I started the day (yesterday) looking up snake species, including their taxonomic classifications. As of the last couple hours, I've so far seemingly pivoted to... Looking up distinct Mesopotamic tablets containing the name of Ereshkigal.

Some Mesopotamic tables have no photo and no line art (i.e.the visual diagram of the identified cuneiforms), just the textual transcription. Others have photo but no line art. Others have just the line art. The second situation led me into this rabbit hole of trying to make sense of the originally handwritten cuneiforms, as in, the specific version carved onto the clay tablets, which seems very different from the modern cuneiform representation from archaeologists and the Unicode symbols... Speaking of which, the specific codepoint for eresh (𒎏, U+1238F, which is also nin, lady/queen) is broken on Android (as seen in my previous usage a few characters before this very parenthetical aside).

Anyways, now I have an entire new album on my phone entitled "linguistic - Mesopotamia". And several freshly-hoarded photos of snakes too.

Why, you may ask? Because I added a snake to my earlier to-become-a-t-shirt artwork, and the owl is holding a fragment of a Mesopotamic tablet with the name of Ereshkigal.

(Why do some Mesopotamic tablets have holes drilled through them? To me it seems like attempts (either modern and/or ancient) to damage the name and memory of Ereshkigal/Alatu...)