Shy Stir Fry

the rice keeps running away from the wooden spoon

You can duckstack, but you can’t hide

Art: Sir Redleaf, by Mario Nevado

What does it mean, to duckstack? people¹ have been asking this question since the stone ages, and we still have no clue what is going on. But we’ve got some ideas.

1. Its illegal

Every country of every civilization on the planet has banned duckstack. ‘cept America. Its visionary, its an experiment, its daring, its faustian. But they are definitely going to bomb us ove r it.

2. at least 10

We’ve tried with less, and it didn’t even break into particles. the more you got, the better the result, but we haven’t reached the cap, and theyre are definitely going to bomb us over it.

3. Flight?

duckstack can fly, but only when moving very. fast. thats what the machinery is for. the ducks don’t like it and they’ re definitely going to bomb us over it. that s why we keep ‘;em in the machine

4. tribbles

duckstack reproduce. very fast. Mitosis? its an emergency. but if fauci can get away with it so can we. bring me more boxes. this is important.

5. loud

there is. too much quacking. very loud. probably not jet engine loud but we cn put get engines on them to fix that,. the ducks will love it.

thos are the facts. theres probably more but. what can you do. forbidden knowledge comes with a price. eat our duckstack dust². we’ll duckstack the moon if we have to. maybe the sun id. k. someone’s got to.

Top 5 Road Trips

Come on a journey with me

1. Speedbumps

2. Large rock

3. Pothole

4. Tripwire

5. Your friend’s foot

All of this is assuming you are walking, of course. If you are driving it is very hard to trip. Even if someone karate chops you in the shin. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen it happen. I hear people talk about road trips all the time though. It seems to be pretty popular so I hope I’m not just out of the loop or being deliberately excluded. Is this some Truman-show tier inside joke? Let me on it. Guys? Guys?

The Fatherhood Failure

The Step Dads Who Didn’t Step Up

There was a 90s trope about dads who would sit on the porch with a shotgun if a boy had the audacity to take his daughter on a date, the implied threat of doing unspeakable violence to the guy if he did something the dad didn’t approve of. This sort of nonspecific personal hostility what everyone wants in a father in law, so I imagine it got a lot of girls married.

You still see a certain type of old guy acting out this bit nowadays, but in 2026 it rings even more hollow. Nobody is worried about rape, the men don’t have the testosterone for it anyway, and in any case the boys are a lot more worried about getting raped. I even read an account this week of an ostensible Right Winger doing this for bit for his 20 year old secretary coworker, who he felt “protective” of³. He had secretly adopted her in his mind. More on this later.

The average marriage costs like $30,000 today. Massive, overblown productions for an institution which is, fundamentally, hollow, unenforceable, fraught with risk, and not even a particularly large step in anyone’s lives since they’re all having sex and living together for years before marriage anyway. This isn’t how it worked only a couple centuries ago, where marriages were mostly small time affairs. Now, people attempt to imbue it with meaning by force, throwing money and ceremony to try to recapture the magic which only standards and accountability could bestow before.

You can see a lot of the same spirit in this pompous protectionism. The father has an inkling that one of his jobs is supposed to be “protecting” his family, but what is there to protect his family from? The state has a near-total monopoly on violence. And I will say, my observation is that a lot of these fathers are not doing a whole lot of presiding either. Men who didn’t really lead or teach their families, now trying to recapture some of the magic by being overbearing, that which was supposed to be imbued by standards and accountability. We note most of the dads you see this talk from hardly care about sex outside of marriage as-such.

This same pomp protectionist generation was constantly encouraging their daughters to put off marriage, focus on a career, or even the abominable phrase “live a little⁴”. Did they not want grandkids? It is no wonder we are on course to a catastrophic fertility collapse- people were literally taught to do so. Just like how people were told to get college degrees right on the tail end of the credentials bubble, and now they are bewildered at “entitled kids” demanding student loan forgiveness and high paying jobs which are at this point nearly entirely given to foreigners⁵. But at least he pressured his daughter’s dates into thinking they’d have a psychotic father-in-law. Fatherhood accomplished.

Something you won’t see discussed much is how little dating advice men were given by their dads. You see a lot of insane redpill misogyny online trying to reverse engineer some framework for dealing with women, anything, because even an atrocious model is better than no model whatsoever. Nearly everyone I have talked to was basically just told “respect women” which is at most quite tangential to what men actually care about, which is getting women to like them. Nothing about managing hormones, nothing about resolving fights, just the quip “happy wife happy life”. There’s some missing steps there, isn’t there.

I know of some extreme cases where the dad basically adopted a new family later in life to cope for his parenting abdications with his biological one. The new family is all grown, the parenting already baked in, now all he has to do is lavish them with gifts and take credit. This is actually a common rich-man failure mode. Its a form of pornography and plays on men’s willingness to go along with fantasy in the exact same way.

A lot of the basic structure of what registers to us as “creepiness” is inbalance, not just in terms of age gaps or consent but often in simple relative perceived intimacy levels. I think a lot of sensitive young guys first got burned in love when they started treating a girl who didn’t really care about them as a confidant. But a lot of guys, especially old guys, didn’t go through that, because when they got married dating was still a functional institution, and getting married just kind of fell into their lap. Also without mass surveillance and social media importing dating norms from 1000000 different cultures at once, people were a lot less neurotic back then about normal things like kissing without asking. They know things have changed, but they don’t know what. Unless they had serious dating/family issues, a lot of fathers never had a need to understand raw relationship mechanics on an autist mechanistic level.

