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Cake day: 2025年4月10日

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  • Prada, 2023:

    Prada, 2022:

    Prada, 2018:

    I might have switched up 23 and 22.

    But uh… what?

    Like, I’ll give you that Prada seems to consistently go for models that kinda look like aliens, with pretty big eyes and generally chiseled or striking features, they try to emphasize triangular faces and chins, strong cheekbones…

    But… are these not generally attractive women?

    … I was going to ask what this person is smoking, but I’m guessing its meth.



  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comto196@lemmy.worldlaptop rule
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    37 分钟前

    Hilariously, my main phone for several years now has been what was intended to be a burner phone.

    Bought it at a gas station, was able to unlock it…

    Its is garbage in terms of performance at anything beyond like, one tab in a web browser… but, it works as a phone, you can pop the back of the case off.

    Removable battery.

    Oh and it has a headphone jack too.

    So I have a semi decent pair of old school headphones and hey wow, the connecting cord itself works as an FM radio antenna.

    And an sd slot, though its only accessible via taking the back shell off.

    So yep this one is staying as the backup/emergency/burner, if I ever even do get a ‘new’ one.




  • Yes, its derived from it, not identical to it.

    They’ve replaced the crossed bones beneath the skull, with a crown on top of the skull.

    But it is used as a ‘challenge coin’, which is basically analagous to … a medal on a uniform, a medal from placing in a competitive sporting event.


    Both the totenkopf as a symbol and the concept of a challenge coin both have their origins in militaries, or at least organized armed groups.

    Many militaries give out challenge coins for various acts or participation in or completion of various kinds of things … most of them don’t give out skull medallions though, due to the extremely bad reputation of the totenkopf.

    More history and examples of mostly military challenge coins:

    https://www.coinvaluechecker.com/rare-challenge-coins-worth-money/

    Note about numbers 8 and 13

    Yes, the Trample the Weak coin does have a skull, and that is in fact pretty uncommon. The 173rd featured heavily in the MACV SOG during US operations in Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia… they were the covert force often sent into countries the US was not officially at war with, to try and cut off the Ho Chi Mihn trail.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tailwind

    They… may or may not have used some kind of mixture of tear gas and … some kind of sarin-like nerve agent, in that operation.

    … pretty uncommon, by US military standards, arguably the existence and most operations of the unit itself… just were some kind of warcrime.

    Now for coin 13… well, thats Jocko Willink’s unit.

    He is exactly the kind of extremely far right person I am talking about. Friends with Dan Crenshaw, Tulsi Gabbard, Jordan Peterson, … super MAGA Trump guy… has a whole glowing piece about him at the Heritage Foundation, an extremely well funded and extremely far right political think tank / network …

    https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/can-jocko-save-america

    It may infact be literally him, Jocko, who… literally coined the crowned variant of the skull, that we see more closely resembles the ICE challenge coin.

    More lately, last couple of decades, various LEOs (law enforcement agencies) in the US and Canada have also begun to and more frequently given out challenge coins of varying kinds, same with PMCs and other private security outfits, for … carrying out various tasks or completing certain kinds of training…

    But when its a skull, the symbolism there has long been a … semi-plausibly deniable Nazi dog whistle:

    If you can find an instance of a group giving these skull mediallions, totenkopf adjacent coins out, you’re nearly 100% certain to find many of the members / leaders of that group also have and use other kinds of Nazi / White Supremacist / Hyper Religious Conservative imagery, symbolism, rhetoric, tattoos, etc.

    Its… well known that ICE has literally 0 hiring standards, and its also pretty well known that a whole bunch of Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, fascist militia types, gleefully joined up with ICE after Trump got elected again.


    Symbols grow and change over time, similar to how language does, how online image memes do, people reuse and remix them… but you can trace a lineage of how symbols evolve and change, who uses them to mean what.

    Maybe the best modern example is how so, sooo many LEOs and their back the blue fans have adopted and remixed the Punisher skull.

    The Punisher is a comic book character who murders corrupt cops and government and officials and basically anyone he feels has fucked him over in some way, abused their powers… but the symbol has been paradoxically adopted by cops, who are themselves quite often abusive, corrupt, and break any law they think they can get away with breaking.

