Scry Script
Every astronaut comes equipped with a telescope, and when they see the earth they say "Land Ho!"
Instead of saying “its on the money”, now we say “its on The Duckstack”
My hands hover over a crystal ball in my lap. Its not actually a crystal ball, you notice. It is a jellyfish. You feel this situation is vaguely familiar. I have ready you your fortune before. It is different this time. This time, the crystal ball is a jellyfish. “Does it sting?” You comment, conversationally. “Immensely,” I reply, as my legs balloon to three times their original size. I am wearing shorts.
“lets get on with it.” you say. “These things can’t be rushed,” I reply, knowing full well these things can be rushed. “Well what am I supposed to do while I wait?” “Find me a hammer or something to crack this sucker open,” I reply. I want you to do this because we have broken into this fortune teller’s tent, and we are pretty sure they keep their money and secrets inside the crystal ball. “The store is out of hammers,” you sadly inform me. “its fine, we’ll make do” I reply, gritting my teeth as the jellyfish stings me again. I punch it, bruising my hand and its head. I don’t know what I was expecting. Neither do you, because my poker face is impenetrable.
In a sudden rush, I turn the jellyfish upside down on the table, obtaining thousands of tiny stings against my vulnerable face. “Inside its mouth!” I yell. “I’m not giving it CPR.” You say, calmly observing my rapidly ballooning face. “No no,” I say, “Its got a Duckstack in its teeth!” “oh fr1?” You say, curiously wandering over. “Lets read it together and see if we can find out the secret combination.”
History
If there’s one thing I’ve learned, its that kids repeat themselves. A billion times.
We took the kids to the mall this week, and apparently they have these ridable motorized stuffed animals for kids that you can rent time on. We thought that would be pretty fun for our kid, who agreed desperately, so we put in a few bucks and got several minutes of delirious screaming (with joy) on video as he actively tried to crash into furniture and people and we actively tried to keep him from doing that, it was really fun and all the people he was trying to massacre seemed to enjoy it too, there is something charming about watching a kid have that much fun
“I don’t want to poop in the potty, because then where would the poop go?” uh yeah that is the point kid
Had to go to the doctor to get minor surgery on my ear with water done this week. I’m not at liberty to disclose the details, but it involved a spray bottle, and I can hear again.
The toddler loves to climb onto things that he can’t climb off of now
Heuristicory
A brief history of heuristics
Heuristic is another word for “rule of thumb”. Basically, mental stereotypes which save energy because they’re accurate “enough”. Since they aren’t perfect, this introduces a degree of risk, which drives idealists crazy. “You can’t stereotype this, what if you’re wrong” And of course they are correct, just not pragmatic. Avoiding heuristics has its own costs and risks, for example abstaining from judgement when danger is real can cause actual, avoidable harm. Heuristics and stereotypes should be seen more as a starting point, without finality. This maximizes their cost-saving nature while minimizing long-term damage.
Some heuristics become useless and worse than useless. Have you ever heard of the boy who cried wolf? He kept saying bad things were happening when they weren’t, and then nobody believed him when actual bad stuff was going on. This is what we see with a lot of legitimately bad things today, such as racism (or really any “-ism” or “-phobia”. It is apparent that the market for racism greatly exceeds the supply, and so what we are seeing is a sort of economic “inflation” of the value of crying racism. Making some races legally have 3/5ths the vote in society, for example, is of quite a different kind than like, thinking the welfare system is broken or wanting to reduce immigration by like 5%. Even seriously racist statements like thinking some races are smarter, or more criminal, or more athletic, or more prone to harass women online seem kind of pale in comparison to what we’ve been taught plantation racism was like. Its what you do with the opinion that matters, no?2
One heuristic I came up with in high school is “error is caused by ignorance or laziness”, and maybe that’s true, you probably can boil most Bad Stuff™ down to that. Failed a test? Well, was I ignorant, or did I just not study? But the question I think we need to ask about heuristics like this is the pragmatic one: Is this categorization useful?
“When you properly name a demon, you gain power over it.” This is a common sentiment to most fantasy novels, but I ask you, think of an atrocity. How much explanatory power does saying “well they’re just evil” have towards this? Does it aid prevention? Are there more specific explanations you could use? This works the same way when you’re in a bad mood. If you just tell yourself “ugh I’m angry” over and over again, you get angrier, but if you say “I’m angry because ______”, if you can fill in those blanks well, you are instantly enabled. You know what you’re dealing with, multiple courses of action appear before you, you are no longer powerless but are instead empowered to take control of your life. That’s the kind of power correct names have. I’ve even had these thoughts about how we define art.
And I think about this sometimes. I don’t know that sympathy is a zero sum game, like if I feel bad for a person who stubbed their toe I won’t have as much feel bad to spare for someone who lost a leg to a wild bear attack, but I wonder sometimes if its a little alienating to the legless among us when we stand around talking about “trauma”. If you’re like “I’ve lost a leg, your stubbed toe isn’t that bad” then you’re kind of commanding the conversation, railroading others, and you have to publicly play the victim to do it. That’s a lot of effort to shoot down someone’s stubbed toe story! So most people don’t do it, and the boy goes on crying wolf for increasingly smaller critters, joined by dozens of similar wolf criers, each one eager for the rush of townspeople in sympathy, because nobody wants to be the bad guy and divide the categories properly. “No, you only get to cry wolf for actual wolves. Frogs don’t count. Maybe its a poisonous frog, ring a bell or something for those, but don’t cry wolf when there’s not a wolf.”
This is the meaning of the phrase in the scriptures, that God’s word is a two-edged sword, dividing asunder both bone and marrow. It is the duty of a man of righteousness and priesthood to properly divide the categories, and award each category its just part.
