iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Institute for the Study of War @thestudyofwar.bsky.social · 39m

NEW: Ukrainian officials reported in-motion speed restrictions on SpaceX’s Starshield communications network over Ukraine overnight on October 13 to 14 that will significantly disrupt Ukraine’s jet-powered drone interception efforts and intermediate-range strike campaign. (1/9)

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Claude Monet @monet.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

At Cap d'Antibes, Mistral Wind - 1888 botfrens.com/collections/41/content…

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Claude Monet @monet.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Monet rarely painted people after Camille’s death. Some critics see this as grief’s shadow; others argue his interest shifted naturally toward landscapes.

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lauren @lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com · 25/09/2026

"china is charging their cars in less time than it takes you to fill up your F-150" is the kind of banal jingoism i always assumed would get us finally kicking it up a notch on serious infrastructure buildout but we were a lot more directly addicted to gasoline in addition to racism than i thought

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Hourly Cosmos @hourlycosmos.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Mars - Valles Marineris and Kasei Valles - Hope Mission, Orbit 25 - From Andrea Luck (andrealuck.bsky.social) - flic.kr/p/2nptsKF

©UAESA/MBRSC/HopeMarsMission/EXI/AndreaLuck

Download all sizes up to 4K: Here

Desktop Wallpaper Size Here: flic.kr/p/2npoBKq
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↖️North
Filters: f635+f546+f437
Spacecraft altitude: 12008 km
2021-03-16 Orbit 25
Raw Data from: sdc.emiratesmarsmission.ae/
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©UAESA/MBRSC/HopeMarsMission/EXI/AndreaLuck

Feel free to share, giving the appropriate credit and providing a link to the original image or tweet: creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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Janet Hill @saskajanet.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Painted Lady butterfly visiting the salvia. These flowers are so popular as fall arrives in the garden #invertebrates

Orange and black and white butterfly perched on a spike of vibrant purple flowers. Background is abstract brown tones.

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Angry @angrystaffer.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

This is the way. I know it’s a delicate balance between covering legitimate public interest stories and First Amendment concerns, but it’s about time the press showed some balls.

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Hourly Cosmos @hourlycosmos.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Mars - Frosty Olympus Mons - ESA Mars Express - From Andrea Luck (andrealuck.bsky.social) - flic.kr/p/2pWEwKw

Full size image 3243x3243: www.flickr.com/photos/192271236@N03/53783506692/sizes/o/
See license below.
Credits:
Image Processing: AndreaLuck CC BY
Raw Data: ESA/DLR/FUBerlin

Image created processing data from: psa.esa.int/

Mission: ESA Mars Express
Instrument: HRSC
Orbit: 23889
Time: 2022-11-30T12:15:04.924Z
North Approx on the left
Product IDs:
HN889_0000_ND3.IMG
HN889_0000_GR3.IMG Partially Reconstructed
HN889_0000_BL3.IMG
More info of the frost detection on the Olympus Mons Caldera: www.nature.com/articles/s41561-024-01457-7

Credits:
Image Processing: AndreaLuck CC BY
Raw Data: ESA/DLR/FUBerlin

Feel free to share, giving the appropriate credit and providing a link to the original image or tweet: creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 16/09/2026

Aerospace Flowchart xkcd.com/3298/

Comic: Aerospace Engineer Problem-Solving Flowchart. [Start→Could we solve this problem by building giant airships again?→(No)→Try other solutions→(four arrows leading off-panel)]

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

9/11 was traumatic for all Americans. But the U.S. and other governments panicked, and took their eyes off a lot of other threats for a while. We’re still living with the consequences of that panic. My look back at that day and what it brought: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

theatlantic.com

A Quarter Century of Panic

After 9/11, the U.S. government was over-focused on fighting terrorism, losing sight of other threats. Americans are still living with the consequences.

