finally feature one of the hard questions of #anarchism :

How do you convince other people to do something they don't want to, when time is of the essence and you don't want to use force or hierarchies?

https://podcast.tomasino.org/@SolarpunkPrompts/episodes/the-epidemiologists

The Epidemiologists might be one of the harder prompts, as it asks for a lot of societal sensitivity and imagination.

#climate #climateFiction #WritingPrompt #pandemic #medicine

alxd, to books
@alxd@writing.exchange avatar

Refining my criticism of , I think I arrived at the core of what bothers me:

It's relatively easy to say whether science fiction is hard or soft when it comes to physical technology, but much harder when it comes to social ones.

The Ministry uses blockchain and a few other buzzword techs the same way other books use nanorobots: they magically solve complex problems. Here: social ones.

Few readers can spot that outright.

alxd,
@alxd@writing.exchange avatar

Since "social technologies" are harder to spot in general, the Ministry can give us an idea that changing economies, societies and cultures could be easy and have few side-effects, where our existing institutions can still exist with little change. It props banks and corporations without showing how different life on the ground is for an average person.

That's why I find it less revolutionary than stylistically messier Gamechanger or The Half Built Garden, which do imagine the consequences.

alxd,
@alxd@writing.exchange avatar

For me one of the most important functions of and in general is exactly this:

Imagining new shapes of societies, of economies, of cultures in a sustainable future, proposing blueprints for a better tomorrow.

The Ministry fails to do that, while appearing to be a "hard sci-fi" making a lot of people believe that we can arrive at a better future without a visible cultural change.

That's my main criticism I wasn't able to clearly vocalise before.

alxd,
@alxd@writing.exchange avatar

Do you know other books you could qualify as "social science fantasy"?

We know that Lord of the Flies doesn't align with actual research on shipwrecked children communities, which tend to cooperate.

Anything subtler?

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