46/2024 Weekly Notes

I used to write these Weekly Notes on my older blog, Parallel Spirals. From now on, I will begin writing them here. I do not want to import the old Weekly Notes.

Lunarpunk

This week was mostly spent trying to understand lunarpunk. I wanted to understand this to take forward and conclude the story of Meera in my novel, Red Mars, Grey Moon, and Green Earth.

I was following Venkatesh Rao who put me on this video about The History and Philosophy of Cypherpunk.

This talk mentioned lunarpunk and Rachel-Rose O'Leary who would speak at the conference about it. When I searched on YouTube to see if she had spoken elsewhere, I saw this talk she gave at CoinDesk.

This seems to point to lunarpunk as a crypto response to solarpunk. A broader Google search revealed otherwise.

My understanding of lunarpunk is based on these Tumblr posts:

1. What's Solarpunk and Lunarpunk? This article answers the question from the point of view of aesthetics and as a genre.
2. Some preliminary thoughts on lunarpunk v solarpunk. This looked at the aesthetics and props that can be used to hint that this is a lunarpunk story.

This understanding has helped me to go ahead with Meera's story in my novel.

Reading

Saurabh created a WhatsApp group for people interested in reading David Deutsch's book The Beginning of Infinity. We decided to begin reading the first chapter and discuss it next Saturday (23 November 2024) as the delivery time for the paperback version on Amazon was long.

My progress on reading Sandeep Mall's Finding the Oasis has also been slow.

Writing

I wrote the fifth chapter of my novel Red Mars, Grey Moon, and Green Earth on thinkdeli.