I Am So Lonely. It’s Three In The Morning. I Can’t Fall Asleep. I Am So Tired. I’m Crying Because

NOOoOoOOOOoO

D:

R I P to the most important sea otter in my life :(

Remembering Rosa the sea otter

Hello Aquarium family. It’s with great sadness that we share that our beloved sea otter Rosa passed away today. At 24 years old, Rosa was the oldest resident otter at the Aquarium and one of our most experienced surrogate moms, having raised 15 stranded sea otter pups in her time with us. 

While Rosa spent the last few months behind the scenes getting extra special care from our staff, she was the matriarch of the Sea Otters exhibit. Beloved and cherished by millions of visitors and fans of the live Sea Otter Cam, she was instantly recognizable thanks to her blonde head (eclipsed only by Ivy as our most grizzled of kelp grizzlies) and her signature head-all-the-way-back swimming style.

“Rosa was one of our most playful sea otters, and even at 24 years old, she would still be seen frolicking and wrestling with the younger otters when she instigated it,” said Melanie Oerter, curator of mammals. “Rosa was usually found sleeping against the window while on exhibit with her chin tucked tight into her chest and her tail swishing back and forth.”

After being found stranded as a four-week-old pup in September 1999, Rosa became part of the Aquarium family before our sea otter surrogacy program even took shape. Our Sea Otter Program staff raised her by hand for nearly seven months before releasing her to the wild. 

Rosa eventually returned to the Aquarium once again in March 2002 when she didn’t take to life outside of human care, and she immediately became a fixture in the formative years of our sea otter surrogacy program as a caring adoptive mother for rescued pups destined for wild release.

She was a delight to work with, though she certainly had her expectations of our staff according to the many Sea Otter Mammalogists who trained (were trained by?) Rosa over the years. 

"Rosa was an incredibly smart otter! Generally calm and patient with the staff. However, she could be defiant at times and there would be no convincing her to do something she did not want to do," said Oerter. "She would often just look at us or swim away. I believe she was the one who was really training us all of these years. I certainly learned a lot from working with such an incredible otter. It has been a privilege and to say we will miss her is understated."

Rosa relaxed into retirement from surrogacy in 2019, acting as a companion and cornerstone in the ever-changing raft of otters in our care. 

Wild female sea otters live between 15 and 20 years, and reaching the age of 24 is a testament to the exceptional care Rosa received throughout her life from our Veterinary and Animal Care teams. In recent years, she began showing signs of age-related health concerns.  In the last few weeks, her health had been deteriorating. After an exam, the veterinary and animal care teams made the difficult choice to humanely euthanize Rosa because those health conditions were compromising her quality of life. She passed away peacefully, surrounded by her caretakers.

Rosa’s legacy lives on both at the Aquarium with our other resident sea otters Kit, Selka, Ivy, and Ruby, and in the wild, where sea otter pups she raised continue to raise pups of their own, contributing to the recovery of their species and their ecosystems along the California coast. 

Rosa was an inspiration to millions as a charismatic ambassador for her threatened species while playing a leading role in the story of sea otter recovery from near-extinction during the fur trade. Rosa will be greatly missed by all of us who got to know her over the years.

To celebrate Rosa’s long life, please feel free to share photos and stories of your encounters with Rosa at the Aquarium in the comment section on this post, in her memory and for the staff and volunteers grieving her loss. Thank you all for being such a big part of Rosa’s life. 🦦♥️

hmm

I like this post. Good post. Quality content.

what if

Frankenstein AU where the Creature, upon returning to seek terrible vengeance on Victor after realizing the tragic existence he's been forced into, takes a few days extra to actually, you know, observe Victor and see what he's like, to learn how best to enact his revenge. And he comes to the conclusion that, "Actually, I don't need to do anything, this idiot's going to ruin his own life without any outside interference, and I kinda wanna see how he does it."

Victor then proceeds to continue with his previously demonstrated levels of making good life choices, while now also constantly looking over his shoulder for his Creation and having the vapors at every little thing because oh noes, it's The Monster come back to Get Him-!!!

The Creature: (watching all this unfold through binoculars like it's a soap opera while sneaking in to help himself to Victor's larder and library when he feels like it, and also occasionally hiding small but vital objects, like Victor's keys or shaving blade, in weird spots in the house) Wow, it really does take an incredibly smart man to be quite this stupid, doesn't it?

Reblog if you've made at least one friend because of a fandom.

And here it is! My first fully completed Procreate Dreams animation. I used audio from one of Technoblade’s more famous rants during his Potato War series. I love Technoblade and miss him every day, so I hope that I was able to capture the magic of his energy in my animation.

I animated the roughs and drew the backgrounds in Procreate, but then I imported that into Dreams to do all the cleanup. It runs at 24 fps, but there’s a lot of variations to spice it up in there.

I wanted to really challenge myself so there’s a LOT going on in this short 9 second clip. There’s a camera move with multiple layers to achieve a subtle parallax scroll, there’s two lighting changes with one being a completely animated shadow layer, and there’s a warp effect on the curtains for when it opens and closes.

There’s still a lot that could be cleaned up. Some of the linework is a little more jittery than I would prefer, and the coloring process was awful. Every color was its own separate layer, which was exhausting to do. I really hope i can figure out a faster and easier way to do the coloring process because that took me over a week to complete! Yikes!

Overall I’m extremely proud of my work here. I’ve been working on this 9 second clip since Dreams released and I really wanted to showcase to everyone just how powerful Dreams is. I know a lot of people were complaining about it when it released and I wanted to do something to help reorient people’s expectations. I genuinely cannot believe that I did all of this on my iPad!

If anyone has any questions or would like to see a breakdown of this animation, please feel free to contact me!

And remember… Technoblade never dies!

I'm so tired of living this way (← girl that will never do anything to change her way of living because breaking the routine scares her more than anything)

NATO Standard Phonetic Alphabet,

The phonetic alphabet was developed as a way to spell things out over radio communications that may be less then ideal, I.E. a lot of static or weak signal. All the words were chosen because they have a distinct sound that is easy to pick out. Military and police communications use the phonetic alphabet heavily and can be helpful to know for talking over CB’s or FRS (walky talky) radios.