MusingsO’Mae Miscellany

Reject The Coup Attempt. Grabbing my flaming sword of justice and hand crank.

[exhausted-cryptid-deactivated20]

when it takes you a while to process what someone is saying and you realize they asked you a question

[doughfox]

I cannot fucking believe I am drunk, past midnight, and tumblr is throwing fucking saturated fatty-acids at me

[musicprincess655]

Listen here friendo I didn’t sit through a year of organic chemistry for you to come into my house and call a carboxylic acid a saturated fatty acid you respect that hexadecanoic acid

[bismuthcladbattleship]

And I didnt get a degree in biochemistry to hear you say that carboxylic acids with aliphatic chains arent fatty acids. That hexadecanoic acid IS a saturated fatty acid!

[mutttooth]

[gleafer]

If you can donate a little or even share this gofundme to help this family get their trans child out of a hostile anti-trans state:

Donate to Help Us Move My Son to Safety, organized by Amanda Flynn

My family and I are facing a difficult and urgent situation. We live in Oklahoma, where my … Amanda Flynn needs your support for Help Us Mov

[backonmyvampirebullshit]

March 2026 be like

[writtengriffin]

[puffbirdstudio]

Since it’s Spotify Wrapped season I thought I’d share this reminder that streaming services are killing the music industry. Musicians can’t make a living like this. If you love an artist, find them on Bandcamp and actually buy their albums.

[void-admin]

Reminder: This friday (December 5th) is Bandcamp Friday! That means 100% of the proceeds from album sales on Bandcamp go directly to the artists you buy from.

[musingsomae]

2024 Update: Now that Trump Has Been Elected, Can Our Marriage Be Undone? - National Center for Lesbian Rights

Back in 2016, after Donald Trump was elected President, we wrote an update for the community responding to people’s fears that their marriag

Made me feel better

[what-even-is-thiss]

I keep hate-reading plague literature from the medieval era, but as depressed as it makes me there is always one historical tidbit that makes me feel a little bittersweet and I like to revisit it. That’s the story of the village of Eyam.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Eyam today is a teeny tiny town of less than a thousand people. It has barely grown since 1665 when its population was around 800.

Where the story starts with Eyam is that in August 1665 the village tailor and his assistant discovered that a bolt of cloth that they had bought from London was infested with rat fleas. A few days later on September 7th the tailor’s assistant George Viccars died from plague.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Back then people didn’t fully understand how disease spread, but they knew in a basic sense that it did spread and that the spread had something to do with the movement of people.

So two religios leaders in the town, Thomas Stanley and William Mompesson, got together and came up with a plan. They would put the entire village of Eyam under quarantine. And they did. For over a year nobody went in and nobody went out.

They put up signs on the edge of town as warning and left money in vinegar filled basins that people from out of town would leave food and supplies by.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Over the 14 months that Eyam was in quarantine 260 out of the 800 residents died of plague. The death toll was high, the cost was great.

However, they did successfully prevent the disease from spreading to the nearby town of Sheffield, even then a much bigger town, and likely saved the lives of thousands of people in the north of England through their sacrifice.

So I really like this story, because it’s a sad story, because it’s also a beautiful story. Instead of fleeing everyone in this one place agreed that they would stay, and they saved thousands of people. They stayed just to save others and I guess it’s one of those good stories about how people have always been people, for better or worse.

[auroranibley]

It gets better.

Here’s the thing. One third of the residents of Eyam died during their quarantine, but the Black Plague was known to have a NINETY PERCENT death rate. As high as the toll was, it wasn’t as high as it should have been. And a few hundred years later, some historians and doctors got to wondering why.

Fortunately, Eyam is one of those wonderful places that really hasn’t changed much in hundreds of years. Researchers, going to visit, found that many of the current residents were direct descendants of the plague survivors from the 1600s. By doing genetic testing, they learned that a high number of Eyam residents carried a gene that made them immune to the plague. And still do.

And it gets even better than that, because the gene that blocks the Black Plague? Also turns out to block AIDS, and was instrumental in helping to find effective medication for people who have HIV and AIDS in the 21st century.

Here is a lovely, well-produced documentary about Eyam and its disease resistance. It’s a little under an hour. Trigger warning for general disease and epidemic-type stuff, but also, maybe it will help you have some hope in these alarmly uncertain times.

