Inflate Rebate
Balloons half off or do it yourself with a knife
Put on your dancing duckstack
Yes, The Duckstack is still running on a Thursday schedule. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you, for those of you who had structured your life around a Tuesday release. Don’t be afraid. We are still watching over you. Or whatever it is that emails do in email inboxes.
Hello, I am The Duckstack. And if you don’t know, or if you’re new here: You are you. Hopefully that clears some things up.
As you know, or may not know, depending on your intel, you are a spy, and I have just given you valuable information. You now know who I feel you are. You have played me for a fool. I imagine you will shortly report this to your superiors, be they organizational or intellectual, or maybe its just you. I have no idea how deep your operation goes, but you’ve got me. You’ve got me good. Some people get tortured for years without their interrogators getting a single word out of them, but you’ve already got like 120. 122 if you count 120. 132 if you count 122 two if you count 120. One hundred forty nine. You sly dog1. I hope they’re paying you. Or if its just you, I hope you’re paying yourself. Maybe you aren’t being compensated enough. In the name of justice, I will give you even more words.
The Prediction Market
Competitive sports for dummies
In a casino, you play games of pure chance. The roll of a dice, the dealing of a card, the pull of a lever. When you romanticize it it sounds pretty fun, right? Its actually very boring. Someone or something else is doing all the work. Maybe the machine is printing out the numbers. The dealer is handing you cards. Its basically a mobile idle game when you think about it. The more of a participant the player is, the less of an element of chance there can be. I hear that in many casinos, counting cards is illegal.
Psychologically, counterintuitively, the less of a participant you are in something, the more like a participant you feel. We call this “cope” but it just means “gambling is addictive”. If you truly felt like the gambling outcome had nothing to do with you, you wouldn’t do it, even if it means you must mythologize your position in your mind. If someone “over there” was rolling some dice, you would say “its got nothing to do with me”. It probably wouldn’t even be interesting. But if they invite you to roll some dice, well now the hooks are in your mind.
This is basically what watching sports on television is, too. As my friend Bennett’s Phylactery points out, sports is pretty much divorced from what made it relevant to people’s lives in the olden days. “Local” teams are comprised 100% of foreigners- who get regularly swapped out with other teams, and they’re bankrolled by huge corporations and rich people. There’s basically no connection to the land or any reason to root for one team or another one, and very little to separate most teams from one another- the differences in strategy are fairly minute. Have you seen that graph of basketball three pointers? Conformity is in some ways the nature of competition.
So in comes the sports “fan”. I almost feel like fan is too dignified of a word for them, but they wear the jerseys, and regularly consume the content, and derive some kind of meaning from it. The mindset is totally alien to me but I do have some friends among them. And really, its probably innocuous enough in moderation. Who needs to be 100% engaged and rational all the time? Not even robots are that stupid. But consider the fan who’s number one identity in life is a hobby which is wholly nonparticipatory. There is no action that can be taken while watching the TV that could conceivably alter the outcome, even a tiny amount. The result is some of the most egotistical men you will ever meet2.
Any other hobby you think of has an immediate feedback loop. If you’re bad at video games, you lose the games. Maybe you can blame your team if you’re inclined, and many are. If you knit, you can immediately see with your own eyes the quality of your work. If you garden it doesn’t grow, if you crash you can’t drive. But if a sports watcher thinks the team should have run some other strategy- when would he ever be shown right or wrong? Unless he has a history of playing the sport himself, never. It is the first truly inert hobby, with no capacity for improvement. It is purely consumptive.
In moderation, this dilutes to safe levels. What happens if someone spends the majority of their time and effort in this aforedescribed state of mind? What happens when this gets into your bones?
