Clever Title Goes Here

So for those of you who don't know yet, this is Colleen Darnell, also known as The Vintage Egyptologist on Instagram where she goes full colonialist in 1920s/1930s clothing complete with pith helmets and using Egyptians both living and dead as props. (Not kidding: she takes Aesthetique™ photos in tombs.) She's married to John Darnell, who was formerly her professor and PhD supervisor at Yale, and it's quite a well-known scandal in Egyptological circles that the two were having an affair before and at the time of her working on that PhD. John, who was married during that affair, eventually divorced his wife and then married Colleen.

In the field, they're considered bad scholars. Beyond the Yale scandal, beyond the fact they're being ridiculously colonialist in the way they present themselves and their "vintage fashion" choices, which they will extend to wearing on actual digs in Egypt itself, their condescending attitudes bleed through in their scholarship. A scholarship that's mediocre at best to begin with, especially John's. However, because they (especially Colleen) have such a strong social media presence, they keep getting asked for docus or to serve as consultants for popular media (e.g. Jodi Picoult heavily consulted them for her novel The Book of Two Ways and whoof it shows), and most people won't question their fashion choices because "ohh aesthetic".

However, by far most Egyptologists severely dislike them for their academic dishonesty and refusal to acknowledge the loaded history behind their chosen mode of dress.

There was one episode with a trans woman getting different gender-affirming operations, including breast implants. It showed the procedure, and (what I found so fascinating that it's stuck with me for decades), as soon as the doctor put the implant in, a censor blur popped up on the nipple.

And you just know there was a meeting between the TLC lawyers and the editors and producers of the show to discuss what the difference was between a "man nipple" (can be shown) and a "woman nipple" (no no must obscure, 'tis naughty). And they decided that as soon as the implant goes in and the nipple has more mass behind it, that's the moment when it becomes a woman's nipple and must be hidden to comply with TV rules.

But it's the same nipple. On the same person. I know what it looks like; I just saw it. But TV and obscenity rules are rules, and the rules say woman nipple = sexual and therefore explicit, but man nipple = neutral, just fine.

To reduce my screen time, I have weaponised my overactive and entirely impractical levels of empathy for inanimate objects. Wym you’re picking it up again? While it was sleeping? You complete and utter monster, let it rest!!

It’s a shirtless dude in a ickle little goofy leather doggy-woggy mask ooooooh terrifying how threatening how terrifying I am traumatised from even imagining it please help me Jesus!!! 😭

who thought of that idea? who thought “put davy jones in a bucket of water” and had the guts to suggest it aloud? and then who went “hey that sounds like a great idea!”

Some folks are asking “well, if he can avoid the no-dry-land curse simply by standing in a bucket, doesn’t that ruin his whole motivation?”, but he’s not on dry land here.

The parley takes place on a sandbar - which, for the unfamiliar, is a temporary “island” of sand deposited by breaking waves, unconnected with the shore, that spends most of its time submerged, being exposed only at low tide.

What Jones is doing here is rules-lawyering his curse. Can you imagine the trial and error he must have gone through in order to determine that this would actually work?

“Okay, do islands count as dry land? How about parts of the shore below the high tide mark? Reefs? Shoals? What if I stand in a pool of water on a shoal? Does it have to be seawater, or will any water do? Does it have to be a natural tidepool, or can it be something artificial, like a bucket?”

Pintel: *licks a spot off his wooden eye and pops it back in his head* Actually, Cap’n, beggin’ yer pardon, but Ragetti an’ me been doin’ quite a lot of theo-retic-ising about that

Ragetti: *very seriously* yeah, men o’ science, what we is, an’ that’s a fact. G’wan Pintel, tell ‘im what I said

Pintel: *suprised* Oh? well, you said “dunno what’s so bad about the Cap’n bein’ an ugly scary monster” and I said “pro’ly wants a beard doesn’t fight ‘im when ‘e brushes it” and you said “pro’ly does smell half a rotten squid if ‘e kiss you” and then you said –

Ragetti: *bopping him over the head with the cannon ramrod” not that, not that! The other thing!

Pintel: right! That do make more sense dunnit, right, Ragetti ‘e said, like, the ocean got land too, just, under the water like, an’, well, it got me thinkin’… you know how a sand bar is just ocean land that pokes up sometimes?

Davey Jones: *massaging his temples with his tentacles* listen, it won’t work, if it’s not underwater then it be dry land

Ragetti: That’s what I said! But then Pintel, ‘e says – 

Pintel: *holding up a bucket* what if technically it WAS underneath some water?

