#Imperial homes

[livesunique]

Jordanian Staircase, Winter Palace, St. Petersburg, Russia,

Source: piter places

[abbeyhomes]

Green and Sustainable Features of Imperial Apartments Zirakpur

Imperial Apartments showcases an array of green and sustainable features that redefine modern living. Designed with eco-consciousness in mind, these luxurious imperial homes in Zirakpur integrate energy-efficient systems, such as solar panels and LED lighting, to reduce the carbon footprint. The apartments boast spacious balconies, allowing residents to enjoy fresh air and scenic views. With a dedicated recycling system and rainwater harvesting, Imperial Apartments Zirakpur promote sustainable practices. Furthermore, the complex features lush green landscapes and a community garden, fostering a connection with nature while providing a serene and sustainable living experience.

[densewentz]

more dreamling dad au bc thats just what i do now apparently i like lazy afternoon naps and so do our boys

[secular-jew]

Pictures for those with limited education & reading comprehension.

[serpentface]

Ephenni man participating in a variant of the kagnoma wantouki folk dance. He has come prepared, wearing bell bracelets and belled and pheasant-feathered dancing shoes, and neglecting a tunic and cloak, allowing for the percussive slaps to his chest and stomach to be louder.

"Kagnoma wantouki" groups together a variety of closely related folk dances that occur across the Imperial Wardi cultural sphere, and beyond (the west + south rivers Hill Tribes, Cholemdinae, and Loberan North Wardi groups have also adopted and developed variants, and one western variant has spread to parts of Bur). The dance is performed differently from province to province (sometimes even from village to village) and goes by several more specific names, but it is distinguished as a collective from other folk dances by the commonalities of:

the dancers use their own bodies as a form of percussion, via clapping their hands, slapping their chests, upper arms, stomachs, thighs, and/or shins, and stomping their feet. The name of the dance itself refers to this.

the dance is otherwise dominated by rapid footwork (often emphasized with bells) and is accompanied by up-tempo music.

the dance can technically be performed strictly solo, with opportunities for partnering.

dancers provide some vocalization.

As a folk dance, it serves no direct religious function and is mostly performed by people with no formal training at social gatherings (this is a mainstay of weddings in particular, but occurs at everything from religious festivals to funerary feasts).

Drumming is the only strictly necessary form of musical accompaniment, but many variants/performances make use of tambourines and rattles. Use of a two-stringed bow instrument is common in the west and south. Chanting by the dancers and singing by a musical accompaniment and/or onlookers is a near-necessity, with a specific call and response form of song developing in tandem with this dance.

Costuming (if used at all) varies by region, but belled shoes decorated with feathers are common (for this and many other dances), and men who come prepared for the occasion usually go with a skirt and a nude upper body (baring more skin to make the slaps more percussive). It’s very common to see men fasten their cloaks around their hips and slip the upper half of the tunic off their arms and down to the belt when joining in opportunistically. Costuming for women requires less specificity and usually lacks the feathered shoes.

The dance can technically be considered unisex, but most variants show slight differentiation of choreography for men and women (in large part aligning to typical dress standards). The feminine variant involves active use of the skirt and less slapping, usually limiting it to claps of the hands, slapping the hand of a partner, and a specialized move during rapid percussive sessions in which the hem of the skirt is lifted by the non-dominant hand while the opposite leg is repeatedly kicked up and slapped on the shin in time to the music.

When dancing with a partner (which often occurs opportunistically among a group), both will face each other and attempt to move in time and punctuate the high-tempo sections with slaps of each other's hands. This dance has no particular connotations of courtship (while some other folk dances are at least Rooted in this and require man-woman dance partnerships with very strongly differentiated choreography). If anything, it's slightly more typical for people to partner up with a dancer of the same gender.

It's very common to see 'dance fights' develop between men in particular, especially when two higher-skilled dancers match up and attempt to outdo each other. This is a semi-formalized aspect of the dance, where the competitors will alternate between 'leading' for each section (punctuated by shifts in tempo and shouts) while the other attempts to match their movements as closely as possible, 'losing' the match if they can't keep up. A good quality fight in action will be deferred to by other dancers, who will circle around them and clap in time (while particularly canny accompanying musicians will improvise more complex rhythms, and singers call attention to it). These 'dance-fights' are almost always friendly in nature and often considered to be the highlight of a kagnoma wantouki, either as a showcase of the highest skilled dancers in a group or as a very, very entertaining spectacle when one or both are drunk.

