Re: Making a gun pretty?

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I hope no flame suit is needed here.
Hiker:

WHY is it that whenever a woman is pictured with a gun she is scantily clad??????
So let's address "Marketing and Advertising" as separate from simple social media pictures and posting.

One of the data sets my teams must analyze are large advertising sets and the meta data within the adverts. The meta data tag keywords very well.

And if you want an easy target, skip the guns and go to "AUTO MUFFLERS, CUSTOM".

According to the meta data, more than 90% of custom auto muffler adverts contain women in bikinis.

Why?

The hind brain marketing effect. The primordial brain has proven (by EEGs and thermal scans) to be the most active when confronted with unknown brands. The primordial brain ignores most of what is "seen" (think like a lizard). There are only 3 signal sets that get through to the hind brain: Kill, Eat, Breed.

The hind brain (lizard brain) is looking, constantly, for things that can kill you, things you can eat, and opportunities to breed. (The scans are identical for men and women, they just trigger on different items.)

Luxury goods use "Breed" messages relentlessly. Look at all the pretty girls and boys in the first 10 pages of Vogue or GQ magazines. These adverts never seem to tell you that a coat is warm; simply that if you wear it, you will get to have sex.

Only massively advertised goods and services get to ascend from the hind brain. A good example is "Dove Soap" versus "Dove Chocolate". These both share the same brand name, and very similar iconography. But the brain never confuses them. They have so many advert repetitions in your lifetime that you are way beyond thinking about them. They have entered regions of the brain more up and forward from the hind brain.

Interestingly, products such as "Snap On Tools" have many advertisements and almost all without any people, and zero scantily clad women.

So one could argue that the Custom Muffler advertisers "know" something that Snap On does not, or that Snap On markets to different folks, or that Snap On has ascended to a higher part of the brand/brain.

Advertising: Using "Breed" messages for at least 200 years that we can find, with various levels of boldness depending upon the brand and the era. Advertising also uses "Kill" messages (Our Airbags are better) and "Eat" messages, all food and many "useful" tools that the human hind brain reacts to similarly to "Eat".

Other than Advertising - Mostly Hobbiest Photos:

So what about non-advertising, where there is no motivation to "sell" anything?

A very large and not public study done within multiple social networks has analyzed public profiles and public posts. (This was 5 years ago, when virtually all social media posts were in effect public and searchable.) For example, there is still a Twitter Feed service called the "Firehose" which costs many thousands per month and contains all feeds in a region (Or all in a common language such as English). The same research was done for 4 years on the "Firehose".

The correlations are astonishing, really. Basically, a person's apparent maturity level is quite evident from a small number of posts, and maintains across virtually all posts. And there are many immature people (of all ages) in the populations.

IMO, most men would benefit from reading "King, Warrior, Magician, Lower", by Robert Moore & Douglas Gillette. "Yes", it is pop psychology and runs into serious limits, but overall, it deals with male archetypes rather well (and not just macho ones - the authors are gentle people.) The conclusion at which the authors arrive is that the "mature" versions of male archetypes are useful and non-toxic. It is the immature versions that cause so much damn trouble; and (wait for it) most males never mature. The causes for this lack of maturity remain a mystery - some blame social changes, the breakdown of healthy initiatory processes, family breakdowns, school teachers, pornography, sugar, food coloring, television, video games, and ...

For someone completely stuck in an immature stage, the book by Moore and Gillette will do little good. But for someone who has some mature aspects and a desire to complete the process, the book is quite enlightening. The journey to maturity is not instant nor perhaps ever complete.

So the "Guns with Babes" photos tell a story of people blending their immature ego states and their adolescent imagery - often continuing into their late 70s.

So, "Yes" we are surrounded with immature, toxic images from every direction.
  • The questions Walker Percy would ask are:

    a) Does this influence you to be immature yourself?

    b) Does it cause you to question how these other people deal with the rest of the issues in their lives? Are the immature images simple expressions with limited implications of their overall approach to life, or are these people's lives actually represented by the images of babes with guns?

    c) Does this cause you to aspire to be a better, more mature person yourself?

    d) Should you leave the life you know, become a Cistercian Monk and escape from the outer world?
[Derived from "Lost in the Cosmos" with far less insight than the late, great Walker Percy would have shown.]

So what happens differently in a "mature" male brain?

First, we would need to find some mature males to interview, but much like Michel de Montaigne, most of us have only ourselves to interview.

I personally find that my hind brain never lets up on telling me: "That person could kill you" - and we call that situational awareness. Unless our hind brain is broken, it does a decent job of watching out for us, as long as we listen, then THINK through the rest of the situation.