    They’re the people the Punisher would be killing, but they can’t see it. They like the skull imagery because ‘death’, ‘badass’, ‘i’ll fuck you up’, ‘you can’t stop me’ … and, also, because … its a skull, fits well into the already existing set of Nazi related imagery.

    As I mentioned in another reply, the Swastika itself is not ‘the original’, its a mirrored version of the original symbol, which now has… extremely different connotations and implied meaning than it did before the Nazis appropriated it and gave it a new meaning and reputation.



  • Definitely give all of TOS a watch if you are able.

    Theres really no other way to explain it than as a seminal and groundbreaking series, that laid the foundation for… so many things that came after it, were inspired by it.

    … like cellphones, for example.

    Its … not high octane. Its pretty rough around some modern cultural edges, most notably sex/gender roles. Its… of hilariously low production value compared to so much of more modern media. A lot of it is goofy as fuck, even within its own world.

    … but its still incredible. It still did things that nobody else had ever done before, and … some of those things still hold up as radical, even today.

    The uh, hah, a lot of the TOS films are … kinda still to this day have lets say ‘mixed’ reception at best.

    Its a show about a crew, who goes on missions, on basically a 5 year tour of duty. It really only works properly with the kind of regular, consistent exposure you get from a TV series, to slowly really show you the characters, as if you’re stuck aboard with 'em, getting annoyed or amused by their various quirks and characteristics.

    … at its best, its a show about a possible way of life, a way of being, of cooperating with strange people and peoples toward mutually beneficial outcomes.

    I gotta stop myself from rambling.

    Is it the best show you’re ever gonna have watched? … Eh, maybe, probably not.

    But… I feel like you actually can’t understand US cultural history properly if you haven’t seen it.

    … we used to actually have a vision of a better future. Hope.

    In… times such as we now live… that should never be forgotten.

    (The tribbles episode is pretty cute and fun though, eh?)



  • I feel that, man, so very much feel that.

    rambling thoughts encapsulated

    I play a … wide and varied amount of video game genres, and… yeah, a lot of people tend to just stick to one, or a few, and… when I make comparisons between their favorite genre, and another that is actually similar is significant ways, or like, has a fundamentally similar core mechanic, but handles it in a different way…

    … usually this causes a freak out.

    You can very rarely get a super fan to admit that such similarities exist, and you can also rarely get them to actually define the things that they say make one kind of game better, or preferable to another kind of game.

    I almost never start those kinds of discussions, but people like that can almost never finish them, they just tie themselves in knots to preserve some undefinable way that their fav game / genre is better or truly unique.

    I got no problem with people having preferences, I hate people who make broad claims that are just objectively not true, not the case…

    And then again, also yes with the sort of ‘you’re not allowed to like these two kinds of things I think are mutually exclusive for inexplicable reasons’ thing.

    Fucking hell. Like, I actually studied Karate for a decade, I’m not like a world champion or a great top tier fighter… but I do know a little bit of what I’m talking about when I try to describe how the basic mechanics/kinematics of say, a fighting game that is at least grounded in realism should work.

    But nope, with so many people, I’m basically just not allowed to know how to code and also know how to throw a punch, at the same time.

    Just doesn’t compute for them, even though these are the same kind of people who will swoon over a more famous person with a similarly mixed set of skills.

    Oh well, normies gonna be normies.


  • Its funny, I’ve actually known (via the internet at least) a few actual ‘Nords’, Finns, Swedes, Norweigans, who are actually quite pissed off by white supremacists increasing adoption of Norse gods and mythology, as they either take the religion … well, a degree of seriously, as a religion, or they just immensely value the stories as foundational to their culture.

    Yep, fasiscm is an almost entirely vibes based ‘ideology’, which ultimately eschews reason, and embraces emotion, theatrics, and rhetoric… all to mask the worldview of a hateful, selfish bully, that really just wants to hurt whoever they identify as ‘the problem’, and anyone who doesn’t agree with their hate.

    As Chaplin said:

    “The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…”




  • Absolutely, always good to give more context for anyone further interested!

    rambling semi-associated thoughts encapsulated herein

    Yep, the Nazis are far from the only ideological … or really just any kind of group to use skull / skull and cross bones type imagery, more broadly, its… well just a commonly recognized symbol of death and mortality, and can and has been applied in various contexts.

