Nothing gold remains

Slytherin I Toreador I Scorpio

[obscurehistoricalinterests]

Summer in Nuremberg.

[obscurehistoricalinterests]

do you still like/are interested saint just? your older posts helped me learn so much more about him i can’t help but wonder!

I am! I haven’t actively posted about him in a while but I have been continuing my research behind the scenes. Here’s his baptismal certificate as compensation for my lack of posts.

[obscurehistoricalinterests]

Question: “I’m a guy from Poland in my mid-twenties, with Asperger’s. Do you have any advice on how to be a better person, and any leadership advice?”

Anna (to Brad): “Well, you’ve already given leadership advice, I suppose.”

Brad: “Yeah, I’ve already given leadership advice but you know, I have Asperger’s as well. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it. Mild case of high functioning autism. Um, yeah - you just have to practice. You have to practice things that make you uncomfortable and squirmy and squishy, like being empathetic and emotionally connecting with people, which I think sucks.

You just have to force yourself to do it because if you can’t, being in a leadership position is going to be very hard, because you see people as objects, and then they become objects. So you need to see them as people, and then they become people.

So just train yourself to do that through repetition. In a way, you have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. That doesn’t mean just physical, it also means mental and in this case it’s emotional.”

- excerpt from Brad’s latest AMA

[delphinidin4]

[icemankazansky]

Omg y'all Y'ALL

[jellyfishdreamofstarlight]

3 years ago, I wonder if they have gone through all that rice yet…..

[theblehthatbloos]

Oh

[nosuchthingasaburdenonsociety]

There was a day in 2021 this post was on my dashboard three times a page

[crabpeach]

As an American, when they said truck load I was imagining an 18-wheeler style truck so I’m not too surprised by the final picture. There has to be like 200 - 300 bags of rice on that truck at LEAST. OPs BIL was incredibly lucky he only had to take 23 bags of rice from that thing.

[thesaltofcarthage]

THE RICE TRUCK STORY HAS PHOTOS

[cavalryghost]

The greatest story ever told IMO

[clover11-10]

That man will never look at rice the same way again.

[marlynnofmany]

FYI Shiv reposted the thread on BlueSky after leaving Twitter. It got just as much attention the second time around (as it should).

(Here’s a link to the last post because the threading got weird; scroll up.)

Happy Rice Truck Day!

[obscurehistoricalinterests]

Interviewer: What was the reaction to Brad’s “it’s nice having friends” speech from the two people he was talking about?

Colbert: Not great, but it was also back in 2008. I think a lot of water under the bridge. There was, um, you know, there was an uncomfortable conversation with him and, uh, I explained and he understood and we moved on. I mean, this is somebody that I have been friends with since we were in junior high school. I’m now far, far, far away from junior high, and we’re still friends. And I think that speaks to the friendship, and we’re not going to let something like this derail that. So, yeah, there was a little bit of an uncomfortable conversation, but other than that, all good. Moving on.

- excerpt from one of Brad’s AMAs

[obscurehistoricalinterests]

Well, I had a pretty rough childhood. Not because of my parents. I was just a pretty shitty kid. And I think my parents would probably agree with that if I was to ask them. They may couch it a little differently, but I was a difficult child. I was fiercely independent. I was probably smarter than my own good, and I got in trouble a lot.

In fact, I was expelled from every school that I ever went to. I was expelled from elementary school, which is pretty hard to do, by the way. Junior high. I was expelled from high school. I ended up finishing school at a military academy in Missouri.

All that to say that I was very rebellious, and I did not handle groups well, and I wanted to give myself a challenge. I wanted to find a place where I could fit in. I originally wanted to be an astronaut. And, in order to be an astronaut—I’ll short-circuit the story—most astronauts were pilots. Pilots come from the military. Okay, so I have to be an aviator.

Well, what do I want to fly? I want to fly F-18s. So that’s Navy or Marine Corps. And the Navy has shitty uniforms. Sorry, guys. Marines—that’s it. And this is, you know, 10, 11 years old. That’s my path.

I didn’t have the personal discipline to stay in college. I tried it for a little while after high school and just said, “Fuck it. I’m just going to enlist.”

Interviewer: I was gonna say, this isn’t one of those scenarios where the parents brought the Marine Corps recruiter to the home.

No. In fact, it was the other way around. And again, I had a rough go of it. I got in trouble with the law. I was on unofficial probation. So I got in trouble, and I had to sort of keep my nose clean for a little while.

So I went to the recruiter, and the recruiter says, “I can’t take you. You’ve got this thing.”

