Flag Designing

[Duerer]

If there was an easier way to vectorize images of Lego pieces so I wouldn't have to do it all by hand like the flag below... Might as well try to redo a few flags to depict actual Lego bricks on them.

Spoiler

Show

EDIT: Thinking about it, I guess I should redo most of my flags so they'd actually fit in a Lego environment.

These kinda seem fine to me for now:

Spoiler

Show

These might need some work on the other hand:

Spoiler

Show

I do wonder how to incorporate that Jack Stone emblem into the flag of Transsrbija:

[Zahru II]

There's plenty of fun stickered/printed existing flags, just to pick a few:

Britannian Hackers Guild


The Hand


Orky


Any Science Corp


S U C C

[Duerer]

Also forgot that the 2006 Krusty Krab set (and its 2009 reissue) is a good source for more generic looking ones:


That could be a field banner for Poles obviously.


Ukrainian flag


Brittannians might find a use for that stuff I guess...


No clue about that one... Briktopia, maybe? Or Blacktron? Or is that the all seeing DSM eye?!

[AZKAMAT]

That's just azkamat's nazi flag in different colors.

Is this some kind of new alt-right flag meme I'm missing out on? Authoritarian symbol in the first space, sword and crown in the middle, white supremacy symbol on the right?

Just stumbled upon this while coughing my brains out unable to sleep. Now I know why my shit got messed with.

This thing doesn't resemble my flag except in how the symbols are arranged. That isn't even the version of the Knight's Cross the NSDAP used; it's the Mediterranean model like whatshisname said. The real white supremacist symbol is on the left. Himmler and the Schutz Staffel made it up. Not that it is a sonnerad to begin with; the inner lines don't touch the circle, are wavy, and don't have a hakkenreuz-like barb at the end. Also, the use of two NSDAP symbols instead of just one set against its historical antagonist distinguishes it again. Further the blade isn't through the crown here. Nor is the background color solid. I am curious if it was inspired though.

What bothers me more is this voldemortizaton of everything the Hitlerians appropriated or conjured up. What? We have to forget about it totally or only treat it like it's in a Spielberg movie and made an absurd joke? I find that notion offensive. I fear that the stage is being set to get triggered by everything that modern media trains people to associate with NSDAP stereotypes; military prowess, sense of purpose, national pride, and all the other stuff nearly everyone has engaged in historically but that the NSDAP suddenly made taboo because they did the shoa. I also find it borderline racist over this outrage at far right symbols when far left ones are just shrugged at. Who cares about tens of millions of eastern European slavs and east Asians that got liquidated or otherwise destroyed when the Holocaust gives us the 5+1 million to tunnel vision onto? It is so Eurocentrist to me.

Another thing I find bizarre about this kind of reaction is that Brikwars is place where a teen can act out a grotesque Turner Diaries-esque scenario of racial extermination but literally two lines bent at some 90 degree angles ruffles feathers. Even have dialogue discussing how this or that race is inferior, and deserves death, and then the speaker doesn't get OMGWTF pwned at the end of the story arc. Maybe I'm not seeing the 'subtle' wit of Peach racism and other weird shit that happens here, but I don't know why that's ok when it more fundamentally represents what people like the NSDAP represent. Cue mental gymnastics response in 3...2...1...

I don't think it'll end well if you intimidate people over their creativity when all they've got up is some symbols that the community doesn't know yet how they're going to be used. I used it because my setting's more serious; I enjoy it that way whatever anyone thinks of the product. It's not a "you-know-what" flag, and anyone who's looked in detail at my stuff so far is gonna understand fast that the faction I made isn't in line with even a lego-ized version of NSDAP ideology, or the guys on the left either. They're their own deal, and I like Brikwars so much because it acts as a medium for me to do my own deal.

Anyway, I don't want to start something ugly; I want to make cool stories and look at other peoples' work. If someone cares enough to discuss this stuff with me please do it by PM.

[Zahru II]

I can't wait for Mike to have a go at that

[AZKAMAT]

I can't wait for Mike to have a go at that

This is basically a continuation of stuff I've talked with him about in private. My shit's resolved as far as I can see but I really hate that someone else might be getting the dick because it kinda sorta maybe-if-you're-upset-by-it resembles my thing. What if this guy takes his little thing and goes somewhere else with it, or just stops being creative, because he feels like people will hate on him because of unrelated bs?

