💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~shufei › phlog › 20200526-Misc-Summer.gmi captured on 2023-03-20 at 18:51:36. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Summer is my least favourite month, generally. Summer means sweat. Summer means insects biting. And the jejune riot with which most of the Earth celebrates the Sun at this time has always been a bit too hyperactive for my taste. Lately, natch, summer has only blazed with more heat, a harbinger of apocalypse, the surfeit of good things wreaking irreparable havoc with Earth herself. We are “too much i’ the Sun”, methinks. We have no humility before the wealth of energy given unto us by our perch a shade too near our star. If we are not more careful, it will come to great calamity, a shame inscribed on the universe for ever. There is a season between summer and fall which reveals all this with more grace, which bestows the gifts of summer with less mania. It is a more stately time, the Harvest. And what a thing it must be to be a flower to lately bloom in that time, alone on the meadows. The bees must be so grateful for those blossoms. All seasons are glorious in their way. Every moment deserves its due of reflection. But how lovely to shuffle toward autumn with slow care. Wines taste sweetest as they approach the dregs. ## ~Solarpanels~ Solar panels revel in summer sunlight, much to our benefit. They turn their dark blue faces up as metal flowers, and with equal joy. Who cannot love a solar panel? They sing the body electric with a comely craft. It feels good to put up solar panels and let them shade and draw from the well of light. I could use another 600w or so of solarpanels. But I’ve nowhere to mount them at present, nor control that much power. Again it is good to be humble and live within precious means. Things will be less ostentatious and even more a delight when thermophotovoltaics are ubiquitous. For now a panel swelters as it works, wasting quite a bit of heat into our overburdened air. With TPV, a goodly amount of this heat will be recouperated again for electricity. These developments are far more moral than mere efficiency. When technology works toward the modest in this way, it is an ontological good which ennobles our endeavours. We become less the monsters we dread we are. We remember the delicate hopes of our ancestors for a kinder summer in the depths of days yet to come. ## ~Tree~ Trees with big green shady leaves do such lovely work. Magnolia and Mulberry and Oak. Let’s be thankful to them for bearing up the summer sky. The Earth is a punishment in summer without them. ## ~Onion~ Onions are cute, too. See their red skin which grumbles and sighs, but gives way to a wealth of green-yellow laugh. They are puckish little friends who will make us cry as we delight in them. So round, worthy of embrace. So sour, a critic of our mammalian hungers, but critics jibing in love. -EOF- .