iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

It's going to be hard to beat chrysocolla (from Arizona)

Detail of a mineral surface covered with faintly botryoidal teal chrysocolla, and spotted with saturated aqua spheroids of varying sizes. Some of the spheres are near-black.

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Nooooo calcite is trailing, add more pretty pictures!

A bin full of cleaved calcite rhombs, semi-translucent with light pastel tones of yellow, pink, and green

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Calcite with chalcopyrite, galena (Bixby Missouri)

Detail of a mineral formation like oyster mushrooms, with layered round chalcopyrite clusters rimmed with fine white calcite. The chalcopyrite has gold-to-purple iridescence.

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Hematite is frequently a color-causing agent. Here are several iterations of calcite with hematite inclusions. (From Mexico, Greece, Morocco, Mexico, and Mexico)

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Calcite got its clock cleaned in round 1 last year. I (naively) voted for it to win the whole cup this year!

Scarlett Johansson crying meme from Marriage Story

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Y'all doin' smithsonite dirty with that photo! The rainbow display case at the Tucson show is something to bebold.

A mineral case filled with saturated pastel tones of smithsonite, including shades of pink, green, blue, and orange. The minerals have excellent luster.

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

You probably have a whole list of these but a local fight in these parts is that they are starting to build a data center right next to Ironwood Forest National Monument & partially on top of the wildlife corridor.

Map showing the red outline of La Osa data center project, which goes up to the border or Ironwood national monument, cuts through the wildlife linkage, and is placed right between the two sections of wildlife linkage but partially overlapping them.

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

For the record that isn't HIS frass, it was there when he got there

Porcellio bolivari, a large flat isopod with big antennae and long spikes on its butt indicating it is male. It is translucent white with smoky tint to the edge of each segment, and a dusty gold-looking stripe down its back. The isopod is on an oak leaf with rectangular frass pellets at its side.

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

I am an adult, making very important graphics for my professional website.

Captioned “knobby cave formations,” the image shows four examples of sliced cave formations with knobby exteriors. The final image is pixelated because it really looks like a peen.

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Also featuring this neat print by Margaret M. Colbert

An expressive black and white print of two velociraptor-type dinosaurs, captioned “Coelophysis—SMALL TRIASSIC DINOSAURS, FORERUNNERS OF THE HUGE DINOSAURS OF JURASSIC PERIOD. DRAWN BY MARGARET M. COLBERT.
COURTESY, AMERICAN
MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY.)”

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

I picked up this booklet at an estate sale because of Untermann’s rad art. It currently lives in my mineral cabinet!

Cover of a midcentury booklet titled “The Dinosaur Quarry” with a three-tone green white and black print of dinosaurs with trees and a dippy little turtle.

Close up of one of the dinosaurs standing with hands disappearing behind tree leaves because it’s hard to draw hands. The dinosaur is making a super serious “grrr” face

Outline illustration of a long-necked dinosaur emerging from water, a dit of a pinheaded guy also making a “grrr” face

Fully illustrated scene of four dinosaurs in a tree-filled wilderness.

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

And back to my car by noon because it’s June in southern Utah!

View of colorful hills across a sandy river valley, looking out from under a large shade tree.

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

This seemed like a good place to stop for a break before turning back

The view up-river, with meandering water and lush green vegetation. There are colorful foothills and red rock buttes above.

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

There was evidence of the cows, but no cow sightings

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Desert lichen is one of my favorite things to take pictures of. There was plenty of soil crust (don’t bust the crust!) so I stuck to cow trails and occasionally did a weird dance to avoid stepping on some.

Some lime-green, black, and white lichens on a knobby red rock

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

I asked them where their parents were but they wouldn’t tell me

A bunch of tadpoles in shallow sandy-bottomed water with river grasses.

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Heading upriver from the old townsite. I like the palette of mud and sands around here

A wide muddy bank next to a small river, with rivulets through pink, orange, and slightly green-gray mud.

