Carte Heart
Put the whole universe on my tab
Where is my super duckstack
You know how when there’s a cake on the counter and its just calling out to you? Well my cake is calling me. My cake is calling me “bobdaduck”. “That’s Mr. Duck, to you. You’re no acquaintance of mine.” I tell it. The cake is informing me that I am two weeks past due on my automobile payment. I tell the cake to do something extremely anatomically improbable. The cake pulls out a gun. I roll my eyes. This is the third cake mugging this week. I do the same thing I always do. Get shot. “Writing newsletters doesn’t pay1 much2.” As I bleed out the cake calls out to me. “Then write more.” Here we are34.
Pending
I have rung your doorbell with this pen to bring you this important message
The Duckstack Zoo has acquired5 a new animal which is a pen bird, it has little bird feet and little bird wings but is just a pen, but it is quite alive. It hops around and twists itself from side to side to get a good look at you, fluttering and ruffling its wings to get them comfortable. Its unique call, a two pitch trill fills your house. It bends down and slams its head into the ground, pecking up grit and pebbles to eat, which it will convert along with the rest of its diet into the ink which is its bloodstream.
It can write but is quite illiterate. Its childlike scrawl is all but indecipherable, but may operate to mark its territory and attract a mate. Its grey plumage belies the colorful ink within, which coloration can change depending on its diet. It is a surprisingly robust animal6, curious, and intent in everything it does, and we can all learn a lot from it.
Sermon: The Machine God
It really grinds my gears
If you believe in God, at all, then you must acknowledge God could, in theory, tell everyone what religion to follow. So your belief system needs to account for why he doesn’t. To find a meme like this compelling requires your explanation to be simplistic, “its all Satan”
Its a variant problem of evil. Call it “The problem of lack of omnipotent clarity” or just “the problem of confusion.” I think you can see from internet atheists that most theist answers to this are actually very bad, because we observe most theists cannot accept God blessing heresy
People take for granted that if their religion is True then it must also be Important, but these are two separate propositions, and it does not necessarily follow at all. Anyone seeking to make converts must answer both. There must be a “why” to one’s directives
The standard answer theists give tends to be something like “to get to heaven”, as though God is a sort of referee with no investment in how people play a game, his only job being to call when you’ve correctly followed scoring procedure. Even non-theist religions are like this
To me this is a major red flag that the theological doctors of the various faiths are running on fumes. If you believe life is a giant marshmallow test+lottery, that’s an inadequate life map. In such a view God, any god, would be wasting a whole lot of everyone’s time for mere invisible/theoretical ends
If the point of life is to, at some point in your ~80 year timeline, make (for example) a verbal confession of faith, then what is all this other stuff. I have to work a job. what the crap. I can stub my toe and also I get to play video games. Theres a lot there
even within religions many doctrines and commandments are seen as “periphery”.
This is a logistical problem, not everything can be of maximal importance all the time. Call it “Dunbar Commandments”. Its probably less than 150. But there are way more than 150 good things in the world. So it should be expected that faiths are somewhat optimized
For how encompassing the Abrahamic God is on paper, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are some of the worst offenders here. This provides an easy route to gotchas like “atheists are more moral”, which is a smuggled goalpost-shift- atheism is superior to Christianity at optimizing for atheism
Atheism is an entirely Abrahamic phenomenon, of course. The ideological assumptions about morality are baked into atheism, including worldview supremacy. You just pick a more peripheral part of Christianity that atheism does better (like “tolerance” at and center it
There is a great spectrum of behaviors that are prosocial or antisocial, and a second y axis for whether these behaviors are of good character or poor character, and another axis where such behaviors are personally beneficial or not, playing with the numbers to present a nice face is trivial, religion tries to draw a regression line through 150 dimensional space
Even with God intervening this isn’t easy. A lot of scriptural absolutism or what we call Pharisaical is cope for this, rules substitute for faith often enough that you can get away with making rules into an idol, then at least you know what you’re doing. God hates that
There exist many funhouse and bizarre mutations of pharisaism. Salvation by correct profession/belief, eternal character insinuations as a response to sin, what those looking to self justify term “judgementalism” but it does happen sometimes. The lack of granularity exposes the attack vector but if you have the spirit of faith you shall not fear
This is what Paul meant when he said to the pure are all things pure. He became all things to all people to lift them up. Impractical but a directionally correct strategy7. The problem with eating meat in a pagan temple, participating in their rituals, it isn’t the participation, its the implication, the appearance of evil
It isn’t a free for all. There really is a regression line and you will be better off moving along it. But you cannot possibly see all the variables, let alone on another person’s path. That’s why faith is vital. Your personal disposition to pursue good. To move along the axis as best you can.
