No one really knows and that's ok.

^“At the bottom of the image is the segment of the flag cut for the St. Patrick’s Cathedral protest. Photograph by Mick Hicks”

The pyramids were built by contemporary workers who received wages and were fed and taken care of during construction

The Dendera “lightbulb” is a representation of the creation myth and has nothing to do with electricity

We didn’t find “““copper wiring””” in the great pyramid either

Hatshepsut wasn’t transgender

The gods didn’t actually have animal heads

Hieroglyphs aren’t mysteriously magical; they’re just a language (seriously we have shopping lists and work rosters and even ancient erotica)

The ancient Egyptian ethnicity wasn’t homogeneous

While the Egyptians were fine-ass astronomers they didn’t align any of their enormous and/or important buildings to modern star constellations, because constellations look very different now than they did ~5000 years ago 

Speaking of that particular sphinx, the Napoleonic expedition is not responsible for its missing nose

Akhenaten was not a “heretic” by contemporary standards

Ramses II appropriated a lot of his predecessors’ buildings/reliefs and isn’t really deserving of the epithet “the Great”

It was not, in fact, practice to shave off eyebrows after cats died; Herodotus lied about that

Here are some vetted Egyptological books/sources (that are by and large appropriate for a lay-audience) you can find most, if not all of the above:

Lehner, M., The Complete Pyramids

Wilkinson, R. H., The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt

Hornung, E., The One and the Many: Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt

Dunand, F. & Zivie-Coche, C., Gods and Men in Egypt

Kemp, B., Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization

Bard, K., An Introduction to the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt

Stevenson Smith, W., The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt

Kitchen, K. A., The Life and Times of Ramesses II, King of Egypt

Sweeney, D., Sex and Gender (in Ancient Egypt)

McDowell, A. G., Village Life in Ancient Egypt:  Laundry Lists and Love Songs

Now Towering was laughing. He was far too relaxed for a bound man, and Blouse sounded far too much like a nice but worried man trying to appear firm and determined. To Polly, it was like watching a child bluffing in poker against a man called Doc.

‘A word in private, Perks?’ snapped Blouse. He drew her closer, but Polly kept her eye on Sergeant Towering. He might be bound hand and foot, but she wouldn’t have trusted a man who grinned like that if he’d been nailed to the ceiling.

‘Perks, you are making a great contribution but I really will not have my orders continually questioned,’ said Blouse.

‘You are my batman, after all. I think I run a “happy ship” here, but I will be obeyed. Please?’

The fine Rank and File (or at least the rank) of the Ankh Morpork city watch! I've been figuring out my designs for them, and I wanted to put them in a lineup to see how they look beside one another. makes you realize how ridiculous the height difference between some of them is

[ID: three digital drawings of the Watch members, against a police lineup background with height marks and an ankh morpork city watch watermark and logo. The featured members are in order of height: Detritus, Dorfl, Carrot, Angua. then Reg Shoe, Visit, Colon, and Vimes. finally, Nobby, Cheery, Buggy Swires and Wee Mad Arthur. they are all wearing variations on the watch uniform of brass colored armor, chainmaille, leather boots or sandals, and a skirt of studded leather straps. end ID]

more detailed description of the designs under the cut

Over the last 20 years, Kazakhstan managed to resurrect the Small Aral Sea, a.k.a. the North Aral, a small part of the Aral Sea, which once was the fourth largest lake in the world, bustling with life and abundance. Situated between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the Aral Sea fell victim to the Soviet Union’s agricultural policies. In the 1960s, when both nations were part of the Soviet Bloc, officials began cultivating vast stretches of barren land in Central Asia by diverting water from the two main rivers that fed the Aral Sea: the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya. Without water from them, more than 90 percent of the lake’s surface area dried up, turning the sea into the Aralkum Desert, filled with toxic pesticides and fertilisers washed down from the cotton fields. After years of restoration efforts, the North Aral, located on the Kazakh side of the dried-up sea, has become an astounding success story in reversing one of the worst anthropogenic environmental disasters in world history. Health and environmetal consequences The consequences of draining such a colossal body of water were devastating and continue to affect the population of regions around the sea and beyond. It significantly affected the climate, manifesting in unbearably hot summers and harsh frosts in winter. The residents of the Aral Sea region were hit hardest. In the late 1990s, the child mortality rate in the region was the highest in the world, and the situation remains dire. Every year, storms disperse 80 million tons of toxic sand and salt from the lake bed, which poisons the population, leading to a myriad of chronic and deadly diseases. NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites have been documenting the diminishing of the Aral Sea since 2000. Image from NASA Goddard Photo and Video. License: CC BY 2.0 Various regional studies found toxic substances, insecticides, and dangerous pesticides in the blood and urine of adults and children, and even in the milk of nursing mothers. Adults and children in the region often suffer from anaemia, cancer, kidney disease, and epidemic-spreading tuberculosis. Economically, the drying up of the sea killed off the finishing industry, one of the main sources of livelihood and food for locals. Until the 1960s, the annual fish catch amounted to 80 thousand tons, making the Aral Sea by far the largest fishery basin in Central Asia.

