Circular Seasoning
Logical fallacies can take many shapes. My favorite is the dodecahedron
One must imagine The Duckstack as ouroboros, eating its own tail1.
As you exit your house today, please notice the skydiving lemmings hitting the ground at meteor speed around you. *wham*, *wham*. Don’t worry, each is miraculously unharmed, but you see, lemmings are known to be gullible, so gravity affects them at fifty times the usual rate. As you stroll to your mailbox, please appreciate the thudding sounds, complimenting and enriching the experience.
Sharing Vulgarity
Stock prices are going up, and up! Buy shares now! Buy, Buy, Buy!
There seems to be a trend in media of replacing creativity with vulgarity. Perhaps you have seen it too, if you’ve watched Netflix or Hulu “adaptations”, seeing all the junk that they throw in can be frankly shocking.
By way of example, There is a webcomic that I love called “Poorly Drawn Lines”, a comic with a surreal schtick somewhere in the vicinity of taking odd points of view and making them poignant, which recently got a Hulu adaptation, which I am not going to watch any more episodes of. Where the webcomic is low tempo, the show can only be described as “screechy”. Where the comic ends each strip on a open note, the show obsessively ties everything back to “real world” dynamics. The characters in the comic swear, but the characters in the show only swear. In fact, it is difficult to go two sentences through the show without curse words, which is not only unpleasant, but also blurs the show’s tone considerably, like a graphite smudge on what could have been crisp pencil writing. Why is this?
The man or the boy who must resort to such language immediately says that he is poverty-ridden in his vocabulary. He does not enjoy sufficient richness of expression to be able to speak effectively without swearing or using foul words. -Gordon B Hinkley, “Take Not The Name of the Lord in Vain”
Be clean in language. There is so much of filthy, sleazy talk these days. I spoke to the young women about it. I speak to you also. It tells others that your vocabulary is so extremely limited that you cannot express yourself without reaching down into the gutter for words. - Gordon B Hinkley, “Be Ye Clean”
I certainly have to agree with President Hinkley here. Why all the swearing, if not to make up for a lack of content? I do not have much of an aversion to swearing, having grown up in the internet age, but it was fascinating to me how much it polluted the show- There wasn’t a lot of creative vision behind it in the first place, but the excessive angry cursing dragged it down to unwatchable levels2. and I see this trend in a lot of popular media. Stock vulgarity appears to be seen by many “artists” as a good replacement for art, wit, and vision, the same way pandering to political victim groups seems to be the default stand in for moral courage.
The common thread here, I believe, is that transgressiveness is a function of humor. Transgressive humor is funny, “I shouldn’t laugh at this” more often than not adds to a joke’s effect. The problem, is that to be transgressive in the internet age, is to be highly cancellable. A racist, sexist, “homophobic” etc joke, even in the distant past, can and does cost people their jobs all the time.
So what I believe is happening is this: We have all these artists and creatives who want to make stuff, but fir various reasons they also want to comply with this state religion, and not get branded a heretic/given a metaphorical scarlet letter by society. They are trying to create art that is still funny, but their compliance demands they avoid anything truly faux-pas. So the “equivalent” that they sort of get pushed into is just being vulgar, crass, angry, and loud, almost as a sort of cargo-cult into wit, as if aping some of the forms will bring in the soul.
The effect this has is a surplus of vulgarity and crudeness in society. We get tons of movies and shows and books, all extremely passionate, but without vision, because their risk aversion boxes them in, pre-emptively cutting them off from discovering “meaning off the beaten path”. All of it becomes gray, tired, warmed up leftovers of the same few things, and the quality of everyone’s entertainment goes down because of it.
This is not to say that taboos don’t have proper purposes in a functional society, but I for one am a little tired of being sprayed with firehoses full of mud and being told to call it a bath.
HISTORY
yelling screaming crying convulsing on the floor because my kid wont eat chocolate
The Little One helped feed his younger brother yesterday, under our supervision of course. He shoved the bottle right into his throat as far back as it went, which while this sounds painful don’t worry it was actually helpful because the baby naturally tries to do this exact same thing all on his own every time we let him get his hands on the bottle. But when it was done, the Little One still remembered past experience with the Littlest One’s appetite: “Its gone. Now he’s gonna eat me!” Its just logic.
Whenever you blow up a bunch of balloons for a party, there’s always one that remains for years after, seemingly never losing any air. Well, we’ve got one of those, and the Littlest One discovered it, and has been having a blast wrestling the thing on our carpet, rolling around, pinning it, biting it, etc. You might worry about it blowing up in his face, but I’m not, because if the balloon has survived this many weeks, a little biting isn’t gonna stop it now. And so far, I’ve been right. It really might be invincible. Maybe it has sacred power, and we’ll get bounty hunters invading our house seeking it, soon enough. I’m not worried though, because we’ve been preparing defenses for that eventuality anyway.
DUCKSTACK COOKBOOK: TOP RAMEN
Today’s cuisine will be a five star favorite: Maruchen
Friends, we are in full survivalist mode here, and we’re here to teach you some of our organization’s essentials. To help you get you in the mood too, start by burning your house down, to enhance realism. Great! Now, you’ve probably heard of “Top Ramen”, because, in the store, it costs less than the average Duckstack.
To start our adventure, you’ll need to catch some wild ramen fishing in a stream. Its important to have a decent fishing pole, called a “rod”, and some good bait. I like to use Jell-o for this, but admittedly it is a little hard to get on the lure, so you can use pudding or water or lava or just whatever essentials you have on hand in your kitchen. Get a bite, reel it in, and put it in your icebox to thaw or do the opposite of that, whatever, you just need something to carry it in. Now take it home.
You’ll want to get some water ready in a pot. You need the water to be boiling- if you’ve still got any of that lava left, go ahead and toss it in, it should heat the water nicely. If you’re out of lava, try rubbing two sticks together inside the water to light it on fire, or if you’re a more modernist type who keeps high tech on hand all the time, just light some matches and drop them in, until the water is boiling.
Now that the water is prepared, it is time for the special sauce: put the ramen into the water3, and boil it for about 5 minutes, until its plastic wrapper shell sloughs off. This can then be discarded or claimed as a trophy, your choice. You may notice the ramen is starting to get a little agitated at this point, but this is good. In fact, you want to agitate it further, really teasing it apart, perhaps with a fork, spoon, pitchfork, pitch spoon, tuning fork, whatever household essentials you have in your kitchen, really. Keep this up until when you lift the ramen out of the water, it is floppy, like a noodle.
Now, this is important, you will want to drain the water, but not all of it. You want about as much water as there is ramen, then pour it all into a bowl. Season it however you like, with the seasoning packet each ramen cultivates like a pearl inside its winter shell.
Now its time to eat up, all those precious carbs! If you have nutrition concerns, remember what we at The Duckstack always say4: carbs aren’t real, its just air. So the only danger you need to worry about is eating too much air, and inflating your little cells like basketballs until they pop. But it would take a lot of ramens to do that, many more than you caught, so you can enjoy your ramen in safety, with The Duckstack Guarantee™5 that it is safe, healthy6, and delicious. Enjoy!
I Scintillia Like As in the Band
You scintillia
A female vocalist in an industrial band? Try it, its good.
Mouthful of feathers, yuck
I wonder if this is a product of the creator giving Hulu’s butchers (cough, writers) influence. Having the extra hands in the pot, rather than him just honestly choking when the time came to move to animated media
from water it comes, to water it returns, put it in the pot
since just barely
Not actually trademarked
admittedly it is probably not that.