Lieu Liaison
Its the ambassador for ambassadors, letting you know you can let them know.
Live by the Duckstack, die by the Duckstack
There is a concept in Tibetan monk astrophysics called “The Butterfly Effect”. Loosely formulated, the idea is that butterflies, when agitated1, can flap their wings really hard. Given their papery wings and virtually nonexistent weight class, this is totally ineffective for deterring predators, who promptly eat them without even realizing the butterfly was “trying to do something” at all. The predator goes on their way, totally unaffected.
The kicker is, that small breeze (if you can call it that) which the butterfly generated will continue, and pick up speed. Its kind of like when you knock a boulder down a mountain and it hits other rocks and those rocks hit other rocks until you have a landslide, except with air particles2. Eventually, you get a hurricane in Spain or something, all because this one little butterfly didn’t want to get eaten.
Now the part where you get all metaphysical with it is when you say, the butterfly flapping its wings hard makes a hurricane, but so does you twitching your little finger slightly while reading this. You just killed a billion people maybe. Congratulations. Every little thing can have big and crazy unforeseen consequences. People who are scared of this will naturally reach the conclusion not to act, ever. They have their reward. But: For the bold and visionary, the people possessed with a spirit of entrepreneurship and fire, this philosophy yields intriguing possibilities. After all, if small things have big effects, how much bigger of effects could you get… With a big thing?
What I’m trying to say is, what if the butterfly was a duck? You should get a duck. Think of the power.
HISTORY
Many ups, many downs, many screaming children
Jethro: “But I do know how old I was on my first birthday.“ and we asked “Oh yeah?” and he smartly replied: “Two.”
The toddler found an entire undumped can of paint this week
The toddler also found some yellow kinetic play sand that looked kind of like a flour mixture and he cracked an egg into it and started trying to make dough. To his credit, this was the least messy thing he did all week.
“I ang-er-ry, mama.” and then my wife told him “hey you said that really well! (he struggles with ‘r’s’). What are you angry about?” "… You right! I angry!” and then ran off. Truly a wonder being a child. Like “how did you know?”
Jethro says "happy be with baby sister" and then "I love you baby" as he strokes her hair
Picking Jethro up he cheerfully says: “Careful! Careful on your Jethro! :)”
Wolfskin Sheepcoats
Our best Duckstack Psychologists say: “wow people sure seem sicker now”
Men are extremely prone to mental illness, and women are doubly so. With the advent of social media, you might have imagined that mental illness rates have gone up, but you’re wrong, because that’s only one of like 50 reasons that mental illness rates have gone up.
But the internet is a nontrivial contributor for all of them. Jonathan Haidt points out that social media use by itself doubles incidence of depression for boys, and triples it for girls. 200% and 300%, respectively, at least in the UK. Mental illness is endemic, its everywhere, and its inflicted on us by our environment in a lot of hard to parse ways. Which is why I got a lot of flak a couple weeks ago when I commented in passing that mental illness can be a vice.
While this is not always true, it is obviously true in some cases. I think most of us have a relative or adjacent friend who is extremely neurotic- its clear to any onlooker that they relish their victimhood, and naturally move to place themselves in situations where they lose control. The Democratic party, which is pro vice, is full of mental illness and in many ways is implicitly, if not explicitly, the party of the unhealthy3. This is what it owes its success to- because nearly everyone is unhealthy in some ways today. You have to go really far out of your way to get anywhere close to the healthiness baseline enjoyed by even one single generation past.
Some smokers live to be a hundred, and a lot more get lung cancer. Its not necessarily a causal thing, its a matrix of risk factors and consistency that lethality tends to start to show up in the statistics. But its very understandable for people to get mad when I say something like this, because what if you say that to someone who’s really struggling through no fault of their own? That would be mean. For all I know, they’re probably right4.
In my opinion, the question that needs to be resolved, (and I believe it can be resolved, I believe you can accurately discern people.) is whether something comes about because of weakness or malice. Jesus talked about sheep coming in among the flock but inwardly they are ravening wolves and I think wolves are just as happy to eat the shepherd, its not just mentally ill people preying on mentally ill people out there. If someone is feigning, or perhaps a better word would be indulging in mental illness, they’re going for sympathy and excuses from normal people. And this type of person needs to be kicked in the pants! That’s the solution, right? Snap out of it, those aren’t the rules here. You can’t just prey on people. This is the most effective solution in my experience, and indeed I have met many people in my life who I have tried to treat in all manner of civility and decency only for their neuroticism to spiral into an increasing vortex, using every concession and conflict avoidance as a stepping stone to further escalation. Only a swift kick in the pants has worked to establish boundaries.
On the other hand, if someone is suffering from mental illness, that is a different story. As Brigham Young said, these you must not chasten severely, they are too tender and will melt like wax to a flame. This type of person actually benefits from being coddled, it helps them to grow in the same way that scaffolding is necessary to construct a great building, or in the way that crutches enable the recovery of a bone. You have to treat the two types separately, even though they’re saying and doing the same things.
