Elen sila lumenn' omentielvo

History and linguistics lover; reblogs mostly Critical Role, D&D, Cosmere, The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. Also lots of cat and other cute animal pictures. And anything else that is pretty. Unapologetic defender of the Star Wars Prequels and Susan Pevensie. Currently locked in to The Locked Tomb.

[angelbabymikaa]

saw an article about an AI startup trying to make drones that would obliterate mosquitos and it literally made me cry like that 4 million dollars they spent could have gone into malaria and yellow fever research or spreading money to areas where they need nets and healthcare due to mosquitos like the answer isn’t killing an entire species from the planet it would destroy ecosystems and leave massive holes in the food chain for birds and other animals not even considering that mosquitoes are pollinators themselves like i truly feel like one company should not have the ability to literally just decide if a species should no longer exist and then execute an entire population like that like i feel like we should have a fucking say 😭

[fatal-blow]

god i wish more sources talked about "sex" hormones like this

ironically its in a book about female sex anatomy that ive come across it (Vagina Obscura by Rachel E. Gross). everyone only wants to focus on the secondary sex characteristics and not the bazillion other functions of estrogen, testosterone, and co.

every body uses both of them!! for a million reasons!!!!! aaaaaa!!!!!!!

[nebulaeyedfish]

Ninth House, Left Greif...

I love Harrow so much btw

Tags: @swanofstorie @imflyingfish @raise-me-up-take-me-up

[haplophrynemolliz]

swear i'll keep you, closest to my heart

[birdyvadu]

this wasn't supposed to be this "elaborate" but I reeeally love how it turned out I want to print it!

[blckgirlacid]

I need my weird alone time or I will explode

[kaiserin-erzsebet]

People will correctly identify that heteronormativity is a problem in old historiography and then immediately turn around and insist that two people must be having sex based on transgressive social intimacy. Then say something like "because sex is a human need for fulfillment."

Ah if only there was more than one kind of normativity to keep in mind....

[kaiserin-erzsebet]

This isn't exclusive to same sex attraction or love either. Anyone who digs into Empress Elisabeth's writings enough will find pretty clear statements about being apathetic (or disinclination) to physical intimacy and fulfillment from totally separate parts of her life.

We can't assume that people's highest fulfillment comes from having sex with the people they love. I wish we could have more nuance about this.

[thoodleoo]

if anyone ever tries to tell you that the ancient greeks were more sophisticated than us, just remember that there was a ship war between plato and aeschylus over whether achilles or patroclus was the top in their relationship, while xenophon was off complaining that he didn’t ship that

[imaginarycircus]

That quoted passage is confusing so let me try to untangle it because I think it’s actually much funnier if you know the details. Xenophon and Plato were about the same age. They were both students of Socrates. They are actually the ones arguing about Homer, using sock puppets. Both were children when The Symposium (bunch of dudes drinking wine and debating love) happened so they weren’t there. They just heard the story repeated by Socrates and others. Both wrote dialogs called The Symposium, about a debate they weren’t present for.

In Plato’s dialog it’s Phaedrus arguing that Aeschylus (the tragedian) was wrong when he said Achilles was the erastes (the adult man in a relationship with a younger “beardless” one.) Phaedrus says that Achilles was the younger one and the more beautiful. Xenophon (in his own version of The Symposium) has Socrates say Achilles and Patroclus were chaste. And they are all arguing about what Homer wrote in the Iliad.

In closing: Plato uses sock puppet Phaedrus to say that Aeschylus was wrong and Achilles isn’t the “top.” Xenophon uses sock puppet Socrates to argue that Homer was writing gen fic.

[specialagentartemis]

Intelligent alien species based on bugs but specifically those moths that don’t have mouths and only live for a week after they pupate. This species’ whole conscious life is actually in the larval phase; larvae are the ones considered people, larvae are the ones with conscious and complex brains who build society, and each instar of the larva is treated as a different phase of life. Larvae become emotionally and socially and cognitively mature without ever becoming sexually mature. When they pupate, they metamorphose into something different and strange and close to mindless, with no mouth and no digestive system, whose only instincts are to mate and then quickly die. Metamorphosis is treated, functionally, like a person’s death, and the imago phase is a kind of proto-afterlife of majestic flight and the continuation of the species. Birth and death inextricably intertwined. Sex is not something people do during their lives, it’s a thing that is done as an imago after you’ve passed on from your life but before you return to the soil in death. Resultant eggs are collected by family members to raise. I think this would be fun.

[tamanduaclaws]

@derinthescarletpescatarian Have you seen this yet?

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

No, but I've been incubating a society similar to this since reading Sheri Tepper's Grass about a year ago.

[naomilibicki]

#reminds me of something ann leckie did in one of the lake of souls stories...am i remembering that right?

@a-green-onion I actually went looking in the tags to see if anyone had mentioned Lake of Souls because that's what I also thought of! If I recall/understood correctly, in Lake of Souls it's actually a symbiote/parasite situation rather than a single species but it's a pretty similar setup.

[telegraphavekiss]

(via latchmaguk on Instagram)

[diphemerald]

Happy Chinese New Year, fellow cosmerenauts! Here's another Lord Ruler I commissioned, whose artist is 阿九啊啊. I love her "illuminated medieval manuscript" style and the little details she included, such as Rashek's favorite wooden flute🥺.

[iamthelowercase]

Hello, tumblr! I saw something on here the other day that worried me, so I decided to Do Science about it. But I can't do it alone: I need your help to build the dataset!

Here's what I need you to do:

If you see a post with a "mature content" label, and it's 2026, DM me a link to the post.

