to the stars eternal

Who is: Lev, spec writer, poet, PhD student, used all my specialization points in medieval studies, queerness, and historical gender. The nerdy bespectacled necromancer of @scholarlyhobbit. mid thirties. Labels: gender weird, no English pronouns, thanks. Queer. Disabled, dealing with Ehlers-Danlos, migraines, TBI, & chronic pain. Filipino-American with a Russian name. Jewish. Now blogging: Tolkien (Gondor, Umbar, Harad, Numenor, dwarves, Rings of Power), The Locked Tomb (I'm Sixth House trash), Detective Anna, probably sometimes other stuff. Askbox: Please send me an ask if you want to talk about something! I'm friendly, promise. Attn: I returned to this blog after almost a decade away, old posts are not necessarily accurate posts. I don't do my political activism on Tumblr, but if you think genocide and transphobia are topics to debate, please leave me alone.

[the-lion-machine]

I stopped using tumblr around the time I became extremely sensitive to gifsets as seizure triggers after an acquired brain injury gave me non epileptic seizures. I largely left fandom because I could barely read and couldn't watch TV at all. That was true from 2017-2021. I blogged on Twitter, and then when Twitter exploded I ended up on Bluesky in 2023, but even when I could tolerate gifs again I felt weird about dusting off my tumblr. In that time, I finished a Master of Fine Arts at Goddard College focusing on dance and music and how we experience stories, and got into a PhD program that went bankrupt after literally stealing my student loans from me (I'm now at the teachout institution working on my PhD on Anna Akhmatova's queer relationships, and regrettably $14k in credit card debt from a semester without income) and came out again, this time as genderqueer and switched to not using personal pronouns or gendered language for myself (just use my name) and moved to New Orleans in 2023 and and and WOW HI Y'ALL

I'm back, and liking your posts because I fell into the Locked Tomb fandom and am Sixth House trash, I'm unhinged about Rings of Power, and I'm not over Detective Anna. I'm also kind of feral for the 12th Doctor.

I don't know that I'll post MUCH but I AM ALIVE. Don't mind me, liking the hell out of your shit. I'm here to write a hideous essay about Annatar as a narcissistic abuser, probably, and wail over Locked Tomb art and meta, and be unhinged in two languages about the only heterosexuals I've ever cared about, Anna Viktorevna and Yakov Platonovich (listen nobody in TLT is straight not even Magnus/Abigail okay?). I'll probably be back on my Gondorposting bullshit eventually.

Tl:Dr; it's really me, file me under "Lev, gender mysterious, no pronouns, spouse of @scholarlyhobbit please do NOT backread this Tumblr everything is +5 years old.

[shadow27]

[witchofprose-deactivated2020041]

This is the FUNNIEST SHIT I HAVE EVER SEEN

[untitled12573]

Reblogging for cultural enrichment

[lab-gr0wn-lambs]

bout time I brought back the Laurel and Hardy flex tape-

[knitmeapony]

From The Killers, 1946. A Film Noir Classic

[theprofessional-amateur]

I’m an archivist, behold my growing collection was of old photos mirroring timeless memes I’ve come across at various places I’ve worked.

[aurvxina]

[fluffehwuffeh]

You can't take loved away

[liarsblade]

*touching his extremely defined six pack* who did this to you.....

[invisiblefoxfire]

*gently lifting a cup of water to his lips* it's going to be okay. *choking back tears* just a few more sips and then we'll get you a sandwich...

[cloverandcrossbones]

Reblog to give a glass of water to every dehydrated actor with shrink wrapped abs whose life was endangered for a shirtless scene

[haveyoumetmythief]

The Saint of Duty

But I see her in the back of my mind/All the time

Like a fever, like I'm burning alive/Like a sign

Did I cross the line?

Do you see her in the back of your mind?

In my eyes?

[boostmobilemastershake]

tough fucking luck losing my cart and my pack of camels in the same 48 hour period i suspect that it may have been ghouls

[ja-khajay]

are you a medieval silk road merchant

[bunnynoldo]

I think we haven't talked about the fact that after Sauron's second proposal, Galadriel not only says no, she actually kicks him in the face?

