JacobCoffinWrites

I've got a coat I wore every winter for like eight years but didn't use this fall because a rain of macroplastics would follow me wherever I go. I can strip the pleather, flaking-paint material off to replace it with something but the fabric underneath is sort of thin and stretchy so I'd need to find something that'll help seal it against wind and rain again. I know they sell pleather paint but reviews said it's short lived or meant for patching lesser damage. It's probably a long shot but is there another option for doing the whole outside of the coat?

Otherwise it's still in great shape.

I think I've mentioned before that rural cyberpunk is just about my favorite setting and I always enjoy it whenever we get a glimpse. Gibson books are great for that, from Turner's brother's farm and Dog Solitude in the Sprawl, to the trailer park in the Bridge books, and basically all of the stub in The Peripheral. I love the way cyberpunk (realistically) rejects clean, fresh-start architecture and instead layers new over old, and I think rural areas provide even better contrast for that than the cities, despite how old some cities are. I've done a few rural cyberpunk scenes before, mostly for a webcomic. I love looking around my hometowns and trying to capture a type of location - not a specific place, but like an amalgamation of a category like 'farmhouse,' or 'junkyard,' and then adding kludged-on tech.

I made this one as location art for a Solarpunk TTRPG campaign book I've been working on. My goal was to show a sort of old-fashioned for the setting design that used a ton of old, scrapped-together tech. The farmer who lives here was a fan-favorite with my first group of players – he does a lot of work maintaining the meshnet for the mostly-abandoned town where the campaign takes place and he became good friends with the group’s hacker character.

His farm is pretty conservative for the setting. I wanted to play with how perspectives would shift in this utopian solarpunk setting, to have a farm that would seem both futuristic and kinda crunchy-progressive by our standards that would still be pretty stodgy and conservative compared to his neighbors.

He’s relying on biochar, crop rotation, and pollarded trees providing radial chipped wood to replenish his soil instead of manufactured fertilizer, using alley cropping and a handful of other agroforestry techniques to shelter his crops. He cooks his food using a scheffler reflector, drives a woodgas truck he uses to produce his biochar, and generates his power with a mix of solar, wind, water, and woodgas.

But compared to the elaborate food forests of a nearby community, Bob’s open fields and heavy reliance on tech makes his farm look downright traditional.

One of my goals for this region of the map was to explore the different ways one can arrive at some of these practices out of necessity. The people from this abandoned, rural town aren’t likely to be solarpunk ideologues but when supply chains broke down, the infrastructure collapsed, and the population emptied out, those who remained had to adjust to keep going. They look out for each other, grow their own food and generate their own power, and adapt their lifestyles to the seasons because that’s what they had to do to get by when things were bad. Bob is a bit younger than many of the other ‘holdout’ characters, but he’s generally following their mix of goals and motivations.

I find the sort of cyberpunk mix of scavenged tech and a traditional-looking farmhouse to be both a lot of fun and pretty much in line with the farmers I’ve known and worked for, who were happy to bolt new stuff onto old if it got the job done. Bob’s farm is full of scavenged robotics, radio antennas, and other tech, mostly controlled using cybernetics linked to his brain. He’s added a drone hangar to his barn and his UAVs swarm into the skies like bats while robotic tractors and hexapod gardening robots patrol his fields and guard his goats. He bolts solar panels, vertical turbines, electrical boxes, and radio antennas to his buildings with an almost punk focus on practical results over aesthetics.

Other elements also show his involvement in his community. In addition to maintaining the local scrapped-together communications network, he plays a big role in maintaining the town’s network of trials. He’s parked an old snow groomer, of the type used by ski mountains, under a lean-to attached to the barn. He uses this each winter to pack down snow on the town’s roads and trails, as most of them are seasonal, and people here travel by cross country skis, snowshoes, snowmobiles, or use vehicles modified with skis and tracks in the winter.

edit: Also huge thanks to the ham radio subreddit and the community on lemmy for looking over the antennas for me and making suggestions!

I’ve been working on some location art for the Buried Treasure campaign. The farmer who lives here was a fan-favorite with my first group of players – he does a lot of work maintaining the meshnet for the mostly-abandoned town where the campaign takes place and he became good friends with the group’s hacker character.

His farm is pretty conservative for the setting. I wanted to play with how perspectives would shift in this utopian solarpunk setting, to have a farm that would seem both futuristic and kinda crunchy-progressive by our standards that would still be pretty stodgy and conservative compared to his neighbors.

