Block Shock
Electric lego minefields: Based? Or war crime.
Where there’s a will, there’s a duckstack
We’ve got a bit of an emergency, and I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but its important to stay informed. In times like this, information is your best weapon. You see, wereduckstacks have begun biting everyone.
Let me be clear, there is a world of difference between duckstacks and wereduckstacks. Duckstacks form naturally when a group of ducks congregates and decides to go vertical, whereas wereduckstacks split a bitten person into a stack of ducks. Similar in appearance, but fundamentally different.
Question: If bitten by a duckstack, should I panic? No! Normal [sic] duckstacks do not carry or transmit lycanthropy. If bitten by a duckstack, there is a good chance it is merely one of the feral kind, and you only have to worry about rabies.
Question: I see ducks in the pond today. Should I panic? Well. We’re not clear on the science on this1, but we’re pretty sure lycanthropes only transform under the full moon and late on a Tuesday night, which is when normal duckstacks are written and published. So it has to be a full moon Tuesday, and those are pretty rare I think.
Question: Against all odds, I’m pretty sure I was actually bitten by a wereduckstack. Should I panic? No! Life as a wereduckstack can be very fulfilling for those that learn to live with it. On the night of the full moon you’ll split into a pecking frenzy, but since it happens at night it won’t really affect your day jobs. In fact many wereduckstacks report superhuman2 strength and endurance, and wake up the day after feeling refreshed and ready for the day. It isn’t all bad by any means!
That said please beware of any pecking duckstacks and report them to the duckstack authorities so we can keep tabs on this sort of thing, its really an evolving phenomenon and we don’t want to be caught napping when everyone’s duckstack emails start pecking the heck out of everyone.
Performances and Ordinances
“Talk is worthless. We are what we do.” -Akshan, from the game League Of Legends (which I do not play)
I come from a performing arts background. Not that I was a theatre kid, but I did ballroom competitively for nearly ten years, not to the professional level but enough. So I'm pretty comfortable with performances.
It is often something of a cynical take, to say “everyone's performing all the time” and I don't mean it in an enlightened way, I Just mean on a mathematical level. You put on a performance for others, and you put on a performance for yourself34, and by learning about these performances you can learn more about yourself and graduate on to more advanced mathematics, such as poetry
Humans structure their lives around narrative. It is a function of heuristics, that your brain literally does not have enough RAM to keep track of every detail of the world, so you have to settle for approximations5. Emotions are a huge help with this, both because memory recall keys to emotions so you are able to quickly surface things you believe to be important, and because emotions are able to encase many more data points than you can float in your head at once. And if you’re still not accurate after all that6, well, its because you don’t want to be, and then you become mentally ill.
Not frequently, but sometimes, I will write about our grief over losing our son only months ago. In many ways I am aware that to do so is to “deliberately pull on people’s heartstrings”- This obviously isn’t a case of someone walking in “at a bad time”, I’m specifically typing things up to share them. Which means that to write of our grief is a performance, no matter how authentic the pain is. I think by tracing out these performances you can learn a little bit about yourself, though of course I hope that others will get more out of it. To perform grief, to write it, almost like a ritual, lets you start to tease out certain landmarks, and familiarity breeds confidence and love. By anchoring these emotions in writing, memories become crystalized, less vulnerable to loss, and I think grief specifically helps us to feel human.
One definition of art is crystalized emotion. Though some will not share the emotion of the artist, good art lets the consumer create their own emotional connections, like a big circuit board, and you can draw power from it. You need art to inspire you. So while its a vulnerable and intimate thing, I justify writing out the grief. I’m not sure everyone needs to do art, but I do think that the process of creation necessarily brings you closer to God, who is the ultimate creator, and it is easier to be holy when you are partaking in the same. At the very least keep a journal.
history
History is short, when you are asleep all the time due to narcotics and jaw pain (I’m getting better)
The toddler has been slightly sick, and he woke up super early so I went and laid in his bed to try to incentivize him to calm down and sleep himself. He’s usually happy to cuddle, for about 5 seconds, so its worth a shot. Well, I like massages, so I put my hand on his back and started giving him a little toddler massage, and he looks at me and says in the most irritated toddler voice: “I don’t need Rubbers right now Papa.”
Talking to the toddler about runny noses and with great wisdom and clarity he summarizes: “The germs, are burgers.”
The toddler helped my wife make Gnocchi. He was good at rolling the dough into snakes, but got over-excited when she cut them up to make “pillows”. So he got kicked out of the kitchen for eating too many raw pillows7.
The wife got the house dressed up for Halloween, including an animatronic scarecrow pumpkin monster, thing. It is pretty spooky. But I have a worse ghost story for you: The toddler thinks its so cool that he won’t sleep he just wants to go outside and stare at it
Ducksnax
Swing
because we’re just making it up
Ducks > Human
And you put on a performance for the quaker oats man
*shudders*
This is not a silly footnote, this guy’s talk is my favorite of all time, about the savior and statistics.
We’re all mentally ill by this definition, which I am fine with. Its sufficient to say some people are way, way less accurate in their predictions for others behaviors and motivations, and you can learn a lot from extreme cases.
Our infant also has this problem, but we can’t really kick her out of anywhere. Nor would we want to tbh