Wit Rid
A battle of wits will knock you wide awake
You win some, you duckstack some12
Congratulations sailor, you’re now a crew member aboard the mighty U.S.S3. Duckstack, you’re now sailing on the duckstack seas. Sheaves of paper beneath our boat, carrying us in waves to wherever it is that we end up going. Nobody knows how to steer this thing.
As a new sailor, you’re going to have to get used to some things. All we’ve got to eat is hard tacks. The pins are prickly at first, but they toughen you up. You’ll get used to it in 3 or 4 years. We don’t carry any other food because we’re purists. The second thing is you’ll need to get used to sailor slang, like “land ho” and “hard to starboard”. You should be good with just those two actually. Also you’ll need to get used to being attacked by pirates.
Duckstack emails are invaluable4 and it is common for everybody in the world to want to intercept them. Pirates are going to come after you, and your only defense will be the duckstack cannons, where you fire duckstack emails at them but with enough force that hopefully it sinks their ship rather than makes them rich5. They’ll be doing the same to you. Everybody who reads The Duckstack will be, I expect. Harden your heart sailor. Your fellow readers are no longer your friends. Do what must be done to survive. Until then though you’re welcome to read them, do whatever you want I don’t care
Trade Goods: Merry Psychotherapy
Pay No Attention to the Therapist Behind the curtain
I skipped college. I knew at a young age it was mostly a scam to certify rather than impart knowledge, and eventually I came around to the conclusion that dropping out was the most efficient thing I could do with my life, and its been 10 years or so and I haven’t been proven wrong yet, so I at least feel like I was onto something where myself was concerned.
Many will know I have many grievances against “therapists, generally”- I have watched at this point I believe 6 marriages fail due to the wife going to therapy, and I’ve been bemused watching many therapists claim things that wildly do not pass the smell test, such as “pornography users are immune to Pavlovian Conditioning”. I’ve seen the rise of affirmation-only therapy in popular therapeutic consciousness, displacing far sounder and more proven treatment strategies, as therapists have rapidly moved to become what I would describe as “woke”. This has always made sense to me, since its a “feelsy” profession, and I was like, “well obviously that’s going to attract a lot of woke people.” I also knew colleges are “woke”, so my general attitude has been “well, you’ll need to be careful with it, if you’re going to go to therapy vet them first”. Since I skipped college, I don’t really know what the training to become a therapist looks like. But I stumbled across an article this week which does, because Ryan Rogers is in one right now and is reporting on it, and its a lot worse than I thought- If he is to be believed, a significant amount of colleges are not only having psychology programs filled with liberals, but the programs themselves are actively aimed at weeding out conservatives and indoctrinating liberalism, and in wholly self-destructive ways as well. And I do believe him, because this explains a lot of things.
I had this idea in my head from A Goofy Movie that college is this dour place full of blistering rigor and knowledgeable professors pushing students to learn, and challenging them, and learn Latin names for things in rich wooden amphitheaters and so on, but this article painted a very different picture- College as a sort of adult day care, pushing students to perform “arts and crafts” and “coloring” activities, pushing dogmatisms in an environment insulated from criticism, and then dressing these adult children in priestly robes and telling them their own neuroses are evidence that they are qualified to play mechanic to other people’s severe mental issues. You must read it.
How did therapy get this way? In some ways it happens by vote, as there are committees at the top of therapeutic practices which vote on what counts as a mental illness and gives guidelines for best practice, such as telling all men that they are evil6. When the majority abstained from the vote to remove homosexuality from the DSM-5, it paved the way directly for homosexuality to be called a “natural” thing. But the real issue, I would say, is that our culture has simply gone in that direction. As my wife put it, “When someone is grieving or in trouble, nobody wants to say the wrong thing for obvious reasons, so everyone says, leave it to the professionals.” this ties in to my article about society's insulation from violence. While professionals tend to cause plenty of harm, it is usually diffused through their agency, and through the legal system, and because you have no real relationship to the psychologist7 nothing is risked this way, other than to the patient, but if you convince someone to go to therapy and the therapist harms them, that’s enough layers removed that you aren’t going to feel guilty on net. And that’s what most people opt to do.