    But, yeah, as you say… in this context… its pretty fucking clear the branch of … symbological (sp?) meaning they are intentionally descending from.

    And… well the unfortunate modern truth of it is that many symbols have been essentially taken, or claimed or colonized, whatever, by Nazis. The swastika itself is an example of this, I’m not a super duper expert, but basically, the original meaning of the symbol was… in the context of Hinduism/Buddhism primarily around India, and it symbolized something like luck, life, renewal.

    But the Nazis famously took it, mirrored it, and ruined it, and also confused the fuck out of a lot of Westerners who only understand the symbol and Aryans via Nazism, when… both topics/concepts have much deeper and interesting histories than simply being something the Nazis appropriated.

    Heck maybe I’m remebering my own American history with rose tinted glasses, but I could swear that in the 90s, the Gadsden flag had not been so strongly linked to the… ‘so libertarian/ancap they actually overtly flip and become loudly racist fascists’ crowd… granted, I was a kid in the 90s, but my impression was that the actual Nazis hadn’t quite cottoned on to using the Gadsen flag, back then they were just mostly using out right Swastikas or KKK derived symbology.

    Metallica had a damned album that was basically a subdued, recolored Gadsden flag, the black album, in '91, and while they’re obviously not saints or philosophers, I wouldn’t go so far as to call them just actual fascists, at that point in time.

    But all that with a grain of salt, thats just me trying to remember my white trash, white supremacist adjacent, evangelical upbringing.

    Update: Here, yeah, Hetfield seems to be somewhat dismayed about how the particular song, and gadsden snake imagery, was warped into having a meaning that he says he did not mean to convey:

    https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/articles/features/the_story_of_the_artwork_on_metallicas_black_album_and_the_unexpected_band_that_inspired_it-161365

    Metallica’s use of the image was a reference to the second single from the album, titled “Don’t Tread On Me.” As for his use of the image, he said this in an interview with MusicRadar in 2022,

    “‘Don’t Tread on Me’, I love the song, but it shocked a lot of people, because everyone thought it was pro-war when they thought we were anti-war, and alls we’re doing is writing songs, we’re not standing politically on any side. ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ was just one of those ‘don’t *** with us’ songs, and obviously referencing the flag and the snake and what it meant, that all tied into the black album and the snake icon on the album cover, and I think it’s great to play that song live. We’re over here in Europe playing it, and people aren’t appalled by the songs. We haven’t played it in Iraq or Iran yet, though.”

    Yeah I mean… “we’re basically dumbass fence sitters and we just want to make cool music with extremely broad market appeal” isn’t exactly commendable, but holy shit are there … way, way more overtly fascist metal bands, at least nowadays.


  • Wait what?

    Who is … asking… huh?

    Yeah, its totally normal to ask people if they share interests that you do.

    … its not normal to expect that everyone else will.

    Its not … reasonable, meaning, grounded in reality, to expect that like, every actor in a show for an IP is going to be obsessed with all things connected to that IP.

    Media generally walks a line between being a geuinely expressive creative output… and being a mass produced product manufactured for a known market demographic.

    The levels of enthusiasm and professionalism can vary wildly over everyone involved in that process.

    Expecting Pearlman to be an avid Fallout player is like expecting the person in the Goofy suit at DisneyLand to themselves be a Disney Bounder, or whatever the term is.

    That’s the point I’m trying to make.

    Things like this, to some people, are just their day job.

    Happy to be a part of it, but not… personally interested in also being a customer/consumer/partaker/etc.




  • It seems to me that the significant majority of people here in this thread at least, do not think the joke is innately/inherently homophobic, and that that is more or less a way that you can read it, if you choose to, but it still works as a joke without a homophobic reading.

    And … that includes me, someone who has been … at least somewhat, depending on your criteria, victimized by actual homophobia.

    Its not as cut and dry as you seem to think, to at least personally judge them in the way you are…

    … sure, many people may have expressed their feelings one way, but many here have expressed them the other way…

    … and it seems like a considerable mod/admin overreach to ban them for it.