That's brutal! That's humiliating! That's a definete 'no'. So he proceedes to plan B - binding Galadriel to him in darkness with Morgoth's crown.

You KICK Mairon? You kick his face like the football? You reject his honest proposal of enernal worship of your light? Oh! Oh! Thralldom for Galadriel! Thralldom for Galadriel for One Thousand Years!

Original gifs

[the-lion-machine]

I won't lie, my husband and I have started saying "oh! Thralldom for Galadriel!" to each other in real life, and I'm not sure we can put this genie back in the bottle. Nice work OP.

[collapsedsquid]

Unemployed people will be given weight-loss jabs under Government plans to get them back to work. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, has said the new class of medication could have a “monumental” impact on obesity and getting Britain working. Mr Streeting has announced a £280 million investment from Lilly, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, in developing new medicines and ways to deliver treatment. The plans will include the first real-world trial of the drugs’ effect on worklessness, productivity and reliance on the NHS.

Future britain where the unemployed have to choose between Ozempic and euthanasia

[collapsedsquid]

The Health Secretary said the injections should not be seen as an alternative to overhauling unhealthy lifestyles, but suggests they could have a major role in tackling the worklessness crisis. Overall, 9.3 million people are economically inactive, according to the latest worklessness figures.

It seems so weird to put this "alternative to overhauling" line in because unless I'm mistaken Ozempic suppresses appetite, this isn't an amphetamine, this isn't "the pill where can live however you want but still lose weight." This is the pill that makes you overhaul your lifestyle! I guess the scolding tone is reflexive, instinctual, cannot be suppressed, maybe they need to take some sort of pill or injection to stop it.

[kelpforestdwellers]

it doesn't 'make you overhaul your lifestyle.' it makes you starve until you stop taking it and regain the weight plus interest. it is not beneficial and this plan is diabolical.

[lesmiserabby]

There was literally a shortage of Ozempic here in Canada, and I think the US too, a few months ago because it was getting prescribed for weight loss. My mother is on it for diabetes and she couldn’t get her diabetes medication for like a month because people who don’t have diabetes were getting it for weight loss. What the actual Hell is this?

[the-lion-machine]

Ozempic works by doing two things that suppress appetite: it slows your digestion speed to a crawl and makes your body stop absorbing the glucose in your blood. Sounds okay but in actuality it makes it very hard to eat enough food, because you lose the ability to eat normal adult portions because your stomach is too full to eat. It does this by keeping the food you eat inside your stomach way too long. It also stimulates glucagon, a pancreatic enzyme that is your body's opposite to insulin, which prompts your liver to burn the glucose stored in your muscles for fuel, and prevents you from storing more. Glucagon is responsible for ketoacidosis if your blood levels get too high, and ketoacidosis can cause permanent organ damage and death.

What this means functionally for someone who takes it is that your body suddenly loses the ability to eat normally without pain. It gives you gastroparesis, an incredibly painful condition where the food in your stomach can't travel into your digestive system fast enough, causing nausea, acid reflux, vomiting, abdominal pain, and appetite loss short term. Because your body isn't taking the nutrients in your food, the food is just sitting in your stomach undigested, it also can cause malnutrition as your body burns through your stored sugar reserves trying to get enough fuel. Gastroparesis has no cure, so if your gastroparesis continues after the medication is stopped (this is, it turns out, common) you now have an incurable condition that makes eating and digestion very painful.

Ozempic is the opposite of a willpower aid. It doesn't cause your to have magic willpower muscles to choose better foods. Ozempic makes it impossible to eat normally, the weight loss is caused by extreme caloric deficit because your body isn't digesting food. People who say it "calms food noise" mean that you're incapable of eating, and eating makes you feel sick, so you stop feeling hunger, because your stomach can't process any more food, it's backed up and the food isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Ozempic doesn't make you healthier, it makes you too sick to eat and stresses your pancreas to stop your body from storing the food you eat as future fuel. For people with diabetes whose insulin and glucogen levels are extremely unbalanced, this drug can have meaningful life prolonging effects, but even in diabetics it still causes symptoms of gastroparesis, the #1 reason people quit it, because gastroparesis is really unpleasant. For the people whom this medication is able to stabilize their insulin and glucogen, it usually has less or more tolerable digestive symptoms, but the drug working as designed is SUPPOSED to make you too sick to eat. People regain the weight and more when they stop taking it because their bodies are literally starving on ozempic, and your body puts on weight defensively after it's been through starvation stress (other more complicated things involving your hormones and vagus nerve also contribute).

