Feather Weather
Meteor showers for dirty stars
Evaporation, Condensation, Precipitation, Duckstack
Today's Duckstack comes to you LIVE from the EYE OF A HURRICANE. You're wondering how I'm alive, but worry not. As you can see, I've wrapped myself in a bionic exosuit forged out of Duckstacks. Full of dials and gauges, I'm now able to ascertain exactly how much danger I'm in at any given moment, and ignore it, for you.
PUBLIC HEALTH ANNOUNCEMENT
Yes so we are seeing some high winds and what we think is rain, though I can’t even tell if its from the sky or the sea at this point. You can see a lot of objects blowing around, like that umbrella there, and if that or something like that were to bonk you it could be pretty damaging so we are advising all our citizens to stay inside.
Alright we’ve got a public health announcement for you guys (our readers1). Its what elbow grease is.
Elbow grease is a naturally produced chemical byproduct of working at something for a while and getting into the rhythm of it. When you use a lot of muscle it actually grinds your bones together at the joints, which powderize and are then converted by special cells in the bloodstream called juicers2 into a sort of paste which acts as a lubricant for your joints. If your body didn’t do this during hard manual labor, your bones would instead develop hairline fractures spiderwebbing up it until they’re so cracked that they just explode3, so instead your wonderous cells get to work producing this substance! Isn’t nature amazing?
Don’t worry, when you drink milk your body rebuilds the bone mass so there’s no overall loss. In this way, your structure is kept sound and intact, without over-lubricating during soft labor or at rest. Physics itself is the regulator of elbow grease, which is why you don’t need batteries, gasoline, or coal4 to fuel the process.
Now some people are in professions which demand a lot of hard labor, and they might be reading this and wondering “but what if I get too much elbow grease?” and unfortunately this is a real issue. Trillions die of elbow grease poisoning each year5. If you’re worried this could be you, you can just get some wd-40 and lubricate your elbows manually, which should prevent the initial grinding at the start of the greasing process. If its too late for you, just drink some milk, which should6 hydrate you, re-calcify your bones, and tilt your ph balance more towards the -, which is always a positive thing7, and should denature some of the grease buildup.
For the rest of you survivors, elbow grease is a valuable addition to our lives, performing years of thankless service in duty to a higher cause: you. Thank your elbows today, I bet they haven’t heard that from you lately.
Reticence: A Poem
The trees blow softly
Coconuts fall knocking heads
Some inconvenience
I see you there and wonder
Whether8 day or night
Whether you are poised or idle
Whether you’ll draw nigh
And all this time conflicted
I want you to touch me so,
But I’m afraid to open up
Because then you’ll let me go
I’m a doorknob
Goldfish Apocalypse
Modern humans have a lot more RAM but all the actual storage is up in the cloud these days. These clouds, to be exact. The ones blowing by me at 80mph per hour. If you have lost your memory, or marbles, please contact the Duckstack Retrieval Squad's helpline9
When prophets get up in the Bible or the Book of Mormon, they’re always like “Remember the promises to your fathers” or “Remember what God has done for you” and sometimes they repeat the word “Remember” multiple times to really drive it home. Did the old testament people have a goldfish memory? Perhaps, that certainly renders a more comical reading; “sorry about the idol worshipping I just forgot where I was and what was going on.” But as a policy, I assume other people are like myself, including both saints and villains of the scriptures, meaning they have motivations that make sense to themselves, and like me, are prone to forgetfulness. Not necessarily of facts, but of feelings.
You see, it is very easy to be righteous when you have the spirit. As the Book of Mormon puts it, “no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually”. When you’re close to God its easy, it makes perfect sense, not just rationally but emotionally. “I should do this” becomes “I want to do this”. Not hard to move with that kind of a tailwind! The problem is in the forgetting, in the fleeting almost dreamlike quality of spiritual revelations, when you are left to yourself, and its again you making all the decisions by force.
So, if we want to be the best servants of God, it is not merely theoretical. We must remember. You can’t be plugged into the circuit all the time, it just isn’t resource feasible. You need batteries.
Here are some techniques you might practice:
Form holiness habits, where you return to “touch” the feeling you had previously. For example, my Duckstack habit consistently re-injects a “surrealist” state of mind into me throughout the week, enabling me to love more deeply and reach into myself for creativity more familiarly.
Act quickly when (righteous10) emotions are high
Keep journals, both of promptings God gives you and of how you feel during important times. These touchstones, especially because they’re written in your own words, enable you not just to remember technically, but remember emotionally as well.
Practice following through on promptings and feelings even once the motivation has drained, or the feeling has passed. This helps you learn to “carry” the important parts of the emotion or feeling forward longer. Like if you have a new years gym attendance resolution, you might feel strongly about it to keep up for a while but eventually that motivation fades, but if you then keep it up, then good motivations will last longer for you.
