JacobCoffinWrites

JacobCoffinWrites, 10 months ago

It works great but it lifts surface thoughts like a keylogger and sends them god-knows-where

JacobCoffinWrites, 10 months ago

The old radio show X Minus One had an episode about folks songs of the spaceways. That’s what came to mind when I saw this

oldtimeradiodownloads.com/…/the-green-hills-of-ea…

JacobCoffinWrites, 10 months ago

And if you’re lucky there may be a store in your area that sells most of that without the containers - the one in my area has big barrels of the stuff with spigots or pumps on them. You bring your own containers and they weigh them and you fill them yourself.

So far they just do cleaning products, which I suppose makes sense - they’re shelf stable and not much of a risk of making someone sick if they get mixed. It’s a small thing but I get our dishwasher powder and Castile soap there. And we use different mixes of the Castile for laundry detergent, hand soap, face soap, an an all purpose cleaner.

JacobCoffinWrites, 10 months ago

Doing a quick search, I see lots of companies selling reusable deodorant containers (having, I think, kind of missed the point) so they must sell some kind of replacement liquid or gel, but most of the ones I see don’t sound very ‘anti-persperant’ - lots of aluminum-free vegan stuff, but no generic yet.

JacobCoffinWrites, 10 months ago

I’m not sure if this’ll count, but I really enjoyed these Let’s Plays using the Alien tabletop gaming system. The GM is an awesome writer with a great knowledge of the setting, and the players are all improv actors so they do a nice job:

wiki.loadingreadyrun.com/index.php/Dice_Friends#H…

wiki.loadingreadyrun.com/index.php/Dice_Friends#A…

JacobCoffinWrites, 10 months ago

So I’m going to throw in a pretty eclectic list:

If you enjoy tech noir, I always like to recommend Other Kind of Life by Shamus Young, because it’s awesome and somewhat unknown. The tagline/blurb don’t do it justice but I recently wrote up a rant about why people should read it here

The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl, Cyril M. Kornbluth is an awesome proto-cyberpunk science fiction story (it’s got just about all the elements of a cyberpunk book, but the feel is much more that of a 1950s scifi story, it’s kind of fascinating. The story is awesome.

Bolo! by David Weber is kind of fascinating because it’s one of the only series I’ve read with a genuine partnership between humans and AIs, where neither one exploits or betrays the other, and it’s in this military scifi book series about tanks the size of small towns. And the scope is huge, from postapoclyptic earth to the rise and fall of several interstellar empires, humans side by side with absurdly giant tanks - it’s a trip. The sequel to this one is also good. The others in the series are fun but the ones by Webber have a surprising amount of heart.

By the way, if you like Baen books, you can get a ton of their stories (including Bolo!) in ebook form for free - they used to give them away for free on CDs, and fans collected those files onto websites, and the company has been surprisingly chill about just keeping those book available. This website hosts most of them baencd.freedoors.org but be warned, it’s got graphic design to rival Baen’s infamous covers.

Anything by Harry Harrison. A bunch of ebook versions of his stories are available on Project Gutenberg Especially Deathworld if you haven’t read it

When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger is a cyberpunk story worth checking out.

Obviously anything by William Gibson, and Philip K Dick (personal favorite, A Scanner Darkly and especially the linked audiobook)

And the Murderbot books by Martha Wells are great.

JacobCoffinWrites, 10 months ago

A friend wanted to show my SO and I Twelve Monkeys (the TV series) badly enough to buy the whole thing as a box set, so the three of us have been working our way through it, we’re in season 2 now - it’s been a lot of fun

JacobCoffinWrites, 10 months ago

If you’d like a printable version, I uploaded it here: …files.wordpress.com/…/spice_list_printable.pdf

JacobCoffinWrites, 10 months ago

Thanks, I’d thought about it but I don’t mind it getting shared or attribution getting lost - I pulled it together from stuff I found online after all. I don’t think I’ll care if I see someone taking credit for making it but I don’t know for sure since it hasn’t happened yet. But I’m trying to get good at just giving stuff away - and if people want to take it and mutate it further, that’s the natural progression of things.

I’d rather nobody sells it, but I don’t think I can make it freely available and keep that from happening.

JacobCoffinWrites, 10 months ago

Thanks!!

JacobCoffinWrites, 10 months ago

Have you tried ‘open image in new tab’?

JacobCoffinWrites, 10 months ago

Thanks! Thats high praise indeed!

JacobCoffinWrites, 10 months ago

You’re right - I had to set the tab to ‘desktop site’ to get it to work (I have to do that to get imgur to work half the time so I already had it set that way).

JacobCoffinWrites, 10 months ago

Thanks! Yeah I don’t remember why I didn’t do headers, it definitely wouldn’t hurt

JacobCoffinWrites, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

The Colonial Marines from Aliens get a lot of points for saying a lot very quickly with their costume design.

