Gift Shift
Show someone you love them. Give them a hand-wrapped transmission gearbox this Christmas.
goes together like oil and duckstack
You are getting sleepy. Verrrry sleepy. Your eyes are becoming heavy and your mind is starting to drift. Veeerry sleeeepy. You are feeling lesssss sleeeepy. You will forget everything I told you when you were asleeeeep. You are feeling refresheedd. You are feeling ready to read The Duckstackkkkk
Duckstack Science: A Captive Audience
Which experiment will it be today… Biology? Or… Physics?
We’ve heard a lot about the kind of things you can do with a captive audience. You can for example treat them like a dog who needs its medicine smuggled in like meat, running your entertainment industry like re-education camps. You can spam them with good person checks like you’re some sort of petty commissar rather than an jester1, all sorts of stuff. There’s a lot of power there. But we've never been able to replicate these effects in a laboratory environment.
Well. We’ve finally got ourselves a captive audience, which we abducted from some musical we found on state street. Now, if they’re not watching a performance, they’re not an audience anymore right? They’re just captives. So we’ve got our Duckstack Scientists putting on musical concerts and talent shows and forcing the captives to listen, and let me tell you they are NOT responding favorably. Now, over the course of this experiment, this is well within expectations, so we won’t be ending the performance any time soon. Our chief scientist Jerry predicts that we probably won’t get any useful data on captive audiences without at least a straight month of readings and observations, so wish our Duckstack Scientists good luck and stamina because they’re really in it for the long haul.
Duckstack Science: Tar and Feathering
Icarus is just one guy. Lets launch scientists at the sun to make sure it replicates.
The wright brothers had a brother2, before they invented planes. Now the essence of science is perseverance. A single failure can’t stop you. But you usually should change up your theorem a little bit, which is the legacy of tar and feathering: This was found to be useful for flight, and has instead been relegated to a mere torture method. Which just goes to show how dedicated Icarus Wright was, to cover himself in boiling tar and stick feathers to himself and then jump out a window. Today we wouldn’t wish this on our worst enemies, but in the past it was a new and exciting horizon, full of promise and wonder. So next time you fly on an airplane, remember that, and take a second to appreciate the forefathers who made such mechanical wonders possible by their hard work and sacrifice. And who knows, maybe one day we’ll bring it back, and find a way to make it work.
Duckstack Science: Seeing Stars
Real phenomenon or hoax and Looney Toons Gag? You Decide!
Everyones seen the floaties worms in your eyes, but where are the stars? Our Duckstack Scientists agree that stars are quite different from worms. Jerry tells me they’re “completely different scientific categories”. So why would you see stars? Initially we assumed this was just talking about physically looking at the stars. Because, well obviously. But it has come to our attention that its actually a phrase that refers to something totally different. We have to know if its a misnomer. So we’ve got a team of Elite Duckstack Scientists, the best of the best, the kind that wears lab coats, just absolutely knocking the heck out of each other with boxing gloves, and I’ve got a feeling we’re going to solve this mystery once and for all, very soon3.
Charity
Through a certain lens, liberalism is a sort of apostate Christianity, where instead of mankind being fallen for eating the fruit, it has white mankind being guilty of slavery and the holocaust as its original sin. Liberalism has a priest caste of advanced parishioners to guide how to implement “decolonization” into your life, it has a chosen people (blacks or jews or gays or whatever), special holidays, and even sacrifices and rituals to pay reparations
The only thing its really missing is a redeemer figure- there’s never a point at which you're forgiven, only a point at which you're compliant.
There is no Messiah in Islam (more or less). You'll see plenty of commandments by which heaven is attained, and they believe Allah will forgive you, but there’s not someone paying for your sins, its just you. And for other cultures, the quran says to be “slightly more chill towards Christians and Jews” since each ostensibly worships one god, but it also kind of says to kill Jews4, so it all kind of comes out as a wash IMO
By a certain lens, antisemitism is an apostate Christianity, where Jews as a people became “natural subverters” through evolutionary pressure and now its “just in their nature” to try to destroy white people or whatever. But in antisemitism there is no redeemer figure. The original sin never gets cleansed. Even if you played along with their evolutionary argument that culture is genetic and evolutionary, they would never say that you could place similar evolutionary pressure to create good genetics/culture in these people, and most even go so far as to say anyone with even a little bit of Jewish ancestry will “manifest” these “traits”. What % of Jewish ancestry would make someone not be guilty? They never have an answer, the system is just an argument of convenience to justify their worldview, none of this makes any sense at any level of granularity.
