GUARDIAN

natalia 28

[catasters]

[idontgettechnology]

The time of his life.

[partlymadeofgold]

source: mooseandpeach_ on instagram! https://www.instagram.com/mooseandpeach_

[deadbirdlife]

Today my Advanced Clinical Pathology professor trailed off in the middle of class and said, “If I seem distracted, it’s because last night I was talking with a friend and she asked ‘Who’s that chick in Titanic?’ but all I heard was ‘Chicken Titanic,’ and ever since then I’ve been thinking about a chicken on the bow of the Titanic like Kate Winslet, wings held high. It’s all I can think about.”

[deadbirdlife]

My hand moved on its own

[magicratfingers]

so rare and beautiful when the art is exactly the image u saw in your mind

[junlight]

It's my 16 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳

Apr 2025, 2010...

Hot Damn, its been sooo long

my blog can get it's learner's permit now 🚘

[rosy2k]

「ネイルUP！」 2009

[diaryofandnwoman]

[cbarc]

okay let’s get all this straight.

the FIRST figure skating backflip was performed by this guy Terry Kubicka

now Terry landed his flip at the Olympics in ‘76 and in ‘77 the backflip was quickly deemed illegal in this level of figure skating as it was considered dangerous and, some argue more crucially, couldn’t be landed on one foot, as is the required landing for all other figure skating jumps

Fast forward to 1998 at the Olympics once more and French skater Surya Bonaly.

It is widely discussed and disputed as to whether Surya was historically underscored by American judges. She won five straight gold medals in the European championships from ‘90 to ‘95 but couldn’t break past 4th place at two Olympics during this period of time. It was at her 3rd Olympic Games she pulled out her backflip and crucially landed it on one foot.

The one foot landing was seen as the big obstacle in the way of the backflip being legalised. That and its danger level. In the time between Kubicka and Bonaly however many skater had already added two foot landed flips to their performance routines (ie not scored competitions)

Some people see this as the moment the backflip should had been legalised in competitive figure skating. Many skaters had executed it safely and Bonaly proved she could accomplish the one foot landing. Bonaly placed 10th at this Olympics, incurring harsh deductions for the illegal backflip. The backflip was at no point considered in contention for legality despite Bonaly’s accomplishments, (one of which being the first female skater to land a quad jump at the Olympics). Her Olympic backflip was seen as a middle finger to Olympic judges and the stringently unprogressive nature of the sport. There were more moments than this throughout her career such as her initial refusal to mount the second place podium at the ‘94 worlds for reasons unclear. There are rumours of her ‘throwing tantrums’ or being ungrateful, and while this may be true, it’s not an uncommon sight in the world of figure skating, and given how black women are still treated in sports today, especially those that take physical appearance and body lines into account, it is undoubted that Bonaly faced racial bias during her professional career.

Surya Bonaly continued to preform her now signature one footed backflip in performances. And the backflip remained illegal in competition.

Within the conversation about Olympic figure skating backflips, there is one skater who may well be the most overlooked. The one who got the committees to legalise it! And that would be this guy, Adam Siao Him Fa

At the 2024 worlds he told himself if he skated his routine clean he would finish with a backflip, a move he had been practicing with his coaches despite it still being an illegal move. Fa did skate clean, and did preform his backflip, and so incurred the mandatory penalty of a 2 point deduction for the use of an illegal manoeuvre.

In a figure skating full circle moment, one of the judges on the panel for that competition, was Terry Kubicka himself. Almost 50 years on from his backflip he has since commentated on the irony of seeing the move he began in the 70’s and being required to deduct points for it. This two point deduction wouldn’t stop Fa from still claiming the gold medal that year. He preformed an illegal move at the end of a perfect routine and took the gold. Mere months after this at a scheduled review the backflip was removed from the group of illegal moves. It would not be granted any technical points like other jumps but would no longer incur a two point deduction.

Today at the Olympic Games in 2026, Ilia Malinin, thanks to these three (and many more performance skaters) before him has landed the first backflip at the Olympics since it’s legalisation.

So to wrap up.

