#easy reefs

[cosmicwhoreo]

Decided to doodle more pre-litter Grand Reef Cookie because he is adorable

[thesaintelectric]

then vs now (+ some close ups :3)

[lord-shitbox]

May the dexedrine make my brain focus on exam and NOT play constant 3D Knot Tying Simulator.exe the whole goddamn time amen.

[idsb]

my favorite thing on my Australia packing / preparation to-do list is "buy an industrial quantity of tampons" because most non-US countries don't sell them with the little applicators and some things are just simply not worth trying to save the environment for

[iknowwhereyousleepatnight]

i had a dream last night where i was trying to put together a piece for an art final in one afternoon (because apparently i was taking an art class? i kept having lucid moments of hey i’m not even taking a real art class but i was content to still do the project) and actually i remember very clearly what i was planning and i have all the stuff for it i think i should recreate the dream art final piece

[cluster-b-culture-is]

Cluster B culture is learning the difference between people who aren't threatened by your enthusiasm and people who uncomfortable about your intenseness

[katanation]

[jcmarchi]

From NASA to MIT to Formlabs

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/from-nasa-to-mit-to-formlabs/

From NASA to MIT to Formlabs

MIT senior Audrey Chen lives by the philosophy that “a lot of opportunities only present themselves if you ask for them.” This approach has served her well, from becoming a NASA intern at 15 to running MIT’s autonomous boat team Arcturus to entering a leadership position at 3D printing technology company Formlabs right out of undergrad.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Chen showed a strong aptitude and passion for engineering at a young age and skipped several grades in math. In her first year of high school, she saw a posting about the Lab Space Academy at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. Though the program was for juniors and seniors, she inquired if they would make an exception for her and they agreed. By her junior year she was helping run the program as deputy.

But Chen didn’t stop there: She had dreams of interning at NASA. She asked her mentor and became a drone air traffic control researcher at NASA at 15. “I was not old enough to drive,” Chen says. “High school would end, the bell would ring, and I would put on my backpack and I would run down the street to JPL. Can you imagine you’re the security guard at the gate of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a kid shows up for work?”

Chen worked on the Orbiting Arid Subsurfaces and Ice Sheet Sounder (OASIS) project, whose goal is to find and examine freshwater aquifers and ice sheets. “It was very early in the mission, so I was doing system and objective definition,” Chen says.

Next stop: MIT

After graduating high school, Chen ventured across the country to explore her eclectic interests at MIT. When she wasn’t fulfilling the requirements for her mechanical engineering degree, she could be found leather crafting, glass blowing, or table welding in one of MIT’s makerspaces, documenting MIT student life with her camera (garnering the acclimation “The Eyes of MIT” by MIT Admissions), working as a researcher sampling deep-sea sediment, or notably, running the award-winning autonomous boat team Arcturus.

“Arcturus has been the highlight of my MIT career,” Chen says. She founded the team at MIT Sea Grant in 2022 along with a group of equally impassioned students who elected Chen as captain.

“I didn’t have any background in marine autonomy, so we pushed very hard to institute trainings and have lots of workshops so that they would feel comfortable coming in and contributing as soon as possible,” she recalls. Seeking additional funding and support, the team found a home at the MIT Edgerton Center.

Launching Arcturus

“Whenever I think about how Arcturus started and how it somehow still continues, I think it’s a miracle,” Chen says. “Our very first year, there were five of us at the Roboboat competition, and if any individual one of us had not decided to join the team, we either would not have a boat, we would not have electronics, we would not have code to run the boat, or we wouldn’t have funding to run the team.”

Chen’s first year as captain was a tremendous amount of work because the team was so small. In addition to managing the team and assuring they met their goals on time, Chen also acted as the team’s business lead, treasurer, media lead, and photographer. “I was juggling a lot of things. Since then, those roles have further split amongst more people within the team,” she says.

Recruiting isn’t easy for an autonomous boat team, as many students don’t get marine robotics experience in high school. To keep their recruitment pool wide, Chen didn’t expect students to have background in autonomy or in marine systems. “Creating an environment that’s welcoming and friendly and supportive of people’s learning is crucial, because otherwise you won’t have a team. We’ve really pushed hard to recruit from a large body of people. We make sure to emphasize that we’re open to all majors, all years. As an industry, marine robotics, like most engineering, is very male-dominated. We work hard to recruit people of all genders and ethnicities.”

