Permanently Tired Mostly a Batfam fan blog lol (Fun fact: flittermouse is an old-timey word for bat) Sometimes I also discuss school, lgbtq+ perspectives, trauma, or just random thoughts. Have any fun facts? Please share! I love to learn. Feel free to call me Aster, Leo(n), or Ray - I’ll answer to any of them. They/Them
in order to preserve my internet privacy i’ll have to start feeding everyone misinformation about myself. i don’t eat. i don’t sleep. i don’t breathe. i don’t blink. i don’t have “blood”
unfortunately, classifying all points as definitively false also presents your audience with data. you gotta present a mix of unverifiable information in a broad range of veracity. I don't have blood. I DO have teeth. How many teeth? 53. I subsist primarily on synthesized potassium compounds and sleep in my closet three nights a year
No way! I sleep in my closet three nights a year too! And also on days starting with P. On days starting with B, J, and Q, I make a nest instead, and on days starting with 7, Z, and N, I sleep in a cardboard box.
I only have 26 teeth and only in the front of my mouth, but that’s ok because I’ve got ridges in my throat to help tear up food before it gets dissolved in my lungs (liquids on the right, solids on the left obviously).
I do have blood (it’s clear), I have four toes but six fingers, and I have hollow bones like a bird (212 total). I sleep 18 hrs a day and photosynthesize most of my food, but will supplement it with the occasional insect and sometimes fish to make up for the protein deficiency (bones are crunchy :)). I’m allergic to eggs or that could work too - the shells are fine though for some reason as long as I wash them first.
“This means… of Rocky, possessive. Of the speaker.”
“My.”
“Correct. But only for names.”
“So you’re calling me…?”
Rocky repeats the word: “My Grace. Yes.”
“Are there other Graces? Why do you need to specify?”
Rocky considers this, tapping his xenonite-encased claws idly against the floor.
“No other Grace,” Rocky says. “We just do this.”
“Like an honorific,” Grace guesses. “It goes before everyone’s name? Everyone you know?”
Rocky whirs in surprise. “No, no, no. Not at all.”
“Okay, then who? What makes me qualify?”
Rocky is silent for a moment.
“...Does this offend Grace?” he asks, voice lower.
Grace blinks. “No! I don’t think so. Is there a reason to be offended?”
“Good,” Rocky says, relieved. Grace is starting to recognize what Eridian relief sounds like. “No, no reason.”
“Who else do you call that?”
“You don’t have this on Earth?”
Grace considers. What for, friends? He couldn’t call Marissa “my Marissa.” That would be weird.
“I still don’t know what it means,” he settles on. “So I couldn’t tell you.”
Rocky groans in frustration. He’s a very impatient tutor. “We just say it.”
“Are you my Rocky?” Grace asks. He hits the two keys to make the my note.
“I don’t know!” Rocky says. “You decide this.”
“I decide? Who do you use it for?”
“You. Adrian. I will use it for my pebbles.”
Grace blinks. “So few?”
Rocky shifts. “I am… you do not have the word yet. Eridian who works alone often, not close to many other Eridians.”
“What, mechanical engineer?”
Rocky chitters with amusement. “Acceptable.”
“Is Adrian your only friend?”
Rocky draws back, like he’s taken offense. “I have friends. Coworkers. But different.”
So just Adrian. And him.
“This worries you,” Rocky says.
“Adrian is your mate,” Grace points out. “I’m not your mate.”
“Correct. You are not. You do not like to be a mate.”
Grace isn’t sure how to respond to that, so he ignores it.
“I’m your friend,” Grace says.
Rocky hesitates, for a second. “...Correct.”
“Like your coworkers.”
“No.”
Grace sighs, rubbing his hand across his face. Okay, maybe that’s fair. It’s not like he felt about any of his coworkers like he feels about Rocky.
“Best friend,” Grace amends. “You’re my best friend, too.”
Rocky hums. “Acceptable.”
“Just acceptable? Now you are offending me. Can you just explain?”
This makes Rocky fall silent for a minute longer than usual. Grace is half-ready to apologize and to say let’s move on and to retype his own name without the superfluous my.
“The Earth ‘best friend’ is not strong enough,” Rocky says finally. “It does not translate this way.”
Grace runs his fingers through his hair, a little nervous, for some reason. “Okay.”
“It is…” Rocky pauses. He has to pause more often, now that they’re not using the translator, to simplify his language. “It means that I am not Rocky without my Grace. You are part of… of the whole. When I wake up, I think of you. When I work. When I eat. When I think I am going to die.”
Rocky speaks slowly, but it’s still a lot of Eridian for Grace to grasp all at once. Even as he works out the sentences in his head, he can feel hot tears rising in his eyes.
“It means that when you are sick, I am sick,” Rocky continues. “And it means I will take care of you, because taking care of you is taking care of myself.”
Grace bunches up his sleeve, wiping it across his face, blinking furiously.
Rocky’s voice is soft. “So Grace is part of Rocky. Grace is like a cell. You see? My Grace.”
