@futurebird equal parts FOMO and disposable income

the EDC world isn't very subtle, it plays the 'real men are prepared for everything, you're a real man aren't you' card right alongside the 'cool guys have this' and 'it's made of the strongest best most prestigious materials, others will envy you'

and it's all performative is the thing, it's done to be seen. you get these boy-men tryna carry the contents of a Batman utility belt in their pockets, and after a while they mostly stop doing it except to take the pics

@futurebird (after seeing the edit picture)

oh, now i see. This is actually a different sort of pathetic insecurity that ends up being adjacent to self defense laws and weapons control restrictions.

Dunno how much of this you already know so if it gets splainey, please forgive it -

there's a whole class of things people carry because they're now afraid to go anywhere without some manner of self defense weapon. They feel naked and exposed unless they can strap up but some places won't let them. And of those weapons there are a subset that are designed to get around restrictions on carrying weapons around. most of those are designed to look like something with a peaceful purpose.

for example, if you are stopped by the cops and searched and they find a pocket knife, that could be bad. pbut if they find a pocket knife with an emergency glass breaker on the hilt, ah, you could have a peaceful reason to have pocketed it and taken it.

if you get in a road rage fight and you pull out a bowie knife from under a seat, there will be questions of premeditated violence. But with something like this doohickey there's room for doubt that you had it in the car for some other reason and just grabbed it when you thought you were in danger.

It's all this grey area thinking applied to the insecurity of young men... some of whom are worried about being hassled by cops, which is unfortunately a little easier to understand than when the college kids with disposable income buy the same thing 'just because'.

You will see things like 'emergency seatbelt cutters' marketed like this. If you look at them carefully, they're meant to be something you can clutch in your fist like brass knuckles or a kubotan. The intention is self defense in places where their preferred weapons would be prohibited. Of course some buy them without ever knowing.

@resonancewright

This is kind of what I suspected. I was kind of hoping that maybe there was some movie about IDK a badass bricklayer who fought a ninja fight with a ruler and that what this was about...

Not that it would be that much better.

@futurebird yeah.

insult to injury it's usually not that well made, this stuff. Sorta thing you find in a flea market and at that one store in the mall. No discerning bricklayer ninja would be caught dead with it, is what i'm saying -- they have pride.

@resonancewright

Well I do run a mall ninja kiosk on here:

We will add all "weapons of math instruction" to our stock.

https://sauropods.win/@futurebird/116547183020059381