Lightspeed Starbeam

This homeless person is making me uncomfortable. Should I call [a man with a gun]?

My neighbor is having a loud party. Should I get [a man with a gun] involved?

There are some teenagers skateboarding. Do you think [a man with a gun] would get rid of them for me?

Ok. So it all started when a guy named Bryan Mansell went to a lego reseller store called Bricks and Minifigs to sell his 80+ year old fathers lego collection so he can pay for his fathers medical bills. Mind you, this lego collection is all OG Star Wars legos all the way down and worth aprox. 200k.

Bricks and Minifigs, which I will call BAM for ease of time, is a franchise and the store he went to was located in Utah. The owners of said location, Benjamin and Chrys Gorman are not BAM at large, they are just people who signed a contract to go into buisness with BAM under their name as a franchisee.

The owners put those legos of Bryans up on consignment. Meaning Bryan still owns them, but the store gets a cut of that money for selling the legos themselves. It is explicitly stated in their contract with BAM that they can sell things on conisgnment.

Corporate BAM comes in once they learn of the lego collection and takes the store away from the owners. The owners previously had decided to move country for Benjamins job so they had contacted BAM about selling the store. BAM just fucking took it. They sent a guy named Brandon Best (more on him later) to get the keys and kick the owners out. They didnt let the owners take any of their personal property out of that store. Not even their fucking bird. But in the process of this, Brandon does say, on camera, that he is going to take on the liability of the consignment. BAM then puts new people in the management spots of that specific location. Josh Johnson and ...well lookie there....Brandon Best.

The store then starts selling those legos and not giving the money to the old man who owns the legos, saying that they dont DO consignment.

In comes Reckless Ben (Ben Schneider) who is an investigative youtuber. He goes all out to try to get these legos back to the family. Even suing the two new owners in small claims court to get that money back to the family. Which he won BTW. Meanwhile the CEO of BAM ,Ammon McNeff, threatened the old owners of the store, which they have recorded, saying that if they take BAM to court, BAM will drag out the court case out so they can drain money away from the old owners. Even ending the conversation with "if you think this is a threat...well...it is."

His words, not mine.

So Reckless Ben wins the court case. Josh and Brandon now have to pay that money back. They don't pay that money back and in fact, Josh threatens Ben on the phone (recorded) that if he persues this, he will claim Ben stole the legos and SWAT him.

Again, His words, not mine.

BAM, Josh and Brandon close that store so they can get out of paying for those legos.

Ben, not to be deterred, files a second lawsuit. He can't get it to go through until he can prove that he has spoken to both Josh and Brandon about getting the situation resolved. So he does.

He goes to Josh's house. The cops are already there. They pull him over for failing to stop correctly at a stop sign, despite having evidence on their own cop car dash cam that is available to the public saying otherwise. They ash for Ben by name. Ben is NOT driving.

They get off with a threat and a warning.

They then go to Brandon's house. Brandon comes out but says nothing. He looks like hes on fucking queludes or something this man is GONE. He sticks around for a few minutes and then fucks off back into his house.

That part of the court case is accepted. They tried to have a conversation, it failed. Got it in one.

Now they gotta go try to talk to Josh again to get everything sorted out.

This is where shit starts to really go down.

They get to his house. Cops are there again. They get pulled over on suspicion of HEROIN possession. Obviously the cops don't find anything but they break shit and threaten this kid anyway. Hours later, Ben gets home. His lawsuit is accepted. Now he has to serve them papers personally.

He goes to Josh's house again and tries to get the papers served. Four times the cops came by, three times they were like "Oh are these papers real? You arent doing anything illegal. Carry on". Until the fourth time where they, ON CAMERA, confirm with the court system that yes, the papers are real and yes they needed to be served.

So they arrest Ben for tresspassing.

Ben gets off on bail after a week.

He decides to do a go fund me for the family. He brings a huge banner for it and puts it up on the public sidewalk across from Josh's house.

The cops are called again. They know its not illegal to do what they are doing. The cops go back to their car, talk it over, admit its NOT illegal, poorly redact the body cam footage saying that and come up with a convoluted reason to arrest Ben again. So they do on suspicion of stalking.

They try to keep him in jail for a month, no bail. A judge went over the order and decided that it was crazy to do that and changed the order to let him go with bail again. Ben goes home.

THEN THEY SWAT THE PLACE HE IS STAYING ON SUSPICION OF HIM HAVING STOLEN THE LEGOS! Remember that threat that Josh gave Ben? Well, it came true. Ben was arrested again. This time they dislocated his shoulder and sent him on his way when they didnt find anything of note. Still, The kid gets harmed, threatened and bullied for the crime of...making an enemy of this company and those people.

And then the cops issue ANOTHER warant for Bens arrest. This time with no chance of bail at all.

So he flew to Mexico and is right now, currently in Mexico while he confers with lawyers over his situation.

The most fucked up part of the whole thing. Every cop and judge that harrassed him was Mormon. The CEO of BAM and Josh And Robert are all Mormons and every single one of em donate hella money to the Mormon church. Like, crazy amounts of money.

I am not making any of this up either. Like there is body cam footage, there are doccuments, emails, arrest records, court orders, dockets, contracts ETC that tell the story better than any words can.

