the phrase "Honor Princess Detective is a tour de force" would not leave my brain until i drew this

[ID (copied from alt): A three-panel comic depicting Murderbot, Sofi, and Farai from the Murderbot Diaries in a simplified style.

In the first panel, Sofi excitedly says, "SecUnit!!! The season finale is about to start!!!" while adorning Murderbot's head with a tiara. Murderbot responds on the feed, "Yes, I see it."

In the second panel, Murderbot and Sofi are seen from behind while Farai walks past carrying a basket. She says on the feed, "You don't have to indulge her."

In System Collapse, Tarik says “motherless” (as opposed to something like motherfucking) and the BE corporates say things like “lame-skulled” and while you could think those are just futuristic insults as a result of linguistic drift (which they could also be), I think they’re just literal translations. It becomes more noticeable when you see how religious terms are rendered: “oh high one! Oh deity!” Which is like…sure. They could literally be saying that. But imo it makes more sense if MB is translating something they’re saying in another language.*

I think the most notable case of this is when Thiago calls Amena “my daughter.” On first read I literally thought it was just a Preservation thing but then I realized it made a lot more sense to me (a 21st century American) if he was saying something like mija but MB was just literally translating it into its archive bc that’s how it processes language.

This is also the reason for Amena’s use of Second Mom and Third Mom. It sounds kind of clunky in English but Chinese does a similar thing which sounds perfectly natural in that language (e.g. da-ge, er-ge, san-ge for first/oldest brother, second (oldest) brother, and third (oldest) brother).

Anyway! It’s a fun little detail I really enjoy about MB. There are definitely way more examples but I didn’t have time to track them all down.

THEY RELEASED THE COYOTE VS ACME TRAILER !!!!!

WE WON !!!

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:

So piracy is at worst not even a problem, and at best it's free advertisement.

Source: (the link to the actual study is in the article)

Closest match: Psylliodes chrysocephala genome assembly, chromosome: 4 Common name: Cabbage Stem Flea Beetle