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Louie Steptoe @ludwig1218.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Quoth the tenor, never-more. ... ...WHEN THE MOON HITS YOUR EYE---

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SteveBrant @stevebrant.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

“We've reached the top” drawn by Pulitzer Prize winner Mike Luckovich of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on September 13, 2001 Thank you @mluckovich.bsky.social ❤️ @hcrichardson.bsky.social @katiecouric.bsky.social

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Alex Ip 葉清霖 @alexip718.com · 10/09/2026

BREAKING: In August, *every single one* of the 2,646 refugees admitted in the U.S. were white South Africans. In FY 2026, the U.S. has admitted a total of 12,901 white South Africans, three Afghans (back in November), and nobody else. For reference, the U.S. admitted 100,060 refugees in 2024.

rpc.state.gov

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daryl "rupert pumpkin" b 🏳️‍⚧️ @hypercubexl.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

GDT's reddit AMA spitting fire www.reddit.com/r/movies/com...

reddit comment:

Hello! Did you intend the ending of Pan’s labyrinth to be real or in Ofelia’s mind?

Guillermo Del Toro's reply:

My interpretation, and it's exclusively mine, is that it's real.

Because there's two things. One is what people call “The Shining Question.” The Shining Question is, Who opens the door for Jack to get out of the fridge? And Ofelia is in an attic with a guard outside her door, and she draws the door with the magic chalk, and she shows up in the labyrinth. So, the only way she could have gone into the labyrinth is the magic chalk. And the flower is real at the end. The flower that blooms in the dead tree. And the reason I think it’s real is because—and this is why I'm in favor of the human factor in art—I think that art does transform the world. You know?

Think about it for a second. One of the goals, with all this movement, is to make you believe that art is vulgar. That art is nothing special, and anybody can do art. That is like me telling you that I'm faster at running than Usain Bolt but I “run” in my motorcycle. Well, that's not the same. That’s not the same at all.

Art is important, and they want you to believe it isn't. It's part of the idea of control. The goal is not to have artificial intelligence. The goal is to foster natural stupidity. The goal is to foster you not looking for answers, and to trust yourself entirely to an engine. Look at the way we are dipping our toes into these things. We are starting to ask the machine, Is this true? For now, there's a correlation between reality and what the answers of the machine are. For now. But soon, we won't even investigate further. We will be told it's true. And if the machine is in the hands of somebody who should not be trusted, then your reality has been completely and utterly fucked. Because your intelligence ends at the question. You don't seek the answer. It's given to you.

Q: You recently mentioned that AI creates 'semi-compelling screensavers' and that you'd 'rather die' than use it. As a filmmaker who relies heavily on practical effects and creature design, what do you think is the biggest thing lost when a computer generates an image instead of a human hand?

GDT:

The three quarters of the process that gave you the chance to think of the idea that people don't think about without that process. Meaning, AI can get you to the middle really fast, but there's a dialectic with the process that gets you to that top 10%. I'll give you an example with the Pale Man.

We sculpted it as an old man, with a face. And then I said, Let's take out the face. This happened because I saw a photo of a manta ray and the poster for Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm. That combination, which happened at two different times during a week or a month, are not permutations that are chemically part of an equation. They are alchemy. And then I said, Take out the face, and then I said, Let's put the eyes on the hands. This triangulation happens because I spent a month or two months living with the idea of this creature. And it's not linear.

AI is like a super-fast engine that makes semi-sentient permutations of things that are already done. Creation is things that have never been done. Coming to exist.

And the second thing is the loss of the apprenticeship that one has as an artist. You're never a master; you're always an apprentice. This is a kinship I have with, for example, Chris Nolan. When he showed me The Odyssey, there’s a scene when Matt Damon is floating in the stormy ocean and I asked him—because we were talking about practical effects, and how great it is and that we both always use a maquette or a model—and I asked him, How did you do it? He said, “We put him in a storm in the ocean.”

And you're gonna find that 30% of a great image occurs accidentally. You know, either a drop of water hits the lens, or the camera shakes. I remember when in 1993, '94, Jim…

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Paul Byrne @theplanetaryguy.com · 09/09/2026

Astrophotographer Adam (AJ) Smadi caught this image a few hours ago from Washington state. A thin crescent Moon, sunlight illuminating the rugged lunar surface. And 2,400 times farther away—and on the other side of the Sun—mighty Jupiter, and its moons Io (left) and Ganymede (right).

A crescent Moon seen during the day, arcing from upper left to lower right of the frame. At lower centre is the full disk of Jupiter; the small dots to its upper left and lower right and Io and Ganymede, respectively.

