2020, twenty-four hours to go: I've got another bookshelf entry for you!

Happy New Year's Eve everyone, I hope you get the appropriate level of drunk to celebrate the end of this year from hell. I've got a couple rum and Cokes lined up to ring in the New Year right proper, before we all wake up and realize that 2020 won.

I'm not sorry for those puns, and I'd make them again. But to make up for them, I can announce a new bookshelf entry I just finished marking up. It's titled An Academic Journey to a New World, and it's one of two papers I discovered on my laptop from my undergrad days. In what's starting to look like a pattern, I once again dabble on the fringes of known history, weighing evidence for Phoenician and Carthaginian travel to the Americas. I was solidly in favor of this idea as an undergrad, then I swung against it as a graduate student, and now I'm not sure. All I can do is point you towards the evidence, be honest about where that evidence has been debunked in the intervening years, and offer my best guess.

If someone held a gun to my head and told me to guess, I'd say that this particular pre-Columbian contact probably happened. The Phoenicians were no less able seafarers than the Polynesians, who I briefly mention in the introduction almost certainly did make it to the Americas and back. The evidence is scattershot and circumstantial, but not without merit. Some peculiarities about the trade with the city of Ophir mentioned in the first book of Kings in the Bible weighs in its favor, as does some narcotics found in Egyptian mummies, and some shipwrecks off the Eastern seaboard. To learn more, you'll just have to check it out.

How to build a tinyhouse in a desert

I've gotten questions about my tinyhouse. I've left Nevada for the winter, so unfortunately I can only use pics and videos I've already taken to illustrate the process I used to make it, and what it looks like now. And as I look through the video I took, it didn't capture the stuff I thought it was pointing at. It's mostly just me talking and pictures of a cloudless blue sky, so we'll skip that bit. The parts that aren't blue sky have been GIF'd for your viewing pleasure to the left, and my narrative in the video isn't really necessary as I'm writing one here.

The first part was building the road to the property. I won't dwell on it too much except to mention it, because if you're trying to do what I'm doing, property access is always your first consideration. Many people who live near me built their roads through other people's property. For the most part, that's okay - so long as you get on with your neighbors. But the moment a feud starts, you don't have the legal right to drive to your own property on the road you built. So literally, don't cut corners here. It took me three months to even just get to my property, because I was pulling out sagebrush and levelling the dirt and digging swales. But it all went through public property, where the developers of my ghost town had once planned for a road to go before never building it.

More cartographyposting: The British Raj

This is India at the territorial height of the British Raj, give or take an Anglo-Afghan War or three. Another cartographic entry into the galleryposting, and like the last one, I made it for an eventual video I'll make for my Youtube history channel for apolitical normies.