#largest home textile

[marlynnofmany]

Unlikely Tech Problems

I reported to the cargo bay for our next delivery, and found concerned faces. Captain Sunlight waited by the door, scaly browridges angled into a dignified frown, while Mimi gestured wildly with his tentacles. I’d expected Mur to come with us instead. Something was up.

Before I could ask, the captain waved me over. “The other ship’s communications appear to be down,” she said. “Additional problems are possible as well. Keep your nostrils open for trouble.”

“Right,” I said, choosing not to comment on the Heatseeker phrasing. “Do we know if they’re okay?”

“They should be,” she replied with one clawed finger pointed at the closed bay door, which blocked the view of a busy spaceport. “The crew member who exited their ship to wave us over didn’t look distressed. And Wio isn’t picking up any alert signals or other causes for alarm.”

Mimi rumbled, “But we’re cautiously alarmed anyway.” He made quite a contrast to the captain, with his voice so much rougher and his attitude grumpier than usual today. Plus all the tentacles. I wondered what he expected the problem to be. Or maybe he just wasn’t looking forward to being mechanic-for-hire as a favor for regular clients. Though I’m sure the captain would have given him a bonus for that.

“We are simply cautious,” said Captain Sunlight. “We’ll head out as soon as—”

Something hissed behind me.

“I hearrrr of thrrrreatening circumsssstanssses?” asked Trrili, sounding pleased.

I turned to see our largest and scariest crewmate doing her favorite thing: looming. Well, second favorite thing, after jumping out and startling people. It was probably good that she enjoyed being terrifying, because with an appearance that was a mix of praying mantis, black widow spider, and unholy nightmares, she was really good at it.

Captain Sunlight was unfazed. “Potentially threatening,” she corrected. “If you will kindly observe in case of problems, I would appreciate it.”

Trrili crouched lower and flexed her pincher arms. “Yesss.”

(Unnecessary hissing is her third favorite thing to do.)

“Right. They’ll be waiting.” The captain stepped forward and opened the bay door — with the airlock engaged. She really wasn’t taking any chances. I wondered if Wio was watching from the cockpit, ready to call the local authorities if need be.

Yeah, of course she was.

The first three of us cycled through the airlock, then waited on the tarmac while Trrili followed. The spaceport was a big one, with ships in all the nearby parking spots and people hustling to and fro. (They're more properly called berths or bays or something, but whatever; they're parking spots. Everybody there could land vertically, and the areas were sorted by ship size.)  I didn’t know which ship held the package we were meant to be picking up. Hopefully it was close.

By the time Trrili stepped out, the ship directly across from us had opened its own bay door, this one without any sort of airlock precautions. A snow-white Heatseeker trotted out and waved us forward. I was glad that the local weather was slightly overcast, since between those white scales and Captain Sunlight’s yellow, I would have been doing a lot of squinting on a bright day.

“Piercing Sunlight!” exclaimed the client. “Good to smell you.”

“Hello, Toothbone,” said the captain. “Always a pleasure. Is your comm system down?”

Toothbone swished her tail. “A precautionary measure. We had a bit of machinery repaired, and it came back with suspicious programming. We’re making sure it’s not malicious before connecting with any other ships, just to be sure.”

Captain Sunlight nodded while Trrili made a quiet hiss of disappointment. “Very sensible,” the captain said. “I trust this won’t affect the package you want us to deliver?”

“No, not at all. It’s a textile piece that one of our crew made on commission for someone on their home planet, no technology involved. Right this way.”

She led us up the ramp into their cargo bay, which had a lower ceiling than ours. Trrili and I both had to duck a little. The Heatseekers and Mimi didn’t notice.

Toothbone pointed out an awkwardly-shaped box that probably held an art frame as well as the promised cloth, and Captain Sunlight tactfully brought out the payment tablet.

Angry voices echoed down the hallway. Trrili perked up and edged forward; I stepped aside to let her while Mimi squashed down beside the package. Captain Sunlight glanced up but didn’t say anything. Toothbone just looked tired.

Since neither of them told her not to, Trrili opened the door and stuck her head out. Somebody shrieked. The sounds of the argument stopped.

“Isssss therrre a prrroblem?” Trrili purred.

“No — well yes, but not — who are you?” someone asked while other voices muttered in the background.

“Courrrierrr,” Trrili said.

“Thank you for your concern,” said an officious voice. “If you don’t mind—”

“Hey, is that a human?” asked another voice, and I saw brown eyes peeking around Trrili. “They’ll back me up! Hang on a sec. ‘Scuse me.”

Trrili stepped back as a slender human with dark skin and a wild-colored shirt skipped past. He hurried over to me. I braced for whatever conversation was about to happen.

“Hi,” he said earnestly. “Please tell me you’ve heard of the thing where people program old Earth games into unlikely bits of tech.”

“Sure!” I said. “My cousin put Doom in a hoverbike’s display screen once.”

“Yes!” He pointed at me and pumped a fist in the air, then turned back to the scaly faces in the hall. “You see?”

I connected the dots. “Did your repaired piece of tech come back with a game on it?”

He whirled, wild-eyed. “Yes! One of the repair guys is a buddy of mine, and he must have done it as a joke. I’ve been trying to explain it, but nobody believes me!”

“What tech is it?” I asked.

“Part of the medbay,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “Somebody sprained their tail, and the medic went to scan it for breaks, then they ended up with a screen full of demons and gunfire.”

I tried not to laugh. “Is it actually Doom in your medbay??”

He dragged his hands over his face. “It’s Doom in the medbay.”

“That’s amazing!”

By this point the other Heatseekers had made their way in to join the conversation, and to be formally introduced. Things got a bit chaotic. But I confirmed for the alien crew that yes, this was a thing humans did sometimes, and no, it was not a threat to the ship. Alarming yes, but not any form of viral attack.

Trrili was a bit disappointed, but everyone else was relieved. Captain Sunlight managed to steer the conversation back to courier business.

The other human shook his head next to me. “I can’t believe my friend did that. Well no, I can believe it; this is definitely his sort of thing. But jeez.”

“You might consider sending him another old Earth tradition in return,” I suggested with a grin. “Possibly a max-volume rickroll?”

He grinned back. “I might. I might indeed.”

~~~

Inspired by this thread. Thanks for the idea, @sleepyowlet!

~~~

These are the ongoing backstory adventures of the main character from this book.

Shared early on Patreon! There’s even a free tier to get them on the same day as the rest of the world.

The sequel novel is in progress (and will include characters from these stories. I hadn’t thought all of them up when I wrote the first book, but they’re too much fun to leave out of the second).

[practically-an-x-man]

I won't lie. I got distracted watching a video of a guy who's tent was being torn apart by leaf cutter ants and began researching the logistics of that.

BUT I'M BACK with an ask ONCE AGAIN. And it's bugged themed. For definitely unrelated reasons.

Your characters gain the ability to control one species of bug (specific species, not all of ants or all of wasps), and they have as much time as they need to research what bug they'd like. What qualifies as a bug in this case is subjective. Anything in class insecta is fair game but arachnida is cool too.

First of all, that documentary sounds fascinating and I can totally appreciate going down a research rabbithole like that :D

Second, I love this ask, let's dive right in!!

Rae: Copidosoma floridanum - a type of cosmopolitan wasp. The main reason she'd choose it is for it being cosmopolitan, she can utilize this power regardless of her travels.

Robin: Reticulitermes flavipes - the eastern subterranean termite. She'd pretty much exclusively use this power to keep them away from the operahouse and its wooden sets (same with her parents' house, since it's pretty old)

Madison: Pachydiplax longipennis - the blue dasher dragonfly. Technically any dragonfly would suffice, but blue dashers are common where she lives so she wouldn't have trouble finding them. Either way - semiaquatic, predatory, and edible in a pinch.

Ophelia: Camponotus pennsylvanicus - the black carpenter ant. Am I stealing this from Ant-Man? Maybe. But she'd find a way to use them in her lab, for sure.

Gia: Apis mellifera - the Western honey bee. Having an infinite supply of pollinators is a surefire way to keep her shop, and her clover, as healthy as possible.

Jasper: Melolontha vulgaris - the May beetle. Oil from their larvae is sometimes used as a topical treatment for scratches, abrasions, and rheumatism in traditional medicine - it's not quite Neosporin, but it'll work in a pinch

Kestrel: Eristalis tenax - the common drone fly. Another cosmopolitan species, good for use on their travels, but small and unassuming enough that could be good for some quiet espionage.

Katherine: Anthrenus scrophulariae - the common carpet beetle. They're one of the four common species of beetles that cause damage to textiles and other artifacts in museums, so that's a 25% lower chance that they'll get damaged on her watch

Quinn: Pepsis grossa - a North American tarantula hawk moth. Its sting is said to be incredibly painful and is among the highest ranked on the Schmidt pain index - she'd go with the bullet ant, but she's a lot less likely to find those in the California desert.

Eris: Paraponera clavata - there's the bullet ant. Eris just wants to cause as much pain as possible, when they need to. What kind of bug could double as a weapon to be used in battle? Bullet ant.

Nikoletta: Periplaneta americana - the American cockroach. It's gross, and she honestly hates roaches (and half of this power would just be used keeping them away from her home), but they're so common in big cities like New Orleans that she's always got a few around to control. It's a similar strategy to Cleo and her rats, really.

Jimmy: Drosophilia melanogaster - fruit flies. Look, here's his logic: they were first used in genetics back in 1910, and they were a big deal, and he works with scientists now too... maybe they'd have use for this power of his? (also credit to the one scientific name I did not have to look up beforehand because I had it memorized lol)

Vivienne: Aedes aegypti - the yellow fever mosquito. Disease is... kind of a big deal in her time, there aren't a lot of cures for these horrific ailments, and while Vivienne itself is largely immune by being a siren, she doesn't want Wojchek or his crew stricken ill by some tiny little bug.

