Duckstack: As seen on TV
Thank you all for coming to today’s special Underwater Duckstack Weaving Class. I know many of you had doubts, me included, about whether the class would be worth it1 or even what the class would be about, but I'm grateful for your show of support. Now here swims out instructor, bobdaduck.
ALRIGHT MAGGOTS. I’M HERE TO WHIP YOU INTO SHAPE. THIS ISN’T A CLASS FOR WIMPS, SO GET YOUR REAR(s) IN GEAR
“is this like underwater basket weaving”
LOOK AT THIS JOKER. I WANT HIM OUT OF MY CLASS BY MORNING. THERE'S NO ROOM FOR SISSIES IN THE WORLD AND I'M HERE TO TRAIN THE ELITE. DO YOU WANT TO BE THE BEST OF THE BEST?
“not really”
WELL TOO BAD. THE MAXIMUM HUMAN LUNG CAPACITY IS 10 MINUTES AND WE'RE GOING TO THIRTY
Rental Illness
Take care of people you borrow
I don’t really care about the mentally ill.
I mean, I do, they’re children of God and we can help them and helping those less fortunate than you is an important part of the gospel. But I don’t make policy on them. If someone wants to be mentally ill they should do it on their own time.
One of the cool things about the internet is that people you used to be able to recognize on sight as severely mentally ill now look totally normal. You can read some story about someone’s horrible parent mistreating them or whatever and totally miss that in real life this person ranting about their parents is a massive drug addict who sincerely walks around on all fours all day because they believe themselves to be an animal owned by shadow people, when they are not having fits. But they can string words together well enough in text that they’re not really distinguishable from any other random person who is bad at writing, which I remember from elementary school is about 70% of the population. So we all go around all day thinking these crazy people are normal. The closest word I can think of for this phenomenon is pornography.
When I heard about kids eating tide pods, my first thought was “that’s ridiculous.” I wasn’t talking about kids eating tide pods, I was talking about people talking about kids eating tide pods. Why would you talk about that? It made no sense to me. It is like talking about shadow people. And the problem isn’t that shadow people don’t exist (relatively), the problem is that shadow people have no bearing on anything. Unless you live with one, of course. Or someone who is a shadow person’s pet. But I don’t. Nobody in my circle of friends, circle of friends, circle of friends, has ever eaten a tide pod, or would ever eat a tide pod. There’s no point in spending hours hashing out some sort of tide pod policy decision on any level other than “how do we restrict social media virality so that people stop thinking mentally ill people are 70% of the population”. That’s the only level discussion of it makes any sense.
Same with multiple current events lately. Certain extremes of activism and behavior are really no different from a story about a mentally handicapped person driving a car into a lake to find atlantis2, it doesn’t “mean” anything. It only means “maybe this person shouldn’t have been driving a car.” Maybe these people shouldn’t have had access to social media. Maybe we shouldn’t take schizophrenics seriously just because they are able to drape their hallucinations in the language of activism and politics.
I think I’m basically ahead of the curve on this. As AI gets better, hundreds of millions are going to start getting hit with scams and invented narratives on a level never possible in history, and at that point there really is only one rule: Trust only your own eyes. If you can’t hit it with a hammer, it doesn’t exist, it didn’t happen. Just like Millennials learned to distrust scam phone calls and Nigerian prince emails, the next generation will only work with what they can touch. The insane world is big, and the sane world is smaller. The more our reach expands, the more nearsighted we become. Whether tide pod eaters are real in technicality, they are fake in practicality. Its nothing personal. Its just logistics.