Memory is probably not normally viewed as a virtue, and it certainly has the qualities of a talent or skill, but a virtue it certainly is. It can also, like many virtues, be taken out of context and made bitter, such as in fruitless grudges and defeatist cycles. These should be corrected with treatment that matches the disease’s true nature of “a sick virtue” rather than as some personality or psychology defect. Your humors (virtues) are out of balance. Spread yourself around, to patch up some of the ruts you’ve dug. With the gained perspective, you’ll find a lot of the challenges you’ve found so insurmountable are now within your reach.
In the name of Jesus Christ Amen.
History
History? Yeah, this is a storm that could make history. Don’t think we’ve seen a storm like this since we started11. A real doozey for sure.
The kid has become a real pack rat (duck) lately. He carries his “backpack12” around everywhere but not to use it. The issue is, he is constantly asking us for food, but then instead of eating it he just puts it in his backpack "just in case" "for later" (later never comes) which has us again wondering in what past life he was starved or deprived of food so much that he feels hoarding like this is necessary
He’s lately become very, very convinced that hitting people with objects is not hitting. It is dude, stop, you are going to get another time out.
I had a very productive conversation with him this week. He told me that “they’re bad guys, because they steal things and put them in bags!” which seemed fair to me, but then I was like “But you do that too13. Are you a bad guy?” and he was like "um, nope, I'm a good guy, because I make funny faces and make my lil brother laugh!" Well, this would be true, if he ever stopped whacking him with a pool noodle
My wife had some sort of a spill or inconvenience and commented aloud “Man, life just can’t cut me a break!” which alarmed the kid a bit. “mama, you don’t want life to cut you into a break!”. He is probably right.
Fertilized our garden with asphalt. This will be really good for our, um, asphalt plants.
Government: A Review
I can see several governments blowing around in here and a whole lot of red tape! If you are missing your red tape please call our Duckstack Retrieval Squad's helpline
Have you ever needed to stop crime but been too busy cooking to do so, because you didn't want to leave the oven on when you were out? Have you ever needed to make a contract, but nobody had invented the concept of notarization? Have you ever been invaded by illegal aliens? Now I've never actually had a government or lived under one, so this is all very theoretical, but really, government sounds like a great product.
First, fighting crime. I think we can all use some more vigilantism in our lives, and it seems like with government you can get all the thrill of vigilantism, from the comfort of your very own home. With rogue uniformed heroes or antiheroes roaming the city, accountable to no one, things should be safer than ever, and you don’t even need to get in shape to do it. I think this is a great benefit.
Second, making contracts. It has long been common practice in our city to summon various demons, but the demons keep eating the people who summon them! This cuts the fun a bit short, and takes a lot of the thrill out of demon summoning, if we're being honest. But it looks like, if you’ve got government, you can actually forge contracts with these entities after you summon them, really expanding the possibilities of summoning demons from what we've been doing before, cutting casualties in half or more.
Its also been common for our townspeople to meet various faeries and naga creatures, sprites and nymphs, ducks and pixies and such, and every time our townspeople end up just getting bamboozled and cursed with some nonsense like pink feet or only being able to talk in alliterations and such, with a dramatically lighter wallet, family, or body to boot. But with government, you could count on a degree of protection and make contracts with these creatures as well. A lot of these creatures are pretty dang clever so I don't know how well it would go but it can't be worse than what we've been putting up with.
Third, governments give some degree of protection from foreign actors. No more will we be at the mercy of alien moviestars. No more will be vulnerable to their rutheless exploitation of our fandom. With a government's swiss-army-knife-like “military” prong, all of these extraterrestrials will just engage with them, and they'll soak up all of that attention cost like a sponge, leaving our people free to their own business and concerns, freeing up unfathomable quantities of time to devote to Duckstack duties such as mayorship.
All in all, this government stuff seems a bit unrealistic to me, my mom taught me to be wary of things that seem too good to be true. What’s the catch, y’know? But who knows, maybe I’ll go to the store and get myself one just to try it out sometime.
It couldn’t hurt, right?
thats you
They are called this by me
which would make it a lot harder to work
if you had a lack of elbow grease, you might need to start eating these
What? Is this talking about arthritis or something?
-Editor
SHOULD
its not actually
-Editor
Weather day or night
*Really?
-Editor
There is debate over the meaning of a lot of words, but I feel righteous stays explicit to pretty much everyone. Sadness might be mope-y and unproductive. That’s unrighteous. Sadness might be guilty and incentivizing to repent, and that’s productive and capitalize-able. Same with anger and joy and love and so forth.
We’ve been stormchasing approximately 4 minutes now
I put scare quotes around it but it actually is just a backpack, its just not really on his back, or particularly used for anything other than packing. It does transport things sometimes, but this is purely incidental.
he steals so much stuff to put into his backpack, we found the floorboard we needed in it the other day