okay, but not enough people know the details on this. people at pride were upset about gay rights in australia. so they decided to sail 200 miles into the coral sea just ‘cause and put a rainbow flag on a fucking empty island out of spite. and i’m talking empty. no inhabitants. zero. it was a flat piece of land with a bit of dry grass. now it has a camp site and a post office.
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.
Highlights from the timeline via wikipedia as this thread is from 2017:
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
The Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Islands was dissolved in November 2017 (when same-sex marriage was legalized)
Remember when Lil Nas X beautifully explored his sexuality, seduced and killed the devil to the banger of all time, and instead of cheering on this openly gay and proud Black artist for his artistry and fighting back against respectability politics, suddenly said respectability politics was all the Queerest Place on the Internet cared about? Hm. Wonder what happened there.
Anyway I miss him and hope he's doing better with his mental health 🙏🏾
Like say what you want about "bad queer representation", but this was the song that made me openly and happily accept that I was bisexual. To see him up there Black and beautiful, making music that I love, absolutely killing it? Yeah. You couldn't tell me shit. This man made me proud to be out. "This will make them think we're evil for being gay" hey newsflash dawg-
A federal IT staffer filed a complaint about DOGE, then went public. Shortly after Elon Musk boosted a post calling his claims false, his br
On April 14, 2025, Dan Berulis, an IT staffer at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), filed a Congressional whistleblower complaint with an extraordinary and urgent claim: The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had seemingly compromised the agency’s data and appeared to be exfiltrating it out of the NLRB entirely. Additionally, Berulis claimed that mere minutes after DOGE members had accessed the agency’s data, there appeared to be login attempts from an IP address in Russia.
At the time, DOGE teams, orchestrated by billionaire Elon Musk, were sweeping across government, firing federal workers and accessing sensitive data and technical systems with no oversight and little transparency.
The following day, Berulis went public in an NPR article with his name and claims. In it, he claimed that in the lead-up to his Congressional disclosure, a threatening note had been taped to his door, including photos of him walking his dog that appeared to have been taken by a drone. Berulis was already scared that speaking out had made him a target.
In a new defamation lawsuit, filed by Berulis in a DC court on April 17 and made public this week, Berulis alleges that Musk himself made him a target of further violence by falsely stating that Berulis’ whistleblower claim against DOGE was fake. The complaint was initially filed under seal because Berulis maintains a security clearance that requires prepublication review of anything related to his work with the government.
Five days after the NPR story went live, on Easter Sunday, April 20, 2025, Berulis got in his car to drive to Maryland to make a last-minute visit to his uncle, opting to take local roads instead of the major highway nearby. Within about five minutes of leaving his house, Berulis realized something was wrong. As he approached a stop sign at an intersection, his car wouldn’t slow down. He ran off the road and into the sign. When he examined his car, he found something that terrified him: His brake lines had been cut.
Unbeknownst to Berulis at the time, the night before, on April 19, at 8:06 pm, Musk had reshared an X post from right-wing influencer Mario Nawfal, claiming that DOGE had been “cleared” and that people were asking the Department of Justice to investigate Berulis. Musk shared Nawfal’s post, writing, “Filing a deliberately false whistleblower claim is a serious crime.” The story had originally been circulated by @amuse, an account that has regularly shared misleading claims and misinformation and is followed by influential people like Musk and Department of Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The @amuse post included Berulis’ name and photograph.
According to a police report viewed by WIRED, when a police officer from Prince William County arrived at the scene, Berulis’ lawyer from Whistleblower Aid, Andrew Bakaj, who had helped Berulis file his Congressional complaint about DOGE, was also on the scene.
Berulis, who found out about Musk’s tweet after the accident, thought back to the threatening note that had been posted on his door earlier that month.
According to the suit, Musk’s “readers drew the implication” that Berulis had committed a serious crime, “as reflected in replies demanding prosecution, jail, harm, or arrest,” and this put him at “increased risk of physical harm.” In the replies to the post, which remains online, several users called for Berulis to be prosecuted. One user wrote, “Snitches get stitches.”
