Reverse image search eventually lead me to something called the “Pineland Resistance Forces”, which seems to have something to do with the Special Forces Qualification Course. Best I can tell, “Pineland” is the name of the fake country where the scenario for the training simulation is set, and the Pineland Resistance Force is the… fake guerilla team the participants are working with? The single article on the subject I kinda-sorta skimmed through wasn’t entirely clear.

That said, the Pineland Resistance Force flag is argent on the bottom and says “Liberty 1870”, but everything else is pretty much spot on.

tl;dr seems to be a US Army Special Forces thing.

That’s either Hayao Miyazaki or Japanese Colonel Sanders, it can be hard to tell the difference sometimes

It’s Denis Villeneuve but I’ll be damned if that isn’t the least Denis Villeneuve-lookin’ picture of Denis Villeneuve I’ve ever seen

The following is a tremendously disproportionate analogy given that we’re talking about a microblogging website, but I really don’t think there’s any better term for it:

It’s really less like you’re calling Twitter by its deadname and more like you’re refusing to call it by its slave name. Twitter didn’t come up with this on its own, some guy just rolled up and said “I’m changing your name because yours isn’t cool enough.” Like, fukken Kunta Kinte.

Again, very unfortunate that that’s the only comparison that comes to mind but I’m really blanking on anything else. Jean Valjean, I guess. Maybe Darth Vader. Locutus of Borg.

At least we can rest easy knowing that concept art was eventually repurposed for the Nightsisters, and there’s no way anyone could ever sexualize a tribe of leather-clad magical goth lesbian amazons with spiky chain whips.

Maaan, all I got was some stupid spatulas.

Once had an order arrive on-time, but the tracking information never got updated and kept telling me the package was “running late” and pushing back the expected delivery date, and then after like a week of that they just said “sorry, it’s been delayed indefinitely” and gave me a refund. For an order I’d already received. And I mean, I wasn’t gonna be the one to tell 'em they were wrong.

I still got my fingers crossed for a Young Indiana Jones Chronciles/How I Met Your Mother-style framing device where it’s Billy Dee Williams and horse girl cruising the galaxy in the Falcon, with the whole flashback to young Glover Lando as some old fisherman’s tale he’s telling that’s clearly being embellished in his favor

Looks like a juvenile, too, based on the color of the beak and the general gawky teenager energy.

Yeah skimming it very briefly, it looks like your instance doesn’t even show bot indicators, so, no way you could’ve known really. But there should be a button to turn it off somewhere in your user settings, probably down near the bottom.

I mean I can certainly understand where the confusion may have come from.

Thank god, for a second there I thought they meant “cracking down on people dodging Windows 11 by intentionally disabling TPM,” like I’ve been doing. False alarm, carry on.

Betcha there’d be more posts there if people actually knew where to get kites…

Someone, somewhere has evidently misinterpreted the fact that US presidential candidate Kamala Harris (pictured center) is of Indian ancestry - as in her family is from the country in south Asia - and instead photoshopped her into the stereotypical Native American “Indian” aesthetic. Why they have chosen to do this eludes me.

There have been several violent incidents in reaction to published depictions of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, which is strictly forbidden by some interpretations of the Sahih al-Bukhari, one of the major Sunni Islamic texts.

I’m assuming that’s what’s being alluded to here.

Beyond that, it also just runs way worse; new.reddit takes at least twice as long to load a page than old.reddit. And when your entire business model is based on exploiting my stunted attention span to trick me into reading advertisements, you can’t give me that extra two and a half seconds to realize maybe I don’t give a shit about half the garbage I just mindlessly scrolled through, or else I’m gonna just go, like, fly a kite or something. And I don’t wanna do that, where do you even get a kite?

And hell, it’s entirely possible this rate limit isn’t just restricted to old.reddit, but nobody’s noticed yet because new.reddit is too slow to make 100 requests in a measly 10 minutes.

“Security footage shows several ne’er-do-wells in domino masks fleeing the scene with a number of burlap sacks, clearly-marked with bright green dollar signs, no doubt containing the compromised data. AT&T security suggests the culprits must have ‘jimmied open’ their servers with a crowbar, or perhaps a bundle of dynamite detonated via plunger from a safe distance. One suspect is currently in police custody after attempting to escape through a tunnel painted on the side of a brick wall. More on this story as it develops.”

I’m leaning Sith right now if only because Jason Qimir started in on “peace is a lie” for that split-second.

I do think “philosophical beef” is probably the right answer, though. Because if some random orphan, taking Forcin’ classes part-time on a beach with some shady-lookin’ drifter, can not only match but surpass a Jedi master in a Force-off… That’s gotta do some serious damage to the Order’s reputation, right? Especially if it comes out that the Jedi specifically failed to train her identical twin? Imagine you’re one of the parents whose child went off with the Jedi because it was the “best way to realize their cosmic destiny”, never to see them again because the order drills “attachments are spiritual poison” into their heads from childhood, and suddenly you find out that, basically, homeschooling was an option the whole time? Now you start thinking maybe those “enlightened peacekeepers” training your kid to “harness their spiritual potential” might just be… kidnapping children and indoctrinating them into their weird death-cult to raise a galaxy-spanning theocratic paramilitary with a forced monopoly on psychic phenomena, against which the common denizen has no defense — who are, incidentally, hoarding all knowledge pertaining to their Order’s history, philosophy, training, and religious practice on inscrutable magic prisms that only they know how to open and read, which they keep in a locked vault in the back of their heavily-guarded stronghold. Trust in the Jedi erodes, maybe folks are a little more hesitant to send the youngsters off to Force Camp, and the Jedi Order either stagnates without new recruits or they start taking drastic measures which will, of course, only erode the public trust more, rinse and repeat until the Jedi go exctinct, and the Sith kick back with a couplea space brewskis and have a grand ol’ chuckle. “Kills the dream” indeed.

Oh, yeah, I saw a documentary about those once, from the '50s. I Love Lucy, they called it…