Its just a product of how you want to see the world. Most people are allergic to rigor. This is because they see no benefit to them. You can get through life perfectly fine just hating on people and being all tribal about everything. The problem is that these thought patterns will spill over into daily habits with relationships that actually do matter, and thus in marriage you see patterns of resentment build up. “She always ______” “He never _______”. Nobody always alwayses or nevers. You put people in a little box to justify yourself. This quickly creates incredibly conflict within the relationship because you’re viewing the situation through a necessarily hopeless lens. A better pattern says to check for ways to give them the benefit of the doubt and encourage good behaviors since you want more of that, but unless specifically taught to do so most people will push towards conflict for no reason at all other than these little convenient shortcuts, and then you’ve got divorce or go to therapy to have the therapist teach you that actually you can give your spouse the benefit of the doubt, you don’t have to think of them as deliberately sabotaging you. If your goal is to promote harmony, cooperation, and the building of something greater than yourself, then avoiding resentment and orienting yourself towards cooperation in the little things is actually a pretty big deal. I believe orienting yourself this way is itself righteous.
Native Americans had a sort of animist religion, but their deities were war deities, called upon for mastery of the elements and so forth- and they certainly had no framework for extending mercy to each other. Lol.
Now, all this paints a cruel picture, and it is far from encompassing. In reality, honor and justice cultures usually had to be fairly ruthlessly enforced- an eye for an eye was a commandment, not a restraint on vindictiveness. This is because most people are lazy and/or cowards who would rather not push issues if they don’t have to (a perfectly healthy impulse) and so as a matter of social order and law justice simply had to be enforced. Even today, nearly everyone would prefer to outsource dealing with criminals and such to the authorities rather than handle things themselves. But this laziness/cowardice/tolerance is not really the same as forgiveness or mercy- its more being a pushover. When Jesus said to give a thief your coat also, that was in fact a very different thing.
What we see from the historical record is that proactive mercy and proactive charity is simply not the norm. Christianity set the stage for cooperation, a word that I love, and it did this in a quite revolutionary way. The first generation of Christians were so zealous about this they would even welcome martyrdom, from a certain viewpoint this meant that they would offend people with their beliefs, but remain blameless for any violence that was escalated to. In a way forcing people to choose between reason and violence, and creating a society where words were not considered violence. I’m being a little reductive here as I have been in this whole article, but I do believe this set the stage for civil society as we know it, elevating mankind above their default assumptions and making way for redemption. Redemption of others is not the human norm, but Christianity is about raising people above their natural impulses, showing them a higher and holier way.
history
Say “eat dirt” to an adult and its an insult. Say it to a baby and its a feast
My wife was playing “what’s your favorite” with the toddler. What’s his favorite color? Green5. What’s your favorite dinosaur, etc. She asked him a couple things he didn’t know, such as “what’s your favorite tax law?” But when she asked what’s his favorite type of money he had no hesitation: “Gold!”
The toddler dipping his ham fried rice in yum yum sauce: “I like spicy!” baby that is mayonnaise
The baby has this thing where she stands on our bed and looks out over the headboard at the cars through the window, and we have gradually discovered more and more bite marks, until our headboard is at this point basically full of them and its like, are you a RODENT? Do you need to whittle your teeth down to keep them from overgrowing? Her crib is the same.
We heard the baby make a terribly sad cry the other day, and ran to save her, and found she was in the bathroom, staring into the toilet. She was terrified that we were not in there.
Animal Facts
A moving and powerful list
Spotted Frog: Found one
Spotted Leopard: Found one
Spotted Deer: Found one
Spotted Hyena: Found one
Ghost Shark: Still missing
Ducksnax
Bunny
Like, another one
if we don’t we’ll run out of funding
Surah Al-Baqarah 2:191 And kill them wherever you find them, and drive them out from where they drove you out. Persecution is worse than killing. But do not fight them at the Sacred Mosque unless they fight you there. If they do fight you, then kill them. Such is the recompense of the disbelievers.
Surah At-Tawbah 9:29 Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture—[fight] until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled.
Neither of these verses are “general” commands to kill or commit violence, one is a last day commandment and one is direction during war, but if we’ve learned anything from the last 1600 years, Muslims are always at war
This is probably not actually his favorite so much as it is the color he happened to pick at that 5 second block of time, and if you asked him again it would probably change