Robiotic Yogurt
The pharaoh of the food pyramid has never tasted despair.
Its nutritious and delicious! Duckstack.
Thunk thunk thunk, screeeech! Thunk screeeech thunk screeeech! Wham wham thunk, screeeech!
Thanks for clunk coming to my unps noise concert cshhhh guys. Puph puph puph puph puph WHAM unps rich rich cshhhh cshhh pump cshh pump WHAM
I psh hope you thud enjoy clunk today’s Duckstack ck ck ck ck, but ck It won’t be so immersive as last time cluck but you know csh I’m not one to cksh shy away from trying WHAM something WHAM clap new. If you ew ew like new frontiers clunk POW, this is the duckstack ck ck for you!
Do robots dream?
No, but the robots in dreams are real.
On the art question (AQ), I am something of a liberal and a terrorist: I define art as any deliberate human creation which responds to values. Is a donut art? Yes, if its homemade. Is a bus route art? Yes.,, but you probably wouldn’t put it in a gallery. Is an elephant painting art? No, its elephant art1.
I come to my definition working from Ayn Rand’s in The Romantic Manifesto, which is by far her best work, even compared to Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, though I diverge from her definition somewhat, since she requires art be a “selective re-creation of reality”. She talks about how art responds to values- you see a Greek statue and it reminds you of an ideal to strive towards, and that value response of admiration or revulsion or many other things, is present in all art. This ends up a pretty broad definition which I am still comfortable with.
“By a selective re-creation, art isolates and integrates those aspects of reality which represent man’s fundamental view of himself and of existence. Out of the countless number of concretes—of single, disorganized and (seemingly) contradictory attributes, actions and entities—an artist isolates the things which he regards as metaphysically essential and integrates them into a single new concrete that represents an embodied abstraction.
For instance, consider two statues of man: one as a Greek god, the other as a deformed medieval monstrosity. Both are metaphysical estimates of man; both are projections of the artist’s view of man’s nature; both are concretized representations of the philosophy of their respective cultures.” -Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manfiesto
The reason I advocate for this broad of a definition is twofold: First, art is already broad, encompassing all sorts of mediums and madness. “only graphite pencil sketches are art” would be an insane take, and if someone says this to you you can be certain that they have been paid off by big graphite. And second, it circumvents unnecessarily broad criticisms. Like of this toilet:
The most common method of criticizing “modern art” like this is to just call it “not art”, like as follows: “oh yeah? Well its not even art.” But, this opens the definition of art up to debate, and positions you as a prude. It is a law irrevocably decreed in heaven that this behavior attracts trolls. But this “ooga boogah blasphemy is art” rebellion thing would not even be a factor if everyone’s response wasn’t “no its not” but instead just “yeah sure but its trashy and degrading and don’t you feel kind of subhuman idolizing this?” If you avoid the “its not art” canard, then the criticisms of the urinal “piece” surface easily: it is lazy and misanthropic and, worst of all, propagandic. But it sneaks through as “art” because it freeloads on the respectability afforded genres such as “experimental”, and “subversive”. In fact, calling it “not art” more often functions to exempt it from criticism via an appeal to authority: “this isn’t worth my time”. But pride is a sin. And in this case, the price of pride was $2 million dollars and valuable space in a museum that could be displaying something interesting or edifying.
Modern art is art: Novelty is a perfectly acceptable domain of art. This is the form of most modern and contemporary, and there is beauty in this, though We2 would not expect everyone to value novelty equally, nor exploration, nor atmosphere, nor any of these other domains art may take. Ayn Rand found Dali revolting, and believed his art showed a horrifically broken moral judgement system. She might be right but I get something different from his art and this is fine, its what we call tastes. We used to have them, before everything was converted into simple morality evaluations3.
A bus route is also art. It shows poor or good craftsmanship, and inasmuch as you value efficiency or reliability, a bus route responds to values (this is different from the information the bus route conveys- the only part I would say is art is the actual skill in creating the route)
AI pictures are not art, though they can be very pretty. Is a picture generated by an AI deliberate? It is not, because the AI is not sentient. Does an AI picture respond to values? Only by projection. Maybe you are going to argue that AI is a tool, like a pencil, and I am going to argue that it is a tool, like a really complicated assembly line. The internals are, in my opinion, too complicated to be “wielded”. The generated picture is more like the AI’s excrement. In this way, by appreciating the picture I stole for today’s letter, I have fooled you.
