The early bird gets the duckstack
The Duckstack as you can see (imagine the duckstack having all kinds of aurora and swooping energy of purple and green and red and orange all over the place) is lost in time and space. Mostly just the time part if we’re being honest. We are looking at shifting The Duckstack’s regular programming from Tuesday Evenings to a different day and time, and have not quite settled on one that we’re happy with- For now, expect The Duckstack newsletter on Thursday Evenings. The reason for this is it better allows me to take the kids to help my wife out.
War has changed. We used to fight it with sticks, in our backyard, but now we’ve got drones and twitter. They keep coming up with new and unusual implements of destruction. I keep coming up with Duckstacks.
History
Toddler while cold: “brr. I'm roasty toasty!”
asked the toddler if he was sick, “we're just worried about you because you've been sleeping a lot today.” and the toddler said “No… A zombie just eat me.”
“There's hair growing out of my belly button, because my eyes are changing.” I think he has misunderstood what we were telling him about puberty
babies new Favorite and Best Toy for Teething and Baby Purposes: The wifi router
Toddler showing mama a strawberry he pulled the leaves off of: “I took the salad off.”
Toddler holding his chin with one hand: “I’m very fragile.”
Toddler counted to 20, so we told him Good job counting, do you know what comes after twenty? and he said “Nope, just one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty.”
toddler calls the gym the “exercise store”
toddler holding up a single slice of shredded cheese: “Is that a cheese?”
Wifeguys and cool guys
being a husband, father, and Christian, without being a “Husband, father, and Christian”
There is a growing gulf between married men and single men that has been getting wider, and the rate of chasming1 is accelerating.
There is a species of online man we call “wifeguys”. There are some good ones, which I will be excluding from the definition for the sake of this article. The term just means “married men”, but there is an evolving negative connotation that amplifies whenever dating discourse takes center stage.
Reliably, married men have bad “takes” online. They’re not the worst offenders in that regard (that would be sports fans) but they are consistently wrong, out of touch, and cocky about it. You would think Christian Dads would be smarter and better, since they’re Christian, and because they convinced a girl to marry them, but usually it makes them generic and boring. I propose that this is due to a state of atrophy.
When you are a single man, getting girls feels like the most important thing in the world. I think they are right, my girl is my most important thing in the world so unless that changes in the next 60 years I would say its good to let young guys look at it this way. But men naturally look to their wives for validation, and this leads many young guys to view having a wife as “the finish line of life.” So what happens when they get married in their twenties? Then they spend their next 60 or so years in a state of basic abdication- their wife handles things, gives them direction, and they don’t want to cause waves anyway since one of men’s main priorities in marriage is peace. So the man gets married, and then lives the rest of his life on autopilot, with no real ambitions or progress.
This state of affairs isn’t exactly satisfactory to women either. Women actually do want their husbands to be driven and have his own projects and things. If all he does is serve her, she is likely to feel dissatisfied, even if he’s doing the bare minimum as a provider. And this isn’t relevant to what I’m saying, but this compounds in some very nasty ways when the guy who lived for nothing with his marriage gets hit with divorce, which is something I’ve seen many times.
Men who live only for their wives are ugly to other men too. I don’t think men would usually frame it this way but I think it is a common experience for a guy to hang out with a married friend and feel like a big part of his friend is just… Gone. Unfortunately in these cases I do not think that energy got redirected to the wife, it just fizzled out having served its purpose. But the sense of loss is real, and re-connecting is difficult on top of that, because, you know, you’re not really interested in living for his wife, so you don’t have a lot of hobbies in common after that. Its a complex problem but the solutions are fairly simple, just view marriage as a foundation for life rather than an end goal and keep building and striving for things.
But the problem is these types of married guys are really prone to giving advice.
I hear young men complain about this all the time- “you old people don’t know what its like to date anymore, you’re out of touch and your advice is worse than useless.” I don’t think this is necessarily true but it is often true, but obviously the dating landscape has changed rather remarkably and most married guys do not make new friends basically ever and so its not like they are keeping their Cold Approach skills up to date or whatever. So the old guys think young guys are lazy and incompetent. To some extent this is true.
But the worse horror is that most of these married guys were never actually that skilled in the first place, either. A lot of them basically lucked into marriage without any special communication skills, seduction skills, networking skills, or anything else, they just happened to get carried by some currents near a girl who happened to be open to it and they made it work. And so most dating advice from married guys actually sounds identical to “let them eat cake”: A famous made-up line meaning “why would peasants have cake to eat when they’re starving?” Even if you had good advice (and many of the principles behind this type of wifeguy’s advice are sound- lowering your standards (slightly) as a man is probably a good idea, being more confident in yourself, getting a job, whatever. But if someone feels you are out of touch, they are not going to take your advice.
So the first step is humility. If a man is married he should be grateful for it. Young men who want to be married are struggling, they will respond to this much better.
