Long Beach in the context of "United States at the 2024 Summer Olympics"

Seal Beach is a coastal city in Orange County, California, United States. It was originally known as Bay City before it was incorporated into Orange County under its current name on October 24, 1911. As of the 2020 census, the population was 25,242, up from 24,168 at the 2010 census.

Seal Beach is located in the westernmost corner of Orange County. To the northwest, just across the border with Los Angeles County, lies the city of Long Beach and the adjacent San Pedro Bay. To the southeast are Huntington Harbour, a neighborhood of Huntington Beach, and Sunset Beach, also part of Huntington Beach. To the east lie the city of Westminster and the neighborhood of West Garden Grove, part of the city of Garden Grove. To the north lie the unincorporated community of Rossmoor and the city of Los Alamitos. A majority of the city's acreage is devoted to the Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach military base.

Alamitos Bay is an inlet of east San Pedro Bay on the Pacific Ocean coast of southern California, United States, between the cities of Long Beach in Los Angeles County and Seal Beach in Orange County, at the outlet of the San Gabriel River. It is near Los Angeles.

The bay is named for the Spanish word for 'little poplars'.

The A Line (formerly and colloquially the Blue Line) is a light rail line in Los Angeles County, California. Part of the Los Angeles Metro Rail system and operated by Los Angeles Metro, it is the world's longest modern light rail line at 57.6 miles (92.7 km). The A Line serves 48 stations, running east–west between Pomona and Pasadena, then north–south between Pasadena and Long Beach. In Downtown Los Angeles it interlines with the E Line, sharing five stations. Service operates about 19 hours daily with headways as short as 8 minutes during peak hours. It is the busiest light rail route in the system, carrying over 22 million riders in 2024 and averaging 69,216 weekday boardings in May 2024.

The A Line's first segment, between the southern edge of Downtown Los Angeles and Long Beach, opened in 1990 as the inaugural line of the Metro Rail system, using much of the Pacific Electric's former Long Beach Line. Plans to extend the line north through Downtown Los Angeles to Pasadena were proposed in the 1980s but delayed due to funding constraints. Instead, the standalone Gold Line (renamed the L Line in 2020) opened in 2003 from Union Station at the northern edge of Downtown Los Angeles to Pasadena, and was extended east to Azusa in 2016. The original plan was realized with the completion of the Regional Connector tunnel across Downtown Los Angeles in 2023, which linked the A Line to the former L Line. The line was extended further east to Pomona in 2025.

Cosplay, a blend word of "costume play", is an activity and performance art in which participants called cosplayers wear costumes and fashion accessories to represent a specific character. Cosplayers often interact to create a subculture, and a broader use of the term "cosplay" applies to any costumed role-playing in venues apart from the stage. Any entity that lends itself to dramatic interpretation may be taken up as a subject. Favorite sources include anime, cartoons, manga, comic books, television series, musical artists, video games, memes, and in some cases, original characters. The term has been adopted as slang, often in politics, to mean someone pretending to play a role or take on a personality disingenuously.

Cosplay grew out of the practice of fan costuming at science fiction conventions, beginning with Morojo's "futuristicostumes" created for the 1st World Science Fiction Convention held in New York City, United States, in 1939. The Japanese term "cosplay" (コスプレ, kosupure) was coined in 1983. A rapid growth in the number of people cosplaying as a hobby since the 1990s has made the phenomenon a significant aspect of popular culture in Japan, as well as in other parts of East Asia and in the Western world. Cosplay events are common features of fan conventions, and today there are many dedicated conventions and competitions, as well as social networks, websites, and other forms of media centered on cosplay activities. Cosplay is very popular among all genders, and it is not unusual to see crossplay, also referred to as gender-bending.