Davy Jones:

IM LOSING IT THEYRE GAY I SWEAR

when Brennan said "It is a horrifying responsibility to think because things cannot remain the same, each and every one of us must shoulder some responsibility for how they will become different."

when Brennan said "Sometimes decisions are not difficult. Sometimes they are just hard."

when Brennan said "There is no moral. The Wolf eats you one day and until it does, the forest is beautiful."

when Brennan said "I always felt the fundamental substance of the universe is creation. None of this makes any sense, when you really break it down. It's like, none of this had to happen, but it's beautiful and art is the definition of 'this didn't have to happen, but it's beautiful.' [...] It resonates with the universe because the universe is consciousness playing with itself."

when Brennan said

Meta-jokes in the text that only make sense if you know that the audiobooks are narrated by the guy who played Spike in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (James Marsters)

The author fucking with the Marsters by putting the word "little" in the text a bunch of times in a single page based on a note Marsters gave him (the word "little" is, apparently, hard to enunciate)

The author using the books to take shots at the person who does the covers because they didn't read the first book and made the decision to give Dresden a hat on the cover of the first book (and thus every subsequent book)

A plot-relevant BDSM scene that only exists cuz the author heard someone say that such a thing is impossible and took it as a personal challenge, and

The author spoiling a major plot event to fuck with someone on Twitter

Aside from Duchamp’s readymades, I love “Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Even”. Pictured below, the work invokes a complex machine, one my professor spent a great deal of time studying. Eventually, he reached his conclusion. My professor had been pranked. He believes “Bride Stripped Bare” is a joke about masturbation, hidden to all except those study it excessively.

As a lover of art, there are many complex and technically impressive works being created today, which both embrace different artistic traditions and break from them. To ignore those is to ignore contemporary art.

Here, OP is raging against conceptual art, which stimulates thought and challenges tradition. He wants his followers to believe that art has “degenerated”, because the West has “degenerated”. OP is intentionally engaging with fascist ideas of “degenerate art”.

If OP wanted to be accurate, he would seek to restore the Salon System, the Beaux Arts Academy, and classical training in the arts. The collapse of this specific system allowed for Modernism to evolve. Of course, that’s not what OP is talking about. He’s evoking beauty as a moral standard, telling his followers to “restore Western tradition”, to fight against aesthetic “degeneracy” in culture.

(By the way, Duchamp is commenting ON MODERNISM with “Fountain”. Duchamp submitted the work to the Society of Independent Artists’ salon in New York, who would accept any work by any artist, for a small fee. In part, Duchamp is saying, “Is this what you Modernists want? A urinal? Look me in the eyes and prove this is not art.”

Duchamp had other readymades, like his snow shovel, where if you actually look at the photos, the handle is square and the bowl is way too flimsy. Why would manufacturers make a snow shovel with a squared-off handle? It’s impossible to hold! Duchamp slapped the “readymades” label on all these items and the hoity-toity art people who were so good at looking at things didn’t see it (probably because they’d never had to do labor like shovel snow imo, amongst other things).

And they’re different! If it was a real “readymade” he could have just bought some more at his local hardware store, but no. He changed them in OBVIOUS WAYS.

See the triangle of holes?

Here’s the one from the Tate Modern:

Oh hello, cross-holes. Fancy seeing you here.

SFMOMA’s edition has the triangle holes, but it also has a line of holes at the top that are completely different from either other version.

Here’s one from Moderna Museet. Line and a circular set of holes!

Duchamp definitely intentionally made these different on purpose. It’s a “readymade” but it’s not, really, each of these is a specific custom creation.

It’s not even clear if he made it! He wrote a letter to his sister claiming that a female friend sent it to him, and he just enrolled it in the art exhibit under his own name. There’s also a possibility that that female friend was himself, since he later had a female pseudonym of Rrose Sélav.

and sometimes that message is

“die mad about it.”

Horatio still sees him. 

Whether it is at Wittenberg, the memory of Hamlet’s loud laughter ringing in his ears as he walks the too-empty halls of the university; whether it is in the moments Horatio finds himself unable to rise from bed, much too wrecked with grief over the lacuna in his chest to bother getting about his day; whether it is when Horatio cracks a smile at a stupid joke that one of the younger students make, Horatio sees him.

It is nothing, only a blip. The curl of glossy black locks, the unhidden twinkle in ocean blue eyes. The words on the edge of a margin, sand slipping between his fingers. 

Horatio wanders the gardens of Elsinore, sometimes. Having been given special leave by His Majesty Fortinbras, for the young king recognises something of his own grief in Horatio’s gaze, he is free to roam the castle with nary a questioning gaze. (Sad and pitying ones, those he cannot escape.)

Once, he comes upon a couple.

They must be in the first stages of their relationship, those early days where all the world seems brighter when your beloved is with you. They giggle, and sneak small touches, and stare at the other like there is nothing else in the world. One of them brushes back an errant curl from their lover’s face with absentminded devotion.

He watches, hidden in the bushes. 

The silhouette of a hand slips into his, and Horatio does not have to wonder any longer.

Just in case this isn't a spam message:

Posting AI-generated content to a platform intended to be an archive for writers is not appropriate use of the platform. On a platform intended for human creation, it is rude and inappropriate to clog search results with AI-produced content which often plagiarizes the work of human authors.

Use of generative AI is also horrible for our environment, leading to massive waste of fossil fuel energy and water. We should not be doing damage to our planet for the sake of generating (robot-produced, often plagiarized) fiction, especially when the joy of fiction comes from the creation and emotion of real people.

You aren't doing the writing yourself if you use generative AI. You're offering up a single sentence and asking a machine to steal the hard work of others so you don't have to actually write anything. The hard work you steal may well belong to people who actually need assistance with writing, and absolutely will not appreciate seeing the struggles they overcame being turned into slop for others to claim as their own.