BlueSpruce

Social scientist, data scientist, cozy gamer, solarpunk, game dev.

Solo developing Cave Oasis at Shylake, a hopeful futuristic farming sim and small town life sim video game.

BlueSpruce boosted:
2025-07-14

fast and furious and bicycles

I’m racing-downhill excited to announce the release of my latest #SolarPunk novel, Neon Riders. You can discover the ebook on this indie site.

smashwords.com/books/view/1810

E-bike riders racing through San Francisco. The illustration is by Neville Dsouza.
BlueSpruce boosted:
Em :official_verified:Em0nM4stodon@infosec.exchange
2025-07-13

No-AI and solid end-to-end encryption is the new tech hype.

If you don't invest heavily in solid end-to-end encryption, privacy-protective and No-AI features, you will be left behind. People might even laugh at you.

Tell everyone.

#NoAI #Encryption #RootForE2EE #Privacy #Tech

2025-07-10

@fritzoids Woah yeah that is a very long time to wait for a sequel!

2025-07-10

@moz Exactly! And then I have to refresh my memory of the last one when the new one finally comes out. Though that can be fun, if it was good enough that I decide to read the first one all over again right before the second. Might do that with this one, we'll see.

BlueSpruce boosted:
Annalee Newitz 🍜annaleen@wandering.shop
2025-07-10

Do you dream of lazy Sunday afternoons, full of tasty noodles and robots? Have I got an event for you! Join me and AI expert @alex on 8/3 at 3pm to talk about my new book Automatic Noodle! Hosted by Noe Valley Books in San Francisco. Sign up now! It's free! noevalleybooks.com/event/2025-

2025-07-10

Ugh, I should never read new series-starting books right after they come out. Now I have to wait however long it takes for the author to write another very good novel so I can read the sequel.

The book is Jayán F.R.’s The Wind of Venus: The Aeoliad Part I (jayanfr.com/books). I had no expectations going in, saw a post by the author on r/solarpunk, debut novel.

It’s very well written, the story’s interesting, the setting is imaginatively compelling (anarchist community of airships sailing Venus’s temperate cloud layer, so #solarpunk + speculative #scifi ).

First half is engaging slice-of-life type story telling, with a coming-of-age angle. Action picks up in the second half. I definitely recommend it, just hope the author’s a fast writer ‘cause I’d very much like to find out what happens next.

#books

BlueSpruce boosted:

Remember that one comic I made about Solarpunk, realism, and dystopia? There's a zine version available now! Feel free to print it out and distribute

Thank you to the person who arranged it ✨ all credits listed in the document

Link to the PDF: fenestrate.net/imprints/solarp

#solarpunk #comic #zine

A screenshot of the entire zine-formatted comic about Solarpunk, realism, and dystopia
2025-06-28

@sarenaulibarri 💚 I enjoyed Steel Tree too, different in such a fun imaginative way, but with parallels. You have so much creative range and yet a clear perspective throughout. Can't wait to read what you write next!

2025-06-28

There are several interwoven conflicts that shape the story, but probably the most important one occurs within the main character. It involves a scientific development related to reincarnation, and I struggled to believe that part at first. But like all plot lines, it was a device to facilitate a particular human struggle, and I think ultimately a useful one.

The story is all about the past's relationship to the present and future, how we deal with inherited guilt for the sins of our ancestors, and how we avoid repeating history in our sometimes myopic attempts to do things differently.

In the end it was a deeply personal story, with learning and growth, finding respect for others across generational divides, continuing to question potential class divisions and imbalances of power, knowing what we've achieved is never quite right, but can always be made better if we listen to each other and work together.

2/2

2025-06-28

I just read @sarenaulibarri 's #solarpunk #novel Another Life. I really enjoyed it. Like the best solarpunk stories, it focuses on a close-knit, supportive community, one that is complex and subtly flawed, but deeply hopeful and inspiring.

When the story begins, the community is well formed, with a compelling origin story that shapes its culture and social structure. It has a form of communalism that is pretty well thought through, both in the internal distribution of resources and effort, and in the community's external relations. But the community isn't finished evolving, as real living ones never are.

1/2

#books #climatefiction #bookstodon

BlueSpruce boosted:
Sue is Walking the Earth 🌱susankayequinn@wandering.shop
2025-06-24

**Because there's no one hero that's going to solve the climate crisis. We have to do this together.**

Which brings me to one of my favorite reviews (from @bluespruce ):
5/n

BlueSpruce
@bluespruce@mstdn.games

Oh wow, I just finished @susankayequinn 's Nothing is Promised series. It was good throughout, but it’s breathtaking at the end. The last book is powerful. And it made me appreciate more fully what she did with the whole series.

