simply having a wonderful duckstack time

The Duckstack remains on an intermittent publishing schedule, but may become more regular with the new year. Thank you for being patient with us.

When the first duckstack came to be, some 9 trillion trillion years ago1, it was a fairly empty universe, just a lot of what scientists called back2 then “cosmic dust”. Luckily, duckstacks have feathers, and feather dusters are made of feathers, so we were able to do some house cleaning. We’ve been waiting 9 trillion trillion years for you.

Happy Halloween!

Boo! Did I scare you?

Its time for spooky haunts here at The Duckstack, with fearsome frights and wicked witchcrafts and so on and so forth. The winter solstice is just around the corner a couple of days ago, you know. That means the days are very short, and the night rules the, ah, night I guess. You’ve also got snow, which can mask an assassins footsteps. Or maybe it makes them louder because its crunchy? So we’ll say only newly fallen snow is spooky, and old snow is anti-spooky. Nevertheless, its always snowing somewhere, so watch your back.

Plus, there’s a lot of dead people in the world. By my calculations, which I did on this comically big abacus, look I’ve even got ghost stickers on it and stuff to decorate it for halloween, there’s both more dead people than there’s ever been before, and there’s a lot more of them than us. Maybe they’re leaving us alone right now, but what happens if they decide they want what we have? Lets hope the government doesn’t fix the economy, lest their terrifying gaze fall upon our wealth.

Third and finally, I like Halloween. My son liked halloween. He would probably want today to be Halloween. So make sure to put some spiders or skulls on your tree for him.

How To Be a Chess Grandmaster

source: I'm 1200 elo

One of the first things very observant people notice about chess is that it takes forever3. Then, normally, they will notice it doesn't have to be this way, and challenge the chess master to a game, and then lose fantastically within 3 minutes. People used to do this in xiaolin monk temples in the Himalayas4. The monks learned a lot from this, which is why they go to the Himalayas to study chess against upstart competitors who just learned the rules of the game.

But the actual secret to getting good at chess, is something so simple anyone can do it5. Not grandmaster of course. To reach grandmaster you have to actually practice (shockingly) so that some patterns become muscle memory whatever. But actually getting good is extremely straightforward: Just take your time.

When my dad was teaching me chess6 what he would say was “sit on your hands”. This is torture for a little kid, which is why chess is used to torture children in many third world countries today. But it works. If you're sitting on your hands, physically, then it is much more difficult to jump to making moves that will lose you the game in under 3 minutes. Did you know that China dropped their divorce rate by 70 percent after implementing a 30 day waiting period before divorce applications can be completed?

Repression isn't bad. Resentment is bad, outbursts are bad, liberal therapyspeak shows you petty resentment and stupid outbursts and says they're repression, thus remapping your moral intuitions against “impulse control as such”. Most modern divorces list “irreconcilable differences” as the divorce reason. Most people do not know what irreconcilable7 even means.

I have witnessed my fair share of marriage fights. Not mine of course. If my wife and I fight, I close my eyes8. But I’ve seen other people fight, and if you see this a lot its really striking how stupid most fights can be. A lot of times both people want the same thing and manage to miscommunicate enough to blow up on each other anyway, its astounding.

Most people don’t write and argue for a living, and I don’t either but I do it a lot anyway, but even still I have to tell my family that “I think slowly, when it comes to myself.” I think one of the big things men are bad at is self-understanding, making it difficult to articulate their needs and wants, let alone in a way that other people will understand and readily accept. If you write and argue a lot maybe you start to see where people are coming from (and yourself) and can eventually put things in the write way once you figure out how to speak them, but most people don’t have hobbies that practice this sort of thing, so I imagine most people as sort of just going through life and then only having to reflect once something goes wrong. I’m no exception, of course, but I do know how to play chess, which is to sit on my hands, and I think it often keeps me from saying something stupid by accident9.

I don’t wish to imply there’s no such thing as righteous anger, and I doubt anyone is mistaking me here but just for clarity, there’s plenty of righteous anger, and I believe our emotions are God-given barometers to alert us to when something is wrong. But I also know that the human heart is deep, and its always better to consider for a while extra before acting, because the best chess move is almost never, never the first one you see. Take some time to be clever. Its good for you.

Parable: The Parable of the Talents

Next week: The parable of the parable of the talents

Once upon a time, a man had 5 talents, worked hard, and ended up with 10. Another man had 2 talents, and ended up with 4. Another man buried his talent, and it was given to another, who squandered it on cocaine, shoes, and speculation.

The person who wasted the talent then got into blogging, where they decried the king for not passing sufficient laws outlawing drugs and crypto rugpulls. They explained that squandering their talents was actually boosting the economy, when you think about it, but if they had increased their money, that would have meant taking money from someone else, one of the clearest examples of immorality there is. This person was a Republican, of course, and gained a ton of fame and was seen as one of the most respectable commentators of the day.

Histyoy

A brief histyoy of a vacation we just took our kids on, and their reactions to it

Both of our children are developing rapidly. For our toddler, this mostly means being a picky eater, and developing games like “pass me back and forth between parents or I will scream” and “put forks everywhere”. Our son is also developing games, like “don’t step on the grey tiles at the mall while sprinting and smack headfirst into a pillar” and “try to drown myself while my parents try to stop me”, all of which we’ve played for hours on end these last couple of weeks

Our kid asked where we were going. To the doctors. “We’re going to a doctor’s disappointment?”

Our son happily eating an omlette: “This omlette has a lot of different food in it!”

Both kids went snorkeling this week. The toddler got a giant life vest and didn’t actually look in the water but some fish came up near the surface which was cool. Meanwhile our son got a mask and no snorkel so he just drowned himself over and over again to look at the fishes, he seemed to really enjoy this

They also got to play in a normal pool, with a deep part and a shallow part ringing it, and the toddler would excitedly run up to the edge and then daintily wait for us to gently lower her into the water. And the son would just jump into the center and make us rescue him over and over again.'

The kids snack lately, especially our son, has been seaweed, and he’ll just munch on seaweed packs and our whole house smells like seaweed. “Mama, do you want a piece of seaweed? Be careful not to get the sea weed wet.”

Oh, one other toddler hobby she’s picked up this week is walking around in her brothers shoes everywhere. So one new game is having us lift her onto the bed in her brother’s shoes and then they’ll fall off when we lift her and she’ll have to climb back off to put them on again, we’ve played hours of this one also

Oh, also one other other toddler new hobby recently, if we put her in her high chair then she buckles herself in and then has a screaming meltdown that she is now stuck. Then we unbuckle her and the cycle repeats.

Duckstack Interviews: Some Random Guy In My CS2 Lobby

We had a gamer moment

The Duckstack: Ok first question, we are happy to have you here, thank you for taking time out of your day to do this. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Haku: Ya I like *** ***** and drugs

The Duckstack: Nice. Do you have any pets?

Haku: Ya I own a ** ****** cat, she does whatever she wants and annoys the **** out of me, but I love her

So there you have it! There’s a ton of people in the world, and they have a ton of thoughts about a ton of things. Some of them even play video games. Hopefully this interview was as informative for you as it was for us! I know I’ll for one be thinking about it for a long time.1011

Ducksnax

Wright