Short Story: The Bureaucratic kidnappers
Please enjoy this definitely not real story which is not about insurance
“We have your son.” A jolt of mixed relief and mixed wariness lights through your system. The call came from an unknown number. “Oh thank heavens. Is he okay?” you ask. “you can have him back.” they say. Then they hang up.
Oh okay. You let out a breath and you get another call. It is the same number. “Yes?” you say, but the voice on the other line cuts you off, smooth as butter: “Give us ten dollars.”
The mysterious voice explains that its for gas money, so you fork it over because these strangers are obviously trying to get your kid back to you. You arrange to meet up with them.
However, all does not go as planned. When you reach the meetup point, you instead get a call, from a different number. “We’ll need $10,000,000” the voice says. “What!!11!?” but the voice is adamant. You don’t have that kind of money, you have never had that kind of money. The line goes dead.
Then you get another call from another number. Another voice. “Hey you owe me $5000 for finding your kid, finders fee.” You barely have that money in savings, but when you try to explain this the voice becomes frustrated and they hang up on you. Then immediately another phone call, another number, another voice, saying you owe them gas money for the gas you spent to get to the meetup point, which still nobody but you have arrived at. You say you don’t and hang up, frustrated. Eventually you get a call telling you they couldn’t make it to the meetup. “When you go leave behind a couple dollars, and I will return your son.” You’re pretty confused but you put a couple benjamin’s down, anything to get your son back. You come back the next day, and the money is gone. “I need two dollars at the meetup” declares your phone. You insist you already paid, and the call ends. You leave some money even though they didn’t ask, hoping to end this confusion and get back on their good side, go home, and try sleep.
The next day, your son arrives. He’s a little scared, but no worse for wear. The cops didn’t do it, the kidnappers must have returned him. Life returns, slowly, to normal.
Then a year later, you start getting calls again. The calls say you owe thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars, in exchange for returning your son. “We didn’t have to do that, but we did. Pay up.” you aren’t keen on the idea, but you decide to do it anyway. You already have your son back, there’s no harm in it.
For the next year you get bills for returning your son, which you pointedly ignore. This is working great until it isn’t, when the U.S. Government informs you that your bills have gone to collections and the government will arrest you if you fail to properly reimburse your son’s kidnappers. You yell at the government, but the government is stoic against your cries. The government says the kidnappers claim is valid, even though the amount keeps changing.
Occasionally you get new bills for having your son returned to you from the kidnapper. The amounts on them are never the same, and half the services they send you invoices for aren’t things you’ve had anything to do with. You have no idea what is going on other than that you must pay. Gradually, you realize that everyone must pay.
The end.
Daylight Savings Time
The daylight, its in trouble! You know what time it is!
Have you ever experienced “jet lag?” This vaguely euphoric feeling comes from being addled by traveling. There exists a common unit of measurement in every country- not miles or kilometers, but timezones. And when you move timezones, that’s when you’ve gone too far. Now Earth has to catch up. It is explaining this, that is our endeavor today.
You see, scientists have discovered that the Earth has something called “layers3”. The Earth’s essence, or “core” if you will, doesn’t have timezones4. Anywhere you go with the Earth's core, it will be the same time5. If you were feeling romantic, you might say “the earths core is timeless”. The people who inhabit the earths core do not have watches for this reason, and also never experience jet lag.
Above the earths core are tectonic plates. You can think of these something like a treadmill, or a conveyor belt, with many plates all joined together. This is how jet lag is alleviated- the plates rotate around to put you back in alignment. According to scientists6, these plates are where the timezones live.
Like any reasonable person, when you look at a map like this you think “that is too many” and you would be right. The design makes no sense. The number is inconvenient and cumbersome, and the mental math of figuring out which timezones your friends are in is tedious at best! To make matters worse, each time zone has a different time, so when you say its one o’clock, someone else might disagree and say it is actually purple o’clock, and you would both be right.
This black magic, according to my understanding of history (which comes entirely from watching Nicholas Cage steal the declaration of independence) was first introduced by Benjamin Franklin, a Wiccan7. Nearest I can tell, he was scared of the dark and trying to preserve daylight, which is why he called the project "daylight savings time", but to do that he needed to stagger the time in each time zone. You ever wonder when you roll back your clocks one hour, where the hour goes? It gets sucked into the next timezone, which in turn loses its hour to the next time zone after that, and so forth. It is very efficient.
So there you have it, hopefully none of this is stuff you already knew! Time zones are serious business, so make sure to keep these facts in mind next time you travel.
Deer Update
I still don’t really have any firm grasp on what deer “are”
Its winter you know what that means, the deer are here, at our gates, a small army standing eerily still with red glowing eyes at our gates. Out of our garden deer, shoo. Out of our nightmares deer, shoo.
For Real is slang for “really?”
Affirmative action under any reasonable definition is incredibly racist- explicitly treating people differently for the color of their skin. But you don’t get called a nazi if you preach affirmative action, because its benevolent. “Euracist” if you will. Liberals arrive at affirmative action because certain races are obviously disadvantaged- they claim the cause of this is systemic (I agree to some extent) because certain races are discriminated against, therefore, these races need euracism to save them. But notice, you can arrive at this exact same action a very different way: "certain races are obviously disadvantaged. The cause of this is inbuilt- they are simply inferior. Therefore, these races need euracism to save them.” Whether the Euracism takes the form of scholarships, extra attention from teachers, handicap allowances on tests, its the exact same action, whether arrived through euracism, or old fashioned racism! We are taught one leads to genocide and atrocity, but I don’t think that’s true, and, not to get too political, I think the history of communism shows you can get pretty genocidal and atrocious the other way too.
I’m sure they have a latin term for this though. They’re scientists, after all
or inhabitants, really
fiery annihilation time
citation needed