Spider: Sigh... I'd been so careful about strictly insects this whole time, but it would be wrong to give him anything but a spider. Hogna carolinensis - the wolf spider, and the largest wolf spider species to be found in America. He just thinks it would be cool to freak people out by having this massive wolf spider crawl out of his mouth or something. He's... an odd one, that for sure.

[dwellordream]

“In the majority of immigrant families and for many working-class families of native-born Americans, the standard middle-class pattern, in which an entire family lived on the income of one man, was completely unachievable. The wages paid to a semi-skilled working man in 1909, for example--between $12 and $15 a week--were simply not enough to sustain a family. In large cities, rent often took between a quarter and a third of the family income and frequently did not include heat or fuel for the stove. Food, purchased daily to avoid spoilage, was relatively expensive. A chicken cost 25 cents, and potatoes were 2 cents a pound. Pennies for the newspaper, nickels for carfare, loaves of bread, and cups of coffee added up fast. Many families had bought their furniture on the installment plan, and many belonged to unions or mutual benefit societies. These payments and dues had to be met monthly.

Working class families adopted a variety of strategies to expand their incomes. In African-American families, where education was prized as a way out of poverty and second-class citizenship, children and teenagers remained in school while their mothers sought work as field hands, domestics, or laundresses. In Northern mill towns, where entire families worked at the textile mill, parents made childcare arrangements with neighbors and relatives for the youngest children so that mothers could work for a share of the family income.

…By far the largest employment sector for young American women, both black and white, was domestic service. In 1900, one-third of all wage-earning women--nearly 2 million of them--worked either as servants in private homes or as waitresses in hotels and restaurants. The great majority of household servants in the North, Midwest, and West were white immigrant women or their daughters, though native-born white women continued to work as domestic servants in country towns and villages. In the south, white middle-class families almost exclusively employed black women as maids, nurses, cooks, and laundresses.

Because the weekly wages of domestic services were comparable to those of factory hands, and room and board were free, domestic service gave immigrant women a chance to save money. Among Irish servants it was common to send money back to relatives in Ireland or to pay ship’s passage for parents and siblings who wanted to immigrate to America. Women from other immigrant groups--Germans, Scandinavians, and Slaves, for example--went into domestic service because they spoke little or no English and were unqualified for many other jobs. For some new arrivals domestic service provided a chance to learn a little English and become familiar with American culture.

…The advent of new machinery and new workforce efficiency techniques, called scientific management, contributed to the “deskilling” of labor, either by eliminating tasks formerly done by hand or by breaking the tasks down into ever-smaller segments. In many factories, for example, no worker completed a whole garment or shoe by himself, and no one needed more than a day’s training to learn the simple, repetitive work. With all these changes in the technology and management of the factory, some men did lose jobs to less-skilled women, who would accept cruelly low wages in order to help their families survive. When working men blamed women for taking their jobs or depressing their wages, they failed to see that it was not the fault of women who needed to work, but the fault of an industrial system organized solely for profit.

Few industrial jobs held any possibility of advancement, and it was not until after World War I that women became job foremen or floor managers to any appreciable extent. Many jobs, like candy making and bookbinding, were subject to seasonal rushes and slack times; women garment makers often found they worked for a 14-hour stretch for three days and then had no work--and no pay--for the rest of the week. Work hours grew shorter, and by 1920, the 54-hour week had become the legal standard in New York and a number of other states.

…For a few years in the 1880s, before it collapsed under its own size and increasing competition from the new American Federation of Labor (AFL), the Knights of Labor had successfully organized hundreds of thousands of skilled and unskilled workers, both men and women, black and white. The AFL, meanwhile, concentrated its energies on organizing unions for skilled male craftsmen. The AFL was not interested in industrial unionism--the organizing of masses of unskilled workers, such as miners or mill workers, by industry rather than by specialized craft. Many Americans, including the AFL leadership, felt that industrial unionism was under the control of revolutionary socialists. They were deeply suspicious of the socialist Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, who were successfully organizing miners and mill workers in the opening years of the 20th century.

The AFL, unlike the Wobblies, ignored African Americans for many years. And, though it did charter a number of women’s local unions between 1890 and 1920, it was heavily biased against women workers. The AFL leadership believed that women should be at home and not in the workplace, and feared that women’s willingness to accept low wages constituted a threat to male jobs and wage levels. The AFL would be very slow to realize that encouraging divisions between men and women workers only retarded the progress of labor unionism as a whole, for women were in the workplace to stay.

..Before 1917, white-collar work was almost exclusively reserved for native-born white women. Immigrants, even second-generation daughters of immigrants who spoke with an accent or had noticeably “foreign” or Jewish names, usually found it impossible to get sales or office jobs. Black women knew that discriminatory hiring practices in both the North and the South made it useless for them even to apply to white-collar office or clerical work in any but black-owned businesses. Increasingly, and mostly in the South, black women were hired to teach black children. By 1910, 22,547 of the nation’s 29,772 black teachers were female.

Similarly, black women entered nursing in growing numbers around 1900, after the founding of a number of black nursing schools in the 1890s. Black nurses worked in the black community and as private nurses; they were denied jobs in white hospitals and in the Army Nurse Corps and the Red Cross. Excluded from membership in the American Nurses Association, they formed their own group in 1908--the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses.

White women who worked in offices occupied an increasing number of specialized positions as typists, stenographers, shipping and receiving clerks, bookkeepers, cashiers, accountants, or office-machine workers. Their jobs had come with the growth of business and industry and technological advances in business machinery. At the same time that the demand for office staff skyrocketed, the spread of public school education, especially high school training, meant that a growing supply of women was available for office work. By 1915, approximately 50 percent of all office workers, and nearly 85 percent of all typists and stenographers, were women.”

- Karen Manners Smith, “Women at Work.” in New Paths to Power: American Women, 1890-1920

[cuppajj]

Here's the current draft for Thalamhan's map, including the names of all four cities and Danuas's location! Things are most likely going to change in the future but for now, this is the layout. It's not entirely accurate, for one the scale is probably bound to change and the map presents the colony as very vertical when it's not. I'd probably need to make it in a 3D software for it to be the most accurate it can be, but that can be for another time

When Danuas tunneled into the planet millions of years ago, the series of interconnecting cave systems she left behind would become Thalamhan. Early Thalamites would found Danann, the capital city, and during the Branching Era centuries later, they would expand upward toward the surface, founding the other three cities as well as many smaller towns and villages. Thalamites also live along the tunnels connecting each settlement to another.

Danann is the capital and cultural center of the colony, home to the Sacred Grounds. Beneath it is Danuas, accessed only by the cityspeaker through an entrance known as the Well of the Titan.

Loc Faore is the agricultural capital, a city built around a large lake of the same name. The settlements that surround it are along the streams that come from the lake, home to most of Thalamhan’s farmers.

Astorea is known for its high population of smiths and metallurgists. Its nickname is Little Danann, as it has the second largest cultural scene in the colony, particularly textiles and art.

Tollana is unique for being a mostly vertical city, so most of its population are Thalamites with flight based alternate modes. Many scientists and engineers including some from Danann have residences here, as it is the closest city to the surface, perfect for researching the planet and sky themselves.

The dark regions that surround the colony are the Darklands.

[chemanufhout44]

Chemical Manufacturing Companies in Houston

The Role of Chemical Manufacturing Companies in Houston

Introduction

Houston, Texas, is a powerhouse in the world of energy and industrial production, with a particularly strong reputation in the chemical manufacturing sector. The city is often referred to as the "Energy Capital of the World," but it’s also a critical hub for chemical production, contributing significantly to the global supply chain. Chemical manufacturing companies in Houston are at the forefront of innovation, producing a wide range of chemicals that are essential for numerous industries, from healthcare and agriculture to electronics and automotive manufacturing. This article delves into the importance of these companies, the range of products they create, and their impact on both the local and global economy.

The Significance of Houston’s Chemical Manufacturing Industry

Houston’s strategic location near the Gulf of Mexico, coupled with its extensive infrastructure, makes it an ideal location for chemical manufacturing. The city is home to the largest petrochemical complex in the United States, and this has fostered a robust ecosystem of chemical manufacturing companies. These companies benefit from the proximity to raw materials, such as oil and natural gas, which are essential inputs for chemical production. Additionally, the city’s well-established logistics network, including ports, railways, and highways, facilitates the efficient distribution of chemical products both domestically and internationally.

The chemical manufacturing industry in Houston is not only a major contributor to the local economy but also plays a critical role in supporting other industries. The chemicals produced in Houston are used in the production of plastics, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, and countless other products that are integral to modern life. Without the chemicals manufactured in Houston, many industries would struggle to maintain their current levels of production and innovation.

Key Players in Houston's Chemical Manufacturing Sector

Several major companies dominate the chemical manufacturing landscape in Houston, each contributing to the industry’s strength and diversity. These companies range from multinational corporations to specialized firms that focus on niche markets.

Dow Chemical Company: One of the largest chemical manufacturers in the world, Dow has a significant presence in Houston. The company produces a vast array of chemicals, including plastics, performance materials, and agricultural products. Dow’s Houston operations are integral to its global supply chain, enabling the company to meet the demands of industries across the globe.

ExxonMobil Chemical: As a division of one of the largest oil companies in the world, ExxonMobil Chemical plays a crucial role in the production of petrochemicals. The company’s Houston facilities produce a wide range of products, including polyethylene, polypropylene, and other polymers that are used in packaging, automotive components, and consumer goods. ExxonMobil Chemical’s innovations in polymer technology have helped drive advancements in material science, contributing to the development of lighter, stronger, and more sustainable products.

