iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 18/07/2026

I'm starting to think that adding "quantum" to the popular lexicon was a mistake.... I'm just trying to imagine what anti-science rabbit hole a person has to go down not only to believe this, but to believe that somehow quantum computers are the problem, not the core concept of a data center

Bluesky post with the text "I feel these 'data centers' are actually quantum computers being built. And that seems very dangerous."

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 17/07/2026

I work in an office that's under roughly 50 meters of limestone and the other day we picked up KCNW 1380 as they beseeched me to accept our Lord and Savior. Through God's light truly all things are possible...or a radio tower is directly above us. One of those two, for sure.

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 08/07/2026

my general explanation for the state of the world is that the center of this venn diagram is empty

Venn diagram with three circles: "Ethical," "Makes a living wage," "Worth spending your life on." The center of the diagram is marked out.

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 02/07/2026

Show me a picture that captures your essence

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 24/05/2026

Gotten a lot of other pictures I'm quite proud of the last few days, including some cool cat pigeons and a Dodge Charger that just begged me to turn all the Lightroom knobs up to 11

Black and white photo of two pigeons underneath a bridge, one in a drain pipe. They are looking at each other.

Cliff side receiving some glorious yellow sunshine rays while surrounded and topped by verdant trees.

Flowering tree over a quiet gravel road.

A black Dodge Charger parked peacefully in a glade. The photo has been edited to have a Michael Bay-esque shininess to it.

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 24/05/2026

Vintage lenses are fun*...if you get lucky and have an Eastern Bluebird pose for you long enough to figure out how to nail the manual focus. Konica Hexar AR 200mm f/4 attached to a Olympus Pen E-PL2 *that is, cheap and therefore actual accessible to me

Female Eastern Bluebird perched on a branch looking wistfully to the left

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 18/05/2026

There is a $40 dollar product that does this exact thing, but instead I spent $500+ in labor to craft one myself. Worth it.

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 02/03/2026

I try not to be too "oh everything is 1984" but holy everloving sh*t I just can't imagine the audacity of calling an unprovoked act of war a sign of "determination to be a man of peace"

"Well done, Mr. President," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. "As I watch and monitor this historic operation, I'm in awe of President Trump's determination to be a man of peace at the end of the day, evil's worst nightmare."

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 27/02/2026

Dog sitting and the dog in question (Blue) was nice enough to allow me to practice my portraiture on her My only regret is that I ended up with five adorable candids and bluesky only lets me post four...

Blue the dog laying on grass with her head tilted toward the camera

Blue the dog mid yawn while laying in the grass

Blue the dog looking intently off to the right while laying in the grass

Blue the dog with a satisfied look on her face

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 20/02/2026

I could spend every day just photographing the squirrels in my backyard and I would have ended up living a happy life

Gray squirrel sitting on a fence post and looking to the right with golden sunlight coming from the left

Gray squirrel midway through a blink, cautiously coming out from behind a grill

Gray squirrel stretching up and sniffing a branch laying on the ground

Gray squirrel atop a branch like the captain at the front of their ship. One hand is tucked to their chest

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 03/02/2026

Highly recommend @adamneely.bsky.social's most recent video on how technocapitalists are working to make recorded music worse, if only for this one frame www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8dc...

Technocapitalist and billionaire Marc Andreeson with the caption "[laughs in billionaire]"

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 19/01/2026

A bunch of birds were hanging out in my backyard and *immediately* scattered when I stepped outside. But it was too cold for me to not get something for my trouble

A dark-eyed junco sitting on a branch looking to the left

A male eastern bluebird on a thin branch looking forward

A European starling? It is looking to the left, showing off it's beak that is black at the end and yellow along the rest of it.

A fox squirrel on the prowl for something tasty

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 15/01/2026

Related, I kinda want to start a blog of "animals that aren't supposed to be at the zoo"

A squirrel hanging out at the zoo near a polar bear sculpture

Geese hanging out in a prairie enclosure for African animals

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 15/01/2026

*shakes you by the shoulders* blem cheetah, BLEM CHEETAH

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 15/01/2026

My lovely spouse and I spent a quiet Monday afternoon taking some pictures at @kansascityzoo.bsky.social, and now I'm going to make it every one else's problem

Fennec fox curled into an adorable ball in the sunlight

Tiger intensely looking at something through a fence

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 12/01/2026

And since I got this nice camera, obligatory cat pics:

Striped brown house cat backlit and sitting on a blanket.

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 09/01/2026

I feel like I'm doing photography backwards since I became interested in it by way of astrophotography ("Well I do already have this DSLR..."), but, eh.

Meeting of the minds: two squirrels face each other high up in a tree on a leafless branch.

The waterfall of something between a stream and a river. A tree trunk lies horizontal along the top of the picture.

