Patounes prod

Dungeon Meshi Season 2 is now offical!

Shop update

The stickers are now available!

I’ve also completely revamped my shop:

There are now two ways to buy my products:

Etsy: (stickers and keychains only) https://www.etsy.com/fr/shop/AelKurai

Shop: (includes NSFW artwork) https://aelkurai.sumupstore.com/

If you're a Patron, you have access to a discount code. I'll be posting about it on Patreon soon, but feel free to send me a DM in the meantime.

Some products might still be missing, so if there's anything you can't find, don't hesitate to let me know 🙂

Final Dungeon Fantasy! Which one would you like to play?

I haven't seen anyone talking about this and just wanted to make a quick post on here.

Akihiro Miwa recently passed away peacefully june 20th, and was not only a drag queen and a queer icon, but also the japanese voice of Arceus in the movie Arceus and the jewel of life, as well as the witch from Howl's moving castle and Moro from Princess Mononke.

"The white falcon" Griffith, Berserk

A gift for one of my oldest friends ♥ Want to commission me?

children of any species are very good at being annoying and very cute while doing that

a sphinx child based on this post

Very much did in the sense that I literally do not know where my job is at the moment. But, for the time being I haven't been let go because nobody else including the store owner knows where it is either.

So, I don't wanna risk doxxing myself by posting pictures but goddamn am I tempted because this is not a believable event. This is a cartoon problem. For looneytoons.

But yeah, so, I work(ed?) at a kiosk selling boba tea, right? Freestanding kiosk in the mall with full water and electrical hookups and multiple fridges and sinks and a mini kitchen and the works. Fully functional tea shop. Very important to note that it was there last night, The work chat was discussing another issue last night at closing time. I'll get back to this.

It's been showing signs of being on the way out with how business is being handled lately and I've been considering other options, which is probably why I'm not as torn up about this as I should be, but maybe it just hasn't set in yet, but that's not the point. The point is there's been a lot of shit breaking and not being replaced and nobody mentioning anything about it until I walk into work in the morning and have to figure out why shit like the fucking cash register isn't there today. So I'm kinda used to having to ask questions about big things that nobody bothered to update me on. I was out for two weeks recovering from a surgery, so I came to work this morning assuming there'd be some kind of bullshit, yeah?

So, the question I had to ask the chat this morning was:

Not a text I ever thought I'd have to send in sincerity, but there it is. Because what I found instead was a fenced off patch of discolored tiles and a few holes in the floor where my entire place of employment used to be.

And the answer? Nobody knows! It was there last night when the mall closed, and every single trace of the structure and all its contents including drink making supplies and our safe and cashbox was gone when it opened again. And when I say nobody knows, I mean everyone from last night's closers to the actual (former?) owner of the store jad no fucking clue about this until getting that text from me this morning. For once I am actually the first to know. 🎉.

So. I guess I didn't so much lose my job as had it stolen. Not by AI, but good old fashioned hands-on human beings picking it up and carrying it away somehow. All mall security would tell me was that they were instructed not to tell me anything and have us contact our management. Who also don't know anything. And later on I came across some construction workers around the gravesite of the kiosk discussing filling in the holes, asked them about it, and was told that they "weren't at liberty to say".

So, not only is my job gone in the most literal physical sense of the word, but it was taken in some kind of super secret kiosk extraction in the dead of night without any warning or witnesses and nobody is allowed to speak of it. The store owner said she was gonna figure it out 10 hours ago and still no word back.

My mother in law thinks the FBI took it.

Not any of the other stores around the state. Just the one little kiosk.

Why? Because she loves a conspiracy and is just a little bit extra.

Also because she was around for the massive crackdown on Yakuza-owned businesses in Waikiki (in her homestate) that did actually involve the FBI seizing stores (no confirmation of making kiosks cleanly disappear in the middle of the night though).

Still no word from my job on what's actually going on, but the most likely theory so far is that maybe the kiosk was on lease and got repossessed? The mystery continues

According to the owner, based on what she's been able to find out, the kiosk was not removed legally and they're starting a potentially long process of legal action. I hope she gets to sue the shit out of whoever did it but for now at least I know for sure I'm unemployed.

Really hoping for more details in terms of who/why/how, so I'll keep updating if I learn anything.

For now the summary is: An unnamed entity that is most likely mall management (on account of mall security cooperating with them) stole an entire kiosk and all the contents including money and machinery with barely a trace in the middle of the night grinch-style, with zero warning or explanation, and ensured the silence of both security and the construction crew, in an action that was definitely preplanned and illegal, and as far as I know nobody knows its whereabouts.

Enjoy the unintentionally funniest text I've ever sent in my life

Aaand a close-up:

HEY HI HELLO THIS ONE'S MY FAVORITE

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

When she was representing the Pharoah, she wore male clothing and presumably used male pronouns, but it was ritual theater. She was acting. She also may have died from complications of diabetes because of an overly-rich diet.