First backflip (two foot) - Terry Kubicka - move made illegal

First backflip (one foot) - Surya Bonaly - move still illegal

Legalisation turning point - Adam Siao Him Fa - move made legal

First fully legal backflip - Ilia Malinin - flip still does not score points

In the future personally I hope to see the flip be utilised by more and more skaters, be given a score, and personal creativity to be more welcomed into the sport, because really we could have had 50 years of Olympic Backflips at this point.

[mymodernmet]

Sultan the Pit Pony is a 200-meter-long, raised-earth sculpture made of 60,000 tonnes of coal shale in Caerphilly, South Wales. Designed by Welsh artist Mick Petts, the colossal work of art is known as the largest figurative earth sculpture in the United Kingdom.

[veggiezombiex]

@becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys

Amazing.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

More accurately, the real life Sultan the pit pony was the last pit pony to be brought up out of the Penallta Colliery when it closed. The earthwork uses spoil specifically from Penallta, and it was designed and named in Sultan’s honour as a tribute to all the equine workers of the South Wales coal belt

The real Sultan was a bit of a local celebrity, by all accounts, and in his retirement was taken around local horse shows as part of parades or opening ceremonies or what have you. So, when the art was designed, the locals and the artist both named it after him.

It’s very cool being there; it’s actually so big you can’t tell what it is from the ground. There are picnic benches in his nostril

[gfriendunited]

VIVIZ 'Like It's Christmas' Jonas Brothers Cover Shooting Behind the Scenes

[anglaised]

like straight men know they r harming and neglecting and preying on women bc they dont treat other men that way 😭 they dont “just try to be friends” with random guys at the grocery store… they dont follow other men to their cars at night in hopes of getting their phone numbers….they dont offer to buy random guys drinks hopes of intoxicating them enough to fuck…they don’t invite their guy friends out to eat with the only intention of getting sex after bc of seeing the interaction as transactional, i promise they know they r being shitty 2 women…and they like 2 do it specifically bc they r doing it to women

[ad-hawkeye]

[everythingfox]

Living with a singer

[fozmeadows]

the older I get, the more the technological changes I've lived through as a millennial feel bizarre to me. we had computers in my primary school classroom; I first learned to type on a typewriter. I had a cellphone as a teenager, but still needed a physical train timetable. my parents listened to LP records when I was growing up; meanwhile, my childhood cassette tape collection became a CD collection, until I started downloading mp3s on kazaa over our 56k modem internet connection to play in winamp on my desktop computer, and now my laptop doesn't even have a disc tray. I used to save my word documents on floppy discs. I grew up using the rotary phone at my grandparents' house and our wall-connected landline; my mother's first cellphone was so big, we called it The Brick. I once took my desktop computer - monitor, tower and all - on the train to attend a LAN party at a friend's house where we had to connect to the internet with physical cables to play together, and where one friend's massive CRT monitor wouldn't fit on any available table. as kids, we used to make concertina caterpillars in class with the punctured and perforated paper strips that were left over whenever anything was printed on the room's dot matrix printer, which was outdated by the time I was in high school. VHS tapes became DVDs, and you could still rent both at the local video store when I was first married, but those shops all died out within the next six years. my facebook account predates the iphone camera - I used to carry around a separate digital camera and manually upload photos to the computer in order to post them; there are rolls of undeveloped film from my childhood still in envelopes from the chemist's in my childhood photo albums. I have a photo album from my wedding, but no physical albums of my child; by then, we were all posting online, and now that's a decade's worth of pictures I'd have to sort through manually in order to create one. there are video games I tell my son about but can't ever show him because the consoles they used to run on are all obsolete and the games were never remastered for the new ones that don't have the requisite backwards compatibility. I used to have a walkman for car trips as a kid; then I had a discman and a plastic hardshell case of CDs to carry around as a teenager; later, a friend gave my husband and I engraved matching ipods as a wedding present, and we used them both until they stopped working; now they're obsolete. today I texted my mother, who was born in 1950, a tiktok upload of an instructional video for girls from 1956 on how to look after their hair and nails and fold their clothes. my father was born four years after the invention of colour televison; he worked in radio and print journalism, and in the years before his health declined, even though he logically understood that newspapers existed online, he would clip out articles from the physical paper, put them in an envelope and mail them to me overseas if he wanted me to read them. and now I hold the world in a glass-faced rectangle, and I have access to everything and ownership of nothing, and everything I write online can potentially be wiped out at the drop of a hat by the ego of an idiot manchild billionaire. as a child, I wore a watch, but like most of my generation, I stopped when cellphones started telling us the time and they became redundant. now, my son wears a smartwatch so we can call him home from playing in the neighbourhood park, and there's a tanline on his wrist ike the one I haven't had since the age of fifteen. and I wonder: what will 2030 look like?

