#Water Pump Automation

[adixtechnology]

Adix Technology's Automatic Water Level Controller for Submersible Pumps

Upgrade your water management system with Adix Technology's cutting-edge Automatic Water Level Controller for Submersible Pumps. Ensure optimal water levels effortlessly, saving energy and preventing wastage. Experience smart and reliable water control for enhanced efficiency in agricultural and domestic applications. For more information visit the blog:https://medium.com/@adixtechnologyprivatelimited/adix-automations-revolutionizing-home-water-management-with-automatic-water-level-controllers-for-face87d23d10.

[pumpingstationsuk]

Discover the advantages of automated pumping stations for residential areas in the UK, including enhanced efficiency, cost-effective maintenance, improved water management, and environmental benefits. Upgrade your infrastructure with Packaged Pumping Stations Ltd. Contact us today for reliable and efficient solutions.

[shivajikshirsagar]

Complete Water and Pumping Solutions Under One Roof: S.R Sales and Services

Welcome to S.R Sales and Services, where we’re dedicated to transforming your water experience! We’re thrilled to introduce our innovative solutions that can truly make a difference in your life, whether you’re seeking better water pressure or eco-friendly heating options.

With over 23 years of experience since our founding in 2001, we’ve committed ourselves to delivering top-quality solutions and excellent customer service. Whether it’s water pressure pump, solar water heater, heat pump water heater, water treatment plant (water softener and R.O system), or more, we have the expertise to assist you. Let’s work together to find the perfect water solution tailored just for you! Read More....https://srsalesandservices.com/2024/04/24/complete-water-and-pumping-solutions-under-one-roof-s-r-sales-and-services/.

[blackfridayoffers]

The Complete Guide to Water Treatment Solutions

Water is an essential resource for life on Earth, but it can also be a source of contamination and disease. Without proper water treatment solutions, water can become contaminated with bacteria, viruses, and other pollutants that can cause serious health problems. That's why it's so important to have water treatment solutions in place to ensure safe and clean drinking water.

In this guide, we'll discuss the different types of water treatment solutions available and how they can help protect your health and the environment. We'll also look at the benefits of using water treatment solutions and the importance of regular maintenance.

What Is Water Treatment?

Water treatment is the process of removing contaminants from water to make it safe for drinking, bathing, and other uses. Treatment solutions can range from simple filtration systems to more complex processes such as reverse osmosis and ultraviolet light treatment. The type of water treatment solution you choose will depend on the source of the water, its intended use, and the level of contamination.

Types of Water Treatment Solutions

There are several types of water treatment solutions available, including:

Filtration: This is the most basic form of water treatment and involves passing water through a filter to remove suspended particles and other contaminants. Filters come in a variety of sizes and types, including carbon filters, reverse osmosis filters and ultrafiltration systems.

Disinfection: Disinfection is the process of killing or removing bacteria and other harmful microorganisms from water. This can be done through chemical disinfection, ultraviolet light treatment, or chlorine treatment.

Softening: Hard water contains minerals that can cause scale buildup in pipes and appliances. Water softening systems use salt or potassium chloride to remove these minerals and make the water more palatable.

Ultraviolet Light Treatment: Ultraviolet light treatment, or UV treatment, is a process of using ultraviolet light to kill bacteria and other microorganisms in water. This is a popular method of water treatment for drinking water and can be used in combination with other types of water treatment solutions.

Reverse Osmosis: Reverse osmosis is a process of forcing water through a semipermeable membrane to remove contaminants. This is a popular method of water treatment for drinking water and can be used in combination with other types of water treatment solutions.

Benefits of Water Treatment Solutions

Water treatment solutions can provide many benefits, including:

Improved water quality: Water treatment solutions can remove impurities and contaminants from water, making it safer to drink and use.

Reduced health risks: Water treatment solutions can help reduce the risk of waterborne diseases, such as cholera and typhoid fever, by eliminating the presence of harmful bacteria and other microorganisms.

Cost savings: Proper water treatment can help reduce the cost of plumbing repairs and water bills by preventing scale buildup in pipes.

Environmental protection: Water treatment solutions can help protect the environment by removing contaminants from wastewater before it is discharged into rivers and lakes.

Maintenance and Monitoring of Water Treatment Solutions

Water treatment solutions require regular maintenance and monitoring to ensure they are working properly. This includes checking filters, cleaning equipment, and testing water for contaminants. It is also important to ensure that chemicals used in water treatment solutions are stored and used properly to avoid contamination.

Conclusion

Water treatment solutions are essential for ensuring safe and clean drinking water. From simple filtration systems to more complex processes such as reverse osmosis and ultraviolet light treatment, there are a variety of water treatment solutions available to meet your needs. Proper maintenance and monitoring of water treatment solutions is crucial to ensure they are working properly and providing the protection you need.

[chriswu08]

RTU S272 Water Pump IoT Monitoring System

1.Introduction

The water pump IoT monitoring system realizes the functions of remote control, real-time monitoring, running status recording and fault alarm notification of the optical water pump controller. Users can control the equipment through mobile phones or computers, check the operating status of the equipment, and know the occurrence of faults in time. This not only reduces the work intensity of management and maintenance personnel, but also can deal with faults and maintain equipment. By querying and analyzing the historical operation data on the server, you can grasp the equipment usage, failure rate and other information, and provide data support for equipment maintenance.

2.System Block Diagram

Real-time monitoring of water leakage, water tank level, temperature and humidity, incoming pressure, outgoing pressure, and flow of the pump room can be realized through Sensor+ S272 + KPIIOT Cloud. On-duty personnel can view various data in real time through computer PC and mobile APP , When the data is abnormal, you can receive reminders such as phone calls, text messages, WeChat, emails, APPs, etc., and can link the on-site alarm.

3.System functions

Monitor and display the running status of the water pump in real time and collect various operating data, including running stop time, running time, fault time, fault content and other data;

Pump fault management, record fault information, and accurately push it to relevant staff, and generate fault statistical reports to facilitate staff analysis and processing;

Intelligent statistical analysis, displaying historical operating status and historical fault records in pie charts and tables, and combining big data analysis technology to assist decision-making;

Life cycle management, according to the equipment maintenance cycle, intelligently remind customers to carry out equipment maintenance or maintenance.

4.Application scenarios

Remote monitoring and management of urban water supply systems, power plants and factory pumping stations

Oil Well Remote Monitoring System

Thermal Power Plant Remote Metering System

Remote measurement and control system for river water level valve

Water source well remote monitoring and control system

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble

Back in 2017 Long Island Ice Tea — known for its undistinguished, barely drinkable sugar-water — changed its name to “Long Blockchain Corp.” Its shares surged to a peak of 400% over their pre-announcement price. The company announced no specific integrations with any kind of blockchain, nor has it made any such integrations since.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

LBCC was subsequently delisted from NASDAQ after settling with the SEC over fraudulent investor statements. Today, the company trades over the counter and its market cap is $36m, down from $138m.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/textbook-case-of-crypto-hype-how-iced-tea-company-went-blockchain-and-failed-despite-a-289-percent-stock-rise

The most remarkable thing about this incredibly stupid story is that LBCC wasn’t the peak of the blockchain bubble — rather, it was the start of blockchain’s final pump-and-dump. By the standards of 2022’s blockchain grifters, LBCC was small potatoes, a mere $138m sugar-water grift.

They didn’t have any NFTs, no wash trades, no ICO. They didn’t have a Superbowl ad. They didn’t steal billions from mom-and-pop investors while proclaiming themselves to be “Effective Altruists.” They didn’t channel hundreds of millions to election campaigns through straw donations and other forms of campaing finance frauds. They didn’t even open a crypto-themed hamburger restaurant where you couldn’t buy hamburgers with crypto:

https://robbreport.com/food-drink/dining/bored-hungry-restaurant-no-cryptocurrency-1234694556/

They were amateurs. Their attempt to “make fetch happen” only succeeded for a brief instant. By contrast, the superpredators of the crypto bubble were able to make fetch happen over an improbably long timescale, deploying the most powerful reality distortion fields since Pets.com.

Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. We’re told that trillions of dollars’ worth of crypto has been wiped out over the past year, but these losses are nowhere to be seen in the real economy — because the “wealth” that was wiped out by the crypto bubble’s bursting never existed in the first place.

Like any Ponzi scheme, crypto was a way to separate normies from their savings through the pretense that they were “investing” in a vast enterprise — but the only real money (“fiat” in cryptospeak) in the system was the hardscrabble retirement savings of working people, which the bubble’s energetic inflaters swapped for illiquid, worthless shitcoins.

We’ve stopped believing in the illusory billions. Sam Bankman-Fried is under house arrest. But the people who gave him money — and the nimbler Ponzi artists who evaded arrest — are looking for new scams to separate the marks from their money.

Take Morganstanley, who spent 2021 and 2022 hyping cryptocurrency as a massive growth opportunity:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/morgan-stanley-launches-cryptocurrency-research-team

Today, Morganstanley wants you to know that AI is a $6 trillion opportunity.

They’re not alone. The CEOs of Endeavor, Buzzfeed, Microsoft, Spotify, Youtube, Snap, Sports Illustrated, and CAA are all out there, pumping up the AI bubble with every hour that god sends, declaring that the future is AI.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/wall-street-ai-stock-price-1235343279/

Google and Bing are locked in an arms-race to see whose search engine can attain the speediest, most profound enshittification via chatbot, replacing links to web-pages with florid paragraphs composed by fully automated, supremely confident liars:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

Blockchain was a solution in search of a problem. So is AI. Yes, Buzzfeed will be able to reduce its wage-bill by automating its personality quiz vertical, and Spotify’s “AI DJ” will produce slightly less terrible playlists (at least, to the extent that Spotify doesn’t put its thumb on the scales by inserting tracks into the playlists whose only fitness factor is that someone paid to boost them).

