Nice work, Terra! Love the cool banner style around the sunflower, and a great message! :D

I did a couple touches to it to increase contrast, and moved the B down one pixel to line up with the I across from it.

As it doesn’t seem likely we’ll get any more template submissions, I vote we use yours :)

Smol version:

No? If you’re unfamiliar with Anarcho-communism, then I’d suggest taking a look at this documentary. It’s a political philosophy that goes back to the 1800’s.

Thanks for the heads up :D

I found that the Canvas event actually has stats available for how many pixels were placed by each instance in previous events, and how many users participated. In 2024, 13 of our users participated and placed 3100 pixels.

I personally witnessed two lenovo legion laptops bought at the same time have pretty severe issues. One had a USB port fail, and the other seemed to have an issue with the SSD controller where it would flake out every 30 minutes causing a complete system crash, even after replacing ram and SSD.

They were both the same model, so maybe there was something specific to that, but considering bow much they cost and yet only lasted a year before encountering issues, desktops seem the safer long-term bet.

I’d be a bit wary of using a red star specifically, as I suspect for many it would bring to mind a connotation with authoritarian regimes such as the USSR, which could be a big turn off. It’s sometimes used in other contexts, but it’s mostly been used by Marxist-leninist groups, historically.

As you’re trying to represent a non-authoritarian communist movement, more distance from well known authoritarian communist symbology would probably be a good idea, in my personal opinion.

What does the green fire represent?

From what I recall, only self-burnt CD’s and DVD’s degrade quickly, while self-burnt blu-rays last significantly longer, even if not m-discs.

Never thought to use an e-ink display as a monitor, great idea!

Also 100% worth using auto suspend :D

Ultimately worker coops by their design limit the amount of excess money that can be siphoned off and concentrated to CEO’s and shareholders, so capital holders would likely refuse to invest in co-ops in fear that were they to become the standard way of organizing businesses, they would get a smaller and smaller piece of the pie globally, as more wealth is distributed to the workers themselves instead.

The current system of capitalism is inherently designed to oppose all forms of more equal distribution of power and wealth.

If co-ops were to become successful in spite of that, the capital owners would likely attempt a military coup to literally fight back against it, just as they attempted during the Business Plot in response to FDR’s economic reforms.

The capital holders hold a tremendous amount of the power to influence the globe to their will due to their concentrated wealth, which is only possible to accumulate due to the accepted exploitation of labor. They will do everything in their power to prevent the loss of that power, even if it means sub-optimal profits.

I picked up an old used SFF (Small Form Factor) office PC a couple years ago to use as my daily driver instead of my gaming PC. Based on a Kill-o-watt power usage meter, my gaming PC would idle at around 40w, while the office PC (with a fairly power efficient i7-7700 and integrated graphics) idles at 10w, so 3x more efficient. Now I only ever boot up the gaming PC when I actually need its performance. As a side bonus, the DDR3 RAM it uses is still very affordable on the used market. It browses the web and plays videos really well, and even plays most games I’m interested in nowadays :)

For anyone else interested in doing that, Dell, HP, and Lenovo are the big makers of those SFF PC’s, and they can generally be had pretty cheaply on eBay, but you can also sometimes find them locally at recycling facilities or the local dump drop-off area. You may want to avoid anything older than the 6000 series of Intel CPU’s, since the older ones don’t support modern video codecs (meaning they’ll use more power playing youtube videos, decoding them on the CPU itself instead of the build-in decoder), and they aren’t as power efficient overall.

I also found that reducing your monitor’s brightness to around 50 to 60% reduces power usage significantly, though that may not be viable if you are in a room that gets very bright.

I’m not entirely sure how big we could realistically make it. It’s possible we’ll get some outside help once the event begins from our neighboring artworks, but probably best to assume low-ish participation, and be a bit restrained in size.

Guessing just on gut feeling, I think we could probably manage up to 30x30 okay, and maybe 40x40 if we get a few people who really get into it. My own proposal is 28x26.

That’s not a bad idea, and it would be quite easy to draw in various sizes. In past events there was usually an area of the canvas where people drew various flags together, maybe we could add this near those, while also doing a specific SLRPNK themed piece as well. If we keep it small-ish, that should be doable :)

Here’s my quick proposal for a template (sized up 1000% so it’s more easily viewable here). It’s our website name in slightly stylized lettered using the colors from our green sun logo, combined with an orange-y sun behind it. It’s 28x26 pixels large, which should make it pretty manageable for us to achieve.

I drew it using the free and open-source Pixelorama tool (which is available on all platforms). If anyone wants to try editing or adding to it, here’s the original size:

I didn’t say there would be no conflict, but significantly less.

If everyone is an owner, there is no incentive to withhold labor and strike, as they can simply come to a consensus with the other co-owners instead. The only reason unions exist and strike is because of an imbalance of power between the capital owners and the workers that generate the capital, so the unions must leverage their labor as a bargaining chip to try to get a slightly more fair deal. That dynamic is not present in a worker owned co-operative, since everyone is an owner and has the same incentive to increase profit, since it benefits all instead of the few.

This would make everyone pay attention because people don’t really care about anything but long term growth independent of the company’s operating system.

All traditional companies have an incentive to fight the formation of unions, even if they do generate more profits, as CEO’s and shareholders do not wish to split up those profits to the workers any more than is absolutely necessary to retain those workers to begin with.

CEO’s and Shareholders are virtually all extremely self interested, often times combined with dark triad traits which both encouraged and enabled them to reach those positions to begin with.

They do not act rationally purely in interest of profit, as if that was the case, then they would’ve already adopted lower working hours, work from home, better benefits, and given partial ownership of the company to the workers voluntarily. Instead, history has shown time and time again that they would much rather let an entire company be destroyed rather than give up power to workers.

You will not have any success whatsoever of convincing existing corporations to embrace unions by proving an example.

A co op would be so different from existing systems that I fear people would think hey that’s neat but we can’t replicate it unless we started over.

There are plenty of examples of worker owned cooperatives, even huge successful ones like Mondragon, which is a multi bullion dollar coop that employs 70,000 workers.

Virtually no existing corporation nor its shareholders would want to become a co-op, because it would mean the inability to exploit and profit from their labor force. Just as they do not wish for unions to impede on their ability to exploit their labor force.

A worker owned cooperative would be more ideal than a unionized but otherwise standard corporation, and is less likely to have internal conflict.

Getting to know your neighbors and joining or creating mutual aid groups is a good way to build community. This can include informal networks through friends, tenant/renter organizations, solidarity groups, and industrial unions.

Check out this handy guide to find existing groups in your area.

There’s also some projects you can do that help build community (and can be fun in themselves!). My instance put together a list of ideas, just scroll down to the “Fun Projects to Build Community” section

This BIFL community does not require that something literally last forever, just that it be more durable and lasting than other objects in the same category.

It’s Mint’s built-in version of redshift, it reduces blue light at night by tinting your screen orange to be easier on the eyes. It is installed by default on all cinnamon versions of Mint. It is not included with Xfce (not sure about MATE).

If you want something similar on Xfce, you’d have to install Redshift and manually configure it with either a schedule or a location for it to work automatically, as it has been abandoned and the automatic location finder is broken.

AFAIK the fairphone is the only phone on the market that is explicitly designed to be user repairable. It doesn’t have a headphone Jack, though.

On a platform that doesn’t allow ad-blockers, I’m guessing?