I use this heuristic a lot. If you go to Sunday school and someone says something heretical, blasphemous, or otherwise annoying, you can’t just blow up on them, you need to know where they’re coming from. I don’t think this is usually something you can see from just interactions in class. Are they a misguided sheep? Or a wolf? You shouldn’t ever blame a misguided sheep for being misguided. Heaven knows I’m misguided often enough- and I would hope for mercy from others when I’m in error. Right? Hopefully I don’t offend in the same points that bother me, but I think it would be really foolish to think I never go astray either. Parable of the Lord’s debtor, you know?
But I don’t think this is a good excuse to never exercise justice either. I think that’s really bad. If you never fight for what you believe in you’ll never get it, and if you never try to disabuse harm then harm will continue. But in these cases the approach is important. Are they misguided? Or are they trying to misguide? Temperance.
Top Children’s Shows
Shows to show your kid
Been a parent for a million years now. Seen a lotta shows come and gone. Most of ‘em are trash. You don’t want to put that on your kid. You want your kid to win. Give them the good stuff.
With childhood cancer, your options for giving your child “a good life” become restricted. Jethro hasn’t been able to walk for at least a month, and with my having to work we end up giving him more screen time than I would prefer, and I’ve observed there’s some start quality differences among children’s shows. I noted before that all the shows that used to be good have all become pretty much just climate activism now. What made a show good was, in my opinion, that it taught kids actual things, that it was funny for adults, and that it wasn’t evil. You would think this wouldn’t be a hard bar to clear but some modern shows have managed to be even clearing it *well*. Here are my kids shows recommendations5.
Steve and Maggie: A viral youtuber, Steve’s show is essentially a simple clown bit between him as the straight man and his crow puppet as the silly one. He does all the normal kids songs like the finger puppets thing. He is a little repetitive but kids never mind that, and from what I have watched its wholesome and sometimes decently funny. Low on learning and plot, but for a kid who is just looking to be entertained, he is entertaining.
Word Girl: Word girl has been around since I was in high school and it is still funny. I think learning new words is not a really high priority learning thing but I always loved the zany whimsicality of the writers. It spans the balance between jokes kids will enjoy and jokes adults will enjoy pretty well. Its also from what I can tell continued to be wholesome.
Wonderballs: Anthropomorphized crafts. Its creative, occasionally has lessons like “share”, and without language its hard to teach bad things. It really is just straight arts and crafts though, which feels wholesome to me.
Odd Squad: This is a really new6 show that in only a few episodes became my favorite children’s show ever. The learning focus is math, but instead of being told through a sort of adventurous plot driven medium, the show opts for simply bizarre “villains” and world structures that demand highly arbitrary shape rotation skills. It really tickles my surrealist sense, and I think the many inserted layers of adult concepts like bureaucracy and red tape are absolutely charming. The writing switches key really rapidly, so it stays pretty high-frequency throughout each episode. Give it a watch.
Bottle Top Bill: An honorable mention for this list. While far from being the most entertaining show I’ve given, Bottle Top Bill makes up for it in sheer adventurousness of the medium. Its a stop motion scrapbook show which you kind of have to watch to understand what makes its animation so unique. The environments are constructed ad-hoc as the characters move, and overall the shows pacing is very stable. I think its fun enough that more people should know about it.
Martin Luther King’s Dream
let me share a vision with you
Once upon a time there was a group of adventurers farming creeps at mid, and the mobs got too powerful but they pulled some brilliant maneuvers and totally wiped them. They all got a lot of experience and level ups, but then God came down and said “alright, take what you want and leave but don’t build a city here.”
And the party looked around at each other and at the rich loot and said “Are you abandoning this? No way. Just a little building a city here is probably fine.” Each of them thought, “well, I’m not working on behalf of the party, I’m just an individual panning for gold on my own.”, and thus they justified their abject loitering.
Anyway, a bunch of heroes living in a spot attracts a lot of commerce, and soon you had merchants setting up shop to buy and sell supplies, and the area soon became a thriving metropolis. It was one of the richest, and most abundant places on earth, due to the natural resources and accessibility of all trade routes. The people thought God was a fool, or that they had tricked him. They had overcome whatever God was talking about through force of will. And then a huge meteorite that had been on that trajectory for 500 billion years hit the city and crushed it to dust.
The End
DUCKSNAX
surf7
######EXPERIMENTAL FEATURE BE CAREFUL#######
I suppose they can also do this when excited or bored, I’m not a butterfly cop
Or whatever air is made of
What did you think fatphobia, homophobia, transphobia, ablism, were for? Even racism is usually about this
I don’t know how catastrophic it would be if someone told me something that wasn’t my fault was my fault but I am happy to just believe I am The Übermensch in this scenario
My anti-recommendations list would include anything British, because without fail they will do the “two mommies” LGBT thing. Peppa pig, geckos garage, and many others have disappointed me like this.
uhhhh 2014
technology is truly amazing, that I can recreate such high definition images using digital art