Blues Rues
A fireman waters fire, a waterman fires water.
Whistling through the duckstack
Have you heard of “blue light”? Its true, in fact there are many colors swirling all around us, even now, that we cannot see. Look around you. Can’t you see all the colors? Blue light is a cousin to “infrared”, being just a little to the left1 on the color spectrum from ultraviolet. It is also a cousin to blue light, as in the wavelength, but we use the same word for each because they’re both blue.
Anyway, color is all around us, but invisible, emitted from devices such as light bulbs, screens, and the sun. And screens, as in phones and computers, emit special light called “blue light” which is evil. At some point, everyone became conscious of this at the same time via a mass revelation drawn from the ether- “blue light is evil”. Try telling the next human you see, as an experiment. Will they argue? None of them will2. Blue light comes from phones, computers, and like most light makes its way into your eyeballs, where it sloshes down your retinas and into your brain. The brain is the ultimate destination of all light, and if you look around you, you will see this to be the case. The light goes straight for your brain, first chance it gets.
That’s not the problem. We know from science that colors don't really weigh anything so you’re not going to “fill up” or anything like that. The problem is that blue light is into discotek and immediately sets up your brain to throw a party. This is reported to cause difficulty sleeping in some people who are too weak minded to handle a little disco music. Personally, I fall asleep when using screens. I’m asleep while I’m writing this, right now.
Cheap Taste
No no, its “designer” plastics3
The internet has brought all of us closer together45. People are more accessible than ever before, a veritable cornucopiac banquet of information and content. As we have seen, this is really depressing.
With information comes being surrounded with examples of very high skill. For a significant amount of people, this has the effect of preventing them from even trying to develop their talents- “I’ll never really be good.” Their standard of “good” has raised beyond all reason into the realm of parody and nightmare. Nevertheless it is true: Your grandpa had a pretty good shot growing up of becoming the best he had ever seen at his trade. The same can’t be said of people now6. We are surrounded by excellence, but this is also causing us to be surrounded by wretchedness, is it not? Everyone agrees the quality of movies has nosedived.
As recently as the 90s this wasn’t the case- In school you had guys getting good at hackey-sack, tec-deck (the finger skateboards), standup comedy. They had a chance of becoming the best they’d ever seen in their community, and they applied themselves. Now even video games toss you in a lobby full of strangers, and you are given a ranking label that tells you exactly how you stack up against people who are actually good at the game, and people grind obsessively, but not possessively. There is no opportunity to gain reputation in modern pursuits.
At least not honorably.
I mean, technically you can. But the on ramp is much larger and the results far less guaranteed, which is basically a sentence that captures pretty much all differences between the old days and today.
There is a type of media personality that isn't very smart, but desires power and prestige. This includes me so lets not get too condemnatory, but there's a lot of people out there who do it “better than you”. So the solution is to try to carve out a niche, and through niches you can be “the best in the world” within your weird specific thing that there's less of a market for. You can build this sort of thing on truth following the rules of respect, or you can build it on lies.
If you build it on truth, your focus is on providing honest value, such as it is, and you accept that you’ll have a smaller audience share since you aren’t as good at juggling or pro-life propaganda or whatever. If you decide instead to build on lies, anything is free game, because you can just lie to people. I think this isn’t obvious to many though. A political commentator can get extremely far by just making up conspiracies and posting meager evidence in favor of them, and writers can get very far by having AI write puff summaries on websites that they can then flood google’s algorithm with. You can be the best in the world at something without any expertise at all- especially in the realms of words and opinions, what you’re really selling is how you can get people to feel.
In most cases that’s outrage. Outrage sells a lot better than sex. The earliest journalist, Satan, discovered this with Cain, and has been refining his strategies ever since, and I’ll be the first to tell you there is such a thing as righteous outrage but honestly if you see something online that makes you mad your first thought should be they’re selling something.
New Game: Checkers
patent pending
I’ve got a new game for you lovers of the middle ages, it has kings and queens and knights and bishops and pawns and its called checkers, because when you got a guy lined up to hurt the king you say “check!”
The goal of the game is to get enough guys hurting the king that he goes home and cries. Easier said than done! You also aren’t allowed to actually hurt him, that would be improper. The order of operations is threaten, threaten, good game. That’s what makes for a good checkers.
You can have lots of different colors but we’re using white and black, to symbolize eating all colors and devouring their energy to fuel your mad schemes, and reflecting all colors away because you’ve been hurt in romance before, and you don’t want to let anyone get too close. All the pieces are blind, so players have to move them.
One of the most novel things you can do in checkers, besides yelling check, is “castling”. This is why medievalheads love it. You can flip the king into the castle to keep him from getting hurt, just like your love life (if you’re playing as white). The game gets its educational value because the names of the pieces are all medieval, and we’re going to sell it as “the smart person’s game”, since medieval stuff is usually pretty smart.
History
Snoozestory
Took the toddler to the aquarium this week. “oh look the cute fishies wimming around around!” And then he stopped, and very sternly said: “adorable fishes.”
toddler scolding me after trying to climb my leg: You're too slippery
toddler after unscrewing a water bottle and spilling water everywhere “oh no it spilled itself!”
Baby reaches out and grabbed the toddler’s hair, she comes away with a strand and that's when the protests start: “Noo that's not your hair! I need that there.”
The toddler didn’t want to leave a playground to go home, and he cried and kicked and wailed: “No the house is not right, the park is right.”
We were driving through a big farm type place and the toddler was singing to himself and I tuned in. “There’s a farmers market. And another farmers market. And another farmer’s market!” and I was like “…What do you think a farmer’s market is?” and he said “its red.” So he means the barns. He calls barns “farmers markets”.
The Orphan and the Frog
A parable about animal identification
Once upon a time an orphan boy found a frog, and he picked it up and took it home. The orphanage girls were all grossed out since it was all slimy, which drove home to them the courage or insanity princesses who kiss the things must possess. The teacher freaked out and said “that’s a poisonous tree frog! They have more poison than blood! They have so much poison they could fell an ox! They secret poison and even things that touch them get poisoned! They can spit poison 50 feet. The boy yawned and said “so? I can do all that too.” And then he transformed into a poison dart frog7, right in front of the teachers eyes, and shot poison out of his eyeballs all over the room causing all the girls to scream and freak out and all the boys to go “cool!" and “wow!”. The frogboy found the teacher in the corner dying and said, “You knew what I was when you picked me up.” And the teacher said “What? No I didn’t this is insane” and then died. The end
Ducksnax
Rocket
`` Previous Duckstack ``
or right, I don’t know
Or your money back!
And in my blood? That’s designer microplastics, baby.
We’re packed like sardines in here, in this internet.
.. Other than physically
Humbly, I am the best I have ever seen at writing Duckstacks
dont try this at home
“The earliest journalist, Satan” is a line I will remember forever