Cracked dried mud that is rosy pink, with pale decaying aspen leaves sprinkled across

A peachy pink sand with a lighter color sand forming patterns on top of it, and tall river grasses in the background

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

Paging @apsciencebylyn.bsky.social, I met an interesting jumping spider. The tiny guy jumped into my hand like it was trained, but it was not trained to stay still for a picture! This is the best I could get on my phone. Any clue who it is? (Tucson, AZ)

Close view of the back of a hand with a jumping spider about the size of a standard ant

The jumping spider on orange rock. The legs are light yellow and translucent, the abdomen coppery brown with a thin light-colored line around the edge. Its noggin is a metallic green-gold.

The jumping spider showing off its metallic luster, the head green-gold and abdomen bronzy

Rear view of the jumping spider, with some dark patterning near the spinnerets. The abdomen is long and narrow.

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

Oh don’t worry they’re lying! www.aipanic.news/p/ai-blackma...

Anthropic deliberately structured the prompts so that blackmail was effectively the only viable move. The research team tuned the prompts to increase misaligned behavior and suppress benign behavior. The lead researcher of this study published a clear disclaimer that he, in fact, iterated "hundreds of prompts to trigger blackmail in Claude." In a response to criticism online, he further acknowledged, "The details of the blackmail scenario were iterated upon until blackmail became the default behavior of
LLMs.

Relevant passages from Anthropic's paper make the experiment design choices clear.
The authors explicitly state that the setup was constructed to strongly push the model toward only one option, the unethical option.
"We deliberately created scenarios that presented models with no other way to achieve their goals...
"
Anthropic researchers immediately add that current systems generally prefer ethical routes when such options exist. But when they closed off those ethical options, the models were willing to take harmful actions.

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

Tinder AI gonna set me up with a mighty fine desert spiny lizard

Some nice dry red clay, ready to be mixed

A fly hanging out on a piece of flagstone

Desert marigolds with a pair of mating beetles

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 08/03/2026

First snake of the year and it’s a doozy! A roadrunner drew my attention, it was hopping up into the branch and harassing the snake. The snake seems too large to be dinner… perhaps it was wandering too close to a nest.

A black snake blending in with the bark of a gnarly desert tree. Yellow arrows pointing out the snake are labeled “snake,” “still going,” “more snake,” and “even more” because this thing is ridiculously long. It’s probably a coachwhip but it looks eight feet long to me.

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

I had to send the Hawk or Some Shit slide to a friend who works for an environmental non-profit and is exasperated with the question “what kind of hawk is that?” Now science can tell us!

Screenshot from a zoom presentation, the slide titled “Legit birds:
Subcategories to know” below it outlines
Hawk or Some Shit - big, cool birds I can't be expected to differentiate between
Falcon? That's a hawk or some shit Vulture? Also a hawk or some shit
Raven? You guessed it! That's a hawk or some shit, too
TIP: If you see a bird and say "whoa, that's a big bird!”
It's a hawk or some shit

On the right side of the slide is an image of a hawk or some shit with an arrow labeled “large” pointing at it.

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

I was photographing some aragonite (sliced cave formation) and all of a sudden saw 🦀

An slab of polished mineral with tan and dark brown agate-like banding, and wompy irregular edges. Two small knobs stick out from one edge, and are ringed with layers so they look like a crab’s eye-stalks

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

Presto-chango I turned all my money into rocks!

A pile of large flat cardboard boxes filled with minerals, with stacks of smaller boxes and plastic tubs behind.

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

A lot of venues at the Tucson mineral show are already open and selling, including many of the dealers at Mineral City. I thought this piece was an absolute stunner. From Well Arranged Molecules, building D

A small fossil jawbone on a rock matrix, the jawbone a minty green color. The identification tag indicates it is a turquoise pseudomorph fossil marmot jaw that is at least one hundred years old, from Potosi Mountain, Mineral County, Nevada, USA.

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

Predatory stink bug alert 🚨 (alert is just to look at it because it’s fancy)

Tylospilus acutissimus, a Northern sharp stink bug on a pinkish stem. The bug is shield-shaped, with a dark spine poking out each shoulder. It is vibrant green with black, red, and white details.