Ask The Experts
I used to be a mere pert, now I am an ex-pert
As you know, The Duckstack is home to a diverse population with many backgrounds, but one dream3. Can the eye say to the body, I have no need of thee? But we wanted you to get to know some of our less public residents, who have great hidden talents! In fact, everyone is an expert in something, and by interviewing them, we hope some of their knowledge can rub off on you.4
Our first expert was Hashish, a duck who often spends his time relaxing under a tree near the central pond. Hashish is an expert in ice. While talking to him, he showed us his snowflake collection, which he keeps in a large briefcase, with carefully catalogued pockets for each lovingly itemized flake. We were awestruck by the variety of formations the snow crystals could grow into, and Hashish proudly explained that his collection didn’t have a single duplicate. He waxed sentimental about how different snowflakes in his collection were from different countries entirely- he was particularly proud of an Arizona flake that he had snagged on a family trip there, which happened to coincide on the day of one of the only snows in a decade. He pulled it out of its designer snowflake sleeve and showed it to us, holding it aloft with tweezers. We learned a lot about snowflakes from him, and his collection was certainly impressive until it melted in the sun while we were talking.
The second expert we talked to was Carlos, an Olympic swimmer in the community pond and well known to all. But did you know Carlos is an expert in pi? We were actually expecting to talk to him how he swims so well, and he told us he recites pi during the breaststroke, which enables him to enter a trance state with laser focus, no distractions. “Here, I’ll show you”, he said, and started just saying numbers. I only know the first 15 digits of pi so I’m not sure how accurate he was after that, but when we left him he was still there, standing glassy-eyed, speaking numbers in a dull monotone. He was still there a few hours later when the sun was setting and we were wrapping up interviews. Would that we could all be so well informed as he!
A duck we hadn’t seen very often before was there, you might know him by his title Neutron. Neutron likes to waddle around the park on giant stilts, terrorizing other lounging ducks and chasing children. But did you know he is an expert in the solar system? Neutron confessed to us that he mostly wants to give people a sense of scale, and his purpose is education, which is why he wears a giant cardboard scale model of the solar system as a mobile everywhere he goes. Suspended by strings, his little planets would be great learning tools if everyone else wasn’t so busy running away. Stomping on someone’s sandcastle, he explained to us that cosmic radiation form the sun would obliterate the Earth just like that if we didn’t have our atmosphere to protect us, and that eventually he hoped to make stilts long enough to put up another one.
Arnold: This duck is an expert in fatness. He’s the fattest duck I’ve ever seen. He didn’t really want to talk about it at first, but once he realized our goal was to learn how to emulate his lifestyle, he lit up. “Drink high fructose corn syrup through a straw.” He told us. “Walk on your wings instead of your feet to avoid distributing weight by gravity. People say to eat Twinkies but its a trap because they don’t have an ideal balance of unhealthiness and you lose a lot of nutrient density to preservatives preventing your bulk. If you must swim, use a floaty and a remote controlled fan you stuck upside down in the water. If you’re really serious, you’ll need a friend. You can lose an incredible amount of valuable calories in carrying things yourself, even holding your phone can burn 30 calories per hour. Normal people just don’t understand the risk.”
Last we interviewed Richard, an expert in silence.
History
baby zombie in nose wah wahh
Grandma was trying to convince Jethro to eat fish. “Eat the fish, its good for your brain. Do you know what your brain is?” And Jethro said “its what zombies eat”
The kids were playing vending machine mama. The toddler would run screaming and then run back with a bunch of imaginary coins, which Jethro would shove into mama’s mouth. She had no choice in this- she was trying to go to the bathroom.
toddler: “mama can I have some chocolate milk with no spiders in it” Yes, you may
asked the toddler how his diaper was and he looked up at me as if to comfort me, and told me “Its right here.”
I told everyone “I'm off to the dentist.” and Jethro asked “can I see if there's any bac-ter-i-as in your teeth when you get back?”
Dentist says my teeth look great, but he suspects I might have a rare redhead disease called gingivitis. Hopefully there’s a cure
The toddler was playing “run from mama dinosaur” in her giant light up dinosaur mask and he swiveled around and bashed his head into the counter. He went to mama for comfort but was a little unsure about it due to the giant dinosaur face
Ducksnax
Volleyball
you get what you pay for
WITH apologies to all my based friends. Its different when you do it.
Stacking
No offense