Trickle Tracks
The moon is made of ice cream, that's why its got all those craters
Duckstack: some assembly required1
Many of you have been wondering: Why is it called The Duckstack? Why not X Æ A-12 Musk2? Well. The Duckstack is based out of California3, which has a lot of regulations in place for newsletters and such4. But California has native attractions: There’s an abundance of diverse wildlife, both human and otherwise, and beaches rich in sand5 and earthquakes. There is a little known sport dubbed “surfing” where local wildlife gets out in the water and the waves carry it around. Its called surfing because the experience resembles “surfing” the net6.
Sometimes some of the wildlife, mainly Ducks, California has lots of Ducks just like everywhere else, go surfing also. They’re aquatic birds so they’re very good at it, the waves just carry them right up and forward with incredible force. But some days the waves are smaller because the moon is further away or something, so the little gentle waves kind of just pop the ducks up a little bit. And sometimes the ducks land on top of each other and form a stack.
So that’s why7.
suicidocraxy
kamikaze nationalism, Mutually Assured Destruction Occupied Government, grievance addicts
Most people have never encountered someone truly manipulative. A lot of what we call abuse is more accurately styled as miscommunication, misunderstandings, poor communication styles and so forth. But it doesn’t really, if people are honest, come anywhere close to something like a terrorist threatening to shoot some hostages if their demands aren’t met. And the tactics which are effective for dealing with “abuse” in quotation marks do not actually have a lot of overlap with the tactics which are effective in really seriously abusive situations. So the ways of dealing with terrorism and war look abhorrent because most people are simply not under pressure often enough for that kind of thinking to come naturally. For example: “We do not negotiate with terrorists”. The hostages die.
That’s kind of what naivete is though, isn’t it? Like maybe you could read about these sorts of things in books, but few people have to actually develop any sort of reflexes against that sort of insanity. The heuristics required to navigate an abusive situation diverge radically from the ones useful in regular conflicts, and the more extreme the abuse, the more divergent the rules.
Some of the problem of this is abuse suffers from severe concept creep. When a classification is rewarded (this can be correct and even necessary) it introduces an incentive to expand the requirements for anyone “somewhat close”. And then the incentive moves to people who are now “somewhat close” to the new requirements. For example, when AGILE computer development became trendy, lots of jobs started implementing like 1/80th of AGILE methodologies and calling themselves AGILE, to attract the good programmers who wouldn’t apply if they knew the company wasn’t really AGILE. Here are some more examples:
Gaslighting, the psychological term for a kind of abuse where one person attempts to convince their partner that they are hallucinating, schizophrenic, or have too faulty of a memory to do anything but rely on them, saw a rapid and exponential spike in popularity amongst certain feminist groups, and rapidly became a term for “being disagreed with.” Since accusing someone of gaslighting comes with the implication of severe moral wrong/malice, it gives an arguer pathos and an automatic moral high ground. Even when its totally spurious and all that is happening is a normal fight. Unfortunately, the rapid prevalence of this accusation as an insult makes all claims of being “gaslit” hard to take seriously. See also: The boy who cried wolf.
Sexual Consent was first introduced as a necessary contingency to dropping marriage sexual morality without opening the door to pedophilia morality, when divorce and fornication became prevalent and needed justifying. The claim love is all that matters in sex opens all sorts of cans of worms, so consent was put forward as the new marker for morality. This is of course no different from the wiccan rede, but it did stave off the question of having sex with teenagers and animals and stuff. But the new system devolved quickly once consent started needing to be verified, and now you can find sex ed classes across the nation teaching people to get written consent before each sexual encounter, even with the same person, even if consent was already established some other way.
“Retard” used to be a charitable, clinical, and neutral word for calling someone retarded. But calling someone retarded turned out to be an effective insult, so now it is an offensive word, even in non-insulting usages. Terms for black people, gay people, and illegitimate children all received similar children, and now most of these words can no longer be spoken in polite company. The interesting thing about this is that most of these used to themselves be considered the polite terms. See also: The Euphemism treadmill8
Concept creep cheapens the original concept, and victim payouts cheapen real tragedy. When disability checks flow, what you get is hundreds of people in Mississippi living in trailers who don’t work because their back hurts, all receiving the same check for the same dollar amount as their neighboring veteran who got his leg blown off in the war.
I love the story of The Crucible. Its about the Salem witch trials, where girls got caught dancing naked so the girls claimed Witches Made Them Do It which at the time sounded realistic enough for people to hunt down these witches and kill them
25 people died.
I remember an interview of these girls, conducted later, after some sanity had returned to the village and they were too old to have anything to lose, and in the interview one of the girls said something that stuck with me which was that “over time, as we accused people of being witches, we started to believe it.” That’s a placebo effect for you! 25 people hung for your accusations, just digging that trench over and over again! First for convenience, later for peer pressure, and finally it seemed real. This is how social contagion works. You still see this effect all the time, this tactic of making accusations in order to preserve dignity. Its a heck of a lot easier than being honest. But I object: Witch hunts give witches a bad name.
CHRISTMAS TREES: a review
Christmas Trees: Are they Christians? Are they trees? What utility can you expect from one on average? We’re asking the hard hitting questions today in this slam interview with one of the most famous trees on the planet
Readers I apologize, I’ve done you wrong. We were scheduled to have an interview with Old Sequoia today, and we had a studio audience lined up and everything, but unfortunately Old Sequoia is being transplanted today. So we’ve got the worlds largest backhoe out here and preparations are well underway. There’s even some tree huggers protesting the move but they’re pretty small compared to our equipment so we’re not worried they’ll get in the way very much at all, this should be no trouble. We can’t do the interview though.
