Simple Supper
I'm cutting calories out of cardboard, a two dimensional meal
Its turtles all the way down, except today its ducks.
Sorry for all the jumpscares last email, we cleaned all the eggs up. Despite all the chickens, and ducks being a laying species, we aren’t the eggstack, and we remain absolutely committed to remaining The Duckstack. If we aren’t The Duckstack, we’ll give you your money back. (1¢). We’ll give you your ducks back. Some assembly required. (to stack them yourself). We’ll release you back into the wild, into an unwitting world, wholly unsuspecting and unprepared for what we, The Duckstack, have just unleashed upon them.
Until that eventuality, welcome:
to The Duckstack.
Subpar Heroes
Just kind of mediocre, really.
I like action shows a lot, and I really like heroes. Specifically, I really like my protagonists to be competent and powerful. I like Ayn Rand protagonists, I like superman, I like virtue and seeing virtue in practice and if I am going to consume a model of something I’d like it to be a model of something useful, such as ways to do good in the world. Its a real shame superheroes are so much not that.
A guy named “Mencius Moldbug” wrote a piece called Technology, Communism, and the Brown Scare where he says that America’s search for fascists is a classic witch hunt: If witches were real, witch hunting would be a far less lucrative career. He goes on to argue America is actually a Communist country and a whole bunch of other stuff, but one really really important concept he introduces is the concept of something he dubs “Callous altruism”. In short, a sort of distant empathy- to say “I support this, in theory”, or to run around supporting causes while your neighbor starves to death in front of you. Quote:
When you are motivated by genuine charity, and your charitable efforts backfire and actually harm the recipient of your help, you feel guilt and sorrow like nothing else. You’re a witness to a horrific motorcycle accident. You run over to the man on the ground, pull his helmet off, hug him and give him CPR. Unfortunately, he would have been fine, except that you just severed his spinal cord. How do you feel? Is your reaction: “Oh well, at least I tried?”
How did the American people react when their Arab experiment didn’t go so well? I’ll tell you exactly how they reacted. “Oh well, at least we tried.” And then they changed the channel. And that’s what’s wrong with callous altruism.
-Mencius Moldbug
I think a big part of modern superheroes is that they replace character1 with power, and they follow the same modern trends Moldbug describes- They don’t need to be especially virtuous, because they fight things on a scale so big that their neighbor starving to death in front of them pales in comparison. A lot of people are thinking that way nowadays. Why would you have a villain that kidnaps Lois Lane? Probably didn’t make a lot of sense in the comics either, but by removing that quality, most of our super heroes, at least in the Marvel movies, have become unprincipled, to say the least. But they’re saving the planet, so they don’t really need a moral code or anything. A lot of people are thinking that way nowadays.
I mostly use the Marvel movies as a gauge because my impression is that nobody reads comics anymore. I think comics are kind of like art now- mostly a front for laundering money, or in some cases, liberal talent. At this point there isn’t a single superhero that hasn’t had an incredible bold and daring and visionary same sex kiss scene in one of their modern comic reboots, and the reason is because 1) nerd are perverts and 2) because homosexuality is sterile, callous love- The perfect archetype of modernity.
History
Training monsters, to compliment our dinosaurs.
The little one woke screaming, when I came in he sobbed “There was monsters!” “Oh no, did you have a bad dream?” I asked, in sympathy. “Uh huh.”, he replied, then paused and contimplatively remarked, “Monsters are my favorite!”
The Littlest One is learning the game where we throw them234, and he can’t crawl yet so it was very cute for him to crawl back to my wife and when she picked him up squirm onto his back with his head back to get ready for the next one.
The littlest one’s rabies training is starting to be a success, he’s pretty much inseparable from chew toys now so that’s great! He’s got a rubber one the size of my hand and he wads the whole thing into his little mouth
I asked the Little One “Do you want anything for breakfast?” and he said “Like fries?” and I said “okay… Anything else?” and he said “Milk?” and I said “Okay, anything else?” and he said “Cereal?” and I said “Okay anything else?” and he said “Pancakes?” and I really suspect we could have just kept going indefinitely
He’s got a new, light up, roaring sound effects dinosaur now, which he insists on “sleeping” with now
He had a hard week, however. You see, he was trying to shove a hot wheels car into buzz lightyear’s space helmet, and it wouldn’t fit, which caused (naturally) a lot of despair and crying and such.
Presenting: Duckstack Air
You are now breathing manually.
The Elden Scroll Rings: A Review
Picked up lord of the rings or some game like that, which I’ve been playing and enjoying, however:
Elden Ring is the newest Dark Souls game, which is a series legendary for its difficulty and punishing gameplay, and Elden Rings follows up on this tradition except open world, which means that unlike in regular Dark Souls games, you can wander into areas you’re totally not strong enough to deal with and get slaughtered.
The premise of the game, nearest I can tell, is you’re a zombie that eats runes, on behalf of women, while killing grotesque Zerg, medieval Terran, and I’m pretty early in the game but I assume Protoss is the endgame, true to Blizzard’s latest pattern. but anyway you attack them with a sword and sometimes you don’t even die doing it.
The reason the game is difficult is because every fight the enemy has certain attack patterns that you have to learn to time dodges and attacks, but since heals are limited you basically only have 2-6 mistakes you can make in a fight maximum before you have to retry the whole thing, which sometimes requires lengthy battles to reach the section you died at. Its pretty fun.
Originally, however, that isn’t why the game was so tough, it was because it was obviously built for game controllers and not a computer keyboard, so the tutorial teaching you controls and maneuvers explains how to do things with a joystick and bumpers, which my computer keyboard doesn’t have, for some reason5. So it was like “here’s a really important maneuver, you need to know how to parry, just hold the left bumper button while pressing Y” and the key remapping is not very comprehensive or explanatory at all, so I ended up going through the entire tutorial just kind of mashing my face against the keyboard hoping to get the right combination. In conclusion, the combat is actually pretty simple, the fabled difficulty of Elder Ring is actually that you don’t have half of the controls necessary to play the game.
So I’m stuck going through the game with the two maneuvers I know: Shield bashing, and putting your sword in your pocket. I’m getting pretty good at it. Monsters flee in terror at how skilled I am at putting my sword in my pocket.
Now if only I can figure out how to take it back out again6.
D&C 29:36 “.. for, behold, the devil was before Adam, for he rebelled against me, saying, Give me thine honor, which is my power; and also a third part of the hosts of heaven turned he away from me because of their agency;”
Gently, onto the bed
its a good idea probably, why not?
To take the sword back out again you have to hold the inventory button but not open the inventory and then press the shield button