Sometimes when I am in an internet argument people will call me an idiot. That’s fair enough, I consider myself smart but that doesn’t mean I’m smart in all domains or even ones I think I’m smart in. What if someone had purposely trained me wrong, as a joke? So sometimes I’ll say “sure, lets have a match of chess, or take an intelligence test, or have some other competition with an objective standard of competence.” And the other person usually goes “I was just saying I hate you, that sort of thing raises the stakes way beyond what’s reasonable for an internet argument, I’m willing to spend 5 seconds writing some insults but I’m not setting aside a half hour for you dude, that isn’t reasonable at all.” Cowards.
So you can’t really psyche evaluate other people and in any case that isn’t what Christ died for. Whether the sportsbros can be redeemed is his business. But you can improve yourself and strive to become more honest. Here is a terrifying quote if you have been lying or stealing recently:
"When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported back, the rate of improvement accelerates."
-Pearson’s Law or something. IDK, I’ve just always heard it in church and never with attribution so I just learned it has a name from googling it just now3.
With sports, or politics, or similar spectator sports, certainly you can write down your predictions and then report back to yourself. I don’t think its necessarily right to become a “data guy” but for a few small things that are important to you, wouldn’t a little accountability help? Counterintuitively, you can raise the stakes by literally betting on these things, in something called “prediction markets”. That probably isn’t necessary for "becoming an honest person” which is the goal I advocate to my readers anyway, but the point is that there are ways to discover what kind of a person you are.
The dunning krueger effect is totally a meme. Fake. Totally wrong4. Never cite it. But what is true is that being the best in your sphere might totally not at all correlate to being actually good at something. I used to think of myself as a patient person. It turns out, I just didn’t care. Being patient was easy. That’s not high patience, its virtue untested. And people who have taken their virtues through the forge, and the beliefs, do not tend to be arrogant about it. What isn’t bought cheaply tends to be respected, and not sold for popularity or coin, unless you’re marketing it (which is dangerous.) The skilled often are the humble, because their rubber has spent the most time on the road, getting worn down and duct taped back together and at least it still works.
“Courage is the form of every virtue, at its testing point.”
-C.S. Lewis or something, IDK I’ve only heard the quote in church and didn’t even google it this time.
Coreoscopes
To the heart of your future
Earth’s Core: You’re on a hot streak! Keep it up, you have another several million years in you.
Apple Core: The seeds of greatness lie within you, but you will never do anything with them. Move on quickly.
Core Strength: Flexible and adaptive, a little workout here and there will greatly improve your life.
Core Values: You have been faking it for too long and everyone is sick of it. Stop pretending to be a religion and start acting like a company. Your employees are working for a paycheck and want a raise. They don’t need a sermon. Geez.
Core Curriculum: You’ve gone back to basics, and its really benefited you. Keep it up! Especially compatible with Core Strength this week. Your stars are fighting with Apple Core. Your unlucky object: Piano benches.
History
Quick and dirty, like kids tend to be.
The toddler running into the room to talk to the baby:”Yes I found you! Look, the monster’s right next to you!”
The toddler, touching mama on the nose: “Boop! Boop! I'm playing nose.”
We had some electricians over. The toddler told them, “you are breaking our house.”
The toddler has a game he plays where he screams joyfully at the infant. Technically this game is not new, he’s been doing it since she was born. But she’s had months of practice, and she’s starting to get pretty good at it. Now, sometimes when he starts yelling at her, she laughs.
The parable of the #2 ticatondra pencil
100% certified real parable
What man of you, having need to write, doth not have a drawer full of broken and useless writing utensils? Go therefore, and get yourself a reliable pencil, which can be quickly sharpened with those pencil sharpeners that everybody has lying around from who knows where. For that which must be written shall write, and that which shall write must be written, just like I am saying unto you now, except I am doing it with a keyboard obviously, which you wouldn’t stick with your other writing stuff. But you could. Nobody’s stopping you. It is yourself holding yourself back, as it always was. Along with your lack of a properly sharpenable #2 pencil.
Ducksnax
Balance
Or whatever animal you feel best represents your slyness. For me, it is a duck.
and I know egos. I’ve got one myself. A real designer brand, too.
TBQHWY
He explained, Dunning Kruegerely,