In addition to fish, which all disappeared from the sea due to increased salinity, the Aral Sea disaster also led to the extinction or endangerment of dozens of mammals, birds, and plants in the area.

Save a small part or lose all of it?

By the early 1990s, after the Soviet Union fell and Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan became independent, the Aral Sea stopped existing as a single body of water. It was divided into the “Big” Aral on the southern Uzbek side, fed by Amu Darya, and the “Small” Aral on the northern Kazakh side, fed by Syr Darya.

Connecting these two bodies of water was a narrow channel, which ran from the Kazakh city of Aralsk to the largest biological weapon testing site in the world, built by the Soviet Union on the so-called Vozrozhdenie Island, located in the Big Aral.

Uzbekistan failed to direct water from the Amu Darya, which originally fed 70 percent of the water to the sea. Consequently, the Big Aral became an evaporating pot for the water coming from the Syr Darya as well, which trickled down from the north, pushing Kazakhstan to prioritize saving the North Aral.

Put simply, there was not enough water to save the entire sea.

Thus, in 2005, Kazakhstan built the Kokaral Dam to trap water flowing from the Syr Darya and save the North Aral. Stretching 13 kilometers, the dam was built with the financial support of the World Bank.

By the time the dam was built, there were no fish left in the North Aral, and the shoreline had retracted 40 kilometers away from Aralsk, a former port town. In addition to building the dam, the authorities also modernized the irrigation and water distribution system to increase the flow capacity of the Syr Darya and save water for the North Aral.

Parts of the Aral Sea, a once-expansive body of water between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, have dried up, leaving boats grounded and the region desertified. Image from Flickr. License: CC BY 2.0

The results have been an astounding success. In 2025, the total volume of water in the North Aral increased by 42 percent and reached 27 billion cubic meters. This helped to decrease the salinity level by four times and reclaim 870 square kilometers of previously dried up sea bed.

Here is a YouTube video about the resurrection of the North Aral.

[you'll need to visit the article for this because i can't view or copy embedded yt videos]

Environmentalists also reintroduced fish to the sea — so successfully that the annual catch reached 8,000 tons, reviving the fishing industry and boosting local economic development.

Continued resurrection efforts

More good news awaits the North Aral in the near future. The Kazakh government has already announced that it will start implementing the second stage of the project to resurrect the North Aral and will continue cooperating with the World Bank and researchers.

Between 2026 and 2029, the authorities plan to make the Kokaral Dam wider and taller to help raise the water level from 40.4 to 44 mBS (meters of the Baltic system). This will also increase the water volume from 27 to 34 billion cubic meters and expand the water surface to 3,913 square kilometers.

In addition to reconstructing the dam, Kazakhstan will modernize and automate irrigation systems in the Turkestan and Kyzylorda provinces, through which water from the Syr Darya flows. This will further improve water resource efficiency and direct the saved water to the North Aral.

Here is a YouTube video about the next steps to resurrect the North Aral.

(this one apparently works?)

Ultimately, the goal is to improve the socio-economic standing of the population and the environmental situation of the nearby region.

Kazakhstan’s biggest challenge going forward is the sustainability of the North Aral. The interim success is built on man-made support, which makes the current landscape quasi-natural, characterized as “imperfect, unnatural, and weak” from the sustainability viewpoint.