He’s relying on biochar, crop rotation, and pollarded trees providing radial chipped wood to replenish his soil instead of manufactured fertilizer, using alley cropping and a handful of other agroforestry techniques to shelter his crops. He cooks his food using a scheffler reflector, drives a woodgas truck he uses to produce his biochar, and generates his power with a mix of solar, wind, water, and woodgas.

But compared to the elaborate food forests of a nearby community, Bob’s open fields and heavy reliance on tech makes his farm look downright traditional.

One of my goals for this region of the map was to explore the different ways one can arrive at solarpunk practices, either out of necessity or for goals like self-sufficiency - because in the end of the day, they work. The people from this abandoned, rural town aren't likely to be solarpunk ideologues but they work together as a community, follow permaculture practices, and adapt their lifestyles to the seasons because that's what they had to do to get by when things were bad. Bob is a bit younger than many of the other 'holdout' characters, but he's generally following their mix of goals and motivations.

I find the sort of cyberpunk mix of scavenged tech and a traditional-looking farmhouse to be both a lot of fun and pretty much in line with the farmers I’ve known and worked for, who were happy to bolt new stuff onto old if it got the job done. Bob’s farm is full of scavenged robotics, radio antennas, and other tech, mostly controlled using cybernetics linked to his brain. He’s added a drone hangar to his barn and his UAVs swarm into the skies like bats while robotic tractors and hexapod gardening robots patrol his fields and guard his goats. He bolts solar panels, vertical turbines, electrical boxes, and radio antennas to his buildings with an almost punk focus on practical results over aesthetics.

Other elements also show his involvement in his community. In addition to maintaining the local scrapped-together communications network, he plays a big role in maintaining the town's network of trials. He's parked an old snow groomer, of the type used by ski mountains, under a lean-to attached to the barn. He uses this each winter to pack down snow on the town's roads and trails, as most of them are seasonal, and people here travel by cross country skis, snowshoes, snowmobiles, or use vehicles modified with skis and tracks in the winter.

Huge thanks to the ham radio communities on lemmy and reddit for looking over the antennas and giving me advice!

I realized while setting up my campaign for the second playthrough that I never actually wrote a intro for the Reclaimers, though I gave one during the first session. I think they're a fun organization so I thought I'd share it here too:

The Reclaimers are an international community of volunteer builders mostly known these days for using the lessons of the GCW wartime slums and the American Realignment to turn parking garages, strip malls, parking lots, and other remnants of the interstate age into vibrant communities. Their members include builders, electricians, plumbers, roofers, masons, architects, engineers, inspectors, farmers, community planners, mechanics, and anyone else who wants to contribute to their projects. If Habitat for Humanity was a full-out lifestyle and organized into chapters that double as extended family groups, it’d be a pretty close fit.

They arose during the Global Climate War as a mutual aid network helping provide shelter to people using whatever was available to them, making ruins and abandoned structures habitable, often repurposing them in creative ways. They entrenched themselves in many areas through their contributions to the postwar cleanup, and were very active in protests leading to the American Realignment, even helping build fortifications where necessary.

The Reclaimers have an old policy dating back to the crumbles that goes ‘there's always room for one more and we’d be lousy builders if there wasn't.’ They won't turn anyone away unless they’re a threat to their other residents.

In my campaign they've turned an abandoned wealth enclave – a development of McMansions around a golf course – into a planned, self-sustaining agricultural community (which has then become a salvage boom town during the region's rewilding).

Here's something silly - I've seen conspiracy theorists sling the term "Socialist Vampire" around as an insult frequently enough (saying socialists are secretly vampires, sometimes literally, basically a continuation of the usual rightwing blood libel bullshit).

This musician appears to have worked backwards and asked what if there were actual vampires and those vampires were genuine socialists and it's pretty funny.

It's a three part series of short songs. They're on other sites too but the tiktok version seems to have the best video (which kinda makes it) and lyrics onscreen.

Vampire Conspiracy: https://www.tiktok.com/@olifro.st/video/7427845222706548001

Vampire Conspiracy II: https://www.tiktok.com/@olifro.st/video/7336959535183121696

Vampire Conspiracy III - Mesmerize: https://www.tiktok.com/@olifro.st/video/7407128924838235424

One of our GMs is looking for additional players! I thought I'd repost their LFG from a discord we're both in:

Looking for one or two people to join a brand new solar punk SF game using the free ruleset Fully Automated! 7:30 PM EST Tuesdays on Discord

Fully Automated! is a new solar punk TTRPG undergoing testing. Join on the ground floor of a brand new play test campaign as we explore Michigan and the Great Lakes region. Explore the depths of deserted Detroit, fight off Quebecois pirates, and negotiate between synthetic humans and bird-adapted survivalists!

