#SmallScale

[wondrous-art]

Finally finished my line up of my mob members, (which took forever btw). They are part of a miinuvian organized crime group known as the Mothia, and below I'll introduce everyone:

The Boss -

Princess Solen Flame, rogue Queen of the Fire Ant hive. She has had a grudge against the hive ever since her rightful place as Queen was usurped from her by Maculini, a Blue Alcon butterfly with the power to use her pheromones' to mind control the ants, tricking them into making her their new Queen

She started the Mothia as a means of enacting her revenge and creating her own army of loyal followers. However no one knows this truth about her. As far as everyone else knows, she is a mysterious figure whom everyone believes to be a Cinnabar moth, as she hides her identity from her former hive.

She runs her gang with the grace, intellect, and ruthlessness' of an ant queen, and goes to great lengths to make sure everyone in the gang knows their place and stays in line.

The Recruiter -

Arressa is a emerald cockroach wasp and Solen's right-hand woman. She's one of the few people that know the truth about Solen and shares an intimate relationship with her.

Arressa uses her beauty and charm to scout out fresh meat to recruit to the gang, and she has a knack for finding the down-trodden and desperate. If they say no, she also has a bad habit of taking people out for a one night stand they don't come back from.

The Bounty Hunter -

Tox is an elephant mosquito and a high ranking captain in the mothia. He is stoic and quiet, and is always willing to do what needs to be done with cold calculation. Normally he is managing drug runs and other missions in the mob, and making sure things get done and the mob gets paid, but if anyone breaks the rules and gets too far out of line, he's the one that's called to take care of things.

Tox is a flying sniper who does not rest until his target is a cold corpse on the ground. Very few have ever gotten away from him alive, and he never forgets their faces.

The Chemist -

Melle is a miller moth with an affinity towards chemistry. She is incredibly intelligent and is responsible for much of the chemical weapons and explosives that the mothia utilize. She is also responsible for processing the drugs that the mob peddles.

She is an introverted person, often demanding her personal space in her lab and getting frustrated when people interrupt her while working. She also has a bad habit of inhaling a lot of dangerous fumes from her work, resulting in her often having headaches and being physically weaker than the rest of the crew.

The Wild Card -

Scoros is a man who loves to be sent on a violent mission. He was once a private detective who was tracking down a murderer, who rigged his home with explosives, killing her girlfriend at the time and leaving him with severe head trauma and brain damage. When he recovered, he tracked the criminal down and beat him to death along with his family, and supposedly also cannibalized their bodies. He frequently makes morbid jokes about having 'eaten a baby.'

After this brutal crime, he found himself in the mothia, where he could release is new aggressive tendencies by killing people the mob wants dead. Often works alongside Tox on hit missions.

The Muscle -

Luc Pincer is a man who joined the mob to pull himself out of hardship and starvation. After witnessing a close family member being brutally beat by overzealous Fire Ant soldiers, he has had beef with them ever since.

In the Mothia, he acts as a body gaurd not just for Solen, but any other high ranking member. His sheer size and his massive pincers are enough to make anyone second guess trying anything stupid while he's around. While he doesn't enjoy killing, he'll do it if he has to.

The Decoy -

This little guy is actually my friend @lexezombie's beefly OC Bylie, so I can't speak for him entirely, but I wanted to include him in the picture. I imagine he uses his looks to trick people into letting their guard down around him, despite him being a ruthless killer. He is obsessed with Tox.

The Runner (The Traitor) - Cullen was at the time, one of the newer members of the mob. A mosquito down on his luck, he saw his first taste of truth power and respect when he joined the Mothia. He worked the frontlines, running drugs and selling them to earn money for the mob. He was good at it, but soon his crippling addictions got the better of him and he started skimming money and supply off the top of his sales. When he was caught, he was hunted down by Tox, who was able to shoot him in the eye, but somehow the bug survived and fled town and hasn't been seen since.