LyondellBasell: This company is one of the largest plastics, chemicals, and refining companies in the world. With its headquarters in Houston, LyondellBasell is a key player in the production of polypropylene, polyethylene, and advanced polymers. The company’s products are used in a variety of applications, from packaging and textiles to automotive parts and medical devices. LyondellBasell is also a leader in sustainability, with initiatives aimed at reducing plastic waste and promoting circular economy practices.

BASF Corporation: A subsidiary of the German chemical giant BASF SE, BASF Corporation operates several facilities in the Houston area. The company produces a wide range of chemicals, including those used in agriculture, automotive, and construction industries. BASF is known for its commitment to innovation, investing heavily in research and development to create new and improved chemical products that meet the evolving needs of its customers.

The Impact of Chemical Manufacturing on the Local Economy

The chemical manufacturing industry is a major driver of economic activity in Houston. The sector provides thousands of high-paying jobs, ranging from engineers and chemists to skilled laborers and logistics professionals. These jobs not only support the livelihoods of those directly employed by chemical manufacturing companies but also create a ripple effect throughout the local economy. For example, the presence of a strong chemical manufacturing sector attracts other businesses, such as suppliers, contractors, and service providers, further boosting economic growth in the region.

In addition to job creation, chemical manufacturing companies in Houston contribute significantly to the city’s tax base. The revenue generated from these taxes helps fund essential public services, such as education, healthcare, and infrastructure development. Furthermore, the industry’s emphasis on innovation and sustainability has led to the development of new technologies and processes that have the potential to reduce environmental impact and improve efficiency across various sectors.

Environmental and Safety Considerations

While the chemical manufacturing industry in Houston is vital to the economy, it also presents challenges, particularly in terms of environmental impact and safety. The production of chemicals involves the use of hazardous materials, and if not properly managed, these materials can pose risks to both human health and the environment.

To address these concerns, chemical manufacturing companies in Houston are subject to stringent regulations enforced by federal and state agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). These regulations govern everything from emissions and waste disposal to workplace safety standards. Companies are required to implement comprehensive safety and environmental management systems to minimize risks and ensure compliance with these regulations.

Many chemical manufacturers in Houston have gone beyond regulatory requirements, adopting best practices in sustainability and safety. For instance, companies like LyondellBasell and BASF have implemented programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, minimize waste, and promote the use of renewable energy sources. These initiatives not only help protect the environment but also enhance the companies’ reputations and appeal to customers who prioritize sustainability.

The Future of Chemical Manufacturing in Houston

The chemical manufacturing industry in Houston is poised for continued growth, driven by advancements in technology, increasing demand for chemicals, and the city’s strategic advantages. However, the industry will also need to navigate challenges related to environmental sustainability, regulatory compliance, and global competition.

One of the key trends shaping the future of chemical manufacturing in Houston is the shift towards sustainability. As consumers and businesses become more environmentally conscious, there is increasing pressure on chemical manufacturers to reduce their carbon footprints and adopt more sustainable practices. This shift is likely to drive innovation in areas such as green chemistry, renewable feedstocks, and circular economy models.

Another important trend is the growing role of digitalization in chemical manufacturing. Companies are increasingly using digital technologies, such as data analytics, artificial intelligence, and automation, to improve efficiency, optimize production processes, and enhance safety. These technologies have the potential to transform the industry, enabling companies to operate more sustainably and respond more quickly to changing market demands.

Conclusion

Chemical manufacturing companies in Houston play a critical role in the global supply chain, producing essential chemicals that support a wide range of industries. The city’s strategic location, robust infrastructure, and access to raw materials make it an ideal hub for chemical production. As the industry continues to evolve, driven by trends in sustainability and digitalization, Houston’s chemical manufacturers will be at the forefront of innovation, contributing to economic growth and helping to address some of the world’s most pressing challenges.

In conclusion, the chemical manufacturing industry in Houston is a vital part of the city’s economy and a key player on the global stage. By continuing to prioritize innovation, sustainability, and safety, these companies will not only maintain their competitive edge but also contribute to a more sustainable and prosperous future for all.

[marztheincredible]

Atlas of The Boiling Isles: New Crike

New Crike is considered the Capital of The Boiling Isles, even though it is not the largest city. The highly populated city has history and tradition interwoven into the new laws to keep to The Old Ways as best as possible.

The city is split into two districts. The Foundation District, or Lower District to city-dwellers, is bustling with citizens churning out production of goods. From textiles, to foods, to inspiring entertainment such as playwrites, the denizens in the Foundation District live up to its name. Cradled within the encapsulating mountains a few yards northwest is the long abandoned outpost of Witches who held the title of Smiths.

The large forge, Hel’s Spite, now lies cold and dormant. A place where a budding Apprentice starts their journey is no more.

The Snail District is also known as the Upper District. Here is where you will find the means to buy the many goods crafted in the Foundation District. The Grand Market is found here, as well as the Athenaeum for a place of study and research.

The looming citadel was once a place where council for this large city was held. It is now home to a high ranking Emperor’s Coven official who’s in charge of the large precinct found in this city, and turned the ancient halls from a place to seek refuge to an overcasting oppression.

[ghanatrails]

Discover the Unspoiled Beauty of Volta: The Ultimate Guide to the Volta Experience with Best Ghana Tours.

Are you ready to escape the hustle and bustle of city life and connect with nature? Look no further than the Volta Region of Ghana! Best Ghana Tours offers a unique Volta Experience tour package that takes you on a journey through the unspoiled beauty of Ghana's eastern region.

Afadja Mountain

Our Volta Experience tour begins with a hike up Afadja Mountain, the highest peak in Ghana. Enjoy breathtaking views of the surrounding landscape and spot rare bird species like the Afep Pigeon and the Blue-Headed Coucal.

Lake Volta

Next, we'll take you on a boat ride across Lake Volta, the largest man-made lake in the world. Enjoy the stunning scenery and spot fisherman at work. You might even catch a glimpse of the elusive Hippopotamus!

Kente Villages

The Volta Region is famous for its vibrant Kente villages, where you can learn about the history and significance of this traditional Ghanaian textile. Our expert guides will take you on a tour of the villages, where you can see weavers at work and even try your hand at weaving your own Kente cloth.

Waterfalls and Caves

The Volta Region is home to some of Ghana's most stunning waterfalls and caves. Our Volta Experience tour takes you to the majestic Wli Waterfalls and the breathtaking Afadja Cave, where you can swim in natural pools and explore the stunning rock formations.

Culture and Tradition

The Volta Region is rich in culture and tradition, and our tour takes you to the heart of it. Visit the Kente festival, where you can watch traditional dancers and musicians perform. You'll also have the opportunity to try traditional Ghanaian cuisine like fufu and banku.

The Volta Experience with Best Ghana Tours is the ultimate guide to Ghana's unspoiled beauty. From Afadja Mountain to Lake Volta, Kente villages to waterfalls and caves, our tour package has something for everyone. So why wait? Book your Volta Experience tour today and discover the secrets of Ghana's eastern region!

[bestghanatours]

Vibrant Cities, Serene Beaches, and Rich Traditions of Ghana.

Experience the wonders of Ghana with Best Ghana Tours, your ultimate guide to exploring this captivating West African nation. From bustling cities to tranquil beaches and rich cultural heritage, Ghana offers an unforgettable adventure for every traveler.

We start our journey in Accra, the lively capital city known for its vibrant arts scene and bustling markets. Visit the Kwame Nkrumah Museum to delve into the country's history, or explore the Osu Castle and Independence Square for a taste of its colonial past. We won’t miss the Makola Market, where you can find everything from traditional textiles to fresh produce.

Ghana’s coastline is dotted with serene beaches perfect for relaxation and water sports. We head to Labadi Beach in Accra for a lively atmosphere with local music and dance, or escape to the secluded beauty of Busua Beach for surfing and sunbathing. Cape Coast and Elmina offer stunning beaches alongside historical sites like the Cape Coast Castle, a poignant reminder of the transatlantic slave trade.

Kumasi, the cultural heart of Ghana, is home to the historic Ashanti Kingdom. We would visit the Manhyia Palace Museum and the bustling Kejetia Market, one of the largest open-air markets in West Africa. Kumasi’s vibrant atmosphere and rich history make it a must-see destination.

Immerse yourself in Ghana’s rich traditions by attending local festivals such as the Akwasidae in Kumasi, where you can witness the vibrant culture of the Ashanti people. Explore traditional villages in the Volta Region to experience the unique customs and crafts of the Ewe people.

At Best Ghana Tours, we tailor each tour to provide an authentic and enriching experience. Let us guide you through the vibrant cities, serene beaches, and rich traditions that make Ghana a must-visit destination. Book your tour today and embark on an unforgettable journey with us.