But even if you add all of this up, double it, square it, and add a billion dollar confidence interval, it still doesn’t add up to what Bank Of America analysts called “a defining moment — like the internet in the ’90s.” For one thing, the most exciting part of the “internet in the ‘90s” was that it had incredibly low barriers to entry and wasn’t dominated by large companies — indeed, it had them running scared.

The AI bubble, by contrast, is being inflated by massive incumbents, whose excitement boils down to “This will let the biggest companies get much, much bigger and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves.” Some revolution.

AI has all the hallmarks of a classic pump-and-dump, starting with terminology. AI isn’t “artificial” and it’s not “intelligent.” “Machine learning” doesn’t learn. On this week’s Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete — not our new robot overlord.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4NHKMZZNKi0w9mOhPYIL4T

We all know that autocomplete is a decidedly mixed blessing. Like all statistical inference tools, autocomplete is profoundly conservative — it wants you to do the same thing tomorrow as you did yesterday (that’s why “sophisticated” ad retargeting ads show you ads for shoes in response to your search for shoes). If the word you type after “hey” is usually “hon” then the next time you type “hey,” autocomplete will be ready to fill in your typical following word — even if this time you want to type “hey stop texting me you freak”:

https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/provocations/neophobic-conservative-ai-overlords-want-everything-stay/

And when autocomplete encounters a new input — when you try to type something you’ve never typed before — it tries to get you to finish your sentence with the statistically median thing that everyone would type next, on average. Usually that produces something utterly bland, but sometimes the results can be hilarious. Back in 2018, I started to text our babysitter with “hey are you free to sit” only to have Android finish the sentence with “on my face” (not something I’d ever typed!):

https://mashable.com/article/android-predictive-text-sit-on-my-face

Modern autocomplete can produce long passages of text in response to prompts, but it is every bit as unreliable as 2018 Android SMS autocomplete, as Alexander Hanff discovered when ChatGPT informed him that he was dead, even generating a plausible URL for a link to a nonexistent obit in The Guardian:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/02/chatgpt_considered_harmful/

Of course, the carnival barkers of the AI pump-and-dump insist that this is all a feature, not a bug. If autocomplete says stupid, wrong things with total confidence, that’s because “AI” is becoming more human, because humans also say stupid, wrong things with total confidence.

Exhibit A is the billionaire AI grifter Sam Altman, CEO if OpenAI — a company whose products are not open, nor are they artificial, nor are they intelligent. Altman celebrated the release of ChatGPT by tweeting “i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u.”

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1599471830255177728

This was a dig at the “stochastic parrots” paper, a comprehensive, measured roundup of criticisms of AI that led Google to fire Timnit Gebru, a respected AI researcher, for having the audacity to point out the Emperor’s New Clothes:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/

Gebru’s co-author on the Parrots paper was Emily M Bender, a computational linguistics specialist at UW, who is one of the best-informed and most damning critics of AI hype. You can get a good sense of her position from Elizabeth Weil’s New York Magazine profile:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html

Bender has made many important scholarly contributions to her field, but she is also famous for her rules of thumb, which caution her fellow scientists not to get high on their own supply:

Please do not conflate word form and meaning

Mind your own credulity

As Bender says, we’ve made “machines that can mindlessly generate text, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it.” One potential tonic against this fallacy is to follow an Italian MP’s suggestion and replace “AI” with “SALAMI” (“Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences”). It’s a lot easier to keep a clear head when someone asks you, “Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?”

Bender’s most famous contribution is the “stochastic parrot,” a construct that “just probabilistically spits out words.” AI bros like Altman love the stochastic parrot, and are hellbent on reducing human beings to stochastic parrots, which will allow them to declare that their chatbots have feature-parity with human beings.

At the same time, Altman and Co are strangely afraid of their creations. It’s possible that this is just a shuck: “I have made something so powerful that it could destroy humanity! Luckily, I am a wise steward of this thing, so it’s fine. But boy, it sure is powerful!”

They’ve been playing this game for a long time. People like Elon Musk (an investor in OpenAI, who is hoping to convince the EU Commission and FTC that he can fire all of Twitter’s human moderators and replace them with chatbots without violating EU law or the FTC’s consent decree) keep warning us that AI will destroy us unless we tame it.

There’s a lot of credulous repetition of these claims, and not just by AI’s boosters. AI critics are also prone to engaging in what Lee Vinsel calls criti-hype: criticizing something by repeating its boosters’ claims without interrogating them to see if they’re true:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

There are better ways to respond to Elon Musk warning us that AIs will emulsify the planet and use human beings for food than to shout, “Look at how irresponsible this wizard is being! He made a Frankenstein’s Monster that will kill us all!” Like, we could point out that of all the things Elon Musk is profoundly wrong about, he is most wrong about the philosophical meaning of Wachowksi movies:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/may/18/lilly-wachowski-ivana-trump-elon-musk-twitter-red-pill-the-matrix-tweets

But even if we take the bros at their word when they proclaim themselves to be terrified of “existential risk” from AI, we can find better explanations by seeking out other phenomena that might be triggering their dread. As Charlie Stross points out, corporations are Slow AIs, autonomous artificial lifeforms that consistently do the wrong thing even when the people who nominally run them try to steer them in better directions:

https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future

Imagine the existential horror of a ultra-rich manbaby who nominally leads a company, but can’t get it to follow: “everyone thinks I’m in charge, but I’m actually being driven by the Slow AI, serving as its sock puppet on some days, its golem on others.”

Ted Chiang nailed this back in 2017 (the same year of the Long Island Blockchain Company):

There’s a saying, popularized by Fredric Jameson, that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. It’s no surprise that Silicon Valley capitalists don’t want to think about capitalism ending. What’s unexpected is that the way they envision the world ending is through a form of unchecked capitalism, disguised as a superintelligent AI. They have unconsciously created a devil in their own image, a boogeyman whose excesses are precisely their own.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway

Chiang is still writing some of the best critical work on “AI.” His February article in the New Yorker, “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web,” was an instant classic:

[AI] hallucinations are compression artifacts, but — like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier — they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

“AI” is practically purpose-built for inflating another hype-bubble, excelling as it does at producing party-tricks — plausible essays, weird images, voice impersonations. But as Princeton’s Matthew Salganik writes, there’s a world of difference between “cool” and “tool”:

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2023/03/08/can-chatgpt-and-its-successors-go-from-cool-to-tool/

Nature can claim “conversational AI is a game-changer for science” but “there is a huge gap between writing funny instructions for removing food from home electronics and doing scientific research.” Salganik tried to get ChatGPT to help him with the most banal of scholarly tasks — aiding him in peer reviewing a colleague’s paper. The result? “ChatGPT didn’t help me do peer review at all; not one little bit.”

The criti-hype isn’t limited to ChatGPT, of course — there’s plenty of (justifiable) concern about image and voice generators and their impact on creative labor markets, but that concern is often expressed in ways that amplify the self-serving claims of the companies hoping to inflate the hype machine.

One of the best critical responses to the question of image- and voice-generators comes from Kirby Ferguson, whose final Everything Is a Remix video is a superb, visually stunning, brilliantly argued critique of these systems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rswxcDyotXA

One area where Ferguson shines is in thinking through the copyright question — is there any right to decide who can study the art you make? Except in some edge cases, these systems don’t store copies of the images they analyze, nor do they reproduce them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

For creators, the important material question raised by these systems is economic, not creative: will our bosses use them to erode our wages? That is a very important question, and as far as our bosses are concerned, the answer is a resounding yes.

Markets value automation primarily because automation allows capitalists to pay workers less. The textile factory owners who purchased automatic looms weren’t interested in giving their workers raises and shorting working days. ‘ They wanted to fire their skilled workers and replace them with small children kidnapped out of orphanages and indentured for a decade, starved and beaten and forced to work, even after they were mangled by the machines. Fun fact: Oliver Twist was based on the bestselling memoir of Robert Blincoe, a child who survived his decade of forced labor:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59127/59127-h/59127-h.htm

Today, voice actors sitting down to record for games companies are forced to begin each session with “My name is ______ and I hereby grant irrevocable permission to train an AI with my voice and use it any way you see fit.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence

Let’s be clear here: there is — at present — no firmly established copyright over voiceprints. The “right” that voice actors are signing away as a non-negotiable condition of doing their jobs for giant, powerful monopolists doesn’t even exist. When a corporation makes a worker surrender this right, they are betting that this right will be created later in the name of “artists’ rights” — and that they will then be able to harvest this right and use it to fire the artists who fought so hard for it.

There are other approaches to this. We could support the US Copyright Office’s position that machine-generated works are not works of human creative authorship and are thus not eligible for copyright — so if corporations wanted to control their products, they’d have to hire humans to make them:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise

Or we could create collective rights that belong to all artists and can’t be signed away to a corporation. That’s how the right to record other musicians’ songs work — and it’s why Taylor Swift was able to re-record the masters that were sold out from under her by evil private-equity bros::

https://doctorow.medium.com/united-we-stand-61e16ec707e2

Whatever we do as creative workers and as humans entitled to a decent life, we can’t afford drink the Blockchain Iced Tea. That means that we have to be technically competent, to understand how the stochastic parrot works, and to make sure our criticism doesn’t just repeat the marketing copy of the latest pump-and-dump.

