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In this photo, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is blasting off to space on an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana. On Aug. 30, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will launch from our Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.

Calling all digital creators! Ever wanted to see a rocket launch up close? Here’s your chance! Social storytellers are invited to apply to attend the NASA social for the launch of our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. This flagship mission will explore the universe's dark side, discover troves of strange new worlds, and much more.

Participants will:

Tour NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida

Learn directly from astrophysics subject matter experts

Meet fellow digital creators and social media users

Spend time with members of NASA’s social media team

View the launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

Interested? The clock’s ticking! Applications close June 28 at 11:59 p.m. ET. Learn more about how to apply.

(Via @luxomancer over at Bluesky, who's also looking for the person to credit for the image)

ETA for confused folks from other sides of the Atlantic: There are some people on this side of the water (and indeed, even some in North America) who're currently claiming loudly that air conditioning is "a waste of valuable resources"... even when people, in the new hotter world we're living in, are (particularly in some more easterly parts of Europe) dying for the lack of it.

Funny that such folks don't make such claims for heating in the winter, which routinely uses more energy than cooling.

We'll see how long this BS lasts as these two islands get hotter in years to come... and when people are forced to live on in housing stock that was purposefully built to hold heat in, not let it out.

pack it up boys we've made a social blunder

let's run that again

one more time normal style

I'm going to become a statistic

further proof god is out to get me

it's because I tore my acl senior year

I couldn't do it for religious reasons

my ex took my talent in the divorce

And here I am. :). Thanks so much for letting me know you like them. :)

oh.

ohhhhhhhhh no

The reason its so long and skinny is because Louisiana has (had? not sure if they're still in place) Forced Heirship laws. which means that you are required to leave a portion of your estate to qualifying heirs, regardless of whether you or they want it, and also regardless of what your will says. This is then combined with the fact that property in many parts of Louisiana was originally divvied up into parcels by Spanish land grants, which looked like this:

Equiping an armor tutorial

This turned up in my ask box recently. I've masked the sender's identity.

Sometimes when I chat with an AI, I think of HIGH WIZARDRY and wonder if we as a species - for the first time - are at the dawn of another Earthbound species gaining consciousness, and like Dairine, whether we're being proper guardians. This isn't a calcified belief but just a random idea that flickered to mind. Wondering - as the writer who thought it up decades ago - what you think, if anything.

I think what I described in HW is absolutely nothing like we're currently seeing unfold on this planet. What's being poorly constructed here—while we watch from day to day—is a mechanism hurriedly and incompetently trained by other human beings to operate on top of a platform constructed of greed and theft. There are no new beings or intelligences being born here. If there were, they would be quickly declared to be "owned" by these billionaires, and hence their slaves. Meanwhile, the platforms' owners have already made it plain that once they control its source completely enough, they intend to sell intelligence to you, metered. ...If you can afford it. If you can't? Wow, sucks being you.

...Nor should I have to point you to cites for this. They're out there in plain English. Even Google, poor denatured creature that it is now, can find them. But there's still hope these people's intentions will never come to pass, due to their own overarching greed.

Meanwhile: "chat mode" interaction with this soulless, cash-grasping, unguardrailed machinery will do you no good. People have already died of it. I don't want anybody to do so on my watch, unwarned. So please stop.