【homo eroticism in sports】

All is homo eroticism in sportswritten in the stars. And now, also, on Snapchat.

Snap has just built a full-fledged astrology app within Snapchat itself. Beginning Thursday, users can access their detailed astrological profile — including analyses and personality explanations of their sun, moon, and rising signs, and the positions of the other planets in the solar system — by clicking an icon in their Snapchat profiles.

The feature is social, too. Click on the same astrology icon in a friend's profile, and you can tap through a similarly detailed astrology compatibility analysis. It's all presented with Bitmoji, swooshing and twinkling planetary backgrounds, and easy-to-read insights. Tapping a button in the upper right hand corner of a card lets you send it to friends.

To get to the feature, you'll have to update to the latest version of the app. Next, click your Bitmoji icon in the upper left hand corner of the app, which takes you to your profile. From there, click on the star sign icon below your name, and you'll be prompted to opt-in to the astrology feature by entering your birthday and time and place of birth. Once that's done, your star chart awaits.

You even get an "Astrological Profile" that shows you your dominant "Elements," "Modality," and "Polarity." That's 13 slides just for you to learn about yourself — much more than a simple sun sign horoscope reading.

Snapchat hopes that the features will help friends have more meaningful conversations with each other. Whether or not you're an astrology devotee, the company sees it as an accessible way to talk about topics like love, friendship, fears, or goals, that are sometimes difficult to broach. Also, astrology is insanely popular right now, and generally pretty fun whether or not you take it seriously.

Aside from the concept, the product itself is impressive in its scope. Like some of Snapchat's other features that let you identify a plant or find out the breed of a dog, Snapchat could have just pulled tools and information from an existing astrology app.

Instead, engineers built the product from the ground up. It features over 700 unique cards filled with "star chart analyses powered by expert human astrologers in close consultation with our product team."

"We had a team of engineers who got really, really deep into astrology," Jeremy Voss, Snapchat's product lead for the astrology feature, said in a call with reporters.

Snapchat plugs into an existing astrological database that finds out the position of the planets in the sky, to give users their signs and personality readings and advice. As Snap pointed out, there's an almost endless number of combinations for users' own readings and their compatibility. No wonder the engineers became so obsessed.

Of course, other astrology apps or apps with astrology features have risen to popularity in recent years. Notably, Co-Star has become a go-to dispenser of (sometimes harsh) life advice and romantic analysis.

However, some of these apps require more than an entry level knowledge of astrology to find them meaningful. Snapchat's astrology features are particularly accessible, in that they give you deeper plain-language analyses of your own chart and compatibility, rather than just telling you what your signs are and which planets carry influence in your life. This is important, considering many users who aren't particularly into astrology might stumble upon the feature while exploring the app, or get sent an astrology card from a friend. Helpfully, while you're scrolling through your star chart, you can scroll up to see a different card that explains, for example, just what the heck a "rising" sign is, anyway.

The Snapchat integration could also help make divining astrological compatibility less, well, awkward. If you add someone who you're flirting with on Snapchat, they might have already enabled the astrology feature, so you can automatically check the vibe between your signs — no longer will you need to ask for the time and place of birth of someone you just started talking to on Tinder.

Snapchat's astrology features might be more simplistic than other apps, but their accessibility — both within the app, and the way that they are communicated — makes up for that. Call it yet another digital gateway to the stars. Snapchat users will have no trouble walking through.

Additional reporting by Morgan Sung.