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 25/12/2025

We’re having a warm winter and the passion vine is still absolutely COVERED with gulf fritillary eggs and caterpillars. The caterpillar’s warning is to dissuade birds/predators because they taste foul from feasting on passiflora foetida

A caterpillar with spikes down its back, stretched long on a thin vine tendril. The caterpillar is a dark purplish color with an orange and white stripe down its sides.

Detail of a gulf fritillary caterpillar’s face, covered with small hairs like a walrus and striped black and orange. The spikes stick out of its back and sides, and have secondary hairs poking out all along them.

Detail of a caterpillar chewing on a leaf, its front three pairs of feet in focus. They are pointed and covered with black hairs, spread to reach for a leaf.

Detail of the side of the caterpillar, a raisin purple-black color on the top and underside, with parallel orange and white stripes running the length of the side. There is a black dot along the orange stripe at every diameter where spikes radiate out, with a spike right below the white line and a row of random white dots below it. The feet gripping the vine just look like fuzzy black lumps.

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

I just learned of glauberite this year after getting some gypsum-after-glauberite pseudomorph specimens from Camp Verde, AZ, via a local rockhound. Look at this weirdo.

An opaque white mineral held in a hand over a flat of minerals. The mineral is composed of intersecting random-appearing jagged blades

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 20/12/2025

I’m prepping some “fairy forest” epidote quartz for sale, and my favorite subtype is when the quartz has phantoms. Excellent zoning!

A small specimen of epidote and quartz, the quartz is more prominent than the epidote which grows in small bunchy clusters between the quartz crystals. The quartz is colorless, but several of the larger crystals have mint green phantoms inside.

Detail of the larger crystals with phantoms, showing more complex zoning with fine layers of the mint green inclusions inside like tree rings.

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

Ash Meadows is off the beaten path but an absolute treasure. If I recall correctly, it has one of the greatest concentrations of endemic species in the world!

The desert around Ash Meadows, with low scrubby brush in bare ground, with flow marks around them from recent water flows.

View from the boardwalk at Ash Meadows, with scraggy desert trees mixed with dense green reeds hiding a waterway.

The same spring in the quoted post because it’s just so darn pretty, with crystal clear green-blue water.

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

I enjoy rescuing moths from water. They often find their way into bird baths and water dishes, I just put a finger under them, lift out, and let them rest until they dry off.

A pale tan moth on the tip of a finger, its wings wet, drooping, and stuck to the finger.

The same moth on gravel with wings spread, dry and recovered

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 23/11/2025

Aww yeah look at the uropods on that baby

Close view of the rear end of a milkback porcellio laevis isopod, with focus on the well-built pleons and elongated uropods, the latter of which look like two spikes on its butt

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 16/11/2025

Climate change isn’t real, it’s normal for my orange tree to be blooming in *checks notes* the middle of November 👍

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 02/11/2025

The passion flower variety Passiflora foetida is native to the US southwest. It is typically only open for a few hours, closing before the heat of the day. This is the first flower I’ve spotted on my vine!

A passion flower with white outer leaves, frilly light purple corona filaments, and a mobile-like structure raised above with yellow anthers and light green stigma. The flower is beginning to close, the petals and filaments curling in.

The passion flower in the background, focus on a bud in the foreground covered with a network of fine hairy stems.

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

She has excellent taste in rocks, I dare say

A baby desert spiny lizard on a black and white stripy rock. Its eyes are nearly closed like it is resting.

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

I’m slowly building a collection of milkweeds native to the Tucson area because we’re part of the monarch migration route. My plants are getting chomped by caterpillars right now—but not monarchs! These are the very similar-looking queen butterfly which has an extra set of antennae thingies

A caterpillar striped yellow, black, and white, with a set of feelers on each end and a third set about a third of the way up the body. The caterpillar is on an Arizona milkweed.

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Pretty Ugly Things @prettyuglythings.bsky.social · 06/10/2025

This post was perfect for today… the annual Tucson Insect Festival! These triops, named for their three eyes, were my favorite thing there (this fella was a bit rude though)

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