Grace is quiet, for a moment, trying to get himself together. When he speaks, his voice is shaky.
“...Oh.”
Rocky hums, pressing his carapace gently against Grace’s arm. “You are leaking. Does this make you sad?”
Grace shakes his head, sniffing, crossing his arms across his knees and resting his chin on his sleeves. “Not at all.”
“Good, good.”
“I feel like that,” Grace mumbles. “Just like that. Just exactly—exactly like that.”
“About your old mate?”
“Don’t act stupid. You know I’m talking about you.”
Rocky hums, burrowing closer. Grace curls one arm around his carapace. That’s not enough, so he leans over, dropping his head down so his forehead presses against the xenonite.
“My Rocky,” Grace whispers in English.
“My Grace,” Rocky echoes in Eridian. Grace can recognize the note at the start. He will add it when he plays Rocky’s name.
“How long have you called me that?” Grace asks. “Must’ve been a while. I didn’t notice it change.”
i like when eridians describe grace in other-worldly, incorporeal, eldritch ways. that he's beautiful and terrifying at the same time. a horror you can't look away from because you don't want to miss a thing.
you can never get a clear listen to him. his primary sense node is covered in "hair" and the part that isn't is hidden by two crystals that refract sound waves in a pleasing but disorienting way. he covers his body in billowy cloth at all times. not snug and sensible and unobstructive like eridian coverings, but loose and layered, draped and flowing.
the most clear part of him are his internal organs. because yes, the alien's carapace isn't sound-proof. his single heart beats insistingly in his core, his lungs exchanging gas constantly, his long digestive tract always bubbling and contracting. his thorax is packed impossibly tight and it's all moving and singing.
and it shouldn't be possible, with how fragile he is, for that internal pressure to maintain. how does the thin membrane of his external organ (another horror that sends eridians reeling) keep it all contained? his "skin" is so easily pierced, cut, bruised, burnt, how does he not split open under his own mass?
when savior rocky first arrived home and described the environmental needs of his alien, the scientists thought he'd made a mistake in his frantic panic to get everything out. it isn't possible this being lives at such low atmospheric pressure, at half the gravity, and in a gas that's nearly double the weight of ammonia. in a gas so dangerous, so caustic. and if it does then how is it obligately terrestrial like rocky claims? shouldn't it fly or float instead? (and then to see it in the water, learning that it can float or sink at will.)
and this alien has come bearing gifts that will not only save your species but launch it into impossible heights of technological and intellectual advancement. he has discovered the solution to astrophage and bred it to thrive on threeworld and translated his instructions into eridian. he has given your people the complete sum of his people's knowledge, advanced in ways the eridians can't believe and behind in ways that seem ludicrous. and he has given his life for your people to have these things.
he knows how your solar system was formed. he knows how the universe started.
his name means beautiful and generous and relieving.
This illustration shows the relative scale of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and a Tyrannosaurus rex. Roman is over 42 feet (12.7 meters) long — about the length of a T. rex — and over 14 feet (4.4 meters) wide when fully deployed. Roman also weighs around 18,000 pounds, or 8,000 kilograms (dry mass), which is the approximate mass of a T. rex as well.
Did you know NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is both roughly as long and as massive as a Tyrannosaurus rex? This observatory, which will move to the launch site at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida very soon, is over 42 feet (12.7 meters) long and weighs around 18,000 pounds (8,000 kilograms), not including the fuel. Let’s explore some of the components that bring Roman to T. rex proportions.
Artist's concepts of NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (left) and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (right), highlighting the 7.9-foot (2.4-meter) primary mirrors that sit in the heart of each observatory.
At the observatory’s heart sits a mirror that’s 7.9 feet (2.4 meters) across and 410 pounds (186 kilograms), or about the length and weight of a protoceratops! Roman’s primary mirror is the same size as the Hubble Space Telescope’s main mirror, but less than one-fourth the weight thanks to major improvements in technology.
Technicians installed Roman’s primary instrument, the Wide Field Instrument (pictured at left), in the fall of 2025.
The mission’s 300-megapixel infrared camera, called the Wide Field Instrument, is over 8 feet (about 2.5 meters) tall, which is about the length of a triceratops skull. It will give Roman the same angular resolution as Hubble while capturing an area of sky at least 100 times larger. The mission will gather data up to 1,000 times faster than Hubble.
Its sweeping cosmic surveys will help scientists discover new information about planets beyond our solar system, untangle mysteries like dark energy, and map how both normal matter and dark matter are structured and distributed throughout the universe. Casting such a wide, deep “net” into space will give astronomers plenty of cosmic bycatch as well; Roman’s crisp, panoramic views will offer practically limitless opportunities for astronomers to do all kinds of exciting science.
The Coronagraph Instrument was installed on Roman’s instrument carrier in October 2024.