[booty-uprooter]

a bunch of random worldbuilding in no particular order

my silly isekai book takes place on the continent of elara, which is in the southern hemisphere of the planet eulea. elara contains 7 (formerly 8) countries

there are four basic 'types' of elves: wood-elves, stone-elves, sea-elves, and dark-elves. only the sea-elves don't live in the same country as the others, because they prefer to live along the coast. the sea-elves also have close ties to the merfolk

LACIROTH is the home of the fae and location of the divine temple. laciroth is the only completely landlocked country and their main industry is forestry

CRASIL is the northernmost country. it's the traditional home of the dwarves, but more and more goblins have been emigrating there recently. it's the most mechanized country and their primary industry is textiles, though they also grow 'luxury' crops like cocoa beans and eulea's version of tobacco and coffee

OSNON is the largest and most agrarian country. it used to be ruled by the human kingdom of Osnus, until the kingdom was dissolved and replaced with a loose republic. Osnian is the most widely spoken language in elara, and about 55% of the population speak it as either a first or second language

ASTRIA is a coastal country and the home of the sea-elves. their primary industries are salt and fishing

FRUEN THIL is an underwater country and home of the merfolk. their primary industries are magical items, jewelry, and stuff that can only be obtained in the deep sea

CRUJ GLYA is the southernmost country and home of the dragons. it's the only exception to elara's general open borders policy, as the dragons rarely allow foreigners past the outermost regions of their country. they're the only country with ties to the birdfolk, who live on floating islands

NEBLYA is the home of the lesser beast tribe and location of the Seven Sisters University, the largest and best school of magic on the continent (though they also teach other things). their primary industry is ranching

SNEICA was the 8th country. formerly home to the greater beast tribe before they were mostly wiped out. now uninhabitable by anyone except undead due to an underground fire that occasionally farts out clouds of poisonous gas. their primary industry was mining, but this manufacturing niche has been taken over by the dragons

lesser beasts are kemonomimi and greater beasts are furries

[ausetkmt]

On the morning of June 12, 2022, Ángela Astudillo, then a law student in her mid-20s, grabbed her water bottle and hopped into her red Nissan Juke. The co-founder of Dress Desert, or Desierto Vestido, a textile recycling advocacy nonprofit, and the daughter of tree farmers, Astudillo lives in a gated apartment complex in Alto Hospicio, a dusty city at the edge of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, with her husband, daughter, bunny, and three aquatic turtles.

Exiting the compound, Astudillo pinched the wheel, pulled over next to a car on the side of the road, and greeted Bárbara Pino, a fashion professor, and three of her students, who were waiting inside.

They headed toward a mountain of sand known as El Paso de la Mula. Less than a mile from her home, squinting into the distance, Astudillo saw a thread of smoke rising from its direction. With her in the lead, the two vehicles caravanned toward the dune, the site of the second-largest clothes pile in the world.

As they got closer to El Paso de La Mula, the thin trail of smoke had expanded into a huge black cloud. Astudillo stopped the car and texted the academics behind her.

It looks like it’s on fire. Hopefully, it’s not there. :( :( :(

She then dialed them directly and asked, “Do you still want to go?”

Pino, director of Santiago’s Fashion System Observatory at Universidad Diego Portales, had planned this trip for months. Astudillo had volunteered to be their guide. The mound of discarded fabric in the middle of the Atacama weighed an estimated 11,000 to 59,000 tons, equivalent to one or two times the Brooklyn Bridge.

By the time the team reached the gates of El Paso de la Mula, more than half of the clothes pile was on fire. Smoke obscured everything, hanging like an opaque black curtain. Municipal authorities turned the group away, forbidding them to stay on the premises. But Astudillo knew the landscape, so she directed the team to the dune’s far side, where access was still unimpeded.

There, the students surveyed the inferno. It was “like a war,” Pino said. She felt waves of heat. Black smoke unspooled from the burning clothes. The air was dense and hard to breathe. Smoke coated the back of their throats and clogged their nostrils with the acrid smell of melting plastic. They covered their faces, trying not to breathe it in. Then the group heard a series of loud pops as mini explosions burst from within the vast expanse of burning garments.

Despite the danger, Pino and her students rummaged, pulling out specimens to examine from among unburned portions of the pile. On prior visits to the clothes dump, Astudillo had uncovered clothing produced by the world’s most well-known brands: Nautica, Adidas, Wrangler, Old Navy, H&M, Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Forever 21, Zara, Banana Republic. Store tags still dangled from many of her findings. The clothes had come to the Atacama from Europe, the United States, Korea, and Japan. Now, as Astudillo began taking pictures and uploading them to Instagram, Pino wandered the mound, horrified and fascinated by the grotesque volume and variety of apparel: ski jackets, ball gowns, bathing suits. She plucked out a rhinestone-encrusted platform stiletto in perfect condition. She crouched to search for its match, but the wind was getting stronger. If it shifted, the team realized, they’d be trapped in the spreading fire.

For 14 years, no rain has fallen in Alto Hospicio or the surrounding Atacama Desert region. Those dry conditions, coupled with the nonbiodegradable, predominantly synthetic, petroleum-derived fibers that modern clothes are made with, meant that the pile never shrank. Instead, for more than two decades, it grew — metastasized — with every discarded, imported item that was added.

In 2021, six months prior to the fire, a photographer from Agence France Presse, Martín Bernetti, captured a bird’s-eye image of this sprawling mound of apparel, essentially an oil slick, strewn across the edge of the Atacama desert.

The aerial image was picked up by news outlets across the globe, from the front page of the New York Postto the BBC, and continues to circulate today. But the mountain of clothes depicted by that 2021 drone photo is utterly gone. As Astudillo, Pino, and the three students witnessed, and unwittingly tasted: The blaze tore through the pile, throwing black plumes of toxic ash into the air.

The town of Alto Hospicio sits on a cliff above the Pacific Ocean, a bedroom community for the seaside vacation city of Iquique below. Imagine if Atlantic City in New Jersey were simultaneously hemmed in and backed by a high Nevada plateau, and if the two locales were connected by a two-lane switchback highway.

Each day in Iquique’s port, giant cranes pluck containers full of discarded clothing from the decks of ships and deposit them onto flatbed trucks. No one really knows exactly how much clothing passes through the port every year; estimates range from 60,000 to 44 million tons. Next, they head to the nearby Free Trade Zone, known locally as “Zofri,” where trailers back into the warehouses of 52 used-clothes importers and forklift operators transfer sealed bales of clothing, or fardos, inside.

Chile is the biggest importer of secondhand clothing in South America, and between 2020 and 2021 it was the fastest-growing importer of used clothing in the world. The port of Iquique is an established tax-free zone, incentivizing this booming industry of castaway textiles.

From Zofri, bales of clothing are sold, uninspected, to merchants betting that at least some of the items inside are sales-worthy. “When you buy, you are buying with your eyes closed,” one former merchant said. Sometimes 80 percent of the garments in a bale are usable. Sometimes the opposite is true. Because bales are so cheap, however, most merchants need only sell 40 percent to turn a profit.

According to the global environmental advocacy group Ekō (formerly known as SumofUS), an estimated 85 percent of the used clothing imported into Iquique remains unsold. Chilean federal law states it’s illegal to dispose of textiles.

Considered Iquique’s backyard, Alto Hospicio is one of the poorest cities in Chile, widely known as a place to abandon pets and dump trash. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the small desert town is where more than a dozen teenage girls mysteriously vanished, until their apprehended killer led authorities to bodies buried in desert graves.

In 2001, Manuela Medina*, a former gardener, saw an opportunity in Iquique’s growing textile abundance. Relocating to Alto Hospicio, she established an unauthorized compound on government lands at the base of El Paso de la Mula, the huge sand dune at the far side of an unregulated shantytown. Every few days, she hired a fletero — a driver with a jalopy — to travel the switchback roads, out of the brown dunes of Alto Hospicio, to arrive in the colorful oceanside city of Iquique, which sits a thousand miles north of the country’s capital, Santiago.

Near the dock where cranes unload massive container ships, inside Iquique’s free trade zone, Medina ventured into the contiguous warehouses, asking secondhand clothing importers, “Do you have any garbage?”

Back at her compound, Medina unloaded her wares in piles on the ground where she had the luxury of storing them indefinitely — the Atacama Desert is one of the driest places on Earth, meaning items don’t undergo normal degradation from elements like rain. Here, Medina sold her piles to merchants and others for $10 each.

As more and more bales of ropa americana, or secondhand clothes, arrived in Iquique, the clothes flooded importers’ warehouses and overflowed vendors’ stalls in open air markets, including La Quebradilla — one of the largest open air markets in South America, located just a few miles from Medina’s unauthorized compound.

Soon,importers and secondhand merchants began to deliver surplus used clothes directly to Medina. Fed by daily truck deliveries, and then by multiple daily tractor trailer load deliveries, Medina’s pile grew.

By 2020, Medina’s gargantuan desert dump had become an open secret in Chile, stretching across dozens of acres. Others followed her model, creating mini-dumps across the desert and along roadsides, but Medina’s pile remained the largest.

On March 29, 2022, Paulin Silva, an environmental lawyer, stood before the Primer Tribunal Ambiental de Antofagasta, a regional tribunal in northern Chile that specializes in resolving environmental issues within its jurisdiction. She was presenting a lawsuit, brought on behalf of herself as a resident of Iquique, against the municipality and the federal Chilean government for their inaction over the sprawling, unregulated clothes dumps. For her submission of evidence, she asked the tribunal to join her in touring the mound of clothing.

For weeks, her informal team of supporters (a geographer, her sister, and her brother-in-law) had been documenting the problem, joking among themselves, “In which dump are we going to party tonight?”

Since obtaining her law degree, Silva has prosecuted a handful of environmental cases, but this one was personal, and she felt empowered to tackle it: “I have the education; I am a lawyer; I can do something,” she said. She’d grown up in northern Chile, a pencil thin country bordered by the Pacific Ocean. Her father is from Alto Hospicio and her mother is from Iquique. At 35, she’s several years older than Astudillo, the co-founder of the nonprofit Dress Desert, whom Silva asked to be a witness for the case. When Silva was a child, she observed people dumping clothes everywhere — the streets, yards, and city squares. Because this was the only place she knew for so much of her life, she thought, “It’s normal for people to live with … garbage accumulated around them.”

This local “clothes-blindness” was documented by Astudillo’s colleague, Bastián Barria, an engineering student and her co-founder of Dress Desert. In November 2020, he and others conducted a survey to ascertain local attitudes regarding the clothing waste. Of the almost 400 people in Alto Hospicio he surveyed, representing less than 1 percent of the town’s population, more than half did not think there was any issue.

When Silva was 18, she moved a thousand miles south, to Valparaiso in central Chile, to study law and that was where she remained until the pandemic, when she returned home. That’s when she realized the dump situation had worsened. Exponentially.