Most people rapidly learn to gauge relationship balance from body language, or how engaged people are in the conversation, basic stuff like asking questions. For people whose social skills are untested, they have no such mechanism. And once they get older, they stop caring, because the carrot is worth it: Power tripping

There’s something called (by me) Small Town Phenomena, where people are very snoopy and into each other’s business, usually because they don’t really have anything better to do⁶. It happens in nearly every insular community, whether a church group, a set of coworkers, or just an actual small town. Rather than gauging relationship, people will just act like they have a license to PI⁷⁸ that they haven’t earned and which the socially anxious has no norm for discussing with them. Parenting mixed with gossip acted out as an overt fantasy. In an insular environment, “Small Town Problems” present opportunities for outsized amounts of street cred, which attracts opportunists like sharks to the water⁹¹⁰.

Parenting is easy to do badly and so many will opt to act it out in safer, more exported ways, especially in a culture that conditions risk aversion. When you deal with risk constantly you start to understand how to fall and how to get hurt to minimize injury, risk becomes less scary, but the more insular your reality the more lost you feel outside it. This is what is going on with men who sit on the metaphysical porch with a shotgun, playing fantasies of being a tough guy, shouting at clouds, government, CNN. Its kind of a predatory instinct where they’re seeking easy marks, but not to rob, its more like they’re looking for props for their fantasy. This is what the sin of “objectification”, inasmuch as it truly is a sin, looks like.

And like most sin, in the end it is not others who are the most hurt, who mostly just see them as off-putting or weird, but themselves, who late in life find themselves wandering bewildered by the events that surround them, wondering why their understanding of human nature couldn’t predict their come social famine. A tragedy of manners and evasion.

Myers Briggs Horoscopes

Straight off the presses from Myers Briggs¹¹ himself

• ISTJ: You are the first man on the moon, Niel Armstrong. You miss it every day. Your negativity is starting to pollute the atmosphere, and SpaceX will need to solve this one day.

• ISFJ: Discovery of fire is up to you. Get knocking rocks together. NOW

• INFJ: You make connections at lightning speed, which are always wrong. Do the exact opposite of everything you would normally do this week, to survive.

• INTJ: Though not particularly smart, you make up for it with brawn. Be sure to flex everywhere you walk.

• ISTP: Go to a bookstore and open the first book to the very first page. Dog ear it, and put it back. That is all.

• ISFP: You are destined to succeed in your entrepreneurial pursuits. Take out a loan for a million dollars NOW

• INFP: You are a ruthless terror to everyone around you. Try toning it down a notch. You regularly trample over people in your lust for power and your zeal for control.

• INTP: Spend some time in therapy. Talk about your feelings. Make them up, if you have to.

• ESTP: ESP isn’t real, stop kidding yourself

• ESFP: Try stepping out of your comfort zone this week. Try telling: Knock Knock jokes.

• ENFP: Join the draft and become a soldier. Become deadly in combat. You are uniquely suited for the “berserker” class, with its D12 hit dice and its Rage class feature. Make sure to come up with a cool jihad slogan.

• ENTP: Use your shyness to your advantage. Act weak and sad to draw out the empathy in others. Then swindle them

• ESTJ: Live in the moment. Develop short term memory loss. Burn all your plans for the future. Run around in contextless sensory hell because you have no clue what is going on. It will be good for you

• ESFJ: Do everything it takes to make your fears come to pass.

• ENFJ: Though your sensitivity knows no bounds, you show it through brutal honesty. Your brutality knows no bounds. Your friends are mostly there for the bloodsport.

• ENTJ: Your introspective poetry is inspiring to be around and a joy to hear. Where do you get it from? Your mother. The world would be a better place if you put personal poems up, everywhere.

HIstory

The toddler is obsessed with my keyboard. She knows where the money is¹².

The toddler found bright red safety goggles and wore them around, especially to type on my keyboard.

In church, the kids class is called Primary. We asked him if he was ready to go to primary and he argued with us “you mean cranberry, not primary.” He had apparently been thinking it was cranberry this whole time

Toddler has a new hobby, lining hot wheels cars up super carefully, then stuffing them down her shirt

My wife put the toddler down to bed and then heard crunching. The toddler had a secret bed apple. Not the apple she was eating earlier. We took it from her and it woke her up. It was her comfort apple.

Games our kids play well together: Son grabbing toddlers legs and smacking them into his face, and then into her face. Games the kids do not play well together: Cars, read books, hide under blankets, sit on the bed, watch TV

The kids were taken outside today, first day in a while because its been cold and winter. They got the bag of chicken treats out and fed the chickens all by themselves! And then they fed the toddler. So… That’s another thing to childlock. Very productive though! The chickens were up to their eyeballs in chicken treats they couldn’t even eat them all they were so stuffed

Parenting involves sacrifice, mostly of bathroom privacy. This increases the difficulty rating of bathroom tasks¹³ significantly, especially when the toddler keeps ripping up all the toilet paper, but our son actually noticed and straight up brought in a brand new roll, all by himself. Incredibly thoughtful!

Ducksnax

slide

Ducksnax #097

¦ previous duckstack ¦

1. ducks?

2. they will bomb us over this

3. please I will do anything to cock block a young man before I die

4. This is a necromantic spell incantation.

5

Microscopic and outdated sample

6. If you’re worried this is you, a simple check you can run by is “if I don’t give the name and relationship of who I’m talking about, is what I have to say still interesting?”

7. Private eye

8. Can I see your math loisence, mate?

9. “Don’t you mean blood?” No. I throw a shark in the water, it takes to the water instantly. You ever tried throwing a shark in a pool of blood? It dies.

10. Verified with over 80 sharks and counting. Our Duckstack scientists are indomitable

11. The MBTI was actually concocted by two people, Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers. I have no idea who the guy we talked to to get these was

12. she’s after my bitcoin

13. brb got a “bathroom task”