iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

And maybe we should be more careful when applying Ramesside Deir el Medina to stuff that happened hundreds of years later. Lastly, a coffin from Akhmim probably covered in Orpiment. Yeah. Eat it, Thebes. These bumpkins have bling AND good artists.

Close up of the coffin of Fayt aat at the field museum, Chicago.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

So my argument would be instead that maybe things like Orpiment and Blue WERE expensive—everything is expensive compared to ochre and charcoal, but maybe they were less expensive and easier to get in certain places and times, like Beni Hassan in the 22nd Dynasty or Hiba in the 25th.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

But, this observation, like most explanations involving demonstrations of prestige, is something you could use to handwave any counterexample to your pet theory, so I’m suspicious. And meanwhile you have this from 25th dynasty el Hiba in red and glorious, expensive deep blue:

A coffin with stick figures in blue and red on a white ground.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

This was doubtless not a cheap piece and its FOUR enclosing wooden coffins—in a time where wood was ostensibly scarce illustrate Taylor and Cooney’s assertion that buying a coffin was a series of “negotiation” based on the ideal and what you could afford. In this case, wood+blue > artistic skill.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

According to Cooney, blue was one of the most costly pigments since it had to be manufactured. The knowledge of how to do it may well have been a state monopoly, but in the 22th dynasty faiyum, you get pieces like this—which I’ll attribute to the 12 year old son of the worst artist in town.

sketchfab.com

PAHMA 5-1405 (Outer Coffin Basin & Inner Coffin) - 3D model by Book of the Dead in 3D (@bookofthedead3d)

This coffin was purchased by William Randolph Hearst in the first decade of the 20th Century. It now resides in the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley. Thi...

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Let’s talk coffins and pigment! I’m reading a paper by Batman in Chronique d’Egpte about the coffin of Nesmin at RISD. Nesmin’s coffin is gorgeous. And Bauman of course cited Cooney’s Cost of Death to quantify it… which deals with documents nearly a 1K yr earlier—The most expensive wood and pigment.

The coffin of Nesmin at RISD, early Ptolemaic., with liberal use of now blackened Egyptian blue and a golden mask

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Also, be suspicious of all claims that trouble inside the house is really coming from outside.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

The minute they do this is the minute the government decides we need regulation on AI.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

I have been meaning to read this, so thank you for posting it.

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Reposted by Kea Johnston

Dr. Alexandra F. Morris @disabledarchaeo.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Happy to have been invited to give the inaugural lecture for The Classical Association in Northern Ireland 2026-2027 this Wednesday October 7 at 6:30 PM. Come if you wish to hear more about ancient disability and Alexander the Great:

Event poster in three panels. Left: a fragment of the clepsydra (water clock) of Philip III Arrhidaeus, in dark stone, incised with hieroglyphs, a cartouche, and a crowned king offering to two deities, one with a sun disc. Centre, in orange italics: "The Classical Association in Northern Ireland presents:". In bold: "All Our Yesterdays: Alexander the Great and Disability in Ancient Macedonia and the Ptolemaic World". Below: "Alexandra Morris (QUB), 27 University Square, room 01/003, 7 October 2026, 6:30 pm". Right: Alexandra, a white woman with long curly brown hair and blue-pink glasses, smiling against a cream wall. She wears a black velvet dress embroidered with silver suns, moons and stars, gold earrings and a long gold pendant necklace. Along the bottom: CANI logos and icons for YouTube, Bluesky, Instagram, Ko-fi, Mastodon, TikTok and X.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

By the number of students I’m going to guess it’s a grad level ancient languages class. 😡

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Humanities in education are under outside attack from right wing ideologues and bean-counters, but on the inside, Critical studies makes a great case for dismantling the bases on which fields are built without saying why fields ought to exist to begin with or what the future might be like.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

This thing is like a bayonetta boss. So eye-popping!

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Hi. It’s me. I’m the people. The press should be allowed in my house.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Saltwood sound either like a suburb or an age of Myst.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

So you didn’t name it like Grimbia or Glenn Atoll?

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Ok. Why is it named Saltwood?

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

My only complaint is that does not cover African American revivals of AE religion. I’d like to read about yheir perspective specifically.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

My Egyptian religion class ended and I did not get the chance to discuss it— I found it LAST WEEK. I am enjoying this book. It reminds me of how reputation conscious Egyptologists can be. I have to recognize and fight my own biases WRT religion, but don’t want to be THAT sort of Egyptologist.

routledge.com

Profane Egyptologists: The Modern Revival of Ancient Egyptian Religion

It is widely believed that the practice of ancient Egyptian religion ceased with the end of pharaonic culture and the rise of Christianity. However, an organised reconstruction and revival of the auth...