Today (Mar 9), you can catch me in person in Austin at the UT School of Design and Creative Technologies, and remotely at U Manitoba’s Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture.

Tomorrow (Mar 10), Rebecca Giblin and I kick off the SXSW reading series.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A graph depicting the Gartner hype cycle. A pair of HAL 9000's glowing red eyes are chasing each other down the slope from the Peak of Inflated Expectations to join another one that is at rest in the Trough of Disillusionment. It, in turn, sits atop a vast cairn of HAL 9000 eyes that are piled in a rough pyramid that extends below the graph to a distance of several times its height.]

[leahnardo-da-veggie]

Home

Introducing part 2 of stuff that's been rejected from publishers! I hope y'all enjoy :)

As the train station rumbled with movement, I pulled my hoodie over my shoulders and adjusted my mask. Better safe than sorry, my mother always said, and I tended to agree.

Even with the mask, the air reeked of ammonia. It stung my nostrils and made my eyes water. Damn, but I wanted to be back. The gantry was empty, automated stations blinking neon in the hazy air. I hopped over it and continued through, shoes squeaking ever so slightly against the tiles. Rare that the train station was in a train station, I thought.

The clock overhead warned me that it was almost midnight. Whyever they used an analogue clock in this day and age, I did not know. I watched its fourth hand speed towards 13. Just as it struck, the train sped into the station, the lights glinting off it like a kingfisher diving in the mangrove.

Its doors, several tons of solid gold, creaked open to reveal a single man, in a tophat and intricately embroidered vest. “Miss Maya,” he said, by way of greeting. His accent was impossible to place, vaguely refined with a peculiar emphasis on the sybilants. 

I stepped into the train and returned his nod. We had met before, and courtesy never hurt. “Hama. Being daring today, aren't we? Sitting in an empty carriage?”

Hama shrugged. “Please, Miss Maya, do not fret over me like a hen. I am careful,” he told me. Unlike you went unsaid.

Maya and Hama were not our real names, of course. Those were far too valuable to hand out to another. But they were close enough for both our purposes.

I sank myself into the soft cushion. “Don't be ridiculous. You shouldn't have risked it, careful or not. You've heard what happened to the poor bastards who got caught by it, haven't you?”

Hama sighed. “Yes, but ‘twas almost midnight,” he explained, a hint of melancholy in his dry voice. “I was thinking of the rumours.” Beneath us, the train rumbled into motion, grinding gears and pumping steam.

“The rumours, huh?” We had all heard of them. They were lies, of course. The idea that the midnight train held any special powers was… Tempting. “You should've known how dangerous believing that crap is.”

Hama just shook his head. Briefly, I regretted chiding him. These train rides were long infuriating, and often dreary beyond belief. Having someone willing to talk with me was worth a lot sometimes.

“I'm sorry, Hama,” I said, when the pause between us stretched too long. “You don't need the reminder, do you?”

Quietly, he said, “‘Tis just- Do you not miss it?”

I froze. We did not speak of it. Nobody with half a grain of sense did. I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it.

“I have not seen it in five years, Miss,” he continued. “My wife will be old and wrinkled by the time I get home. My sons will have grown up. My daughter would be married, without me to give her my blessings. Do you know what that feels like, Miss Maya? To watch the world go by?”

I swallowed the knot in my chest, and said, “I know. Believe me, I do.”

Hama ran his fingers through his overgrown hair. “How long has it been for you? You are so young, I cannot imagine it has been more than three years.”

“Two,” I said, quietly enough that my voice was swallowed by the train.

Hama had sharp ears, however. “Two years? Your formative years, then. That is a travesty,” he informed me with avuncular concern.

A laugh bubbled out of my chest. It sounded just like the ammonia in the station I had just departed from, sting-sharp and hateful. “Not two years,” I replied, grimly amused.

“Two decades.”

He blinked. “You hardly look a day over sixteen,” he told me, finally. “It simply cannot be.”

“Have you not noticed? We do not age here. My hair has not grown an inch since the day I began wandering. Our wounds do not heal. Old Akat died from blood loss after she stepped on a nail. So believe me when I say, I too am careful.” The last words emerged in a hiss, barely more than the steam that powered our train.

“I- Twenty years? I cannot imagine how painful that must be, and with you so young. You poor-” The squealing of the train's halt cut off the rest of his words, sparing me the pain of telling him about the lonely nights, the shivering desperation that had festered in my heart, the slow death of a hope that should never have existed in the first place.

The doors swung open, and I fled out. The lands beyond were smoggy, thick with mist and carbon monoxide. Yet I could see the telltale signs of suburbia beyond. They reminded me of the days before, and it twisted the knife Hama had stabbed my bruised heart with. So I snapped, with a childish vengefulness, “And there's no such thing as a way back!”

The doors clanged shut firmly on my back, and Hama left with them. It was dangerous to be on a train alone, of course, but he had willingly taken that risk in the name of what… A rumour? That the midnight train would take you home?

Foolishness, I insisted, and tried to ignore the way the streetlights looked just the way they had twenty years ago. The streets were so similar, too. There were the potted plants lining the sidewalks, forcing me to walk on the roads home. There were the birdcages and the washing machines beneath crowded canopies.

The tracks disappeared behind me, leaving me exactly where I had left twenty years ago. The road signs were identical. I was on the right street, too. Just a short way away from a house I had once resided in.

It was absurd, of course. Once you wandered, you would never find your way home again. Everyone knew that.

Still, the worm of hope gnawed at the apple core of my soul. I kicked a stone angrily, as though that would chase the emotion away. It did not, and I continued striding grimly.

But if I truly believed I could not go home, why did I continue wandering? Why not settle down like Haru did, in some strange town with four-eyed people? Why not make a new place to live and call… Well, a place to live. I could not bring myself to say the word, even after all those years away.

That house was different, I noted with fierce satisfaction. There had never been a house with a green roof in the past. That settled it, of course. My paranoia was simply acting up again.

Yet- a lot could change in two decades. It might even have been more than that, for all I knew. I had met a wanderer who forgot their own name, once. A couple of years could have easily gone amiss.

Before I could banish the niggling thought, my over-sharp eyes caught the next house's number. 542. Just a short distance from my old ho- habitat.

Damn, but I wanted to go back. 

What could it hurt? If I went there and proved to myself I was not, in fact, back, I could put the irritant to rest once and for all. My feet took me along the path I had once taken back from school. Or a close mimicry of it, at least.

I came upon the house sweating slightly. Not out of excitement. I merely wanted to get it over and done with, to rid myself of this compulsion.

The lawn was slightly overgrown, utterly unlike how my father would have left it. The roof had more than a few tiles that needed replacing. Our swing was there, but the rope was fraying. The fault of time, or a sloppy trap.

The lights were on. Warm light shone through the windows. I could here people moving about, eating and chatting and doing whatever it was people did in their locations of staying. I had almost forgotten how such things went, with no need to eat or drink.

It was probably a trap, a lie, or one of those odd coincidences that occurred sometimes. Pressing that doorbell, which looked nothing like my old one, was a ridiculous idea. Yet my finger was drawn to it like a moth to flame.

The bell rang like the train's whistle.

With the scuffing of chairs and curious exclamations, the door swung open. An old woman, her skin wrinkled with liver spots, stood on the other side. “Eh?” She narrowed her eyes at me.

Before common sense could take over, I pulled down my hoodie and took off my mask, baring my face to the world. 

The woman made a small choking noise. “M- May-”

“Maya,” I said quickly, the way I told the strangers I met on my wanderings. “Call me Maya.” What she would call me had I not interrupted, I did not want to know.

“Oh.” She deflated slightly. Her ugly flower-print dress did remind me of my mother's sense of fashion. “You remind me of my daughter, was all. Though you're much too young to be her. Ah, what was the matter?”

I froze. What was I to say: ‘Hello, I have been frozen in time for twenty years wandering world to world and boy, you sure look like my mother aged up by two decades'? 

The silence stretched on. It was doing a lot of that recently, I noted. “You remind me of my mother, too,” I replied, my voice barely a whisper, not needing the train's clanging to drive it underground. “Though it has been twenty years since I last saw her.”

The woman who looked awfully like my mother stared into my eyes. “James? Come here. There's something you need to see,” she cried, in lieu of something better to say.

James was my father's name too. Another funny coincidence. The old man who wheeled himself to the door had an uncanny semblance to him too, though my real father would never have ended up in a wheelchair.

He looked up and me and let a little gasp out. “It- Oh my god, it can't be. Allison, are you seeing this?”

My mother had been named Allison. I was reminded of another one of her favourite sayings. ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.’ This had to be a trap. Yet, for some reason, I could not bring myself to leave.

The woman who could not possibly be my mother told him, “She says her name is Maya.”

He regarded me thoughtfully. “What's your favourite juice, kid? And who were your best friends in primary five?”

“I'm torn between apple and grape juice, and my closest friends were Betty and Qi Le, though I hung out with Josh a lot too,” I answered promptly, before cursing myself. What was I doing, handing out private information? That was how wanderers got caught! “Go on, tell me: what did your daughter make for you for science class when she was 10?”

Allison and James, my parents' doppelgangers, exchanged another concerned glance. “I’ll do you one better than that,” Allison told me. She reached back into the room and brought out a little clay dragonfly. “This was a part of the set yo- I mean, she made. The larvae and the eggs are lost, but we kept this.”

I did not know whether to laugh or weep. It was green. The one I had made was blue. Oxidation, a part of me whispered. Lies, the other bit cried. “Yep,” I whispered. “That's the one.”

“You had best come inside,” James said, his motorised wheelchair whirring slightly as he backed into the kitchen. My father was braver than that. He would not back away from discomfort. “Would you like some apple juice?”