Yes, that's really it.

I am hoping to collect several thousand such posts, so that I have a decent sized dataset. I do not care what the post is about; if it's labeled as "mature content", I want to add it to my dataset.

If I get 10,000 posts in my dataset before August 31st 2026, I will post my preliminary findings then. I won't feel comfortable calling my findings "settled" before 2027, unless I get over 50,000 posts.

[iamthelowercase]

Tumblr Science FAQ, round 1

What's your hypothesis, OP?

I am not talking about that unless I have results to share. That would bias the results.

I did write them down and I did share them with a trusted contact who can prove that I wrote them down the same day I made this post. (While I did so before I made this post, I am not sure they will be able to provide proof of that, because I did so on the same day.)

OP are you interested in...?

Do you have to click through to see the post? Does the clickthrough contain the words "mature content"? Then yes.

OP are you interested if the post is about...?

I am interested in the mature content labels, not the content of the post. Is there a clickthrough that contains the words "mature content"? Then yes.

[iamthelowercase]

Tumblr Science FAQ, round 2

Should I reblog this for reach?

Yes, please. I felt really silly when I noticed I forgot to include that in the original post.

Is it okay if I send you my own posts?

Yes, those are perfect for what I'm looking for. I actually need to do some processing on a post to make it useful for testing my hypothesis, and this makes it easy.

Are you looking for "potentially mature content" also, or just "mature content"?

I want both, please. Anything that throws up a blocking screen that you have to click through. The distinctions between them are one of the things I am hoping to study.

Does it matter when the post was made originally?

Technically no. There's no way to respond to this without introducing some bias in the results, and I don't want that. However, I do collect some data on a post as part of making it useful to me, and that data is easier to collect if the post is recent.

What if I request content label review on a post after I send it to you?

I need to see the mature content label to be able to use the post. Because the mature content label hides the content of the post, it is very hard to use a post that no longer has a mature content label. You could send me a screenshot, but people could use that to lie to me.

Basically, it's more work for you to make it usable to me.

OP are you a transphobe? It would ruin the experiment for me if you're a transphobe.

I promise I'm not a transphobe and not doing this for transphobic reasons. You should still double-check that I'm not a transphobe for yourself, though. I am not sure that this study will have the useful effects you're hoping for; I am studying something specific, and it may not be what you hope.

[boitterfly]

it’s so special to me that so much of fan culture is textual analysis for the love of the game. like thank god there are people in my phone who are also thinking about this thing i love so much that they are writing transformative fiction as character studies and setting clips of the show to music with theme-relevant lyrics and writing long text posts analyzing every line of dialogue like!! yay!!!

[heterorealism]

Truck comes first and if there is any money left over the kids may eat. - Modern Consumer Patriarchy

[varginhamonologues]

she got her degree and started removing the parasite 🙏

[earths-roots-grow-up]

Tinfoil hat moment but I don't think he was dumb, I think he was strategic. He put her in a situation in which she had to either: sell her car (so the only means of transportation is now in his name), or maybe even to drop out (to have time for the second job) if she wants to feed the kids. He did it right when she was aaaaaalmost done with her degree. Either way, it's sabotage.

Sometimes when an action makes NO sense to us ("he's like a stupid alien"), it's bc we are not understanding its true motivation/purpouse. If his goal was control, financial pressure and limiting her options due to lack of funds, it makes perfect sensie to buy the truck.

Tinfoil hat moment over!

[ralfmaximus]

No, this is not tinfoil stuff.

This is classic abuser behavior: maneuver the partner into a situation where they feel trapped and cannot escape. The timing on this is too perfect; he saw her gaining agency & power in the relationship and moved to short circuit that.

I am SO GLAD she got out.

If this happens to you, try reaching out to friends & family first. Chances are they've been watching your situation and are aching to help, but have felt powerless. I can't tell you how many times I've watched this scenario unfold. Ask. For. Help. Nobody will judge you, and they're probably waiting for you to make a move. People notice abuse and want to help.

if you feel truly alone, start out with some free online resources.

There's also online legal help for filing no-fault divorce papers or how to find a lawyer you can afford.

[proxima-bee]

it is kind of unfortunate that “is john gaius's nine houses fascist” has become metonymic for “do you think the empire is good or bad” when i think it'd actually be interesting to analyze the political character of empire given that the two perspective characters with the most insight into the actions of the empire are each vantaged not to analyze it from this light (meaning, what they take for granted and what they don't mention are each as important as what is described in detail) and given that its founder has meta-knowledge from an apocalypsed earth on how ideological currents present themselves and that tamsyn muir herself while not infallible is pretty adept at articulating these things through the discourse of her text. like to me it's interesting that john doesn't present his empire with the well-worn mediatic symbologies that define the fictional scientifantasy ‘fascist empire’ while also sharing the veneration of the classical, and it's also interesting that the empire's internal mythos and propaganda allow its characters (and many of its readers!) to ignore that it is, in fact, a populist and idealist system that conceives of itself as a composition of heterogeneous parts which rally around a state of emergency to defend its capital interests and resist a growing might of a militant progressive movement. it's compelling to me that the empire's ideological self-propagation is cogent enough that a lot of readers go ‘it can't be counterrevolutionary, let alone reactionary! there are women in the soldier class!’ and the women in question are abjected therein

[achillesinhighheels]

sorry i can’t go out tonight i’m at home sitting down

[inbabylontheywept]

you're not allowed to bring wireless devices into classified areas and a security guy noticed a square phone-ish shape in my pocket so he asked me to show him what it was and i had to show him my can of pocket herring :/

[inbabylontheywept]

artists depiction of event