During the decades between Silva’s girlhood and today, clothing production worldwide doubled, while utilization — the number of times an item of clothing is worn before it is thrown away — declined by 36 percent. Countries like Chile, Haiti, and Uganda became depositories for fast fashion discards. In 2021 alone, Chile imported more than 700,000 tons of new and used clothing — the weight equivalent of 70 Eiffel Towers.

“Even if we stopped clothing production throughout the world tonight,” said Francisca Gajardo, an Iquique-born fashion designer, “we still have more garments than we need or that the Earth can safely hold. It won’t go away nicely, and we’re not stopping today.”

Nine days after the giant fires, around 4 p.m., Silva was having a light meal, the Chilean equivalent of afternoon tea known as once (pronounced “on-say”), with her family in northern Chile. A few days prior, the Primer Tribunal Ambiental de Antofagasta had informed her it was ready to view her case evidence by touring the clothes pile in person. Silva took out her phone to share the good news on Instagram with Desierto Vestido, but before she could, she saw the images of the burning clothes Desierto Vestido had just uploaded and shared.

Silva sprang from her chair to process what was happening to the evidence in her case just a few miles away. She suspected why the court had been willing to view the landfill: “Because obviously the matter was burned,” she told Grist.

While no official cause of the fires has ever been reported, local residents claim it began late on Saturday night or in the early hours of Sunday. Days later, toxic air still clung to the area. Astudillo, who visited the site regularly, described the pile as “volcanic” — with clothes smoldering under the sand, venting smoke full of textile chemicals from synthetic materials. She warned, “You can’t be outside for long.”

In the days following the fire, on June 22, instead of leading the tour of the prosecutorial evidence, Silva filed a statement to the Primer Tribunal Ambiental de Antofagasta: “With sadness and shame I inform you that 11,000 tons of clothes in the textile dump were burned.”

Although Paulin provided the court with Dress Desert’s smartphone video recordings of the clothes in flames, the defense argued that the Instagram account where they’d posted the videos could not be verified and confirmed. Lacking a certifiable timestamp, the films were inadmissible.

One year later, in August 2023, the Primer Tribunal Ambiental de Antofagasta called a trial hearing so that all parties involved in the case — the Consejo de Defensa del Estado, the body that judicially represents the state in Chile, the municipality of Alto Hospicio, and Silva — could present evidence.

During the hearing, the Mayor at Alto Hospicio, Patricio Ferreira, said that one of his priorities is to “transform this problem into an opportunity to generate employment.” He alluded to discussions he had with European businessmen to explore initiatives related to recycling.

Silva got people to testify in her favor, activists and academics who have given statements to different media outlets about the environmental problem generated by the textile landfill in the Chilean desert. But on the day of the hearing, none of them arrived.

“At the end of the day, in practice, I am alone in this action,” she said.

Chile’s government recently voted to adopt recycling measures that make certain producers accountable for their waste. Known as the extended producer responsibility law, or REP using its Spanish acronym, the legislation passed in 2016 and took effect in January 2023. Currently, Chilean companies that make tires and packaging (such as bags, plastics, paper or cardboard, cans and glass) must comply.

Eventually, according to the Ministry of the Environment, Chile intends to incorporate clothing and textiles as a priority product into the REP law.

However, in the case of clothes, many describe the REP as a “paper solution” that lacks tangible enforcement, said Pino, from the Universidad Diego Portales.

In parallel, the Ministry of the Environment is developing a circular economy strategy for textile waste. Unlike the REP, the agency crafts public policy for the public and private sectors to prevent overproduction.

The ministry has been holding workshops and conversations to collect input from stakeholders, including academics, business executives, retailers and nonprofit leaders. It is also tabulating the results of a preliminary survey on consumer clothes-buying habits. The details of this circular economy strategy is expected to be published in March this year.

At the minister’s invitation, Pino has shared her fashion expertise — both in the markets and in the desert — with the group. “These two things are wonderful initiatives,” she said about both efforts, but she lamented that they fail to address the issue of used clothes.

A decade ago, when the REP was first being discussed, Denisse Morán, president of the Tarapacá Recyclers and the head of ServiREC, a recycling cooperative that operates within Iquique’s free trade zone, sought out her local representative to request that the law apply to both clothing producers and clothing importers.

“Oh, because you are from Iquique?” she recalled him asking her.

“Not only because I am from Iquique,” she replied, “but because we all wear clothes.”

For years, many residents in Alto Hospicio saw the piles of textiles as more of an opportunity than an eyesore or environmental threat, something that supported the local economy.

When Jazmín Yañez arrived in town from southern Chile in 2018 almost penniless and on the brink of homelessness, for example, someone gave her a few cast-off garments and household garbage — from towels, kitchen implements to furniture — to sell. Ever since, Yañez, now 28, has waged a zealous campaign to salvage, fix, and reutilize all “waste” materials. She operates an informal store from the kitchen of her house called Stop Recicla: “Your trash is my treasure,” where she sells, exchanges, and gifts items such as rugs, used clothing, school supplies, costumes, and electronics to impoverished mothers, like she once was.

It’s this trash/treasure duality that kept Astudillo and other locals from viewing the region’s booming used clothing trade as a problem. But six months before the fires, in January 2022, Nathalia Tavolieri, a Brazilian journalist, invited Astudillo to El Paso de La Mula, where she encountered Manuela Medina’s mountain for the first time.

Astudillo had seen numerous clothing dumps strewn and mounded throughout the desert, but nothing as big as this immense tangle of blouses and pants. “It was terrible,” she said, weeping as she recalled her first visit. “Maybe if I had been older, maybe I could have done more things [to stop this from happening].”

The experience galvanized her. She had already co-founded her nonprofit Dress Desert, or Desierto Vestido, two years before, to raise awareness and creatively respond to the country’s burgeoning waste clothing issue. As part of the project’s efforts, she and 20 other members host workshops and conversations. They upcycle castaway materials into new garments and craft household items. Seeing the vastness of Medina’s clothing pile, Astudillo stepped up her resolve, because “many people don’t see — or don’t want to see.”

“It was very, very hard,” she said, “to know that we live in a place that is so polluted and damaged by everyone’s waste.” Several months later, Astudillo brought Gajardo, the clothes designer and a fellow Iquiquean, to the dump, and gained an ally in her efforts. Despite growing up and shopping at the region’s numerous outdoor secondhand clothes markets, Gajardo was appalled by the scope of the waste. She developed rashes from rummaging among the fabrics.

“The fact that we have a desert, the fact that there’s a place to receive this, doesn’t mean that the place has to become the dump of the world,” she said. Since then, Gajardo’s conviction to never design clothes from virgin materials has deepened. Additionally, through her brand You Are the New Generation, she offers workshops in reusing garments, and visited Kansas City, Missouri, last year through the U.S. State Department’s Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative to teach people to make new clothes by harvesting old ones.

Other entrepreneurs have attempted to turn the clothes problem into revenue, but have faced a series of setbacks.

Franklin Zepeda is a celebrated Chilean entrepreneur who toured Europe’s textile recycling plants before returning to the region in 2013 to establish Ecofibre, now known as Procitex. (Its name is an acronym meaning Proceso Circular en Textil in Spanish).

With seed funding from CORFO, the Chilean economic development agency, and later from private capital, Zepeda was able to route textiles imported into Iquique to his plant, where they were disassembled, shredded, doused with flame retardant, and transformed into insulation panels. Zepeda got praise for this work in several major international news outlets, but he shuttered his plant in Alto Hospicio in 2021 because of unfavorable economics, including the taxes on shipping the insulation panels to other regions of the country.

Dario Blanco, manager of the ZOFRI User Association AG (AUZ), a trade association that brings together businessmen from the Iquique free zone, believes that the solution to the region’s problem of discarded clothing is out there — it will just take the right company and policies. And there are plenty of entrepreneurs, fashion designers, and environmentalists working on the issue of textile waste, both in Chile and internationally.

As Bloomberg reported in May,New York, California, Sweden, and the Netherlands are developing legislation similar to Chile’s extended producer responsibility law that went into effect this year, mandating that the fashion industry fund recycling programs via tariffs calibrated to the quantity of garments produced.

In order to help New York City uphold its existing law limiting or forbidding textiles in the waste stream, FabScrap, a nonprofit founded in 2016 by a former New York Department of Sanitation worker, receives 7,000 pounds of pre-consumer textile waste each week. Sorted by volunteers, the nonsynthetic scrap items are sent to a New Jersey facility that shreds the material, producing “shoddy,” a stuffing used to fill punching bags, sofas, and soft toys.

A Czech company called RETEX has been attempting to bring its fabric-macerating technology to Alto Hospicio. Blanco says that in exchange for securing a contract with Chile, the company promised to hire local workers. But, Blanco admitted, negotiations like these have fallen through in the past. For example, he said, a Spain-based company, Egreen, planned to open a fabric-waste processing plant, but the deal was scrapped late last year.

Read Next: How clothing forms the fabric of society, both past and future

The governor’s sustainability adviser at the Regional Government of Tarapaca, Pablo Zambra, recently formed a 25-member committee that includes stakeholders such as Astudillo and Barria from Dress Desert and Morán, the president of the Tarapacá Recyclers, to publicize economic incentives for circular economy initiatives. Collectively, they hope RETEX will succeed in doing what Zepeda’s company failed to do: turn a profit. As of this writing, no importers are involved.

Meanwhile, every day, container ships continue to offload more cargo.

In the fall of 2022, Alto Hospicio’s mayor, Ferreira, acknowledged the unsolved problem but blamed clothing manufacturers, citing a “lack of global awareness of ethical responsibility.”

“Our land has been sacrificed,” he said.

Pino agrees that the fashion industry and its consumers are culpable. “We have to worry about the complete cycle: before, during, and after our clothes,” she wrote in an editorial published in 2021.