[cryptid-deity]

[Image 1: a photo of Eyem’s abbey and graveyard.]

[Image 2: a photo of a stone basin.]

[ineffablesilversmith]

Crowley in the first of David’s BAFTA suits. (Brooch made of red brass.)

[musingsomae]

wow

[the-prophesied-disco-gay]

Literally sobbing. A judge, a US judge defended us. A judge brought up intersex people, uaing the term intersex, to *defend* us by not allowing our erasure. I'm having a lot of feelings right now

[musingsomae]

sanity.

[starlightshadowsworld]

Calling all Brits on this hellsite.

We all saw Elon Musk do the nazi salute at the Trump inauguration. We know that he is influencing and fanning the flames of right wing political parties.

And that very well may include ours.

Because Elon Musk has pledged to donate $100 million to the Reform party. He has since mentioned that it might be hard to give such a large sum now.

But I don’t think we should take our chances. And I think we can agree that letting billionaires influence our countries politics is a terrible idea.

If you also agree here’s a link to a Parliament petition.

It calls for the government to remove loopholes that allow wealthy foreign individuals to make donations into UK political parties (e.g. by funnelling through UK registered companies).

As it is a parliament petition the government are required to debate it in parliament. But for that to happen it needs to reach 100,000 signatures.

Non British folk I’m afraid you guys can’t sign but I encourage you guys to reblog so that more people can see this.

[turquoisedata]

Signed.

UK people please sign 💜

Non UK people please signal boost

[ineffablechocolatecheesecake]

Crowley’s singing)

[musingsomae]

love

[catstronaut-one]

Happy Valentine's day! ❤️

[theconcealedweapon]

[plant-based-person]

had a fascinating english class that resulted in the notes header “the forcefeminization of victor frankenstein”

[plant-based-person]

what the people want, the people get

you see

my professor’s take is that mary shelley is feminizing victor throughout the novel, as a way of flipping gender roles and putting a male character through female experiences.

evidence as explained:

victor is creating life. he is putting his health at risk (spends two years with little sleep or socialization) to bring life forth into this world

his illness after he is shocked by the creature coming to life is akin to both ‘hysteria’ and postpartum depression

he pretty much swoons, let’s be honest

henry clerval, a man who has been characterized as manly and heroic, has to chase after damsel-in-distress victor and care for him as he convalesces 

afterward, he hides what he did and went through, for fear that others will label him crazy and emotional and not believe him. sound familiar?

Victor in general is more emotional than the other characters and is constantly tempering his reactions to not be seen as irrational 

the book does not otherwise have central female characters 

Also, Shelley’s mother died in childbirth. It’s interesting, then, that Shelley presents the creation of life as something horrific and damaging. She parallels Victor with her mother.

in conclusion, Frankenstein (1818) by Mary  Wollstonecraft Shelley is one of the first examples of mpreg in English literature 

[tamilhobbit]

I was not expecting that last line.

[trainsgenderfoxgirl2816]

THIS IS THE KIND OF ESSAY WE NEED MORE OF

[musingsomae]

Tanith Lee: Why Was One of Horror’s Best Female Writers Blacklisted? A Women In Horror Month Tribute (Part 1)

Is Horror so the personal property of a certain type of white male writer that only certain types of infractions are to be tolerated – the o

was reading more about Tanith Lee and potentially why I haven’t encountered her works yet…

[musingsomae]

I am going to start my first Tanith Lee book today. Way overdue, but I only just learned about her. Looks like her work heavily inspired Sandman.

[bauliya]

just gonna leave this here

[princecharmingtobe]

I’ve said this before, possibly even on this post, but this also means throwing out that shitty attitude of “You can tell this was made by cishets for cishets” just because it doesn’t relate to your specific queer experience. I have seen works created by queer creators based on their own experiences get labeled “by cishets for cishets” because it didn’t reflect a particular experience/reflected a different experience from that of those criticizing it. There is no universal queer experience. Just because it’s not YOUR experience doesn’t mean it’s not queer.

[the-real-seebs]

i can’t believe people having the experience of being-other would do it differently from me. surely the point was to recreate the perfect uniformity of idealized 1950s cishet nuclear families, only different in exactly the way i’m different.

[musingsomae]

agree.