Plain Patents
There's a whole world of patents out there, braving the Oregon Trail, dying of dysentery
Duckstack, now part of this1 balanced breakfast
Last week2 we advised you brush your teeth with Duckstack. However, we have now received numerous death threats from the FDA. THE DUCKSTACK IS NOT EDIBLE3. Take care not to brush your teeth with too much Duckstack4, as this may result in side effects5.
It is too late for many of you, who used too much Duckstack as toothpaste and who foolishly consumed it. For those who remain, we also must now advise you (due to numerous death threats from the park rangers service) to Beware The Duckstack Guzzler. This new cousin-by-adoption to bigfoot wanders the Earth stealing and chugging your entire Duckstacks in one gulp. He doesn’t ask permission, he has no manners, he is also immortal6. When you hear his burp, which sounds like a cross between a bear’s roar and a clown’s bike horn, you’ll know you’ve been guzzled. So what can you do? Is there no recourse for you now that you’re Duckstackless? I’m afraid until we open a central Duckstack bank and start issuing fiat currency and manipulating interest rates, to produce value from thin air, no. There are no gold bars backing your Duckstacks, and we have no Duckstack Accountant to replace your lost Duckstacks using math and void magic. You’ll just have to wait for your new shipment of Duckstacks like the rest of us. What’s that? Here’s one coming now!
Planet Earth
Due to inflation, the Earth has recently joined Pluto in Not Being A Planet
I liked PBS kids television (“Public Broadcasting Service” i.e. government television) growing up so I watch it with my toddler a little bit now, and I can say that it has gotten much better and insanely worse
There are a few extremely promising new and old shows- Word Girl was my favorite growing up, and it has not deteriorated at all. Odd Squad has a lighthearted surrealism woven into every episode, and you can tell the writers are really enjoying themselves. Daniel Tiger replaces parents (being almost entirely thinly veiled teaching children emotional processing pretending to be entertainment).
However, I’ve also observed a fair amount of drift. Arthur's animation style has gone incredibly downhill and is quickly catching up to sesame street in being explicitly a vehicle for social justice nonsense. Cyberchase used to be about math, but now its about… Climate activism? This is what I want to talk to you about today, because this trend is interesting.
PBS kids is all climate activism now. Its not apocalyptic or anything, but they have about 10 separate shows dedicated to nothing but “preserving nature” including like I mentioned multiple shows that used to be just about math. It seems everything needs to have activism now, and I think climate change is the “most neutral” activism there is. As long as you don’t say the words “global warming” pretty much everyone will agree with you. Heck, “save water” helps parents in theory save on water bills, so it kind of does benefit everyone. I am a big fan of taking care of the planet7 myself, though I think of it mainly in Latter-Day Saint terminology: Stewardship. "God made the planet, and trusted it to me, so I should try to take care of it", and also I'm a citizen of a community. So when I pick up a piece of trash while walking or put an extra shopping cart away or whatever, this "purifies the cultural commons" that the whole herd drinks from, improving life for everybody. Also, if I pick up beer cans and recycle them, the recycling place will pay me five bucks.
However, it is interesting that so many old shows seem to have gone this way- not explicitly liberal/social justice, but none of them are just doing math anymore. Maybe in some senses this is one-upsmanship. You want to have the characters or show care about something? Well, what’s the biggest thing to care about that conceivably needs saving? The whole planet! And then they just write with that premise. 1984 got language wrong- they’re not editing the dictionary to corral how you think, they’re editing the dictionary to corral how you feel, so that everything can be categorized into stark two dimensional outcomes. I’ve written about this trend with super heroes- They’re all about saving “the day” rather than giving your starving neighbor food. But feeding your starving neighbor, who is real, is what real morality looks like. It doesn’t help that most media has become so vulgar. Whatever it is, this trend cannot be good.
Like most people, I started really getting into anime around covidtime. I wasn’t a stranger to it before, I’d seen a dozen or so, but I wasn’t really “into” it until I had so much time indoors on my hands. And I remember one of the initial Big Draws , was that it was media that didn’t try to preach to me! It was like a breath of fresh air, to just be told a story that didn’t try to be anything other than a story. Japan has its own share of vulgarity, of course, and finding clean shows can be a task on its own, but there is a real disparity here: the manga for “Kimetsu No Yaiba” (Demon Slayer) outsold the entire comics book industry in America. Put together. By Ten. Times. It is that much better, or American media is now that much worse. Many people will not feel this loss of culture, but I do, and I constantly worry that sometime soon people are going to start looking up from their phones and noticing “woah, this sucks”
ONE GOOD SPORT
I have been training sports like pokemon and pitting them into a gladiator death match to see which one is the best, and it was baseball. Let me tell you about it.
nobody is even good at it
fans dont even care that much
"oh cool he hit the ball" is the emotional peak
chill players
spectators arent even watching, just there for hot dogs and atmosphere
nobody knows whats going on and this doesn’t bother anyone
American
musical
History
Hi, Story!
I have learned this week that kids sizes go “4t” to “10”, I don’t know what’s next, probably “orange” for 4 year olds
My wife bought more chickens, to replace the fallen. Soon our very walls will be chickens.
Putting on the Little One’s shirt it got stuck on his head, and immediately he was like “I’ma ghost!”
Took him to the hospital and he asked on the drive “where are we going?” and we told him “the hospital” and he started singing “Don't want to get shot-tedddd”
We forgot to open the door to the chicken coup to let them all back in overnight, and the good news is our night predator situation isn’t as bad as we thought, and the great news is that when you leave chickens to their own devices they climb high in trees and just sit there, like Christmas ornaments.
The little one has blisters on both his thumbs now in the exact same location, we cannot figure out why.
This week, the Littlest one instantly learned to walk. He walks with his hands straight up.
(The Little One, eating ferociously) “I don’t like it!”
I went outside to do some digging in the garden but didn’t tell the toddler where I was going. Apparently he kept running up to mama and saying “Mama, we have a mission! Papa’s missing!”
My wife was playing with the Little One. “Should I cover you in tickles? “No, tats too much.” “One tickle?” “Otay!” and then he ran to flop over so she could tickle him.
The Little One walked into a room with a bagel, making bagel noises for the bagel: “Bagel bagel bagel bagel”
A SHORT STORY ABOUT TOWELS
In toweltown everything is made of towels.
A SHORT OPINION ABOUT TOWELS
Useless8!
(picture of a massive feast of every imaginable food need and duckstack tiny in a corner)
it was like 5 weeks ago
officially
Just a shot in the dark here: one ton.
not sure if this is a side effect but for legal reasons we must say do not chug Duckstacks hoping to gain this power
Genesis 2:15And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.
its just an opinion, its not necessarily *my* opinion. Don’t shoot the messenger