The second step is to avoid malicious criticism. It is common for married men to view single men as inferior because they’re into anime or whatever, and young men can feel the contempt and will simply match it and return it. You aren’t trying to go where they want to go, you aren’t even trying to help them get to where they want to go (a marriage with a shared interest in anime. Or whatever) so you’re just a loser who needs to get lost, right?
The third step is to keep that first step’s humility from becoming docility. Being a jerk does not earn people’s respect, but being a pushover doesn’t either. It is being your own person. Vitality is something people can do something with. Laying yourself across the person you are ostensibly wanting to help, as a “dead weight”, is simply unhelpful.
All of this is symptomatic of defective Christianity. This is why atheists do not have the “Husband, Father” problem2.
I can propose two definitions of submission. The first one, the false one, comes from narratives in media about “power structures”, slavery, and rules for constraint. This view is occasionally true, but usually not. You will get much further in life if you swap out the word “submission” in your head in all instances for “contribution”.
To submit to Christ is not merely to obey. Obedience is a byproduct, any evangelical can tell you that. But what they can’t really tell you is that the fall of man creates (or rather, forces) an environment where imperfect solutions are a fact of life. You can’t wait to be told everything to do, you have to “ad-lib”, because God wants you to be a God. This is what I believe. And if you’re going to learn to be like your Father you are going to need to learn to make correct choices.
Part of those choices is working within your available personality; your capacity for righteousness is not increased by shrinking yourself. By increasing your own agency, you become more like God. That is simply a tautology. '
I am arguing for my own religion here, I do not claim to be unbiased: But when you’ve got a religion predicated on the idea that a single book is all that is needed, for anything, ever3, it is hard to create the sort of expansive mindset required for vitality. When you spend all day in church preaching that the Bible is so sufficient that God would never speak again, then its going to be really easy to apply similar one-size-fits-all approaches to dating, to assume “the landscape never really changes.” So you give old advice mixed with some stuff that works for you- And since you’re out of the dating scene, you can’t test these theories. Thus, wifeguys give young men advice as a form of human mine-detectors, sending them into a minefield to confirm their pet theories. It is normal for young men to resent being treated this way.
The moral of the story is fat people cannot really lecture skinny people, even if the fat person was skinny once, even if they walked uphill through the snow to school both ways in the rain. You cannot stop exercising.
And this is good advice for the married men anyway- Most married men know that marriage is a bit like canoeing upriver. Its a gentle flow, but if you stop working at it, you’ll start to backslide4. Most married men understand, on some level, you should “perpetually court your wife”. Or at least that that’s a form of marital fertilizer and “a good idea either way.” I assume most guys are horrible at this because I am horrible at this. But if you internalize this attitude of continual expansion, everything in your life will follow suit. Better relationships, better teaching for those who lack, and better relationships because the teaching isn’t strained by delusion. A win for us all.
IQ test
Think you’re smart? Think again. If you can.
unscramble this word: ot
spot the right letter from this sequence: “right”
Find the pattern: ▰ ▀▰ ▀▰ ▀▰ ▀▰ ▀
Find green:
How did you do? Hopefully you didn’t get any wrong. This test is kind of formative for everything for the rest of your life. Well, if you did poorly no worries, we can’t all know everything. I suppose if you’re ever feeling cocky and want to try again, you can come back and re-read this section. It won’t erase your past failures but it may give you solace. Now send in your friend, he’s next.
ANIMAL FACTS
one animal fact is a tragedy. A dozen animal facts is a statistic.
Crabs WALK sideways because their BRAINS are sidways
Octopuses grow eight arms because they are descended from BEES. They still remember the taste of honeycomb
sloths are PRIDEFUL. They were named entirely wrong, because you can’t speak sloth to know just how arrogant these little buggers are.
Elephants recognize themselves in the mirror, a psychological phenomenon known as “mirroring.”
penguins slide because their stomachs are made of ICE
zebras have spots
Mantis shrimp punch at the speed of LIGHT
Narwall horns are radio antennae, and their taste in music SUCKS
Lizards regenerate their tails because they are AMOEBAS
Hyenas do NOT know what is going on. They laugh to FIT IN
Chameleons are not HIDING they are MATCHING. It is FASHIONABLE.
Fish are LIKE THAT.
Ducksnax
vampire
Its chasming chasmer than ever
They have the, “I’m a woke liberal who has never thought through the negative implications of any of my opinions” problem
A belief derived out of terror of confronting possible reasons why there aren’t any more books given a loving God and all that- sola scriptura is simply a religious-affirmative version of the problem of evil.
an analogy I stole from some mommy blog
You will get much further in life if you swap out the word “submission” in your head in all instances for “contribution”. - Casti Connubii teaches among many other thing this idea, Pius XI has a wonderful capacity of knowledge and insight
I went to that Mommy Blog you referenced and clicked on "Marriage Advice." Got 404'd. Seems symbolic. Or maybe just true.