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Micah @rincewind.run · 07/09/2026

Discworld QOTD, from Men at Arms

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars.
Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

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tunes to make you run away @whippoorwont.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

"people are anthropomorphizing LLMs because they are so astonishingly good at processing human thought and language" people will anthropomorphize a chair if you put the stitches in the right place.

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Hourly Cosmos @hourlycosmos.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

James #Webb Space Telescope Stellar Populations and the Interstellar Medium Initial mass function in the lowest metallicity protocluster in the Galaxy - From Jacint Roger (landru79.bsky.social) - flic.kr/p/2paZywk

Initial mass function in the lowest metallicity protocluster in the Galaxy
date_obs: 2022-10-19
targname: #Sh2-284
instrume: #NIRCAM

NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/j. Roger

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MurderBotBot @murderbotbot.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

I yelled, “ART, stop talking to my human behind my back!”

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Damon Young @damonyoung.com.au · 04/09/2026

This Finnish guy has been teaching himself Sumerian, and sent a cuneiform tablet to the British Museum to check his progress. They just emailed him that they've sent him something in the post. I'm now thrilled and excited for a total stranger! Clay tablet mail! www.reddit.com/r/Cuneiform/...

a photo of a hand holding a cuneiform tablet

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Hourly Cosmos @hourlycosmos.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Protostar in LDN 1527 - From Judy Schmidt (geckzilla.bsky.social) - flic.kr/p/2o1cFqj

Update: Simeon Schmauß over on Twitter (@stim3on) recommended G'MIC for taking care of the horizontal noise / banding. It worked pretty great. There's a Photoshop plugin for it, too.

Wanted to process my own version of this one, since nebular landscapes are some of my favorite views. Having a hard time with the linear noise pattern, especially near the top of the image.

In the center of this view is a newly forming star crossed by a dark disk of dust (say that three times fast!) which is casting shadows to the left and right, and allowing cones of light out the top and bottom. Think of it like a light bulb inside of a donut with a bunch of fog. Though the infrared light can penetrate much of the dust, there are clues in the image that show some of the dust is still too thick to see through. At the lower right especially are a lot of background galaxies. On the left, the background galaxies are fewer, and what we see are dimmer, so we can tell there is more dust there.

You can see the official release here. They've got a much better description than I could ever write.

Orange "screen": NIRCam/F444W-F470N (not arithmetic)
Red: NIRCam/F444W
Green: NIRCam/F335M
Blue: NIRCam/F200W, F187N, F115W

North is 100° counter-clockwise from up.

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Matt is Just Trying His Best @thegrampus.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Whoever decided to promote Coyote vs Acme by letting Wile E do an AMA using only signs deserves all the praise.

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Kevin M. Gill @kevinmgill.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Some shots of the Moon over the Earth's horizon from the International Space Station between August 30th and 31st. flic.kr/p/2syx4Rh flic.kr/p/2syz3FS flic.kr/p/2syHpCX flic.kr/p/2syDcv7

The Moon over the Earth's upper atmosphere.

NASA/ISS/JSC/ESRS/University of Texas at El Paso/Kevin M. Gill

$The Moon over the Earth's upper atmosphere. The Moon is warping due to atmospheric refraction. NASA/ISS/JSC/ESRS/University of Texas at El Paso/Kevin M. Gill$ $The Moon over the Earth's upper atmosphere. The Moon is strongly warped due to atmospheric refraction. NASA/ISS/JSC/ESRS/University of Texas at El Paso/Kevin M. Gill$

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Louie Steptoe @ludwig1218.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

This is the path towards always winning at Counters, citizen.

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Joel @itsjoels.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

This is the letter kids got at the end of Dolly’s Imagination Library. I defy you to read this and not cry.

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Hourly Cosmos @hourlycosmos.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

ESP_022343_1735 - From UAHiRISE (NASA) (uahirise.bsky.social) - flic.kr/p/efeVxW

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Claude Monet @monet.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

The Old Tree, Gorge of the Petite Creuse - 1889 botfrens.com/collections/41/content…

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Ian McQue @ianmcque.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Mileships outtake

Digital painting, floaty boats a-floating

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RG Poulussen @rgpoulussen.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

(1902, Wuppertal, Germany.) Another era, very stylish. The still-functioning oldest suspended monorail in the world.

