@ClarkGregg : I love combat sports and adrenaline. I also suffer from anxiety and panic attacks. They’re part of me and dealing with them has made me a stronger, deeper human. That’s why #idontmind telling you that your mental health is as important as your physical health. So let’s talk about it and wear the words #idontmind. #miaw17 @nami @idontmind #mentalillnessawareness
While A Wing & A Prayer and Birds of a Feather (the bottom two paintings) are still available as originals, I’m opening up the askbox for prints.
Please include the name of the print you want, an email address for the invoice, and a shipping address in your ask. (The askbox sometimes eats intact email addresses, so please use AT or DOT instead of the symbols.) I’ll be responding to print asks tomorrow at 5, so if you don’t have a response by then, your ask may not have gotten through. Shoot me a message at that point.
Prints are $10 + shipping, originals are $20 + shipping, and there’s no limit on how many prints you can order. You have the next 24 hours to send me an ask for prints!
writers of avengers fic consistently misunderstand this phrase, and honestly i don’t blame them, it’s pretty confusing in context. bucky barnes is a sniper. snipers use rifles. fury was shot outta nowhere, by a sniper, presumably with a rifle. and if you’re not a humongous gun nut, you probably don’t automatically think slug == shotgun, not rifle. nor will you know that ‘rifling’ can mean two different things.
lucky for you, i am a humongous gun nut, so i’m here to sort that out for you!
okay, for starters, shotgun barrels are, in fact, rifled. and we all know you trace a bullet by the marks the barrel’s rifling leaves on it. so how could the winter soldier’s leavings make the ballistics techs at SHIELD shrug helplessly? well, because it wasn’t a bullet, it was a slug. a shotgun slug. and in shotgun slugs, ‘rifling’ doesn’t mean the grooves in the barrel, it means the fin-like protrusions on the slug itself, like so:
that’s an american-made big game slug, and it’s got those fins to keep it twisting despite the drag of the cork back end, which acts to stabilize it with air resistance. short range, but plenty effective if you’re hunting moose.
but the winter soldier was hunting bigger game: nick fury. through a brick wall. which is why he used something more like this:
stainless steel saboted slugs. as you can see, they have no rifling – that is, no twisty fins. they rely on their forward-weighted mass for their accuracy, which is tolerably good up to about 100 meters.
there are a number of russian makers of these, going back to soviet days, but you can also easily machine your own. these don’t deform on impact, meaning they wouldn’t have great stopping power against, say, a charging polar bear – but also meaning they keep their trajectory when going through obstructions like the wall of steve’s apartment. and that plastic sabot, or boot, which makes it fit tight and grip in the barrel, flies off when fired, taking with it any identifying marks from the barrel rifling.
i don’t think we ever got to see what bucky fired these from, but it would probably have been something like this:
a russian vepr 12 shotgun, which looks a whole lot more like a rifle than a shotgun at first glance. tactical shotguns like these are popular with law enforcement for the same reason bucky used one to shoot fury – urban combat. right through the dang wall.
so there you have it. ‘russian slug, no rifling’ means bucky came loaded for bear.
“A devout cat lives at a fourteen hundred year old museum Hagia Sophia in Turkey, guarding and preserving its religious and cultural history every single day. His name is Gli.
He is a loyal feline that resides in the 1,475 year old museum. He is slightly cross eyed but a whole lot of cute.”
knitting in the dark 