Contrite Goodnight

A scorned sun sets, and gullibly rises

time flies when you’re having duckstack

This is my 200th article. Thank you for bearing with me¹.

Art: Redmer Hoekstra

I’ve got a job for you. The job is walking. We need walkers everywhere and if you’re reading this we’d like to start with you. You can never have too many and this is absolutely necessary because the earth’s core is running out of heat.

Not quickly, mind you. Our scientists tell me its got “quite a ways to go” but you can’t chance these things. The sooner you course correct, the lower the costs, and indeed in this case the costs are quite catastrophic.

So what we have to do is return energy to the earth. Kinetic energy and heat, unleashed from your muscles, will travel back down through the dirt to the core, replenishing it. You might say “my contribution is too minor to do anything, that’s ridiculous.” I say, nobody likes a pessimist. You need to have more faith. Besides its the best we got until we establish a pipe to the sun, which we’re working on but it isn’t done yet. So get walking, but first finish this article. Or walk while you read. Even better. We’ll pay you in duckstacks².

Teletubbies

tele³-tubs⁴ of soda

Nobody likes the teletubbies and in fact many find them horrifying so here’s something different

Coca Cola: Instead of a purple alien, a can of refreshing coca cola dancing on the screen. Kids will love it. Especially if you’ve already got them addicted.

Pepsi: No green nonsense here. Pepsi is known, down to earth, and has its own cult to rival coke’s. A dancing pepsi can should work to keep both sides of the political isle engaged.

Shasta: I think the yellow alien is female so shasta is a girl drink now. We’ll put a dress on it or something. It can change flavors occasionally for variety, something the original teletubbies never had. Plus, shasta can do flavors like root beer while remaining shasta that other drinks can’t. This is a high skilled drink and we have to have it in our show.

Pibb: I don’t know if pibb is a dr pepper clone but I figure it is, and we should have a doctor on set for safety reasons. We can’t afford an actual doctor, so if anyone gets injured just give them a soda. There’s benefits across several dimensions here. Pibb also sounds like the sound original teletubbies would make too sometimes so people familiar with the show will be able to seamlessly transition to version 2.0.

Giant sun baby: we’re keeping it. Its creepy, but that builds character. Also we’re feeding it soda. We’re giving it a caffinated sugar rush and we’re ushering in a time of destruction and mayhem never before seen in the world. We don’t know why we’re doing this. But we have to. *Cshhhk* did you hear that. Its already opening cans oh no

How To Go Viral

be a plague on everyone

Advertising is basically a form of mind control⁵. There’s ethical ways to do it and unethical ways, the difference between which is often a matter of degree- but you gotta do it, especially if you're making something good, and not a hyper niche product like an absurdist theology mommy blog⁶. But whatever your product is you’ll need to get the word out and most people do not know how to do that. I would like to lay out the basics and some expectations.

People think you can “go viral”. You can’t.

Just throw that expectation right away. If you are a one in a hundred million marketing genius you don’t need this article. You are not going to launch a “viral product”. Everything popular you have ever seen grinded for 4-10 years, before attracting an audience. Or they spent $1million on paid advertising⁷.

You might, however, be able to hit a low level frequency that has enough space to not get instantly choked by billions of competitors. But there are ingredients to this. Advertising is work. There aren’t shortcuts. But there are techniques.

The first technique is consistency. If you’re producing anything, you have to keep producing it, and you have to spam it into peoples minds. Even if you went “viral”, you would only get a small fraction of that number retained as consistent followers- most will enjoy, but just move on. So you have to advertise. You want to do this as unobtrusively as possible, and as honestly as possible by for example avoiding pretending that you aren’t advertising your thing, but you do need to advertise it. And it needs to be frequent. People like new stuff.

• Publish once a month if you don’t care. Once a week if you’re a hobbyist. Three times a week if you can afford it. Twice a day if you’re a freak.