[ketchup-the-kid]

i'm also realizing that I never posted my updated Scyllo. holy shit this is way more manageable

[nsemkekanews]

Ghana’s small-scale gold exports surpass large-scale for first time: $4 billion windfall boosts cedi - Nsemkeka

Ghana’s small-scale gold exports surpass large-scale for first time: $4 billion windfall boosts cedi – Nsemkeka Gold exports from artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASM) have, for the first time, outpaced those from the large-scale mining sector—raking in over $4 billion between February and May 2025. The breakthrough was announced by the Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Gold Board…

[dibzdoesarts]

First attack for artfight!!

@ibbywondrous

[endeavourweigh]

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[smallscalles]

Re watching Sense 8 with my dad. Honestly a really awesome show it has so many layers. Also thank you Ladyknightthebrave for talking about sense 8 the vid is a yearly re watch.

[nordfjording]

there's a new carbon footprint calculator out adjusted for the nordics and its great and all (lists me as about half of the average norwegian) but it also pinpoints how hard it is to make these accurate because the "best tips for how YOU can improve!" are very much along the lines of "take the train!" no trains in my region. "stay at your vacation destinations longer and fly less!" i don't go on vacations. "eat less meat!" i buy 1 pack of salami per month. "buy fewer eggs!" i haven't bought an egg in several years. "take the bus to activities!" i don't have regular activities.

[stochastique-blog]

Okay, this is interesting

Smallscale evening exercise by Chicago Artist Billy Jackson. Pen on paper #noeraser #whiteoutoktho #tonipreckwinkle #cookcounty #small #smallscale #chicago #politics #politician #billyhjackson #billyjacksonart #billyjackson (at Portraits By Billy Jackson) https://www.instagram.com/p/5X7hQaRYiP/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[piper-mcqueen-ask-blog]

Piper Mclean Claiming Scene If It Was Done Well 🔼

[fatehbaz]

Nothing in the past, moreover, gave any cause to suspect ginseng’s presence so far away. Or even closer by: since antiquity, for well over a millennium, the ginseng consumed in all of East Asia had come from just one area -- the northeast mountainous lands straddling Manchuria and Korea. No one had found it anywhere else. No one was even thinking, now, to look elsewhere. The [...] [French traveler] Joseph-Francois Lafitau didn’t know this. He had been [...] visiting Quebec on mission business in October of 1715 [...]. He began to search for ginseng. [...] [T]hen one day he spotted it [...]. Ginseng did indeed grow in North America. [...]

Prior to the nuclear disaster in the spring of 2011, few outside Japan could have placed Fukushima on a map of the world. In the geography of ginseng, however, it had long been a significant site. The Edo period domain of Aizu, which was located here, had been the first to try to grow the plant on Japanese soil, and over the course of the following centuries, Fukushima, together with Nagano prefecture, has accounted for the overwhelming majority of ginseng production in the country.

Aizu’s pioneering trials in cultivation began in 1716 – by coincidence, exactly the same year that Lafitau found the plant growing wild in the forests of Canada. [...]

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Since the 1670s the numbers of people [in Japan] clamoring for access to the drug had swelled enormously, and this demand had to be met entirely through imports. The attempt to cultivate ginseng in Aizu -- and soon after, many other domains -- was a response to a fiscal crisis.

Massive sums of silver were flowing out of the country to pay for ginseng and other drugs [...]. Arai Hakuseki, the chief policy maker [...], calculated that no less than 75% of the country’s gold, and 25% of its silver had drained out of Japan [to pay for imports] [...]. Expenditures for ginseng were particularly egregious [...]: in the half-century between 1670s through the mid-1720s that marked the height of ginseng fever in Japan, officially recorded yearly imports of Korean ginseng through Tsushima sometimes reached as much as four to five thousand kin (approx. 2.4–3 metric tons).

What was to be done? [...] The drain of bullion was unrelenting. [...] [T]he shogunate repeatedly debased its currency, minting coins that bore the same denomination, but contained progressively less silver. Whereas the large silver coin first issued in 1601 had been 80% pure, the version issued in 1695 was only 64% silver, and the 1703 mint just 50%. Naturally enough, ginseng dealers in Korea were indifferent to the quandaries of the Japanese rulers, and insisted on payment as before; they refused the debased coins. The Japanese response speaks volumes about the unique claims of the drug among national priorities: in 1710 (and again in 1736) a special silver coin of the original 80% purity was minted exclusively for use in the ginseng trade. [...]