“The correlation was obvious to me, with the timing,” he says. Berulis also began to worry about how exactly whoever had been threatening him knew where he lived.
maybe orpheus always looks back because his very effort to reverse death means that he can't look forward. if he could look forward, he could accept eurydice's death, grieve, and keep moving in life. his refusal to accept her death is looking back. his going down to the underworld, asking hades and persephone for her life, trying to lead her out... it's all 'looking back'. he does nothing for the entire story except look back. orpheus! looks! back! it's his entire thing! the story ends the same way it begins: orpheus looked back.
Bear religion probably fucking rocks. You're a fucking bear, you're the deadliest thing on earth, once a year an endless supply of salmon just flings itself up the river to gorge on and then you nap for 3 months.
The most delicious food in the world is protected by tiny demons who can defend it from everyone except you. Your natural armor is thick enough that you can just eat the damn hive while they buzz around you. God's chosen animals right there
Regular bears tell stories of angel bears sent by the Bear God, pure white and twice as strong as any normal bear could be, who rule the summit of the Earth and kill all who stand in their path.
And they are right, those bears exist and totally do that. Humans just have fake angels as a cope.
love the idea of bears being the chosen species actually. having a near death experience and glimpsing heaven and realising it's just full of bears, no humans at all, humans not ensouled actually, humans an accidental byproduct of God's plan for bears
It’s the final few days of the Bluminarmour Project! After some issues with Kickstarter let’s see how far we can get!
If you want to see fantasy tropes, historical movement and silly tricks tested in authentic full plate armour, please consider chucking a few quid over (or like and share this post):
Blumineck is trying to fun a video series doing fun and serious historical and fantasy testing in fitted plate armour.
its so weird to me that cis people will dislike their name so ardently and yet. not change it. you guys know that’s an option, right. no one can make you keep the shit name your mom gave you. no, not even her.
One of my friends in undergrad changed his name because he didn’t want to bear the name of his abusive and absent father. It’s been years since he did it, and he still says that it was the single best decision of his life.
One of my friends in high school changed his named as soon as he turned 18, so that the ethnic name his family gave him was finally the name reflected on all of his paperwork. He told me that he understood why his parents had given him an “English” name, but that he felt that if he needed to assimilate in order to succeed, then that was a type of success that he didn’t want.
When I was on my way home from the courthouse after changing my own name, I got into a conversation with my rideshare driver, who was extremely interested once I told him what I was in court for, and wanted to know how I’d done it, how much it cost, was it difficult, etc. It turned out that his girlfriend had chosen the name “Yo-yo” when she came to the United States, unaware of how rare that was as a name, and that she was frequently made fun of because of it. Neither one of them had realized that a name change was so easy, and he told me he was excited to let her know that she had options.
There was an intern at a summer job I had once, who changed her name to be the same name, but a different spelling. She said that she had no idea why her parents had spelled her name so oddly to begin with, and suspected that it was just an honest mistake either by them or by some nurse, but it had been a headache for her entire life, and it was a huge relief to not need to be correcting people’s spelling on important documents anymore.
One of my exes legally changed his name to have an exclamation point, because he liked to sign his name with an exclamation point.
You can always change your name if you don’t like it. You always have that option. It doesn’t matter why – it can be conformist or anti-assimilationist, serious or silly, a minor change or a major change. Your name is yours, and you have every right to change it to be whatever you want.
being told you’d cruise the seas for american gold you’d fire no guns, shed no tears, now you’re a broken man on a halifax pier might not be a universal experience, but like neither is the club. so a little perspective might be nice
"But it's not FOR them!!!" The biggest military power in the world belongs to a christofascist nation overseen by a felon found guilty of 34 federal crimes and has greenlit a gestapo with more direct funding than the entire military of Canada for the purpose of ethnic cleansing. Let Hetero Jessica throw some biodegradable glitter at a municipal parade
At this point if anyone is trying to exclude anyone benignly pro-queer from a pro-queer space I'm just going to assume you're a fed or something idk like something something destabilize the movement from within or whatever
From the Nashville Zoo’s fb page! Here’s the petition, please please please take a moment to add your name (even if you’re not from Nashville!). If you are from Tennessee, contact your representatives and make it clear that the people do not want this data center. This is an AZA accredited zoo which is home to several species of critically endangered animals, we NEED to protect it. Make your voice heard!
People who are making posts telling us what is happening over on threads, twitter, and Instagram are like war correspondents sending us reports from the front.
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