Reports of significantly reduced fish catch amounts in 2025, from 7.8 to 3.9 thousand tons, and the receding water line underscore the precariousness of this victory.

Kazakhstan’s status as a “downstream country” also contributes to the sustainability problem, making it dependent on the upstream and neighboring Kyrgyzstan for a steady water supply. Not to mention the rapid melting of glaciers that feed the Syr Darya.

I don't live in a walkable city.

I live in a mid-sized Texas town that only realizes that there are people who don't drive when TXDoT gives them money for active transportation infrastructure.

People constantly tell me that you just cannot walk or ride a bike in this city. It's impossible!

I do it anyway, because I firmly believe that solarpunk is a useless aesthetic if you aren't living it as best you can. We don't need technology to solve our problems we need will.

Also I do volunteer work on the political side of the local animal shelter and so I find myself at city hall several times a year and there's no bike rack.

Or rather there wasn't a bike rack.

I complained to someone, politely, informing them that I am doing this volunteer work and I don't have any safe place to lock my bike and that locking it to a handrail is inconvenient for everyone and also hideous.

A few months later a single staple-style bike rack was installed at city hall. It's not much, but I got sent a photo of someone else who got to use it before I did, clearly there was a need, if small.

Then I turned my gaze to the local grocery store, which had a bike rack, but the bike rack was terrible. It was too short for modern tire sizes, it was placed too close to the wall so one side was useless, and it was generally pretty cramped.

It took some time, but an advocate friend told me to contact the property owner instead of banging my head against the wall contacting HEB itself, and so I sent another polite complaint with a photo, explaining why it wasn't a very good bike rack and it would be really cool if we had a different one with better placement.

And about two months later, we have new staple-style racks at the grocery store, properly placed for maximum parking.

It's not a new bike lane. It's not a removal of parking minimums. It's not infill development or an active transportation advisory board.

They're just bike racks.

But that's the beauty of it. I, a person with an email address, some basic "how to be firm but polite while making an argument" skills, and a willingness to work out who to contact, fixed two problems for the local community. Trust me, I have had people wait on me to unlock my bike so they could have the "good spot." I was not the only person annoyed at the old rack.

It can be done. You're not powerless. Solarpunk doesn't have to be a wishful aesthetic.

Technology will not save us.

[Second ID: The full screenshot of the aforementioned poem. Transcript is as follows:

Good Bones / Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I've shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I'll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that's a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.

And I juxtapose that with pterry’s telling Neil Gaiman that his anger is what’s made him a bestselling author.

And yeah, you know what? These books are angry. Vimes is angry and Susan is angry and Granny Weatherwax is angry, and the entire Monsterous Regiment is angry, and sometimes Adora Dearheart is angrier than all of them. Moreover, Tiffany can’t become a witch until she’s willing to be angry.

You have to do the right things with your anger. You have to drag goblin-killers to justice, not get drunk and fight the gutter. You have to tell the football gangs to shove it, not tell your best friend to walk away from fame and fortune. But anger is what changes the world.

And Pratchett’s anger resonates with us, and makes us recognize our opportunities to change the world. We read these books and we catch the anger like a disease, and discworld shapes it like a mold, and so his anger goes on living, goes on revolutionizing, even after he dies.

The band, the music, the dance.

1. Playing an instrument is difficult. Doing so in sync with others even more so. Don’t think I’m stepping on any toes saying that.

2. Dancing is difficult. Doing so in sync with others even more so. Still not controversial.

3. YOU AVOID, AT ALL COSTS, MOVING YOUR BODY WHILE PLAYING A WIND INSTRUMENT.  To make the correct, pleasant sounds, you need to be in the correct form. And that form involves your ENTIRE body, even your legs when sitting down.

4. “oh, but I’ve seen marching bands before and-” MARCHING BANDS HAVE ENTIRE SCIENTIFIC FIELDS DEDICATED TO FIGURING OUT HOW TO MARCH WITH MINIMUM BREAKING OF PROPER FORM. A marching band tries to be as smooth as possible while moving, so as not to jar their instrument, mouth, neck, arms, torso, or anything else.These ladies and gentlemen are BOUNCING and still playing properly, what the FU-!