Forcing job seekers to take this drug is just punishment. It makes eating actively unpleasant. It introduces physical discomfort that doesn't always go away later. The fact that weight loss as an industry has convinced society that the answer to a heavy body (which isn't necessarily a medical problem!) is "just stop eating, you just need help to literally become unable to digest your food and then you'll lose weight" is bonkers. We need to eat. Eating is both a vital human function and a vital social function. If you can't eat normal portions without pain, you're cut off from a huge aspect of life. It is so profoundly unsustainable to give people "eating makes you physically sick" shots to stop them from eating to change their physical appearance.

That ozempic is the 14th most prescribed drug in the United States (most prescriptions are not the diabetic use) is not something the UK should be emulating. People shouldn't feel pressured to LOSE DIGESTION in order to conform better to a beauty standard. And we shouldn't be requiring ANYONE be forced to take ANY medication of dubious medical value to them in order to access benefits.

[quasi-normalcy]

So it's come my attention that there are a lot of students, particularly in humanities and social sciences disciplines, who need to hear this, so here goes:

Do the readings.

Oh my God, just do the readings. I promise, it gets easier once you get into the habit of it.

What makes a good student? Doing the readings. Literally just doing the readings is enough to make you a good student.

[quasi-normalcy]

The readings *are* the course. The lectures are just priming you for the readings. The tutorials and seminars are just how we collectively process the readings. If the readings were intended to be optional, they would have been listed under the "optional readings" heading.

[scholarlyhobbit]

I've been in graduate school since Moses was a freshman and I also work in the Disability Office at my university, so please believe me when I say: even if the readings don't get easier, you have to do them. If you're struggling with your reading load, figure out why. It could range from anything like inadequate prep time to needing alternative formatting like audiobooks/text-to-speech. Shifting to a lot of text-to-speech after I had COVID really helped. I can process more and retain more.

If you can't pinpoint your problem with getting readings done, please talk to someone, maybe multiple someones. Talk to your professors (I promise, I've never bitten a student) about what you're struggling with. Talk to your advisor. Get strategies and suggestions for tackling the reading. When I'm behind the lecturn, I don't judge you for struggling to keep up and I'm happy to strategise for optimal retention and class participation. I do judge students for not doing the reading and pretending they finished it to bullshit the discussion. I promise, I know when you do this, you aren't fooling me, and you're making the class worse for yourself and everyone else. I would much rather you tell me the truth and own up that you didn't read than pretend you had and derail the class.

Look for more ways to get into the readings than for ways to get out of them.

[the-lion-machine]

If you can't do the whole reading, do some of the reading and admit you didn't get past the intro or you skimmed the end. If you can't do ANY of the reading, instead of pretending you totally did the reading, tell your professor you're sorry but you're behind today and don't have anything related to the reading to discuss.

Sometimes your professors and TAs will consider "I didn't do the reading and I'm not prepared" to be non participation because it's the same as you just skipping class in certain kinds of discussion based classes. Take the L and make sure you read for it next week. More often, professors and TAs will shift their discussion slightly either so you can follow it better, especially if you did SOME of the reading. Sometimes you didn't do the reading because it was too much work during an unusually busy time, nobody did the reading in full, and the feedback that it wasn't a viable amount of reading to do actually helps your professor refine the class syllabus.

Sometimes you don't do the reading because you're unwell. Especially if you have depression, anxiety, PTSD, ADHD, burnout, etc -- and if you're struggling this hard against the readings every week, because you're existentially tired or freaked out by having to do them or afraid to do the readings, most schools have some kind of psychiatric support you should ask about and look into. It's not actually normal to be emotionally unable to read, even if the reading isn't entertaining. You should be taking care of your physical health, too-- do you need to see a doctor? Do you know you have long covid you've been trying to ignore? Are you tired and in pain and trying to read through that? The problem isn't willpower and it's probably not your readings.