With Chen’s skillful recruiting, Arcturus increased from five to 74 members in 2024. Arcturus flourished under Chen’s leadership, winning First Place Design Overall at the Roboboat competition in 2023.

The challenges with autonomous boats

Chen was drawn to autonomous boats because the field is so full of potential. “You leave a robot on land and you turn it off, it doesn’t move by itself, versus you put it in a body of water and you don’t do anything, then it still moves because of the currents. It needs to be constantly taking in that input and trying to localize where it is,” Chen says.

Chen sees a lot of potential in the marine biotics industry to gather crucial data about our environment. “Autonomy in the marine space is not as well researched as land autonomy is. There’s immense potential for marine autonomy to benefit the world. You think about mapping ocean topology or looking for endangered species or habitat protection or surveying bleached coral reefs. As a vehicle, you have more flexibility to move around versus a buoy. That gives you the ability to take water and sediment samples across a wider spread of area. And by making it autonomous, you eliminate high labor costs, so the price per sample for a researcher would go down. These are different ways in which autonomy has potential to benefit the research sphere, but also, more broadly, the world.”

Chen graduated early this past February and passed Arcturus on to captains and rising juniors Ami Shi and Karen Guo. “They’re rock stars. The team is in good hands,” Chen says.

Becoming a project manager at Formlabs

Chen graduated a semester early and accepted a project manager position at Formlabs. She brings many lessons from MIT to her work. “The biggest thing that I’ve learned is that I don’t need to know everything. Part of being successful is knowing what you don’t know. So I’m always aware that in every Arcturus meeting, and probably every technical meeting that I’ll be in at Formlabs, that I will not be the smartest person in the room. And that’s fine. I don’t need to be the smartest person ever because that’s not my job. My job is to bring these projects together and know enough about all the systems to integrate them.”

Chen is thrilled to stay near MIT after graduation, allowing her the opportunity to visit her friends and continue mentoring Arcturus. Upon announcing her new job, she remarked, “To my friends at MIT, I’ll be just down the street, so you won’t be able to get rid of me that easily!”

[girlscience]

alien be upon ye

[toyherb]

I wish they let you type out messages on splatoon 3 not just drawings but also I wish I knew if anyone was giving me fresh likes

[reasonsforhope]

A reef that has been degraded—whether by coral bleaching or disease—can’t support the same diversity of species and has a much quieter, less rich soundscape.

But new research from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution shows that sound could potentially be a vital tool in the effort to restore coral reefs.

A healthy coral reef is noisy, full of the croaks, purrs, and grunts of various fishes and the crackling of snapping shrimp. Scientists believe that coral larvae use this symphony of sounds to help them determine where they should live and grow.

So, replaying healthy reef sounds can encourage new life in damaged or degraded reefs.

In a paper published last week in Royal Society Open Science, the Woods Hole researchers showed that broadcasting the soundscape of a healthy reef caused coral larvae to settle at significantly higher rates—up to seven times more often.

“What we’re showing is that you can actively induce coral settlement by playing sounds,” said Nadège Aoki, a doctoral candidate at WHOI and first author on the paper.

“You can go to a reef that is degraded in some way and add in the sounds of biological activity from a healthy reef, potentially helping this really important step in the coral life cycle.”

Corals are immobile as adults, so the larval stage is their only opportunity to select a good habitat. They swim or drift with the currents, seeking the right conditions to settle out of the water column and affix themselves to the seabed. Previous research has shown that chemical and light cues can influence that decision, but Aoki and her colleagues demonstrate that the soundscape also plays a major role in where corals settle.

The researchers ran the same experiment twice in the U.S. Virgin Islands in 2022. They collected larvae from Porites astreoides, a hardy species commonly known as mustard hill coral thanks to its lumpy shape and yellow color and distributed them in cups at three reefs along the southern coast of St. John. One of those reefs, Tektite, is relatively healthy. The other two, Cocoloba and Salt Pond, are more degraded with sparse coral cover and fewer fish.