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

So, I should mod the game to make my female badass fantasy because that wasn’t included in the $80 price tag. I probably will. You’ve done a nice job of illustrating the wide variety of female characters you can play in this game, so thanks.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I know it’s not the point, but the point IS being inside a fantasy. And the problem with games always has been that they ONLY cater to the fantasies of straight cis men.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Yet somehow, they found the resources to add different breast and nipple sizes for the female figure. If that’s the truth, they might as well just don’t let you upload a portrait like they do in the old CRPG games. By the way, I used to work in video games so I know how this works.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I’ve seen some of the trans critiques of this, and they’re spot on about how superficial the representation is. It just cheeses me that 12 years after gamergate all mail dev teams still can’t get it through their heads that people who aren’t like them want to play in their game worlds.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

And the in-game ads? I mean I guess they were going for bladerunner, but I feel like every single billboard in the game didn’t HAVE to be T & A.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I played Cyberpunk 2077 today and found it weirdly regressive…even for a video game—especially given the hype about being able to customize your genitalia. But can I make a butch gal in her thirties? No I cannot. Can I make a tall woman? Nope. Options are all pixie dream girl variants.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

This is going to end horribly because you are playing god and humans were never meant to have this much power.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

All I really remember about Merneith is that her tomb is quite large and that Egyptologists always seemed keen to make her a regent instead of a king when her successors acknowledged her. So I’m thrilled to see this paper on her, complete with an imaging technique I’d like to try!

reddit.com

From the OutoftheTombs community on Reddit: A Woman Ruled Ancient Egypt as King 5,000 Years Ago, Research Claims

Explore this post and more from the OutoftheTombs community

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I’m torn. I’m working on my own codebase that works closely with a poorly documented API where it’s not clear why some results are occurring. AI has been great at finding and explaining bugs with it. Half the fun for m, though, is figuring out why and how it’s doing what it is.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

So it’s gotten me past some roadblocks that would have had me putting my fist through the screen. I’m willing to learn from the choices it decides to make and have it explain them. So there’s some satisfaction in that.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

What is also disturbing is they expect the audience to be like “it’s ok to level 40 towns in retaliation for attacks on settlements and the continental army.” Is it also ok for Putin to bomb children’s hospitals and power plants because the Ukrainians army is attacking his supply lines?

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Fox can be honest about what happened and color it in a minimizing way to protect their image of Washington: war is Hell; it’s not like the 18th century had a Geneva convention; but they can’t even do that.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

A student of mine took this screenshot of me, and I guess this pretty much sums up my academic career.

A picture on zoom of me saying “…But if we want to talk coffins, we can talk coffins because I love coffins.”

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

The Medici family would throw some money at the arts.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

We are not so different, humanists and scientists. Scientists face lack of funding for projects that don’t have an obvious economic impact, and pressure to either produce results either revolutionary or confirming priors. In humanities it’s maybe more acceptable to spend time disproving earlier work

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Anyway this was a long way of saying that the big difference between science and humanities is that it’s hard or unethical or impossible to test theories in humanities, but I think we may be getting to the point in sciences where results demand a lot of subjective interpretation as well.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

The old kingdom in Egypt may have collapsed because of weak kings AND climate change AND economic collapse. There are rarely neat answers in the humanities.We are getting to the point in science, at least in biology where we are realizing there may be no easy answers there, either.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

People bring a lot of themselves (and the zeitgeist) to their interpretations and to the theoretical frameworks they stake their interpretations on to give them credibility with other scholars. And you end up with a lot of situations where data has many explanations that are simultaneously true.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Humanities tends to involve looking at a set of things that happened and proposing an answer as to WHY that is or HOW that happened. And sometimes the data you are dealing with is a set of past people’s hot takes. So, a lot of the humanities ends out being interpretation.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

A lot of folks in the humanities want to be seen as scientists— it’s a cachet thing, I think. For a long time, science got funded. Science is based on scientific method and scientists are trusted because they are thought to deal in facts.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Who wants to bet it will be inexplicably difficult for families with stay at home dads to get this because it’s really about keeping women out of the workforce?

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Also, those little bugs that skip on the water are called “WATER SKIPPERS”.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Well, damn. It thinks I’m from Utah. I guess all of that careful dialect training I did was a waste of money. 😆

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

It’s either a mixed bag of stuff people said on Reddit and Steam forums, ad-filled AI slop walkthroughs strung together from from Steam and Reddit posts to build a wrong and incoherent walkthrough, or YouTube vids. I don’t want to watch your damn video. GET OFF MY LAWN.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I am playing the game Dimhaven right now and loving it. Someone else loved Obsidian and Zork Nemesis and I feel seen. I’m gonna put away my old lady nostalgia and get out my old lady rant now, though, because it is impossible to find a good written game walkthru these days!

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Reposted by Kea Johnston

Petra Korlević @petrathepostdoc.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

YESSSS THE AUSTRALIAN CRYPTIDS ARE HERE

silly digital doodle of a drop beat, a carnivorous blood splattered red eyed koala sitting on an eucalyptus log, on a white background.

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Yes! The ferocious Drop Bear!!!

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Kea Johnston @kjohnston.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

I’ve been wanting to learn how to work with “The Cheating Machine (Claude)” so I had it rewrite my personal website site in Hugo. Claude did a nice job rendering my CV in markup, but felt the need to summarize rather than copy the blog entries. I redid them by hand.

kmjegyptology.org

Kea Egyptologist

Personal website of Kea Egyptologist — researcher, writer, and academic.

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