Iron Borealis

Winter soldier Anakin au

AND I'LL BEAT THAT DEAD HORSE AGAIN BECAUSE IT'S 1. HOT AND 2. NARRATIVELY GREAT

for any address to twitter you can replace the “x.com” with “nitter.net” and you will be able to browse as if you have an account. Lifesaver.

When she finally snaps and rebels, and runs off to Starfleet, she almost ritually unwinds and combs out her long, long hair en route to Earth, and almost the first thing she does is get it cut off into the Louise Brooks aesthetic (shout out to @betty-fran for linking to Brooks!) that's aggressively androgynous by Vulcan standards of the time:

Gratau pursed their orifice as the humanoid rattled off an... Incredibly precise technical description of the haircut that they desired.

Not surprising given that said humanoid had interrogated them for several minutes about whether it was ethical for their shop to advertise that they provided Federation Regulation Haircuts given Starfleet's rather vague grooming standards for humanoid-variants.

Gratau just wanted to eat, management made the advertising decisions -- Starfleet wasn't the only Federation out there after all -- even if this particular space station mostly saw inbound traffic heading to Starfleet's Academy on Earth. Gratau didn't have hair, but many humanoid-variants placed high value on their keratin strands being "well groomed", and if Starfleet had a particularly broad definition of what that meant, then it wasn't unethical to advertise that they provided FedReg Haircuts if most everything counted, now was it?

All that arguing just to get them to sit in their chair and have their customer give them instructions down to the millimeter of how much hair they wanted cut off in various places --

"Do you have... a picture?" Gratau's vocolator emitted in a low gravel.

The customer looked at them as if Gratau were being deliberately aggravating.

If it weren't for that mountain of keratin perched on their head --

"I've given you a detailed description --"

"Picture," Gratau's vocolator interjected. "Choose picture, please," Gratau fluttered their Marcellae at the display embedded in their booth's mirror, narrowing the options down to human and female and short -- their best guess to the customer's species, gender, and desire. Humanoid variants all looked pretty much the same to Gratau, and determining a humanoid's gender a complete guess most of the time.

Fortunately, the customer had no more complaints and briefly glanced through the scrolling look book before choosing one captioned "Flapper"

"I see no need to 'flap', but this selection is the closest to my desired outcome."

Gratau was not in the habit of questioning a customer's desires unless they were impossible, risky, or tedious -- they had to eat after all, but they'd been cautioned about humanoids in particular desiring to make drastic changes regarding their keratin in their classes at FrK'homas School of Beauty Culture. Some humanoids irrationally took their need for control out on their keratin strands and if not fully thought through could leak copious amounts of saline and fury over the result.

Going from hair half their body length to hair just above the tip of their nose was a drastic change, in Gratau's experience.

"Are you..." Gratau paused the vocolator a moment to emphasize the question. "... certain."

"Yes," the customer looked offended to be asked. In the end Gratau had tried and besides keratin regrew quickly for most humanoid variants. This customer did not seem the type prone to emotional saline discharges that would put Gratau off their meal.

I like this picture. I really really like this picture.

As you can see, George Foreman is approximately 12 times bigger than God, making 6'3" Muhammad Ali look like an itty bitty little guy by comparison. And Foreman has the facial expression of an athlete doing a sports whereas Ali is making the face most of us would make if George Foreman were trying to beat us up. The poor guy looks so terrified. He looks like he just shit hisself from it.

Muhammad Ali then proceeded to mercilessly clobber the ever-loving shit out of George Foreman in what was ultimately a pretty one-sided match, scoring one of the greatest wins of an already legendary career.

I made this transparent PNG the night he died in preparation for one of the many ways I was going to memorialize him--a surface rug in his likeness that I planned on laying directly in the line of his favourite sunbeam. And I uploaded that PNG here, because this is the website where people post their cats.

I was not expecting the reception I got. Many people have pointed out that this post has more reblogs than likes, and how insane that is in 2025 when reblog culture is at an all time low. I didn't even talk about the fact that Burger passed away in the original post, it wasn't a tearjerker reblog bait or anything like that. People just loved Burger that much, in the same way I fell in love with him at first sight. He was such an ugly kitten.

Anyways, it's really special to me that so many people have reblogged my best friend. I made this PNG to memorialize him in a completely different way, and you all wound up doing just that in ways I never even imagined.

Thank you. Wherever he is, I know the sun is shining.