YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL.

“YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL.”

(152830) 1999 VD57 is a small, stony main-belt asteroid 700 meters (2,300 feet) in diameter. It was discovered by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) survey at Socorro, New Mexico on 4 November 1999. This asteroid was identified as a flyby target for NASA's Lucy mission in January 2023, which will approach 450 km (280 mi) from the asteroid on 1 November 2023. 1999 VD57 will be Lucy's first and smallest flyby target and it will become the smallest main-belt asteroid visited by a spacecraft yet. It was identified as a target by Raphael Marschall, mission collaborator of the Nice Observatory, only after Lucy had launched, due to the asteroid's small size.

1999 VD57 has not been named yet, but the Lucy mission team has proposed the provisional name Dinkinesh, after the Ethiopian name for the Lucy fossil after which this NASA mission is named.

Dinkinesh translates approximately to “You Are Beautiful.”

pov: you are a rat or perhaps a mouse

Taking photos of snakes is a lot harder than you’d think 😂😭

OP here. Yes, very salient points, thank you cyle! Absolutely didn't intend for the post to read as minimizing or making light of the very real problems we have here, but then again I didn't anticipate this would make it outside the small circle of people who know me and understand my intentions. (ngl after this started really getting around I was anxious about exactly that for days.) It was a clever pun cooked up by my subconscious, that's all.

Obviously I don't expect this to be legitimately implemented, even as an April Fool's one-off. There are numerous practical problems standing in the way. But someone in the notes suggested tribbles as an alternative, and I LOVE that, so y'know... maybe getting whacked by that particular Apollonian dodgeball wouldn't be so bad.

had a fucking hilarious dream that tumblr replaced the "block" function with the far funnier "glock" function, which did the exact same thing except whenever anyone blocked you a random bullet hole, like a png of a bullet hole, would appear on your blog. discourse blogs were unreadable bc you'd go to the page and the sheer amount of bullet hole pngs stacked over the blogs obscured everything. I woke myself up laughing

Lore Tuesday

So, a while ago, a community Discord server I was in had a thing called Lore Tuesday: every Tuesday in the daily questions channel you got a free pass to share a random nugget of information about your original world/story/characters. That server is effectively dead now, but I'm bringing Lore Tuesday here, because I miss it very much and it feels like a fun thing to do on the blog –especially considering I haven't actually posted much in the way of worldbuilding, historically speaking. I'm gonna try to post a random lore nugget every Tuesday, and tag it with #lore tuesday! Feel free to snag this idea yourselves if you so desire. :)

For those of you wondering what "tor" means and why I use it: it's a fictional oath I made for Sphaera!

Watsonian explanation: "tor," often used in conjugation as "snowing tor," derives from the name of the Temoran underworld and is grammatically used equivalent to "hell." "Snowing tor" is an emphasis modifier -it could never snow in tor, thus the phrase is used primarily to express incredulity.

Doylist explanation: "tor" is derived from "torrid," since the underworld is a hot place, but it also has a more entertaining meta origin: the Rush song By-Tor and the Snow Dog! I've been a fan of Rush for a good decade now and their music has influenced the development of Sphaera -in particular its mythos. The Prince of Hell in that song is called By-Tor, so I interpreted it as a title and took the "tor" half as the name of hell.

Original post by @yeeeem