August 7, 2023 – I went to the Friday evening session of Confluence, the convention by Parsec (https://parsec-sff.org/), Pittsburgh’s science fiction club, on July 21. A good time as always, highly recommended for all science fiction and fantasy readers and writers. I particularly enjoyed the session on hopepunk and solarpunk. They’re sort of the opposite of dystopian, proposing that maybe technology and human ingenuity can make things better instead of just causing horrible dark problems. A good local source of some hopepunk is DreamForge magazine (https://dreamforgemagazine.com/).