Tacky Flak

You would fight with shrapnel? Where is your self respect

Legend of Galactic duckstack

Art: Goose City by Torkzz28, with AI

All aboard The Duckstack! May I see your ticket please? You do have a ticket, don’t you? Don’t tell me you misplaced your ticket. I can’t verify that. I need to actually see your ticket. Can they get here in the next few minutes? Okay then that won’t work. We’re literally ready to get started, right now. You’re really supposed to have your ticket ready. How were you supposed to know? Its new? I don’t believe you. I’m pretty sure we have always required tickets to board The Duckstack. I’m afraid I can’t let you on. No don’t cry, don’t do this to me, I’m just doing my job. Okay look I’ll call my supervisor. I’m really sorry but he said no, but I’ll tell you what I can do. You can sign right here, and instead of boarding, I can let you read. Reading is free. How is boarding different from reading? I don’t know. Just make sure to have your ticket next time.

Sermon: To Kill A Mockingbird

NEXT TIME: To deep fry a mockingbird

Have you ever heard of the prosperity gospel? God wants you to be rich, happy, with a hot wife or husband and never be sick and to skip through a field of flowers. You know religion is true when its coolest¹, not whether it describes basic reality. What’s cooler than prosperity? You think this is naive and shortsighted and likely to cause problems for people that take prosperity doctrine seriously? That is not very prosperous of you, bro

One thing you can attribute the rise of therapists to is priests falling down on their job to provide useful counsel. People generally want to believe religion as such has all the answers. Skipping the part where specific doctrines map to any specific realities. In other words, priests are in fact becoming sheltered.

As technology and societal atomization increases, practical experience with what you could call “applied religion” has dropped abysmally. Applied faith sucks. The book of Job talks about this. Joseph Smith taught his apostles that they would have to be tried as Abraham and if they can’t stand it, they wouldn’t be fit for the kingdom of God. Jesus said this too. When the Lord walked the earth it was so urgent you couldn’t even leave to attend a funeral, you were supposed to deprioritize your own parents in the face of being able to walk with Jesus, who I remind you was a man, looked like a man, talked like a man. He didn’t have a constant halo and doves following him around to mark him as the son of God to ‘normies². People only had their hearts and the doctrines they felt and the miracles they saw. But that isn’t the same as faith, and it definitely did not make it easy. “You have to sacrifice everything.” Modern Christians interpret this mostly in terms of loyalty, as if loyalty is a sacrifice. But most Christians don’t hurt from being Christian. In fact, it puffs up their egos. (I would say the lack of “hard doctrines” is attributable to Christianity lacking authority to speak for God, not cowardice). The point is that Christ directly tested his followers regularly, even refusing to feed them, saying if they didn’t put up with it there was no place in heaven for them.

So then his apostles were like, “then who on earth can even be saved then, that’s ridiculous” and Christ said its like a mustard seed that grows. Thankfully miracles also occur in proportion to faith, so there’s remediating benefits. Sometimes you can even soften people’s hearts. But that’s not common, what we see instead is people having zero faith and thinking that having zero faith is what’s going to soften people’s hearts. This is what “just be nice” usually means, in practice, especially (nearly universally) when it is being told to someone else, rather than to yourself, in the mirror. Sic Semper Jannie Centrists.

If discipleship made everything easy, people would do discipleship the same way they do drugs. We tend to be taught to think of niceness virtues as “conquering”, hence the rise of slogans like “love wins” and “just be kind” and everything else that assumes the proper way to run the world is the mere set of rules used to run a kindergarten class. But this is obviously insufficient. I keep watching good guys get divorced, and no amount of being Christlike saves them from petty and vindictive women. You can’t just tell people believe in yourself through tragedy. Its the wrong message. Niceness doesn’t “win”, it more gets “honorably trampled³”. The right message is “even if you’re kind, even Jesus was betrayed by Judas.” And then if you’re serious, you teach people how to handle the other side of that. But who wants to hear a sermon on “getting divorced with grace”? This is practical Christianity, but is it what you want? The apostles in Christ’s day were promised very little in life, only that God saw their deeds. Their reward was the afterlife.

Some people are just evil⁴. There’s not a secret righteousness jiu-jitsu technique you can use to judo-throw people into heaven. As soon as you’re trying to corral or trick people into behaviors, you’re doing politics. I think its really important to keep this in mind, lest you sell yourself that your peeves are actually God’s.

Duckstack Science: Water

We’ve verified beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can pour water between beakers

Anyone who's ever been on a cruise will tell you: The earth has a lot of water. I've been on a cruise too, and I must admit I find the arguments compelling. However, I think it falls short for a few reasons.

First, God gave Adam dominion over the animals to name them. Animals, not rocks and stuff⁵. So how can you say the stuff we eat and drink is water? You can't . It might be something totally else.

Second, they told us fish live in water, but some fish don't, like frogs. What are they hiding?

Second, I can think of lots of things that aren't water. So how can you say the earth has a lot of water? Why not say the earth has a lot of music? Where is your optimism for the beauty of life?

Third, the earth is neither a store nor sells its water. It gives forth bountifully. It asks for nothing in return. The Earth is so meek and generous and we do not appreciate it enough.

Charitably, there is one sense in which the earth does have a lot of water, however. It has nothing to do with cruise ships, but the Earth indisputably has parking lots. And at least one of those, at any given point, is being rained on. But its still not enough water to make a pond for ducks though, so what use is it, huh?

History

life gets better once the kids start being able to play together unsupervised for 5-10 minutes without disaster

Our son’s habit of running up and screaming in his sister’s face has finally developed into a parse-able “culture” for her and she recognizes that he is playing with her and that the screaming itself is not a threat, and therefore safe to laugh at. The threat is when he touches her

Our son has acquired a new talent, which is that he plugs his nose with his fingers and takes advantage of his unique anatomy to make what he calls “vulture noises”. It sounds kind of like donald duck screaming. Which is confusing, because he also has a slightly louder “vulture screaming” version

Great news! Our son sings while washing an apple he got for himself, and says “okie dokie” spontaneously.

Duckstack Cooking: Sweet Pork

we had it for dinner and I helped by going to the store to buy the ingredients. And now you can have it too.

My wife is an alchemist who can transform ingredients into food. I never got that skill when I was isekai’d into this world⁶, but I have a functioning imagination and I can pretend how she did it. First, I bought a lump of pork. I would describe it as “a big rock except pork”. I believe what she did with it after that was shred it with a fork, put it in a “crock pot”⁷, and boil it in coke. I haven’t tried this but you can also use meth or heroin, if its legal where you live.

Then we put it on tortillas and tortilla chips with tortilla rice and tortilla sauce and tortilla lettuce and tortilla beans and tortilla guacamole and so on. It was pretty good and we had leftovers for days which wouldn't be the case if we ate at cafe rio.

Ducksnax

cannon

Ducksnax #094

§ Previous Duckstack §

1. The flowers are, uh, made of metal with LED lights and are on fire

2. What if he was obama? Imagine having to forsake everything to follow obama

3. there’s a time and a place for that, but Jesus certainly didn’t display this mode of being constantly

4. Or they’re “just being evil right now” is a better frame

5. pretty much everything is rocks, even lava, so I assume water is a sort of liquid rock too. Probably based on the two rocks hydrogen and oxygen

6. duckstack planet… my home….

7. no known relation to croc shoes