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

If you have anything more to say to me, you can kindly say it to my lawyer.

conflicting feelings about god

So at the very beginning of the play there was a scene where Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are at a funeral as the primary mourners. A stretcher is carried on with a covered body. The body was notably very small. They laid flowers on it and Macbeth immediately left for battle.

Now *I* studied Shakespeare in college so I immediately knew there is one single line that implies that the Macbeths lost a child at some point. Most of the time this isn't utilized in productions; it's just a throwaway line, intended to paint just how determined Lady M is for this regicide thing to work and how furious she is that her husband has cold feet. In this production she delivers "I have given suck, and know how tender tis to love the babe that milks me" nearly in tears. She takes a moment to steel herself before saying, "I would while it was smiling in my face, have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums and dashed the brains pit, had I so sworn" and she very nearly SCREAMED this in Macbeth's face.

Also noted was how the Macbeths looked at Macduff's children. Lady M was clutching her heart, nearly breaking watching them embrace their parents. Macbeth could not even look at them.

At the end of Lady Macbeth's plot, when she is sleepwalking and sleeptalking, she is typically portrayed as speaking to no one or to her husband. However, at a certain point of her monologue she got on her knees, raised her voice to a comforting octave, and began miming tear wiping, hand holding, hair and face stroking, around a child-sized figure. "Wash your hands, put on your nightgown, look not so pale. I tell you yet again, Banquo’s buried; he cannot come out on’s grave." Then she stands and appears to take the child's hand. "Go to bed, go to bed. I can hear knocking at the gate-" then she looks down and realizes that no one is there, followed be the most heartbreaking shriek I've ever heard followed by a full minute of her just weeping while curled up on the floor before she stood up, finished her monologue and left the stage.

Most of the time when the loss of a child is utilized in a performance or adaptation, it is assumed that the child was an infant and lost some time ago. To imply that the child died IMMEDIATELY prior to the events of the play and had been cared for and loved by their parents for a few years adds such a fascinating layer to the desperation to ascend to the throne, Lady M's madness, and Macbeth's initial hesitation into "in for a penny, in for a pound" attitude, Macbeth's fury that Banquo's, not his, children will take the throne, and even Macbeth's eventual demise following a frenzied final battle.

How far will grief push you to fill a hole? How far will grief push you to desperation? And what happens when none of your new pursuits are filling the void left by the one you lost? And what happens when you realize you have nothing left to lose?

I’m currently trying to get a member of the british peerage to give me £50 because we’re distant cousins. I appreciate her.

she travels around for these videos and one day she went to Manchester and parked on a road called Collier Street.

Collier Street has (or had, at the time) another car park at the end of it - the SIP car park. SIP is a private company that runs these. the signage on Collier Street indicated that the payment machine there was where you’re supposed to pay, so Zoë and a fuckload of other people assumed that that was where you got the tickets. Zoë put it on her car and went about fucking with whoever she decided to confuse today

she gets back to her car, has a parking ticket, and is confused

again - she paid for a ticket. she wasn’t trying to get out of paying.

because she’d bought a ticket from the machine that the SIP car park instead of the council run machine that is actually on a different road, she’d been ticketed. and, rightly so, she contests it and the person at the council says that the rules are the rules and there’s clear signage

Zoë: the signage is misleading

council: we don’t believe it is

Zoë: well, I was misled

council: we believe the signage is adequate

Zoë, being Zoë, doesn’t agree with this. she pulls up literal years’ worth of data on the history of that sign, the parking on the road, and the number of people who got ticketed. very early on, she says she’s not actually bothered about her own ticket, but she’s upset that people are being caught out and sees that it’s a money-making scheme for the council. she speaks to parking wardens, who mostly seem to agree that the signage is misleading. she has data. she calls them back. same response.

Zoë, being an artist, makes her own sign. which she puts up below the official one. and then she waits to see how long it is before it’s taken down.

[note: there was a side quest sometime during this - it went on for months - where she put cones in the parking spaces. the council moved them onto the pavement/sidewalk. this made it inaccessible for wheelchair users, people with prams, other people who can’t just move around them, which is illegal. so she called the council repeatedly to complain about the cones and monitored them until they were moved. this took ages - we are talking weeks.]

Zoë’s sign gets taken down.

the signpost it was attached to, with the misleading sign, becomes a point of pilgrimage for British people who appreciate a good bit of humour with the intent of bullying the local government. it is COVERED in stickers.

her sign is taken down. the sign is not changed. more people get tickets.

[there was a second side quest, where Zoë discovers that the SIP car park - the private one - doesn’t have planning permission. she doesn’t let this slide.]

not happy with this, Zoë calls in to the local radio station. which has a Q&A with Andy Burnham. the Mayor of Manchester. she calls in and asks him about this. Andy Burnham says he’s taking her concern into consideration and will look into it, and get back to her if she calls in next week.

she’s not put through next week.

she contacts his office.

no response.

she calls in again and brings it up.

[all this is happening while she’s repeatedly ringing the council to ask them about it]

she has gone from “harmless tiktok prankster” to “calling out government incompetence”. with a MASSIVE platform.

eventually, after her being interviewed by the BBC, Manchester City Council puts up a sign saying where the actual car park for Collier Street is (there is a running bit where a council worker misheard her and thought she said “Collyhurst Street”, which to my knowledge does not exist. Zoë now exclusively refers to it as that, including in her radio appearance and on her phone calls)

she isn’t done. she now has a petition to force the government to change vague signage. the government said no, all their signage is adequate. she’s now fighting with them. in one of her most recent videos, she was on the phone with the House of Commons enquiry department trying to figure out how to contest it. she’s brilliant.