I'm 23 Today!! 💪

It takes a village! 🧑‍🤝‍🧑💪🦈

Our Animal Care team recently completed annual exams on all seven leopard sharks in our Kelp Forest exhibit. From aquarists to veterinarians and volunteers, it takes a small community of shark afishionados to get this important job done!

Each shark was brought up individually by the dive team, anesthetized, and given a full workup. Vet services drew blood, inspected gills for parasites, checked eyes, and examined the elasmobranchs via ultrasound. Meanwhile, aquarists recorded measurements as the sharks woke up.

These annual checkups are critical to the ongoing care of these amazing animals—and it wouldn’t be possible without the collaborative work of our dedicated Aquarium community! 💙

📸 Thanks to staffers Mary and Tiffany for the fintastic photos!

theres a popular brand in canada called no name brand and it manufactures everything you can imagine in a grocery store and it kind of makes me feel like im in a world no one bothered to do much world building for

Our local newspaper ran a story about the legendary graffiti artist who recently passed away and. Literally everything about it is fucking insane. I'm insane about it.

So this guy has been extremely active for around fifteen years, during which he spread these beautiful, high quality pieces all over the country, way over a thousand of his standard signature, and probably thousands more. He did completely batshit stuff like literally spray painting an entire train from top to bottom or leaving his signature at the top of a 600ft tall overpass and this whole time, only five people from his crew know who he really is. To everyone else it's a complete mystery.

And then he dies at the age of 35. A few weeks after his death, his crew shows up at his completely unassuming parents' doorstep, reveals who they are and asks if they can host a memorial exhibition of his art.

Turns out, this dude has been leading an insane double life. In the daytime he was a meek little office worker with a partially paralyzed arm and no social life to speak of. In the nighttime he was a fucking legend. Not only did he climb that fucking 600ft overpass, he did it WITH A PHYSICAL DISABILITY. THE MADLAD. And throughout the entire time, fifteen years, he got caught once. ONCE. HE DID ALL THAT UNNOTICED. THAT'S INSANE.

"Do you ever dream of land?" The whale asks the tuna.

"No." Says the tuna, "Do you?"

"I have never seen it." Says the whale, "but deep in my body, I remember it."

"Why do you care," says the tuna, "if you will never see it."

"There are bones in my body built to walk through the forests and the mountains." Says the whale.

"They will disappear." Says the tuna, "one day, your body will forget the forests and the mountains."

"Maybe I don't want to forget," Says the whale, "The forests were once my home."

"I have seen the forests." Whispers the salmon, almost to itself.

"Tell me what you have seen," says the whale.

"The forests spawned me." Says the salmon. "They sent me to the ocean to grow. When I am fat with the bounty of the ocean, I will bring it home."

"Why would the forests seek the bounty of the oceans?" Asks the whale. "They have bounty of their own."

"You forget," says the salmon, "That the oceans were once their home."

[image id: a four-page comic. it is titled “do not stand at my grave and weep” after the poem by mary elizabeth frye. the first page shows paleontologists digging up fossils at a dig. it reads, “do not stand at my grave and weep. i am not there. i do not sleep.” page two features several prehistoric creatures living in the wild. not featured but notable, each have modern descendants: horses, cetaceans, horsetail plants, and crocodilians. it reads, “i am a thousand winds that blow. i am the diamond glints on snow. i am the sunlight on ripened grain. i am the gentle autumn rain.” the third page shows archaeopteryx in the treetops and the skies, then a modern museum-goer reading the placard on a fossil display. it reads, “when you awaken in the morning’s hush, i am the swift uplifting rush, of quiet birds in circled flight. i am the soft stars that shine at night. do not stand at my grave and cry.” the fourth page shows a chicken in a field. it reads, “i am not there. i did not die” / end id]

a comic i made in about 15 hours for my school’s comic anthology. the theme was “evolution”

nobody understands my craft

You might be frustrated by the library never having a complete manga collection on its shelves at any given time, but the 12 year old checking out 14 volumes of One Piece at once is vital to the library ecosystem. He's like the sea otter keeping the kelp forest from being devastated by an excess of sea urchins.

Flat asked someone to redraw it with V1 so I did

Original:

i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.

there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.

anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.

A Better World - create an alternate history timeline

Alter Ego - abandonware birth-to-death life simulator game

Seedship - text-based game about colonizing a new planet

Sandboxels or ThisIsSand - free-falling sand physics games

Little Alchemy 2 - combine various elements to make new ones

Infinite Craft - kind of the same as Little Alchemy

ZenGM - simulate sports

Tamajoji - browser-based tamagotchi

IFDB - interactive fiction database (text adventure games)

Written Realms - more text adventure games with a user interface

The Cafe & Diner - mystery game

The New Campaign Trail - US presidential campaign game

Money Simulator - simulate financial decisions

Genesis - text-based adventure/fantasy game

Level 13 - text-based science fiction adventure game

Miniconomy - player driven economy game

Checkbox Olympics - games involving clicking checkboxes

BrantSteele.net - game show and Hunger Games simulators

Murder Games - fight to the death simulator by Orteil

Cookie Clicker - different but felt weird not including it. by Orteil.

if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.

In light (haha) of the recent eclipse, I’d like to point out that it was during an eclipse in 1868 that French Astronomer Jules Janssen observed an unusual spectral line produced when he pointed his telescope at the partially obscured sun. He assumed that it corresponded to the spectrum of Sodium.

Observation by English astronomer Norman Lockyer later that year revealed it to be a different element. The first one discovered on a distant celestial sphere before it was discovered on Earth. He chose to name it after the sun.

In 1968, one hundred years later, a space probe was launched to orbit around and study the sun.