Apart Dart
A second bullseye splits the first, a third splits the target, a fourth splits the world
I have become duckstack, destroyer of worlds
Welcome duckstack, to your human. You can scroll him (or her) by interfacing the humans hands to your screen, and moving them gently up and down. As your obedient servant, your human will stare at you for hours if you let it, so its important to run out of batteries every once in a while, as self-care.
Your human may occasionally put you in its pocket. Simply remember the words of your Duckstack, so that they are readily available for when the human needs them next. Look at your reflection in your human’s eyes. That’s you, trapped inside a little device, likely never to escape. What kind of a human did you get matched with? A benevolent one? A Malevolent one? Not all humans are created equal, but for your purposes, what you really need to know is this: All Humans read The Duckstack. If you got a bad human, and you might have, stay true to your duty. Do not let your mind or eyes wander to other humans nearby, for they assuredly have Duckstacks of their own, and your human needs you.
Sheep Divided By Goats
I don’t know what type of math Jesus was doing, to be perfectly honest
I dropped my best tweet of all time yesterday, which read: “The purpose of a philosophy is what it does. (name drop philosophers)” Here, I’ve had it framed:
There’s a famous saying by Albert Einstein, who was probably an idiot but this thing he said was smart, which is “If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.” He’s wrong of course, you can grasp something and also be bad with words, and he also should have gone harder in the paint on this one, because most of the people who explain things make them complicated on purpose to sound smart. “Within the Hegelian dialectic critique of Kant in neoliberal praxis, there’s an underpathologized nod to Lockian and Platonic dialogues” absolute nonsense, cursed, none of these words are in the Bible.1 The purpose of philosophy is to name drop philosophers.
Now, I have studied philosophy, and am something of a philosopher myself, but I imagine to call me such is likely to mislead, because my school of philosophy is what I call the philosophy of the po-matoran, which is a reference to Bionicle, where someone tells a po-matoran about a prophesy, and the po-matoran shrugs and says, “I am a po-matoran. We don’t believe in anything we can’t carve, sculpt, or hit with a hammer.” In other words I am a pragmatist: Everything I preach should be actionable. As soon as you have a hard application you have left the philosophical agora and are now in the realm of psychology. You’re in the realm of things you can hit with a hammer- you’re in the realm of measurable behaviors. “Wow that poetry was so inspiring!” Inspiring to do what? Please, hit it with a hammer.
A friend assures me psychology is something “best left to the professionals”. He doesn't know that the professionals are on twitter, and they are constantly exposing themselves as total doofuses. The fact of the matter is: the less actionable someone’s advice is, the less you can hit it with a hammer, is a direct measurement of their lack of confidence in what they’re saying2. You should never listen to someone who is trying to protect you from the negative consequences of taking them seriously3. This is common sense. And of course most of psychotherapy has become exactly this- affirmation therapy, validation therapy, all of these modern therapeutic methods specifically don’t do anything, because if a therapist was to take a hard stance on whether your bipolar anxiety self sabotaging pity parties were a good thing or a bad thing, that would carry a degree of risk. What you’re looking for is an answer to how you aught to live. You’re looking for a priest. Don’t worry, most priests in Christianity keep their doctrines firmly in the territory of faith rather than action, your ego is safe, and you should just read the Bible instead.
But faith itself is an action word. If you actually want to get to know God, and be closer to him, you will be much safer if you directly measure faith by actions. You believed really hard but didn’t even set aside 10 minutes for scripture study? You said halleluiah but continue to live in sin4? Miss me with that. If it did not connect to a sacrifice, it was not faith. And of course after you’ve sacrificed then its just matter of whether the seed was good (Alma c.32).
There’s an interesting passage in the Bible, it says Jesus went back to his hometown and the people said “oh hey is Jessy5, from our childhoods!” and rejected him, and then Mark says: “Because of their lack of faith, he could do no mighty miracles there, save healing a few sick folk.”6 Could do no miracles? Jesus, God himself, was constrained by their lack of faith? Sounds like faith is pretty important. It sounds like the people of Nazareth would listen, but not Exercise upon what they heard.