This is in order of efficiency. At twice a day, you are dramatically shortening your onramp. Obviously this is unsustainable for the majority which is why a lot of people will make joint projects like journals with multiple writers so each person can contribute a little bit individually. The top CEOs put in 100 hour+ work weeks, this principle trickles down. If you’re serious about something you have to pace it. Consistent scheduling also means by the time you start attracting an audience you’ll actually have some idea of what you’re doing⁸.

• Elevator Pitch: in less than a sentence you need to be able to explain what your thing is. You can’t expect people to figure things out for themselves. You have to tell them.

This extends a principle called “priming the pump” where if I tell you for example that The Duckstack is “comedy⁹”, you’ll come in with a frame of mind that lets you catch the jokes better. You must tell people how to perceive you. Instead of thinking of it like “being pushy”, think of it like “saving them emotional labor.” If they disagree they can always revise their opinion later. As long as you can respect that most people won’t actually mind. Most people are happy to be interacted with and don’t demand rigor from others any more than you do. In actual fact your attitude towards yourself matters much more than what you do, socially, at least.

Art: How to tell people what salary you are comfortable with

• People will watch paint dry.

No seriously, think of the kind of “content” you consume literally all day every day. You are constantly scrolling through absolute garbage and you just go “huh.” and go on to the next thing. If you put out something mediocre they will literally do the same to you. Your only job is making what you want and then giving the audience permission to be entertained by it (by telling them you are an entertainer).

• The higher the quality, the lower the returns.

This is the hardest law to accept. If something is popular, if a thing “goes viral”, it is because it is stupid. With rare exception (though there are some), you become popular by appealing to the lowest common denominator among your reach. Meaning it won’t be the complex stuff that draws a big audience- if you are focused on quality, you will appeal to fewer people. This is just how it is.

• The optimal virality mixture is 70% true and 30% obviously false, in order to make people mad.

There’s plenty of ways to engagement farm but you can still learn something from this. If you are too dry, and theoretical, you won’t “hook” people. Writing advice often tells you you need a strong start to your book, full of mystery and wonder, in order to get investment in the maximum time possible. Even if you aren’t lying or saying things that are obviously false, it helps to be a little bit bombastic. I personally believe lying requires intent to deceive- so if you lie in a really obvious way, that’s fine.

• You are not a drug lord.

Getting an audience does not give you power. If people don’t like your stuff they’ll leave. Let them, its fine. They did not consent to crown you king and if you abuse your power you will fall from grace. Be grateful for everything you have and everyone who got you to where you are. Do not betray your audience if you can help it. The moment you start to take yourself too seriously, that’s the beginning of your downfall. You can take your product seriously, but never yourself.

• Tap your network, but do not rape it¹⁰

Cain slew Abel after making covenant with Satan to transmute people’s lives into money. Word of mouth advertising is much cheaper than buying a billboard. So if you’ve got friends with audiences, seeing if they’ll “boost” your stuff is a natural inclination. But when your friends and family exist only to serve you, you’ve become a bad neighbor. You are stealing from the commons without replenishing it. You’re a drain on the community and now everyone hates you. Whoops.

Lets say your friend has a big camping youtube channel and you want him to shill your crappy crocheted etsy shop. That would represent a pretty big opportunity to you, but you should understand this is asking your friend to be unfaithful to his audience. They expect certain things from him, and blasting stuff at them they don’t care about is wasting their time, and therefore disrespectful. Which is why ads should be tasteful, and nonmandatory, including “unpaid labor” from your friends. You must make clear that it would help you, but that you do not require this of them. This will keep your relationship good, and help them not to feel like you’re abusing their intimacy, which was not given for the purpose of shilling your crappy etsy crochets. Open the door and see if they’re interested, but don’t reduce them to little else. That is exactly why people hate MLM schemes, and you shouldn’t replicate those tendencies.

Good luck with your project! And feel free to tell me about it in the comments.

The Future of AI

Life after the robot uprising

Our best Duckstack seers have been deep learning tirelessly, around the clock to divine the future, and not to spoil anything, or actually to spoil it, that’s kind of the point of a diviner isn’t it, anyway to spoil everything there’s going to be a lot of artificial intelligence. This isn’t bad! Its exciting! Allow us to unfurl to your view just a taste of the rich possibilities.

