#i just really like ducks

[byrdbr4in]

He's doing his best

[inbabylontheywept]

Memories of Grandpa Dale

I was playing in the barn, but I was also hiding from my grandpa. I was aware that this hurt his feelings, but I didn’t know what else to do. Every year I’d ever visited him before, he’d seemed kind of mad at me, but I’d hoped still that year was the year that we’d finally be friends. I even made a list of things to do together. 

Unfortunately, the list did not fix things¹ so I'd been forced to acknowledge that if he couldn't be happy with me there, and he couldn't be happy with me gone, then perhaps he simply could not be happy. At least, not until someone invented The Secret Third Thing.

(But I was only nine. So. That someone would probably not be me.) 

Fortunately, being happy is a task that I've never needed to delegate - I’m actually quite good at it. I’d been sad in the barn for maybe an hour or so, but eventually that got boring, so I invented a new game where I would chase big clouds of shiny blue flies off the sun-warmed horse-poop and try to shoo them towards a corner of the barn that I knew had a large spiderweb in it. 

I was perfectly aware that this is not ideal for the flies, but I had just read Charlotte’s Web, so my empathy function was very biased towards spiders, who I perceived as patient and compassionate and slightly maternal women. Who just happened to have eight legs.  

(I, like most nine year old boys, would have personally been willing to fight a war for every patient, compassionate, slightly maternal woman I had ever met. If you, personally, have ever hugged a little boy who was trying very hard not to cry in front of his friends after skinning his knee, know that there is a child in this world that would kill in your name.)

(Now live with that knowledge.) 

I played my game with the flies for a long time. Long enough to get into a rhythm of running and laughing and then panting outside on my back while wallowing in the long green grass.

It was during one of those walks outside to lay in the grass that I noticed my mom. She was sitting on a hay bale, looking baffled. I don’t know how long she’d been there, but I was too young and confident to even feel odd. She asked me what I was doing, and I just kind of gestured to the ceiling, and said, You know, just. Feeding spiders.²

She nodded. I was feeding spiders. Of course. 

We sat there a few moments. It was an amicable silence, but I was still faintly relieved when she broke it.  

Your grandpa’s been looking for you, she said. He got some grapes earlier. Wanted to take you to feed the ducks.

I've always really liked feeding ducks³. Visiting them had actually been the next thing on my list. 

I was baffled by the effort. 

He’s mad at me, I pointed out. My mom, to her credit, looked genuinely confused. 

He’s not, she said. 

But he was mad when we picked blackberries, I pointed out. And when we went on that walk down to the prairie. And he snapped at me this morning when I asked if I could have some of his dried mangos. 

The mangos had been my last straw. The weirdest part was that he didn’t even say no, he just (angrily) said of course you can, as if it was an insult to his hospitality that I was asking when just the year before he’d yelled at me because I ate a tin of dried apples. Apparently, I was just supposed to know that those apples were exclusively reserved for The Apocalypse. 

(To be fair, my grandpa has always been very worried about the apocalypse, but mostly in the context of not having enough dried apples for it. There was a period of my life where I thought that The Apocalypse referred to some kind of prophesied biblical event where there would be No More Apples. This thought has stuck with me for a very long time⁴.)

Well. Yeah. My mom said. He’s mad. But he’s not mad at you. He’s just… Mad. 

I mulled this over. 

What about the mangos? I asked, and she shrugged at that. 

Alright, so that time he was mad at you, but that’s being mad one time in three days. Cut the man some slack, you’ve been asking him for permission before eating anything. 

I just don’t want to eat the wrong thing, I said. I’ve always been very defensive of my rule-following. Both because rules are important, and also because that #10 can of dried apples ripped through me like a shotgun full of razor blades⁵. That “snack” had 400% the recommended daily fiber for an adult man. And I was very definitely not a grown man when I ate it.  

It was a very painful experience is what I am trying to say. 

I know, my mom said. 

I don’t even like apples, I added. Still defensive. 

I know, my mom said again. She’s very good at saying it. It always feels like she’s agreeing with me, and not just trying to rush me onto The Point. Sometimes, people need to make detours from The Point in order to explain things. Like, hypothetically, why they once ate a very large number of dehydrated apples. My mom is wise, and she has always known this. . 

I just really wanted to eat something sweet, I continued. They don’t keep anything sweet in the whole house. The day before I ate those apples, I licked all the salt off a saltine just so I could eat the cracker plain. And then the cracker tasted just like a cookie. To me. That’s how crazy I was going. 

My mom nodded her head sympathetically. 

My first month of college, she said conspiratorially, I ate about a box of poptarts a day. 

There was another longish pause as both of us considered what led us to this point. 

My parents are crazy, my mom said at long last. It’s a very peaceful statement to her. I'm sure it was stressful when she first realized it, but she's had a long time to make her peace, and she's made it well.  

Will you go with me? I asked. To feed the ducks?  

He’s not mad at you, she said again. Reemphasizing her point. He’s just mad. It’s just how he is. 

But she went with me anyway.

I watched Grandpa Dale closely the whole way to the pond to see if my mom was right. She was. She almost always is.  He was angry while he drove, and he was angry while he parked and he was even angry while he strode purposefully towards the park. When we got there, he took several grapes, and he angrily put them in his hand, and angrily extended the hand towards the ducks, and he looked at me, and for maybe a tenth of a second he looked okay. Not exactly happy, but a little less mad. Then a duck bit the webbing between his pointer finger and his thumb.

