iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

How many different kinds of quartz can you find in my collection?

Multiple shelves with mineral specimens displayed on them, including rock quartz, fluorite, apophyllite, citrine, optical calcite, selenite, amethyst, orange calcite, desert rose, chrome alum, potassium alum, smoky quartz, garnet, pyrite, bismuth, geodes, and more

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

You mean my cute little pink bunny I named Portland is a total biohazard? 🥺🤣

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Here are the pictures I got. Saturn’s rings look a lot clearer to the eye than my phone camera.

Andromeda Galaxy through a telescope. It looks like a faint blur of light.

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

It’s coming right at us!!! It’ll be here in… *checks watch* 4.5 billion years.

Low quality photo of the Andromeda Galaxy through a telescope.

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I often enjoy reading about this sort of thing. I have drawings of the sun at various stages of its life. This drawing is my guess at what the sun’s planetary nebula may look like, based on papers I’ve read relating its mass to how it’ll ionize the matter it throws off.

Dim concentric red circles against a dark background with stars concentrated in one corner. There are some highlights of green throughout the nebula.

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

The ghost of my cat Savannah recommends that you follow @jaspersfelines.bsky.social .

Brown and white cat chilling out next to a cat tree

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Loki pushes against my mom’s foot to try to squeeze by, and it hurts every time. At least Bow Tie will politely wait for Mom to move. Loki also puts all his weight down through his paws all over Mom’s lap. This dog is ouch.

A bright-eyed tricolor beagle is flopped on the couch looking up at the camera.

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Straight out of 2002, here’s my cat Savannah, who lived to the age of 15. She’s probably about 6 weeks old here.

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I aimed my phone camera at the moon during maximum, but the quality was so horrendous, it wasn’t worth snapping. Here’s the lunar eclipse from earlier this year instead.

March 2026 lunar eclipse. The eclipse in this photo closely resembles the near total lunar eclipse of August 27, 2026 at its peak, except rotated 120 degrees counterclockwise.

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

#FlowerReport #RoseWednesday A little pink rose is opening up in my garden today.

A miniature pink rose in bloom next to my fingers. The whole flower is less than two fingers across.

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

I saw this among other sculptures near the University of Saskatchewan on my 2017 Canada visit.

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Giggling at the shape of the bruise on my arm… 🤭

My elbow, with a slight phallic mark on it

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Nah, that pizza better be the size of the cyclotron I visited in Canada back in 2017.

A cyclotron encased in blue metal, with beam pipe, a waveguide, and hoses leading out of it. The whole accelerator is about 2 meters across.

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Face I’m submitting for Bluesky verification:

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

A sleepy Bow Tie for the internet’s enjoyment 🐾🐾

Large black and white shorthair dog asleep on the couch

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

My oldest plushie is a pink bunny I named Portland. I was 9 years old and swiftly packing for an overnight trip with my dad, and looking for a different plushie. I couldn’t find it, so I grabbed a nearby pink bunny, named it Portland, and stuffed it in my bag. I’ve held on to it ever since.

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

A cat to ease your troubles 🐱🐾

A tortoiseshell cat arching her back and looking at the camera, probably waiting for snacks.

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

And he turns into a harmless daffodil when?

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

I got training specific to geese when I went to BNL in 2019 for an internship. Seven years later, I’m trying to keep my distance from some geese while taking pictures of them, and this guy just lets his kid go up to them and their goslings! 🤦‍♀️

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

This rosebush, which produced red rootstock flowers a month ago, is still willing to bloom in yellow. I now have a rosebush that produces two colors of flowers! #FlowerReport #Bloomscrolling

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

My particle accelerator obsessed brain decided to do this:

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

*drops my origami BCC crystal in the comments*

A growing origami crystal structure made of many colorful cubes, shown at different stages of construction.

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

Oak tree??? I love it when my brain is whimsical and random instead of absolute torment.

Picture of Xcelerator, steel launched roller coaster at Knott’s Berry Farm. The tree in question is behind the left side of the roller coaster and is not a palm tree, but is surrounded by palm trees.

