Pretty Ugly Things

@prettyuglythings.bsky.social

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Amateur naturalist, serious collector, and appreciator of the unusual things our planet is capable of… based out of Tucson! Purveyor of minerals, succulents, isopods, and information https://prettyuglythingsaz.com // https://prettyuglythingsaz.etsy.com

Original image from the Katelyn Burns article, of the Claude AI logo with a hand to each side. A ring has been added to one of the hands.
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.
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.)”
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.
A dark green cactus loaded with over a dozen buds so fat the plant is leaning. The cactus is in a four-inch pot on a post surrounded by leafy green plants.
A detailed view of a very small black beetle inside a yellow-orange flower, the petals flecked with small red spots
View of colorful hills across a sandy river valley, looking out from under a large shade tree.
The view up-river, with meandering water and lush green vegetation. There are colorful foothills and red rock buttes above.
Busy insect trails through a mud flat
Cow pat on a salt flat
Some lime-green, black, and white lichens on a knobby red rock
Cotalpa flavida, a bright yellow chafer beetle with orange legwarmers
A bunch of tadpoles in shallow sandy-bottomed water with river grasses.
A slab of chocolate red-brown rock topped with fossilized water ripple pattern.
A wide muddy bank next to a small river, with rivulets through pink, orange, and slightly green-gray mud.
Shaded early morning light over colorful red striped hills with desert scrub in the foreground and red rock buttes in the background
Close view of the back of a hand with a jumping spider about the size of a standard ant
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.
A young corn snake in a desert terrarium loosely coiled like a pretzel among watch-chain crassula
A jumping spider on sandstone
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.
A bee with its head covered in golden pollen climbing out from an orange globe mallow flower. I’m no expert in bees but I don’t think this the specialized globe mallow bee, they are more squat and pale.
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.
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
A pile of large flat cardboard boxes filled with minerals, with stacks of smaller boxes and plastic tubs behind.
A greater roadrunner standing in a path, keeping an eye on the photographer. Its shadow is spread across the pavement.
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.
A close view of a succulent with small plump oval leaves, packed tight in a pot like a bowl of jellybeans. Older growth has a dusty pink-purple color, in a gradient to light green leaves at the ends of stems.
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.
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.
An opaque white mineral held in a hand over a flat of minerals. The mineral is composed of intersecting random-appearing jagged blades
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.
The desert around Ash Meadows, with low scrubby brush in bare ground, with flow marks around them from recent water flows.
A moth on the end of a finger, its tan and green coloration matching the desert brush. Its wet wings are still slightly stuck to the finger
A pale tan moth on the tip of a finger, its wings wet, drooping, and stuck to the finger.
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
A bee visiting a white citrus flower
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.
A blonde rubber ducky isopod on moss held between fingers. The isopod is inspecting the fingers. It has an orange-brown body with golden yellow head and rear, and a small duck-bill face.
A baby desert spiny lizard on a black and white stripy rock. Its eyes are nearly closed like it is resting.
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.
A triops, which looks like a mini horseshoe crab with orange frilly sea-monkey-like anatomy on the underside. It is swimming in a small aquarium, when a second one barrels through from the opposite direction, pushing aside the first.
A plastic tarantula composed of bones, the abdomen is a goddamned rib cage with a spine down the back and even the fangy bits are bones
A small mineral specimen with dioptase and small white calcite crystals on a light-colored matrix. The dioptase is emerald green with chunky crystals.
Doctor: Are you feeling any pain ? Me: Only the normal amount Doctor: The normal amount is zero Me: Meme of the awkward stare monkey puppet
She and other workers at the shelter put on masks and started evacuating the 75 cats and dogs that were inside before some of the workers started feeling ill, Ms. Halverson said. At the hospital, doctors wanted to know what had been burning in the incinerator. The answer, she said, was surprising: It was methamphetamine that the F.B.I. was destroying. Ms. Halverson, the shelter’s executive director, said she had never been told that federal agents burned drugs in the incinerator, which is typically used by the city’s animal control office to dispose of euthanized wild and domestic animals.
A glamour shot of a baby spiny lizard proudly resting atop red-orange swirly layered sandstone, with plants in the background. The lizard has its back to us but is looking at the camera over its left shoulder, with its back left leg stretched out. The lizard is brown-gray patterned with white and black spots, with a black ring around the neck.
A detail view of a small jumping spider striped with light and dark brown pattern, at an angle from behind. One eye on the back of its head keeps an eye on the photographer.
A small jumping spider on the edge of a ceramic pot filled with rocks. The spider has its two front legs reaching out, as if its about to jump onto a rock above it. The spider is brown with near-black patterning, with rings of alternating color down the legs. This guy is nice and fuzzy.
Detail of a corner of a piece of Weardale fluorite with color zoning, the interior a warm purple, with a distinct white band making a sharp right angle around it, then green outside. The green is turning deep blue due to daylight fluorescence.
A trio of houndstooth calcite crystals with good composition, and a smaller trio at the base. Small drill-bit habit crystals cover the surrounding matrix.
A wide piece of matrix covered with small glassy clear hexagonal drillbit crystals
A close view of a brown patterned baby lizard with a large head relative to its body size. Its eensy little toesies are spread out. It is definitely keeping an eye on the photographer.
Looking at the ground, covered with semi-rounded river stones of mixed colors. There is a tiny dark brown lizard with a ring around its neck camouflaged amongst the rocks.
Detail of emerald-green dioptase crystals with lush jolly-rancher translucency
A Jackson Pollock-esque arrangement of three red-purple bird splats down the side of a rock.
A small fuzzy moth on striped red sandstone. The moth’s wings are a subtle maroon color with a white zig-zag line across the top, a straight shite stripe below, and a white spot between. The moth’s fuzzy body appears almost green-brown in contrast.
A mineral specimen of vanadinite composed of hexagonal tablet crystals with deep orange-red color, good gemmy translucency, and high surface luster, mostly covering a near-black matrix. The specimen is mounted on a glossy black acrylic square.
Two morning doves on top of a concrete block wall, the one on the right smaller with scruffy feathers, and the one on the left the mother standing at attention watching the photographer
A proper nest of twigs built in a bowl pot. Underneath on the left is a small paper spine cactus