And I’m like, “Okay, cool. Well, what do we have to do to get this thing?”

“You have to go in front of a judge.”

And so I did. I got it cleared up. But I was a recruiter’s wet dream because I marched right in and said, “I want to be, you know, 0311 infantry.”

That’s one of those things where the recruiter’s like, “I don’t know. I’ll try to pull a few strings and see what we can do.” Meanwhile, that’s the hardest thing they have to get people to do.

I did really well in the ASVAB. And he’s like, “There’s a lot of other jobs.”

I said, “No.”

So I enlisted. I wanted to be a recon Marine. I knew it. If I wasn’t going to fly, that was the only other option.

It is, to this day, I think, one of the better decisions I’ve ever made in my life. And it has served me well, not just in character development and personal growth and interpersonal… I think it’s good for the soul. People who have done what we’ve done and worn the uniform—the service, the sacrifice that comes with it—there is nothing else that you get anywhere in our life. Sure.

- Brad Colbert on the The Team House Podcast

[obscurehistoricalinterests]

The story behind the image in Colbert‘s back tattoo

I‘ve seen a lot of people around here discussing the tattoo that covers most of Colbert‘s back, but the comments mostly resume to “lol, what was he thinking?” because it’s an unusual piece. Well, I‘ve done a bit of research and came up with some interesting information!

We know from Evan Wright that the picture was inspired by an artwork by Luis Royo, which Colbert found in a Heavy Metal magazine, which has been publishing sci-fi and fantasy stories and comics for over forty years now. The image is called „The Spirit of Dorsai“ and you can see it below:

Royo drew this artwork in 1993 to serve as a cover art for a collection of science-fiction stories by Gordon R. Dickinson (published in 1979).

The collection features two tales, Amanda Morgan and Brothers, told in the frame device of a conversation between two characters who reminisce about the past. The first tale focuses on the original Amanda Morgan, first in a venerable line of three women bearing this name, a wizened but fierce old warrior who found her home in the wild and austere planet of Dorsai, and who now must defend it using very limited resources (her old gun and a small group of elderly men, invalids, women and children) for much better equipped and trained invaders. She embodies the spirit of the place she defended for so long - clever, tough as nails, welcoming of hardship, brave but not foolish, unbreakable and fearless in the face of death. She succeeds in saving her homeland, and the moral of the story is that moral strength trumps physical strength.

The second tale focuses on a pair of twin brothers, cheerful and charismatic Kensie and stoic Ian, both love interests of the second Amanda (a distant descendant of the first). Within the first pages of the narrative, Kensie is assassinated and his grim twin brother begins searching for the murderer. The troops, also angry at the death of their commander, are not on friendly terms with the city itself, and it becomes obvious that unless the situation is defused somehow, the troops’ search for the murderer could cause a mass slaughter within the city.

What I found notable about this tale is the way it discusses war and how it irrevocably changes people.

Some things you hardly noticed about them have moved forward in them and taken over. Other things you thought were the most important part of what made them, have gone way back in them, or been lost forever. They’ve grown up in ways you didn’t expect.

Eventually Ian takes revenge by himself on his brother’s murderers and both the city and the soldiers come together to mourn Kenzie, bound by their grief. In the end, the normally stoic Ian proves to have cared deeply about his brother.

We can only speculate on whether Colbert actually read any of the stories. While the magazine made heavy use of Royo’s artwork and serialized many sci-fi stories, I couldn’t even find anything related to Dorsai or this artwork in the Heavy Metal Magazine fan archives.

Anyways. What a nerd.

[obscurehistoricalinterests]

Update: turns out Brad did read the book! He hated it.

He fell in love with Royo‘s work and over the years had multiple artworks by him tattooed on his back.

[obscurehistoricalinterests]

[cammitchell]

ALEXANDER SKARSGÅRD IN GENERATION KILL

[obscurehistoricalinterests]

So you've got Ray, who deals with the screwby by talking about it all the time, poking it, reminding people not to get too comfortable on one side of the line or the other. You've got Q-Tip and Trombley, who understand that sometimes the smartest thing you can do is pretend you're in a video game. You got Captain America, who just wants to fit into the horror movie his life has turned into, and you've got Nate Fick who wrongly assumes that everybody understands what he's saying and not just taking his irony at face value. But what about Brad? How does Brad do the screwby? Brad, who's too smart to give in and too hard and scary to be normal, who sees every single thing and can only make a joke about it half the time. What do weapons do when not in use? What do you do with Brad when he's not killing?

