Collision Derision
Preserving momentum by pressure canning it in food storage mason jars
Once a duckstack, always a duckstack
I apologize once again for the slight tardiness of The Duckstack today. I’m giving myself a pay cut as punishment.
Management says Duckstack numbers are up 100% from the last time they fudged the numbers, which is a really good sign! Because when we last fudged Duckstack numbers, they came out a little low. Looks like we’re on a trend out of the darkness though! With all these new numbers, we’re going to need to make a special effort to count accurately. “Why”. Well that is an excellent question.
Imagine that you are a new number, say, eleventy five. And you’ve just come on The Duckstack, and someone is counting bricks in the wall. Seems innocuous enough, doesn’t it? But what if that person gets to fifth green and skips right over eleventy five? You would feel devastated. You might even feel like The Duckstack had abandoned you. You might even feel like you had only been made up for someone’s nonsensical intro bit, destined to pass into oblivion because no one will remember you. That’s the kind of tragedy which we intend to prevent.
So next time you count, remember eleventy-five comes after fifth green, and before Fish: The Number. If you find this a little hard to remember, just think of the new number’s smiling face when you remember to include him1. I think when we’re not all shooting each other, there’s no harm in validating each other like so. It costs you nothing to remember every hypothetical imaginary number that could come after everything you say, and it could be the straw that breaks the camels back to be forgotten. So be careful, and try not to cause any casualties.
Sponsored Message: Hairbrush
Yes dad I know you sing the hairbrush song every time you even hear the word but this isn’t what this is about
Have you ever wondered why that stuff all over your head looks a little unruly? Ever felt self conscious at a party, where everyone else seemed to have their heads on perfect point? Well, you were right, you look ridiculous. Have we got the invention for you. For only four easy payments of $2.292 you can wield hairbrush into battle.
This thing gives you a charisma bonus just to wielding it. If you go to a masquerade ball and started waving it around everywhere threateningly, I think people would give you their money3. Furthermore, just a couple runs of this thing through your unruly mop will calm and placate any enemy. “Ah, I see”, your enemy will say. “It was not a grave and personal insult, he was simply having a bad hair day4”. This could save your life. Certainly four easy payments of $2.29 is worth your life? Surely you’re not that broke? You don’t want people to think you’re broke, do you?
The hairbrush. Only four easy payments of $2.295.
Englitch
Fake writing is just as good as real writing
There’s an age old debate that my dad told me is an age old debate when I was like 7, which is between the English Majors and the Linguistics Majors. The English majors argue, language is important, words have meanings, and if you don’t use words how they want they will be extremely tedious at you in aggressive retaliatory self defense. The Linguistics Majors argue: “please no”
The Linguistic school of thought feels like communication is the important part, if you know what a Duckstack is and I know what a Duckstack is, then it doesn’t matter that Duckstacks aren’t real, since communication is achieved.
Now with the advent of the internet, I’d say its pretty clear that the Linguists have won, but at great personal costs, since phrases like “begging the question6” will freak out even generally apathetic conversation-goers. And the internet has accelerated this phenomenon beyond all reason. Do you know what lol means? You don’t. Lol is a punctuation mark that was missing from the English language, and has been adopted to fill a void in a text-based English system, which works so well that you can sometimes even find maladaptive basement types saying lol to you in real life.
Speaking of maladaptive types, there is another writing style I noticed recently which conservatives generally refer to as “trooncase”, which is when you write in all lowercase. “i dont like this” “if i use the shift key i will explode”. They call it trooncase because transexuals greatly overrepresent its use, which I admit does dilute its ability to deliver somewhat, but it sticks around because it fills a useful niche, which is pitching your voice. Transexuals like it because they like pretending to be things they are not, but normal people do too, in reasonable doses.
In real life you can shift registers up an octave to achieve a sort of caricature7, but how would you accomplish this in text? You can type IN ALL CAPS, which definitely brings a certain connotation, but feels aggressive. “Trooncase” is the passive form. You can also accomplish something similar with run on sentences, but that’s more limited.
All of this is to say, breaking the rules of English allows a greater range of expression than holding to it. It drives people nuts, and they’re not wrong that we’re losing something at the same time- I don’t believe that the founding fathers or (pick any ancient writer you think is smart) was “not able to express themselves because they didn’t write in l33tsp33k. But I think they knew more words than we know now. So what they could convey in intelligence, we now convey in emotion. I think this is fun and I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. But I do think poetry is in decline.
Anyway, as much as I am a proponent of judging books by their covers, when something sees widespread adoption in any corridor its usually for a reason. Nature abhors a vacuum. And while English is in general collapsing into simplicity8, the things that need to be expressed are eternal9.
Some Inherently Funny Words
We are all entitled to our own opinion, this list is just some of mine
lugubrious
dental
swish
pinion
goop
fork
Dippydap
Floozy
Fibble
Spork
Addictive Behaviors: Duckstack
Are you addicted to writing Duckstacks? We’re here to help.
