It’s a common situation: one of your roommates is moving out, and the remaining renters need to search for someone to replace them. You sit down to talk about your ideal new roomie. When this happened to me last summer, my roommate and I decided that the new addition should be over 25 and have lived in New York City for at least a year. This was our only real criteria, but a few months earlier in 2019 another set of roommates in Portland, Ore. had a seemingly strange and celestial one: No Capricorns . The housing ad didn’t state so explicitly, but one of the existing roommates specified this to a potential inquiring renter. The message, which went viral, read: “This Virgo/Gemini house is a special place where soft mutable signs get to run free untethered by cardinal authorities .” This uncanny request might seem like a one-off, but these picky roommates are far from alone in considering someone’s astrological sign.