[horatio-fig]

iPad baby Thrawn

[funeralprocessor]

I feel like the Primaris should have been the catalyst for like, an imperial civil war. At the very least, much unrest in the house of Guilliman. Their existence, let alone rollout/integration, should have had many chapters absolutely rioting. It should be beyond the pale by several orders of magnitude and be seen as an enormous overreach by the more autonomy loving chapters, a blasphemy by the more orthodox chapters, and an existential threat to chapters with geneseed quirks. Plus anyone with any awareness of the thunder warriors should take one look at them and recognize the writing on the wall. Guilliman should absolutely recognize what they represent, what they imply. Like they're the leading wave of a paradigm shift that doesn't bode well for what came before. And I say this as someone who's not averse to Primaris, I just think they could've, should've, been a waaaay bigger deal. I know they loathe changing the status quo and we're never getting rid of the posterboys but I think we missed out on something interesting.

[axiseart]

Little Trooper

[rootless-cosmopolitan]

In free Kherson, people are desperately going into toxic floodwaters amidst Russian shelling trying to save people and animals before they drown. In Russian-occupied Kherson, Russians are doing nothing to save civilians who are stuck on their roofs, screaming for help, and are shooting at those who do try to help. Witnesses have already seen elderly people who could not climb onto their roofs floating dead in the water.

Any "anti-war" leftist who still thinks that this war is just about meaningless borders, that there is "no war except class war," that Ukrainians THEMSELVES don't care whether they live under Russian or Ukrainian control - I have no choice but to think that you are a rancid ratfucker and wish you every bit of the "peace" you so desire for others.

[athetos]

This is what the RRRRRR look like to me btw

[livesunique]

Catherine Palace, Tsarskoye Selo, St. Petersburg, Russia,

Candida Höfer Photography

[unitedfrontvarietyhour]

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from The United Front!

[arimiadev]

Women-Led Games The Game Awards Edition is a Steam event hosted by Women-Led Games that started today, and there's plenty of visual novels participating in the event - including some of mine!

Canvas Menagerie, a comfy slice-of-life boys love romance about TV actors; Asphodelium, a melancholic lite horror boys love romance about killing cults; and Crimson Waves on the Emerald Sea: Amaranthine Moon, a Victorian vampire otome game about solving a mysterious death are all visual novels I'm making that are in the event!

But, there's also.....

A whole group of us visual novel developers in the event! Here's just a handful of women-led visual novels that have collaborated for this. Be sure to check them out!

Of Sense and Soul by @forsythiaproductions ✒️

Please Be Happy, Our Home, My Keeper, Love in a Bottle and Lock & Key: A Magical Girl Mystery by @vnstudioelan 🦊🖊️😈🌟

Imperial Grace by @synstoria 👑

A Date with Death by @twoandahalfstudios 💀

Velvet Bite: Softly, with Teeth by @studioeverium 🦇

[fatehbaz]

Because tuatara are very long lived - between 100 and 200 years by most estimates […] - the founding of Aotearoa/New Zealand as a modern nation and the unfolding of settler-wrought changes to its environment have transpired over the course of the lives of perhaps just two tuatara [...].

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[T]he tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) [...] [is] the sole surviving representative of an order of reptiles that pre-dates the dinosaurs. [...] [T]he tuatara is of immense global and local significance and its story is pre-eminently one of deep timescales, of life-in-place [...]. Epithets abound for the unique and ancient biodiversity found in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Prized as “Ghosts of Gondwana” (Gibbs 2008), or as denizens of “Moa’s Ark” (Bellamy et al. 1990) or “The Southern Ark” (Andrews 1986), the country’s faunal species invoke fascination and inspire strong language [...]. In rounded terms, it [has been] [...] just 250 years since James Cook made landfall; just 200 years since the founding of the handful of [...] settlements that instigated agricultural transformation of the land [...]. European newcomers [...] were disconcerted by the biota [...]: the country was seen to “lack” terrestrial mammals; many of its birds were flightless and/or songless; its bats crawled through leaf-litter; its penguins inhabited forests; its parrots were mountain-dwellers; its frogs laid eggs that hatched miniature frogs rather than tadpoles [...].