Anyway, picking a full-on fight with an admin sounds dumb and unproductive, and something I don't want to begin with, so I'll disengage the moment this loses its civility.

[stubby]

What bothers me more is this voldemortizaton of everything the Hitlerians appropriated or conjured up.

Longtime forum members know I've wasted a lot of space here comparing the relative demerits of Stalin's engineered famines in Ukraine and Japan's rape of Nanking. If we're speaking from a purely historical standpoint, then yeah, the swastika and the hammer and sickle and the rising sun all have a lot of bad history going on. So as long as the brikwars forum only exists in 1942 then it makes sense to pretend these symbols are all equivalent.

In 2017 though, nobody's spray-painting hammers and sickles all over my neighbors' houses before smashing their cars and windows. Nobody's sharpieing a rising sun on my friends' apartment doors before ambushing them and beating them down with baseball bats. Now, today, in 2017, if you see somebody using a communist symbol you can be pretty safe in assuming that they're making reference to a political position. Today, in 2017, if you see a swastika anywhere outside of the History Channel it means somebody thinks you and everyone likes you deserves to be wiped off the face of the earth, and if they can't use an oven then they've got baseball bats and torches.

I mean, I'm not speaking rhetorically or hyperbolically here. I can tick off people on my friendslist who've been terrorized and assaulted in the last two weeks. The swastika, in 2017, is a terror message first and a political symbol a distant second. Like, 70 years ago distant. And you can make pretty intellectual arguments about how other symbols are equivalent because of things that happened a century ago, and that nothing has happened to change their meaning since then, but there are a limited number of reasons why somebody might try to do that and none of them are admirable.

There's a certain amount of leeway for evil on the forum, because brikwars on some level is a game that's a satire of the evil of human nature. So we've got our space nazis and space soviets and cthulhu cults and peach racists, always at a satiric remove: "this is a belief we're interrogating" rather than "this is a belief we respect." We don't respect nazis and nazi symbols here. No good person respects nazis and nazi symbols. Any more than any good person respects cthulhu cultists or racists.

But damn, this past year we've had a flood of people "innocently" getting excited about swastikas and Deus Vult and all that bullshit, who the second they get frustrated about something suddenly go off on "THE MUSLIM THREAT MUST BE DESTROYED" and try to take down the forum with DDOS attacks and 4chan invasions (which luckily have gone nowhere for the most part so far, since they haven't had as much sway as they thought they did). So yeah, when I start to see an uptick in swastikas I start asking questions, because guys who draw fine points between the sonnenrad as used by nazis and sun-in-circle as used by white supremacists always turn out to be giant pains in my forum-moderation ass.

What? We have to forget about it totally or only treat it like it's in a Spielberg movie and made an absurd joke? I find that notion offensive. I fear that the stage is being set to get triggered by everything that modern media trains people to associate with NSDAP stereotypes

Look, you're the one getting triggered because somebody* replaced your swastika with a dick (* it was me). You're offended that people have a reaction to a symbol that is literally being used to terrorize and kill them - not "historically" or "theoretically" but in the sense that I can point at a burned car and a pile of hospital bills almost from where I'm typing this - but you can't handle a penis because kids at your church might see it. We should be totally okay with you traumatizing whomever you want, but heaven forfend it go the other way around.

Yes. We treat evil with disgust because it's disgusting. We treat the fetishization of evil with ridicule because it's ridiculous. I mean... obviously. Why would anyone do otherwise? (Other than the obvious reason, I mean.) As long as a swastika in 2017 means the thing that it means in 2017, as long as it's used for the thing that it's used for in 2017, we need to acknowledge that and act accordingly, not stick our heads in the sand and pretend it's "wink wink" innocent like it's something that happened 70 years ago.

So like I said. Brikwars has leeway for evil subject matter because it's a game about evil subject matter. But you don't get to pretend it's not evil and then get mad when somebody points it out.

[stubby]

Or, to put a finer point on it:

I put a dick on your swastika flag. It was my intention to be unexpected and entertaining rather than offensive - I don't believe there's anything offensive about human anatomy in vacuo - but there are people viewing it who aren't part of the audience I intended, and you're worried about the effect it might have on them. Their reaction to it has nothing to do with what I intended, and they don't know the forum backstory and philosophical context of why I think it's absolutely appropriate to replace swastikas with penises, but that doesn't matter. Their reaction is their reaction, and you're worried about the effect on them (and their opinion of you, as a side effect).