“Oh, I don't really eat or drink anymore.” I smiled bitterly at their horrified expressions and stepped past Allison into the room. “It all comes right back up again.”

I had tried, of course. I had gulped down water from a dozen streams, begged food off of strange people and taped my mouth shut to keep it down. No matter what I did, my intestines simply rejected it. I could never feel full. I could never feel hungry. I had learnt to accept it long ago, but I could never feel truly alive.

I took up my old place at the table, in the corner next to the old bookshelf. It was still there, though its contents were devoid of all my young adult romances. “What are you?” Allison had a slight roundness to her eyes. Fear. I felt the same when she clenched her fist up. Old though she was, even a single blow from her had the potential to kill me.

“I am a girl who walked into a strange train station in the middle of the street twenty years ago, and wandered for two decades since,” I told her bluntly. It was the same line I gave all my hosts. “How are Qi Le and Betty?”

My mother's brow crinkled and she blinked away a couple of tears. “Is it really you? I- I mean- It's been so long, and you haven't aged a bit. You know, Qi Le's got a little boy. He's hardly younger than you were when you…” She shrugged.

“Wandered off,” I finished. I crossed my arms. “Qi Le would never have a kid. She's deathly afraid of pregnancy. So the question remains: How do I know it's really you?” I glanced down at her leg, the skirt covering her calf. “Still have your tattoo?”

It might have been better to walk off there and then. Damn, but I wanted to go back. I actually wanted to be back on my train and my endless worlds. “Of course it's me,” Allison snarled, sharper than my mother ever would have at me. “And Qi Le adopted, for heaven's sakes! You're the one who doesn't eat or drink, who hasn't blinked since you came in, and whose expression barely changes!”

“Your tattoo,” I repeated. I had come to terms with what I was long ago. It was… tolerable. 

My ‘mother’ went peculiar. Her face slackened and eyes went blank, like a marionette without a puppeteer. I got up and began walking to the door. Of course it was a lie. Twenty years wandering, and I still had the foolishness to believe rumours? I was worse than Hama.

“Maya, right?” My ‘father’ waved to me from his place in the kitchen, as I crossed the door's threshold. “Pardon your mother. We aren't so young anymore, kiddo. The stress has been a bit too much for her.” He wheeled himself up the ramp, which had not been there when I last at my house, and gently prodded Allison. She jerked herself back upright and inhaled sharply.

“I’m fine,” my ‘mother’ snapped. “And as for my tattoo, I had it removed. My wrinkling skin was ruining it. It's been twenty years, Mayra. Twenty years, and you haven't aged a day. What the hell happened to you?”

Mayra was my name. Or, it had been many years ago. “I don't know,” I admitted. “It just did.” What was I even doing here? On the tiny, tiny off chance that this was real, it would only hurt me. “Qi Le's got a kid? What's he like?” 

With the same exhaustion that permeated her entire being, my mother sighed. “Here, take this and phone her.” She handed me a little metal slide.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” I shook it slightly. “And where's the cordless? It was dope.” I had been so proud of the old thing.

“Oh, sweetie,” James said. “It's been twenty years. Things have changed since then. Phones are smaller these days, and they're all cordless.” He took the phone from me and tapped on it.

That settled it. I had seen my fair share of strange technologies, and nothing from the world I once came from looked even slightly like this. Even so, I accepted the phone when James returned it, and pressed it to my ear.

“Hey, QL,” I said, when she picked up the call. “It's me.”

There was nothing but static on the other end. Finally, she responded, sniffling slightly as she did so. “If this is a prank, it's not a very good one. Mayra died a long time ago, but that doesn't make it alright to joke about it.” Her voice was so husky, so unlike her.

“It's me,” I repeated. “Did you get to go with Kyle to prom?”

Qi Le took a shuddering breath. “Where have you been, you idiot? And no, Kyle went with Gwen. You know, the stupid mean girl in our class? Yeah, and she's the CEO of some big shot company now. Kyle married a man. I got to go to their wedding. Damn it, I spent three years hunting all over the country for you. Your parents- They cried themselves to sleep every night. How could you?”

There had never been a Gwen in our class. Had my memory failed me, or was this a lie that swept by? And Kyle- Kyle who always talked about girl's looks? Ridiculous. I listened to her tirade silently. “Hey- Mayra, you still there? I'm sorry, it's just been a long day. Kai got detention, you know, and God, I'm just so worried about him.”

“Kai's your son?” The idea of Qi Le, ever the rebel, being upset over her kid getting detention seemed hypocritical to me. 

“Yeah,” she admitted. “He's a little brat, but he tries his best. He goes to the school that replaced ours. Where are you? I'll come pick you up. We can chat in person. That is, if you want.”

“Tell me something first,” I murmured into the phone. “What was my last name?”

Qi Le scoffed. “It's been two decades, May. I don't remember things as good as I used to. Also, you still sound like a kid.” She exhaled loudly. “It was Brown, wasn't it? Mayra Brown.”

“Hmm,” I replied, noncommittal. “Mom? Pops?’

The people who called themselves my parents perked up. “Yeah, kiddo?”

“What's our last name?”

My father laughed. “Have you forgotten all that already? It's Brown. You used to say it was the colour of your hair.”

I smiled wanly. “QL? You still there?” The vague sound of water came from the phone.

“Yeah, just gotta wash the dishes. You need me to pick you up?” I could picture her, wearing gloves up to her elbows to protect her overly sensitive skin. The motherly tone in her voice matched nothing I ever remembered, however.

Damn, but I wanted to go… Home.

There. I said it. I missed home. I missed the world I had once lived in. I missed my family, my school and my friends. Perhaps, just perhaps, this had been home once. Certainly, if I squinted, it looked similar enough. But my friends had grown up, my school was torn down, my parents old and withered. 

The home I remembered was no more. But I could start over, just like Haru and Venn and all the other wanderers who had settled down. 

“No,” I said. “It's fine. I'm already home. Thanks for everything. Tell Betty to keep grooving, and hopefully without those fugly bell jeans.” Before she could respond, I hung up.

Turning to my parents, I threw my arms around my mother, then bent down to hug my father. “If you really are my parents,” I whispered, just loud enough to hear, “Then I'm grateful to see you again.”

With the same caution I had thrown to the wind earlier, I disentangled myself from them. They smelled different, of pills and age. My mother brushed my cheek slightly. “Come on, Mayra, and tell us everything.”

“Alright,” I said, and allowed myself to be led back home.

Taglist:

@coffeeangelinabox, @dorky-pals, @calliecwrites, @kaylinalexanderbooks, @shukei-jiwa

@thewingedbaron, @pluppsauthor, @cowboybrunch, @wylloblr, @possiblyeldritch @ramwritblr, @urnumber1star, @fortunatetragedy, @bigwipscholar, @ratedn

@vampirelover890, @possiblylisle, @illarian-rambling, @the-ellia-west

@finickyfelix, @evilgabe29, @glitched-dawn, @rivenantiqnerd, @dragonhoardesfandoms

@drchenquill, @everythingismadeofchaos, @owldwagitoutofyou, @oliolioxenfreewrites (Anyone else who wants to get added can tell me in the comments, pm me, or send me an ask about it!)

[delta-orionis]

It's a bit messy, but here's a map of Three Stars Above Clouds' facility grounds. Their can is in the middle, in between the peaks of several mountains.

TSAC's water is trapped in a closed system: TSAC's rain freezes and falls as snow on to the nearby mountains, which collects in glaciers. Meltwater from the glaciers flows down the mountain and collects in reservoirs held in place by twelve dams arranged in a circle. Pump stations at the reservoirs cycle the water through underground pipes back up into TSAC's can, and the cycle repeats.

Beyond the dams are six different sectors dedicated to different functions of TSAC's facility:

Comms. Sector: Contains communications nodes and the closest long-range communications spire. (an analogue to Sky Islands)

Farm Sector: Houses strip farms and automated harvesters that produce food and organic material used by the citizens of Zenith, TSAC's city. (an analogue of Farm Arrays)

Temple Sector: Home to the large temples TSAC's citizens use to conduct religious activities, as well as store their memories. (analogue to Shaded Citadel) This sector is also home to several large radio telescopes, located on the opposite side of the mountain range from the comms. towers in order to reduce radio interference.

Mining Sector: Contains many mine shafts and void fluid drills, to collect valuable minerals and void fluid. Because TSAC's facility is located at such a high altitude, these mine shafts reach deep, deep underground. (analogue to Pipeyard and parts of Subterranean)

Refinery Sector: Contains refineries to extract ore and useful minerals from material collected in the mines, and transports them to the nearby Industrial Sector. Also home to a large waste-processing plant, which breaks down and recycles waste from the nearby mines and factories. (analogue to Garbage Wastes and parts of Chimney Canopy)

Industrial Sector: Center for engineering, production, and manufacturing. The factories use material from the nearby Refinery Sector. The Industrial Sector is also home to a large Data Pearl factory, used to produce the cast amounts of pearls that TSAC needs for their research. (analogue to Industrial Complex)

The second map is TSAC's current facility, long after the mass ascension of the Ancients. Most of the biggest buildings remain intact, albeit with some structural damage. Key differences:

The pumps at TSAC's easternmost dam suffered a critical failure, causing the dam to burst. This flooded the nearby strip farms and caused that reservoir's water to flow down the mountainside where the pumps don't reach, effectively cutting off TSAC's access to it.

The pearl factory has been overtaken by a large group of scavengers, who have stripped the factory for scrap metal and data pearls.

