A work in progress and a place for inspiration and contemplation. Run by a white person inspired and challenged by visionary fiction, afrofuturism, black quantum futurism, indigenous futurism, and sci fi/speculative fiction in general. I hope to be in conversation with those threads, but I've a lot to figure out first. I identify as a Midwesterner and settler living in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. (this is a sideblog)
it shimmers like no gemstones i've ever seen: green as malachite and emerald but shot through with opal, gold, copper. photographs can't do it justice because of how it shines, as well as the way the actual material elements have their own dimensions. you can lean in and study all the fine lines of the circuits or step back and admire how the rearranged whole forms new patterns. it's one of the most beautiful creations i've ever seen.
Rain and low clouds delayed flights for hours Tuesday, compressing a narrow weather window for a high-stakes aerial drone mission over Penns
"Jeff Chalfa of Tennessee piloted the relay drone, while Jimmy Ashby, of Tennessee, and Max Gallanos, of Alaska, hiked to a ridgeline overlooking the Allegheny River and President to serve as visual observers.
The first flight mapped terrain using LiDAR to identify obstacles and elevation changes before a second pass with the magnetometer searched for magnetic signatures indicating buried wells — some extending 20 to 60 feet underground."
Insensitivity reader to make sure that your characters are ignorant assholes in the ways that make the most sense for the characterization you're trying to achieve
Aiming to design for systemic health may not save us from unexpected side-effects and uncertainty, but it offers a trial and error path towa
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We need to respond to the fact that human activity over the last centuries and millennia has done damage to healthy ecosystems functioning. Resource availability is declining globally, while demand is rising as the human population continues to expand and we continue to erode ecosystems functions through irresponsible design and lifestyles of unbridled consumption.
If we meet the challenge of decreasing demand and consumption globally while replenishing resources through regenerative design and technology, we have a chance of making it through the eye of the needle and creating a regenerative human civilization. This shift will entail a transformation of the material resource basis of our civilization, away from fossil resources and towards renewably regenerated biological resources, along with a radical increase in resource productivity and recycling."
Recognizing that forest ecosystems, like societies, have elements of intelligence would help us leave behind the old notion that they are in
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The pines clustered at the edge of this meadow were probably relatives of the same family, their genes diversified by pollen drifting in from distant fathers. These parent trees shared some of the genes of the trees around them, and passing along carbon to each other to increase the survival of their seedlings, their own offspring, would help ensure those genes got passed to future generations. A later study would show that the roots of at least half the pines in a stand are grafted together, and the larger trees subsidize the smaller ones with carbon. Blood runs thicker than water. This makes perfect sense from an individual-selection perspective. It’s Darwinian.
But my work was showing that some carbon also moved to unrelated individuals, ones of an entirely different species. From birch to fir and back again. I looked at the white aspen, its bark basking in the sun, and wondered if it shuffled carbon to the firs under its crown. The other way around too: firs to aspens.
Mycorrhizal fungi are generalists — they colonize plant root tissue, sometimes even intracellularly. They might invest in many tree species to hedge their bets for survival, and the off chance that some carbon would move to a stranger was simply part of the cost of moving it to relatives.
But this was not what my trees were showing. They were offering me evidence that the pattern of carbon movement was not just by chance, an unfortunate consequence of the moveable feast. No, my trees were demonstrating that they had a lot of skin in the game. Over and over, the experiments showed that carbon moved from a source tree to a sink tree — from a rich to a poor one — and that the trees had some control over where and how much carbon moved."
Once a coal mine, then slotted to be a prison, a group of activists are working to reclaim the land.
"On a freezing cold Wednesday afternoon in eastern Kentucky, Taysha DeVaughan joined a small gathering at the foot of a reclaimed strip mine to celebrate a homecoming. “It’s a return of an ancestor,” DeVaughan said. “It’s a return of a relative.”
That relative was the land they stood on, part of a tract slated for a federal penitentiary that many in the crowd consider another injustice in a region riddled with them. The mine shut down years ago, but the site, near the town of Roxana, still bears the scars of extraction.
DeVaughan, an enrolled member of the Comanche Nation, joined some two dozen people on January 22 to celebrate the Appalachian Rekindling Project buying 63 acres within the prison’s footprint.
“What we’re here to do is to protect her and to give her a voice,” DeVaughan said. “She’s been through mountaintop removal. She’s been blown up, she’s been scraped up, she’s been hurt.”
The Appalachian Rekindling Project, which she helped found last year, wants to rewild the site with bison and native flora and fauna, open it to intertribal gatherings, and, it hopes, stop the prison.
The environmental justice organization worked with a coalition of local nonprofits, including Build Community Not Prisons and the Institute to End Mass Incarceration, to raise $160,000 to buy the plot from a family who owned the land generationally.
