Snow in Takarazuka

Beth Winter. Polish. Multifandom with a focus on musicals, the Takarazuka revue, whatever else catches my attention, and random beautiful things.

[yukinojou]

For the express purposes of pinning to Twitter, because Elon is an idiot and goodness knows when Twitter will implode entirely:

@bwinter.bsky.social

Here, of course

Beth Winter@AO3

Yukinojou_bw@instagram

And in the before times, @bwinter@twitter

[wigglybunfish]

in which murderbot is a very normal terracotta soldier and ART the dragon spirit of a chinese junk who dwells in the ship's keel. they meet in the ming dynasty perhaps, when ppl are sailing places extra willy-nilly.

*Nüwa is the mother goddess in chinese mythology, known for creating humanity from yellow clay and repairing the sky.

thank you @mutualrapport for hosting the event! original prompt below.

[drawn for the prompt: an AU of ART and MB's first meeting and conversation - e.g. another look at their first meeting from a fantasy, historical, or (non-canon) sci-fi lens! Any perspective is fine. The only constraint is that it cannot be set in the canon universe. Any visibly non-canon AU- fantasy, human, historical, etc. - anything goes!]

[czech-hunter-reject]

Teeheehee, off to do my little schemes 😜

[czech-hunter-reject]

Teeheehee, on my way back home from doing my little schemes 🤪

[monster-at-the-end-of-this-book]

How were the schemes Were the schemes successful

[czech-hunter-reject]

Oh- hehehejehe huhuhuhu hæhæhæ, my little schemes were an astounding success!! 😝 they never saw it coming teeheehee

[spaceshipsandpurpledrank]

[spaceshipsandpurpledrank]

@jorality

[jorality]

We know who has all the brain cells

[arsnof]

It makes the dream work

[naamahdarling]

Being smart enough to know when to consult and listen to someone more knowledgeable is in fact quite smart! Many humans cannot manage this!

[stephendann]

Damn, that cat is showing that the real solution was the friends we made along the way.

[wizardarchetypes]

Awesome video displaying phenomenal craftsmanship—posted by one of my favorite Tiktok accounts: Tlingit_Haida

Aani (the land known as Southeast Alaska) has been home to the Tlingit and Haida Peoples since time immemorial

Edit: To clarify, this particular video features Git Hoan Dancers, of the Tsimshian Tribe. They say so in the video, but I realize my caption about the Tlingit and Haida Nations might cause confusion.

[museum-spaces]

this is amazing1

The masks look so much like the ones in museums and cultural centres while still being articulated that way. Look at that amazing skill.

Its so smooth that it took me a moment to realize those are modern masks and the historic ones don't move like that.

[penny-anna]

what the hell is going on

[penny-anna]

i believe in you Binface. you can do it. this could be your moment.

[penny-anna]

Please god it would be so funny

[penny-anna]

there is no downside to voting for Count Binface. its not taking away from other candidates bcos they aren't any and the more votes he gets the stupider Farage looks.

[penny-anna]

for people out of the loop:

Nigel Farage is the leader of Reform UK, a far right party who are currently in the process of a serious bid to become the UK government. they are just straight up evil.

Count Binface is an intergalactic space warrior with a bin on his head. he likes to run as a novelty candidate in general and mayoral elections. a big thing he likes to do is run as a candidate against the incumbent prime minister:

(Also pictured: Boris Johnson, Elmo)

Anyway, in brief:

Nigel Farage is currently in the midst of a big scandal about his finances

He has decided to deal with this by 1) making a show of nobly resigning from parliament and then 2) immediately running in the resulting by-election

He has stated that he is letting 'the people' judge his actions and implied that if he wins that will prove that he has been exonerated in the court of public opinion

His goal was presumably to get a big resounding win over the other parties, proving that The People still love him.

the other parties have thus far decided that this is a 'vanity election' and, well, there is one very easy way to ensure that he will not beat any of them, and that is simply not to play.

and as a result the only person who has so far confirmed they are running against him is Count Binface. no matter the outcome this makes Nigel Farage look like, u know, a fucking clown.

[butterflyslinky]

So what happens if Count Binface actually wins? Does he join Parliament? Does he have to take the bin off his face?

[penny-anna]

I've seen some people saying he would have to give up his title but it would seem that is no longer the case as of 1999; so, no, he can keep his ceremonial bin if he wishes.

Important to note also that Count Binface is the alter ego of comedian & political satirist Jon Harvey who seems to be an intelligent individual with reasonable politics. As I said no real downside.

[penny-anna]

The no hats rule clearly does not apply to him. He is not wearing a hat. It's a bin.

[redscharlach]

It has come to my attention that some of you have never seen what I firmly believe to be the greatest music video of all time: Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart. It is the perfect marriage of a galactically bombastic power ballad and a writhing mass of 1980s video clichés, thrown into the path of a wind machine and blasted down a moodily lit corridor into the realm of legend.

In case you’re wondering what the heck they were thinking of when they made it, I remember Bonnie once explaining on TV that it’s about the dreams of a headmaster’s daughter, hence all the boys in (and out of) uniform. In retrospect, the whole shebang is quite fascinatingly female gaze-y, and I’m pretty sure it was a major formative influence on my pubescent imagination.

And yes, there is also a very amusing literal version, but for my money, the original is definitely the most hilarious…

[redscharlach]

A sad and deeply fond farewell to Bonnie Tyler (1951–2026). May somersaulting ninja schoolboys sing you to your rest.

[orteil42]

why do closed captions keep pretending english is the only intelligible language? when a character speaks spanish what exactly is forcing your hand to transcribe it as "[speaks foreign language]" rather than "Si"

[concerningwolves]

This intersection of Anglocentric bias + ableism and audism makes my blood boil.

