Welcome to the 25th writing club update! 😊
I hope you’ve all found some nice cozy spots in the shade, to do some creative thinking or writing. Or perhaps some of you have been taking a break, there’s nothing wrong with that either!
The usual info about how this writing club update works:
To anyone stumbling upon this post and wondering about the rules – there really aren’t any! This is a club for mostly the same regulars and semi-regulars, but visitors are encouraged to comment on writing updates or share their own. The main idea is to set a goal for yourself and try to achieve it by the next month’s update. :)
Feel free to comment and tell us how things are going for you, regarding writing, creative works, and everything related!
I recently saw a video about the water sanitation systems that are commonly used in the US, and only then I realized even nowadays a lot of houses over there are effectively “off the grid” when it comes to their entire water system. Quite fascinating as a European! (Over here the towns are so dense that you always have municipal water treatment available from somewhere.)
One of my British friends was kind of horrified at how we do things over here, especially in rural areas. The houses I grew up in only had electricity and phone lines (and eventually cable tv/internet) run to them. Individual wells and septic tanks/leach fields is very much the norm, even in planned developments. Lots of redundancy and you need to get your water tested occasionally to make sure the groundwater hasn’t been contaminated by industry or neighbors (and basically no recourse if it has).
Once you get into adding rainwater collection for showers/toilets and switching to small scale solar, especially stuff like partial or whole house conversions to DC power to reduce conversion loss, things get complicated enough that a houseguest probably can’t safely assume things work the way they expect. It’s possible not every outlet is lit the usual way, or maybe they can only charge a device when the sun is out, or maybe you need to know the right valves to open to draw water from a cistern.
IRL building codes and consumer mindsets in first world countries have standardized a lot of things and offloaded/hidden a lot of the complexity that underpins our day to day existence. For many of us our power and water are handled by specialists in dedicated facilities, and the equipment which goes into our homes have strict codes and expectations to keep the experience of using them fairly standard.
But in a solarpunk world, especially one that’s rebuilding, and relying on salvage and diy, I think we’d see many more retrofits and ‘bespoke’ solutions which are more efficient but leave the complexities of filtering water or generating electricity or disposing of sewage more exposed to regular people. I think there’s some cool worldbuilding potential in that.
Y’know I’d never thought about this directly but I’m realizing that it’s been sort of on the periphery of my brain lately - I recently installed Linux on my other laptop and have been delightedly customizing it to suit my specific needs. The other day my partner asked about something and I was like “Here why don’t you just boot up my laptop, the password is XYZ, I’ll come help in a minute” Cue my partner being absolutely baffled as to how my laptop works.
Since then I’ve been thinking about standardization/convenience vs function and all those complicated big thoughts. People don’t switch to Linux (and my partner does not want to use my laptop XD) because it’s not familiar to them, because unfamiliar things are inconvenient and inconvenience takes energy. But something like Linux can be made so it suits the user extremely well, like my laptop, so it functions much better (for me) than, say, the standard Windows layout. I suspect where this is going is that we should design things for function rather than standardization in many cases. To do that, we’ll have to remove the things that are making people choose convenience every time - our good ol’ enemy Capitalism. But once we sort that out, think how well stuff could work for people!
Anyway, that’s a bit of a ramble, but TL;DR I’m excited by the idea of well-functioning but unusual systems and I’m looking forward to reading your wiki page c:
Same! I’m actually about to start posting around asking for anyone’s favorite examples, and digging into permiculture forums which are often a gold mine for this stuff.
I’m 100% with you on linux, I’ve run into the same situation and conclusions a few times. In fact a lot of how I live tends to involve having to explain the quirks of whatever system to people who want to use them, and I’m still in an apartment with standard up-to-code water, electricity, and sewer hookups. I’ve known homesteaders who were far and away further along on that stuff than I am. I’m excited to see what we can gather up here, as one of my ongoing projects features a mostly-abandoned region where people likely would have introduced some high-context systems just to get by once the grid and everything else started to fall apart. And those systems have had decades to metastasize until each location is weird in its own way.
That’s so interesting! I grew up on well water. When my family moved to the city I was like “what do you mean we have to pay for water it’s water it comes out of the ground”