    Sure, people can not like it all they want, downvote, explain why they think its bad… but… banning for this seems extreme, needlessly censorious.

    And shaming them and demanding an apology thus also to me seems wholly unwarranted.


  • In case anyone is somehow unaware:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totenkopf

    In the early days of the Nazi Party, Julius Schreck, the leader of the Stabswache (Adolf Hitler’s bodyguard unit), resurrected the use of the Totenkopf as the unit’s insignia. This unit grew into the Schutzstaffel (SS), which continued to use the Totenkopf as insignia throughout its history. According to a writing by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, the Totenkopf had the following meaning:

    The Skull is the reminder that you shall always be willing to put your self at stake for the life of the whole community.[11]
    

    SS-Totenkopfverbände (‘Death’s Head Units’) was the Schutzstaffel (SS) organization responsible for administering the Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps for Nazi Germany, among similar duties. While the Totenkopf was the universal cap badge of the SS, the SS-TV also wore this insignia on the right collar tab to distinguish itself from other SS formations.

    The… symbolic etymology, or however you’d say that, of this symbol… directly traces back to and explicitly references the Nazis, the SS.

    Yeah, its been a thing in other LEO organizations in the US and Canads for a while now too.

    LEO organizations run and staffed by Nazis.


    EDIT:

    In replying to a comment, I’ve made what is to me, an interesting discovery:

    https://www.coinvaluechecker.com/rare-challenge-coins-worth-money/

    The Battle of Ramadi was one of the bloodiest during the Iraq War in which the Iraqi forces, the U.S. and its allies fought against insurgents. During the eight-month battle, many lives were lost on both sides, including U.S. Navy SEAL Michael Monsoor.

    Monsoor died following a grenade attack in which he was trying to save others’ lives. He was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously for his acts of heroism.

    Monsoor was part of SEAL Team 3 led by commander John Willink aka Jocko. A challenge coin was created commemorating the team’s exemplary efforts during such a bloody war.

    That is apparently a challenge coin … presumably, designed by Jocko Willink, or at least for or by him and the surviving members of his unit, to commemorate primarily Monsoor.

    That’s the first iteration that I am aware of, within the US Military, of a ‘totenkopf’, not with crossbones underneath, but with … well, strictly, they are flames, but they do resemble a crown.

    … as we see in the ICE medallion.

    The US military generally tends to stay away from overt usage skull imagery, due to… the similarity to and association with the totenkopf… you can find a few exceptions, but they tend to be … some kind of unit doing something … covert, deniable, probably not strictly legal. Cough, MACV SOG, cough.

    So, perhaps, more recently… the crowned skull variant as a symbol just actually derives from Jocko, or that this serves as some kind of evolutionary step, a missing link between ‘totenkopf’ and the evidently current ‘crowned death’.

    Jocko is a (former) Navy Seal, chummed it up with Dan Crenshaw, Tulsi Gabbard, Jordan Peterson, generally a big MAGA/Trump guy…

    Yeah, I dunno, just ran into that, found it notable.


  • I mean, he says more than just the single phrase.

    He narrates the entire intro and outro, all of its possible variants, various lines for ways you can die, etc, for the original Fallout.

    Here’s the actual whole intro:

    https://youtube.com/watch?v=VvRW46pyKCY

    (Pearlman’s part starts at about 1:35)

    War. War never changes.

    The Romans waged war to gather slaves and wealth.

    Spain built an empire from its lust for gold and territory.

    Hitler shaped a battered Germany into an economic superpower.

    But war never changes.

    In the 21st century, war was still waged over the resources that could be acquired. Only this time, the spoils of war were also its weapons: petroleum and uranium. For these resources, China would invade Alaska, the US would annex Canada, and the European Commonwealth would dissolve into quarreling, bickering nation-states, bent on controlling the last remaining resources on Earth.

    In 2077, the storm of world war had come again. In two brief hours, most of the planet was reduced to cinders. And from the ashes of nuclear devastation, a new civilization would struggle to arise.

    A few were able to reach the relative safety of the large underground Vaults. Your family was part of that group that entered Vault Thirteen. Imprisoned safely behind the large Vault door, under a mountain of stone, a generation has lived without knowledge of the outside world.

    Life in the Vault is about to change.