OK so I came up with a slightly crazy idea. Do you know how cars are emblazoned with logos and emblems? Like the brand name (Toyota), the car name (Kluger), engine and other doodads (V6 etc etc). What if we made like jokey versions of these to replace on our cars? Like make a Toyota logo but it looks a bit more like a penis.

Instead of car doodads we just make up acronyms with no explanation (AR-X, BFI, MIG-TL). We could also have unfortunate acronyms with explanatory text below it, like "AIDS" and then in smaller text it would say "Advanced Infra-red Drive System".

If enough people do it to their cars then it will show that we don't respect them.

Is it possible to create something where knowing about the thing constitutes copyright infringement?

Wow that circuit board is so evocative, with such a clear and apparent link to Native American heritage. How cool would a Solarpunk story be about this?

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/3103720

Excerpts:

Not only was the first female engineer at Lockheed and NASA(1) a citizen of The Cherokee Nation, a Native American Tribe, but she -Mary Golda Ross- was a pioneer and founding member of the renowned and highly secretive Skunk Works project at Lockheed Corporation...

Like Jerry Chris Elliott High Eagle, one of the first Native Americans who worked at NASA. He’s best known as the lead retrofire officer during Apollo 13, where his actions saved the lives of the 3 astronauts & earned him the Presidential Medal of Freedom...

Then there’s Dr. Fred Begay/Young of the Los Alamos National Laboratory & part of a NASA-funded space physics research team on the origin of high energy gamma rays and solar neutrons in the 1960’s & 70’s...

And speaking of Navajo innovation, if you have ever wondered why computer circuits resemble Navajo weaving patterns then you will not be surprised to learn that this is not a coincidence but is in fact by intentional Navajo design. As one scholar put it upon discovering the connection “ I had no idea that indigenous people in the U.S. had played such an important role in the early history of computing devices.

Pretty strong solarpunk vibes from this one.

I don't think Solarpunk has normalised the idea that we could just routinely talk to animals.

The phantom liberty expansion is out now, and something to note is just how many roads and cars are in the game considering... well... how are they still burning fossil fuels in 2077?

Something interesting about it is how the game now reads like Grand Theft Auto in the dystopian future. Cars exist so you must be able to drive and shoot out of them and there must be cops and there must be traffic and... all of that is sort of meaningless in that universe. So much of the marketing is set around cars, but if they got rid of the cars, if cars weren't there, then maybe they would have put more effort into the other systems.

Maybe the broken systems just wouldn't need to be built, because so many of them are shoehorned in around cars.

EDIT: wanted to address the comments here as they are all very similarly themed:

I am not talking about the fiction, I am talking about the game design. Yes it's a dystopia but that's not why the game is buggy or boring. Having cars in the fiction means the game must add mechanics to drive and get new cars and vehicular combat. Once there's so much car stuff, the game feels like GTA, which prompts people to make comparisons, which means CDPR needs even more GTA-like mechanics. That's time which could have gone into more RPG mechanics, better missions, etc.

The only time I was talking about the fiction was in reference to how much would cost to own a car, including roads and so on. Why isn't every road pay per use? Why isn't biofuel like $20 a litre? But that would be oppressive to drive in, and because it's a power fantasy, all of that goes by the wayside.

Overall my point was that just as cars dominate the city scape of the present, so they dominate the game design of everything where cars are present.

So, where do I download it from?

This is a Rant. I know I should write my own fiction with blackjack and hookers but just let me get it out of my system.

I've read some solarpunk at this point (mostly short stories) and the number of times that I've read the equivalent of "and we all decided not to be jerks to one another and agreed to a bunch of stuff" it's basically a meme at this point. Yes, Solarpunk doesn't need to be hard sci-fi, there can be fantastical elements, but can we get over the "we magically work as one humanity now"?

I think it's OK to have a world that, without mass media and government control, we would realise that people are friendly and getting things done is easier than it seems, but it's also OK for this to be done in pockets. It's OK for there to be raiders and selfish people and people who still endeavour to pollute and it's OK to have bad guys. It's OK for the indigenous ways to just be the norm rather than the exception, but there are still a lot of ancap crazies out there.

So, if you're writing climate fiction / Solarpunk, please consider not doing that. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Surprised to hear Singapore has a law which states that any building must create equal square footage of green space as the footprint it occupies. That's pretty solarpunk, and probably something lawmakers anywhere could adopt.

Designers from the Netherlands but they are solving problems in a pretty solarpunk way.

From the notoriously flat structure of Valve to the support of free software to the extremely laissez faire way of running steam to the main Dota tournament being named "The International"... Is Gabe Newell a card carrying Anarchist?