Roman’s Coronagraph Instrument is about as wide (5.5 feet, or 1.7 meters) as a velociraptor is long. The Coronagraph is designed to demonstrate new technologies for directly imaging planets around other stars. It will block the glare from a star and make it possible for scientists to see the faint reflected light from planets in orbit around them.
The Coronagraph aims to photograph worlds and dusty disks around nearby stars in visible light to help us see giant worlds that are older, colder, and in closer orbits than the hot, young super-Jupiters direct imaging has mainly revealed so far.
This photo shows Roman’s 18 detectors, which are the heart of the mission’s 300-megapixel camera.
Roman’s “eyes,” 18 saltine cracker-sized detectors in its primary instrument, are each about as tall as an allosaurus tooth. They each have about 16.8 million tiny pixels for a total of 300 million, which means Roman’s images will be super hi-res. Each detector is made of millions of mercury-cadmium-telluride photodiodes (sensors that convert light into an electrical current), one for each pixel.
Principal technician Billy Keim installs a cover plate over Roman’s detectors.
The detectors are secured to a silicon electronics board that will help process the light signals using indium, a soft metal that has roughly the same consistency as chewing gum. Together, these ultra-sensitive detectors can capture vast areas of sky in a single shot while still revealing incredibly fine detail, allowing Roman to map the cosmos faster and more precisely than ever before.
Roman’s electrical wiring was installed on the spacecraft flight structure in the summer of 2023.
There are 1,000 pounds, or 450 kilograms, (the weight of a pachycephalosaurus) of electrical cabling, made up of about 32,000 wires and 900 connectors, laced throughout the observatory. If the wires were laid out end-to-end they would span 45 miles — nearly enough to trace the entire perimeter fence in the imagined Jurassic Park! Functioning as the Roman’s “nervous system,” the cabling enables different parts of the observatory to communicate with one another, provides power, and helps the central computer monitor the observatory’s function.
The Roman observatory was fully integrated on Nov. 25, 2025, at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
Roman’s six solar panels each measure about 7 by 10 feet (2 by 3 meters), collectively giving Roman a “wingspan” similar to a pteranodon’s! Together, they will provide a total of 4 kilowatts of power, which is about the same rate that a modest rooftop solar panel system produces during the daytime.
Over the course of two days in June 2025, eight technicians installed Roman’s solar panels onto the outer portion of the observatory.
The panels are covered in a total of 3,902 solar cells that will convert sunlight directly into electricity much like plants convert sunlight to chemical energy. When tiny bits of light, called photons, strike the cells, some of their energy transfers to electrons within the material. This jolt excites the electrons, which start moving more or jump to higher energy levels. In a solar cell, excited electrons create electricity by breaking free and moving through a circuit, sort of like water flowing through a pipe. The panels are designed to channel that energy to power the observatory.
Roman’s high-gain antenna will provide the primary communication link between the spacecraft and the ground.
The radio dish that will send data across a million miles of intervening space back to Earth spans 5.6 feet (1.7 meters) in diameter. That’s about the size of the largest known dinosaur footprints, yet it weighs only 24 pounds (10.9 kilograms). Its large size will help Roman send radio signals across a million miles of intervening space to Earth. The dual-band antenna will use one frequency band to receive commands and send back information about the spacecraft’s health and location. It will use another frequency band to transmit a deluge of data at up to 500 megabits per second.
We’re only a few months out from launch, and so close to a completely new understanding of the universe and our place within it. Follow along with Roman’s road to launch at nasa.gov/roman, and virtually tour the Roman observatory here.
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If minimum wage you'd like to make,
This ancient quiz you'll have to take.
Step right up, but be prepared.
Those who fail are poverty-snared.
Question One!
If your labor proves most fruitful,
Raking quarters by the bootful,
Who should excess profits reap,
Me the wolf or you the sheep?
Question Two!
If, by merit, you're made pope,
What will be your fervent hope?
Law and order justly paired?
Or mercy and the guilty spared?
Question Three!
If a train should leave Topeka
Driven by a solar squeaker,
How then should the cat behave?
Give it milk or give it grave?
Question Four!
Do you have a criminal record?
Day ONE of filling this with aro and/or ace characters
Starting off strong with Ryland Grace from Project Hail Mary!! While he is not canonically aroace, I felt as though he’s really spearheaded the aroace community these past few months and helped many people feel seen and accepted :)
What if human astronauts visit Erid one day and are doing diplomatic things and whatnot and they learn Ryland Grace is sstill alive and is in a terrarium. One of the astronauts jokingly says “you’re not experimenting on him are you” and the Eridians freeze cause yeah, they totally are. They experiment on him all the time. They’re experimenting on him right now in fact. They read about deep sea diving and are now testing the effects of replacing certain gases in Graces atmosphere. Right now they’re testing helium.
They send someone to stop the experiment but Grace refuses cause they’re so far in already and well that would just ruin the data.
The new humans think this is hilarious and insist on joining the experiment as Grace excitedly yaps about all the cool stuff he’s learned about aliens but he’s still got that high pitched helium voice.