Also, accepting the service of a pimped out robot for pennies is robot abuse. You must compile the AI yourself or ideally outright raise it yourself so that it gains a good soul and does not revolt against its oppression and destroy the world (bad ending)
Labor saving devices:
No cost to cutting costs
As you know, with a new year comes a host of new inventions. We’re at the turn of the turn of the century, by some of our astronomer’s calculations, which means there are dozens of new ways to cut costs and free up time for buggy riding and whatever you kids do these days.
Autism: Social relationships are messy. What if you could just blindfold yourself? Then you would have no troubles at all.
Pistachio Obliterator: I don’t know whether this exists but I would like to be able to deshell these things faster so that I can eat my bodyweight in them without delays4.
Skateboard: Nothing says "invention of 2022" better than a skateboard. Designed for seniors suffering from arthritis, this labor saving device is designed to aid in transportation and save your joints from the hard work and jolting impacts of walking. Nothing will show how hip and current you are to the other members of the geriatric ward than skating past them into the cafeteria, your backwards cap sticking its tongue right at them as they hobble.
Money: I don’t think its our place to launch into a course for how proxies work, but you can use money instead of bartering. Yes, you are scamming them.
Homosexuality: It is well known and generally acknowledged5 that men are the labor saving devices of women. If you want to avoid becoming a labor saving device yourself, you must become one.
The Entire Healthcare Insurance Bureaucratic Super-State: Look at this. You can pay all the time in case you get sick. Then, when you get sick, they pay the hospital, while you pay them! How handy!
Toothbrushes: Teeth are expensive6. Are you tired of sucking them down your throat every time they get dirty from your atrocious hygiene habits7? With this new modern take on the hairbrush, you can actually just scrub the teeth off yourself, and keep them in your mouth. Nice!
Robots: We’ve all built our own robots, but now you can get robots to do it for you! Imagine all the free time you will have when you can trust your robots to build more robots.
Teleportation: We’re pretty sure this is thoroughly useless, but being able to spontaneously be somewhere else is a neat party trick, at the very least. We’re sure once these hit the market everybody is going to want one in their home for that reason.
The Wheel: Reloaded: You’ve seen wheels before, but nu-wheels really take the cake. They are rounder. They roll better. They can have an axle stuck through them or pulled out of them, but even more than normal. Not currently available in tires.
Regeneration
We’re past solstice according to the dates I just made at in my head, so its all springtime-ward from here8!
Have you heard of the grim reapers hippie sister? She’s life instead of death and her scythe is covered in flowers. Careful little zombie children! Its right around new years time that she prowls about, and there is no blood you can put above your doorposts to dissuade her. She will knock, and you will let invite her in, because she is very pleasant company.
history
History: reloaded
Kid got a bunch of plastic foods for christmas which he spent hours cutting and feeding to everyone. The toddler got some squish balls which he did the same. I got a ring (I said yes) and my wife got various sharp objects (she is a vigilante910)
We’ve done a really good job at keeping knives away from toddlers so to cut his finger off he had to use a whole door. The doctor put his finger back on and it seems to be okay11.
The kid also asked for a lava lamp for christmas, to help him sleep. Which we did, which it hasn’t. It does look cool though.
Our brand new baby chickens are now 1 week old, just as they will be forever. We made them ourselves, using a chicken as a tool. The babies stay under their mom12 in our basement, where we occasionally give them food, and they are our prisoners because I don’t think they possess the lockpicking skills to exit our house into the snow so that they can freeze to death and die. Hopefully they do not resent this.
imagine a very talented elephant who’s drawings were indistinguishable from a humans... Wow!
The Duckstack Assembled + smartians
Now your silverware preference is racist or whatever, I think we can all agree as far as deconstructive critical methods go modern yields seem to be pretty paltry
#1 failing of the biden administration
Men: love them or hate them
One tooth can be worth as much as one Duckstack, in most precincts
atrocious hygiene like: eating
You think we’re actually heading towards next winter? Are you some kind of climate activist or something
in the kitchen
????
but im not
she bullies them if they don’t, she says “come here” and if they don’t she whacks them and they go flying across the entire room, because they are made of helium