At Salt Pond, Aoki and her colleagues installed an underwater speaker system and placed cups of larvae at distances of one, five, 10, and 30 meters from the speakers. They broadcast healthy reef sounds – recorded at Tektite in 2013 – for three nights. They set up similar installations at the other two reefs but didn’t play any sounds.

When they collected the cups, the researchers found that significantly more coral larvae had settled in the cups at Salt Pond than the other two reefs. On average, coral larvae settled at rates 1.7 times (and up to 7x) higher with the enriched sound environment.

The highest settlement rates were at five meters from the speakers, but even the cups placed 30 meters away had more larvae settling to the bottom than at Cocoloba and Tektite.

“The fact that settlement is consistently decreasing with distance from the speaker, when all else is kept constant, is particularly important because it shows that these changes are due to the added sound and not other factors,” said Aran Mooney, a marine biologist at WHOI and lead author on the paper.

“This gives us a new tool in the toolbox for potentially rebuilding a reef.”

Adding the audio is a process that would be relatively simple to implement, too.

“Replicating an acoustic environment is actually quite easy compared to replicating the reef chemical and microbial cues which also play a role in where corals choose to settle,” said Amy Apprill, a microbial ecologist at WHOI and a co-author on the paper.

“It appears to be one of the most scalable tools that can be applied to rebuild reefs, so we’re really excited about that potential.”"

-via Good News Network, March 17, 2024

[ltwilliammowett]

Rooms in a Lighthouse

Although the buildings of lighthouses differ depending on their location and purpose, they generally have common components. However, a distinction must also be made between a lighthouse station consisting of the lighthouse and all the outbuildings such as the lighthouse keeper's house, the fuel house, the boathouse and the building for fog signalling, i.e. a land station, and an inhabited lighthouse as it was found at sea.

Sections of Bell Rock and Skerryvore Lighthouses, date 1884

Skerryvore is a remote reef that lies off the west coast of Scotland, 12 miles (19 kilometres) south-west of the island of Tiree. Skerryvore is best known as the name given to the lighthouse on the skerry, built with some difficulty between 1838 and 1844 by Alan Stevenson.

The Bell Rock Lighthouse, off the coast of Angus, Scotland, is the world's oldest surviving sea-washed lighthouse. It was built between 1807 and 1810 by Robert Stevenson on the Bell Rock (also known as Inchcape) in the North Sea, 11 miles (18 km) east of the Firth of Tay. Standing 35 metres (115 ft) tall, its light is visible from 35 statute miles (56 km) inland.

If you are only dealing with an inhabited tower, you usually have the following rooms in it. Please note that, apart from the lantern room, there is no standardised scheme and the rooms were often arranged differently.

The lantern room is the glazed housing at the top of the lighthouse that contains the lamp and the lens. The glass panes are held in place by vertical or diagonal metal rungs. A lightning conductor and an earthing system, which are connected to the metal roof of the dome, ensure that any lightning strikes are safely discharged.

Sections of the Eddystone Lighthouse of 1759 and 1884

Immediately below the lantern room is usually a guard room where fuel and other supplies were stored and where the keeper prepared the lanterns for the night and often kept watch. The clockwork (for turning the lenses) was also located there. On a lighthouse there is often an open platform, the gallery, outside the watchroom (main gallery) or the lantern room (lantern gallery). It was mainly used to clean the outside of the lantern room windows. Below this was a living room, bedroom, possibly a separate kitchen, if not a cooking area was accommodated in the living room. In addition, there were often several storage rooms, an oil room (where the oil for the lantern were storaged) and a coal room. And if you're wondering where the bathroom was - well there wasn't one, there was a wash bowl, possibly a wooden tub for an occasional bath, but rarely, and chamber pots in the bedroom.

Life in a lighthouse at sea was not easy and managed to bring many an old sea dog to his knees. The lighthouse keepers on land had it much easier.

[ceruark]

opening sequence

synopsis: you escaped to dreamflux reef thinking your captor wouldn’t be able to reach you, but your so-called savior lied to you. notes: yan! sunday x gn! reader. words: 1,424 cw: general yandere themes - brainwashing, and implied obsession, possessiveness, and abduction. disclaimer: major 2.2 story quest spoilers.

