I love the scruffy train uncle

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

FIFA has also intentionally MADE it worse. Because they're closing the parking lot. They're also preventing ride shares from what I can tell??

Meanwhile the governor of New Jersey is saying this is going to cost NJ $48 million to deal with the ridership, and wanted money to offset that, which FIFA doesn't ever do. So they decided to massively inflate train fares to offset the cost.

Again, while trying to prevent rideshare services from occurring.

Oh, ALSO people in New Jersey and New York City are all being told to "work from home" on days of the world cup matches because the public transit congestion is expected to be that bad, coincides with rush hour, and because for some of it, they're full closing off public transit to anyone who doesn't have FIFA tickets.

And then there are people complaining about our "shitty national stadium" and I don't even know how to begin to explain that MetLife isn't even the biggest capacity stadium in the US. It's not even in the top ten. (It is #15).

I genuinely do hope everyone is just being a bit of a troll when they say they're going to walk on the 95 or some shit because people will 1000% die. I don't even know what a comparable metaphor for this is.

But you cannot just shut this road down:

1) nfrastructure is hard. Like really hard. It's loud, it's expensive (so fucking expensive) and very disruptive to traffic.

2) it's a fucking highway. One of the busiest. It's a really busy section of highway because it has a huge amount of commuters. Do you have any idea how many traffic disruptions that would cause. It would literally months to years of traffic disruptions on one of the biggest highways in the country. It's a direct line into New York City. We have a hard enough time filling potholes and you want us building sidewalks

2) it's so expensive. You don't understand. Because building materials are expensive and you need a lot of them. Then you gotta get people to actually build the things. Depending on on where you source workers, they are probably unionized. Don't get me wrong that's a good thing, but it does balloon the cost. Then you gotta pay people (most likely cops) to guard the projects because it's on a fucking highway and as someone who learned to drive in New Jersey, trust me it's dangerous. Also the cops guarding the sites are definitely unionized and again see above for ballooning costs.

3) the cities did not fuck up. First off, I-95 is owned by the respective state governments so if anything New Jersey and New York fucked up. They didn't, see above. MetLife stadium is in east Rutherford. East Rutherford's total 2025 budget was $32.908.690.24. which seems like a lot until you consider that New York City's 2025 budget was $3.8 billion. That's literally 251.5151 times the budget.

4) FIFA said it would help with the costs and then pulled out of the deal.

Source: I have lived in Jersey and work in government (the people who build the infrastructure)

Neil himself is long gone from this world, and yet every April 13th this group of internet strangers come together to celebrate him and his act of banging out the tunes. Like an entire holiday, all for this little guy

that shit has to be done by wednesday. it's almost april 15.

do not panic, you got this. this is just to help make sure you got this by wednesday. wednesday, april 15. you got this.

also google your state + "state return free file" and the state's tax dept website probably has a list of services that will e-file your federal AND state returns for free if you meet the income restrictions.

(you probably do.)

fuck turbotax. there are better, still easy options not trying to nickle and dime your broke ass for this nonsense out there, and you can probably use a few of them to file fed AND state for free.

by wednesday.

wednesday, april 15. 2026.

I'm glad I was able to make a 413 tribute this year. Art block and little time were my main obstacles, but skipping this day is something I simply can not allow. Of course there's always this desire to make something grandiose and exciting, sadly I have no such opportunity (but there's always next time).

As for the idea, I was going to draw something much moodier and maybe more personal (as I often do) at first, but it didn't feel quite right. So in the end I went with a more stylized approach and a more "familiar" scenario. It was nice to try out something different, and I'm rather happy with the result (also the process was fun. Using Rebelle instead of the usual CSP helped with that a lot.)

Anyway, happy 413, everyone! (if this day can even be happy)

P.S. the title is rather ironic, but that's the point.

Speed painting video \/