Retired truck driver Wayne Whitaker, who owns neighboring land and had considered purchasing it as a hunting ground, told Grist he was supportive. “There’s nothing positive we’ll get out of this prison,” he said.
The penitentiary has been a gleam in the eye of state and local officials and the Bureau of Prisons since 2006. It has always sparked sharp divisions in Roxana and beyond and was killed in 2019 after a series of lawsuits, only to be quietly resurrected in 2022. Last fall, the bureau took the final step in its approval process, clearing the way to begin buying land...
In his book Coal, Cages, Crisis, Schept noted that mine sites are considered ideal locations for prisons or a dumping ground for waste, rather than places of ecological value, as some biologists have argued. The Roxana site has been reclaimed, meaning re-vegetated with a forest that now shelters a number of rare species, including endangered bats.
Opponents argue that a prison will bring more environmental problems than jobs. Letcher County was 1 of 13 counties ravaged by catastrophic flooding in 2022, a situation exacerbated by damage strip mining caused to local watersheds. The prison slated for Roxana will exacerbate the problem.
The Bureau of Prisons estimates it will damage 6,290 feet of streams and about 2 acres of wetlands. (The agency has promised to compensate the state.)
DeVaughan said the purchase also is a step toward rectifying the dispossession that began with the forced removal and genocide of Indigenous peoples. The Cherokee, Shawnee, and Yuchi made their homes in the area before, during, and after colonization, and their thriving nations raised crops, ran businesses, and hunted bison that once roamed Appalachia.
In all the time since, coal, timber, gas, and landholding companies have at times owned almost half of the land in 80 counties stretching from West Virginia to Alabama. Several prisons sprang from deals made with coal companies, something many locals consider the continuation of this status quo.
Changing that dynamic is a priority for the Appalachian Rekindling Project, which hoped to buy more land to protect it from extractive industries and return its stewardship to Indigenous and local communities. DeVaughn said Indigenous peoples throughout the region will be welcome to use the land as a gathering place...
DeVaughan sees its work establishing a new vision of economic transition for coalfields, one that relies less on “dollars and numbers” and more on “healing and restoration” of the land and the Indigenous and other communities that live there.
She is working with some personal connections in the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations to acquire a herd of bison and plans to work with local volunteers, scientists, and students to inventory the site’s flora and fauna."
Explore data center proposals across Pennsylvania. Stay informed on AI-driven growth and infrastructure projects shaping the state’s future.
"But after reading about a data center proposed across from her childhood home near Scranton, she decided to build a public map showing where data centers are planned in Pennsylvania — a tool for residents to learn more. Now, she hopes to make the tool to be open-sourced so others can replicate it across the country...
"I think AI is a good tool,” she said. But she questions whether Pennsylvanians will be the primary beneficiaries of the technology...
And although Doda’s mapping did not reveal an overlap of data centers and former coal mines, Pipa sees the relevance of the region’s industrial history.
“To build data centers, you need significant outside investment,” Pipa said. Investors use local land, water, and electricity, which is “not dissimilar to energy extraction.”
"[x story type] but what if-" short story. come on man you should know that if your story is easily blurbed down to "interesting thing happens" that is not going to sustain a reader for 400-600 pages. a book is where you write an actual narrative, not a cool idea that came to you in the shower last night.
there's nothing wrong with writing a short story! there are lots of good short stories that revolve around Interesting Ideas. What if I was my own mother. What if fish people were real and also (evil) living in massachusetts. What if you were your own worst enemy, literally. lots of good short stories there, all at just the right length for a cool idea. no one is going to go see the feature-length adaptation of William Wilson though, because that's it. unless you add in a tragic backstory and a love interest and so on and unfortunately there are a lot of novels and movies running around out there that clearly were meant to be a short story before someone took them and stretched them to a silly length.
your short story doesn't even have to be short! herman melville wrote over 100 pages of a guy who hated his job so much he died of being a hater the end. good show, herman. thank you
novellas exist. you can write one. please. it's necessary for the land to survive
I know I say that I'm kinda nuts for doing the amount of visual research I do, but at the same time:
Specificity is SO much more compelling and real feeling, and imo not getting references often makes things look more amateur.
Eg. drawing a sofa- my mental image of a sofa is something like this:
Like. Its a sofa. It works. But it's not very convincing, the pillows are kinda wrong at the back, and it's not really giving any information about the owner.
Even if you want a basic sofa...
What kind of basic.
comfy and cheap?
kinda rigid?
inherited?
------
who does this comfy cheap ikea sofa belong to anyway?
guy living alone?
teenage girl?
Grandma?
Anyway I'll get off my soapbox but specificity is sexy and fun and it can do your storytelling for you!
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theartofmadeline