Right? We can agree with all of that so far?

Now: you put a swastika on my forum.

Just repeat everything from the paragraph above; it all applies exactly the same, except that swastikas represent literal threat and actual evil in addition to just being generically internet-offensive. Your objection to dicks is exactly the objection to swastikas. You've made your own counterargument.

(Unless your argument is "the lives of church kids are worth protecting from offensive symbols, but jewish / muslim / black / d a p p e r / trans / etc kids aren't," in which case that's a completely different discussion.)

[Duerer]

I put a dick on your swastika flag.

You actually did? How could I have missed it then?

[stubby]

He changed it back. But it was hilarious for 24 hours or so.

[Venge]

Jesus fucking Christ, what is going on in this thread? Let's not have a repeat of Voin and Stubby's walls of text that got turned into spider-memes.

[Duerer]

Don't worry, I'll make sure to merge it with this topic when the time is right.

[Steel_Valkyrie]

To clear things up, because it is my flag, the only thing remotely inspired by the Nazis on that flag is the lightning bolt, symbolizing blitz warfare, which is merely a type of warfare the Nazis used. the symbol on the left was meant to symbolize a dyson sphere, nothing else.

[stubby]

To clear things up, because it is my flag, the only thing remotely inspired by the Nazis on that flag is the lightning bolt, symbolizing blitz warfare, which is merely a type of warfare the Nazis used. the symbol on the left was meant to symbolize a dyson sphere, nothing else.

Thanks! I wasn't really trying to accuse you of anything in particular, I just wanted to make sure there wasn't something going on that I didn't know about.

[AZKAMAT]

(Unless your argument is "the lives of church kids are worth protecting from offensive symbols, but jewish / muslim / black / fabulous / trans / etc kids aren't," in which case that's a completely different discussion.)

Why are you are you harping on this when I told you, specifically, that the reason I was bothered by the business with the church boys is because they have autism and have a history of reacting strongly in the negative to body humor? As in the get ill from it. There is no moral principal about what to expose kids to generally (my opinion is: anything anytime), or something like that, underlying that event. In any case it's over because I just redirected them back to dA. Which isn't even to mention that I'd have been dismayed no matter what part of my project was messed with.

"But you don't get to pretend it's not evil and then get mad when somebody points it out."
It went on the flag because it is fucking evil. That's the whole point. They keep the memory of the pain out in the open so that they'll always remember.

Look, I really don't care about the stuff pertaining to me. That seems settled. What I want to avoid above all else is some kind of witch hunting atmosphere where people are looking for stuff to attack others over.

"Thanks! I wasn't really trying to accuse you of anything in particular, I just wanted to make sure there wasn't something going on that I didn't know about."

THAT is what I got triggered about last night, and the reference you made to me. I don't care anymore about the dick because it's been over with. It all sounded really accusatory toward Valkyrie and the following posts immediately made me think of setting the stage for formalized censorship. Like, we can only make flags from a sanitized pool of stuff.

You also need to understand that your view of the symbols is not the universal one. It seems to be in your close circle for sure and I respect that. For others though it really is just lines. And to be frank, you're the only person who's reacted negatively to it so far. All my minority friends at work had no objection and thought it was interesting when I explained it, and nobody else here or on dA have made a fuss about it. Only you. Even the Jewish artist Leonid Afremov leaves faves on my stuff with the swastika in it.

"but there are people viewing it who aren't part of the audience I intended, and you're worried about the effect it might have on them."
Yes, because even though I'd discussed the issue with you respectfully months in advance you still went and messed with my submission. I accept it as true that you just forgot, but you have to understand how it looked from my perspective. Again, though, it doesn't matter because it's settled now.

Now, I like you. But I worry that in this anxiety to protect your site from alt-righters and pepe spammers you're smacking the wrong people as you watch for moles popping out of the arcade machine. That is my true issue. Sending you into a frenzy where you end up targeting people who are trying to be creative with no underlying alt-right (or whatever) agenda is probably one of their goals. Stay calm. Ask us questions about our motives please.