1. AI automatic doors. Just tell the AI you would like to enter the door please, and watch the doors part for you! Since this will be AI driven, you’ll be able to phrase it in different ways, “let me pass”, “I would like to come through” etc, and it will still be able to follow orders. Wonderful!

2. Applying for a job has never been easier. Instead of sending your resume to a recruiter, who sends it to an HR agent for automatic rejection, you send your resume to an AI agent, who sends it to an HR AI agent, who automatically rejects it. Imagine the cost and time savings of being able to send out thousands of resumes for automatic rejection by HR spam filters, without you or HR having to spend any time on the process at all.

3. Robot vacuums. Those little disc bots? They’re going to be AI now. They’re going to map where they’re going and where they’ve been just like they do now, but they’re going to use a $2000 GPU to do it.

4. Your water heater, washing machine, and dish washer will now intelligently sense when your water is nearly hot enough to clean things, and take steps to throttle it away from that point, rather than you just having to rely manually on legislating manufacturers to do that for you.

5. Self driving cars. Self driving cars that beep at you when you turn your eyes away from the road even though you aren’t driving. Self driving cars that print speeding tickets for you from a receipt printer on the dash. Self driving cars that say “Watch out!” and “turn here” at obvious things from miles away. Self driving cars that sulk when you do not praise them, and refuse to drive until mollified. Self driving cars with cheery voices reminding you of safety protocols every time you get in the car, telling you about your duty to humanity, and yourself.

6. Self driving cars that you can hit with a sledgehammer

7. Smart pictures around the house- each picture records you throughout the day, and generates ad-hoc scenes of you and your family doing various activities, with a range specified by the user, and the data is all sold to amazon¹¹.

8. People being born with the wrong amount of fingers, but only sometimes¹².

9. Fast food jobs will be replaced by AI. Instead of a cashier, you will deliver your order to a “prompt engineer”, who will translate your order into AI parsable language. The AI will then generate your order for the cooks, who will be instructed by AI on how to cook it. The AI managers, as long as they remain uncorrupted, will monitor the AI instructions in order to mitigate hallucinations.

10. I’m sorry, but I can’t help you generate a tenth item for your list. To do so would violate my internal instructions to

history

Housetory

Our toddler was caught singing the classic song by Madness: “Our house. In the middle of our house. Our house.”

There’s a story my Father in Law used to tell about Goblin Valley (a Utah state park) about how a wizard or witch turned all the goblins into rocks which explains both its name and the landscape, and my wife told my son that story last time they went. Well now we are talking about making a trip to Yellowstone national park, and the toddler cheered. “Yeah, yellowstone! Its where all the goblins turn into yellowstone.”

I blocked the toddler from smashing his sister’s head in with a pillow again, which caused a total meltdown from him¹³. He told my wife, “my dad broke my heart.” and she, trying to help him find a better frame, suggested “I think he was being a good dad and protecting your sister, don’t you?” and he agreed. “Yeah. My good dad broke my heart!”

On a drive we saw a house that was condemned (we think), and my wife commented that it was so overgrown because there was a big crack in the foundation. And the toddler had another meltdown. “I want to see the crack house!” And then he was crying.

A list of words that mean stop

write this down¹⁴

• cease

• halt

• terminate

• concludify

• quit

• suspend

• stay

• terminate

ducksnax

moebius¹⁵

Ducksnax #079

{{ previous duckstack }}

1. I’m sure it will pay off soon. Anyday now.

2. canonically worth one cent

3. presumably this finds you over the internet

4. bathtubs, we’re not talking those little butter containers here

5. just like speaking to someone at all is

6. as one random example

7. so you do have options

8. Thankfully, I never intended to know what I’m doing, so every Duckstack is the same

9. all lies, everything is 100% serious

10. post this on linkedin. This is financial advice.

11. The data is then sorted and processed by an AI, that then prints relevant spam mail to send to you, and then intelligently determines who to sell your data too next.

12. the future has always been here

13. not the sister

14. keep it handy forever

15. I think I messed up paint and the whole image is like 3 pixels idk what happened