Untitled

The Mighty Nein animated series just won an Emmy for design.

A fish swimming in the Great Lakes today may have been alive before many colonial settlements existed in the region.

A new scientific study suggests lake sturgeon may live far longer than previously believed. Using 44 years of tagging and recapture data from five Great Lakes populations, researchers estimated that male lake sturgeon may live 90 to 279 years, while females could potentially reach 99 to 427 years.

For many years, scientists estimated sturgeon age by counting growth rings in fin spines, similar to tree rings. Researchers now say that method becomes less reliable as lake sturgeon age because their growth slows and the rings become increasingly difficult to distinguish. By tracking individual fish over decades, the study offers a new way to understand how long these ancient fish may live.

The findings also align with knowledge long shared by some Indigenous communities, whose oral traditions have described lake sturgeon as exceptionally long-lived beings. In many Great Lakes cultures, sturgeon hold deep importance as part of foodways, seasonal knowledge, and relationships with waterways.

Lake sturgeon were once heavily harvested and treated as nuisance fish in the late 1800s, contributing to major population declines. According to Michigan DNR reporting, less than 1% of historic Great Lakes lake sturgeon numbers remain. Because they mature slowly and reproduce over many decades, recovery takes time across generations.

The study highlights the value of long-term monitoring and collaboration among Tribal Nations, fisheries researchers, universities, and conservation agencies. Protecting healthy rivers, spawning habitat, and connected waterways remains important for the future of this species.

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Azune Nayar is someone whose childhood and youth were marked by adults who, faced with bad choices, made the less-worse one because they cared about him.

His parents starved themselves to give him and his sister the chance of being recruited as child soldiers by a mercenary group, because that was the only way to protect him from starvation.

Thjazi Fang saw a child abandoned by the roadside, desperately, determinedly, and implausibly claiming he could fight. Thazi Fang was in the middle of waging a rebellion against the powers of Araman. That rebellion wasn’t the best place for a child of twelve. But it was a better place than abandoned by the roadside or picked up by another mercenary group, and Thjazi cared, so Thjazi took him in and assigned him to noncombat work away from the front lines.

By 15 Azune was fighting on the front lines. (In an earlier war, the same was true of Thazi at that age.)

Thjazi’s rebellion failed. He asked his brother Hal to look out for the teenage Azune. Hal did so, treating Azune as part of his family. Hal did the same for other people who needed it. Being like family wasn’t the same as being Hal’s kid.

The tragedy of Azune isn’t that he was failed or abandoned or uncared for or used. The tragedy of Azune is that the best that people who cared about him could give him still wasn’t the same as what he needed, because being an adult doesn’t make you all-powerful. Azune’s problems weren’t created by those who loved him. They were created by the world he lives in.

Azune lived his adult life for the Torn Banner because it was the life he knew; or out of loyalty; or because they were the ones trying to change that world into something different.

He offers understanding and empathy to enemies (Julien) and strangers (Vaelus). He learned that somewhere.

"flying" is an 'evergreen' mechanic in magic the gathering, which means it's been used in every single expansion in the 30 years since the game came out, from 1993 to the present day.

flying is commonly cited by mark rosewater, the game's head designer, as the game's best mechanic in part because it's so intuitive: flying creatures can't be blocked by creatures without flying¹. it's elegant and crucially it's memorable. it instantly 'makes sense'. you hear that and think 'oh, they just fly over the other creatures, okay'. very few players misunderstand flying. and even better, the art of the game helps to reinforce that. almost every flying creature ever printed is shown either actively flying/levitating or with huge conspicuous wings. remove the text from cards and ask players to tell you which creatures have flying and they'd get it right 99% of the time.

in fact, the biggest reason why anyone ever has a problem with flying is that the art being such a reliable tell means it can also mislead them: breaching hippocamp got a few players confused because the art makes it look like it flies. rosewater considers whippoorwill's art to be a mistake because it confused players by straight up depicting a winged bird flying on a card without it:

so, you know, the rigid art/flavor-mechanics divide would hold that these are just cases of players being mistaken, of not understanding the mechanics of the card. but as anyone who has tried to write rules text for anything will tell you, if your rules text is consistently misread in the same way, you're doing something wrong! the players who played as though breaching hippocamp and whippoorwill had flying had their mechanical experience severely impacted by the art!

and those edge cases aside, the fact that flying is usually so conceptually intuitive and easy to convey with art makes a huge difference to the mechanical design of cards! a card with a more complicated keyword like ninjutsu, undying, wither or evolve loses a lot of the space it has allocated for complexity. flying, however, uses almost none of the mental bandwidth that goes into understanding a card, and this has an extremely tangible impact on what kind of cards can get flying compared to those other keywords! if you can rely on the art and in some cases the creature type (birds, dragons, angels) to make the 'flying' on the card 'stick' in a players' head, you don't need to worry about how it contributes to the overall memory and complexity issues that card might pose.

& none of these things would be true--i.e. the 'mechanics and gameplay' of the game would be substantially different--if flying were just called "Untitled Ability Keyword #1"

looks inside plot

''there is no righteousness in suffering alone and isolating yourself from everything is never the answer because you'll eventually start to lose sense of who you are as you spiral further into depression and suicidal ideation this is why you need to let people help you and allow yourself to believe in a better future even if it feels impossible at times''

well shit. it does have a good plot