And my stance on that, you know, is that even if you’re not trained, you’re much better off taking or giving that sort of harm in a relationship where you have accountability and an incentive not just to try not to give bad advice, but also an incentive to try to help if it turns out your advice was bad, in order either to maintain the relationship or simply to help them. There’s a threshold where an untrained person who cares beats out a trained professional who doesn’t- and that threshold is a lot lower than you would think.
Tongue Tied
How do you grow a tongue? You plant it in your cheek
Have you ever “lost your voice”? This condition affects hundreds of people every year, and is ranked “mild to severe” in terms of how alarmed you should be. What happens when a person loses their voice is that their tongue has become defective. If its still under warranty you can just replace it, but if not, the current best medical advice is to attempt to grow a new tongue.
Tongues, as you know, are a fungus, which means they reproduce by spores. Even defective tongues will still release spores in the form of morning breath, and its a simple matter to catch them in a jar and seal it until you can see some tongue buds developing, also called “taste buds”. No relationship to friendship.
With these taste buds developed, simply suck them up into a vacuum and put them into a spray can, and spray them over your tongue. A new tongue should develop right around your old one, and by that time your voice will be back, one way or another.
History
The toddler has invented a new song, it goes “I like to eat eat eat eat eat eat eat eat FRENCH FRIIIIESSS”
We try not to watch so much TV nowdays. We’ve been told its bad for kids. But I must say, without the anchoring influence of television, the toddlers grasp on reality grows tenuously thin. We constantly hear him talking to himself, saying things like “Yup, that's ice in the apple juice, so it doesn't turn into peanut butter.” and singing the monkeys jumping on the bed song, except after “bump they’re head” it goes “because they’re not vampires they’re just birdies”
The baby has learned to pull herself to her feet using objects. She hasn’t learned how to get down.
Energy Drinks: A Review
TLDR: They definitely TASTE like batteries
Though caffeine isn't prohibited by Latter-Day Saint scripture, for most of my life I have stuck to root beer and sprite. The reason for this is I discovered early on that coca cola tastes kind of like carbonated tar.
My friend Jacob recently launched his new line of racist energy drinks called KEYED Energy, and I bought a couple of monsters to celebrate. I also bought some of his new drink, but I learned he's using tea extract in his formula so I'm not comfortable drinking it. I'll give it away to nonmember friends. But since nearly everyone I know is into monsters I figured I'd try one, not even for caffeine reasons, but just to see what all of the hubub was about. I grabbed a white one and a peach one, since everyone says white is good and someone said the peach one tasted like those peach ring gummy candies, which tracks with the single sip of Red Bull I had 6 years ago, discovering it to taste like carbonated smarties. It wasn’t good.
The can itself feels good. They keep them in those fridges in the stores for a reason, and the cans are designed to sweat. You pick it up and your psychology immediately goes “ah, refreshing.” That’s an impressive bit of engineering there. The problem is the taste, which is pretty much like drinking straight potassium.
From my observation, the first sip is “alright”, tasting faintly like the flavor advertised, but it is immediately followed by an overwhelming aftertaste. Maybe its just the caffeine, but we’re two for two on different flavors just tasting like caffeine, and I don’t think I’m going to try more. Having tried these things, my new conclusion is that everyone who drinks them has been stockholmed syndromed into liking the bad taste, or perhaps they are experiencing such a strong placebo effect from the anticipated energy that they have convinced themselves it tastes good. Either way, its kind of comically bad for someone who doesn’t drink them regularly.
As for the caffeine, I have heard caffeine is a chemical that wakes you up, but both times after drinking the drinks I felt strongly like taking a nap, even when I got enough sleep the night before. So my conclusion is: False advertising all the way down, do not drink these. Hopefully my friend’s line will do much better, after he removes tea to make it sharia compliant for us saints.
Ducksnax
Sucker
you winsome, you duckstacksome
Deep wisdom. Write that down.
United States of… States.
As long as you do not value them. Be careful, or else they may lose their invaluable status.
Or… Inrich, I guess. If you’ve been being careful.
There was quite a lot of blowback in the Psychology community at the time, which all went unheeded. Here is one: https://www.scribd.com/document/385347642/Review-of-Practice-Guidelines-for-Men-and-Boys
“Neo-Therapists are something like hookers- you pay them to go away”