You spent nearly a year planning, making connections, figuring out who would keep quiet and who would tell on you in a heartbeat— nearly a year biding your time.

There was a booth in the corner of Dreamjolt Holstery that often went forgotten, so it was quite easy for messengers from the Dreamflux to overlook you when reporting to Gallagher. It wasn't hard to figure out what he was planning, and it was even easier to blackmail him using what you knew.

Take me to the Dreamflux, you demanded, or I'll damn us both.

He commanded Death to take you then and there. You disappeared without a trace, a few weeks before Robin did.

It was damn near impossible. But you'd done it. You'd gotten out.

The two months you've spent in Dreamflux Reef have been some of the best in recent memory. You spoke to strangers without worrying if you appeared too friendly with them. You roamed aimlessly, unconcerned with making it back to Dewlight Pavilion before a certain hour, or feeling the weight of a nightingale's unwavering gaze on your back.

For the first time since you met Sunday, you lived freely.

Hearing of the Astral Express's arrival only heightened your hopes. They never turned down a passenger, and if you asked to travel with them at the end of the Charmony Festival, you could get out of Penacony. You could escape his grasp for good.

The final step of your escape seemed all the more reachable when you heard through the grapevine that Gallagher was planning to lead the Express Crew to Dreamflux Reef. When you asked him if it was true, he confirmed it. When you begged him, for the umpteenth time, not to bring Sunday, he swore he wouldn't.

He lied.

The thing about being subjected to the gaze of the Harmony countless times is that, eventually, you become bound to it. In the Dreamscape, there was a constant tugging pressure in your head that reminded you your mind wasn't solely your own anymore, that reminded you of the person who had done this to you. The pressure would become more taught the further you wandered from him, a mental leash that ensured you stayed at his side.

The pressure dissipated completely once you arrived in the Dreamflux. You almost forgot what it felt like.

Almost.

You're sitting in a bar when it happens. You and the bartender watch, entertained, as a drunken Pepeshi guest attempts to play a game of Egyptian Ratscrew with other patrons who get him worked up just so he can bet higher and fatten the pot. He's just ran out of cards and is furiously yelling at the winner, a damning finger thrust in their face. You and the bartender laugh, and when you make eye contact with her, she winks at you.

You open your mouth to make a sly comment about the situation, but you choke on your words when a sharp pain stabs through your head. You double over, tumbling out of the barstool and onto the floor. The bartender and a few other guests run over to you, clamoring above you. Their words are static in your ears until the pain subsides.

Left in its wake is a familiar tugging sensation, far too loose for your liking.

Fear and adrenaline flood your veins. You shoot to your feet and push past them, your urgency enough to prevent them from trying to stop you. You rush toward the back of the building and shove at the back door that leads out into an alleyway.

You run for what feels like an eternity, but you don't feel the cord getting any tighter. If anything, it feels like it's getting even looser, and the mere thought terrifies you. You’ve changed directions several times now. How can he possibly be advancing on you?

In your frightened haze, you fail to recognize that there's a figure in your path, a figure that brightens at the sight of you.

You crash into them, sending you both tumbling to the ground.

"Sorry," you mumble, already getting to your feet. You don't have time to feel bad or make sure they're uninjured. You're ready to take off into a sprint again when a hand wraps around your wrist, and a melodic voice calls your name.

Your blood runs cold, and you slowly turn to face the woman sitting on the floor. Robin stares up at you in a mix of relief and worry.

"So you are here!" She exclaims excitedly, using her hold on you to bring herself to her feet. "I figured, after my own experience, that the same thing must have happened to you. Are you alright?"

Your throat goes dry. She doesn't know— she has no idea. Even if left unsaid, Sunday made it clear through implications that the worst of the Harmony would be reserved for if you ever said anything to Robin, so you never tried to. You don't have the heart to tarnish the adoration she has for him, anyways.

You force a smile. The thread unravels, growing slacker by the second. "I'm fine," you say, and you sound anything but it. You gently remove her hand from your wrist. "I have to go."