These maps aren't exactly to scale (the mountain peaks should be bigger), don't show elevation, and don't account for things underground.

The different sectors are connected by a subterranean transit system, used to transport material and workers. A vast system of pipes also snakes underneath the mountain and up into TSAC's can to supply them with water and void fluid.

Also, directly beneath TSAC's can is a large frozen glacial lake, bathed in darkness from the can overhead.

I'll probably make a cross-section map at some point to show the landmarks at different elevations.

[bestworstcase]

Your thoughts about Remnant's kingdoms having imperialistic and expansionist tendencies that don't have anything to do with Salem or Ozma makes me wonder, at least based on what I vaguely remember of the game RWBY Arrowfell:

In Arrowfell, we learn about the existence of ruins outside of Atlas and Mantle with ancient historical artifacts, and that makes me question if Solitas really as empty as it seemed, or was there already indigenous people living there before the displaced settlers of whatever regions of Sanus showed up on their doorstep? Did THEY get destroyed by those settlers?

Did those people live alongside Solitas' Grimm with no issue, and shit only went down AFTER the emotionally repressed imperialists of Sanus came in and wiped out whatever culture they had, imposing their own "Grimm evil emotions bad must repress and subjugate" nonsense onto a culture that might have already figured out a better solution?

I keep thinking about this because of how the settlers of the local settlements there within the game have vastly different appearances, and strongly implied different cultures compared to the likes of Mantle and Atlas.

tumak!

i rotate those ruins in my mind a lot, because the only thing we really know about them is that they predate the great war and they’re a formally-designated “heritage site.” vine talks about artifacts taken from the site as though they’re very ancient, but his statements are framed pretty overtly as bullshit—he comes across more as a new age mumbo jumbo type of hobbyist than someone serious about history. older than the great war just means that the ruins are at least a century old.

so there’s definitely a layer here of atlas—which has probably not been around much longer than a century or two—culturally not having a very accurate sense of historical scale (a la US americans thinking anything older than a century or two is ‘ancient’) and exoticizing The Past. whereas beacon’s professor of history teaches teaches the great war and its aftermath as recent history, because vale is much older.

that said, tumak does look like it’s a few centuries old, because it’s all built of stone. in any other story i’d take it as a given that the people living there were conquered or displaced by mantelian settlers for… the same reasons i take it as a given that mistral being called an “empire” and having “territories” means what it sounds like.

what gives me pause with regard to tumak and mantle is—well, two things:

there were no grimm in western solitas when mantle’s first settlers arrived.

it’s heavily implied that the global industrial revolution began in mantle following the discovery of large dust deposits under the tundra.

now, the one thing we know for certain about grimm is that they eat people and they die in captivity, meaning that they do need to eat. the simplest explanation for there being no grimm in western solitas when the mantelian settlers turned up is that there weren’t any people there for grimm to eat.

the second point matters matters because the industrial revolution is a prerequisite for building anything with steel: before this confluence between practical necessity and a great abundance of underground dust deposits, every large structure on remnant would have been built with timber or stone or clay, or whatever material happened to be abundant in a given region.

(i am making a drastic oversimplification here but, in essence, the main reason we had our industrial revolution when and where we did is england ran out of trees and started digging for coal. coal mines have a lot of coal on site, making coal-powered machines a more cost-effective way to pump water out of deep shafts than manual labor, and then after a certain point these pumps become very efficient and it becomes cost-effective to employ mechanized rotational movement further away from the coal mines, and then you get automated spinning jennies and trains and it all snowballs from there. whether it’s on purpose or not, remnant’s industrial revolution occurred under precisely similar conditions and i think that’s neat.)

one presumes that mantelian settlers didn’t go from living in natural caves or snow shelters to steel-frame construction overnight. the technological innovation needed to build with steel in subzero temperatures would have been a long, iterative process. both tumak and the “ancient monument” built in the same architectural style are also situated on the continent’s western coast, while mantle is at least a few hundred miles inland (although it’s difficult to get an accurate sense of scale from the game map). if i’m right that these settlers were displaced from northeast sanus by valean expansion, the west coast of solitas is where they would have landed.

we also know that mantle itself is built on top of what seems to be an enormous dust mine.

in the WOR episode, the early settlement is represented like this, with people keeping watch over coastal cliffs and grimm being frozen solid by the cold:

the amity arena ice sabyr card indicates that the ice-encrusted solitan grimm adapted to the cold fairly quickly:

These Sabyrs seem to have somehow adapted to Mantle's environment. Gone are the days when the cold kept the Grimm at bay, and now we deal with the ice crusted versions of the Sabyr. Still, there is a burning question in our minds. Didn't these Sabyr… adjust a little too quickly?

(which, lol. it’s dust. solitan grimm incorporate dust into their bodies to give themselves a protective coating against the cold; we’ve seen the geist in the mine use dust to armor itself against attack. a lot of the amity arena grimm cards are fun; the one for seers is literally like “they’re super weird, we have no idea what they do because we’ve only ever found broken husks, but they’re floating crystal balls with tentacles so we assume they must be able to control people. probably.” grimm studies is pseudoscience!)

and then back to the WOR episode, the depicted distance between mantle and alsius is wildly exaggerated:

with mantle located on the southwestern peninsula and alsius being where mantle stands—or stood—in the present day. before playing arrowfell, i always took that to be just a stylistic choice to emphasize the economic separation between mantle and alsius, but:

again, nothing is to scale here, but mantle and the atlesian crater are in the right place, there’s an abandoned dust mine on that southwest peninsula, an outpost with a train on the western island, and tumak and the other ruin along the west coast. so the relocation depicted in the WOR episode—a migration inward from the coastal region to where mantle is today—actually seems to have been literal.

what makes the most sense to me is that these coastal ruins were built by the original settlers a few hundred years ago. both tumak and the “monument” are mainly underground, with these barrow-like stone caps over the entrances: this strikes me as a solidly defensible layout for fending off weakened, scattered packs of grimm, but not one that could withstand the increasing numbers of cold-hardy grimm as time went on.

in the SDC WOR episode, it’s noted that mantle’s existing dust mines were nearly depleted before nicholas schnee discovered new deposits in the mountains to the north. and in arrowfell, if memory serves, the old southwest mine was exhausted and abandoned long ago. taking this to its logical conclusion, the people living in tumak and other coastal settlements had to deal with a relatively fast spike in grimm populations at a time when dust was already becoming scarce, so they abandoned these sites and migrated to a more defensible area—the plain flanked by mountains—where they serendipitously found much larger and deeper dust deposits. and that became mantle and alsius/atlas.

meanwhile, over on the eastern side of the continent…

the geographic separation here is pretty striking! in between mantle and the free towns to the east we have a large inland sea and mountains. these towns are explicitly not part of the kingdom and, as you noted, have a pretty different culture. (including cultural attitudes toward the grimm: a huge megoliath wanders into essen early in the game and the townspeople just… clear out of the immediate area and keep an eye on it from afar, which is probably also how the unnamed village in v4 dealt with that geist. there is also a lady from dormir who goes into GRIMM-INFESTED CAVES, alone, to dig up dust. nothing bad happens to her.)

tellingly, bram thornmane seems to view these free towns as independent polities for the purpose of fueling his persecution complex by treating his residence in essen like a quasi-exile from atlas, but when it’s politically expedient to do so he acts as though these are satellite communities dependent on atlesian protection, hence his use of the grimm lures to attack them as well as atlas and mantle. i imagine that this is a common atlesian attitude.

one of the villagers—cerise claire, who fled from crossed to essen when the former was overwhelmed as a consequence of thornmane’s scheme—mentions having ancestors who fought during the great war; specifically she implies that her ancestors were involved in resistance to the mantelian regime’s prohibition against art and self-expression. the free towns don’t seem to be particularly young—wood and stone, again suggesting pre-industrial construction—so they must have existed before the war.

cerise is also a faunus (i think; it’s hard to tell if the wolfish ears are attached to her head or just to her hood and they’re not the same color as her hair, but they’re a prominent feature of her design and why do that if she’s not meant to be faunus) which certainly. carries a lot of unspoken weight in the remarks she makes about her ancestor bravely keeping a journal of their years fighting in the great war… and if her family lived in crossed back then, well.

gestures at vacuo’s side of the great war being a desperate bid for independence. gestures at the implication that the vytal accords were in large part a decolonial project; vacuo and menagerie became sovereign states, and a huge swath of eastern anima seems to have been freed from mistrali rule.

mantle and mistral formed an alliance during the conquest of northern anima; if if the towns in eastern solitas are older than the great war—which is quite plausible!—then they likely existed during this period of time and it seems reasonable to think that they might have been occupied as well, if not by mantle then by mistral. eastern solitas being under occupation prior to the war and liberated by the accords thanks in part to the efforts of a local rebellion tracks.

but an interesting thought occurs to me: this means the quasi-scientific modern narrative that the grimm “adapted” to the cold unnaturally fast might be baseless. there would have been cold-hardy grimm living east of the mountains already. perhaps the intense hardship and struggle of those early years simply drew an existing population of grimm over the mountains?

[adixtechnology]

Elevating Home Comfort: Unveiling Adix Automations' Automatic Water Level Controllers for Submersible Pumps

In the ever-evolving landscape of home automation, finding solutions that seamlessly integrate into our daily lives is paramount. One such innovation that promises to enhance efficiency and convenience is pump automation for homes. Specifically, the integration of automatic water level controllers for submersible pumps has become a game-changer in the realm of home management. Today, we'll delve into this technology, shining a spotlight on the notable brand, Adix Automation.