He's in flight. Eyes closed in the sun, shirt off, in a field. Arms stretched out, joyously. Very young. And he's flying, grinning in the light.

The opposite of maneuver warfare, the archaic old standard, is the war of attrition: the siege. Force applied over time to a single location. Maneuver warfare is force applied to all locations, engagement of the enemy on as many fronts as possible; derangement of his senses; dislocation of his ability to make conscious choices. Men of war, in both cases, represent the force applied. But the thing about men that makes them different from weapons is this: the action can be anything. We are nuclear. Men aren't weapons at all: that force exists whether or not it's weaponized. Remove the war, remove the possibility of warfare, and you still have action, inside. And it builds, and builds: carry a baby, apply that force to easing the torments of war. Walk alongside the civilian enemy. Encino Man and Casey Kasem and Godfather are so close to it, and they'll never see it, because they think like weapons. Think like a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

But what do you do if you're Brad? If you have all that action inside, and they won't let you spend it on war, what will you be? What happens when you go home? What do you do, in the sunlight, too tweaked to rest and too blocked off to fight? Take flight.

"Over all stations, be advised: Sergeant Colbert is wings level. Can somebody clear him hot?"

Ray asks if Evan gave him drugs, and he says no, but he did: "Asked him what he would be if he wasn't a Marine." Take away the war and the action remains. "Oh my God, he wants to be a ballerina? That's my fuckin' dream!" shouts Ray. Brad screams, joyfully, and stays aloft. "You fucking rock," somebody says quietly. He carries them all, for a moment, on his wings. He glides down to a soft landing, on his knees, before Evan and Ray: "Better now." It is.

- my favorite excerpt from Jacob Clifton’s incredible review of Episode 6, *Stay Frosty*

[obscurehistoricalinterests]

1835. Somewhere in the north of France, the relatives of a deceased man by the name of Nicolas Leclerc are gathered around a crackling fireplace. They’ve discussed what they are going to do and they agree that it must be done. You see, they are in possession of around twenty letters they consider dangerous. They were written to Nicolas by his former roomate from the time when he was a young man studying in Reims. The letters themselves weren’t particularly incendiary, in fact, according to Leclerc’s nephew who read them in his youth, their content could be likened to the kind of harmless lines young friends would write to each other during those times: plans for the future, political activity.

What made them dangerous, in the minds of the Leclerc relatives, was their author. Although he had already been dead for over forty years, his name was still bringing back bitter memories in the minds of those old enough to remember the events of one of the most turbulent and significant periods of their country’s history: The French Revolution. One by one, the yellowed envelopes fell onto the flames and curled up, an echo of destruction reminiscent of those troubling times, when documents by the thousands were burned, and with them burned crowns and gods alike on a pyre made by people who had finally had enough.

Who was this man who left such a mark on the history of France, so much that his harmless letters were considered dangerous so long after his passing? His name was Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just. Archangel of Terror, political radical, enfant terrible of the Revolution. He shot up from obscurity and took center stage in the merciless theater of history – and stayed there until the bitter end. Idealist? Monster? Patriot?

We shall endeavor to find out.

[obscurehistoricalinterests]

Heartbreaking.

[obscurehistoricalinterests]

Hi, I was reading your series about Saint-Just’s personal possessions such as his books and clothing and other stuff he owned. Can I ask what sources you used to get this information? I would love to do some reading of my own, since I can’t find anything easily online and I am very curious. Thank you very much!

The original lists of Saint-Just’s possessions can be found in the National Archives of France. For his list of books, for example, the signature is F/17/1198 (117). Everybody is allowed to purchase electronic copies of these documents. This is the source that all historians use.

[obscurehistoricalinterests]

TIL that Brad has *checks notes*

an 18 year old daughter that is off to college and two little boys.

[obscurehistoricalinterests]

Brad sits down with Ray Person to discuss all things Generation Kill, the USMC, life in general and to call each other gay in a touching and funny interview long overdue.

[obscurehistoricalinterests]

Hi! Random question: do you know if the Generation Kill audio commentaries are available anywhere online? Thank you so much!

Not to my knowledge!

[obscurehistoricalinterests]

Death and Cyclamen - The Nuremberg Trials through the eyes of Rebecca West

A rare, sober and devastating look at the Nuremberg Trials through the eyes of a woman - the great British journalist Rebecca West has a front seat to the most important trials of the past century: fascism is on the dock.

[catherinesboleyn]

Isabelle Huppert as Alphonsine Plessis

Lady of the Camelias (1981)