I mentioned in a post a little while ago10 that I’ve been a little depressed what with all the goings-on in our family but its important to keep writing anyway, because if you don’t, a habit loses its “sacredness” in your mind, and its nearly impossible to go back. This also applies to addictions- in reverse of course. But some people will find a special angle or mantra that helps them, and they will have great success until they allow it to fail (Like, “I’m lonely, I’m going to the bar tonight it’ll be fine and just a one time thing”) but then the magic is lost, and you have to find a new angle or mantra or positive habit or whatever to get it back. The moral of the story is: Its very important that you keep writing Duckstacks, even when you don’t have the motivation to do so. Because what is addiction recovery, but motivation engineering?
What The Heck Is Pool
We’re all just fishes in an emerald sea fleeing for our lives from a giant, empire-state-building-sized 8 ball
When someone says “hey, are you going to the pool”, what do you first think of? Water polo? Slippery slides and giant inflatable tubes? Impossibly thin towels with frankly pathetic absorption capacities? All of these things are wrong, and what you should be thinking about is pockets.
In pool, you and a number of other people are balls, flying around in space and bumping into each other, just like the internet. The goal, nearest as I can understand it, is to put people in pockets and keep them there. Its not unlike human resources, in this way. You want to get your guys in pocket, and you want to keep the enemy’s guys angry, incoherent, and committing various forms of social terrorism, a state called “out of pocket”. When someone’s out of pocket, there’s no telling what they might do and how it might affect you, but when they’re in pocket they’re safe, locked away, and fully understood. Essentially, a ball in pocket is a perfect employee, and you’ll never have to give them a raise
But as you know (or don’t know) billiards don’t move on their own. This is where you come in, in your perfect capacity as an authorized proxy for God, being a human resources worker. You whack everyone you don’t like with sticks and hope it scares your guys into pocket. Your goal is a stagnant, empty world, with no possibility of change or being acted upon.
Players take turns knocking everyone around and hoping for favorable outcomes. To the layplayer this is essentially magic relying on random chance, and hitting balls with pool cues is really no different from a friendly game of dice11. But to an expert sociologist, you can predict with a fair degree of accuracy social changes from pressures applied at specific points, letting you engineer procedural outcomes. Eventually, we can see a world freed from sin.
History
Many close calls this week (Jethro has not been hearing well due to severe ear infections (hopefully) so we need to call very close to his ear for him to understand us)
We had a long stay in the hospital this week. Basically the chemotherapy killed his blood cells and he had no platelets, so even a small bleed would be really bad. We stayed in quarantine and got transfusions, and Jethro is not enjoying the hospital nearly as much as he did when he was 2. He said, “Papa, I want to go to the dollar tree once we bust me out of here!”
Jethro like a zombie in his sleep: “Chocolate .. chocolate…”
My wife asked the toddler “Is your mama going to have a baby?” and the toddler said “nooo!” while sitting on her 38 week pregnant belly
The toddler got a bit attention starved while we were in the hospital. He calmed down when he got some time with mama and she was like “you just want attention don’t you.” and he cuddled up and said yes. And then it occurred to him that he doesn’t know what attention is. “You give me battention…. You… Eat? Battentions?”
We got out a whole bunch of cotton balls to take care of Jethro and the toddler found them later while we weren’t in the room. He dragged them to us upon finding them: Its marshmallows!
The nurse came to get some of Jethro’s blood from his port. He freaked out initially thinking it was a shot, and we did our best to console him. Finally he said “Its not a shot?” And pulled up his shirt for her, and said, “Where are you tubie??”
Ducksnax
Work
######EXPERIMENTAL FEATURE BE CAREFUL#######
Or, imagine his confused face, when he finds out he is between fifth green and fish. Really lost the lottery there, didn’t it?
Plus shipping and handling multiple offers may not apply
I don’t know what a masquerade ball is
Good on you for having such forgiving enemies
This ad brought to you by bobdaduck’s unruly hair, unbrushed for at least 3 days if not more. It looks fine mom. BTW.
English people think this means assuming the premise. Linguistics people just use it as the actual phrase which is “demands the question be asked” and win because the Linguistic guys have more normies
I actually noticed that this happens a lot in anime too, I was watching lvl 99 villainess and it was really common to occasionally and briefly switch to a chibi art style in order to deliver deadpan punchlines, and then switch back to normal animation. This is something very similar to that.
Modern people know like 50k words, but if you read old books its evident they knew more like 300k only a couple hundred years ago. I will not be substantiating this claim.
This also explains a phenomenon called the “Euphemism treadmill”. In short, a word that respectfully describes any negative behavior quickly becomes itself taboo, and as the old word is now a slur a new polite way of referring to the negative behavior needs to be invented. The classic example is “retard”, which used to be a very clinical classifier, and is now a very coarse descriptor. The things that need to be expressed don’t change, so it ends up an arms race.
like 7 minutes
I don’t know what game “a friendly game of dice” is. Have you ever played a friendly game of dice? What games even use dice? Nobody knows.