Understanding the Need for Automation

As homeowners, managing water resources efficiently is a constant challenge. Submersible pumps play a crucial role in supplying water for various domestic purposes, from irrigation to maintaining water levels in overhead tanks. However, manual operation of these pumps can be cumbersome and often leads to unnecessary water wastage. This is where automatic water level controllers step in, addressing the need for a more intelligent and automated solution.

The Power of Automation: Water Level Controllers for Home

Automatic water level controllers bring a new level of sophistication to home water management. The system typically includes sensors strategically placed within the water tank, connected to a control unit. When the water level falls below a certain point, the controller activates the submersible pump, and conversely, it switches off when the tank is full. This eliminates the need for constant vigilance, providing homeowners with a hands-free and efficient water supply system.

Adix Automations: Pioneering Pump Automation

Among the frontrunners in the field of pump automation for homes is Adix Automations. Renowned for their commitment to cutting-edge technology, Adix Automations has developed automatic water level controllers that are reliable, user-friendly, and compatible with a wide range of submersible pumps.

Adix Automations' controllers stand out with their advanced features, including precise sensors for accurate water level monitoring and intuitive control panels for easy customization. Homeowners can effortlessly set desired water levels, ensuring a tailored and efficient water supply system that aligns with their specific requirements.

Benefits of Adix Automations' Water Level Controllers

Efficiency: Adix Automations' controllers ensure optimal water usage by activating the pump only when necessary. This not only saves time but also contributes to reduced energy consumption.

User-Friendly Interface: The intuitive control panels make it easy for homeowners to program and customize the system according to their preferences. This simplicity enhances the overall user experience.

Water Conservation: By preventing overfilling of tanks and avoiding unnecessary pump operation, Adix Automations' controllers play a vital role in water conservation efforts, aligning with sustainable living practices.

In conclusion, the integration of automatic water level controllers for submersible pumps, with a spotlight on Adix Automations' offerings, marks a significant step towards a more efficient and eco-friendly home. As we embrace the era of smart living, solutions like these not only simplify daily tasks but also contribute to a sustainable and responsible use of valuable resources.

[elbiotipo]

I have a worldbuilding question that might be too cultural for your expertise, but any point of view can help.

We have a deep canyon that amplifies every gust of wind to almost instantly lethal speed. There's only one bridge crossing it (that we know of), with twin cities at each side, which started out as both trading posts and settlements for the bridge repair team. As such, they always were heavily technology focused, even more so after legendary First Engineers built domes protecting the cities from the wind.

Question 1: how big of a city can safely rely on vertical gardens?

Question 2: how would you imagine them parting with their dead? For the physical aspect I can see air burials using niches in the canyon walls, making a weather forecaster the most important part of burial rites. But that means disposing of the body in the first windless moment available. There can't be any festivities planned around it. Would they even want to gather together to say their last goodbyes though? Would they throw one last party for their dying beloved? Or gather around the corpse while it's waiting for the burial time? Or do nothing at all, since the person's worth is in their accomplishments, and these won't vanish?

Ohh, this is very interesting! Let me try.

Of course the food question depends on your technology level. From what you've told me, the canyon itself is uninhabitable. My first idea was to make terrace farming on the canyon walls with pumps bringing water from the river at the bottom (if there is one) but the winds would make that hard or impossible. Low tech vertical gardening would involve stacking 'shelves' of plants and pumping water up in a cycle through pipes; for extra protein and food production, the water would be recycled with pools of fish, crustaceans and other edible creatures. This is called aquaponics, and you can extract quite a bit of food from it. The limiting factor here is sunlight.

These structures WOULD be made facing the sun to have the best possible growth. Architects and city planners WOULD priorize sunlight as an advantage, in a way that sunlight will determine land ownership. Perhaps more wacky systems involved mirrors might be possible, especially in an engineering-focused culture. However, I don't see aquaponics being enough to cultivate cereals which are the base of human agriculture, except for perhaps rice, and not in the same amount of having cultivated expanses of land. I see cities like this being a net importer of food, but certainly they would try to produce it too. In fact, these methods of food production might be part of the city identity.

You could also supplement this with raising semi-wild aerial creatures like pigeons, the top of the buildings might be used for that. Palomares in Iberia, and to a lesser extent in Latin America, were once very widespread not because of the food (neither pigeons or their eggs are very tasty AFAIK) but because of pigeon guano used as fertilizer. It's a very smelly, dirty job that is nearly extinct nowadays. You could imagine other kind of fantasy creatures that are fliers and more easy to eat. Another more wild option are insects; rooftop beehives are common in the US lately, but raising insects for food is something often unexplored.

The more high-tech solution is of course to replace the sun with electric lamps. Now, what you need for this is a constant energy source. You have one, of course: Wind. Wind turbines could be geared to produce energy to create indoor automated vertical agriculture. You can see current attempts though to see how expensive and resource consuming this is, so it would have to justify itself against more low-tech attempts and the easiest way of just importing food. And of course, if winds are inconsistent, there will be competition for power between the indoor farms and the rest of the city.

Both systems, of course, imply HEAVY consumption of water and manpower, one to maintain the system itself, the other for the machinery. That would be your limiting factor, where does the water come from, and who are the people who work in these food-production systems? This might be key to your society here.

Now, about funerary rites, there are two things that came to mind when you mentioned this, the sky burials in Tibetan and Caucasian cultures (WARNING: graphic pictures) and the similar "towers of silence" in Zoroastrianism, they have in common the fact that they let the body exposed to the elements to be eaten by carrion birds. Well, actually three. The Chachapoyas in the Andes also did deposit their dead in remote, VERY remote cliff niches (here are some articles about it: 1, 2). We unfortunately don't know their exact burial rites but it is likely they would have face similar challenges to your culture. The wait between wind and windless periods might also be a cultural factor but I see it more as something more "whispered" than formal, like "that man took so long to be buried, it's clear not even the winds liked him". On the other hand, there's always the option of cremation and scattering to the winds, perhaps less interesting than canyon-side niches, but one I can see very appealing in this culture.

I hope this helped! Feel free to ask me anything you like about worlbuilding!

[shivajikshirsagar]

Avoid These Common Mistakes When Choosing a Heat Pump Water Heater

Heat pump water heater have gained popularity in recent years as an energy-efficient alternative to traditional electric or gas water heater. However, amidst the excitement of embracing this innovative technology, it’s essential to avoid common pitfalls that can lead to suboptimal choices and outcomes.

Let’s explore some of the most common mistakes people make when choosing a heat pump water heater and how to avoid them with the expertise of S.R. Sales and Services.

Underestimating Hot Water Demand

Ignoring Climate Considerations

Not Considering Installation Space and Requirements

Overlooking Energy Efficiency Ratings

Conclusion

By avoiding these common mistakes and approaching the selection process with careful consideration and informed decision-making, you can choose a heat pump water heater that meets your hot water needs effectively while maximizing energy savings and environmental benefits.

With the expertise and guidance of S.R. Sales and Services, you can make a smart investment that enhances your home’s efficiency and sustainability for years to come.

Read More.....https://srsalesandservices.com/2024/05/03/avoid-these-common-mistakes-when-choosing-a-heat-pump-water-heater/

[mod2amaryllis]

hi mod! you are the person i know who knows and is most excited about fish, and my favorite way to learn is to ask people whose passion and delight i am already familiar with. i know this is stuff i could find digging around on yt or search engines but it is just less fun and often less informative. but ofc feel free not to answer if you don't have the time/energy etc!

i am coming to realize that i would really like fish (after attempting to convince my wife that he would like them and then they pointed out that it kind of sounded like *i* wanted the fish and well). but i am very chronically ill (spend most of my time laying down in bed) and also poor. i'm worried about not being able to take care of them well enough.

assuming i restrain myself (that is don't deep dive into habitat design or breeding or anything beyond just having some guys to spend time with while i'm stuck in bed) what are the daily, weekly, monthly things i'd have to make sure got taken care of? are there ways i can simplify or automate tasks while not sacrificing their care?

OR do you know of good places where people have already talked about this, or other people who love fish a lot and might wanna share their knowledge?

my partner is also suggesting a plant&snail tank instead of fish but i'm even less sure how to approach their care needs!

watching you get into fish reminded me of how much i love them (had some when i was young but was not primary caretaker). it's good to see you make creatures so happy.

well thank you for reading and i hope you are having a good weekend!

ahhh weeee haha fish ask fish ask

there's definitely ways to make mega low maintenance tanks! what you're going for is overfiltering, understocking, and planting as much as possible. I'll go over those points. this got mega long so i'll put it under a cut.

overfiltering basically means bumping your filter up a size. if you have a 10g tank, get a 20g filter. this will reduce how often you need to maintain that filter. I'd recommend sponge filters, they're by far the cheapest option and imo easiest to maintain. you'll need the sponge and an air pump. i see a lot of mega reduced amazon sales for the tetra whisper air pump. depending on how dirty it gets you're looking at every 2-3 months taking it out into a bucket of clean tank water and squeezing out the gunk.

in that vein, you wanna get as big a tank as you can. seems counterintuitive, but the more water you have, the more stability. the less maintenance. so if you wanted a 5g for a betta, consider getting a 10g. if you want a little 10g nano school, get a 20g long. if you want a 20g community, get a 40g breeder. whatever's gonna fit in your space. my best recommendation for tank size is 20g long, it gives you sooo many options without being massive. if you're in America the cheapest way to get a tank is wait for Petco to have their quarterly tank sale. otherwise look for something on the local market.