"Wait!" She catches you again by the shoulder, and urgency flares up in your stomach. You don't have much time left. "Can we talk? I could use a familiar face right now."

Your stomach sinks, and you place a hand on her shoulder, giving it a squeeze. "Later," you lie, "I promise."

Your hand drops to your side. You turn away from her, unable to look at her crestfallen expression.

The tension releases. A chill runs down your spine, and your mind feels fuzzy.

It's too late.

Only Robin's voice could make the devil's name sound beautiful to your ears. You turn just in time to watch him return her hug, one hand coming up to hold the back of her head gently, the other rubbing soothing circles into her back as she starts to cry.

His golden eyes pierce you, pinning you in place.

You tear your gaze away from him and look at your feet. The ground swims beneath them, swirls of pink, orange, and yellow contaminating the edges of your vision. The bone-deep terror grows muted as the Harmony hums in your head. You're euphoric, nearly hysterical.

Sunday releases his sister and pulls at the thread connecting you. Drunkenly, you stumble toward him, closing the few feet of distance between you. Your arms come up around his neck, and his arms snake around your waist, pulling you impossibly close to him. He presses a kiss to the side of your face. His lips tickle your ear when he speaks.

"Tell me," he whispers. "Was your disappearance planned by Gallagher?"

You know better than to try and lie in this state. "No."

He hums. His hold on you tightens. You can hardly breathe. "Did you ask him to bring you here?"

"Yes," you choke out. You bury your face in his shoulder. You can't bear facing him right now.

He sighs and presses another kiss to your cheek. "Dearest, you know I only want what's best for you."

You do know, and that's what hurts the most. No matter what he does to you, and no matter how much you suffer, you know he only has good intentions. You know, undoubtedly, that he loves you. Somewhere, beneath the meticulousness and the paranoia, is the charming, sweet man you fell for.

A sob escapes you. Behind you, Robin coos, moved by what she believes to be a heartfelt reunion between her brother and his lover. Sunday shushes you and brings one hand up to your head. Gloved fingers card through your hair, a comforting gesture.

"It's alright, dove." He gently takes your head between his hands and removes it from his shoulder, looking you in the eyes. "You and I will have all eternity to make up for the lost time."

There's not a hint of cruelty in his face, but something fervent— almost manic— gleams in his eyes. Your voice trembles. "What?"

He closes his eyes and presses a tender kiss to your lips. When his eyelids flutter open, rings of pink and orange surround his pupils.

"Rest now." He says against your lips, and your limbs grow heavy. You lean into him, and one of his arms comes up to support your back. His fingers dig into your spine.

"When you wake, we shall be one."

[mmani-e]

Hello! After all this effort, behold:

DANGANRONPA DEMIX, THH EDITION!

Dr Demix 2

Finally got the talentswap designs I have for the THH characters one and done with! You can click through the read more section for some fun design insights. I'm intending on uploading a doc containing short lore bits about them eventually.

Kyoko Kirigiri - Ultimate Affluent Progeny

So Kyoko's design was both kinda simple, kinda not, wanted to give her a very fine and regal kinda attitude to her but not arrogant as that's very much Byakuya's thing. Her story is that she loves her dad more than the family business and her grandpa so she abandons detective work and just uses her brain to help her dad out.

Makoto Naegi - Ultimate Novelist

Makoto is a wonderful guy, just great all around. He loves writing children's books and happy stories. This is his main coping mechanism so he doesn't have to process any negative emotions he gets, the rest he can't process… well they go into a murderous psychopath alter.

Aoi Asahina - Ultimate Lucky Student

Shoujo protagonist Aoi. Cute, headstrong, affective, competitive, these are all the traits that make her fight for her friends and clash with Kyoko (and more often than not Byakuya) in the killing game, even when all hope seems lost… she pushes through, unafraid to let tears spill from her eyes for all those lost, but pushing all the same.