For a more scifi design I’ve always been fond of the soldiers’ armor from Hunter Prey

https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/d40718da-f469-4e2b-9f72-e60b5f60116e.webp

JacobCoffinWrites, 10 months ago

Thanks!! They show up in Windwaker, then in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. I haven’t played the first yet but I like watching my SO play the new games

JacobCoffinWrites, 1 year ago

I used my old Droid mini as a video player in my workshop (I like to watch long-form let’s plays while I work). I screwed it’s case to a shelf and slipped it back inside, and plugged an old computer speaker into its audio jack. I’d like to also use it as an intercom to the apartment (like the ones my grandparents used to to connect my grandfather’s workshop to the kitchen) but we haven’t set up anything for that yet.

JacobCoffinWrites, 1 year ago

And if the reason you don’t need it anymore is that it’s no longer supported by the manufacturer, you can try reloading it with lineageOS or similar alternative ROMs to get some extra life out of it

slrpnk.net/post/384369

JacobCoffinWrites, 1 year ago

An inability to fit large furniture into my sedan has definitely been a limiting factor on what I’ve claimed over the years and I don’t doubt it has affected others.

That said, I’ve seen a lot of clever solutions to moving large items through our group.

People here are fairly generous with offering their vehicles when they see a discussion where someone can’t get an item, especially because of physical limitations. There is also some kind of volunteer service in this town for transportating things for the elderly or disabled, which I sometimes see recommended. U-Haul rental trucks are surprisingly cheap but what’s really cool is when people sort of ride-share daisy-chain the thing - they’ll coordinate a route between a bunch of people who need to move bulky objects, basically taking turns. We kind of did this once. I had helped a friend build an arcade cabinet, mostly out of salvaged materials, and we rented a truck to move it. At their place we photographed the armchair the arcade cab would be replacing and put it up on the group. By the time the arcade cabinet was set up we had someone interested in the chair, so we loaded it in the truck and drove it to their place on our way back to the rental lot. It’s not too uncommon to see someone post that they’ll have a truck this day, what do you need moved.

Often the trade-off for not spending money is time or sweat - time waiting for the thing you need (whether that’s a specific dimension of lumber, a type of appliance, or a stack of cinder blocks) to show up on the group, or (for those of us who are able) sweat to move it. My spouse and I have spent many walks lugging some piece of furniture back to our apartment. When I was helping my neighbor clean out we had one lady cross half the city with a wheeled cart planning to drag a filing cabinet home that way (my neighbor insisted on using his hatchback instead, which worked out better for all concerned).

The groups definitely aren’t a full-fleged solution yet - they can’t match the convenience of capitalism which will generate the item new, deliver it tomorrow, and replace it if it arrives damaged.

But that level of convenience is fairly new in human experience, so maybe part of a solarpunk future will have to be paced a little slower or a little less precise. I grew up listening to stories from my grandparents about growing up on farms in the Great Depression, and worked for a brief span at a farm museum where the historical business model appeared to have been “make do” so that might color my thinking.

In my hobby of making things with as little waste as possible, I’m often accepting tradeoffs. Time spent to find the materials I need rather than just going to the store, warped or cracked boards rather than new, stain found on garbage day rather than a shade I picked out of a rainbow of swatches. I like the addition challenge, but I know it’s not for everyone. I think figuring out how to make it more palatable is probably one of my long term goals

JacobCoffinWrites, 10 months ago

Just wanted to add some more thoughts, this time about changes in thinking I’ve noticed after a couple years of using these groups.

The first is that it’s been awesome at helping me let go of stuff I’ve been holding on to in case I need it. Part of that is just the fact that I was keeping stuff so it wouldn’t get thrown away, but the bigger part is the confidence that if I let go of something I can replace it if I need it.

It works something like this: I’ll find a piece of furniture on trash day, or get it off my local EIF page. Maybe an exercise bike, or an ergonomic kneeling chair for example. I’ll use it for a bit, but maybe not enough. Someone else posts an ISO looking for one, and I know I can pass it on to them because if it turns out I need the thing, I can get another one the same way. It’s almost a bit of a post-scarcity feeling, like you have the items that are individually significant because they’re sentimental, they have special memories attached, or were a gift, or passed to you by a relative etc. And you have everything else, that you’re just kind of using for the moment. It’s surprisingly freeing. I especially like doing this for building supplies (wood, paint, stain, etc). I’ll grab stuff to keep it out of the landfill, or even with a specific project in mind. But if I still have it when someone needs one, (it takes me a long time to get to some projects) then I feel safe to pass it to them knowing I can get more.

The second thing is that it’s helped me break out of the mindset of seeing other people as a resource to exploit. That sounds harsh, but I think it’s very much the default in our society. I notice this most when I talk to friends or relatives about something I gave away and they mention that I should have sold it. I’m lucky enough to be in an okay place financially - not enough for my big goals, but enough at least so that I feel safe day to day - so I don’t have to worry about trying to get paid for everything I do (and I know how big this is - I’m very grateful to be in this place now). These groups really are just people helping each other out. I give stuff into the community, and get different stuff back out, from different people, but it all kind of evens out, and we all benefit. I sometimes find myself giving something to someone who previously helped me, or vice-versa, but we’re not trying to track value or debts between specific individuals, it’s just a funny surprise to see someone again.

I don’t know if this is useful info, I just wanted to put it down here now that I’ve noticed it.