Friday Night’s All Right For Carbon Capturing

One of the most frustrating things about the climate crisis is that it’s tough to keep it from feeling simultaneously too abstract and too overwhelming. Even for those of us who take it seriously and are suitably worried about it, it can feel too distant to be able to take significant immediate action.

That’s part of why I like Rollie Williams’s Climate Town videos: they let me stay motivated via pure rage. The latest video recaps the story of an Exxon executive blatantly acknowledging the company’s role in the climate crisis, how they’ve been knowingly lying about their role in public, and how they’ve been lobbying to prevent the government from doing anything to halt it.

I’ve been avoiding Exxon ever since the Exxon Valdez oil spill (that’s how long I hold a grudge!), but I’d started to wonder if it were foolish to act as if my meager boycott were doing anything. Now I say screw ’em all, and if I can help it, I’ll never buy another tank of gas again.

Climate Town is also a good source for reminders about bullshit corporate statements pledging to be environmentally responsible, like a recent FedEx campaign.

Today, Hank Green posted a video to the vlogbrothers channel giving a high-level explanation of steps governments can take to address the climate crisis, so that laypeople can better understand the terminology.

Unrelated to climate change: I don’t believe I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m a big fan of the Monstrum videos by Dr. Emily Zarka for PBS, which have long been excellent takes on cryptids and monsters from folklore. I wish PBS hadn’t lumped it in with a couple of unrelated topics, because they’re so well made they deserve their own channel.

The most recent entry in the outstanding 50 Years of Text Games series is about one of Emily Short’s games, which reminded me to check out Short’s blog about Interactive Storytelling. It’s great both for her deep dives and for her link round-ups with a little bit of everything of interest to people interested in narrative games.

One particularly interesting post I hadn’t seen before is “Montage, Narrative Deckbuilding, and Other Effects in StoryNexus” from 2017. The application is more esoteric than I’m interested in, but the idea of combining narrative games and deckbuilding games is absolutely genius.