now onto understocking. basically pick animals that aren't gonna shit that much lol, and put in less than can technically fit in the tank. the snail tank is a definite fun option, as long as you're sticking with pest snails and fewer large snails (big snails have a big bioload, even bigger than most fish). a planted 10g with a variety of big snails (a mystery, a rabbit, a nerite, etc), pest snails, and a few amano shrimp, would be fun and extremely low maintenance. you'd even have the option of trying some fancy shrimp, tho they might breed like crazy. if you want a tank with fish instead, i recommend getting a school of a tiny species like chili rasbora, ember tetras, pygmy corys, basically anything that stays little so you can get as many as possible without a big bioload. for schooling/shoaling fish, the more the merrier. absolutely do not get live bearers. no guppies, no mollies, no platys. that's the opposite of low maintenance. shit machines that will multiply forever, don't do it.

now. you know i love my bettas, favorite fish, but i'm always hesitant to recommend them. they're wonderfully personable but the caveat is that it seems more and more they run into health problems as they get commercially overbred. it's luck of the draw. you might get an easy buddy who can survive anything, or you'll get a sicky. most of the time my bettas are super low maintenance and rewarding, but when they ARE sick, it's hard. it can be daily water changes and treatment for weeks, and sometimes even that doesn't help in the end.

so with that said, my dream low maintenance tank stocking would be 20g long with 4 amano shrimp, 1 mystery snail, 1 rabbit snail, 1 nerite snail, and a school of around 15 nano fish (I'd do either chili rasbora or celestial pearl danio cuz they prettyyy). OR i'd just have a centerpiece in that big old tank, like 1 betta for the whole tank or a pair of sparkling gouramis. fish choice is definitely too much to get into for this post lol.

now third point, planting the crap out of it. this is where things can get expensive. i really do recommend investing in this step at setup, but try to cut costs by buying from local sellers, or even seeing if people are giving cuttings away. the lowest maintenance plants are ones that don't require trimming, like crypts, buce, anubias; these plants are gorgeous but they don't filter water that well. faster growing stem plants and floaters will REALLY help to filter the water, but require more maintenance via trimming and replanting stems (monthly) or removing overgrown floaters (weekly). hornwort and guppy grass are great options for something fast growing that you can just chuck in a tank, no need to plant. what I'd most highly recommend for the sake of lowering maintenance is adding some pothos cuttings coming out of the water. terrestrial plants are much better at filtering water than aquatic plants because of their direct co2 exposure, and I've had the most success with pothos! i also love a spider plant in water.

some other money specific points. for substrate, you can use rinsed play sand and/or pea gravel from a hardware store, but you would need to add nutrients if you have things planted into the substrate. you can add root tabs (api root tabs cost about 8 bucks a pack, but you need to replenish them every few months) or a small layer of aquasoil at the bottom. (aqueon has a little bag of shrimp/plant soil on amazon for i think 12 bucks). and the one thing you shouldn't go cheap on is the heater. their failure is more dangerous than other hardware because they tend to fail ON, aka they cook the water. you wanna make sure you trust it. the cheapest heater i trust are the aqueon preset submersible heaters, also frequently on sale. or you can forgo the heater and commit to only "cold" temperature livestock; the snails and amano shrimp idea would be fine w/o a heater.

labor specific points, once it's cycled (which can take weeks, during which time you'll do literally nothing to the tank) and stocked, it'll depend on how fast those plants eat up your nitrates on how often you do water changes. for me, i do 25% every two weeks on my 20g. it could probably stand to have more since mine is pretty overstocked but fish are ok to sit in slightly higher nitrates as long as they're used to it. when testing, i do recommend the api master test kit. it's more expensive than strips but way more accurate and it's lasted me longer than 2 tubes of strips. if you don't want to buy the test kit, just do water changes as often as you can. every 2 weeks if possible, then you can try pushing to 3 weeks, or even monthly.

get a water siphon to make it as easy as possible. empty water into a bucket on wheels so nobody has to carry anything. you can also look into getting a submersible pump with a long enough tube that you can empty water directly into the nearest drain, then to refill with clean water put a bucket in the sink with tap water, put the submersible pump in that bucket, and run the tube back to your tank, adding dechlorinator directly to the tank beforehand. just be careful with this method if you have small animals at risk of being caught in the siphon.

also, some people with planted tanks don't do water changes AT ALL. they just top off as water evaporates. what i do some would consider overkill, but i'm so frequent with my water changes because i have really hard water and there's this thing called old tank syndrome that can happen if you only top off, and yeah that's this other whole spiel lmao BUT not doing water changes IS possible, people have success. just not me!

so monthly tasks; rinsing sponge filter every 2-3 months. weekly tasks; depends on how often you decide to do water changes. daily tasks; feeding, frequency varies depending on livestock, but i basically feed once a day. if you're going for a self contained ecosystem low maintenance dealio, feed as little as possible. i know of people who do this and sprinkle in food weekly or less. i don't have experience with automatic feeders, but i'm wary of them lol, they could be totally fine, idk. it's better imo to just feed infrequently than risk the auto feeder dumping too much food.

to wrap it up, i'll be real with you, setting up something that's as low maintenance as possible while working with budget constraints is hard (at least in my area). this hobby is notoriously expensive, especially when you're just starting out. you need to see what the local market is like. see if there's fish hobby groups in your area that can help you with spare supplies and plant trimmings. your partner's idea of a plant/snail tank might be the best place to start! as far as other resources, the fish subreddits have soooooooooooo much info.

[pilot-posting]

🔞 "Asynchrosis" Pt.2

hehe it’s been like an hour since i finished the first little bit but oh my god i am losing it

“Medical leave”

i stared at the ceiling in the trauma center, my legs bouncing lightly up and down unconsciously. i looked pretty out of place, most patients wore clothes similar to hospital garments from earth, but i was wearing my body glove, a simple black skin-tight body suit. the nurses had tried to get me to change out of it but i wouldn’t let them, protesting aggressively about how it made me feel comfortable. thinking about the tantrum made me cringe at myself but i shook my head and stared up at the ceiling. i had other things to be embarrassed about.

i had just been given “the talk”, my lieutenant pulled me aside the day after i had been admitted to medical leave. he sat me down in a locked office and explained to me my predicament.

“Listen, Emerson, it’s not unusual or even necessarily bad for pilots to grow attached to their mechs, Class-X mechs are arguably designed to make that happen…”

i wasn’t listening, there was just so much static behind my eyes. the night before i was pulled out of my Haratora-Zed by a concerned Class-I pilot while in deep synchrosis, in plain english, i was fucked up. i felt so angry with him for a little while… why couldn’t he just keep his mouth shut, why’d he have to poke me. i don’t blame him as much now, he was doing his job, but still…

“Your mech, The Nagarrond?” my head snapped up to listen at the mention of her— i mean it, whatever.

“yes sir?”

“are you even aware how quickly you reached pique synchrosis?” i stared at him and shook my head no, i was lying, i had been training myself to fall quicker and quicker,

“22 minutes, you were in your mech for 22 minutes before synchrosis was complete. that’s record lows, and also terribly uncharted waters…” his voice faded off for me again. Nagarrond, my mech, has a specially designed interior, it was originally made for the feminine frame but, it was given a masculine attachment between the legs, to accommodate my… yeah.

“Pilot, we’re more worried for you than anything, alright?” i nodded, taking this comment as the end of the conversation and stood up,

“may i return to my quarters sir?” he looked a little beside himself but he nodded, i quickly walked down the hallway to get to the elevator, praying no one else was joining me, i could feel the crotch of my body suit getting tighter…

the way a class-x works is pretty simple to explain, pilots are pumped full of sensory enhancers through these fun little mechanical ports they put into you, before you put your body suit on, they cover you in a siphoning substance, basically so that the suit will vacuum seal itself to your skin… sometimes you do it yourself, but normally you have other crew help you. recruits to the program have a pretty typical track record of sexual misconduct during this period, as the gel is applied, hands wander and, protocol falls apart. but once you get into the mech, i assure you, you will never yearn for hands again.

once entering, your body suit will be pressurized by the mech grabbing and tightening around your body, this will cause the siphoning liquid to rapidly leave through the neck, finalizing the body suit equipment, then the mech will attach various prongs to the neural link halo implant around the upper half of your head, causing you to gain eye sight, and a informational HUD, including power levels, estimation on “time until release” (how soon you’re likely to cum), incoming messages and orders, some of which are automated meaning the mech is basically just using you as a power source, and some of which will request your direct input, alongside this you also get various fun “settings” you can neurologically activate.

after the halo insertion, then begins the output interfacing. in crude language since they somehow manage to make it boring during training, if you have a dick, it puts you into an industrial grade, personalized, and neurologically tuned vibrating, squeezing, and sucking fleshlight, which is constantly self lubricated. if you have a pussy, it attaches a pump to your clit which will constantly suck on it, and occasionally spray it with water to rehydrate, alongside this pump a scan of your interior is taken, and a studded self positioning dildo will extend to your ideal length and angle, and then always pump into you at the right speed. both body types are penetrated with anal vibrators which run on personalized cycles to stimulate your anal g spot as well as they can. most pilots will cum up to 4 times during calibration alone, causing the suit to provide appropriate sustenance through a pair of ports which are surgically implanted into your neck.

as the elevator door started to close i couldn’t help it, i leaned against the back wall and reached down to my girl-bulge, rubbing it through the bodysuit~ my tip tented against the rubbery material which hugged my skin, i could only imagine how bad this would hurt for a girl with a bigger dick… but i didn’t have that problem. i whimpered to myself as the door finally finished closing, i collapsed to a cross legged position, leaning forward as to rub my bulge across my calves, i humped at it desperately, growing frustrated with myself. it was the first day in months i didn’t have any stimulus enhancers, every stroke and hump felt unsatisfying? despite how much i whimpered at them. before i knew it i had to get back to standing, as i saw the floor number rapidly approaching mine. as i got myself up i made myself look professional, aka i yanked my girldick between my legs and just prayed it would get a little softer…

i rushed back into the trauma unit and past the receptionist, into the quarters, locking myself in my room and collapsing against the door, the cool blue lights were flickering on from the motion detection as i just stared down at my humiliating girl dick, i shook my head rapidly for a second to try and get my mind off it before undoing the body suits binding and tossing it on my bed.

i grabbed my holo phone and went for the shower… i had some sketchy websites to look at.

