Local Fandom Harpy

All the paintings:

And then mine specifically which looks small next to the massive ones on either side of mine lmao

Took reference photo of the set up so I could keep working on it might be slightly off angle from where I was looking but w/e

Also close up of the teacher's painting:

I like what I did, and feel I have progressed skill wise, I just don't think it's finished. I want to finish painting and correct the faux chaise lounge, polish the lamp, add the skull, create more contrast in the background walls vs floor and maybe neaten the windows and add in the curtains. OH!! and add in the greenery.

The last long pose painting where we did 5 weeks on the main painting I did (as opposed to 3 weeks) was like, in August of 2024 apparently?? At least I THINK it was??

So 2024 vs 2026:

Hack philosopher Nathan Cofnas published a substack article documenting evidence of Arday's plagiarism in his PhD dissertation. Nathan Cofnas, by the way, is a racist and eugenicist/scientific racist who believes in a "hereditarian revolution," and that intelligence can be linked to race. Cofnas was fired from his research assistant position at Emmanuel College, Cambridge when he posted a blog post basically saying black people are less intelligent and that in a real meritocracy there would be zero black professors at Harvard.

So Cofnas is bitter about losing his job on account of being a wildly racist moron. And he found that Cambridge's "youngest ever black professor" had mostly likely lied about his entire backstory and plagiarized MUCH of his academic work, including his dissertation. Cofnas found the one guy he believes proves him right about all black academics just being DEI hires and not actually qualified. He has heavily pushed other white racist reactionaries into fixating on this and it's not because he gives a shit about plagiarism in general — to my knowledge, Cofnas never fixated on Dr. William O'Reilly at Cambridge who was found guilty of plagiarizing his own students *and* who threatened to sue the student journalists who published these findings. O'Reilly is, no surprises here, white. He was found guilty of plagiarism a few years ago and was also not fired by Cambridge.

And Cambridge, of course, is heavily to blame for this entire debacle — because they cared more about the appearances of supporting diversity and equity and being able to brag about Arday's hiring than researching any of the numerous insane red flags in Arday's personal story (and there are SO SO MANY).

Finally, the actual evidence and personal stories of Arday are almost certainly indicative of plagiarism and fraud or more generally just telling wild lies about his personal life and disabilities.

So this story blew the fuck up in ways O'Reilly's didn't, because this story involves larger impacts of racism and antiblackness that will essentially overlook a white man's crimes but try to destroy a black man for the same thing *and* then use that to imply something about *all* black academics; discussions of equity in education (Arday was a sociologist focused on education and equity); and the culture hot button of "DEI".

/ end tl;dr.

And unfortunately today it was announced that Arday was found dead, presumably of suicide until further information was released.

And I swear to God the number of people who cannot bring themselves to realize that a black man could very well be a liar, plagiarist, and fraud, AND also hugely impacted by racists obsessing over him AND that racism underlies this story, including Cambridge basically hiring someone in order to brag about what they are doing to open up academia to minorities while not actually respecting the work of black academics enough to do real due diligence on their qualifications — is enough to make anyone feel like they're going bananas.

Like: Arday was a chronic liar if nothing else. His personal story was far beyond believability.

Among other things, he claimed: he was totally mute/nonverbal until almost the age of 12 as part of his autism; that doctors said he was essentially a vegetable as a child; that he was basically illiterate until the age of 18, and had the reading level of a young child during his master's degree; that he was beaten as a kid so badly by other teens that he developed epilepsy; that he once ran 600 miles in six days; that he has survived two brain tumors (and had to relearn his dissertation due to memory loss as a result of one of them), or possibly testicular cancer - the story changed.

So I think his academic career was never going to recover from all of this, especially because he was being trotted out as a minority-overcomes success story for education equity.

But like, the ways in which some people are talking about his presumed suicide and the consequences of his fraud is absolutely GHOULISH. GHOULS

Explaining to people that multiple things can be true at once is like trying to get a baby to do quantum physics or something like holy fucking moses in a basket of reeds.

Arday was a liar, probably also a fraud and plagiarist. cambridge should be the main villain of this story for failing to do basic due diligence when hiring him and ignoring concerns raised by other people. And for essentially fucking over all other black academics by playing into reactionary arguments that minorities who get jobs only do so because of DEI and not because of their qualifications.

The fact that a media fire storm fixated on arday and that a white professor who was found guilty of plagiarizing at Cambridge a few years ago kept his job and basically became a non-story is related to anti-black racism and white reactionaries protesting DEI. Cofnas's fixation and his shitty eugenics and scientific racism was his motivation for researching Arday's story and academic writing. Arday being guilty of any of these things doesn't mean racism isn't also involved in the way this all played out. And people who are being flippant about Arday dying are being ghouls because plagiarism doesn't merit dying, and the man has two young children. You can think someone is fundamentally wrong about something and even committed fraud and plagiarism that disqualifies them from a specific career without wanting them to die about it, or being glib about them "dying to avoid consequences."