You're in school to do the readings. That's what the degree is, ultimately -- all the tests and final grades do is establish you sufficiently understand the readings. If you genuinely can't do the readings, you need to figure out why.

[teaboot]

Kinda wanna know what the statute of limitations is on necromancy

[teaboot]

Like. What even is death

Is it when the electrical synapses in my brain stop firing? Because the cells and bacteria and fungi and viruses that form my body will still be alive a while after that

Is it when my tissues break down? When the descendants of the bacteria in my gut have dispersed a certain distance away into the soil?

Are my bones still me? And if bones are enough to bring me back and walk me around the living, is my hair? My blood? My tears?

When does it stop? If my calcium can be risen, what about my carbon? And how far back?

If I ate meat from a cow, and the proteins in that meat became part of my hand, could I cut off a finger and animate it with the cow's soul, or does the act of bring consumed destroy it?

A fossilized skeleton isn't a skeleton, it's the rock and mineral that replaced the skeleton as it took over the place the skeleton used to be, but are there no traces left behind? No flecks of raw materials mixed in that were once a living creature?

If I pick up a handful of topsoil, most of what I'm holding will have come from living organisms that have died. Plants, animals, fungi, bacteria. Can you revive dirt? And if you can't, why?

When is an alive thing no longer even partially living, and when 8s a dead thing no longer dead?

What's the line between something that is dead, and a pile of raw materials?

What is the dividing point between a pile of meat and a pile of dirt

Everything I'm made of right now used to be a star, or molecules that became a plant that was eaten by a rat that was eaten by a dinosaur that died in a river that a mammoth drank from before it died and became grass that a mountain goat ate before it's descendant became a sheep whose manure was used to grow a tree that I ate an apple from a week ago, and now the nutrients in that are in my flungs or something

Is part of me that mammoth? That rat? That Plant?

If a single molecule in my body was once inside of a dodo bird, is that enough to animate a dodo bird?

What if it is, and you can just control one molecule?

Could you necromance all the souls of every animal someone ate in the last month, could you control the parts of their body that were generated by those nutrients? And again, does that limit max out after the proteins are digested? And at which point?

Is the shape of my body and the space it occupied any more mine than any random fleck of dander or loose fragment of bone?

Is the imprint if my body "me"? And if not, what else makes the things inside me into myself and not something it used to be?

What is the threshold for things that denote control over death? Is everything dead, or nothing? What does something stop being itself and start being something else.

Do I eveb hold possession over myself?

I have been awake for 22 hours and I don't remember why I was thinking about any of this

[feyosha]

Laughs

[ralfmaximus]

"While I was trying to photograph the Northern Lights in the wee hours of the morning, my cat decided to photobomb the picture. Since I had the camera’s shutter speed maxed out, it ended up leaving a sort of ghostly image of my cat in the photo."

Photographer: Kristie Kohn

[dramatic-dolphin]

'all age gaps problematic' people are so wild. "what can a 19 year old and a 28 year even have in common??? what do they talk about??" BITCH THEIR HOBBIES???????

[dramatic-dolphin]

Do You Not Have Hobbies Or Interests

[dramatic-dolphin]

being age appropriate??? to a NINETEEN YEAR OLD?????????

[dramatic-dolphin]

like yeah i do personally think it's weird to date a 19yr old as a 28yr old but let's not act like that 9 year age difference makes them different species that can't even interact even as friends. like can we be normal. i promise you can talk to younger people.

[wtrys]

I think their point is, though, that the lives of a 19 year old and a 28 to 30 year old are way different, because one could be in college and is fresh out of highschool, lending to their naivety, while the 30 year old (I like round numbers better) has a lot more experience in life, so it's hard to relate insofar as events happening to them.

[dramatic-dolphin]

i don't like generalizing like that, because people's lives can all take very different paths. not everyone goes to college. a 19 year old could be in the army. they could be getting married, they could be getting divorced, they could be doing anything. a 28 year old could be in college and living with their parents, while a 19 year old could at the same time be struggling to pay rent and being the legal guardian to a child. they could be in the same college class, even. life experience isn't linear, and it does the human experience a disservice to pretend everyone walks the same paths.

and relating is not all there is to human connection! i can't relate to the experiences and life of an olympic sports player, but that doesn't mean we can't connect on any level.

