Oh geez this. My parents never let me try out new things if they would be messy or might fail. I wanted a veggie garden, nope. Baking, too messy. Tons of craft things were vetoed for a very long time too. Thankfully as an adult I’ve rekindled these desires, and i have a garden I cultivate and a sourdough starter going (as examples). But I do mourn the learning I could have done as a kid.

I’m determined to let my kid do messy things. Right now the messiest thing she can do is spit up, but when she’s older she can have so much play doh and dirt time and baking time.

(Play doh only if she’s not eating it)

The swaddle. My child has learned being awake is fun. Including at night. By the power invested in me by this swaddle blanket, she will learn the beauty of SLEEP.

I would love a general/weekly discussion post! Currently 8 months pregnant with my first, so I’ll take any chance to connect with other parents once she is here.

So a perspective I haven’t seen here yet: in many places, Starbucks is the only suitable third space left. I.e. place that is not work/school or home. I have non-Starbucks cafes nearby, but due to astronomical and increasing rent for all the independent cafes in walking distance, they are in smaller buildings and they can’t afford to have people sitting for hours on laptops using the WiFi/talking to friends/reading a book. I still support my local cafes for food and coffee, or really short meetings with folks, but if I need to get out of the house and spend time in public where I’m not obligated to speedrun my coffee, Starbucks is The Choice.

And that’s why i might be inside of a Starbucks while hating capitalism. Because capitalism made Starbucks the only corporation able to afford proper cafe space.

(There is a library nearby, yes, but not with good space for sitting down and working on a laptop. And even having THAT Is a massive privilege)

(Also I actually do have a MacBook that I do my personal stuff on, because of various bits of software i need that are OS specific, which is annoying as heck but i got used to my work mac anyways and then found a nice one used… so yeah.)

UK based Senior software engineer here (by title anyways, I have a little over 3 years experience iirc so I’m more a mid stage-wise). I kinda use indeed, mostly use linkedin and recruiters though. My last two jobs, a recruiter just reached out to me with companies I’d never heard of or looked for. But I got on their radars by applying to postings on linkedin.

Oh I feel you on the “how do I afford living” bit. I’m a senior software engineer—arguably the career people say makes some of the best money—and I still feel broke as fuck constantly.

(I mean I’m in the UK so it’s not Silicon Valley Monopoly money but STILL)

Seconding the question on what kind of PT stuff you’d go for, because I often consider the same.

I just want to say that I love that this book isn't on Amazon (or is but I just can't find it). I'm an author as well and the amount of focus there is on "get your book on Amazon!!!" drives me bonkers. Evil evil corporation, as we know (here anyways).

Anyways that aside, cover is gorgeous, and the blurb is super intriguing. Like, a murder in a place full of things you can murder someone with? That's a neat premise.

I'll set a reminder to grab it from smashwords on the 8th!

It would be really helpful for further discussion if you backed up your reasoning with a direct refution of something they said. Even if it's just an example. It's a lot easier to keep discussing where we need more intersectional viewpoints if we know what you find lacking.

It's tricky. I'm bipolar, and I need my medication to thrive, so we'll need ways to compound those kinds of medications that aren't at odds with solarpunk. What that looks like, I don't know. I'd need more knowledge on how aripiprazole is created and a definition of "solarpunk" enough to combine them...

But also, I used to have severe issues with social anxiety. I still have the underlying anxiety predisposition, but improving my surroundings and the people around me helped with the anxiety.

I think a more solarpunk society will benefit the general mental health of a lot of people, but there are still going to be mental illnesses that need medical intervention.

But I think it's also important to note that Solarpunk isn't handed down from any governing body. There's no strict dictation of what is and isn't solarpunk and what does and doesn't fit. We have general consensus, but it comes from the ground up, and it comes from what we talk about and how we talk about it. In short: If you want to discuss how mental health will be handled in a solarpunk society, the ball is in your court. It's up to mentally ill folks and our advocates to determine our futures here.

Final caveat: I think there are some people in the solarpunk community who overlap with the... "natural is better" community. The "anti-chemical" community, or the "the only antidepressant you need is trees" community. That's a problem we as individuals should definitely address. But again, how? Up to you and us.

Radical! I need to remember this for my garden. Finding a large water container is so difficult on a budget. But if I can make one, that's cheaper and saves something going to landfill. hmm...

Gently, I think. I like to focus on what we can do together, not on what they shouldn't do. It's a bit of a mind game, but phrasing things in terms of possibilities and community goes farther than discussing remedial actions-- what people need to stop doing before we face horrible consequences.

Granted once you've got them on board, we can discuss the harder subjects that might require we make less fun changes to our lifestyles.

I plan to ~~indoctrinate~~ introduce people in my neighbourhood to solarpunk and grassroots activism by sharing produce from my garden, as an example. Once I have a good rapport with them, it'll be a lot easier to convince them to make changes. It's a lot easier to listen to the nice person who gave you a basket of broccoli than it is the person who slashed the tires of your gas-guzzling car. Beyond that, I think just being an example of how solarpunk communities can work is convincing enough.

(Note: I don't necessarily have an issue with more in-your-face protests like slashing tires, but I do think they serve a different purpose than getting people into a community)

I was recently at a conference for AWS (Amazon Web Services, AKA the cloud provider for a HUGE chunk of the internet), and part of the keynote claimed that it was greener to run in the cloud because... uh... well, they didn't exactly say. Don't get me wrong, I could see how it would be easier to make all AWS data centers compliant with using green energy than it would be to convince every random financial institution that their on-premises servers need to be green, but quite frankly it's Amazon and I don't trust that they're telling the truth about themselves and not just greenwashing.

Quite frankly, for things like lemmy instances, I think we could totally achieve a totally solar powered setup easily... but not easily at scale or reliably.

I've thought about how cool it would be to have a server room linked up with a solar array and batteries, and basically only have the servers up when there's enough energy to power them. In theory, it sounds fun to have a static splash page that shows when the servers are down that explains why they're down, as a way to make people think about how energy-expensive servers are. In practice, it sounds like a nightmare for a ton of reasons to have an intentionally flaky server. But it sounds like this is already a Thing with Low-tech magazine, which is neat!

But that's not to say we couldn't build and self-host a reliable and sustainable server room. Just that I don't know the numbers on what a server room actually pulls energy wise and how much energy generation we'd need.