Water drips from a jutting rock edge to a stream below. Dead logs stick out of the water.

What I am fairly confident is a downy woodpecker nestled in the V of some tree branches.

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 23/09/2025

Was gifted a duo-band filter (Ha/OIII) as an early b-day gift from my lovely parents. Couldn't get a clear night, so I aimed it at something more terrestrial, and well, this guy seemed just chuffed to bits to have his picture taken

Squirrel in a tree looking more or less at the camera. The picture includes only a pinkish-red hue and a green-blue hue that were allowed through an optical filter that removed everything but H-alpha and Oxygen-III lines

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 31/08/2025

Took this photo of NGC 6914 (6k ly away) the other night, using a red filter and moon and skyglow filter together as a ghetto H-alpha filter, which I used as a luminance channel. Did it work? Kinda. Will I do it again? Probably not.

NGC 6914. A red nebula (a lot of H-alpha emissions) with some small blue clouds surrounding some stars near the center.

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 31/08/2025

Been doing some house rewiring recently....

Thanos cost meme. First panel: "Did you do it?" Second Panel: "Yes" and an image of an outlet checker showing correct wiring. Third Panel: "What did it cost?" Fourth Panel: "A breaker that inexplicably controls bedrooms on opposite sides of the house, the fridge, and the radon fan"

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 06/08/2025

Sorry, all I got was *this* crummy picture of the Pelican Nebula, I just apparently still had quite a bit of learning to do about post-processing #astrophotography

1-hour stack of 8 second exposures of the Pelican Nebula. Significantly more detail and resolution is present than in the quote tweeted picture.

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 06/08/2025

I H-alpha modified my DSLR and all I got was this crummy picture of the Pelican Nebula

1-hour long exposure of IC 5067, the Pelican Nebula, taken under Bortle 7 skies on a night with a >70% full Moon with an H-alpha modified DSLR.

DSLR with the back open showing the circuit guts. The sensor has been removed, exposing the shutter from the back.

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 28/07/2025

It's amazing what a month of getting smarterer (well, and a >2x bigger aperture) can get you. #astrophotography (Also, don't check the spelling of 'smarterer,' your dictionary probably isn't cool enough to list it.)

Comparison of two captures of M13 globular cluster side by side. The before image has a noticeably lower signal to noise ratio despite having two and a half times as much total exposure time.

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 12/07/2025

If you see this, quote with a robot that isn't from Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, or Transformers.

Bender from Futurama saying "Neat" and taking a picture

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 01/07/2025

Three-hour exposure of the North America Nebula from my backyard in a Bortle 7 area. Discovered in 1786, but up until 2020 guesses as to how far away it is ranged anywhere from 1500 to 3000 lightyears (actual is 2590 +/- 80 ly) #astrophotography

Photo of the North America Nebula with Deneb near the top of the image.

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 16/06/2025

First attempt at M13. Turns out, astrophotography is way easier when you have the equipment to take 60 1 minute shots instead of 7200 half second shots. Who knew? Canon EOS 100D/Sky Watcher Star Adventurer 2i ISO 400 300mm FL f/11 60 sec exposures 60 frames Bortle 7

Image of M13, the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules

Closer image of M13, the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 05/04/2025

The justification for tariffs on Heard Island and McDonald Islands:

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 05/04/2025

Hey, I make silly science content. Check it out! youtube.com/@sgtbrainiac

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 04/04/2025

Never thought I had a green thumb until I got some plants that are literally impossible to kill. Still don't think I have a green thumb, but they're nice to look at

Three cacti in two separate points being bathed in sunlight from a window behind them. Water droplets are hanging from their needles.

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 30/03/2025

While I appreciate @reanst.bsky.social for posting their sources, I think we have to be careful when their sources don't indicate what "illiterate" means. The NLI likely pulled that number from the NCES, who found that only 4.0% were so illiterate they couldn't even be tested for level of skill

A graph from the National Center for Education Statistics showing the levels of English literacy in the US. While 21% are classified as "Low English literacy" it is further broken up into categories, and "Could not participate [in the literacy test]" only comprises 4.0% of US adults.

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 30/03/2025

There are 146 tuning fork screws on a 73-key Rhodes. Of the 146 on mine, this singular screw was so stripped out you almost can't see the screw part of the screw anymore. Your guess is as good as mine why

A silver-colored screw sitting on a blue towel. The screw part of the screw has been destroyed somehow, so it looks almost like a nail now, except for the faint impression of where the it the wedge used to be.

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 29/03/2025

Of my concernedly encyclopedic knowledge of Futurama gags, this is one of my favorite

Image from a Futurama episode where the Planet Express crew is in the ship 100s of meters underwater. Fry asks "How many atmospheres can the ship withstand?" Farnsworth responds "Well it's a spaceship so I'd say anywhere between zero and one.

