If a Duckstack falls in the woods, does it make a sound?
Gentle Ducks and Ducklettes, Mayor's one and all, you are wondering why I have asked you here today, as am I. I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors: The Duckstack is switching over to diesel, The Duckstack has run out of funding, The Duckstack is about to fire all of its readers, past and future1. Well, let me put these worries to rest: They are all true. You are all fired2. With no employees on our payroll, it is the opinion of our Duckstack Scientists that we will be able to stretch our funding of zero indefinitely. This will be horrible news to The Duckstack’s enemies, among which, after filing for unemployment you may find yourself numbered. This is regrettable, but what are you gonna do, sue us? We don’t have any money. Cut our electricity? We run on diesel, punks. Come and get us.
Simple Seductions
Just nothing in the air
There seems to be a fair degree of buzz over hierarchies, communism, and Christianity this week, and I thought it would be only appropriate that I add my own contribution to the discussion in a longform Substack article. I am not going to do that.
Instead I am going to talk about the cult-classic online culture sensation of Simping. Simping is, simply put, sucking up to women online. I’ve written before about the phenomenon of the “E-girl”, and I’ve written before about the dynamics of how anonymity changes dynamics online, but these dynamics are complicated much further by romance, which, online, will be unrequited, say, 99% of the time. Online culture has developed the term “Simp” to help bully/regulate these relationships and their influence on communities. You might ask “What’s wrong with sucking up to women online?”, and the answer is that online is not real life.
It usually goes something like this: An e-girl posts a provocative selfie of herself, and some poor dude forgets that she isn’t real3 and decides that he will have a good chance of establishing romance with her if he calls her beautiful in the comments of every single thing she ever posts for the next, say, year, estimating conservatively. When you’ve got a community going on around some hobby, this is annoying and distracting to members of the community. But its also incredibly degrading to the dude, why does nobody ever think of the dudes? How do you build self respect in someone like this?
When a man is involved with a woman, he installs a very normal priority set: He wants to protect her, and share things with her, and give her gifts, among many other things. These are special things a man gives to a woman as his part in the relationship4, but if these urges attach to an e-girl, there’s nothing reciprocal being given. She isn’t actually establishing anything of the sort of a relationship with him. They aren’t dating, they aren’t even going to date. (If she actively leads him along, that puts her in a different class. There are words for a woman who falsely intentionally leads along many men at once.) Anyway, a man needs to learn discernment, and part of this is learning to reign in his target selection for these sorts of impulses. If a dude buys every single girl flowers (or whatever the equivalent in his love language is), it doesn’t mean as much for him to buy his girlfriend flowers also. This is immature masculine behavior.
Most guys around puberty learn about their pair bonding impulses and eventually learn to reign them in. It helps that this sort of behavior is usually extremely creepy in real life. But the internet isn’t real life. On the internet, if you make a girl uncomfortable, she would have to go extremely far out of her way to communicate this to you. Most often, she will scroll on by, but the poor guy never got any signals to back off! So his affections continue and continue, escalating, and in his mind he’s got a real relationship with this woman, he spends so much time with her! He has had so many “conversations” with her, and since she “started” the conversations (not with him of course) he doesn’t even realize it to be one sided. The e-girl, by allowing the “simp’s” behavior, is enabling some deeply incorrect ideas about how to be polite to women- and these ideas will fester until he finally crosses some line.
At that point, when he finally gets pushed away, he doesn’t assume his rules were wrong, they’ve been “fine” for so long, after all! Instead, he feels betrayed and becomes offended and misogynistic and jaded and often chews her out “after all I did for you!”5 and these stories are always insane to read because obviously to the rest of us the woman was uncomfortable the whole time, but the guy never heard that6. This is why women should never post pictures of themselves online.
Now there’s the community’s perspective as well. “Don’t feed the trolls, don’t enable the e-girls.” This is where the bullying as a form of social regulation comes in- “if the girl isn’t going to patrol this guy, we of the community have to”, usually by calling him a simp and thus socially ostracizing him. As I wrote (I will link it again,) e-girls are kind of parasitic on communities because they aren’t really there for the hobby at all. But what if the community tries to ask the e-girl to post less pictures of herself? What do you think will happen? I will tell you what happens: Her dozens of orbiting simps rush to her defense, validating her, encouraging her, causing her to resist correction, and then she proceeds to dox and backstab every member of the entire community and get a whole bunch of reporters to write slanderous articles about everyone who was “mean” to her and ruin their reputations to the maximum degree she can. Do you think I am being hyperbolic? I am describing six separate events I watched in the last year alone. The reason is because when attention is your main reason for being someplace, as it is with many e-girls, then there’s really no point to you keeping loyalty if someone else outbids you in that currency! If attention is your main objective, then normal people principles like “don’t cause drama7” not only fall to the wayside, but they’re actively counterproductive to your incentives. Attention isn’t bad, of course. But why you are at a place reliably predicts how you will act there. This is why internet communities work hard to regulate these things on a cultural level, in ways that may appear odd to outsiders. It is community members taking responsibility for the boundaries that make their community enjoyable.
HISTORY
Every day I wake up to concussions as the Littlest One plays bongos on my forehead
The Little One comes to a shocking realization: “I'm acting like a superhero, but I'm not, I'm me!”
“I don't like mud, I don't like drinking it” what
The Little one came to a small step in the lawn and hopped down. “oh, I guess I’m a froggy now.” he thought. And proceeded to get down on all fours and hop and hop and hop, instead of getting in the car to go shopping.
“I hate wind!” “Oh yeah?” “Uh huh! because it blows people away!” I’ve been warned.
When his toys eat food they make noises, but it isn’t chewing noises, its “Yum Yum Yum Yum Yum Yum Yum Yum!”
*Shoving his fingers in mamas mouth* “Why are your fingers in my mouth?” “Because they’re yummy fingers!” Oh
“its getting dark! That means its almost Halloween!” I don’t think he can keep track of five separate minutes at a time, let alone the yearly holiday rotation. Welcome to Halloween, everybody.
He really wanted to go to see dinosaurs at the dinosaur museum, but we’re worried he has some fundamental misunderstandings, because he seems to be under the impression they’re going to let him ride them.
I left briefly to get some water, and apparently the whole time I was out the Little One was frantic: “He’s not coming back! He’s gone! Papa’s not coming back!” But the second I opened the door he was very smug: “I knewed papa was coming back!”. I feel he is very close to omniscience, if he keeps this level of historical revisionism up.
SCIENCE GIRL
She blinded me with SCIENCE
but not present
If you have any secret unpaid Duckstack positions, you are still obligated to perform them to the extend that you aren’t paid. As long as we aren’t paying you, we own you.
They don’t live near you, you aren’t going to meet them, or as the bullies put it, “She’s not going to have sex with you”
Many of these behaviors drop off a little bit after a relationship is established, so its important for guys to learn to do them mechanically so that his wife doesn’t feel scorned. If you love her, keep her well paid.
This is the root of when guys complain about girls “friendzoning” them. They are going through this learning experience.
A guy can do a say a lot of things to a woman online and she won’t feel “threatened” by them, so she doesn’t feel as pressured to act as she would if he did or said the same bonkers insane things in real life. Every girl on every dating app has dozens of extremely creepy experiences weekly. If you’re close enough to ask, I’d recommend doing so, it should be eye-opening.
Its not just e-girls, but men usually go to more masculine vices (sloth and violence, money and power), the exception here being gay men, who at every opportunity to be “faithful latter day saints” have immediately after receiving fame backstabbed the church in the most public and savage ways available to them.