Byakuya Togami - Ultimate Detective

This one, I wanna go into more lore territory, cause I kinda memed around his last desc I gave him so here goes:

"A disgraced heir of the Togami household, Byakuya lost the competition that would've secured his riches. Disdainful and bitter, he sought out to get to the bottom of why he lost, uncovering a rabbit hole in the process. By the end, he proved his sibling a cheater, but it didn't matter because by the end as he found the sweet satisfaction of uncovering secrets and crushing liars and cheaters under the weight of their hubris far more satisfying than any inheritance."

Sayaka Maizono - Ultimate Spirit Medium

So Sayaka isn't a clairvoyant at all like Yasuhiro, in fact her entire skillset is completely different, first of all she is like an actual psychic, and I based her design off of the japanese Itako, quite loosely. Very interesting group, look it up, also she'll never use these powers in the killing game because I dunno how to even approach these rituals or what they look like or how to write them while remaining respectful, so she won't do it in a killing game for the express reason of her not having the right tools available and not wanting to disrespect her traditions.

Leon Kuwata - Ultimate Swimmer

I really wanna draw him again, all these characters again tbh, and I wanna show off the patterns on his wetsuit. It's a whole coral reef under there, that anemone and clownfish bit is only one part of a whole reef stretching his midline.

Sakura Ogami - Ultimate Programmer

Sakura has installed chips into her body to help optimize her body processes and also cause why not. As for the muscles, she's an Assembly programmer, the programs she's made can run on calculators she loves it.

Chihiro Fujisaki - Ultimate Martial Artist

Chihiro's design here with the two belts is an explicit nod to his preferred martial art - Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, so unlike Sakura in canon who'd be easy to imagine cracking someone's skull in half with a chop, Chihiro's approach is more crawling onto someone and bringing them down to the floor with grappling like an angry halfling monk. As for the belts themselves, on his head is his final junior belt, while around his waist is his current belt, he's not a black belt yet because he's still too young for it.

Celestia Ludenberg - Ultimate Baseball Star

Celestia actually isn't a legend in this AU, Taeko is. Celestia hates that and wants to start a baseball career going international, whatever the hell that means is up to her own definition, but she wants to be remembered forever as Celestia, not Taeko. Also extra sentence, but this is the SINGLE hardest design I've ever had to deal with here, I think in the future I'll be drawing all her little accessories and I have an alt costume for her I have in mind.

Hifumi Yamada - Ultimate Pop Star

So I changed Hifumi's story as I originally outlined in the OG post with him. He was friends with Aoi all his life, pretty much his only friend at all, and ever since he was little he had an obsession with writing songs, because he was obsessed with stuff like anime openings and was content to just keep the songs to himself. It wasn't till Aoi convinced him to share some of his songs that he started his journey to success, but bc he's not traditionally attractive, his first hits were literally just… his voice being played over other more attractive singers and it wasn't until very very recently that he even performed a song of his for the first time.

Toko Fukawa - Ultimate Fanfic Writer

So while Hifumi was clearly a Doujinshi but due to weird translation, ended up as fanfic creator, Touko is straight up a FF then Wattpad then AO3 girl, who would get obsessed with this really shitty, tripe manga that she didn't even like reading. It did however have super hot dudes in it, so she wrote good stories of those characters when she got frustrated with the actual authorial content - which was always.

Yasuhiro Hagakure - Ultimate Gambler

Quite LITERALLY the never stop gambling meme personified into a guy. He can lose 3 mil on slot machines but always comes out fine because it means if he keeps gambling he'll eventually run into his 1/3 and win giga millions, what he needs to pay off his debts. It isn't just with luck though either because his personality and lack of intelligence or understanding of most the rules of the games he plays means he'll never react the way he should when getting a good hand in poker or a bad draw in blackjack, so he wins those games almost always through just… stupidity.

Mukuro Ikusaba - Ultimate Biker

She's number 16 in her gang, and is easily the most loyal enforcer and taskman of the gang. She does anything she's told, to a grim and disciplined degree not typical for hooligan bike gangers, she doesn't really desire a seat as top dog of the gang though, after all she's got school to worry about, and her sister.

Mondo Owada - Ultimate Warlord

So his relationship and Kiyotaka's is gonna be interesting, because I don't want him to be exactly like Mukuro at all, who was just sort of an all-obsessed Yandere. It's more like he's always chafing under Taka, who is less than friendly with him in this AU, really the main way he even lets Taka boss him around is because he pays incredibly well and helps keep his gang members from devolving back into the unstructured, chaotic criminal life, the same that took his brother years ago.