[justplainwhump]

Just A Fling: Distraction

Because @wildfaewhump has amazing (hot!) characters and Dany just can't keep her hands to herself, here's another spicy AU. In which my Dany and Vic's Peyton have had nothing bad happen to them and are successful rich kids working in their parent's companies. They also happen to have insane chemistry.

[Just A Fling Masterlist]

(Don't worry though, there's plenty whump on the horizon. Peyton isn't exactly a nice guy.)

(This is technically aligned with the "Everything and Nothing" AU of Vic, focusing on Valerian as Peyton's spouse)

Content: (Very) Spicy flirting. A lot of innuendo.

Night has long fallen, and Dany leans back in the leather chair of the hotel bar, staring at the city lights far below. Young Leaders in Management, the conference is called, and it's an honor to be there; chances are a bunch of them will be in next year's "30 under 30" list of top managers. It's hard to truly believe in it, when most of them work for companies that have their parents' name.

People like Peyton Montgomery, 29, CFO of Montgomery Capital. Charlene Lennox, 26, CFO of Baxter, Lennox and partners. Orville Roscoe, 25, whose grandmother put the R in WRU. And herself, Danielle Hammond, 29, COO of the Hammond Group.

Charlene had invited her to dinner over their joint venture building up a freight airline; and as always she'd been a strenuous and utterly un-fun conversation partner, leaving Dany in desperate need of a drink after their meeting had finally ended.

A drink, and a distraction.

She pulls out her phone with a sigh, scrolling down to find the respective apps.

"What are you doing?", Kate asks, suddenly alert. Shes been half asleep before, and Dany almost feels the pang of a bad conscience. Kate is second shift of her security detail, but that still means she's been working all night.

"Bumble." Dany turns her screen for Kate to see. "I need a fuck."

"Dany," Kate groans. "Please, give me a break. You know how hard it is to vet random strangers on the internet? For all I know, any of the men in that app could be a serial killer."

"Well, what else do you suggest?"

"Look at what's right in front of you. How about..." She makes a vague gesture. "Peyton Montgomery? He's sitting at the bar and he checked your ass out twice in the last five minutes alone."

Dany glances over her shoulder through the dim light of the half empty bar, easily spotting Peyton's dark curls. He's sitting at the bar. Alone, it seems - a state that seems entirely wrong for him. At home during any social events, he's the heart of the party; him, his spouse and their elitist circle of old-money friends. She'd never felt any need to belong.

"Pretty sure your line of arguments is flawed," she notes. "Rich boys can be serial killers, too, you know."

"At least I can be sure that he isn't in it for your money." Kate shrugged and pushed her glass of water from one side of the table to the other. "Plus, he lives in the same hotel. Neither of us has to get out in the cold."

Dany sighs and looks at him again. She's attended a panel with him, earlier today, 'Cost cutting by Process Automation'. Arrogant, spoilt, pumped with the casual confidence of those who always got whatever they wanted. He's also got a pretty smile, dry humour, and a way with numbers. And she really likes the way his shirt emphasises his shoulders.

Maybe it's worth a shot.

His head goes up to the mirror over the bar and he smirks, acknowledging her stare. Slowly, not breaking eye contact, he raises his glass to his lips and takes a small sip.

Fuck.

Just for that smirk, she'd swipe him right in any app.

She breaks their eye contact and looks back at Kate, half defeated. "I'll talk to him."

Kate grins and raps her knuckles on the table. "Good luck."

~

"Dany Hammond." Peyton smiles as she steps up next to him. "Really enjoyed that debate with you today. You're up late."

"Thanks. Right back at you. Still not over your cost efficiency argumentation, though. These numbers are obviously -" She bites her lip and shakes her head. Focus. She's here to find something else entirely. "Well you're right with one thing. It's too late to talk business."

"It is." He tilts his head at the empty bar stool next to him. "Let me buy you a drink?"

Dany raises an eyebrow, stepping back to look him down slowly. His shoulders and arms under that expensive shirt look even better up close. He really is her type. "Depends on what your intentions are with that."

He chuckles and returns the favour, taking her in head to toe. "Well... I could certainly come up with some ideas for my... intentions." Peyton glances over her shoulder and raises his glass towards Kate. "I guess it all depends on what your bodyguard back there will let me do to you."

"Ah." Dany clicks her tongue in fake disappointment. "Wrong answer, rich boy."

"Oh?" He narrows his eyes, a hint of a challenge sparking in them. "Depends on what... you'll let me do to you?"

She takes a sip of her drink and tilts her head. "Better."

He's not moving for a moment, simply assessing her, and she wonders if Kate's been wrong.

"Let's say..." He begins, and something to his tone makes a warm shiver run down her spine already. His eyes are firmly on hers now, very carefully observing any reaction. "Let's assume my intentions were to fuck you over every horizontal surface of my suite?"

Dany's heart is racing with anticipation. "Hmmm." Her lip twitches into a smirk. "Then I guess you should order these drinks to go."

Peyton snaps his fingers and signals the bartender without taking his gaze off of her. "You should just know, Dany," He gives her an almost boyish grin, as the bartender scurries back to pick up a bottle. "I was prepared to properly seduce you. I'd have given you the whole nine yards. The words, the smiles, the body language, the touches. People tend to admire my effortless charm."

Dany slides from her chair, their bodies almost touching, but just not, close enough to feel the heat radiating from each other. "Oh I don't have a doubt you're a good actor", she admits, and reaches out, fingertips resting on his chest. "But haven't we found on in that debate that we both rather share a passion for..." She leans in, acutely aware of how her hair falls over his shoulder, how her breath must feel on the skin of his neck. "... efficacy."

He moves faster than she expected, his hand on her hip spinning her around, and then she's pinned between his body and the bar, and it's his mouth that is on her neck, his teeth grazing over her skin.

From the corner of her eye, she sees Kate jump to her feet.

Peyton chuckles, holds out his hand, and a cold bottle of champagne is handed to him.

"Make sure your bodyguard knows not to disturb us," he murmurs into her hair. "We're going to be making a lot of noise."

[azzydoesstuff]

behold, my massive fucking moonshine factory (in minecraft for legal reasons)

so basically, i've been goofing around with the create mod the last few weeks and i installed quite a few addons to add way more content. one of these addons, "destroy", adds chemistry and stuff. but that's not important, all that matters is that it adds ILLEGAL LIQOUR BREWING

knowing me, i'd of course spend almost a week or two building a 100% fully automatic moonshine brewery and distillery.

the only thing that isn't completely automated is the heat from the blaze burners of the steam engine that powers this behemoth, which have been fed with creative blaze cakes so i don't have to build a blaze fuel farm too (i'll do it at some point)

here's some screenshots

and here's a top-down view, with and without legend

Steam Engine (absolute beast, provides power to the entire factory)

Emergency Waterwheels (in case the steam engine overstresses, i can disconnect it from the main mechanism and start it up using these, no need to restart it up manually)

Ingredient Sorter, Left Wing

Ingredient Sorter, Right Wing

Aging Barrels, Left Wing

Aging Barrels, Right Wing

Water Pumps (collect water for the moonshine)

Distillation Bubble Cap Mechanisms (three of them for maximum liquor potence)

Final Fluid Tank (stores fully-distilled moonshine before it is bottled)

Automatic Cobblestone Generator

Cobblestone Crushers (two sets of crushing wheels per belt, one crushing cycle turns cobble into gravel, the second turns gravel into sand)

Bulk Blaster (create mod's equivalent of a super-smelter. smelts all of the sand into glass)

Mechanical Crafters (craft glass into glass bottles)

Bottling Station (spouts sploosh moonshine into the freshly crafted bottles)

Final Storage Vault (where the bottled moonshine finally ends up. has a storage space so massive it'll basically never stop growing)

Automatic Wheat Farm (wheat is one of two ingredients for moonshine, uses a gantry carriage contraption to sweep the mature crops and then deposits them into the vault sorting system)

Seed Composters (uses the leftover seeds from the wheat farm to make bone meal for the mushroom farm)

Semi-Automatic Mushroom Farm (relies on the wheat farm for bone meal, but besides that, is fully automatic. repeatedly plants a mushroom, bone meals it into a giant shroom, then cuts it down with a mechanical saw to get more shrooms in return)

Mushroom Crusher (grinds mushrooms into bricks of yeast, the other ingredient in moonshine, then flings it into the yeast vault)

Wheat Vault (stores wheat until it's time for another brewing cycle)

Yeast Vault (stores yeast until it's time for another brewing cycle)

Wheat Farm Sorting System (wheat is deposited into the wheat vault, seeds are flung into the mushroom farm's composters, and any other items that might've ended up there by mistake are incinerated)

Distilled Water Disposal Pipe (transports any leftover water from the moonshine distillation into the steam engine, thus getting rid of it)

Catwalk Elevator (thought it'd be cool to have a lift bring you up to some catwalks above the whole factory, so i made it)