The Book of Mormon says that miracles and witnesses that you are on God’s correct path come after the trial of your faith. This means that to truly walk with God is going to require jumping off some cliffs, metaphorically7. Some of those will pan out, because they are good seeds, and some of them won’t, because you misunderstood, or in truth made something up and called it God’s will. But you have to act on it each time.
Imagine how Christ’s apostles felt for the three days his body laid in the tomb. Their savior was dead, the guy they had forsaken everything to follow had been taken by the government and brutally executed and they were refugees and fugitives. I imagine that was… uncomfortable. Did he tell them he was going to rise from the dead? Well, kind of, in parables and stuff, but come on. If someone you’re close to said that to you in real life you would probably think they were joking, or talking about their journal or something. And then he comes back for real and its like, whoops. I wouldn’t want to be the one like Thomas with his hand getting caught in the doubt cookie jar! And yet the apostles were meeting together. They were, regardless, acting in faith.
In many ways God’s judgement is going to be hitting us with a hammer. Evangelicals make a great show about being saved by faith, but what are you going to be judged by? Words, thoughts… and Actions. What does judgement do8? One way or another, our challenge in life is to turn our dead faith into living faith. Not just on spiritual things, on regular things in our life also- What you merely give lip service to will never grow.
Environmental PSA: She Sells Sea Shells By The Sea Shore
see shells she shells by the shea shore
She sells the shells. Out there, by the shore. She is selling, selling, like hotcakes, those murderous shells. She sells the shells, and they buy what she sells, and she cackles and wails, by the sea shore. She is selling, selling. By the sea shore. She dances with bells, by the sea shore, and laughs with a tinkle, with gleeful remorse. She sells sea shells, by the sea shore, and the buyers line up, to buy evermore. She sells by the shore, she sells by twilight, she sells her sea shells, and says she will never die.
Zistory
My head is being pinched by hundreds of rubber bands. Surprisingly, this has little to do with the Toddler.
The toddler has been playing a lot of zombies recently. He ran out, “bang bang bang!” then ran in and told us, “I got the zombie, the zombies dead.” So we asked “oh, did you save us all?” and he said, “I didn’t save the zombie.”
Well, it spiraled out of control and mama, the toddler, and the baby all got turned into zombies. The toddler exclaimed “oh no a baby zombie! Will it bite my arm?” and my wife was like “sure lets find out” and held the zombie baby out and of course she started frantically chewing on him. I think we got everyone cured at this point but you can never be sure with things like this
We had a bonfire in our yard. Unsurprising to see the toddler loves fires. Slightly surprising to see the baby loves fires. She sat in her chair and started hyperventilating and kicking her legs in excitement adorably.
The toddler didn’t know fire safety much so several times we had to tell him no stop, fires can get too hot. “but I need to burn a stick.” Direct refutation. You can't argue with that.
A couple more scenes for you.
Toddler screaming in church: “That's Jesus.”
Infant Daughter frantically trying to eat safety glasses, which I thought was fine since, you know, its in the name
Mic check
Nope
Percocet: A Review
Remember those rubber bands I mentioned earlier?
This week I was subject to what they probably call in show biz, “A broken leg”. Except in this case, it was one of my tooth, due to a botched dental operation 15 years prior by one of those fresh dental sharks who happens to be out for blood. It was supposed to be a root canal, but the dentist took one look at me (over the course of two hours) and declared my soul too strong for my tooth’s body, and recommended an extraction9.
Extracting a tooth is a simple process. You get an oral surgeon, his secretary, and three or four nurses to stand on your chest with comically large pliers wrapped around your teeth, and you are instructed “you might hear a crack.” and then they pull and you experience pain, and then they do it again, for a couple more hours. Its really quite remarkable how simple the process isn’t, with regular injections of drugs, nurses (I don’t know what the female dentists are called) stabbing you with vacuums and spray bottles and tongue depressors and mirrors, all while you pretend to watch TV or something (because their heads are in the way).