[tuulikki]

My grandfather, who is 100, remembers his dad’s accountant doing math on an abacus. Now he texts me “<3” on his flip phone.

[ad-hawkeye]

thinking about this letter once more. god. it reminds me of 'think of me' from phantom of the opera and ohhhhh i'm emotional again

[ashstfu]

i don’t think people understand how much of life is grief. not just people dying, but losing the version of yourself you thought you’d become. grieving the city you had to leave. the friends you lost not in argument, but in silence. the summer that will never come back. the feeling that maybe you peaked at 12 when you were reading books under the covers and believing in forever

[emjiajia]

Expression practice!!!

[institutionalized-gaming]

October can’t come soon enough

IT IS AUGUST

[its-an-ear-hat-john]

This has been in my likes since last year. It is time.

[bedhead-queen]

This is the 21st night of September skeleton. He only appears once a year.

[gallusrostromegalus]

Happy Halloween!!

[ltwilliammowett]

Do not mess with Welsh Women

In the annals of history, the name Hastings stands as the site of Britain’s last invasion. But there is another contender - the town of Fishguard in Pembrokeshire, Wales. And the story of this attempt by the French revolutionary government to liberate England is proof that women ashore had as much spunk as their men at sea in the age of sail.

Part of “The Last Invasion Tapestry” (x)

On 22 February 1797, the French set in motion a plan to distract British troops from Ireland and launch a major attack there. Some 1,400 soldiers, in dark blue skirts, they wanted to look like Royal Navy personnel, led by the American Colonel William Tate were landed from four French warships on the coast of Carreg Wastad, west of Fisherguard. However, the French were to remain on British soil for only two days.

French forces landing at Carregwastad on 22 February 1797. From a lithograph first published in May 1797 and later coloured, by James Baker (x)

The few British troops on site found themselves overrun by the French and surrendered. Already certain of victory, the French could not believe their eyes when they saw what they were gathering on the nearby hills. Large numbers of troops were massing there and at the sight of these reinforcements they surrendered to the local militia led by Lord Cawdor and withdrew.

Part of “The Last Invasion Tapestry” (x)

In fact, what they saw were not redcoats of the British army, but hundreds of Welsh women in their traditional scarlet cloaks. One local woman in particular is being hailed as the hero of the hour: Jemima Nicholas, a 47-year-old cobbler from Fishguard who attacked 12 Frenchmen with a pitchfork and captured them all single-handedly. 

Part of “The Last Invasion Tapestry” (x)

The whole story was recorded in 1997 on a tapestry, based on the Bayeux Tapestry. The tapestry itself is 100 m long and 51 cm wide and took four years  to complete.

[record-guy59]

[yesjohnnash]

Just like a Nazi.

[frogeyedape]

Trump targets 'anti-American ideology' at Smithsonian museums

The order says that "divisive narratives" must be purged from the US museums and research centres.

DC museum visitors react to Trump administration plan to remove some exhibits from Smithsonians - WTOP News

President Donald Trump’s executive order to remove exhibits that display so called “anti-American ideology” from Smithsonian museums is bein

Upcoming 'upgrade' to Holocaust Museum exhibit on US response to Nazi Germany sparks some staff concerns: Sources

A Holocaust Memorial Museum exhibit will temporarily close for upgrades, sparking concern from some staff over potential changes amid Presid

Historians Defend the Smithsonian - AHA

Updated August 15, 2025—On August 12, 2025, the White House notified the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution that the administration wi

[why5x5]

Trump Orders National Park to Remove Famed Photograph of Formerly Enslaved Man

Amid a crackdown on materials related to enslavement, Trump ordered a national park to remove a print of 'The Scourged Back.'