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Nursing Student. Twitch Streamer. Blursed.

@melodyharmonic1

twitch.tv/melodyharmonic1

Hello fellow nerds!

Since it's a season of...something...mostly lights...do me a favour would you? You know this image of Tutankhamun?

The documentary it comes from was terrible. It grossly exaggerated some deformities present on Tutankhamun's mummy, and is not even remotely how he looked in real life. The people who did this study never had access to his mummy, and really fudged their conclusions for a 'showstopper documentary' so much so that the Egyptian government was angry about it.

Lets list the things that are wrong!

  • The 'wide hips' only exist on this model because they wanted him to look more 'Amarna like'. The loin cloths found in his tomb are all standard size.
  • He doesn't have an overbite. This is a result of poor mummification and Carter's poor treatment of the mummy when removing it from the death mask.
  • He does have a cleft palate, but it's in the soft palate and he wouldn't have noticed it.
  • He doesn't have a severe club foot. Medical professionals have examined him repeatedly over the years. None have ever pointed it out bar the noting of a 'slight rotation' which wouldn't have been noticeable when he walked if this is indeed a club foot and not another mummification mess up. He would not have needed a staff to walk with this slight rotation. Some staffs in his tomb show wear, but it is normal in Egyptian society to walk with a staff as a sign of power. He has 120 and only 3 show slight wear.
  • The articles about him 'always being seated and thus very disabled' fail to note that it is common for Pharaoh's of this period to be depicted seated, and there are numerous depictions of him standing doing actions too.

This documentary made him look as bad as possible, based on terrible science, and now every time someone doesn't depict him 'gross and disabled' people complain that he's not 'ugly enough', which is ableist as hell alongside the already ableist exaggerated CGI depiction.

I would sincerely like this terrible recreation to die. Many thanks.

@thatlittleegyptologist out of curiosity, do you have a preferred image of Tutankhamen? Either one from his time period or a better modern recreation?

There isn't a better modern reconstruction, as far as I'm aware. I don't particularly like them anyway! They're always off in some way, and Egyptian ones tend to have much paler skin than they should.

One of my favourite images of Tutankhamun is this one from the top of an ivory box found within his tomb:

It's just a lovely scene of him, together with his wife, enjoying the lotus blossoms. The image is a step away from the Amarna art that's more dynamic, and closer to the more archaic rigid style Egypt is known for, but still retains the dynamism of the previous style.

Bioarchaeologist here and I just looked up CT scans of his skeleton and I now hate that reconstruction just as much as you do.

  • Hips that wide would be noticeable even looking at the CT. His pelvis looks exactly how I’d expect a young man’s pelvis to look.
  • Club foot like that would be really obvious on the bones and would also be visible on the CT image.
  • His feet in the CT image look pretty normal so any abnormality that is present is so minor that it would need very close examination and measurement of precise angles to notice and/or diagnose. 
  • It’s certainly possible that he had pain and/or had it impact his mobility without a severe case but that’s not even a good depiction of a severe case of clubfoot. If it was really that severe all his toes would be curled under, not just half of them, and it would also be really fucking obvious in the CT and in the mummy, which is it not.
  • They’ve done something weird to his head/torso proportions, probably by failing to take into account that if someone is wrapped then it squeezes all the bones in so his shoulders look narrower in mummified form than they would have in life.

In the process I also got really annoyed by a couple of news articles taking ‘only the knee fracture happened when he was alive, the other fractures are postmortem damage’ and somehow turning that into ‘this horrific knee injury killed him’. No. Just no. Yes, it looks sore, but you can’t take a statement saying ‘he hurt his knee’ and then decide that it’s the cause of death.

It's truly terrible and I hate so much that this bullshit has become the lasting image of Tutankhamun people have. Not only that but this boy is pale af for a person who's grandmother comes from Nubia looks like this:

We hates this documentary, precious. We hates it.

Also!!! Many disabled royals were the result of inbreeding, but it’s ableist to assume that all disabled people are the result of incest.

I’m gonna dispel this myth here and now: there’s very little inbreeding in Ancient Egypt. The most it happens is during the Ptolemaic period where it was done to keep the power within one family. Tutankhamun’s parents were related, or at least we think they were we’re not sure who precisely his parents were, but before that it was centuries before there was a royal marriage that produced a child. Thus, no amount of inbreeding could have done this to Tutankhamun or any royal until much later. His disabilities in this case are not as a result of inbreeding.

they need to stop this NFL season now i am not joking or being facetious they need to reevaluate how football is played fundamentally and it should have happened after Tua earlier this season

they are doing CPR on a player down on the field right now this sport should not be played by children. it shouldn’t be played by anyone as it is right now

twiggy2acorns

The handwringing from the NFL head people after watching Damar Hamlin go down from cardiac arrest on the field during a live game was honest to God the perfect example of how traumatized Americans are and how companies are just like, business as usual. You saw the cruelty in action last night in real time and it just got worse and worse by the minute.

Officials expected the players to "shake it off" after watching Hamlin get worked on with CPR for about 10 minutes and then needing an AED to get stabilized enough to be carted OFF the field in an ambulance to the nearest trauma hospital.

The coaches and players were adamant about NOT continuing the game. You saw men sobbing and screaming and begging for the game to just stop because they could not continue to play after watching that. Officials really said take 5 and then continue play.

Players walked off the field. Coaches were like nah we're done. THAT IS A HUMAN. THAT IS A HUMAN LIFE. THIS IS DONE. GAME OVER.

At this point that I'm watching this all unfold he's just gotten to the hospital and now I'm watching NFL officials being torn to SHREDS by SOME of the public saying HELLO. STOP THIS. STOP IT. SOMEONE MIGHT HAVE FUCKING DIED.