Close-up of the tree in question, screenshotted from a YouTube video of an on-ride perspective of the Calico Mine Train. It is a large tree behind a bunch of foreground palm trees.

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

I saw a picture several years ago of equipment around the Proton Synchrotron where they sent beam through the air. The beam itself was invisible, but the effect it had on the material it passed through was quite clear.

Glowing blocks of metal next to the Proton Synchrotron magnets

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Because I’m in a fact-dumping mood, here’s a pic I saved off the internet years ago. The yellow tubes are beam loss monitors. Enjoy this math-heavy, graph-heavy resource on beam loss monitors! cas.web.cern.ch/sites/defaul...

Photo from CERN of the LHC tunnel, showing someone inspecting the collider. There are small yellow tubes (beam loss monitors) on the sides of the dipole magnets (the large blue tubes).

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Last physics beams before CERN wraps it up for the decade and gets to work turning the LHC into the High Luminosity LHC!

Large Hadron Collider status screen showing beam intensity and energy graphs, plus instantaneous luminosity graphs. Status: ion physics, stable beams. Comments: Stable Beams. All IPs on target.

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

See also: the Large Hadron Collider’s cryogenic magnets insulated from room temperature by the “chill of space”.

Cutaway diagram of a Large Hadron Collider magnet, showing, among other components, the vacuum vessel intended to keep the warmth of the surrounding air away from the helium coolant and cryogenic operating parts.

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

I made this art while happy. Honestly, art captures every aspect of the human experience. It doesn’t necessarily have to be suffering alone. This painting captures a very happy time in my life. I went to Knott’s Berry Farm when I was 15 and took this picture, then painted it 5 years later.

Detailed painting of the Xcelerator roller coaster at Knott’s Berry Farm

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

These geese seemed quite used to humans. Still, I remained cautious. I’m happy to have been able to take this picture.

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

#FlowerReport #Bloomscrolling #BloomscrollingWithBee A bee is getting the blackberries ready for the summer 🐝🌸

Blackberry plants in bloom, with a fuzzy bee on one of the flowers.

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

#Bloomscrolling #FlowerReport One of the most fragrant roses in my garden is now blooming.

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Happy 60th birthday to the SLAC Linac, the longest linac in the world! In 2022, I had the privilege of working an internship at this accelerator optimizing beta functions for LCLS.

Removed portions of the linac on display, including part of the copper accelerator, a quadrupole magnet, the alignment tube, a waveguide, and (I think) a klystron.

A view down the two mile long klystron gallery

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

I remember doing one of those in college! We were trying to decide what experiment to do with it, when I started pressing the metal the optics were mounted on. It changed the interference pattern slightly. We used that and force measurements to find Young’s modulus for the metal.

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

I was admiring my roses yesterday, and it seems like a bee had quite the landing on one of them. She left a streak of pollen on the flower and tucked herself in for a nap. I checked the same rose this morning, and it seemed she’d cleaned up and left.

A red rose with a streak of pollen along one petal and a bee tucked in between two other petals

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

#Bloomscrolling #FlowerReport Roses and peonies are in full bloom this time of year 🌹🌸

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

*cues up ”Just The Girl” by The Click Five* This pic was taken on a film roll 😭👵🏻⏳ I got my first phone two months later, and it was a flip phone. It really has been over 20 years since I went to Knott’s Berry Farm!

Silver Bullet, an inverted roller coaster at Knott’s Berry Farm. Photo taken in 2005.

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Stephanie 🎀 @beamsandbows.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

#Bloomscrolling #FlowerReport One of my rosebushes took me completely by surprise this year. I planted a rosebush with yellow flowers in 2022 (last picture). Today I’m seeing dark pink buds on it??? I looked up the possible cause, and it seems these are rootstock roses showing through 😵‍💫

My hand holding up a rosebush branch with several buds on it. One of the buds is a dark pink/red color.

Another cluster of rosebuds showing dark pink petals

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