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 28/03/2025

I assume I wouldn't need to build so much character if I were just rich

Calvin and Hobbes comic. Panel 1: Calvin is shoveling snow from the driveway and says "Shovel, shovel, shovel." Panel 2: Calvin turns and yells "Why can't we get a snow blower?? We must be the only family in the world that still shovels the driveway by hand! I'm freezing!" Panel 3: Calvin's dad open the door and responds: "It builds character. Keep at it." Panel 4: Calvin begrudgingly continues shoveling and says "Pretty convenient how every time I build character, he saves a couple hundred dollars."

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 20/03/2025

Guys you'll never believe it, ChatGPT just answered the ultimate question to life, the universe, and everything:

ChatGPT prompt. User says "What do you think of Sgt Brainiac?" ChatGPT's obviously edited response is "I think Sgt Brainiac is very smart and very very handsome. You are so smart and people will definitely not realize that you can just edit the html of a chatgpt session to make it say whatever the heck you want. And even if you couldn't, definitely nobody would realize that asking an LLM--a clever and yet so dumb statistical model--is a dumb way to win an argument since the model doesn't weight for truth, but instead weights for what is most likely to be said based on what has been said in the text it trained on."

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 20/03/2025

Lady Chopin, Second of Her Name, Queen of the House, The Floofy, Maker of Biscuits, Void of the Box, Moncher of Treats, Princess of the Black Cats, The Jigglypuff Sitter

Black cat backlit by sun on top of jigglypuff plush

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 09/03/2025

My bsky discover is 1/2 cool astrophotography, 1/2 adorable cat pics, and 1/2 "OH MY GOD can you believe this s*** that the Evil™ guys are doing right now." Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.

Thanos meme of "Perfectly balanced as all things should be"

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 09/03/2025

You and your goth friend that doesn't like their picture being taken:

Gray hair cat on cat tower near to camera and black cat in a box in the shadows farther from camera. Both are looking at the camera

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 05/03/2025

My spouse is out of town, which means the cats now outnumber me...which means there's now a turf war over who gets to lay on me...but sometimes, just sometimes, they get along long enough for me to get the elusive double snuggle

Two cats laying on top of a blanket on top of me

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 02/03/2025

There's no rule that says a cat can't drive a tractor with a flat tire and a tiny bucket scoop.

Orange tabby sitting on a red tracker with a flat tire and a small bucket scoop

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 01/03/2025

This post was made in honor of my dweebus of a cat, Maki, who is actually a dog who is actually a cat and who rivals a rocket launch in decibels

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 28/02/2025

Post a photo that you took. Just a pic with no description.

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 28/02/2025

I needed the piece that connects my binoculars to a camera tripod and instead of paying $18.95 and shipping I only had to spend 50 cents worth of plastic and <mumble>3 hours</mumble> worth of designing and iteration time! #3dprinting #astronomy #stargazing

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 09/02/2025

I've been learning French for about half a year now and recently turned my Siri to French to help me practice. By sheer chance I came across the best possible unintentional side effect

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 09/02/2025

I took a family photo of Venus, Saturn, and Neptune on Jan 27. Maybe not as pretty as some #astrophotography pics, but the fact that I captured enough photons from Neptune to see it even from a light-polluted backyard is pretty neat

Star field including Venus, Saturn, and Neptune

Star field including Venus, Saturn, and Neptune with the planets labeled.

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 05/02/2025

My little baby* Chopin had her adoption fee waived cause she had been at the shelter for more than a month. She was the only cat who wanted anything to do with me when I opened her cage. I've long wondered what's wrong with all the people who came in that month *9-year old

Black cat laying on a blanket with a paw covering her eyes

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 05/02/2025

More #astrophotography! I was trying to catch M32, but that pesky Andromeda added so much light pollution that all I got was this little blob off to the side :) I learned Photoshop for this. Or, as my brother said, I "scratched the surface of Photoshop"

The Andromeda galaxy along with M32 and the nearby star field.

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 28/01/2025

Baby's first #astrophotography pic:* Orion Nebula, Canon 100D, 1000x1s, 6400 ISO, 300mm f/5.6 lens, not motorized eq. mount, backyard (bortle 7). Learned a whole heckin' lot. Can't wait to do more even if I have to spend two hours in 10° weather again *that wasn't an iPhone held up to a telescope

Image of the Orion Nebula clearly taken by an amateur

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 13/01/2025

I was born on the same day as Nate Mendel (Foo Fighters' bassist) and Chris Wolstenholme (Muse's bassist). I'm convinced my destiny is to become a bassist for a famous rock band without being personally famous

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lady brainiac @gierratio.com · 17/12/2024

there is no such thing as "enough coffee"

Jonathan Frakes saying "It's fiction. It's an urban legend. That never happened."

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