ShimmeringKoi

We're flying over the Sunset bridge. Something, or someone, has taken the city

Now that I'm hearing this without all the zombie and gunfire sounds I can appreciate how hard this actually goes

I saw a reddit post of someone who put pulsing RGB light strips inside their gun safe, and while I don't hate the look (they should have slowed down the speed though) I just had to have a little dread-laugh at the idea of trying to find what you want in there hungover at 3 AM by gamerlight. Rushing through the dark to a gun safe in fear of your life while the sounds of pursuit draw near already sounds like a level of terror bordering on the psychedelic. If I was experiencing that primordial state, and I got my safe open and it suddenly filled the room with a glaring rainbow light that said:

spoiler

HEWE'S YOW WEAPONS UWU, KIWW OW BE KIWWED

I actually think I might puke. It would feel like some mocking hallucination. I might wonder if I was already dead. I certainly would not feel more prepared for anything.

I feel this way when I look at a lot of gun things online. Obviously there's a representation bias there, where people without opsec needs, people who like to share their cool stuff, and people with too much money -or all of the above- are more likely to post online. Therefore the most prolific gunposters are also the ones most prone to doing epic internet shit to their guns, I get that. And I also get that there's serious guns and there's fun, weird range toys. Not everything must be serious at all times, we can sometimes wash our ushankas. And I will first say that I'm not in regular contact with any part of the gun world that isn't online. I'd like to be, but ammo is expensive. So this is a largely vibes-based analysis with an internet skew. That said, my opinion is this, so much of the gun culture I see online, in stores and at ranges is deeply frivolous (whatever) and childish (troubling). Yeah I know, , but it feels like theres been a qualitative shift in the vibe. I'm not sure how to encapsulate it other than by saying that American gun culture, being mostly a consumer culture with military and police crossover (which brings extra brainworms from the Micheal Bay movie slop propaganda sphere) was ripe for Marvelization, and it has Marvelized to an intense degree.

Maybe I'm just applying a new label to a timeless dialectic: some people have always done silly shit to their weapons, and some people have always scoffed at it for reasons of solemness or something, like I am now. It just seems like the level and style of dumb shit that we specifically are doing now could only come from a culture so enamored with living vicariously through fictional warfare but so generally insulated from the real thing. All this shit could only exist, be sold in the zero-gravity environment of the boring suburbs whose numb inhabitants nurse more and more fevered dreams, are subjected to massive media campaigns of psychological conditioning to make them dream, to sell more stupid gun shit. The second you subject it to the gravity of a real life and death struggle, it become absurd. When you're menacing a drag story hour with your rifle and your bros, all your fascist meme patches are doing their job: instilling in all decent people the fear of being murdered by a fucking loser, which is worse than just regular getting murdered. But in an actual shootout, how are those baby yoda pepe patches gonna look covered in your friend's offal? How are you gonna look then? Like a toddler. Like a big, out of your depth baby, which is what you are, and do you really wanna die looking like that? Be immortalized in crime scene photos as the corpse wearing an IFAK labeled "emergency bacon"?

Don't get me wrong, while this is mostly a right wing/centrist/apolitical dumb guy who thinks he's the boondock saints phenomenon, nobody is immune to it. It's seductive, you find a cool thing and you want to put it on your cool thing, and then smash cut to the slim but real chance of you fumbling with your 12 pound rifle in the middle of the night, half-remembering how to operate 6 different attachments and praying the little Mechanicus incense brazier you hung from the barrel doesn't clank against anything in the dark.

I don't really have a conclusion, other than the obvious one in the title. I guess my conclusion is "know your toys from your weapons, and keep them seperate". With the way everything has been accelerating, I feel a special kind of disgust that such an unprecedented moment of omnipresent crisis be met with the fucking tired, stale, insipid, oafish symbology of the gun-as-toy collecting, chemtrail fearing moviebrains who accuse everyone else of being sheep and not taking the responsibility of self-protection seriously.

Big Audio Dynamite (later known as Big Audio Dynamite II and Big Audio, and often abbreviated BAD) were an English band, formed in London in 1984 by Mick Jones, former lead guitarist and co-lead vocalist of the Clash. The band mixed various musical styles, incorporating elements of punk rock, dance music, hip hop, reggae, and funk. After releasing a number of well-received studio albums and touring extensively throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Big Audio Dynamite broke up in 1997. In 2011, the band embarked on a reunion tour.

I've come across drastically fewer pieces of sidewalk furniture in the past year than before

I don't think a fifth round through the dishwasher is gonna do it guys

My roommates are surprise moving out and they said the landlord told them that they have to get their part of the deposit from me, ie "no fuck you if you want your part of the deposit you paid me, get it from ShimmeringKoi." When asked, he just said "California law" and also said we have 24 hours to decide if we're still on the lease or not.

I can see the 24 hour thing maybe being official, but the deposit thing immediately scans as bullshit, what can I do about it?

Get in tormented wanderers, we're Sunderposting

Maybe this will be a bit on the identifying side, but I've been wanting to build my first ar-15 for like 6 years now. Once I finally had the money and was looking at the parts though, I thought:

: The primary advantages of the 5.56 cartridge is that it's small size and light weight allow you to carry lots on your person, and pack many rounds into one magazine.

: Since you live in a place with a 10-round magazine limit and are not a soldier on the march, neither of these benefits particularly benefit us. Perhaps a caliber less hampered by the laws of man would be more suitable.

: If we are to be limited to ten bullets, they should be ten of the biggest bullets you can stuff into a magazine

: Well, the biggest round that's both controllable and affordable, of course

: Yeah, yeah...

: One such caliber comes to mind immediately. An icon of the last century that survives, dinosaur-like into this one. Portable-ish, light enough, renowned for it's killing power, and extant in vast surplus war staches throughout the world. The 7.62 by 39.

:Comrade bullet! That 230-grain pencil lead that has signed countless uprisings and revolutions! Millions have carried it like a companion on the path to total human liberation; now it's your turn.

: It may not have the same velocity as the 5.56, but it's twice the weight and has better terminal ballistics. Which is to say, a more dramatic and horrifying effect on a target.

: And the kick! We've fired an AR-15 before, remember? It was like a baby space gun, hardly any kick! You need something bigger, something that'll remind you you're alive!!

:Okay, sounds like the big bullet is for me. Aren't AKs pretty expensive though?

: These days, there are all sort of things you can do with hybrid parts. We can build an AR15 that fires AK47 rounds and feeds from AK47 magazines.

Conceptualization-Easy (success): An AR-47, if you will.

: If we make it from parts, we'll have to make the grip and stock ourselves. We can practice our woodworking and engraving!

: I'm pretty sure they have those things for sale too

: Nope, we must. It will be beautiful and custom, or we will not do it.

: Lasered wooden furniture, hybrid appearance, brass fittings...people are going to wonder why and how some sort of 1920s vampire hunter has made it onto a modern day range. Best wear your most stylish coat.

: A beautiful mutant for a beautiful mutant: how fitting.

So now I'm waiting to pick up my hybrid AR lower that takes AK mags, and slap it on the upper I got. Then it's woodshop time baybee