Opal

Curse of the Golden Flower / 满城尽带黄金甲 (2006)

Visionary Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou reunites with his former muse/partner, Gong Li, for this Tang Dynasty-set wuxia period piece / familial melodrama, the most expensive film of its era, which consciously employs an over-the-top aesthetic of opulence and excess as class critique.

Director: Zhang Yimou

Cinematographer: Zhao Xiaoding

Costume Designers: Jessie Dai and Chung-Man Yee

Production Designer: Tingxiao Huo

The pyramids were built by contemporary workers who received wages and were fed and taken care of during construction

The Dendera “lightbulb” is a representation of the creation myth and has nothing to do with electricity

We didn’t find “““copper wiring””” in the great pyramid either

Hatshepsut wasn’t transgender

The gods didn’t actually have animal heads

Hieroglyphs aren’t mysteriously magical; they’re just a language (seriously we have shopping lists and work rosters and even ancient erotica)

The ancient Egyptian ethnicity wasn’t homogeneous

While the Egyptians were fine-ass astronomers they didn’t align any of their enormous and/or important buildings to modern star constellations, because constellations look very different now than they did ~5000 years ago 

Speaking of that particular sphinx, the Napoleonic expedition is not responsible for its missing nose

Akhenaten was not a “heretic” by contemporary standards

Ramses II appropriated a lot of his predecessors’ buildings/reliefs and isn’t really deserving of the epithet “the Great”

It was not, in fact, practice to shave off eyebrows after cats died; Herodotus lied about that

Here are some vetted Egyptological books/sources (that are by and large appropriate for a lay-audience) you can find most, if not all of the above:

Lehner, M., The Complete Pyramids

Wilkinson, R. H., The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt

Hornung, E., The One and the Many: Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt

Dunand, F. & Zivie-Coche, C., Gods and Men in Egypt

Kemp, B., Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization

Bard, K., An Introduction to the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt

Stevenson Smith, W., The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt

Kitchen, K. A., The Life and Times of Ramesses II, King of Egypt

Sweeney, D., Sex and Gender (in Ancient Egypt)

McDowell, A. G., Village Life in Ancient Egypt:  Laundry Lists and Love Songs

dragon age: the veilguard

currently watching

The litchi road

love in between

love of the divine tree

the first frost

blossom

lost you forever s2

hard to find

dropout (misc shows)

in blossom (ep2)

west out of yumen

strangers from hell

the apothecary diaries

yona of the dawn

frieren

Do you really think you can leave this place?

Do you really think you can leave this place?

It’s an 8-episode K-Drama on Hulu/Disney, with each episode under 45 minutes. It’s classified as a mystery/horror show, a genre I tend to avoid, but I’m glad I got through all 8 episodes, because the payoff despite one night of bad dreams was worth it.

The first four episodes are pretty scary. No jump scares, but the director does a great job building up tension and anxiety in viewers, and actor portrayals of pure terror, helplessness and feeling trapped sold the experience.

But the tone shifts from episode 5, and it becomes more somber and tragic. There’s a lot to cry about; the show and relationships are well written and heart-achingly bittersweet.

It’s a slow burn show where they don’t give everything away until you’re over halfway in, but it’s only 8 episodes long and worth hanging around to finish, and the reveal makes it much more poignant than anything I’d ever expect a horror-genre show to have

On April 8th, 1970, 5 Israeli bombs and 2 airstrikes targeted Bahr el Baqar, a primary school (for children aged 7 to 13) in Port Said, Egypt.

46 Egyptian children were killed, over 50 were injured, and the school was entirely destroyed.

Israel claimed it was an "accident".

[ID: A greyscale photograph of four bloodied corpses of primary school children. There are streaks of blood on the floor. The watermark of Al-Ahram, an Egyptian newspaper, is overlayed in uniform repetition over the photo.]

Description of text in tweets is in ALT.

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"Maybe the Egyptians put elementary students in a military base." I found this to be particularly resonant in light of the school and hospital bombings in Gaza. Same justifications, same lies, same demise of innocents.