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Despite having met a reassuringly temperate climate [mild, oceanic, comparable to western Europe], too, the newcomers nevertheless sought to make adjustments to that climate, and it was clear to them that profits beckoned. Surveying the towering lowland forests from the deck of HMS Endeavour in 1769, and perceiving scope for expansion of the fenland drainage schemes being undertaken at that time in England and across swathes of Europe, Joseph Banks [botanist on Cook's voyage] reported on “swamps which might doubtless Easily be drained” [...]. Almost a century later, in New Zealand or Zealandia, the Britain of the South, [...] Hursthouse offered a fuller explication of this ethos: The cultivation of a new country materially improves its climate. Damp and dripping forests, exhaling pestilent vapours from rank and rotten vegetation, fall before the axe [...]. Fen and march and swamp, the bittern’s dank domain, fertile only in miasma, are drained; and the plough converts them into wholesome plains of fruit, and grain, and grass. [...]

[The British administrators] duly set about felling the ancient forests of Aotearoa/New Zealand, draining the country’s swamps [...]. They also began importing and acclimatising a vast array of exotic (predominantly northern-world) species [sheep, cattle, rodents, weasels, cats, crops, English pasture grasses, etc.] [...]. [T]hey constructed the seemingly ordinary agronomic patchwork of Aotearoa/New Zealand's productive, workaday landscapes [...]. This is effected through and/or accompanied by drastic deforestation, alteration of the water table and the flow of waterways, displacement and decline of endemic species, re-organisation of predation chains and pollination sequences and so on [...]. Aotearoa/New Zealand was founded in and through climate crisis [...]. Climate crisis is not a disastrous event waiting to happen in the future in this part of the world; rather, it has been with us for two centuries already [...].

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[T]he crest formed by the twinned themes of absence and exceptionalism [...] has shaped this creature's niche in the western imagination. As one of the very oldest species on earth, tuatara have come to be recognised [in Euro-American scientific schemas] [...] as an evolutionary and biodiversity treasure [...]. In 1867, [...] Gunther [...] pronounced that it was not a lizard at all [...] [and] placed the tuatara [...] in a new order, Rhynchocephalia, [...] igniting a frenzy of scientific interest worldwide. Specifically, the tuatara was seen to afford opportunities for "astonished witnessing" [...], for "the excitement of having the chance to see, to study, to observe a true saurian of Mesozoic times in the flesh, still living, but only on this tiny speck of the earth [...], while all its ancestors [...] died about one hundred and thirty-five million years ago" [...]. Tuatara have, however, long held special status as a taonga or treasured species in Māori epistemologies, featuring in a range of [...] stories where [...] [they] are described by different climates and archaeologies of knowledge [...] (see Waitangi Tribunal 2011, p. 134). [...]

While unconfirmed sightings in the Wellington district were reported in the nineteenth century, tuatara currently survive only in actively managed - that is, monitored and pest-controlled - areas on scattered offshore islands, as well as in mainland zoo and sanctuary populations. As this confinement suggests, tuatara are functionally “extinct” in almost all of their former wild ranges. [...] [Italicized text in the heading of this post originally situated here in Boswell's article.] [...] In the remaining areas of Aotearoa/New Zealand where this species does now live [...], tuatara may in some cases be the oldest living inhabitants. Yet [...] if the tuatara is a creature of long memory, this memory is at risk of elimination or erasure. [...] [T]uatara expose and complicate the [...] machineries of public memory [...] and attendant environmental ideologies and management paradigms [...].

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All text above by: Anna Boswell. "Climates of Change: A Tuatara's-Eye View". Humanities, 2020, Volume 9, Issue 2, 38. Published 1 May 2020. This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Humanities Approaches to Climate Change. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Text within brackets added by me for clarity. The first paragraph/heading in this post, with text in italics, are also the words of Boswell from this same article. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[t00thpasteface]

yeah yeah boomers don't get M*A*S*H, but gen-Xers watch that show with their third eye wide open

[psychomusic]

i believe in nar shaddaa superiority