Spite Kite

We're flying our emotions today. The sky is blue.

That’s one small step for duckstack

Still on a two week publishing schedule, for now. I want to move to the once a week schedule again, but this is working better for us for now. Sorry! Thank you for your patience.

Art: There Is No I In Team, by Mike Davis

When you visit the average pond, in your yard, your first thought is usually, “that’s it?” Which is fair because the average pond in your yard is far below the average for ponds, if we’re being frank¹. Unless you’ve got a big property with huge ponds, and ducks²³ and stuff. Your pond is probably the result of rain, or worse just sprinklers and good old fashioned bad landscaping⁴. This shows your tendency to judge ponds by their covers, never looking at the depth beneath, which in your case probably doesn’t even exist. However, imagine if you visited a real pond someday, on vacation perhaps. How bad could it be for you if you kept the same attitude! “That’s it?”. Even though its a totally different pond, with totally different ducks, if it has ducks at all, which your home pond probably doesn’t, which just goes to show how accurate your judgement is in dismissing it as worthless. But now that you’re on vacation, you might be missing the forest for the trees, or the pond for the ducks, or something. You’re wasting your vacation. You’re wasting the ducks. How inconsiderate! Imagine the ducks hop on top of each other on your vacation, forming a stack, with the following text on it? They would be totally invisible to you, a casualty of your blindness, your inability to appreciate what’s important. But that’s fine, because you’re right 99.99% of the time

The Parable of the Pearl and the Swine

Pigs will eat anything

If you know anything about jewelry, you know that oysters like to eat dirt, which they then put a pearl around, to beautify it. This is basically what kidney stones are in humans. I don’t know if pigs do this too. The end

Locker Talk

Some thoughts against the hysterical histrionics, the vapid vapors, the pearl crutching, the fainting couch⁵

2012 was the reckoning election for whether civility politics still worked. The Principled Centrists and the Prude Right had their platonic ideal civility candidate, a man who had professionally trained for decades in the art of Gentleman’s Debate and Public Disagreement⁶. He got on stage to reason with the country about his views, to be the best man he could, putting all his debate skills and knowledge at their feet, and to hopefully earn their confidence, their vote, and the right to the Presidency over the United States, and Obama got up and called him a racist for 60 minutes and won. Now we’re here.

A key point in character assassination is trying to pin who someone “really is”. Call it Pin the Who Someone Really Is on the Donkey. This means digging into someone’s private lives because people let their hair down in private. And this means that digging out skeletons is actually very easy. As the saying goes which nobody believes in, “nobody’s perfect.”

This is exactly backwards. What people say in private should reflect less on them than what they say in public. It is within actions that character resides. One such action is audience sensitivity- to show discretion in not saying things to people which might be taken the wrong way. Words spoken in private do not necessarily reflect a person’s full perspective any more than words spoken in public do- obviously not everyone records every little thing, you only say a little bit of it. In a certain light, to dig such things out in order to show them to people to get them to take them the wrong way could be classified as abusive.

Of course social boundaries exist for a reason. Its (more or less⁷) wrong to say something offensive to someone who can’t handle it, but I don’t buy that its wrong to say something to someone that would be viewed as offensive by someone who isn’t even there. Its kind of like going into someone’s house and criticizing how they’ve organized it. And I believe it is a mistake to conflate manners with morality. Or more often, an act of outright malice.

We know testosterone increases risk tolerance, energy, ambition, libido, and temper, among other things. Because of these factors (and many others) when men talk to each other their conversation is significantly more unrestrained. So men are disproportionately likely to have “ill mannered” conversation lurking in their closets, making them far more vulnerable to this sort of reputation attack. I believe many people believe women are inherently more moral than men because of this. If you aren’t even tempted by a ‘sin’, do you still get points for not indulging in it?

Once you start telling people (almost exclusively men, honestly) they can’t talk about distasteful things, there is no way to form an allowance for men to talk about true things. You literally cannot have both, because to seek truth entails making mistakes. Women often do not value innovation, and in this way an overemphasis on manners-as-morality risks (and in many cases does) make men worthless, because the things that make men, men, cannot “go” anywhere. In this perspective, men are basically inferior women, on a primal level. They may be stronger or have other strengths, but on a moral level, a man that leans into his uniqueness is bad, whereas a woman that leans into feminine uniqueness is righteous.

As moralities go, I do not care for this, but its a coherent system, so whatever. There’s truth to it. The problem I take is that it isn’t really sufficient for governing male behavior. One of the reasons boys find distasteful jokes funny is because it teaches them about boundaries. Some say there’s “an element of truth to every joke” but this is to blatantly miss that there is also an element of joke to every joke. By showcasing the boundary line, I believe it causes men to understand it more deeply. This isn’t how women work at all. However, we all acknowledge jokes can be harmful for both. So where might that line be?

I recall reading but can no longer find so may be hallucinating that C.S. Lewis in an obscure meditation once talked about “tree-ness”. The question went like this: “Where does the essence of a tree reside?”. Does it live in the colors, the wavelengths that reach our eyes? Does it reside in our perception of it, in our concept of trees which it matches? Or is tree-ness dependent on the trees perception somehow, or God’s? I believe a similar exploration might be valuable here- Where does the immorality of an evil joke reside? Is it in the levity, where it is a sort of blasphemy to reduce the evilness of the act? Is it in the influence it might have upon others? Is it in the evil concept itself, which is simply immoral to “suspend disbelief” about? Or perhaps it is elsewhere, in the poor breeding it shows. Perhaps each of these could be both true or false, depending on the circumstance. My money in most circumstances is on it just being about vulgarity, that such jokes are considered evil in basically the same way cussing is.

I have, for most of my life, been told that my music is “demonic”. Its a bit of a sore spot for me. On one hand, its like, “what do you expect me to do about that.” Stop liking it? Never listen to it again? For what? And on the other, I simply can't bring myself to believe it. I can see where they're coming from, for some songs, but that simply isn't how the music connects to me. But if someone tells you, “you are evil for liking this”, that’s a very manipulative thing. And I don’t mean manipulative in the “cunning method of exerting pressure to achieve an outcome” sort of way, I mean in the literal sense of mere involvement amount. It interacts at a deep level with the soul.

I can easily picture a man who is crass and vulgar, yet is loyal, charitable, hard working and principled. My mind rebels against judging him on the former. Again, this is because I believe all, or at least most, men harbor this “evil” within them. The simplest example of this would be the predatory nature of most men’s sex drive, which men, especially good Christian men, feel deeply ashamed about. And they just want someone to tell them “Its okay. This is a safe place for you, you won’t hurt me.” This type of thing is experienced directly by men as medicine. And so the vulgar conversation in private between men is sort of a venting or commiseration, and I won’t allow myself to believe it is immoral.

And because this is a Latter-Day Saint blog, I'll note a relevant Joseph Smith quote.

“I love that man better who swears a stream as long as my arm. and administering to the poor & dividing his substance. than the long smoothed faced hypocrites.”

Of course, I do not think this means Joseph Smith would say: “Swear a stream as long as my arm!⁸” But I think he was practical minded about these things. Joseph Smith preached often about the value of loyalty, and how much value it held as a virtue. We moderns have grown weak over a lack of pressure, with things like no-fault-divorce greatly reducing the “damages” disloyalty causes, but loyalty remains a virtue. I have found that I am perfectly capable of maintaining good relationships with many people with whom I have deep political disagreements, because we have a mutually beneficial relationship in real life. But when you push everything to the realm of principle, it usually means that your principles can be exploited to burn bridges in the name of self righteousness. What are people left with, when they do this? Nothing.

We cannot allow propriety to hijack our limbic system and take priority in what we believe about others.

Tron: Ares: A: Review:

Would I say they “tronned”? I would now.

Tron: Ares: Was great. It was not exceptional. I would say there was a lot of wasted potential.

First: I love Nine Inch Nails. They did the soundtrack, but they leaned towards techno beats and daft-punk-esque ambiance, which did fit the film, but was disappointing. There was very little of Trent Razor’s iconic vocals and their grungy electric guitars. Out of 24 songs, only “As Alive as you Need Me To Be” and “Shadow Over Me” feel like NIN at all. Both excellent, of course. Nothing detracts, but the film could have been something better.

Secondly: The world of “The Grid” was a bit flat. Unlike in Tron: Legacy, where each area was filled with wonder, you are presented with two areas which are mostly content-less. In Tron: Legacy there were bars, games, mountain hideouts and highways, citadels and all sorts of things, and each felt unique. In Tron: Ares its basically a control tower and Flynn’s Hideout.

Third, the combat scenes mostly left a little to be desired. They’re kind of linear and have poor choreography. You can tell there were a few visionary people on the project, but there weren’t enough. There is a lot of opportunity to do cool and unique stuff with a movie like this. I was blown away in one of the final fight scenes where a melee weapon leaves a light trail that the protagonist uses in a half-second shot to jump off of and gain height advantage. The whole movie should have been like that and I was disappointed it wasn’t.