She believes a more comprehensive solution is necessary, including regulating the entry of textile materials to Chile, educating consumers about prolonging garments’ lives, promoting Chile’s homegrown fashion industry, and supporting research to design new uses for fabric waste.

Ecocitex, founded in 2020 by engineer Rosario Hevia in Santiago, has sprung up as another Chilean company addressing a surfeit of garments.

Ecocitex operates in a manner contrary to the country’s organized and informal secondhand clothes markets. It invites people to recyclehigh-quality clothing or pay$1.50 per kilogram to leave poor quality clothing and walk away empty-handed.

During the pandemic, Andrea Espinoza Pérez, a civil industrial engineer at the University of Santiago, initiated a study on the ecological impacts of projects like Ecocitex. She wanted to know: Did factory-processed, used clothing produce fewer emissions than the original clothing manufacturing process? With data provided by Ecocitex’s founder Hevia, scientists determined that the clothes deconstruction processis effective because it keeps waste clothes out of landfills, and it replaces the demand for virgin materials. However, the study found that Ecocitex’s procedure is highly energy-intensive — using about 73 percent of the energy required to produce the same product from raw materials.

Meanwhile, neither Zepeda’s Procitex nor Hevia’s Ecocitex in Chile, nor Fabscrap’s efforts in New York and Philadelphia, have matched the direct profitability of Medina’s now-defunct business. (Medina has started a new business storing tires.) In fact, all have relied heavily on a variety of underwriting measures, including subsidies, nonprofit funding, subscriptions, or volunteer labor to generate their products.

In recent years, Zepeda has earned his living as an employee of Chile’s largest retailer, CENCOSUD. He collects surplus clothes donated by customers, and produces insulation panels for buildings that are sold by the same retailer.

As for Ecocitex, in June, the business caught fire and the building was destroyed. The cause is still under investigation. Undeterred, Hevia has launched a campaign to rebuild. Meanwhile, she is raising funds by selling blankets made from recycled fibers to a mining company.

By last January, the height of the Chilean summer, the gigantic, unsightly clothes dump at El Paso de la Mula, the one Agence France Presse had shown the world, was nowhere to be found.

All that remained was a smattering of ashes and the tread marks of bulldozers. Here and there, across Medina’s unofficial backyard, small piles of garments peeked out of the sand dunes. But according to municipal officials, dumping and burning continues. Rey, an indigent man who lives by the side of a desert road in a blue and yellow tent emblazoned with “National Geographic,” attests that he and others accept money from nonprofit refuse-disposal contractors or freelance truckers in exchange for setting fires to whatever waste is discharged from a truck. This way, the trucker can keep more of his hauling profits, which would otherwise be whittled down by the official dump fees.

Astudillo says that beyond the limits of Manuela’s dune, there are as many as 200 micro-garbage dumps, and consequently, miles and miles of ashes in the desert — not just scattered over the ground, but also in the air. She told Grist in late December that this is an everyday thing. “You go out to buy bread and you smell the burning smell. You smell the materials that make up the clothes: oil and plastic. After 5 in the afternoon, I no longer let my 7-year-old daughter leave the apartment, and I close the windows to prevent smoke from coming in.” She also confirmed the abandoning of clothes continues: “They throw it away, they burn it immediately.”

On December 12, the Primer Tribunal Ambiental de Antofagasta issued its final ruling in the case with Silva, commissioning a unit of experts to carry out an on-site report on the accumulation of textile waste in different areas of Alto Hospicio, and to propose a solution to the accumulation of waste.

The municipality of Alto Hospicio, which claims it does not have the workforce to adequately address the problem, has also installed nearly 100 cameras along the main roads as a means of tracking polluters, and has begun doling out fines as high as $350 for illegal dumping. So far, trucks have been apprehended transporting domestic and industrial garbage, as well as bulky items such as mattresses, washing machines, and furniture.

Drone footage recorded by Cheng Hwa, one of Pino’s students, the day of the June 2022 fires captures the municipality fighting what was in essence an oil fire. Hwa, who grew up in Iquique and now works in tech for the hospitality industry, had long been aware of the desert dumps but didn’t comprehend the magnitude until he witnessed them at close range.

He’s haunted by what his drone footage made visible. “How the desert of sand starts to turn into a desert of clothes,” he said. “It has no limit; there is no closure … Clothes begin to appear on the ground until the horizon is completely covered.”

In Iquique, he often glances up toward the high plateau of Alto Hospicio. “You can’t see the dump, but [you can see] the column of smoke on days that [clothes] burn. That cloud of smoke lets you know … It makes [the issue] visible on a day-to-day basis.”

Thirty miles south of Iquique, toward the city’s main airport, on her family’s farm, Astudillo and her parents drop pieces of used clothing on the ground, but in a purposeful way. Over the past 20 years, Astudillo’s father has experimented with growing trees in the infertile, saline soils. Many of his efforts failed until he began using certain fabrics to mulch his trees. This improves the quality of the soil, enabling it to retain moisture. For the past year, Astudillo has been working with one of the Zofri importers, who asked to remain anonymous. She consults with his staff about the clothing bales and recommends ways of sorting the material into specific categories based on fiber content, some of which she collects personally. Those items — a pair of cotton shorts, a T-shirt, a blouse — become mulch for a pine and eucalyptus forest rising in the desert.

Recently, as Astudillo was leaving the farm, she stashed a few perennials in her truck and drove them to Manuela’s compound in Paso de La Mula. Just beyond Medina’s courtyard, where sky- blackening fires had once burned, Astudillo troweled a small hole for the plants. As she dug, she dislodged several odd socks and a faded blue sweatshirt — discarded clothes that had survived the fires, but were buried by bulldozers.

Astudillo filled the hole, amending the desert sand with compost and garden soil. “For me it’s like a Band-Aid for a wound that is so big in that place,” she said. Then she tucked in cardinal flowers — a native plant whose petals resemble shooting flames.

Editor’s note: During visits to her compound in Alto Hospicio, Manuela, the owner of the secondhand clothing dump, told Grist reporters her name was Manuela Medina. However, other outlets have used the surname Olivos. Her legal name is Manuela de Los Angeles Medina Olivos.

[nothwell]

Hi it’s me, the anon who asked for Mr Warren content warnings. I wanted to ask what your technique for historical research is, if you’re willing to share. I used to interpret at a historic woollen mill and was totally surprised by the level of accuracy in your writing when it came to textile production.

Technique is a strong word but I'll give it a go!

For Mr Warren's Profession specifically I was fortunate enough to visit the Lowell Mills Museum in Lowell, Massachusetts. Their guides and exhibits were vital to making the mill in the book come alive.

For my Victorian historicals in general, I'm very lucky in that the Victorians did a whole lot of self-documentation that is well-preserved in a language I know how to read. I read extensively for four years, focusing on…

fiction written by Victorians

nonfiction written by Victorians (self-help guides, technological journals and manuals, newspaper articles, etc.)

nonfiction written by 20th/21st century historians (I owe Judith Flanders my life)

For Hold Fast specifically I also visited Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Connecticut (home of the last wooden whaleship in the world) and the New Bedford Whaling Museum in New Bedford, Massachusetts (home of the largest scale-model whaleship in the world and also many actual whale skeletons).

For Fiorenzo, I read mostly nonfiction by present-day Venetians and 20th/21st century historians. I also visited the Sargent, Whistler, and Venetian Glass exhibit at Mystic Seaport, which gave me an opportunity to interact with not just historical Venetian crafts and art but also a real life gondola.

tl;dr - A lot of nonfiction reading, some fiction reading, and ideally something I can visit in person to draw my own observations.

[travelwithtravejar]

Museums in Georgia offer a Cultural Exploration: Visit 7 Must-See Exhibits

Explore Georgia's rich history through its diverse museums on our exclusive Georgia tour packages 2023. Discover archaeological treasures, sacred artifacts, and artistic masterpieces spanning over 1,000 years. The National Museum of Georgia, the largest in the country, houses an extensive collection, including Urartian inscriptions, hominid bones, ceramics, ancient icons, handicrafts, and historical clothing. Explore these remarkable exhibits not only in Tbilisi but also in various display buildings. Additionally, delve into comprehensive collections of zoology, anthropology, and geology, enhancing your immersive journey through Georgia's cultural tapestry. Join us for an unforgettable exploration of Georgia's fascinating heritage in 2023.

Georgia also has a large number of local exhibition centers and art galleries where exhibitions from diverse collections are frequently opened. The majority of art galleries are private, although this does not stop them from exhibiting the best Georgian masterworks from previous centuries. Please be aware that practically all museums in Georgia close at 18 o'clock on Mondays (and even earlier in the winter). 

Museum of Georgia

The Museum of Georgia, a section of the National Museum of Georgia, is situated on Shota Rustaveli Avenue in the heart of Tbilisi. Taxis and public transportation are both simple ways to get to the Museum. The Museum in Tbilisi is home to an exceptional collection of ancient artifacts from all around the world, including items from the third century. A permanent exhibit about the Caucasus' natural history is available to visitors to the Millennium BC.

Soviet Occupation Museum 

The Georgian History Museum houses the Soviet Occupation Museum, which depicts the 70 years of Soviet authority in Georgia, starting in 1921 and ending with its fall in 1991. Along with other artifacts depicting Georgia's social and political tyranny during the Soviet era, you can view the personal files of "rebellious" prominent personalities in Georgia as well as preparations to have them executed or exiled. One of the train cars where the 1924 national revolutionaries were executed is also housed in the hall.

National Gallery, Tbilisi

The National Gallery is one of the amazing places to visit in Georgia if you love art and want to see Georgian painters' greatest works. The structure was constructed in response to the Russian tsar's 1888 plan to establish a military and historical museum to highlight the superiority of the Russian Empire inside its borders. The works of Georgian artists from the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Niko Pirosmani, Lado Gudiashvili, David Kakabadze, and the sculptor Iakob Nikoladze, are currently on display in the museum's permanent collection. 