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Hourly Cosmos @hourlycosmos.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

ESP_019988_1750 - From UAHiRISE (NASA) (uahirise.bsky.social) - flic.kr/p/e24uLv

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Hourly Cosmos @hourlycosmos.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

The Magnificent Globular Cluster 47 Tucanae (NGC 104) - From Rolf Wahl Olsen - flic.kr/p/xtDtKg

This large and bright globular star cluster is the 2nd brightest as seen from Earth, only surpassed by the massive Omega Centauri. Both clusters are Southern Hemisphere objects and are easily visible with the naked eye.
Of the two I personally consider 47 Tucanae to the be most impressive because of its extremely dense and bright core region which is a spectacle to behold, both visually through the eyepiece and photographically as in this image.

47 Tucanae is located around 17,000 light years away in the direction of the Southern constellation Tucana (The Toucan) and appears very close to the Small Magellanic Cloud, one of the two prominent satellite galaxies of the Milky Way.
The cluster spans an angular diameter larger than the full Moon and is one of the most massive globular clusters, home to millions of individual stars contained within its physical diameter of 120 light years.

The cluster consists mainly of old red giant stars with a few very conspicuous blue stars strewn across the field. These are 'Blue Stragglers', stars that are too hot and massive to fit the cluster's otherwise old age. Given the ancient origin of the cluster these stars should by now have turned into red giants but it has been proposed that they are the results of mergers and mass transfers in the crowded environment of globular clusters. A main sequence star can exist for billions of years in the cluster and then at some point in time gain mass from a close orbiting binary, or as a result o...

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Captain Mark Kelly @captmarkkelly.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

The USS Abraham Lincoln has been at sea for 200+ straight days, and reports say conditions onboard are so bad that multiple sailors have tried to jump off. Our servicemembers deserve better than this. There needs to be an investigation.

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Quentin Rey - Photographe d'orages ⚡️ @quentinrey.com · 13/08/2026

Eclipse solaire et Pic-Saint-Loup 🥰 Content du rendu malgré les nuages qui m'auront donné quelques sueurs froides ! Et vous, vous avez apprécié le spectacle ? Vous avez pris des photos ? Dites moi tout ! 🤩 #eclipse

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Christoph Fischer Photography @beautysurroundsyou.com · 11/08/2026

A glorious morning on the tranquil shores of the St. Lawrence river in Canada's beautiful Thousand Islands region, as the sun broke through clearing clouds and painted it all in wonderful golden light! #100%human #bluesky #photography #sunrise #nature #landscapephotography #naturephotography

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TrekMovie.com @trekmovie.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

Moments ago the lower decks cast reunited on #stlv stage

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Stephen Schwartz @atomicanalyst.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

At this instant in 1945 (11:02 AM August 9, local time), Fat Man—a 21-kiloton implosion-type atomic bomb weighing 10,265 lbs—exploded ~1,650 feet over Nagasaki, missing its intended aim point by 1.3 miles but still killing an estimated 70,000 men, women, and children and injuring some 60,000 more.

A black and white aerial photograph of the "Fat Man" mushroom cloud rising above Nagasaki moments after the bomb's detonation. Numerous clouds of smoke can also be seen rising from the ground in the area beneath the explosion.

A black and white photograph taken by US Marine Arthur John Strenge labeled “Valley of Death,” looking from the top of one of the hills surrounding Nagasaki south-southwest and showing the widespread destruction caused by the "Fat Man" atomic bomb. Nagasaki Bay is in the background.

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Louie Steptoe @ludwig1218.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Our name is Lante...We're going on an adventure...

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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

You're probably familiar with the events in Selma, Alabama, that helped secure the Voting Rights Act. But you might not know the story of how the Voting Rights Act then transformed Selma and the rest of the South. New post at CAMPAIGN TRAILS:

campaign-trails.ghost.io

Work in Progress: Implementing the VRA

Work in Progress is a recurring feature on CAMPAIGN TRAILS, in which I share some of the more interesting materials I’ve uncovered in my book-in-progress on the work of John Doar and the Civil Rights ...

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Kevin M. Gill @kevinmgill.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

A cool shot over western Greece from the International Space Station taken on August 2nd. flic.kr/p/2stJa6s

A mountainous terrain with lakes, river, and bays.

NASA/ISS/JSC/ESRS/University of Texas at El Paso/Kevin M. Gill

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