One of the brightest objects in the night sky isn’t a star or a planet — it’s a communications satellite.

The BlueWalker 3 satellite, launched in September 2022, is now the eighth-brightest object in the sky, just behind blue supergiant star Rigel and ahead of nearby star Procyon. And it’s just a prototype for an entire constellation of similar broadband communications satellites called BlueBird, which satellite designer AST SpaceMobile hopes to launch sometime next year.

BlueWalker 3’s 692-square-foot array of solar panels reflects a lot of sunlight, which is what makes the satellite so bright. Astronomers around the world, led by University of Atacama astronomer Sangeetha Nandakumar, recently tracked the satellite to measure exactly how bright it is, and the results were alarming for anyone who’s at all invested in actually being able to see the stars. They published their results in the journal Nature.

Matthew Lillard has made a living from having fun.

While he’s best known as a Hollywood actor of millennial hits like Scream, She’s All That, and the live-action Scooby-Doo, more recently, he’s harnessed the power of his Dungeons & Dragons obsession into a thriving side hustle. In 2018, Lillard and his best friends co-founded Beadle & Grimm’s, a tabletop gaming accessories company. The founders have all played the same continuous campaign of D&D together for more than 30 years and counting, and it’s company policy that they must still make time to play as a group.

Inverse hopped on Zoom with Matthew Lillard to talk about his origins with Dungeons & Dragons, the characters he first started out with, and how decades of playing in an imaginary world led to unforeseen success as a man in his 50s.