Hey guys! Sorry about the delay in response, night-shift makes my energy levels fluctuate across the work-period.
@rana y sapo It's hard to know where to start. Madagascar is the size of Oregon, California, and a good chunk of Washington combine, with eighteen ethnicities with longer histories of cultural and linguistic separation than the French and the Germans, and a collective history that reads like Game of Thrones, but with Arab traders and Pirate Kings. 80-90% of the Flora and Fauna is endemic, so it's as close to an alien planet as you're really going to get. There's quite a bit of variation in civic culture, what with the insular nature of a country whose government is being paid a lot by foreign interests not to develop/repair their infrastructure, forcing the sale of Madagascan natural resources (which include every imaginable resource, and some beyond) at lower than market value and purchase of manufactured goods at higher than the going rating, creating artificial widespread fiscal poverty, forcing a high degree of jugaad engineering, ingenuity, and agricultural self sufficiency. Child prostitution isn't really a visible feature of the society, though I saw one or two in one of the major cities, but prostitution itself is rampant in the few areas that can be described as "touristy;" a blend of Indo-Asiatic, African, Melanesian, Arabo-Sahel, and European bloodlines have made a people group that we in the west find very, very physically attractive, which has led to a lot of young, beautiful Malagasy brides marrying some rather decrepit French pensioners. Other issues are deforestation, cattle-rustling, and the recent effect of global warming on the formerly-dependable monsoon/dry season, which is rapidly becoming typhoon/drought season. That said, there are vast swathes of Madagascar that are exquisite, whether the Beaches, the Tandroy (alien, lush, thorny desert), the highland rice terraces, the Tsingy (alien, stone shard spires that cut through anything but metal and kevlar), the caves, the rainforests that cling to the mountainous spine of the country against the tides of deforestation and occasional renewal, the red and yellow rivers, the ancient cities of distinctly african brick architecture, the constellations of pirate islands that still ship with schooners - gas is expensive if you're a developing country - and the cities, with their crumbling French colonial architecture and their Mad-Max repairs, and their cafes, and markets, and cobblestone Peugeot traffic.
I went to teach at a religious university, because there's a lot I'm willing to endure for a prolonged visa in Madagascar, and despite sequestered life in the countryside during the semesters, I got to travel quite a bit on my breaks, both northward and southward. I befriended a lot of the local faculty, pissed off a lot of the white South African administration by "going native," and got to road trip around with locals, celebrate traditions, and receive house-guest hospitality the compassion of which I've never seen equal. The food is incredible, the people are friendly, intelligent, gracious, and have a humorous sense of gravity, and I fell deeply in love with the country, despite getting hit with typhoid, weeks-long power outages, bandits, and a class-4 super typhoon. If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.
@Hillbilly Castro Likewise howdy!! The Adirondacks look beautiful, and I'd indeed be interested in getting in on a bit of a home base through which to loop some road-orbits, but I'm not flush with cash at the moment, and land is unfortunately difficult to come by without it. Best of luck! And if Steampunk is an alternate past or present, Solar Punk is a potential future, a utopian reaction to our dystopian cultural fascinations, or if not Utopian (No-Place), Eutopian (A-Good-Place). Like most speculative fiction, it hinges around some major What-Ifs (Steampunk: what if we'd put more development into mechanical engineering than electrical, vacuum tube than transistor, bronze alloys than steel, victorian conventionality than wholesale world-war self slaughter; Cyberpunk: what-if the eighties and nineties continued unabated, and humans really are essentially terrible)... but the fundamental what-ifs of Solar Punk are "What if we can actually get our shit together, as a species?" and "What if we can recover from peak capitalism, peak government, peak resource addiction?" This leads to a lot of ethnically-cosmopolitan inclusivity, focus on resource self-sufficiency, defiance of the current system, a focus on human economy as our species' ecology, a lot of ecological focus itself... Aesthetically, it tends to look very Art-Nouveau, with a dash of Hippytechture, wearable tech, and that bit of the Seventies where PBS watchers decided to revive old-school craftspersonship, ancom communalism, whole earth catalog, etc. Ideologically, it's driving a lot of the tumblr generation over to historical thinkers like Kropotkin, Woody Guthrie, Engels, the Diggers, and other classical-preblackbloc-anarchists, which helps provide some guidance to the modern sentiments - noble, if somewhat directionless - of resistance and antifascism. What I find rather fantastic about the whole thing is that is it started as a writing prompt, with a bunch of internet-based writers imagining specific kinds of ecological tech, and then the science side of tumblr responding, "we already have that, just actually use it." XD It's a very positive, builder-focused green anarchy, which is something that strikes a bit of a chord with me, I guess.
@Matt Derrick My go-tos are "Spokanistan," and "Spo-Vegas."
I was born here, then moved away as a kid, and now I'm back lol