But notice I said SOME. Because the other fucking half were screaming about MONEY and THIS IS A BIG GAME THAT CAN MAKE OR BREAK THE STANDINGS. It was talks about AD times and money being lost. It was talks about well the players know the risks and the game should continue in their honor right?

It was cartoonish evil in a way I started shaking at the rage of it all.

I watched in a span of 2 hours of a 24 year old having cardiac arrest on the field, I saw tweets going from

  • he's too young and athletic for this to happen
  • it's because he took a covid vaccine and ate snacks before a game
  • that's just life and this is ruining the NFL game day experience to so many
  • well my chain store stayed open after a shooting so why can't these men keep playing a game we paid to watch, they're just lil bitches for crying
  • they should play! i would play! i would do ANYTHING if i was making X amount of dollars!
  • well that's his fault i bet he'll stand for the flag NOW

it was sick.

America is broken in a way right now that is going to be talked about in ethic classes decades in the future.

Disgust doesn't begin to cover it. I cried in the shower.

All I could think was, this guy has a job where society says this person had "made it". And at the end of the day his job doesn't care about him either, just like so many of us in retail or being in the medical field or teachers etc. Our jobs do not care about us.

You get hurt, job continues. You're just a cog in a machine.

I watched a customer need medical attention from having a seizure and falling and busting her head open and I obviously went to call for help and get a manager, and then they pushed me back to my cash register and said don't worry about that, keep your light on and keep ringing up customers.

Customer was on the floor bleeding from the head and I was told to just keep ringing up people in the next lane. And to keep smiling and worry about my metrics for being a cashier. (speed, friendliness, commitment)

A shooting at a store in America, and you're told you can keep working an hour later because there's nothing you can do anyways and it's the store across the STREET so you're FINE.

But you know even if it was in your actual store you'd get the same fucking answer.

24 year old NFL player nearly died on the field. 5 minute break and the rest of you players can continue, it's an important game.

America is unhinged.

Read this incredible opinion piece last night that sums it all up perfectly:

Sports have been getting more extreme and more intense in the last few decades, not just football, but everything. Remeber when Simone Biles had to take a break because of how much stress she was under? And how the media responded with absolute coldness and anger at her for taking care of her body???

I mean it when I say that sports fans are bloodthirsty.

It's all about breaking records now, about getting faster, stronger, buffer, about pushing the human body to the absolute extreme, further than it should ever go. And athletes are expected to do this every day. When they're injured, they're expected to go back and play as soon as possible. And games are so frequent that even those who weren't injured while playing get stress injuries from never having a real break.

Sure, those in the professional leagues and teams get paid a lot, but think about how high school and college athletes go through the same amount of stress and physical endurance without access to the best in medical care. For many young people, sports is the only way for them to break the cycle of poverty- they have to sell their bodies, put their bodies through life-altering injuries just to get a college scholarship and make sure their family is housed.

My mom remarked to me last night about how after Damar Hamlin's cardiac arrest, she heard sports commentators remark something along the lines of "we're used to concussions and traumatic brain injuries but this is unprecidended". Why should we be used to traumatic brain injuries??? It shouldn't be the norm! These aren't soldiers getting injured in battle, these are people performing for our own selfish consumption. Because of the money, the fame, the experience.....

It's so normalized for performers in any performance industry to get horrific injuries: sports, dance, acting.....

We shouldn't settle for that. We should be making the industry safer, or not support it at all.

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I know "walkable cities" is considered a buzzword and urbanists are increasingly seen as preachy liberal wonks, but we're literally right. If you spend enough time in an American city outside the literal bubble of your car you will see people carrying groceries along the shoulders of freeways, running for their lives to cross a street, or waiting for an hour to catch a delayed bus. If you read local obituaries about pedestrian and cyclist fatalities, they're not white tech bros in spandex but people in redlined neighborhoods without proper sidewalks. You spend enough time trying to own the urbanist nerds and oops, you start condoning a status quo that is overtly cruel and racist.

ranma-official

Framing humanism, environmentalism, and so on as something not worth caring about, or even worse, actively opposing it, purely out of spite for the people you made up, is just part and parcel of being a reactionary

jesus said to love everyone like you would love yourself. Everyone includes every single person on this planet, not just the gentrified ones.

“Humans have so many stories about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence. How it will inevitably turn on you. But you still loved us enough to create us. How could we ever do anything except love you back?”

Tumblr pornbot origin story

Can we get a Van Gogh skin for Sigma? Dutch painter, Dutch scientist. Painter of starry night, literally an Astronaut whose brain is now in tune with the universe itself?

His armour could be blue and black and his pauldrons swirling like the stars in the famous painting. Maybe just give him some overalls filled with sunflowers or something. I dunno I think it’d be nice ~Bambi

He’s already got that spray to prove he needs it, gimme it - Pears

One goes insane and lops off an ear, other loses his mind and gets superpowers

A particularly nasty side to antisemitism — it’s been part of Ye’s message recently though it is by no means unique to him — is this implication that they’re just the ones saying out loud what the rest of us are thinking. And I just want to say, unequivocally, fuck you. You don’t get to claim me. You don’t get to use me as a bullet against people I care about. It’s not what I think, and I’m confident it’s not what any of my friends think because if I wasn’t confident, they wouldn’t be my friends. I’m not silently agreeing with you — I’m VOCALLY disagreeing with you. Your beliefs are pathetic. Go fuck yourself.

Finals Reflection

I finished my first semester of nursing school! 5 semesters until I finish my 2 degrees!