I write science fiction, draw, paint, photobash, do woodworking, and dabble in 2d videogames design. Big fan of reducing waste, and of building community

https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com/

@jacobcoffin@writing.exchange

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Throwing in a little odd advice for the secondhand scene - even if the shops are bad, I’ve had some good luck with estate sales and cleanouts (where a family or realtor basically opens the home to anyone who’ll cary stuff away and save them the trouble and cost of throwing it out). It can feel kinda bad, picking through stuff in that context, but we’ve saved a bunch of nice old tools and kitchen stuff that way, and the houses generally have everything else you might need for a house. Personally I think the best BIFL stuff is old and made before they really perfected enshitifying their products.

    The cleanouts I’ve been to we found through postings on our local free groups (which I also really recommend) or word of mouth, but I used to know some folks who went to them professionally, looking for merchandise for their own businesses, so they must be advertised somewhere normal people would find them too.




  • Yes! I’ve been looking for a good place on the internet to set up a community resource repository where players and GMs can share/collect various resources they’ve made, like docs with writeups of house rules and settings and NPC builds etc which might be useful to someone else. Even photos/photobashes for setting the scene. I think my ideal format would be some sort of wiki or share drive full of folders where anyone can add something but a mod can remove things in case someone uploads something horrible. I’m not sure how much account-walling we’d want, but I’d very much like to reduce our reliance on big corporations and especially on increasingly-problematic ones like google.

    So basically a share folder where anyone can have create permissions but only mods have modify and delete. That division of permissions seems to be a bit harder to find.

    We could use the FA community wiki on slrpnk.net but it’s configured so only moderators can upload files. So people would have to submit files to have them added which takes it out of the community’s hands a little.

    We use the regular community but add some kind of tagging system like [resource] so things would be easier to find but that would be pretty disorganized.

    We might be able to add a file share to the wordpress site, I’m not sure what exactly is under the front end I used while messing around setting up the site because that predates me on the project, but it might be worth talking about with the person who offered to host us. ( https://wordpress.com/plugins/shared-files might have some potential (as an option for hosting a central resource repository, or as a security vulnerability, I’m not sure which))

    And I know you just set up a Github page for tracking change requests/typos etc. That might work for this, even if it does need an account.

    If anyone has any other ideas that’d be great!








  • I’ve been having a great time running the Fully Automated campaign and working on the guide for running it. We just finished session 10 and it looks like next session will wrap up this story, hopefully with time for a little epilogue.

    Overall I’m very pleased with the players’ arc through this campaign. They hit a bunch of locations and events I was hoping they would, and also surprised me a bunch of times with creative, thoughtful, and community-oriented solutions. I’m a huge fan of games that let the players stack the deck in their favor by being smart or creative, and I’ve had a great time watching them short-circuit potential conflicts before they could begin, rally an investigative effort in the region that’s essentially too big and public to stop, and assemble a small army to help them confront a villain while stealing damn near all his weapons out from under him before he could use them. Their community-first approach has felt like a really solarpunk way to play this solarpunk campaign and their concern for my NPCs has been very sweet.

    In running it I’ve found that I have enough of the setting and NPCs (and even some pre-set triggerable events) all established well enough that I can let the players do whatever makes sense to them and let the world sort of operate around them. The only time I’ve really weighed in rather than just reacting to them is to adjust certain NPC actions to keep the story’s pace engaging and narratively satisfying.

    After it wraps I’m planning to do a second playthrough with some IRL friends (where I’ll be introducing them both to the game system and solarpunk as a genre) but I’m also looking forward to really digging into the campaign doc with some of the devs and doing some proper editing. General consensus so far is we should be ready to publish it in a few months through their usual channels (website, itch.io, and drivethruRPG), libre and gratis. They’ve already made some great suggestions so I’m looking forward to seeing what else they come up with!


  • Normally I accept that new tech is more expensive so they need to make it a luxury product at first to make a profit but car companies have been prioritizing ‘luxury’ pickups and SUVs for awhile now, even in ICE vehicles. A few years back now I’d have loved to buy a small, practical Ford Ranger or Toyota Tacoma or similar, but they’re only making big trucks with all kinds of cost-markup-worthy luxury features. (So I bought a sedan). The focus on higher returns per individual sale seems to be the overall trajectory and why wouldn’t it? The line must always go up.

    I don’t doubt that the established car companies can turn an ever-growing profit (at least for awhile) by cutting overhead and fine-tuning existing products, but I’m frankly skeptical that they have the nerve or ability to really invest in developing an entire new type of vehicle. I just don’t think they have the ability anymore, they’ve spent too much time specializing in short-term profits. It’s much easier to complain and demand protectionism from competition.

    I don’t disagree that the chinese companies have a lot of advantages, many of which are unfair. But I also don’t have any real sympathy for our Too Big To Fail™ car companies, who have received a frankly absurd amount of help themselves with far less benefit to show for it. And even when they get that protection I find I’m skeptical that they’ll use that cover to actually work to improve their electric vehicles to something comparable to the vehicle fleet that’s being locked out of the market.




  • I also really don’t like the implication that people without an addiction should somehow be ‘above’ reuse, salvage, or diy projects. That consuming products and filling landfills is somehow safer or more dignified. It feels like marketing at work and it’s an attitude I sometimes get from some conservative relatives who see fixing old things as poor people behavior and don’t understand why I wouldn’t just buy something new if I could afford it. I love fixing things, making things, and finding interesting ways to reuse or repurpose parts. I think this idea that buying products, especially new, should be the default or only way is wasteful and damaging. Especially when those products are deliberately made worse so you’ll buy them again and again.

    I’ve done some car work over the years and easily half the parts I put in came secondhand off eBay, undoubtedly from a junkyard in some other state.

    I’d like to switch to an electric vehicle but I’m deeply skeptical of the built in surveillance and overreliance on internet enabled software. I kind of wonder if my best bet for a car I trust to not spy on me or get hacked will be some kind of kit car situation in a few years.