If interested, you can find them on the Fully Automated discord: https://discord.gg/2FtTfGGDJr

Text pulled from my blog post here: https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com/2025/01/06/buried-treasure/

The blog’s been quiet for a few weeks while I’ve been working on another project, so I thought I’d go ahead and write about that a little.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I’m also a dev for the Solarpunk TTRPG Fully Automated!, but I don’t think I’ve said so here. It’s an open-source, free (libre and gratis) project intended to be something like a solarpunk scifi version of Dungeons and Dragons (in that it has a robust ruleset and lore you can use or discard as you like while writing your own campaign). I joined like a year ago because I was looking for somewhere to talk solarpunk worldbuilding, and was drawn in by their lore and the sheer ambitious scope of their setting.

I think my understanding of solarpunk and my dreams for the future improved significantly just reading through their guide on how their world works. I think it’s by far the easiest-to-understand depiction of the end-state goal of various leftist systems, probably because it’s designed specifically to help players and GMs actually occupy this eutopian future in-game. It’s hard enough to imagine a better world, let alone to play a character who lives in it. They do a good job of depicting what a day-in-the-life would actually entail, in simple language, and it’s appealing.

When I spotted some gaps in the lore they were happy to take on my suggestions, and I contributed more and more until eventually they asked me to formally join the team.

The other devs have a wonderful knack for taking any idea I have about how something could work and dialing it up to 11. My solarpunk and cyberpunk fiction tend to be near-future things, the solarpunk in particular being much more postapoclyptic than utopian. The FA! team is ambitious and sees a much grander end state much further out than I normally focus on. If I tend to write the journey, I think they’re writing the destination.

I helped them get the rulebook ready for release, then helped review the premade campaigns they’d written. I think that was when I started thinking about making a campaign of my own.

I wanted to do something set in my neck of the woods, to explore how small, rural, ‘bedroom communities’ like the ones I grew up in would change in a world where endless growth and a total reliance on cars were no longer the societal default. The existing lore and premade campaigns are very LA-centric, so I moved my campaign to the east coast and got about as rural as you can while still having some human presence. In contrast to some of Fully Automated’s setting details, the region generally aims for a lower-tech, slightly more grounded vibe.

The end result is a sort of riff on treasure hunting adventures where the players need to journey off the edge of the map, searching dense forests and lost ruins for clues. But the forests and ruins are in a mostly-abandoned region of rural New Hampshire which is being rewilded, and the treasure is tons of industrial waste illegally dumped there sixty years ago during the setting’s WWIII (and which is now useful in the production of geopolymers). It’s got some heavy environmental themes around conservation of wild land and watersheds. As the players search for the pollution they begin to unearth other forgotten details of the region’s wartime history and draw the attention of someone who would rather they left the past alone.

I had two big goals for this campaign – the first was to explore various ways rural solarpunk could look, including questions of what makes for a genuinely sustainable community, the sort of tradeoffs and sacrifices a degrowth-based rural community may need to accept, and how towns and industries look when they accept that they live in a world without limitless resources. It examines various lifestyles and technologies that make sense in that context, local infrastructure, and even the kinds of people the region might attract. It pulls a lot from what historically worked in the region long before cars reshaped it.

In many ways, it represents a sort of amalgamation of all my rural solarpunk projects so far. If you like my postcard series, then playing this campaign should be the closest thing to stepping into those scenes and visiting the people they depict.

The second goal was to get an admittedly narrow glimpse into the Thousand-Year Cleanup – the nigh-endless work of a world where many people have made cleaning up our society’s mess their life’s purpose. The hidden pollution the players and their allies are working to find represents a common wrong from our time, and from the last hundred years of industrial production. Every time a corporation or business owner takes a shortcut that leads to disaster, or deliberately dumps poison into the land and water to save a few bucks, it represents their entitled expectation that the world around them, their human community, and all the other species impacted, will subsidize their cost savings with their health and lives.