The Parable of the Blushing Tree
For the purposes of this story, imagine that you are also a tree, or a lot of this will not make any sense
Longtime readers of The Duckstack know that trees do not get embarrassed easily. In fact, trees are known for their wisdom, their strength, and their charisma. But one day a tree was born with none of these things.
“Woe is me”, thought the tree. “I shall never be free. And if I cannot change myself this I shall always be.” And she was right.
A bee flew by and built a nest in her branches. This made her unique from the other trees around her, and the other trees hurried away from her as fast as they could in shunning. Thankfully a tree’s top speed is zero, so the unique tree did not notice the social dynamics putting pressure on her or she would have died of embarrassment, because you see, she was already at her embarrassment limit:
“I’m blemished, marked!” thought the tree. “Built a nest right where I’m parked! This is travesty unto me, I bet the others are filled with snark.” And she was right. She just couldn’t tell, because trees don’t have facial expressions. So again, she was safe from dying from embarrassment, because at this point she was still just living in a social fantasy world, even though it happened to match the real world.
But soon, the bee eggs in the bee nest hatched, and the tree’s branches were filled with the soft cheeping noises of baby bees. The baby bees were very cute9 and caused the tree to forget all of her worries, because they were distractingly cute10. This changed the special tree's social standing considerably, rocketing her from ugly duckling to ugly tree with cute babies. All the other trees wished they had bees nests of their own, and soon they did.
The End.
Duckstack cooking: ice cream
everyday recipes for the everyman's man, man
So we’re making a gallon of ice cream today. You’ll need:
store bought ice cream. Got yours? Great. Open the lid with your fingers, teeth, or whatever primitive tool you need to invent in this desperate time of need that you think11 will be up for the task
Now lets say you get the lid open. Got a bowl or a plate or a pie or something? You gotta transfer the ice cream to it.
An ice cream scooper, now that's some amazing technology. Can you imagine cavemen used to do this by hand? And now there’s one in every home. This has got to be the best example of viral marketing in all of history. Or ice cream scoops propagate on their own, I don’t know.
Whoops, forgot a spoon. You can eat it with a fork or, again, your hands I guess, but in my house we prefer a dignified air so I’ll be getting a spoon myself. If you’re following along at home I’d just say the only thing here is avoiding a ladle
That’s pretty much everything! If you run up against any unaccounted contingencies12 you'll just have to do your best by violence or persuasion, but that's it, the dish is done. Go eat your ice cream. Every day. You've earned it.
history
History was, as it were, a dream. With a lot of interruptions.
We had multiple scares over our chickens this week. Our brooding chicken was happy in her nest until the jenga tower we had set it on fell over, spilling her eggs everywhere and trapping her underneath a box. One of the eggs fell beyond her reach and while it did not break it did not exactly survive either. There’s a process called candling where you try to blind the baby chick inside the egg and the egg was cold and we tried it and the baby chick wasn’t moving but we put it in an incubator anyway and prayed, and today we candled it and it started moving like “ack you are blinding me please stop” so its alive again! Hopefully it makes it to chickhood and is not another rooster.
Our three year old has never learned how to sleep. He screams all night until we go and sit with him the rest of the night and we’ve been doing this for three years now, but this week I was like “look she usually takes one for the team for this, I’m going to go sleep in his bed with him and give her a break” and I fell asleep and as soon as I was asleep he got up and went and climbed into her bed. He’s a trickster archetype.
“Mama can I talk to you about medcines.” “uhh sure” “The good thing about the purple one is it tastes like grape. the bad thing about the white one is it tastes like medcine.” Irrefutable. I guess this rhetorical mode worked well for him because later he opened another conversation with “…Mama, can I talk to you about milk and water?”
Finally did our Christmas oranges and cloves tradition, which is where you get some oranges, and you get some cloves, and you stab the oranges with the cloves a lot, to kill them or something. But it smells good, and we do it while watching the First Presidency Christmas Devotional for our church. And my wife has had this cute little family dream for forever, where we’re all together doing this arts and crafts, and this is the first year we’ve finally been able to action it, and turn her cute little dream into reality. And he’s like “they’re like SPIKE BALLS and they’re BATTLING” and smashing oranges into each other and the toddler is eating whole cloves and shoving them into my shoes while drooling everywhere and stuff, so it was a smashing success and we’re looking forward to doing it next year
My wife, asleep, in the voice of the dark souls narrator: “everybody's got their power tools.” We had several incidents of sleeptalking this week. Our kid made up a song in his sleep that went “Looks like he’s going to the lib-rar-y!”
Some quick notes about other things that are going on: leaky sinks and paint and juggling cabinets flying through the air while the toddler eats candy and crayons and practices for his “unplugging the refrigerator” career whilst the other one asks for granola bars and downs them over and over again because its the only thing he'll eat and also eggs flying around too because the chickens are just shooting them everywhere
by me
i would never do that to you
When naming the newsletter, I had many options
Because California has infected the entire United States, come now, you don’t think I’d be so crass as to think geologically?
The Duckstack is Known by the state of California to cause cancer
If I had a grain of sand for every grain of sand in California, I’d be rich, if I could convert them into Duckstack newsletters, and then convert those into pennies. Just living the hustle
Ups, downs, obstacles, cannon fire
Did someone tell you otherwise? They are lying, and should not be taken seriously.
https://www.truthaccordingtoscripture.com/documents/apologetics/mere-christianity/cs-lewis-mere-christianity-preface.php, starting reading from “Far deeper objections may be felt” (use your browser’s find in page function)
No, I don’t think baby bees are very cute either. Trees have weird aesthetic taste, its fine
In your HUBRIS
sharks?