Update & Map Drop Next Week (Patreon)

As we ramp down for the holiday season and get ready to ring in the new year, I've been looking back and reflecting on all the accomplishments we've achieved this year.

In 2023, we focused on completing the Sprouting from Babel map series on regional languages. We completed some beautiful maps focusing on SoN lore with an ambitious shift in our usual aesthetics. We also made clever maps to depict seemingly mundane distributions of staple commodities, while also producing classic standalone maps of Altera's biogeography. This was also the year we did our American Nations map, as well as our slightly less serious map for a presidential election in the contemporary United States.  

We did this all thanks to amazing support we receive from this most beautiful, diverse, and evergrowing community of syntopian fellow travellers. Ours is a society of odd balls, armchair historians, mappers, and people from all walks of life based in all corners of the world. I love waking up to read the Discord community's chatter, where people from Nusantara and Europe and the Middle East are working on flags for the project or discussing lore or even just chin-wagging for good measure.  In the realm of language, especially, I feel incredibly fortunate to have had the privilege of closely collaborating with a Nahuatl-speaker, an Inuktitut linguist, Amazigh- and Riffian-speaking people, as well as reaching Papuan communities in eastern Indonesia and having a Guarani-speaker reach out to me. 

After doing this for a few years now, I can confidently say that this project is definitely a passion project that I will never be able to rid myself of, and I can't see my way out of it for the foreseeable future. So I guess I'm stuck with Altera, and hopefully so are you :)

I hope you all enjoy great moments with family and good company!

PS: We're just in the final stages of copy-editing this month's feature map, one to wrap up our language focus. This one is going to be added to our big signature maps, to go alongside the political and chorographical wall-mount maps. It's been awhile since we've done a wall-mount style world map. I'm excited to share it with you next week (around the 28th or 29th).