Long term, I’m hoping to make The Thousand-Year Cleanup a collection of adventure modules (with the first being this adventure, Buried Treasure). This would be similar to Fully Automated’s previous premade campaign: Regulation, which included four playable modules. It probably won’t have a throughline plot, just a set of adventures themed around various aspects of cleaning up the world our society left to them. From buried industrial waste to massive swaths of plastic in the ocean, to endless heaps of clothes discarded in the desert, I think there’s tons of potential for campaigns based in some way around cleaning up our waste and making it useful. The scope is a little overwhelming but there’s a powerful optimism in depicting a world that’s making real progress on these disasters through the collective efforts of regular people.

I think it’s safe to say that this 160+ page campaign guide is my biggest Solarpunk project to date – it’s actually shaping up to be my longest finished work of fiction in general. I’ve tried to write several novels in the last decade or so, but usually get bogged down in logistical snares in the setting and plot. Writing for a tabletop campaign (and one I might not even be running) has been oddly freeing. I can’t know what the players or GM will do, so I present options, people and places and events which will be triggered by circumstances in their playthrough, but I’ve been careful not to set a specific set of rails for them to follow. In some ways, this plotless format has been much easier for me than writing a single story. And I’ve been able to include far more world building than any one group of players can possibly see!

Fully Automated’s dev team has a sort of template for organizing the notes/prepwork for running a tabletop campaign – it seems to be inspired a bit by the way scientific papers are laid out in sections, and while I don’t have much experience with GMing, I found it very intuitive. (Though I made some adjustments to organize mine around in-world locations rather than a timeline as Buried Treasure is a bit more open than the introductory ones they’d previously published.)

When I was writing the campaign, I’ll admit I sort of saw actually running it as the playtesting cost I had to pay to get the thing published. I had no idea how much fun I’d have actually sitting down with a group and trying it out. My players are great and I was shocked at how entertaining it was to watch them explore my world and interact with my characters, not to mention the satisfaction of watching them piece together the mystery!

At time of writing we’ve just finished up session 8 and I think the players are approaching the endgame and generally seem to be having a lot of fun. They’ve even talked about doing a second session per week which is asking a lot of six adults with day jobs and projects of their own. They have been excellent at unraveling the mysteries and at interpreting the clues they’ve found – they’ve surprised me a few times now by figuring things out quicker than I’d expected or with fewer clues than I’d prepared. I’m also very pleased with the ways they’ve leveraged community and preemptively diffused potential conflicts – they’ve not just avoided some potential fights but amassed a small army of allies who are helping them solve this mystery. That, to me, is a very solarpunk way to play this solarpunk campaign, and it feels very natural in a reasonable-people-acting-reasonably sort of way in the moment.

We’re looking at getting another group going with a different GM to better test my guide to running this campaign, and the lead dev is looking at finding an artist to do a pulp-style cover for it which is just really cool!

If all goes well we’ll publish the cleaned up version libre and gratis through the game’s various channels. But if you want to try it out sooner than that, we’ve currently got multiple groups testing it out on the game’s discord! And if you want more info or to download resources without an account, you can find Fully Automated over here: http://fullyautomatedrpg.com/>>

We recently switched to using a Linux Mint laptop with an adblocker for our streaming (while also cancelling a bunch of services). A friend at the recycling center set it aside for me - the screen was irreparably smashed but it was otherwise quite a nice little laptop. Replacement screens were too expensive so I carefully removed the broken one entirely so it'd default to the HDMI port and then set it up as a quick media center (we watch a lot of YouTube and the ads were driving me crazy, I might switch to a more purpose-built OS eventually). The TV is one I pulled from an ewaste bin to replace my previous ewaste TV after it finally gave up. It has a thin line through one edge of the screen occasionally but is otherwise fine. I also recently found a perfectly good wireless trackball mouse and a Bluetooth keyboard in the same bin where I got the TV (came with that other mouse). The bin even supplied HDMI cables. The whole thing is perched on a particle board TV stand I found like a decade ago when the college kids move out.

I stumbled on this brief article while looking through this solarpunk blog. On the farm I worked at growing up, all but one of our greenhouses were plastic stretched over a metal frame. We replaced the plastic fairly often (I'm not sure how often - I know I helped do it more than once, but probably not for the same greenhouse) due to sun and wind damage. The old plastic was pretty useless at that point unless you needed a dropcloth with some cracks in it, so it usually went in the dumpster and then to our local landfill.

It sounds like these folks soaked some sort of fabric in beeswax, and I'm curious how well that holds up. Certainly it'll need replacing at some point, but so did the plastic, and at least the textile and wax can be composted eventually. Does anyone have any experience with this?