The half-circles are called zaï! They're a traditional farming practice in the Sahel desert, and their introduction + reintroduction can be largely credited to Yacouba Sawadogo, the man linked above! He reintroduced and innovated on the zaï on his own farm in the 1980s, and did extensive outreach (along with scientist Mathieu Ouédraogo) to encourage other farmers to adopt them as well.

He also promoted the use of cordons pierreux, which are basically just lines of rocks to reduce erosion, preserve sediments, and increase water absorption.

second rule of fandom is everything goes back to kirk/spock

third rule of fandom is everything goes back to holmes & watson

the funny thing is. I originally typed out "fifth rule of fandom is everything goes back to gilgamesh & enkidu" but then I thought 'no, I can't trust that people will be familiar with the epic of gilgamesh'

An interesting game where you are presented with 10 artifacts from the MET. You have to place where the artifact is from and what time period it is from. Each artifact scores up to 10,000 points, and you lose points the further away your guess is and how far off in time you are. You can only play once a day. Thanks to @baebeylik for showing this to me.

Today I scored really well. Yesterday ... not so much.

The problem is that everyone has to work 8 hours, pretty much no exceptions, and with getting ready time + (unpaid) lunch + commute, “8 hours” is actually anywhere between 9 and 12, every single day, with more work to do when you get home because our society and culture was built around having one member of the household home full time and nothing has changed now that almost everyone works.

ETA2: we do use inches/miles in poetic ways ("he was lost in thought/miles away" or "his lips were a bare inch away").

HAPPY PRIDE MONTH EVERYBODY!!! I recently finished this pride flag quilt top, which I'll be displaying at my local pride event next week!

I wanted each block to be different and eye catching in its own way, so that you don't get bored looking at bland stripes. This project is a labor of love. I did the math on piecing nearly every block, save for the house block on the bottom right corner. That came from a book. I went through quite a struggle doing all the math to make the blocks that are split diagonally by color. Those were the ones that took me the longest to get through. The regular solid color rainbow blocks? I flew through those in two days, lol!

I'll share closeups below the cut: