Spirit Sprite
The fizziest ghost you'll ever drunk
All these moments, like duckstacks in the rain
Did you remember to purchase your free duckstack extended warranty? Duckstacks go bad, you know. The letters wear out, the pictures get lossy. The sections develop typeos. In rare cases, they can even go senile. You wouldn’t want to go all out of your way to read this, only to find out later on that this article was in need of serious repairs. You might find yourself stuck with a duckstack in “junker” condition for a long time, because insurance doesn’t cover duckstacks1, while you save up to get a new duckstack. For some of you, this is the only duckstack you will ever read. And it could get stuck in your mental garage forever. To play it safe, you better sign up for updates, recall notices, get well soon emails, miscellaneous thoughts and nonsense, &tc
What’s Up
A classic Buddhist Koan
What is up, really? Away from the ground? If I’m laying down up might be perpendicular to the ground. Is it just the opposite of my feet? What if I do a hand stand? Then up is below my feet. If up was just away from the ground, in space, that would mean up is every direction away from Earth. I think this could get really tricky when the fabric of space warps around gravity wells like black holes and stuff, because then you might have one direction away from earth curve into another direction away from earth. It really wouldn’t be linear at all and I don’t know a lot about Einsteins relativity but couldn’t that curve all the way around back towards earth? Food for thought.
Everyone Should Be A Writer
All about Evil Spirits and where to find them and how to catch them in pokeballs
Everyone knows the problem with witches is that they put hexes on you2. Its pretty rare to hear of witches who do any other form of magic, its pretty much all hexes, curses, and voodoo. They don’t seem to get anything out of this, they just do it for the love of the game. What is ‘black magic’? What do these magic forms have in common? I will tell you. It is ad hominem. The definition of all witchcraft magic is “fate altering”, the ability to influence people without touching them. This is concretely different from wizards shooting fireballs, which have to touch you, or the intervention of dieties, where Zeus lightningbolt still has to touch you. It becomes witchcraft when it pulls your fate invisibly, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Genre subversions aside, witches are generally considered “bad”, and that’s the psychology behind it.
People who feel out of control in their lives will grasp for “guardrails” so that, even though they can’t control their situation, at least they feel like they can understand it. And evil spirits/demonic possession/djinn provide that.
In essence, this is conspiratorial thinking. That there is a coordinated malevolence behind things, influencing things behind the scenes, so you don’t have to grapple with the arguments or complexity of what’s going on. Simplification is a necessary evil in most domains, but you should be aware when you’re doing it. If your statement could be swapped out with “evil gremlins” without changing anything functional, then even if evil gremlins were real then it would be more of a case of being “right by accident”. God does not propagate scapegoats, he encourages accountability. A couple simple heuristics for you, there.
There is a saying in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints that caring too much about evil spirits invites them, a gentle way of discouraging this sort of magical thinking. The idea that there is a voodoo shaman (but like, a ghost voodoo shaman) influencing you is a great way to learn helplessness, but God has given us the spirit of faith, not fear.
So what do we do with the New Testament? Were they casting out devils? Sure. I’ve done it too. Maybe there’s not even evil spirits involved and God is just honoring the person’s perspective and working within the framework they understand. But “possession” is the wrong term for what is going on. Its not mind control, its not body control, its not voodoo fate manipulation. What evil spirits actually do is talk to you. And like any mental tic, people can develop a habit of listening. So what “casting out” a spirit does is just give a person some peace and quiet, whereby if they have faith they can build better habits, get their life in perspective, and refocus. It isn’t strictly necessary, because evil spirits will get bored and leave, and you can literally just not listen to them, just the same as you have to intentionally listen to hear the holy ghost. “There are two wolves inside me.” “Which wolf wins?” “The one I feed.”
Jesus explicitly says exorcism is not some mystical solution. He says you can cast a spirit out but if its invited back in it’ll just come back. Instead of exorcism in at least one instance he encouraged his disciples to fast instead. You will sometimes hear stories of very sensational “exorcisms” where its portrayed as some sort of spiritual lightsaber battle with mana pools and tactics. In real life “exorcism3” is very peaceful, and is instantaneous, because you’re just giving the person some mental room. I theorize that the sensational exorcisms are an issue of authorization and faith4, not some sort of demonic RPG level system.
I know someone who is going through what is commonly called a “messy divorce” and someone said to me that they just can’t understand it, the wife is making her life much harder, and wasting tons of both of their money (like $60,000+ in lawyer fees), “it just doesn’t make any sense.” She just couldn’t understand it. I told her the purpose of a woman is what it does. The harm is the point, including the self harm.
Its pretty common in modern marriage to end up with a situation where the wife “werewolfs” transforming into a vessel of rabies and wrath dedicated to absolutely nothing other than hurting her soon-exhusband in the most therapyspeak way possible. Sometimes people do marijuana. People get into all sorts of stuff throughout their lives, you too. People don’t get into these things thinking about stuff like “consequences” and “prices”. People (yourself included) operate on a very surface level a lot of the time, so thank God that your internal memes naturally have kept you away from many grievous mistakes.
But we see here the power of narrative. If you think you’re weak to evil spirits, vulnerable to manipulation, you can start to act in ways that you think a person influenced by manipulation would act, exactly the same way people who think they’re vulnerable to witchcraft start looking for evidence of witchy manipulation. The types of narratives you find romantic make a huge difference in your perspective and therefore the options available to you. Even suicide is contagious. Because you’re choosing your option set when you narrativize it in your head.
It takes a fair degree of lucidity, or “metacognition”, to be aware of what narratives you are writing in your head. If your wife does something, you can be appreciative, or you can be demanding, focusing on the lack. The more you focus on the lack the more you build a castle of resentment, the more you self justify, at the expense of your marriage and your pro-marriage option sets, restricting your options ever more. When women “werewolf”, a lot of times they’re acting out a script wherein they are the hero against an abusive husband, the oppressed victim, and the reason they seem irrational is because they simply aren’t interested in information or perspectives that don’t enable them to act out their story. Sometimes its evil boredom, sometimes its evil self justification, sometimes its a mix of those and many other things. But mark this: People choose. That is what agency is.
The Enlightenment does a huge injustice to social relations because its narrative is that everything is “evidence-based”. You “follow the evidence”, you “diagnose the mental illness”, you come up with a bunch of empirical woo to explain behavior, and you talk yourself right into perpetual victimhood because you have chosen the mode of being a cornered animal rather than an agent who can afford to give others the benefit of the doubt. You act out the narratives you wrote, whether you wrote them on purpose and with craft, or sloppily with carelessness.5If your eye be evil, your whole body be evil, if your eye be light, your whole body be full of light6.
The Nietzschean Dialetic
The philosophy of the Übermensch
In 1883, there was a battle of philsophers7, and they were all named Nietzsche. They were the chosen ones. There was Red Nietzsche, born with philosophical firepower and leadership. There was Green Nietzsche, born an airhead but with a free and fun-loving spirit, and a down to earth philosophy. There was Purple Nietzsche, born with corrosion and he could deconstruct arguments in 10 seconds flat. There was Blue Nietzsche, a woman, and he had a compassionate and nurturing philosophical heart. There was also White Nietzsche with icy analytics and a frosty temperament. There was Black Nietzsche, who followed the philosophy of the fist, and several others.
The Nietzsche had to fight each other, highlander style, to become philosopher ascendant, just like each of us has to do with our colored counterparts today. Could they do it? They had to. Nietzsche isn’t a person known for his slave morality8. Every Nietzsche had to fight for his superiority, going his own way against all of the others. Every Nietzsche considered himself God, and he had to kill him.
As each Nietzsche sat by the fireplace, puffing on their tobacco pipes in the comfort of their homes, each of which was also Nietzsche colored, they rotated philosophies in their heads at astonishing speeds, an nth dimensional chess match composed of components of sheer thought. It was a bloodbath. Mauve Nietzsche died first, valiant in battle but ultimately unable to hold his form, disintegrating violently on the spot in a puff of Mauve dust. The other Nietzsches were too busy with the war to mourn.
Green Nietzsche took a walk. He went outside. He touched grass. They couldn’t attack him while he was on break. Then he went right back to it. Green Nietzsche wasn’t a slacker.
The battle really took a turn when several of the colored Nietzsches, under Red Nietzsche’s leadership, voltronned9 into a giant mecha Nietzsche, comprised of Nietzsches Red, Yellow, Blue, White, Black, and Orange. They decimated the battlefield while Green Nietzsche was out. Green Nietzsche swore vengeance upon them for his fallen colored brethren, but first, he had to survive, but then he forgot all about it. Ignorance was strength.
Brown and Orange Nietzsche collaborated to sabotage Super Mecha Nietzsche, Orange Nietzsche sacrificing himself to the greater good of all the colored Nietzsches, who he would have had to kill otherwise. Then nobody had to kill him, so it was really gentlemanly all around. But Brown had tricked him, and used the opportunity to backstab Yellow, Blue, and White Nietzsche’ in Super Mecha Nietzsche’s dissolution. This is where the other philosophers attacked, like Locke and Aristotle and Hume and stuff. It was Red Aristotle, Brown Locke, and Dandelion Hume because the other ones were busy. Brown Nietzsche didn’t survive the attack, but because it wasn’t a Nietzsche that killed him nobody got his power, which is why there’s no brown in rainbow Nietzsche today.
When Brown Nietzsche died he had White, Blue, and Yellow Nietzsche’s power, and they didn’t get lost but instead reconstituted into their individual Nietzsches, immediately rejoining the battle to vie for Nietzschean supremacy, except Yellow Nietzsche, who got nerd sniped literally the moment he reconstituted by Eggshell Taupe Nietzsche, who had been waiting in the sidelines for just such an opportunity. Dandelion Hume saw this and took him out, causing Taupe Nietzsche’s powers to be lost to time. Yellow Nietzsche immediately reconstituted on the spot, and then got immediately blown apart by a boulder launched by an ingenious catapult contraption that Pink Nietzsche had built in a temporary partnership with Tan Nietzsche, and they split the kill. This is known as “double jeopardy” and made them 4x as powerful rather than 2x, as long as their alliance lasted. They started to dominate the field, just like Super Mecha Nietzsche had, but just using their twinned powers. Eventually they fought Black Nietzsche to a stalemate, only for their stalemate to be interrupted by Lime Plato, nuking them all. Yellow reconstituted and immediately started cowering, but nothing happened. Then, just as he started rejoicing, Maroon Nietzsche slammed into him from above, dissolving him instantly, and Maroon Nietzsche too, both kills going to Red Nietzsche, who had turned evil. All the philosophers, non-nietzsche and Nietzsche alike, joined together to stop him, but his evil powers proved fatal. Finally, it was just him and Green Nietzsche, who had just gotten back from his break. Red Nietzsche had turned into a horrifying conglomerate of Nietzsches, Lockes, Humes, Platos, Aristotles, and even a couple others. He looked at Green Nietzsche through multiple melting faces, with multiple eyes. “You will never win. I have all the power!” Red-Aristotleplatohumelocke Nietzsche declared. “That may be,” said Green Nietzsche, “But I have something you’ll never have.” “And what is that?” Red-Aristotleplatohumelocke Nietzsche asked. “I forgot.” Said Green Nietzsche.
This infuriated Red-Aristotleplatohumelocke Nietzsche, and he took a mighty swing with a bloated and festering arm, the size of multiple buildings. “I’m going on another walk” said Green Nietzsche, and he did. When he got back, he found that the Red-Aristotleplatohumelocke Nietzsche’s blow had shattered the earth, cleaving a mighty hole all the way to the earth’s core. He was hanging on to a ledge, but his fingers weren’t as articulate due to their monstrous properties.
Green Nietzsche peered over the edge. “Your arrogance has been your undoing.” he said. He wasn’t gloating, he just figured Red-Aristotleplatohumelocke Nietzschealypse deserved to know the cause of his demise. “No! I can’t be defeated like this!” Red-Aristotleplatohumelocke Nietzsche said. “You all ready are.” Green Nietzsche said, a single tear falling from his eye, and with a wave of his arm he used earth powers to slam the fissure closed. An eruption of lava and power shot out, bathing the whole world in rainbow colors, but not like, in a gay way. Green Nietzsche fell to his knees. It was over. Then, he felt something, and it caused him to look up, and all of the Nietzsches were there. Red Nietzsche with his arrogant smile, no longer a monster. Yellow Nietzsche, with his can-do attitude. Orange Nietzsche with his sardonic grin, and all the rest, including Blue Nietzsche, a girl. They seemed to be congratulating him. “You did good.” they seemed to say. “But, will I ever see you again?” Green Nietzsche asked. “You all ready are.” they said. “We’ll always be with you, in your heart.” That was the day Green Nietzsche learned the meaning of friendship and became the Übermensch, which is how he knew so much about it. So next time you read Nietzsche, remember all the work that went into it, to make him the man he is today, and take some courage from it, enabling you to fight your own battles, both in the present and in the future.
Leave a message for Green Nietzsche below.
History
What’s the duck family up to. At this hour possibly sleeping
Being a parent, sometimes you will say things you never thought you would say. But also you will hear things you never thought you would hear. Our son, baffled: “You don’t like me pushing a marble into your belly button?”
Son gardening with mama, she didn’t want him playing in the dirt so she told him she was the dirt guy, and he was the water guy, and he told her “and the plants are the plant guys!”
Our son was doing preschool on the laptop and the toddler kept running to his side to look at the screen, and then around back to look at the back. Where does the screen go? I don’t even have an answer for her.
We’ve got some fancy chocolates with little circle shapes and half is raised and our son calls them “stairs chocolate”
Ducksnax
chilled
I encourage you to ask your agent, however
“what about eating children” this is just a natural part of witch ecology, no different from any of the other harsh realities of nature
Every time I’ve “cast out an evil spirit” its been as a nudged afterthought in a priesthood blessing which the person asked for extraneous reasons- because they simply kept feeling depressed and gloomy, and God told me to cast out an evil spirit as part of the other advice and direction God had given this person in the blessing. And I’ve given thousands of priesthood blessings and its only happened twice. The third time wasn’t a blessing, I had just fasted for someone stubborn and angry. For more information about the mechanisms of priesthood blessings, read Fracture Pasture
In Acts, Jews who were not given the binding authority by Christ got beat up because they weren’t authorized by Christ to act on his behalf.
Acts 19:13-17
13 Then certain of the vagabond Jews, exorcists, took upon them to call over them which had evil spirits the name of the Lord Jesus, saying, We adjure you by Jesus whom Paul preacheth.
14 And there were seven sons of one Sceva, a Jew, and chief of the priests, which did so.
15 And the evil spirit answered and said, Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are ye?
16 And the man in whom the evil spirit was leaped on them, and overcame them, and prevailed against them, so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded.
17 And this was known to all the Jews and Greeks also dwelling at Ephesus; and fear fell on them all, and the name of the Lord Jesus was magnified.
Luke 11:34-36 The light of the body is the eye: therefore when thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light; but when thine eye is evil, thy body also is full of darkness. Take heed therefore that the light which is in thee be not darkness. If thy whole body therefore be full of light, having no part dark, the whole shall be full of light, as when the bright shining of a candle doth give thee light.
my eye is a nuclear fusion reactor and I have .00000000000000001 seconds to live
a spiritual lightsaber battle
or well like he is but not for like “practicing” it, you know what I mean
they voltrooned out