Also, my hind brain never quits identifying females of "breeding condition". I wish it would stop, but it never goes silent. These are not foreground thoughts, you just notice that you are getting a nudge from your lizard brain. I doubt this can be controlled, and like the "That thing could kill you radar", my hind brain thinks it is doing me a favor alerting me to breeding opportunities (none of which are breeding opportunities by the way, unlike the protector part of the hind brain, the "breed" part seems to be broken.)

Part of maturity is to simply learn that:
1) You mostly need to ignore your hind brain's "breed" signaling
2) Women are, surprise-surprise, PEOPLE and don't deserve to be randomly examined for breeding capability
3) Acting out, in any way, on these hind brain signals is unwelcome, rude, often threatening, and certainly not going to get you sex - in the work place, you can get fired, sued and ostracized

And Marlene, I have a small Python program that can emit mush-mouthed, childlike excuses as well. But I didn't run it this time
Last edited by max129 on Sun Aug 19, 2018 4:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Making a gun pretty?

28
Marlene, Python code is not -that- hard to read.

Here is my favorite code base for random excuses:

https://github.com/JC-SoCal/ExcuseGenerator

And you can hack the table to focus on mush-mouth, childlike ones. It is easy.


NOW, back to pretty guns ...

Two years ago, I met Tira Mitchell, who does some really nice engraving. She had mostly revolvers in progress when I saw her bench, but she engraves semi-auto's, lever guns and anything else you want engraved. Tira focuses on Celtic engraving, but she can do "Old West" as well.

http://tiramitchell.com



And I have also met Jim Downing, he of the impressive mustache - and impressive western style engraving:

http://thegunengraver.com
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Re: Making a gun pretty?

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Two years ago, I met Tira Mitchell, who does some really nice engraving. She had mostly revolvers in progress when I saw her bench, but she engraves semi-auto's, lever guns and anything else you want engraved. Tira focuses on Celtic engraving, but she can do "Old West" as well.
http://tiramitchell.com

And I have also met Jim Downing, he of the impressive mustache - and impressive western style engraving:=
http://thegunengraver.com

More on engravers ...

Out of curiosity, I contacted a couple of engravers (was thinking of having my Blackhawk prettified). Everyone I contacted says there is a serious backlog. Jim Downing's is a one year lag time. The way they work is that you place your order, pay a deposit ($100 seems common) and you keep your firearm until they are ready to begin work. Then you ship it to the address they specify (many engravers have a FFL; all have some solution to the FFL problem.) At this point it takes somewhere between a few weeks to 2 months for them to finish, depending upon how much work you want done.

The prices for a fully decorated firearm seem to range between $750 to $1,500 - of course, some people ask for a lot, and pay a lot more.

So, if this is the route you want to go, it takes some research and planning.

Good luck to all.
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Re: Making a gun pretty?

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She's decided, based largely on reviews online plus a little fondling at the LGS, that her next gun should be a big Sig 320 X5. Go figure! I'm not going to argue with her, since she says I can shoot it occasionally and it more or less substitutes for the Glock 34 I kinda want. We may actually pull the trigger on this purchase.

I don't see it as a pretty gun, but I guess the slide could be Cerakoted some day, if it otherwise ends up being liked...
IMR4227: Zero to 900 in 0.001 seconds

I'm only killing paper and my self-esteem.

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Re: Making a gun pretty?

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max129 wrote: Fri Aug 24, 2018 2:40 pm A real pleasure to shoot and handles recoil well.
The review that got her said something like "the flattest shooting gun I've fired." I'm frankly a bit skeptical of that, considering that the bore axis looks to be quite a lot higher than a Glock's.

Unfortunately, the X5 is unlikely to show up at the rental counter for a pre-purchase tryout. They have another full-size 320 for rent, and it was fine, but different trigger and all. She shot better with a Springfield Range officer: 8th or 9th day of shooting (ever) and one (1) previous round through that gun several weeks earlier, and she put 5 of 5 in the black of a B2 target at 10 yards. I was pretty impressed. Not sure why she's not demanding we get one of those. :huh:
IMR4227: Zero to 900 in 0.001 seconds

I'm only killing paper and my self-esteem.

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Re: Making a gun pretty?

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And speaking of pretty guns....
I keep wanting to Ceracote a gun with some pretty combo of colors, but the swatches are so small it is hard to visualize. Why doesn't someone do a site where you could click on the color swatch and see the colors on a image of your own gun.
All religions united with government are more or less inimical to liberty. All, separated from government, are compatible with liberty.-Henry Clay
Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.—Aristotle

Re: Making a gun pretty?

38
Hiker wrote:And speaking of pretty guns....
I keep wanting to Ceracote a gun with some pretty combo of colors, but the swatches are so small it is hard to visualize. Why doesn't someone do a site where you could click on the color swatch and see the colors on a image of your own gun.
This should be a piece of cake to do, it's already done on new car sites.

"In every generation there are those who want to rule well - but they mean to rule. They promise to be good masters - but they mean to be masters." — Daniel Webster

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