Oh and yeah, he still looks like Guile, as he should.

Sparkling Justice - Ultimate Killer Killer

Yeah it's a reference to Killer Killer, sue me I love the manga. He has Hajirahara's ahoge, and I thought it'd be cute to also give him a mask just like the other Makoto from a Kodaka game series (Raincode.) Also, while Genocide jack stuffs all her scissors in her skirt, Makoto keeps a truth gun with "truth bullets" as his main weapon, the gun he stores inside the big book in the chibi of just Makoto, and the bullets kept on his person as the red buttons all over his body, which he pulls out when he needs to reload.

"Kiyotaka Ishimaru" - Ultimate Fashionista

Unlike Mukuro and Junko, Mondo absolutely cannot hide the fact that he acts nothing like Kiyotaka, though this is surprisingly fine to everyone else, because unlike Junko who plastered herself onto literally everything, Mondo always obfuscated himself from the public spotlight, at most showing only his suits while he hid his face behind something conveniently placed. Which played primarily to his vision of an ultimate fashionista, who was above everyone and catered to the rich and powerful.

Junko Enoshima - Ultimate Moral Compass

This was a fun one, I decided to let her have her red hair because I believe it to be the "natural" look of her hair, while attaching little clips of dyed hair to her buns as a replacement to keep her shape sorta and keep the strawberry blonde somwehere on her. Understand that while she is the "moral compass" she is still pretty deranged, and the only reason she focuses so much on keeping everyone on their best behavior is because it's endlessly entertaining to her to make her fellow moral committee members upset when she blatantly makes a mockery of the rules while still keeping kids on their best behavior to make a point.

Kiyotaka Ishimaru - Ultimate Fashionista and Tyrant, the Iron Hand of Despair

Taka's design I wanted to sort of focus on this sort of, holier-than-thou idea, where I wanted to make him look a lot fancier and upper-class than Junko does in his standard highschool fit compared to him. I wanted him to have an upper-crust sort of look

If you're reading this after reading this all, thanks! You're a wonderful person :) Signing off...

Mani

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Science Friday:

Flint Hills rancher Daniel Mushrush estimates that his family has killed maybe 10,000 trees in the past three years.

It’s a start. But many more trees still need to fall for the Mushrushes to save this 15,000 acres of rare tallgrass prairie.

Whenever other work on the property can wait, Daniel and his brother, Chris, don helmets and earplugs, grab their tools and pick up where they left off.

“It’s a lot of old-fashioned chainsaw work,” Daniel Mushrush said. “Walking rocky ridges and cutting down trees.”

The Mushrush family is beating back a juggernaut unleashed by humans — a Green Glacier of trees and shrubs grinding slowly across the Great Plains and burying some of the most threatened habitat on the planet.

This blanket of shrublands and dense juniper woods gobbling up grassland leads to wildfires with towering flames that dwarf those generated in prairie fires.

It also eats into ranchers’ livelihoods. It smothers habitat for grassland birds, prairie fish and other critters that evolved for a world that’s disappearing. It dries up streams and creeks. New research even finds that, across much of the Great Plains, the advent of trees actually makes climate change worse.

Now a federal initiative equips landowners like Mushrush with the latest science and strategies for saving rangeland, and money to help with the work.

Satellite imagery and a better understanding of how trees and shrubs spread could help landowners replace a losing game of whack-a-mole with a more systematic course.

Mushrush calls the approach, promoted by the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s Great Plains Grassland Initiative with guidance from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, a morale builder.

“It works,” the third-generation rancher said. “We’re still overwhelmed with how to do this on 15,000 acres — but we have a plan.”

Each time he thinks about the Manhattan area, which is much more infested with juniper woods and seas of sumac, wild plum and dogwood thickets, he feels the threat creeping toward his home in Chase County.

“If a coral reef is worth saving, if some pristine mountain stream is worth saving, then so are the Flint Hills,” he said. “It’s not easy work, but it’s worthy work.”