It’s really one big, sweeping story, over four books (short novels priced low). Each book takes the story to the next organizational level, introducing new main characters in a nested system, while keeping earlier characters involved in the expanding narrative.

I was on board throughout, but I see in the end how that enabled her to integrate a complex system of many actors, not just one hero, without making the story too cumbersome at once.

The books never stop at the easy ending. They persist and escalate through the full process needed to make things happen, the many ways rich and powerful people can derail even hopeful progress, and the collective, tireless efforts that can overcome that opposition and produce real change.

I appreciated reading them so much.
2025-06-05

@britt Totally get it, I'd love to read that write-up if you ever get to it!

2025-06-05

@britt I'm so glad you're sharing these! Have you read Gideon the Ninth (and the rest of the Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir)? Seems to fit your list of queer, epic fantasy, YA-ish (it's a bit sci-fi too, also gothic, and sarcastic, and very fun).

2025-06-05

New #gamedev blog post about setting my eco-socialist alien Stardew-like game in a cave on a moon: bluespruceinteractive.com/blog

If it seems like everything’s sky islands these days, this is kind of the inverse of that. I thought a cave setting would make a compelling case for treating the game world as a closed ecosystem, in which everything has to be reused sustainably. It also works well for depicting a close-knit community that depends on its local environment and stewards it with care.

Making sure there’s enough sunlight coming into the caves has been a key challenge, in designing the world, and in the characters’ concerns within the game. The main story events involve a series of dust storms on the surface of the moon, which of course affect everything! The solar power supply, the photosynthesizing plants, the supply of food and oxygen derived from the plants, etc.

More details in the blog; wishlist on Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/368

#gamedesign #indiegames #indiegamedev #worldbuilding #sciencefiction

BlueSpruce boosted:
2025-06-05

A thread on my game Neofeud about my life as an impoverished Hawaiian, social worker and STEM teacher for other poor/homeless, living in slums beneath billionaire mansions. My experiences refracted through the lens of satirical cyberpunk. wandering.shop/@silverspookgam

Neofeud title screen of floating palace over slum
2025-06-04

Oh wow, I just finished @susankayequinn 's Nothing is Promised series. It was good throughout, but it’s breathtaking at the end. The last book is powerful. And it made me appreciate more fully what she did with the whole series.

It’s really one big, sweeping story, over four books (short novels priced low). Each book takes the story to the next organizational level, introducing new main characters in a nested system, while keeping earlier characters involved in the expanding narrative.

I was on board throughout, but I see in the end how that enabled her to integrate a complex system of many actors, not just one hero, without making the story too cumbersome at once.

The books never stop at the easy ending. They persist and escalate through the full process needed to make things happen, the many ways rich and powerful people can derail even hopeful progress, and the collective, tireless efforts that can overcome that opposition and produce real change.

I appreciated reading them so much.

#solarpunk #books

BlueSpruce boosted:
2025-06-01

Over on BlueSky, authors are sharing their #unbound horror stories. It’s awful. So much worse than I imagined. It’s Alan Dean Foster vs Disney all over again.

Unbound went into liquidation and immediately a new company, Boundless, popped up. They now own all of Unbound’s assets … and none of its debts.

There are so many authors owed tens of thousands of pounds each. Many of them have no other source of income and this represents a year’s worth of royalties.

@bookstodon @lgbtqbookstodon

BlueSpruce boosted:
alxd of the Story Seed Libraryalxd@writing.exchange
2025-06-01

Our #storySeedLibrary has just been updated with 12 more #solarpunk panels from none other than #CommandoJugendstil !

storyseedlibrary.org/authors/c

A wonderful series on different aspects #sustainable #city in our #climate #future .

#art #illustration #climateChange #HopePunk #futurism #creativeCommons

Feel free to bother Commando about starting a Patreon ;)

A colorful illustration of a seaplane parked just next to a wooden structure with people waving to each other. The seaplane has solar panels on its wings.
2025-05-31

Cornell Lab Bird Cams and the Raptor Resource Project have a live web cam of five baby kestrels in a nest box in Wisconsin, and with five of them, they’ve been pooping up a storm. Yesterday one of them backed up and took perfect aim right at the camera and it is amazing. youtube.com/watch?v=k9c6YK_jh2

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