7.5/10, would definitely watch again

The Parable of the Swirl and the Pine

No pigs or clams were harmed in the making of this story, unlike the other one.

Once upon the time⁹ there was a sandy desert island approximately 20 feet wide with a big pine tree growing out of it. The guy stranded on the island used it as shade and shelter. Thankfully he didn’t need to eat, because his stomach was invincible. Eventually, he decides to leave the island, because an axe in a bottle washes ashore. He uses the axe to chop down the tree, and the glass he litters because he’s not particularly a moral person, caring nothing for the beauty and preservation of nature. So he gets on the tree like a raft and floats out to sea, because he doesn’t need to eat anyway so why not. He does get sunburned, unfortunately, poor guy.

What the guy doesn’t know is, the seas gotta eat. It doesn’t have the anti-hunger curse. A big whirl pool opens up and slurps the man and the pine tree right down, where the man would drown if he had needed air, which he didn’t because his lungs were invincible. Not drowning, the man asked the sea, “would you please return my pine?” and the sea said “in exchange you must give me your invincibility, for I cannot bear to go hungry.” The man said “sure whatever”, not valuing his gifts in his selfish pursuit of his own goals. Having sold his proverbial mess of pottage, the man instantly got hungry, because he hadn’t eaten in like a ton of years, and the sea promptly spat a pine tree into him, because the sea couldn’t bear to have its invincible stomach be full anymore. The force killed the man because he wasn’t invincible anymore, and he never got to his destination.

That’s why you can’t kill the sea today.

Then the man got resurrected by a passing necromancer on a yacht, served him for like 50 years as an undead, before regaining his full humanity and his freedom as a gift for his 50th undeath anniversary from the necromancer, who was only borrowing it for a while. He let the man off on a different 20 feet wide sandy island with a pine tree, and the man lived content in this novelty for the rest of his life, older, wiser, un-undeader, still sunburned (but he had shade now yay), at peace.

history

Some quick notes from my children

“eating makes me longer” - My toddler

“belly buttons are not safe to button” - My toddler, again

Everything is a race with my toddler recently. If we’re eating, he demands that he wants to “eat faster than me.” If we’re changing rooms he’ll get up and shoulder charge you trying to get there first. This is really difficult for him because a lot of times he’ll want to eat faster than me without the actual eating part, and he’ll play around while I eat and then cry.

The baby ran around the slide and ran around the slide and ran up the slide and went down the slide and didn’t come up. Upon inspection, she fell asleep going down the slide. And just decided to nap right there on the end.

I heard a terrible cry and ran to the kitchen and the toddler (like 50 lbs) had climbed into the baby’s high chair and he was stuck. “Why did you get in there?” “I don’t know.”

We took the kids to a pumpkin patch, which in Utah means like, a “farm themed amusement park” where they build a bunch of towers out of hay bales and make slides off of them and hay mazes and have a bunch of petting zoos and corn pits and stuff. There are pumpkins also. There’s a lot of places like this around here. The kids fed the baby goats, which was mostly terrifying for them because the bigger goats will happily jump on them but the kids enjoyed feeding them anyway other than the blunt trauma.

The baby closed the door on me, said “bye” and then opened the door a little and stuck just her arm through and waved ‘bye” at me cutely, which was a real highlight

The toddler is learning a lot from e-preschool. He’s telling us all about vowels and “constigints”. He hates math though. I told him you can do math on time, and he thought that was cool. Sometimes you just gotta connect it to their hobbies, like his hobby¹⁰ of asking what time is it.

Ducksnax

Vision

Ducksnax #088

☺ Previous Duckstack ☺

1. Which we aren’t. We’re being bob. bob da duck. Or at least I am. Okay, *you* can be frank.

2. obviously

3. its not like there’s any other uses for big properties anyway

4. a dilapidated ruin “wow its so vintage”

5. We hate furniture around here

6. and the centrists and prude right nearly universally refused to vote for him, over his religion.

7. I’d measure this mostly on purpose. Being mean for the sake of being mean, making people uncomfortable for the sake of being uncomfortable, or saying something to bolster your own pride should be measured differently than speaking uncomfortable truths. Of course if they’re actually uncomfortable you are going to try to be considerate in how you present them. So this is not actually that hard to measure.

8. Did you know Joseph Smith once said “Swear a stream as long as my arm”? Lets cancel this guy

9. this happened at a very specific time in my imagination, you see

10. kids have such unique past times compared to adults