Adventures in solu

Ink Drawing Tutorial by  Bryan Schiavone

Blood is thicker than water The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.

I give it MASCLES

And I wanna stress that when i say “top of the leg” i’m not talking about the crotch (please don’t flag me tumblr it’s an anatomical term) i’m talking about the point where the femur connects to the pelvis, which is higher up on the hips:

It’s easier to see what I’m talking about in this photo of a man squatting: 

So yeah if you use that measurement when using this technique you should get fairly realistically proportioned legs:

But remember! messing with proportions is an important and fun part of character design! Know the rules first so you can then break them however you please!

Today was my first day as a T.A. for the class that inspired me to study the medieval North: Viking History. To celebrate this, I’m sharing my first History Raid plundering the history of the Vikings. Read more here:

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.

I’m sure a ton of people already know how to do this, but I only learned recently, so I wanted to share one of my favorite thumbnailing tricks! Color matching is SUPER helpful to quickly map out potential color schemes :D

I put on my sunglasses, to hide my swollen eyes, over my tears. I cried all my makeup off. Went inside to have a milkshake. I don’t know why. I wanted something to drink as I figured out what I would do. I got a soda and a milkshake. Medium. The cashier looked at me and with a line around the corner of the counter he rushed away from the counter “Hold on “ he yelled to a coworker.

I filled my soda and went back and saw him looking all over. I go up and he gets close and says “I made it a large”.

That was seriously enough for me not to do it. His kindness. Someone went out of their way and as I went back in my car to cry I realized I could muster through a few other days. A few more weeks. Then I came down from that panicky high of anxiety, depression, and pain. I finished my shake. And it was enough time to let me feel better. I… I’m alive. I’ll make it through.

Try and be nice today. Tomorrow. Something as much as a smile. It helped so much.

Thank you man at McDonalds.