Also, the Pyramids (I believe, if I’m getting the project wrong, correct me), were the site of a strike that at first mystified Egyptologists.

Workers struck because they weren’t getting “cosmetics.”

Eventually somebody found reside in a mortar and reverse engineered it, because archaeologists do cool things like that.

Turned out that what we were translating as “cosmetics” was…sunscreen. Dang important safety gear if you’re doing construction work in the desert!

I’ve seen the Tumblr post that claims the whole “cosmetics-turns-out-to-be-sunscreen” and it’s just not accurate. 

The word that post refers to is sqnn, found on recto 2, line 3 of the Turin Strike Papyrus*:

This word is translated as “oil/ointment”. It was used to denote any type of oil or ointment that they weren’t or didn’t want to be too specific about. If you’re curious, you can find all the attestations of the word here. 

So we can’t and shouldn’t translate sqnn as sunscreen. Moreover, I’ve yet to come across a recipe in the medical papyri (my specialisation) that can be interpreted as sunscreen - especially something that’s as good as the stuff we have right now! 

The number one thing most of these points should be followed by is, “we don’t fucking know.” Because we don’t. All of this is a best guess.

Your degree in Egyptology does earn you the right to have some respect for your sources and opinions. But you also should never forget you are being taught the opinion of academia, which is highly conservative, and incestuous, and gets plenty of shit wrong all the time.

If you want to disagree with me or engage in a discussion with me about the things I write, either in this post or in others, that’s fine. You can do that. I only ask for two things if you do: be sure you did your own research, and make a clear point. Don’t, for example, write “some of this is plain ignorant” without specifying what is ignorant and why you think so. Don’t cast aspersions on what I say unless you can and are willing to back your opinion up with a substantive argument.

And as another general note: a lot of what I said in the original post we actually “do fucking know” because the Egyptians themselves told us so. Egyptians wrote their stuff down. We can read the Pharaonic Egyptian languages. We have, for example, the Diary of Merer, which tells us about the workforce that built the pyramids. It’s true that there are gaps in our knowledge, but even if we don’t have unequivocal evidence for something it doesn’t mean we’re only guessing and hoping for the best. Usually we like to form our theories based on proper methodology. Does that leave things still uncertain? Yes. Does that mean that we “don’t fucking know” anything about ancient Egypt ever? No.

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

Of course, the Egyptians absolutely used writing for mundane purposes. But the act of writing itself was seen as a magical act. There are numerous sources and examples of the names of pharaohs being erased or destroyed in order to attack them in the afterlife. This is another good example of how some scholars are unable to put themselves in the entirely magical worldview of the Egyptians. Magic wasn’t a game, it wasn’t a weird hobby, it was totally real and effected everything in their lives. Writing was a gift from the gods and seen as inherently magical, even when it was used to write a receipt. If you really need sources on this, I can probably find dozens.

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

I would certainly say you can debate this, but do you think that guys like Graham Hancock didn’t account for the changes in placement of the constellations? Have you read Graham Hancock?

Of course we have sources to confirm a lot of what Ancient Egyptians did and believed. But it is infinitesimal compared to the body of work they actually created, and comes no where close to describing the purpose of much of what we have found. Most likely, the purpose of certain artifacts were never written down, because their purpose was taken for granted.

Wtf does “academia is incestuous” mean??

In fact, in academia we’re encouraged to think outside of the box rather than regurgitate old ideas. Research Master/PhD degrees basically exist to either re-examine existing ideas/theories, or to formulate entirely new theories. If we didn’t fully challenge already existing theories as you say we don’t, we’d still be teaching that the pyramids were built by slaves! Or we’d still consider Wallis Budge’s translations totally accurate! 

I for one absolutely disagree with James Henry Breasted - who was a well-respected and influential Egyptologist and the first to fully translate the Edwin Smith Papyrus, the subject of my own thesis - on many things, but most specifically that Egyptian medicine was in any way “superstitious” (a common line of thought, even now!). I’ve told my thesis supervisor this, I wrote it into my thesis, and I was not ostracized. This distinct lack of exclusion is a common experience among my peers. 

We are also taught to, first and foremost, refrain from exactly the kind of condescending holier-than-thou attitude you’re currently displaying. Like I said I’m willing to discuss, but that willingness ends when you start making assumptions about my ability to check my modern bias or my access to reputable Egyptological books and (primary) sources. Besides, you claim we’re only making “best guesses”, but you yourself use predominantly absolute statements. What happened to “we don’t fucking know”?

Wacom recently asked me to talk about why I make queer comics, and given there are multiple bills right now floating around in congress that are effectively "we will kill your livelihood if we get a sniff of queer" I had some pretty strong, simply feelings to relay.