People commonly defend this practise with "But the audience isn't meant to understand!" or "It's inconsequential!", neither of which actually address a) their assumption that the [ideal Anglo] audience wouldn't understand, or, perhaps most crucially in the context of CCs, b) that this is a failure of accessibility. A hearing person who speaks that "foreign" language will know exactly what's being said. A deaf or HoH person – the people CCs are primarily intended for – who speaks or reads that language should therefore have the exact same opportunity to understand. It very much feels to me like an assumption that we deaf and HoH people couldn't possibly understand any language but English, so there's no point in getting those languages transcribed for us. I hope it goes without saying how profoundly audist that sentiment is.

There is also, I think, a profound misunderstanding or ignorance of Deaf culture at play. Which is to say, CCs in English-language media are written with not only the assumption that the audience will be native English speakers, but that all d/Deaf and HoH people speak English as their first language, so all other languages are as supposedly foreign to them as they are for hearing people. But sign languages are their own distinct language. BSL, ASL, ISL, AusLan, NZSL etc ≠ English (and are indeed different from one another), LIS ≠ Italian, JSL ≠ Japanese, and so on. So, if you follow the captioners' logic to its natural extreme, all non-signed dialogue is "foreign" to many d/Deaf and HoH people and should therefore be labelled [speaks foreign language] / [speaks English] / [speaks own language] / etc. – which is, obviously, a terrible idea that perfectly highlights all the biases implicit in closed captioning.

TL;DR: your accessibility feature fails in its function as soon as you fail to transcribe all spoken languages.

[polytropic-liar]

Quick reminder that if you live in an EU Member State, those captions are not compliant with the European Accessibility Act and you can report the platform or company! EU folks please do this if you can; forcing multinational companies to comply with the EAA has a very good chance of making them simply standardize compliance, even in counties that don't have a version of this law.

[mammalianmammals]

Chinese Mountain Cat (Felis bieti), family Felidae, endemic to grasslands on the Tibetan Plateau of western China

Vulnerable.

photos: Shul Conservation, Scottish Wildcat Fdn, Wild Cats Worldwide

[lacetulle]

Elie Saab | Fall/Winter 2026 Couture

[don-dake]

Visit Original Link

RIP Bonnie Tyler [1951–2026]

[artingabout]

A seaglass kiwi made from kiwi seaglass

Behind the scenes:

My materials:

a collection of seaglass gathered on trips to Aotearoa New Zealand, including an abundance of lake glass as well

two broken paua shells

a piece of pounamu

copper tape & scissors

a pencil or dowel to smooth the copper tape down

flux

a brush for flux application

lead

soldering iron and all essentials for masking/ventilation/not dosing myself with lead fumes

dremel with diamond saw blade

diamond sanding belt

styrofoam shapes to serve as templates

This entire project came about because I collect seaglass wherever I go and to my surprise, AoNZ has a surprising amount of brown glass. In hindsight, it made sense since I collected it at waterfronts and beaches that are at prime tourist locations. Tourists discarding beer bottles in the scenic stretches of water. What a shocking development 😑

Since I've been pecking away at this one for quite some time, I forgot about taking as many pictures as I would normally take of the step-by-step of making this fellow.

For the base shape, I had a stash of old styrofoam balls and eggs from projects of Many Years past, which were finally put to good use.

In order to build the 3D shape in a way so I could remove the styrofoam base, I made both halves of the body first to get the shape right, then did the same with the head.

Once I'd secured all the joins on the insides as well at the outsides, I removed the styrofoam and soldered the two halves of the body together. When it was secured, I added the front of the head, leaving the back of the head open so I could solder the joins and ensure a stable connection point for the beak.

Next stage, before I could go further, was shaping the beak so I could make sure it would fit and hold fast. I'd already smoothed this piece of pounamu down and used my sanding belt to give it a more beaky shape.

Once the head was stable, I put a border of copper tape around the beak and attached it by soldering.

Fun fact: it was not, in fact, secure enough. The wee fella overbalanced due to being nose-heavy and fell off the table when I left it unsupervised and knocked the entire beak off. But never fear! We can rebuild him! We have the technology!

Once the beak was actually secured, I soldered on the back of the head and used some smaller pieces of glass to fill some of the larger gaps between pieces.

The final step of construction was cutting the broken paua pieces to add as the eyes. Note to anyone who wants to work with paua - always cut the shell either in water or under running water, because the dust and the smell is quite something.

After that, it was a case of giving the whole thing a thorough soak and scrub to get the flux residue and any stickiness and staining off.

I want to make a little stand for it because it's still a little bit uneven on the base. The nature of working with seaglass is that no two pieces are the same width or thickness, so there is a bit of a wobble where the base pieces didn't quite line up.

Still, it's a 3 year labour of love and is finished and I'm delighted!

[beardedmrbean]

Rick Rolled a entire stadium full of people, epic.

[bisexualbaker]

[Image: Post by Time Capsule Tales: "Rick Astley &the Foo Fighters perform "Never Gonna Give You Up" in the style of "Smells Like Teen Spirit", after Dave Grohl spotted Rick on the side of the stage aand just pulled him up to do the song." Video is as described by the post.]

[moniquill]

https://linktr.ee/stefankoidl

[vulcartist]

I translated the Ea-Nasir complaint into vulcan and engraved it in on a cooper plate

[tournevis-real]

The tumblrest sentence I have ever seen

[mysticplaces]

abandoned thermal power plant | Hungary

photography by Andreas S

[chuwenjie]

So stoked to share the official trailer for the Avatar Aang movie, now releasing JULY 25th on Paramount+!!

I’m so proud of our crew and honored to have been a part of this.. for everyone who has waited to watch the official release in order to support the artists and animators, I just want to say thank you so much, from the bottom of my heart - it truly means so much!!