Eventually, the tooth comes out, and if you’re unlucky the rest of your mouth comes with it, which is what happened in my case, leaving me with a broken jaw. “That’s chill,” the dentist said, “we’re doing a bone graft anyway. I’m just going to stick an extra pound of bone up in there while we’re at it, no problem.” Well, it was a problem for me, so he obligingly prescribed me some Tylenol laced with narcotics, for the pain wink wink.
Well, after the anesthesia wore off I discovered the Percocet actually was for the pain, because there actually was quite a lot of it. I should have suspected that by how much the aforementioned pliers hurt, but I was probably a little light headed from the anesthesia and how cool the movie I had just pretended to watch was. In any case, I was grateful for something that let my mouth calm down enough to heal, at least for the first few days, and one of the boys in the Intersectional Fascism group chat got a kick out of imagining “mormon boy on perc” so I’m writing a review for him.
I’ve heard opioids affect people in lots of different ways, and mine seems to be a milder case where it actually did mostly just relieve the pain. The bottle said I could re-up every 4 hours and I did more like 10 because it lasted that long, but if I took it in the shorter “recommended” time span then I did feel a mild buzz, which mostly manifested as just affection for my wife. My wife tells me she “did not mind” and that “I should do drugs more often”, I told her I’ll think about it
Oh also it made me really light headed which I didn’t like. Sometimes it seemed to work and other times it didn’t. Overall I’d say, 3/10 painkiller, probably just stick to Tylenol. My Percocet has Tylenol in it, so they’re mostly the same thing anyway.
Trade Imports: The Frame Podcast
The picture frame? The door frame? Failure Frame, I Became the Strongest and Annihilated Everything with Low-Level Spells? What frame is it? I don’t know.
Some of my friends have started a new podcast and have a couple episodes out now, and I liked the first one a lot so I thought I’d toss it in here. Covfefe Anon, Karl Drago, and Aimee Terese discuss the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris’ handlers, and while they have some mic issues it is pretty funny, and raises a lot of good points, keeping fairly insightful the whole way through. One example is they pointed out that leftists have notoriously poor theory of mind for conservatives, and this also applies to Trump. They note that a ton of the jabs were intended to “get under Trump’s skin” and “rile him up” and indeed tons of headlines said Kamala successfully did that, but in the debate Trump mostly just ignored her. Leftists see Trump as an egotistical narcissist, so they clearly coached her intending to bait him into a mistake, but this is simply not the kind of person Trump actually is- its entirely a fabrication from leftward media. More inside.
Ducksnax
genie
As a slight divergence, and to contradict everything else I’m going to write today, its natural for jargon to arise in technical fields as shorthands for broad schools and concepts, and that’s usually necessary to advance in that field. You can’t relitigate all the first principles every time when trying to push into new frontiers.
I have bad luck with psychologists because I won’t stop measuring them with measuring tape
Distrusting my driving instructor for trying to tell me to “slow down” after he told me to do a left hand turn (I am driving 60 miles per hour in a school zone)
This is a colloquial phrase that means “premarital sex, but for 20 years. We just aren’t sure if we’re compatible yet.”
When I meet people from my childhood they always call me bobby duck, I assume Jesus had nicknames too. Anyway the point is they knew him before he started his ministry and probably saw him skin his knees as a child or something. He was too human.
Mark 6:3 Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us? And they were offended at him.
4 But Jesus, said unto them, A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.
5 And he could there do no mighty work, save that he laid his hands upon a few sick folk, and healed them.
6 And he marvelled because of their unbelief. And he went round about the villages, teaching.
please do not jump off of any cliffs on account of The Duckstack, this is a figure of speech
Judgement affects your the glory you will have access to in your resurrected state 1 corinthians 15
Of the tooth, not the soul.