Dadiani Palace Museum

In addition to these objects, the museum boasts a beautiful library with books from Napoleon's personal library, furniture in the French and Russian styles, and personal gifts from British, Russian, and foreign nobles to the Dadiani family. Dadiani Palace in Zugdidi, Samegrelo region, is home to more notable remnants of both Georgian and European culture. Over 45,000 pieces, some of which were part of the Dadiani family collection, may be found at the museum. The death mask of Napoleon Bonaparte and the robe thought to have been worn by the Virgin Mary are two of the most important treasures on display here. Salome Diadiani Murat, the spouse of Napoleon's nephew Achille, brought the mask to Georgia.

Sighnaghi Museum

Georgia's most renowned wine-producing region is Akheti. The best tourist spot that must be seen practically all year round is this one. Home to a number of museums in Kakheti, but one is unquestionably worthwhile. This is the Sighnaghi Museum, which is situated in the romantic city of Sighnaghi. Five thousand ethnographic relics, including textiles, copper and wooden household goods, agricultural tools, winemaking supplies, jewelry, and musical instruments, are on display at the Sighnaghi Museum. You may also see the extensive numismatic collection of around 2000 coins, which includes old Sassanid Persian coins as well as local coinage issued by Georgian kings Erekle, Tamar, and Lasha-Giorgi. On the second floor of the museum, Niko Pirosmani's transient paintings are also on display.

Tsinandali Museum

In the Akheti district, the Tsinandali Museum is housed in the residence of Alexander Chavchavadze, a poet and aristocrat from Georgia. Various slices of furniture, works of fine and decorative art, and manuscripts from Chavchavadze's collections are on show in the museum. The house-Museum also features a beautiful nineteenth-century garden and a wine cellar that was constructed in 1835. Regional buses and taxis are two ways to get to Sighnaghi and Tsinandali. The stations are a short walk from several museums in Georgia.

Svaneti Museum and Tower of Margiani

Visitors visiting Georgia are required to climb the Svaneti Mountains. As the tsars transported their wealth to the mountains during invasions, the Samegrelo-Zemo Svaneti region served as the Keeper of the Georgian Treasury for centuries. The Svaneti Museum in Mestia, which is a division of the National Museum of Georgia, currently houses these artifacts, making it one of the most significant collections kept in Georgian institutions. With its renovated media library, modified foyer, and roof terrace (in the summer), the Svaneti Museum serves as an important regional social space in addition to exhibiting one-of-a-kind masterpieces of domestic and international decorative and applied arts. 

Before continuing your ascent to Ushguli, which is thought to be the highest continuously inhabited settlement in Europe, a cup of delectable coffee at a cafe with a panoramic view of the towers of Svaneti and the summit of Tetnuldi will lift your spirits and give you new energy. Regional buses go from Zugdidi and Tbilisi to Mestia. The Mestia city center is just a short stroll from the Museum to visit during Georgia tours.

[flannelshirtsandbubbletea]

Exploring the Beauty of Minneapolis: A Must-See Attractions

Minneapolis, also known as the "City of Lakes," is a vibrant and bustling metropolis located in the state of Minnesota. Known for its scenic beauty, rich cultural heritage, and diverse range of activities and attractions, Minneapolis is a must-see destination for any traveler. Whether you're a nature lover, history buff, or just looking for a fun-filled vacation, Minneapolis has something for everyone. Here are must-see attractions that are sure to leave a lasting impression on any visitor.

Chain of Lakes: The Chain of Lakes is a string of interconnected lakes that are located in the heart of Minneapolis. This picturesque area is a popular spot for boating, fishing, swimming, and picnicking. Take a leisurely stroll around the lakes, rent a boat, or simply relax on the shore and take in the beautiful scenery.

Minnehaha Park: This beautiful park is home to Minnehaha Falls, a 53-foot waterfall that is a must-see attraction. Visitors can also enjoy hiking trails, picnic areas, and a playground for kids. In the summer, the park also offers concerts and other events.

Stone Arch Bridge: This historic bridge spans the Mississippi River and offers stunning views of the downtown Minneapolis skyline. It's a popular spot for walking, biking, and photography. Visitors can also take a guided tour of the bridge, which provides a unique perspective on the history and architecture of the area.

Minneapolis Institute of Art: This world-class art museum features a wide range of artworks from around the globe, including paintings, sculptures, and textiles. The museum also hosts a variety of special exhibitions, lectures, and events throughout the year.

Mall of America: This massive mall is the largest in the United States and offers an endless variety of shopping, dining, and entertainment options. Visitors can explore over 500 stores, enjoy a movie at the AMC theater, or take a ride on the mall's amusement park, Nickelodeon Universe.

Target Field: This state-of-the-art baseball stadium is home to the Minnesota Twins and is a must-see attraction for sports fans. Visitors can take a tour of the stadium, catch a game, or simply enjoy the great views of downtown Minneapolis from the stands.

Midtown Global Market: This unique marketplace features a diverse selection of food, crafts, and other goods from around the world. Visitors can sample international cuisine, shop for unique souvenirs, or simply enjoy the lively atmosphere of the market.

Minnesota History Center: This museum tells the story of Minnesota's rich history and heritage through interactive exhibits, artifacts, and photographs. Visitors can also take a guided tour of the museum, which provides a fascinating glimpse into the state's past.

Como Park Zoo and Conservatory: This popular zoo and conservatory is home to a wide variety of animals and plants from around the world. Visitors can explore the zoo's many exhibits, take a ride on the Como Town amusement park, or simply relax in the beautiful gardens.

Nicollet Mall: This bustling street is the heart of downtown Minneapolis and is lined with shops, restaurants, and other businesses. Visitors can take a stroll down the mall, enjoy a meal at one of the many outdoor cafes, or simply people-watch and take in the sights and sounds of the city.

Minneapolis is a city that has something for everyone and these 10 must-see attractions are just the tip of the iceberg. With its diverse range of activities, cultural heritage, and natural beauty, Minneapolis is a destination that is sure to leave a lasting impression on any visitor.

[reinabeestudio]

More Fairytale Special (WH AU) info

Why yes, I didn't forget about my Welcome Home AU. Have some assorted trivia—text form below if you can't read the image.

🔖🍎 You can read more about the AU itself here!

The top 3 most powerful houses are House of Jasper (Lord Darling), House of Spinel (Lady Joyful) and House of Topaz (Lord Frankly).

One might ask: what makes Lord Darling’s House so powerful? Well, first of all, both him and his House are the oldest in the land thus their roots run deep. His friend Home has been since the very start, way before Wally existed. House of Jasper’s leader has always been the one that makes sure things work properly, and it kinda just… stayed like that since then. Lord Darling is the leader of leaders, so to speak.

Lord Pillar’s land (House of Chalcedony) biggest ‘landmark’ is its port city! His House might not be powerful but it’s important, since it’s the one that receives all the goods for the rest of the Houses and their lands.

House of Chalcedony provides and House of Amethyst delivers! Lord Dear’s House mostly consists in delivering the ordered goods from House of Chalcedony to the rest of the Houses (that isn’t Lord Pillar’s, the caterpillar manages the delivery in his own land). Lord Dear also manages the mail. It’s a very busy House!

House of Peridot (Lady Partridge) is the one that is in charge of textiles, clothes and the such. Lady Partridge herself made the blue coat that Lord Darling wears.

Despite the titles, Lord Beagle and Lady Starlet aren’t leaders! They’re mostly called like that due to their friendship with the other leaders, and their contribution to the land of Home.

Original as I am, House of Topaz is the scholarly one, regarded as the capital of knowledge and learning. The Great Library of Topaz is the largest and most significant library of the land—with millions of items! Most Houses have their own personal libraries with their own history and such, yet the Great Library has pretty much everything regarding the land… though Lord Frankly himself seems to be fond of lepidopterology (and entomology to a lesser extent).

As a smaller fact, the land of Home has celebrated only two big weddings in recent years: Lord Frankly and Lord Dear’s (barely a year ago), and Lord Pillar’s and Queen Eden’s (during the Special itself).

[cuppajj]

Guy who can't draw environments does their best to describe what the colony and cities look like

So I can't draw landscapes for the life of me (yet) so it would be back breakingly hard to draw what this place looks like, but I'll do my best to explain and also compile a set of pictures that gives you a good idea!

TL;DR: the planet the colony is in is lifeless, rocky, and dry, but deep underneath are caverns filled with plant life where the civilization lies. Towns and cities are a fusion of traditional cybertronian and fantasy elements, with the capital being the fanciest and most fantastical.

There's little to no life on the surface of the planet. It's dry, dusty, and almost entirely flat, save for a few mountain ranges. You'd be forgiven for trusting your radar and believing that there's nothing of interest on this planet at all, but if you were to ignore it and take a closer look, land your ship and explore, then you'd find that situated among the sparse hills and ravines are entrances into deep and intricate cave systems, some marked by a ring of stones.

The caves stretch down and out for miles, and they look how they typically do on a place like Earth. Dark rocks, tight spaces, stalagmites and stalagtites. It's almost enough to deter a regular cave explorer from venturing further. However, The further down you go, the more you begin to see streams, glowing rocks, and eventually, plant life. Moss, ivy, mushrooms, and curiously pretty flowers. Soon the caves are filled with flora, thick trees and fresh air, luminescent rocks placed along the ceiling to illuminate like sunlight through the leaves. There are no longer cramped and tight rooms and tunnels as everything opens up, and when you reach different clearings, you can sometimes hardly tell you're underground at all. You've officially entered the colony; and from there on, the lush caverns will only increase in pure spectacle and beauty. It's like stepping into another world.

