It's a Reason to Smile

A deep sea octopus making shapes.

Octopods like this have long, fleshy spikes known as cirri lining their arms. It’s thought they’re used to create a current which draws copepods to the mouth.

There are a whole bunch of deep sea octopods with mantle fins and cirri, all belonging to a suborder called cirrata. Few are as colourful as this one, though!

Corrie Baldauf Infinite Jest Project 2014

Baldauf initially began the process of flagging all the references to color in the text — more than 2,600 of them — as a sort of mechanism to help her concentrate on reading David Foster Wallace’s infamous masterwork, a notoriously difficult literary achievement that has divided readers on one side or the other, or in many cases, lost somewhere in the middle. Stymied by her early attempts to tackle the book, Baldauf “realized that the part I cared the most about was the color references, and that was going to be my impetus — it was going to be the familiar, intriguing thing that was going to help me focus, to commit,” she told Hyperallergic.