Your heaven can be as close or as far as you make it

yes, India made legal gender change impossible but my friends have always gendered me correctly and stick to it even when it confuses other people and my friend's little sibling calls me older brother in Kannada yes, India made legal gender change impossible but my dog learned my new name quicker than the humans and she runs to give me a kiss when she's told to without being confused about who's being referred to

yes, India made legal gender change impossible but I can feel the Adam's apple growing in my throat and my muscles getting stronger, and my smile more real and I'm growing a beard, and I talk more freely

that's right

To our dismay, the artist and author Marjane Satrapi has passed away.

As she wrote, ordinary Americans and Iranians have more in common with each other than we do with either of our governments, which have far too much in common with each other.

This is a form of backdoor bigotry from both normative facts (there are more straight than gay relationships) and well represented bigoted beliefs (men are superior to women).

None of the signup methods require a password. It only takes email and birthday. Minimizing time on the signin or signup screen makes it harder for people quitting to avoid relapse.

"Characters" on the website will send messages "on their own" (prompted by the site) to try to invite inactive users back after as soon as 1 day of inactivity. This is likely to force FOMO, or make users feel more like they owe the bots a response. Unhealthy attachment stuff.

Account deletion is an essential part of every service that should go smoothly, right? Right? Wrong. It takes 1-2 weeks for a Character AI account deletion to be finalized, and account deletion requests have a high chance to not go through if you're not using the app.

Rephrasing: People leaving Character.AI are pushed to download the app in order to delete their accounts, if they haven't already. This makes it harder for people to quit and stay gone. Failing to quit an addiction makes it harder to quit successfully in the future, so this feels like a feature, not a bug. On top of that, the delete account menu reads like this:

The Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Islands is a micronation near Australia.  This is their flag:

The Gay Kingdom (as it is colloquially known) was founded in 2004 in protest against Australia’s legal stance against same-sex marriage.

Here are some of their stamps:

They are currently ruled by Emperor Dale I, and their currency is the Pink Dollar.

they have a declaration of independence that talks a bit about gay rights and then just flat out copies the “life liberty and the pursuit of happiness” part from the american declaration of independence. and here’s the best part: the founding group actually elected their emperor. he was originally going to be called the “administrator” of a republic. their website, however, says that “upon legal advice, his title was changed to that of Sovereign on the grounds that under Australian law a defacto prince trying to claim his crown cannot be charged with treason”. so they made it a kingdom and he now claims to be a descendent of edward ii.

everything about this is glorious and everyone should know about it.

As previously mentioned, the idea originated at Pride (Brisbane 2003) in reaction to punitive anti-marriage legislation

“On the 14th day of June 2004, at this highest point in the Coral Sea, Emperor Dale Parker Anderson raised the gay rainbow flag and claimed the islands of the Coral Sea in his name as homeland for the gay and lesbian peoples of the world. God Save our King!”

The campsite/capital Heaven was named after the London nightclub

War was declared on Australia in September 2004

The aforementioned stamps were issued in July 2006 “with the aim of creating a high and distinctive reputation amongst the philatelic fraternity”

They were never recognized legally/internationally as a micronation (and in fact Anderson refused to attend a conference in 2010 because they weren’t actually trying to be a sovereign nation)

In Feb 2017, Abetz was objecting to the flag of a “hostile nation” being flown

So when Stratt takes Grace to the big conference meeting on the boat, the camera briefly fixes on an older grumpy-looking man sitting to Stratt's right. He scowls and rolls his eyes when Grace walks in.

Played by the movie's visual effects supervisor Paul Lambert, this character is actually the professor that Grace called "a staggering waste of carbon" at the UNESCO Conference in Denmark. He originally had a bigger part (that probably got cut for time), but with that context the whole scene is just that much funnier.