[hyperlexichypatia]

Over half of college students in the U.S. are older than 25. I don't know about other countries, but, like. The notion that "college" means "A life stage that happens at ages 18-23, which is basically an extended form of childhood, during which a person has no meaningful adult responsibilities, does not do their own self-care tasks, has never had a job (or at least not a 'real,' 'serious,' 'adult' job), and certainly would not ever even think about anything like having serious relationships or children of their own" is such an incredibly... astonishingly... narrow view.

Besides hobbies, some things that a 28 year old and a 19 year old might have in common to talk about include:

Their babies. I've mentioned before that my mom's longtime best friend is someone she met when they were 44 and 18, respectively, and mothers of kids aged 3 and 1, respectively.

The college class that they're both taking together.

Their job that they both do. (So many people in the notes are talking about the older person being "more advanced in their career" and, uhhh, are you not only upper-middle-class, but also a time traveler from the '90s? What is this strange "People get regular promotions based on seniority and can reasonably be assumed to be in a higher professional position than they were 10 years ago" alchemy you reference?

[the-lion-machine]

When I was 19, I had college classes with people in their 50s. It was great. We would hang out after class. I would ask them about their families and tell them about mine. We would discuss the readings, or our research. Sometimes they weren't just old enough to be my parents but actually had kids my age. They were cool, and respectful, we had different life experiences but since we were having this experience of college together we took the time to get to know each other. I really valued those friendships, the opportunity to hang out with people who weren't trying to date me, people who I could ask questions of about things like taxes and jobs and just get an idea of what normal people were like (my parents were not people who I could ask questions of). When I transferred to my low residency college, MANY of my peers were adults 40+ and we had great conversations and talks as adult peers.

Now that I'm in my 30s, when people in their teens and 20s just want to chill in my vicinity, I get it. I'm a visibly queer, visibly disabled adult, I get it. Sure you can sit at this public table with me. What're you reading? What'd you have for lunch? We can talk about my take on events you weren't born for, sure, I'm really old in Internet years. I'm happy to just listen to you for a while. I'm probably about to learn a shitton I had no idea about, and it's great.

The thing is, when you're not being weird, you can find something to talk about to most people. You can absolutely just hang out with people 30 years older than you and learn something new, and if they're not being creeps, you probably should try it at least once. You should probably try socializing with someone across generations generally, because most people are pretty interesting, if you don't prejudge them as old and boring or young and cringey. Maybe they'll be boring or cringey and you'll probably not talk to them again. But probably not.

Two specific people having a weird bad age gap dynamic between them because it's an abuse dynamic does not mean being different ages is intrinsically bad or sus. The problem isn't the age gap. It's the abuse.

[androidtrashfire]

Most loathsome RoP villains in descending order:

2. Sauron

1. KEVIN

[calamitysong]

so you think you can stone miette and spit in miette’s eye?? so you think you can love miette and leave miette to DIE?? oh mother!! can’t do this to me mother!!!

[westbrookwestbooks]

All memes left on tumblr for more than about a fortnight metamorphose into Queen

[shiraglassman]

Bohemiette Rhapsody

[randomslasher]

Freddie would so approve of this

[gritsandbrits]

Mama Miette Mama Miette Mama Miette let me go~

[starlight-catt]

I’m just a small cat, nobody loves me~

She’s just a small cat, from a small family~

Spare her hers life from this MONSTROSITY~

[elierlick]

This is one of the oldest surviving recordings of a trans person.

Masoud El Amaratly (1897-1944) was an Iraqi trans singer who became famous in 1920s Baghdad for his folk music. He worked as a farmer before transitioning in his teens. The mustarjil, a term similar to trans man, then moved to the city and sang in cafés. A music agent discovered him there and his fame spread across West Asia.

Enjoy this 1925 recording of him singing the traditional Iraqi song, "Khadri al Chai" ("Please Make Tea"). Check out Ajam's website for more.

[tfblovesmusic]

Via Early Music Memes for Monteverdi-Loving Teens