[T]he project of cultivating ginseng and other medicines in Japan became central to the economic and social strategy of the eighth shogun Yoshimune after he assumed power in 1716. [...]

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China and Korea were naturally eager to retain their monopolies of this precious commodity, and strictly banned all export of live plants and seeds. They jealously guarded as well against theft of mature roots: contemporary Chinese histories, for example, record that the prisons of Shenjing (present day Shenyang) overflowed with ginseng poaching suspects. So many were caught, indeed, that the legal bureaucracy couldn’t keep up. 

In 1724, the alarming numbers of suspected poachers who died in prison while awaiting trial led to the abandonment of the regular system of trials by judges dispatched from Beijing, and a shift to more expeditious reviews handled by local officials. [...]

Even in 1721. the secret orders that the shogunate sent the domain of Tsushima called for procuring merely three live plants [...]. Two other forays into Korea 1727 succeeded in presenting the shogun with another four and seven plants respectively. Meanwhile, in 1725 a Manchu merchant in Nagasaki named Yu Meiji [...] managed to smuggle in and present three live plants and a hundred seeds. [...]

Despite its modest volume, this botanical piracy eventually did the trick. By 1738, transplanted plants yielded enough seeds that the shogunate could share them with enterprising domains. [...] Ginseng eventually became so plentiful that in 1790 the government announced the complete liberalization of cultivation and sales: anyone was now free to grow or sell it.

---

By the late eighteenth century, then, the geography of ginseng looked dramatically different from a century earlier.

This precious root, which had long been restricted to a small corner of the northeast Asian continent, had not only been found growing naturally and in abundance in distant North America, but had also been successfully transplanted and was now flourishing in the neighboring island of Japan. […]

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Colonial Americans, for their part, had developed their own new addiction: an unquenchable thirst for tea. […] This implacable need could have posed a serious problem. [...] [I]ts regular consumption was a costly habit.

Which is why the local discovery of ginseng was a true godsend.

When the Empress of China sailed to Canton in 1784 as the first ship to trade under the flag of the newly independent United States, it was this coveted root that furnished the overwhelming bulk of sales. Though other goods formed part of early Sino-American commerce – Chinese porcelain and silk, for example, and American pelts – the essential core of trade was the exchange of American ginseng for Chinese tea. [...]

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Yoshimune’s transplantation project had succeeded to the point that Japan actually became a ginseng exporter. As early as 1765, Zhao Xuemin’s Supplement to the compedium of material medica would note the recent popularity of Japanese ginseng in China. Unlike the “French” ginseng from Canada, which cooled the body, Zhao explained, the “Asian” ginseng (dongyang shen) from Japan, like the native [Korean/Chinese] variety, tended to warm. Local habitats still mattered in the reconfigured geography of ginseng. [...]

What is place? What is time? The history of ginseng in the long eighteenth century is the story of an ever-shifting alchemical web. [...] Thanks to the English craving for tea, ginseng, which two centuries earlier had threatened to bankrupt Japan, now figured to become a major source of national wealth [for Japan] .

---

Text by: Shigehisa Kuriyama. “The Geography of Ginseng and the Strange Alchemy of Needs.” In: The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Yota Batsaki, Sarah Burke Cahalan, and Anatole Tchikine. 2017. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[discombra]

god dammit how many more content creators that i want to enjoy will end up being shitty people i stg this is the second time this month

[wondrous-art]

Giving Tox slightly upgraded look as well, mostly giving him something interesting to have under that coat of his.

[ketchup-the-kid]

Symon will learn to fly eventually

[rubensmuse]

am i interested in going to dashcon 2. Yes

would it be the stupidest thing to spend money on. also Yes

[evorathesylvurr]

fearing conflict and yet desiring power is such an interesting inherent... well, conflict

[smallscalles]

Small mossy mossy boi