I am not shocked at all by the corruption happening here, but I am hopefull that this is a thread that can be pulled to its source, that something good might come of how exposed these people and their crimes are by their own blatant assgrabbing tomfuckery.

But holy shit. What a development in the lego collection sphere. BAM seems to be going full force into destroying any credibility they have. Because if they can do this to anyone, they can do this to you too. How do you know if the legos you are buying arent stolen? How do you know theyre going to honor your consignment deal? How do you know theyre not gonna send the cops to break your fucking legs if you express any wish to get your rightfully owed money back from them?

Dress

1920s

So, to once more start with a completely random vent here: I hate how media depicts Stone Age people. Because it is just so fundamentally misinformed about how humans work and what we do. And I hate it so much.

Because, well... I ask you to imagine some Neolithic or even earlier humans. What do you imagine?

Do you imagine people with unkempt hair, who mostly communicate in grunts, and wear barely treated animal pelts over their shoulders instead of clothes, yet still live in a somewhat nuclear family unit where the dad and maybe the older brother is hunting, while the women are staying in the cave or something?

Because if you do, you have been dooped by media depictions. And it is not your fault. Because frankly, even within scientific literature we see these depictions again and again DESPITE KNOWING that it is not true.

If you look at pop culture you have stuff like the Flintstones and the Croods. And mind you, I generally really liked the Croods as a movie. But... oh, the tropes in there are... ugh.

And if you look at museums, and text books, and what not, you will still see stone age depictions that look something like this.

Sure, at least those have some sort of tribe, which is at least some advancement over the Stone Age Nuclear family, but I am still so annoyed with a bunch of it.

Because, first these are white people, most of those people would not have been white, especially not people who lived in areas where it would have been enough to just wear a random piece of leather around your hip as clothing. Secondly, well, isn't it funny how these stone age people are all wearing clothes that keep them covered just in a way that aligns with modern day standards (keeping the genitals and the female breasts covered - the latter we know was simply never a concern for most people on this planet until after 1500). And thirdly... Why does nobody believe that neolithic people had not discovered fiberworks? Because... like, we have not a whole lot found of that (because clothing generally just does not survive 10 000 years), but we have found needles, and pieces that were fairly likely used to work fibers - as well as some fiberwork that survived in clay. Moreover, we also know that the people who were wearing animal pelts, did not just wear them over their shoulders or around their hips, but usually actually had those cut onto form and stitched together like actual clothes.

For example, we have these pieces of Clay from which we know that there were weaved textiles.

The left one is a piece of fired clay found in Dolní Věstonice that shows fiber impressions. The side predates the Neolithic. The second is from an excavation side in Kisnytsia.

Then we have this, what looks like some biological images, but is actually flax fibers that have been treated and were likely used in the creation of clothing 30 000 years ago. Some of them were likely even dyed!

And it was not even just a homo sapiens thing. We have this bit of cord at a Neanderthal side, which also needs understanding of fiberwork to create. So, yeah, even Neanderthals had fiberwork.

And then we also have some of the female figures that you probably have seen before. And the way they are created make it very likely that the knotted things on their hip and head are actually a cap and a skirt of sorts. So clothes that was specifically made.

So, it is very likely that even when the people were wearing leathers and furs, it would have looked not like in the pictures above, where it is just roughly draped leathers, but actually something tailored like this or this.

And I know this seems like a weird topic to vent about, but there is actually a reason why I talk about this. And that is because the entire thing about textiles is related to the propaganda inherent to depiction of Neolithic and earlier people.

Neolithic people are depicted as living in nuclear families, to show that the nuclear family is a biologically natural unit for humans to live in, rather than a thing that was invented in the US of the 1950s to get people to buy more home appliances.

At the same time Neolithic and earlier people are shown grunting and wearing barely treated furs to hammer home of the idea that humans have progressed so far and that progression is somehow linear, and with this also framing colonialism as a good thing. Something that brings the colonized people ahead in this development. Which it is also not.

And lastly this is related to another issue that exists in anthropology and has only gotten better since the 2000s: the invisibility of women.

Because here is the thing: we know that a good chunk of human societies - especially unsettled societies - were fairly egalitarian in regards to gender/sex. Though there is some evidence that often a lot of knowledge was more generally transmitted among women. There is a good chance that the fire and the wheel were invented by women, not men. And this is weirdly enough linked to textile work.

Because for a long, long while it seems that textile work has played a central role in the gathering and transmission of women.

While the roles were not as firmly gendered as you imagine today - we have found burials of men with tools related to textile work, just as we have burials of women hunters and warriors - there seems in several early societies have been a relation between knowledge and fiber work.

I mean, technically you very likely know this subconsciously. Because you know old mythology, in which very, very often a goddess associated with textile work is also associated with wisdom and knowledge.

So, yes. This is all connected.

If you want to know more about this, Olga Soffer has written a lot on this. She is a former fashion industry insider turned anthropologist, who has done a lot of research on this exact topic. A lot of the stuff above is based on her research.

But yeah, generally speaking it is quite frustrating to me, that somehow Horizon Zero Dawn - the post-apocalyptic "stone age people hunting robot dinosaurs game - somehow has one of the more realistic depictions of early human fashion.