God isn’t going to condemn someone for failing to find the right religion. But he will condemn someone for failing to look into and seek the continuous Better. The meat eaters aren’t superior to those ready only for Milk but at least both are eating. You can immediately tell receptivity to the truth
God won’t condemn someone for their sect. But if you hear the gospel- the true gospel, not just the commandments, not just its signs, its trappings, and do not take the opportunity to advance- that is when you are in danger. The saints baptize for the dead and most of the dead receive it, but intent, motive power, will, is not created equal, I warn you that God knows this
The good news is that salvation really is by Grace. The bad news is that all actions have maximal, eternal consequences. “Who then can be saved?” The same way as a mustard seed: Grow.
The Tree Who Run the Race
medical advise
This tree is ready for the marathon, not a sprint. Its in its little red wagon and its ready to go. Its got its little tree limbs out and its gonna swim that pavement like oars, I tell you. Its got designer sneakers, sitting in its wagon. Running shoes, brand new. They almost sparkle in the sun. Its jersey doesn't fit well but you can tell its serious. Its here to win.
And there off. The tree is scooting down the road at record speed8. The other racers have legs but they don't have the tree equivalent of heart9. Look at that tree go. He’s passin’ ‘em. He’s finished fifth. Better than anyone expected. Defied. Great job tree. The tree that run the race.
history
Our son now calls the baby bouncer “the baby launcher”
“Are you south north?” -unprompted
“I WON TIC TAC TOE” I look over, the grid is just covered in Xs
Son staring in the mirror: “I want three million eyeballs.” And then in a different, higher pitched voice he says to himself: “three million eyeballs? But that will turn you into a monster!”
K-Pop demon hunter is a current sensation. But it is all my son knows about Korea. Korean “which ones are the demons”?
Our son ran over and we asked him where his sister is. He told us “She’s in the greenhouse.” And then our rule about leaving the greenhouse stuff alone occurred to him and he continued: “But I escaped from the greenhouse… before someone got mad at me.”
Our son was playing with the baby and she said to him, ‘aueue’, and he ran in incredibly excited. “She talks now! She talks now!”. A little bit later he was talking to her and asked us sadly: “Why isn’t she saying hi?”
The new baby reached out her hand and bop mama on the nose. “you got me!” “ehhh!”
At the zoo there was a statue of a giant Komodo dragon. The toddler went up to hit and put her hand on its head and just started talking
Ducksnax
Laundry
Crime doesn’t pay. Neither does writing free newsletters. Supervillains and I are similar, in that way
or at all
I’m scrawling this in blood on my computer screen as we speak, tell my wife I love her
Tell my wife that I was wondering if I could install some ten foot levitating pylons in our yard near the garden, I never got around to bringing it up
through a series of horrifying and illegal experimentation
(?)
“True, there are degrees of feeling and degrees of chastisement, and you are led to chastise one man differently to what you do another. You may, figuratively speaking, pound one Elder over the head with a club, and he does not know but what you have handed him a straw dipped in molasses to suck. There are others, if you speak a word to them, or take up a straw and chasten them, whose hearts are broken; they are as tender in their feelings as an infant, and will melt like wax before the flame. You must not chasten them severely; you must chasten according to the spirit that is in the person. Some you may talk to all day long, and they do not know what you are talking about. There is a great variety. Treat people as they are.
When you consider that you are not worthy to belong to the kingdom of God, wait a moment. Would you like to be a Saint? “Yes; I would give anything in the world—yea, my life, to be a true Latter-day Saint.” What, and then say you are not worthy to have a name in the kingdom of God? That is the most unwise expression you have uttered. We are making Saints of just such characters. I expect to be made a Saint myself, though I have many weaknesses about me. I am going to get rid of them as fast as I can. Have I not a desire to do right? Yes; and the Gospel is designed to make us better and bring us to understanding. When you are rebuked by each other—when brethren meet you and say, “This is wrong in you,” you should receive it kindly, and express your thanks for the reproof, and acknowledge the wrong frankly, and admit that you may frequently do wrong when you do not know it, and say, “I wish you to enlighten my mind, to take me by the hand, and let me go along hand in hand, and strengthen and sustain each other.” What, in your weaknesses? Yes. Do you expect to see a perfect man? Not while you stay here.”
for a tree
Bark maybe? We'll get our Duckstack scientists on this later.
As usual I'm up way later than I should be but at least I got to read this. Sometimes (often) I wonder how one could know in what direction they are moving, whether my regression line is positive or negative. Or is it f*cking flat, or has it broken free from its two dimensions and is currently heading into space? Im certainly moving in a direction, but where? I think someone or someones once said something to the effect of "suffering makes you a better person", but does it? I suppose it depends on who suffers, so the real question is, "is it"? You also mentioned those who self-justify. I'm always wary of falling into this temptation, but sometimes I wonder if in my desire to not self-justify, I have unknowingly engaged in self-deception to tell myself I do not self-justify, when I learn some idea or principal that somewhat assuages self-loathing, am I gaining light and knowledge or am I self-justifying? Who can say.