Bangel Appreciation Week 2026 | Day 5: A colour you associate with Bangel

Now, I thought this AI generated garbage was just truly terrible on a number of levels; first off, she looks wayyyyyy too modern - her makeup is very “Hollywood glamour”, she looks airbrushed and de-aged, and as far as I’m aware, Ancient Egyptians didn’t have mascara, glitter-based eyeshadows and lip gloss. Secondly, her features are exceptionally whitewashed in every sense - this is pretty standard for AI as racial bias is prevalent in feeding AI algorithms, but I genuinely thought a depiction of such a known individual would not exhibit such euro-centric features. Thirdly, the outfit was massively desaturated and didn’t take pigment loss into consideration, and while I *do* like the look of the neck attire, it's not at all accurate (plus, again, AI confusion on the detailing is evident).

So, this inspired me to alter the image on the left to be more accurate based off the sculpture’s features. I looked into Ancient Egyptian makeup and looked at references for kohl eyeliner and clay-based facial pigment (rouge was used on cheeks, charcoal-based powder/paste was used to darken and elongate eyebrows), and I looked at pre-existing images of Nefertiti, both her mummy and other reconstructions. While doing this, I found photos of a 3D scanned sculpture made by scientists at the University of Bristol and chose to collage the neck jewellery over the painting (and edited the lighting and shadows as best as I could).

Something I see a lot of in facial recreations of mummies is maintaining the elongated and skinny facial features as seen on preserved bodies - however, fat, muscle and cartilage shrink/disappear post mortem, regardless of preservation quality; Queen Nefertiti had art created of her in life, and these pieces are invaluable to developing an accurate portrayal of her, whether stylistic or realistic in nature.

And hey, while I don't think my adjustments are perfect (especially the neck area), I *do* believe it is a huge improvement to the original image I chose to work on top of.

I really liked working on this project for the last few days, and I think I may continue to work on it further to perfect it. But, until then, I hope you enjoy!

for those unaware, the spaghetti wall of letters and numbers is a base64-encoded JPEG image (and not a URL as some guessed). in certain cases when you tried to insert/paste an image into what’s ostensibly a text-only box, this could happen.

the thing that’s bugging me however is that there’s image data there. we have fairly a clear (albeit with JPEG artifacts) screenshot of text that, thanks to how Windows ClearType renders text, each character is identical to each other, that is to say, an uppercase Q will always look more or less pixel-perfect each time, meaning we don’t have to guess what a Q looks like, we simply have to pixel-accurate match it.

as an aside, this is why regular OCR struggles so much with this kind of data retrieval, such as code even when it’s clearer than a physical paper scan. ordinarily, OCR will try to best-guess every single letter because it expects each letter to be slightly different from each other (as would be the unpredictable nature in a scanned document), and on top of that most OCR today will try to autocorrect because it expects the scanned text to contain words in some human written language.

so, all we have to do is make a program to recognize each character and piece back together the whole base64 string, right? well…

first i stitched all 7 images back into a single block of text, observing the consistency of the line spacing. some of the screenshots have little bits of the previous one sticking out of it, which helps with alignment and to make sure they’re in the right order.

after that i had to sample every single letter off this file. this means going around the file and finding one example of each different character we’re trying to identify, saving it as its own separate file so that the program can load them as references to compare against in the full image. for base64, the alphabet consists of a-z, A-Z, 0-9, +, / and =. once i had the initial code in place…

…close! but oh so far. if any one single character in a base64 string is wrong or missing, the resulting decode will be wrong. the issues i was having were mostly with the lowercase r and j because of how the kerning affected the pixels around those letters. i was also getting false matches for r where there should be an m. what followed was grueling hours of tweaking the matching code and my known font set to better fit the original image and get as close as possible to a 100% match. here is the resulting code, maybe it’ll be useful for someone and this won’t have been a complete waste of time.

once i was confident through the verification image that i had all characters recognized, i put it through a base64 to JPEG decoder. i actually did this several times as i improved the recognition and what follows is the best result that came out of it yet. i suspect some of the data might be missing (perhaps a line or block of text got lost in between screenshots), or i have a wrong character somewhere resulting in a wrong value. this is the image extracted from OP’s base64 string:

with this it still doesn’t parse as fully valid base64 in strict mode so i think there’s still another letter in there that’s wrong, but i couldn’t find it. however this gives us a better look:

and this is finally enough to do a reverse image search. i present to you, the HD version of our intrepid massive backpacker:

Was it possible to get finger basted inside a regency carriage?

This is SO IMPORTANT and speaks to the political role of what feminist philosopher Sara Ahmed calls the “killjoy” — an interlocutor who introduces necessary friction to the normative functions of oppression by, in essence, Making it Weird.

Not laughing at the racist joke. Not letting ‘little comments’ slide. Being a humorless feminist. Being a cunt. Holding a grudge. Complaining. Insisting. Holding up the works.

This is and long has been a crucial form of noncompliance in a world obsessed with maintaining oppressive structures through, among other things, carceral norms of politeness, decorum, and subservience. The killjoy disrupts the flow of violent norms & reification of “commonsense” discourses that harm and marginalize people by Making It A Thing: forcing people - esp those with relative privilege - to truly look at inconvenient truths.

A skatepark recently opened up near my house, and that place is always FILLED to the BRIM with kids on the ramps and hanging out. I'm not even sure how some of them are able to get there, but they must, because I see them every day.

I'm 16 and I don't have a job. The main hangout places for my friend group are the mall and getting ice cream somewhere, which is good and fun, but I don't always want to spend money. Hell, we sometimes meet at the local pharmacy to buy candy and stuff.

And then we moved to a suburban area where the nearest bus was 15 minutes away on foot. The library was half an hour away if you didn't have a car, and so was the nearest restaurant.

So I stayed at home. Of course I did. Because I tried doing the things I used to do and they were suddenly far more taxing.