Here are ideas of what the lush caves look like:

The towns and cities themselves vary, some fancier, some simpler, some horizontal and some vertical. The colony's architecture resembles cybertronian design, but is also uniquely fantasy-like. Homes can be modeled after flowers, mushrooms, and rocks, and some inhabitants even carve their homes into the cavern walls themselves. Cities similarly have a fantasy-sci-fi fusion, with architecture that blends cybertronian and fantastical elements. Their plans are like the plans of any normal city, divided into districts, with certain sectors having a common category for their businesses. There's an arts district, a textiles and jewelry district, and a science district in the capital, for example. Interspersed are residential buildings and homes, and streets paved with stone in a leaf or floral pattern. Markets and small businesses are everywhere. The main forms of transportation are monorails that run through (and/or up) the city, and canals of groundwater that eventually lead out of cities and into large lakes, which are popular places for residents to visit.

The capital is the largest and fanciest. While its more outer sections have traditional colonial architecture, the closer you get to the heart of the city, the titan herself, the more ornate the buildings become. Colored windows, fancy lampposts, homes and businesses constructed from smooth light stone, covered roof to base in flora. Titan's Guard patrol the corner of every street, and it's here where you'll see the aristocratic class strutting about in fancy silks and ununtrium jewelry. Venture far into this district, and you'll eventually reach a giant, heavily guarded gate that no one is allowed to pass through; because through there are the Sacred Grounds, home to the Titan and her cityspeaker.

Lastly, it’s advised you don’t try to squeeze into any dark or suspicious-looking cracks, though; they’re just out of your sight as you traverse the lush outskirts of the cities, but they’re there. Those ever-changing entrances lead you into what’s known as the Darklands, where the shady, criminal, and deplorable fester in secret, waiting to strike any unfortunate passerby who didn’t stick to the main path.

(some of these aren't underground but imagine that they are)

Cities/Towns: x x x x x

[herdsworldbuilding]

So me messing around.

So I got boarded and decided to mess around with a setting that isn’t mine.

Fate: a winx saga.

So first of a disclaimer I have not watched the second season yet. But this was just me doing something for three hours yesterday afternoon.

So let’s preface this with my thoughts on the show… it’s fine for what it is. I enjoyed watching it but am also firmly of the opinion that it doesn’t need to be connected to the Winx ip. Would have been fine as an edgy teen drama about fairies. And for all the genuine fans of the series I feel bad for the lack of a third season.

In the meantime I’ll have my fun.

So that map. The map of the other world that was provided. I appreciate that in this version of winx we get a map as the original series place soft and loose with locations and space (Is this new location a planet? A continent, a single kingdom? Who knows!) but the map is also very bare bones and the two versions of it contradicts itself. So I drew a map based on these two maps. There is a hint of two other continents on the globe version so I drew some speculative version of the other parts of the continents.

So I’m trying to stick somewhat closely to the canon of Fates. But I still change some things.

Two changes to basic lore about magic I added an element, darkness, it’s a relatively rare element and fairies with the power of darkness have a reputation.

- power of darkness- fear, shadow manipulation and travel, shadow creatures summoning, shadow forms. temporary blindness, curses, perception manipulation, pull and push objects. Darkness and light are closely related and they appear to have some overlap.

Change two, witches: witches are non fairies so are not born with that elemental magic so gifted to the fairies. Instead in order to do magic they rely on complex rituals and formulas (essentially to do magic they are solving complex math equations or study art) then there are blood witches, witches who’s “element” is blood and steal the magic of fairies. Both kinds of witches are illegal in Solaria, but outside of solaria regular witches are quite common.

Now there’s only five realms, the realms are the equivalent of an empire. There are also several other smaller countries.

Long ago there was one large realm called Domino, it’s territory was that of all the five realms centuries ago. It fell to ruin during the dominion wars.

Eventually through numerous conflicts the many realms came to be.

—The realms —

- solaria: politically the most powerful of the five realms. Under the iron rule of the solarian monarchy and home to the elite Alfea college

Cities: Majix (capital), Polaris, dyamond(a city full of gangs, vice and crime, essentially a semi legal criminal haven) zenith (a tec savvy city, the silicone valley of the otherworld)

National symbol: the moon eclipsing the sun

National animal: unicorn

Exports: phones, military gear, paper, wool, textiles, glass.

Locations of interest: celestial dam (largest hydroelectric dam in the world), omega prison, crystal expanse, rainbow arches, ruins of domino. Sea of sand dunes,

- elakrion: know for its warrior culture. Long time rival to solaria and oposium but will supply mercenaries to any side that pays. Often has pirate problems from andros.

Cities: hatchet, fortress

National symbol: two crossed swords

National animal: carnage wyverns

Exports: mercenaries, weapons, wheat.

Locations of interest: golden auditorium (college), ruins of havram

- lymphea: natural wounder covered in lush dense jungle, rich diversity of plants and animals. Rumor has it that powerful relics hidden away deep in the jungle.

Cities: linepia

National symbol: the tree of life

National animal: moss magiwolfs

Exports: wood, spices, exotic ingredients, plants and animals magic items. Medicine

Locations of interest: tree of life, torquise sholes, sea of shimmering flowers, the deep jungle

- Iris: a land dotted with powerful city states but overrun by outlaws. Sees itself as the true heir of Domino’s might. Probably could be if the council of cities could agree on anything for more than a minute. The bread basket of the world. Echos of the army of darkness still scar the land.

Cites: emerald, saphira, ónix, citri, topaz, amathisia, Rubia.

National symbol: a stylized flower with seven colored diamond shaped petals.

National animal: dream eater butterfly

Exports: ores, gemstones, cereals, produce.

Locations of interest: the white mountains, sun fields, scorched run.

-oposium: bitter rivals to solaria. They jump at any opportunity to prove their superiority. Home to the prestigious cloud tower.

Cites: Alk, ing, granor

National symbol: three purple eyes

National animal: ghoul spiders

Exports: witch made items, magic scrolls,

Locations of interest: cloud tower (a citadel of libraries, mazes, and witches. The tower is known to amplify the powers of air fairies. And has long been used for long distance communications, now it’s just a glorified cell tower)

—countries—

-concepts: home to the cites of hope city, terrok and jubilee

-Callisto: a popular destination for tourists and vacationers, with idealized beaches and plenty of resorts. There is also ski resorts in the mountains to the west.

- dolona: an island nation, it has a long history of being occupied by other realms but has a vibrant culture and is quite well off now days even though elakrion military, has a quiet but not unknown presence.

- Promethia: southern neighbor to elakrion and lymphea

- hoggar: a militaristic county that is most concerned with deafening itself from hostile neighbors (elakrion, solaria, andros) well known for housing great libraries and mountain monasteries. Home to the forgers college.

- andros: a realm in all but name. The place is full of islands and is well known for it’s pirates and privateers. Has a lot of water fairies. This land is home to the mermaids.

Cities: Neptune, Posidious, Oceanus, typhon

Locations of interest: black islands, omega portal, islands of nadur, nantros, guanaco.

- melody: a beautiful country known for its ancient history and having many talented musicians who have made many magical instruments. There are a lot of mind fairies from this country

Locations of interest: the pillars of harmony (the largest stone circle of the world.) the stone army (an army of petrified warriors that range from melody out to the quartz step.

-espero: neighbor to romelea and hoggar. It is a bright place known for its large cites, expertise in air and light magic and being the best with barrier magic.

-karunda: a country that is next to Promethius and elakrion

-romelea: a viberant county that is known for its beautiful textiles and metallurgy

-koria: a small country next to the islands of rot, orez and fallat

- avelon: a nation that is old enough to have remembered when domino was at the hight of its power.

Cities: nympi, asgort, elfim

-Ev: small poor country who’s ruling family is cursed

-nations of nymphs: a loose alliance of near three dozen tiny countries

Cities: minth, areandous, daphne, tylin, capipso, cirsis

-pador: home to the forest of oblivion and the guard house of the books of legendarium

-polaris: cold and far north, was once home to domino as well but the land was covered in eternal glaciers from a spell that the legion of light used to seal up some of the army of darkness. It’s icy landscape is why Polaris is not a realm in and if itself.

Cities: icelands

— seas—

-bylar ocean

-sylarian ocean

-eraklyon sea

-adovair sea

-salit sea

-infinite ocean of andros

- sea of shimmering flowers

—Information on fairies and other things —

Fairy animals: animals who have some semblance of the same kind of magic as fairies

Burned ones: created by powerful magic during the dominion wars,

Beasts of darkness:

Shadow monsters: creatures made and controlled by dark fairies creatures like

- kerog (small bat like creature)

- shade mastiffs (dog like creatures)

-tar monster ( long and reptile like)

-many mumbling mouths ( slug like many mouthed creature)

- gergthro ( bipedal, batwinged, lion like creature)

- shade guardians ( bipedal four armed one horned wolf like creatures)

-bugbear (bear like creatures)

-dark giants (very large headless humanoid)

Ice serpent, a creature only found on polariz, highly terrestrial with an icy breath

Ice beasts: created from magic.

Storm harpies: an ancient cursed caused by darkness magic they only live in lymphea and andros

Electric octopus: an octopus that creates electric shock like first world eals

Shimmer shells: rare valuable sea shells only found in the oceans of andros.

Hydra lizards: lizards with multiple heads

Quill cats: cats with tails full of sharp thorns

Fairy hunters: a menice in the first world, a creation of the nation of hoggar, to combat fairies that where sent to hoggar from solaria. Nowadays they are a secret order that kills dangerous fairies

Night children: also called vampires. They can be fairies but also others. They are rare and have been around since before the dominian war.

Kelpie: shapeshifting water monsters

Dragons: nowadays rare creatures but there is a large variety of them.