Diamond Rind
Peel the outside, boil the in
The only thing we have to fear is duckstack itself
Substack tells me today’s letter is too large for email servers to handle. Click the title to read on Substack’s website.
Welcome to the worlds worst apex predator The Duckstack, which snares a paltry few hundred people a week. The majority of people in the world will never even hear of it because its just that bad at hunting. It lurks in the bushes, its beady eyes the only things you can see in the darkness. You shudder in fear. You walk by perfectly fine, nothing happens. The Duckstack doesn’t have legs. It literally just sits there hoping someone will walk into it. Imagine a pitcher plant, but worse. You look closer. It doesn’t even have fangs. Does it gum you to death? Yes. You have been gummed to death. The Duckstack claims another victim, and re-enters hibernation.
How To Make A Joke
No jokes 4 you until you finish this HR training1
I think there’s three components to most jokes. Subversion of expectations, shock, and cleverness. Those can be mixed and in different order and depending on the audience you’ll get different effect. A joke that relies on a high shock ratio might really depend on taste, circumstance, or even just subject knowledge, for example.
Any good joke subverts expectations, but people can have all kinds of expectations- they can have expectations about what concepts go together, but also about how people normally act, or what people do physically. For example, This Charlie Chaplin Video shows Charlie juggling bricks with his legs and feet, showing prowess that isn’t possible, combined with doing brick laying in a way that we wouldn’t expect. A subversive joke would be something like “A man walks into a bar. Ouch.” Jokes that are mostly subversive tend to be just weird and off putting.
Shock is a scale of extremes. An extreme joke would be something like, “A man walks into a bar. The bartender blows him up with a bazooka.”2 The action is extreme, the choice of the word “bazooka” is extreme. Picture me screaming this joke in walmart. Also extreme. And subversive. Some jokes are funny by sheer boisterousness, nothing to do with the content. Jokes that are mostly shock tend to be distasteful in polite company.
Cleverness is another competence metric. Cleverness revolves around making unexpected connections. It elevates the reader’s perspective in surprising ways, or is just outright fun enough to be funny. Often low tier jokes rely entirely on cleverness, like puns and stuff3. A clever joke might be something like, “A man walks into a bar and orders a double entendre—so the bartender gives it to him.”
Humor is a tool for all kinds of things. It increases your lifespan, it creates a social lubricant, it makes people feel a part of the group, and it can draw attention to things in different ways, for example a lot of people use self deprecating humor to shield themselves which I think is bad.
Somewhere along the line, people learned that criticizing themselves pre-emptively is a good way to prevent criticism, and so fearing criticism, they’re always trying to pre-empt it. A lot of times nobody was even going to criticize them in the first place.
But that’s actually the more benign version. There’s a subset of people who specifically make themselves small to gain power over others by hijacking the empathy circuits, whether consciously or not. And humor is as much a tool that can be used this way as anything else- one thing we see on twitter is an abundance of accounts that actually call themselves things like “worlds greatest idiot” and so on. Sometimes this is benign and they’re just trying to appear nonthreatening, but more often they are trying to gain license for their opinions to go unexamined, or even assuage their conscience. “I did already tell them what I am, so I don’t need to live any higher standards.” When people use self deprecating humor, I think people can read that this is what people are doing, so the humor falls out of tune. “oh, this isn’t a joke. Its actually serious.”
I think self deprecation’s real value is as a teaching method, when you’re being honest about your own vices. I’ve never learned to do this and truly envy some who cleverly isolate and scold themselves for being monkey brained or throwing toddler tantrums and such as a way of contextualizing themselves so that they can better repent and grow. The neurotic try to skew everyone’s perceptions of them constantly, but the wise turn that tool inward to enable themselves. Bottom Text
The Sign of The Cross
Christians Crossing4
Everybody who is anybody knows vampires don’t like crosses. In Peter Watt’s record-setting sci-fi novel “Blindsight”, he wrote that vampires are a different, brilliantly intelligent nonhuman species and their eldritch minds are full of strange geometries which enabled them to hunt humans, but there’s a vulnerability where they have difficulty with right angles, so the cross displaying four right angles makes their brains short circuit and steam come out of their ears.
This explanation was picked up by Netflix because they are evil, and in their Castlevania series they used this, despite their vampires being demonic entities rather than aliens and the right angle thing making no sense in a gothic catholic inquisitor fantasy setting whatsoever. Obviously vampires don’t like crosses because they’re creatures of unholiness and crosses symbolize Christ and mercy and good things. Which just goes to show Netflix is the enemy of Christianity, sanity, and all things faithful to source material.
However, The Duckstack is not a gothic fantasy setting, and our vampires are simply evil5, but the reason they hate crosses is because of their lack of aesthetic taste- they want all paintings to be crooked, and the cross represents correct ground-floor-ceiling alignment. They think they’re trend setting innovators but they flee when confronted with the absurdity of their inclinations. The hipsters flee when no man pursueth.
jistory
one kid two kid red black and blue kid
“so cute! we need more teeny tiny legs around here!” “I dont think thats going to work mama” (except he used her name) “what’s not going to work?” “more teeny tiny legs.”
Sometimes people drop things. When this happens, the toddler always goes “ohhh!”
Her brother is too energetic for back rubs but she will climb into your lap, point at her back, and then physically grab your hand and put it on her back. We can tell she’s going to be late at talking because why would she need to when she’s so capable of communicating
Ducksnax
hike
The HR training will, tragically, not be teaching you how to take a joke.
“A man walks into a bar. The bartender blows him up with a bazooka.” -Confucius
I used to hate dad jokes, but now I’m all groan up
that’s good. I’m going to need to write that down for later.
Ask any duckstack vampire, they’ll tell you
My best friend used to trade in self-deprecation. It got quite tedious after a while. I still catch myself doing it, sometimes, though. Isn't that odd? My habit isn't to say, "oops, sorry, i made a mistake", but rather, "oops, i'm an idiot". Even though this obviously isn't true and, indeed, by some metrics i'm quite the opposite of an idiot.