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What Creatures Make These Rare Ocean Gemstones?

These Tiny Candy-Colored Animals Protect Coral Reefs. But They Need Protection Too.

— Photographs By Anders Hallan | By Hicks Wogan | May 7, 2025

This array of sea urchin skeletons reveals a diversity often hidden from view. The specimens in Hallan’s images—more than a thousand in total—are held at the Sea Urchin Science Centre and Gallery in Kurrajong, Australia.

Beneath sea urchins’ exterior spines, rounded skeletons called tests are jewels of color, texture, and symmetry. There are hundreds of urchin species, and they’re found in every ocean on Earth, from the intertidal zone to more than four miles below the surface. In 2018, Anders Hallan, a research associate at the Australian Museum in Sydney, began photographing urchin skeletons that had washed up on beaches or been collected by divers and those on fishing or research vessels. He created a composite image over the course of a week in 2024 using 76 individual photographs.

The project comes at a perilous moment for these creatures. Since 2022, sea urchins have been plagued by a scuticociliate, a single-celled pathogen that eats away at the animals’ soft tissue and makes their spines fall off. A mass die-off that started in the Caribbean that year has since spread east, likely through the Mediterranean, into the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. In some survey locations, researchers found thousands of dead urchins.

The animals’ survival is vital to the health of reefs, where they eat algae that can smother coral. It’s one of the many reasons Hallan is committed to capturing their beauty: “They are really quite ingeniously evolved.”

Stereocidaris Granularis Rubra

Coelopleurus Maculatus

Hallan often photographs sea urchins from above to reveal their radial symmetry. On the animal’s opposite side, its mouth contains five self-sharpening teeth for chewing foods like algae, kelp, and plankton, and for carving nooks into rocks where it can hide from predators.

Phyllacanthus Parvispinus

Parechinus Angulosus

Green Sea Urchins

Plococidaris Verticillata

Plococidaris Verticillata

Colobocentrotus Atratus

Goniocidaris Tubaria

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Grave offerings and burying the dead with tools and goods is actually such a deeply human thing to do. It's not really even necessarily about how much you believe in a literal afterlife or them taking the tools with them. It's also just going Wait, I'm Not Done Taking Care Of You, let me make you one more pair of socks so your feet won't be cold when you go wherever it is where I can't follow.

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In Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels and its Super Mario All-Stars version, there is a "brother byte" in the game's memory that determines which brother the current playable character is. It has two valid possible values, one for Mario (Brother 0) and one for Luigi (Brother 1), and 254 invalid ones, resulting in various unintended brothers (as seen in this previous post).

Most invalid brothers cause the game's ending to simply glitch in typical ways, however, Brother 12 has a particularly amusing way in which his presence is handled. Upon seeing Peach in her cage, Brother 12 continuously runs to the left against the edge of the screen, and continues his running animation even after Peach teleports him to her cage after noticing him.

This results in the impression that Brother 12 is not interested in being kissed by Peach and is desperately trying to get away from her.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: Dekkiedot

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Rainy night tonight on Tonchan-Dori in Harajuku.

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Cheer On

Watercolor On Black Cotton Paper

2025, 10"x 8"

Cherry Blossoms

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Hey y'all. Here's something for you.

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"Why do so many minorities work for companies like Lockheed Martin and Radeon??" Idk man maybe because they face unprecedented levels of hiring and housing discrimination and when your other two options are either homelessness or barely scraping by on minimum wage in an environment that makes you want to die, anyone who offers you a steady salary, benefits, and entry into the middle class will get your attention. There comes a point in your own misery where you dont care about their shady business practices because they are going to continue to do those shady business practices regardless of who sits at that desk doing their filing, so you might as well be happy and secure.

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honestly, i think the idea that you can gauge someones privilege based on only one aspect of their identity is inherently flawed the more we as trans men speak up about our relationship to male privilege

boiling trans men down to just men to justify calling them privileged and completely ignoring other facets such as being transgender or being neurotypical/neurodivergent/disabled/abled or whether he comes from a wealthy/middle class/poor family, etc is overly simplifying it to the point where it loses its meaning, and even then we need to also define if people are assuming someone is privileged only socially (as with things like job searching or being taken seriously by other people) or if someone is privileged structurally (as with having access to and receiving proper medical care)

all this to say: we need to fundamentally reshape our understanding of privilege not based off only one part of ones identity, especially keeping in mind trans, nonbinary, intersex, white-passing mixed race people, and everyone else whose identity cannot be boiled down to simply one characteristic among many that they possess

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For no reason, here is Art Spiegelman's 1991 graphic novel Maus, for free on the Internet Archive.

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while we're at it, tearing down the hostage posters was always evil and fucked up.

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what’s very hard about combatting antisemitism as a jew is that gentiles do not trust jews. full stop. somewhere in the back of their minds, we are deceitful and malicious. we have secret evil agendas. we want to destroy the western world or the eastern world or communism or capitalism. i feel compelled to find multiple sources for this dumb vent post because i always feel compelled to prove i am trustworthy, and while googling, i thought twice about linking a jewish source. this constant emptying of the pockets is a particular source of exhaustion because, like, how can you have any genuine dialogue when the other person automatically writes you off as a dirty liar? how do you convince people you have good intentions when every action condemns you because jews are nefarious manipulators who want to dominate the entire world? hey siri what are the protocols of the elders of zion

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Jewish Progress Pride flag, from Keshet!

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i got these knockoff boots online and instead of the brand name on the tag they have the name of an apparently nonexistent martin scorsese movie??? what the fuck

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the main problem i have with america is that nothings old as hell there. i cant be so far away from a castle it damages my aura