retired ske elitist blog

@voidofcitrine they had a song named BELLA that’s....um... it’s better if u see it:

Cities - go near water!  freshwater lakes and rivers (rivers especially) are the best places for cities because A) source of water and B) travel and trade is much easier cus you can put your boats like right there.  Basically ever relevant city ever was built on a lake or a river.

for rivers in general - because gravity, rivers run from mountains (forming from melting snow and ice (this is why they get fat in spring–more stuff melting)) to lakes/ocean where they can empty out (and even lakes will have rivers leading out that eventually get to the ocean), which can help when mapping out where those start and end.  rivers are also much thinner and faster in steeper elevations and very slow and wide when the land is flat

mountains - i like to think of what the tectonic plates look like because that’s what makes mountains!  mountains are also never standalone they’re always in mountain ranges (archipelagos are really just underwater mountain ranges babey).  a cool trick I like to do is occasionally separate mountain ranges across continents, because over time the tectonic plates shifted and literally split the range in half.  These mountains are really old tho so they’ve eroded and therefore it makes them smaller and rounder (like the appalachians) as opposed to relatively young mountain ranges like the rocky mountains which have taller and sharper peaks

Another mountain trick: if your mountains run along the ocean, the ocean side of the mountains will get a LOT of rain while the other side will be very dry–almost desert-like, in fact.  think of temperate rainforests in British Columbia vs the drier conditions in the canadian prairies

forests - depends on how warm the area might be.  coniferous forests are found further north (before you hit the tree line, and then it’s only tundra onwards) but as you head south you get leafier trees, and the leaves tend to get larger too

If you think about general elevation too, you’ll have places that might be swampy (wet + lower).  if your world has an ice age like we did, then glaciers may have carved the land, leaving piles of soil in the south that was left when the ice receded and places where the bedrock has been bared north of that (like the Canadian Shield in Canada–the reason we see that is because of the glaciers)

You might also have a land that’s dotted in a shitton of freshwater lakes as well because the meltwater filled the holes that the glaciers scraped out (this is why canada has so many goddamn lakes)

and if the ice age was more recent than it was in our world, then you might not even have the forest re-growth and it could be a lot of open plains

Though, for fantasy, you can make the world operate on entirely different principles:

With that done, the actual topic of city placement can be covered by videos like this:

Or

Once you have your places, if you want help naming them in realistic ways, this video can help:

This one is on architecture, which is definitely a subset of cities:

But for a more relevant practical guide on making settlements realistic:

Here’s a quick guide for making demographics:

(here’s my one)

But I haven’t seen any mention of this brand before, memes or no, so why has this suddenly shown up on Tumblr? Especially since it’s pretty low priced compared to a lot of designer names. Let me google! 

Ah. AOC bought a somewhat pricey, but practical, designer name bag, supporting a Black immigrant both directly and by providing publicity for his business. Suddenly, a post appears on Tumblr encouraging socialist and communist-leaning people to hate people carrying this particular designer name bag. 

She’s up for reelection in two months.

The US government just killed Lezmond Mitchell, a Native American man.

It is against the law for the US Government to order the death of a tribal citizen without the approval of the corresponding sovereign Nation's approval. The Navajo Nation (to whom Mitchell belongs) actively campaigned against his execution. This is the first execution of a Native American by the occupying US government in modern times.

These people where advocating AGAINST the execution of a child killer.

In this case, the Navajo nation has sovereignity, which means that for that murderer to be killed, their approval was necessary.

It is to be expected, this government is very pro death penalty even if it means ignoring the rights of sovereign nations