He immediately, without hesitation, without even a second thought, hit the duck with a haymaker⁶. For a human, the punch would have been devastating, but the duck had the benefit of having essentially no inertia, so it just kind of moved sideways and looked perplexed. 

You son of a bitch, my grandpa said. This is a funny thing for anyone to say to a duck, but it was especially funny to hear coming from a former Mormon Bishop. 

Quack,⁷ said the duck. 

My mom started laughing. I'd felt a sort of holy terror at the anger my grandpa was exuding in that moment, but the moment she laughed I realized how absurd it was. I was watching a grown man beef with a duck. I was watching a grown man beef with the world. 

I started laughing too. In a better world, maybe my grandpa would've joined. Maybe he would've taken a good hard look in the mirror and questioned why exactly he was so angry. But he didn't. Instead he swore at the duck some more, and he threw his remaining handful of grapes at it overhand, like a baseball, and then the duck ate the grapes out of the water, and my mom actually laughed so hard she started dry heaving a little, and my grandpa had to go sit in the car for a few minutes by himself to regain his composure. 

¹ He managed to pick blackberries angrily

² Unfortunately, I do this kind of response quite a bit.

³ I got my first kiss from my wife because I managed to capture a duck. They're like, a motif for my life. Very lucky to have that.

⁴ I reference it again in this very weird short story.

⁵ I eat a lot of strange things.

⁶ My wife is concerned people will not know what a haymaker is. It is simply the most redneck kind of punch.

⁷ ...What did you expect it to say?

[surreal-duck]

strawberry sunset and blue piercings

[ninjasmudge]

i wanted to try @donutfloats collab!!! i love gabriel a lot so i crammed amar in there with them, i hope they both have fun doing some inadvisable shit at a concert

original post

[taxlthomas]

Been a few months but i watched a few eps of this earlier so

(If im being honest i just wanted t’draw Daffy Porky n Petunia but it irritated me not to do em all)

[asvidema]

finally got to sit down and draw my interpretation of Penelope, queen of Ithaca, from epic: the musical

also as a bonus, her namesake duck

[pikawings]

I present the duck candle art for a wip (character ref If You Give A Bat A Burger)

Step 1: place duck in a bowl of water

Step 2: allow for ambient ecto to be absorbed into the duck

Step 3: when the duck is fully saturated, murder burn it

Final product: ecto infused water, great for adding into soups or drinks for extra energy or used as the base for ectodejecto and other medical needs

(For the wip ’Doctor Duck’, name also a wip. I got some notes, but it's not good enough to start writing)

For an AU where GK Danny works for Penguin because he is the only one with a family plan. He’s the on-site medic for big missions, a bouncer in the Lounge and animal caretaker mostly for fun. He learned most of hisnmedic stuff from Frostbite and Victor Fries whom he is friends with. Jazz is in a coma after she got severely injured when rescuing Danny from the lab. She can't go to the GZ bc it would kill her and Frostbite doesn't know human medicine enough to be of help. Penguin pays for her private hospital room that Danny has decked out with ducks of various use. The ducks are red because of Blood Blossom extract which attracts ecto rather than repell it.

(Ik it sounds like I got a plan for this but it's too wonky and I don't have everything planned out yet so it's locked in the basement for now)

UPDATE: now named What We Do For Family. If my brain allows, it’s planned to start releasing around mid 2026

[bogkeep]

okay this is an extremely long shot but you never know. i want to look up a story from the donald duck comics. it was a mickey mouse centered story, and i'm pretty sure the artist was either rodriguez or ferioli. the story is about stories and fairytales coming to life and destroying the city - the giant from jack and the beanstalk, midas' curse, and i think the gingerbread cottage were all there. it turns out it was all happening because a boy with a magic book was throwing a tantrum. the muse calliope is there

[dhmis-autism]

been thinking about them lately ok

[byrdbr4in]

I haven't painted any ducks in a while, but I'll try to do it more.

[surreal-duck]

@midoyuzuweek day 1 | theme scout / firsts

toyland and dollhouse outfits u will always mean the world to me. honestly wasnt sure on how to do the background ngl

[wheatormeat]

something about lazin on a sunday afternoon

[ace-of-garlic-breads]

*looks at my favorite characters*

Hold on. THREE of you are Blue or wear blue, are middle children or coded to be a middle child, with a red older brother/older brother figure, and you all act extremely confident & are also really silly goofy lil guys but ALSO HAVE incredibly emotional moments usually related to SOME kinda trauma, Have REALLY great found family dynamics, AND you're all voiced by Ben Schwartz?!

Wow. I've got a type ig.

*the 3 characters in question*

[maysrinn]

Goosey Gray & Coriolanus Duck 🪿✨

The marvelous summer romance of a pampered little running duck who falls head over first for a wild spicy water cobra~

Goosey Gray trademark name by @spoomed \òwó_

[luckylunatix]

I feel like someone who worked on Duck Dodgers just really liked dressing X2 up in silly little outfits

This isn't even all of them. A lot of characters have had a few different outfits but they seemed to especially like doing this with X2. Like more than anyone else. Not that I blame them nor am I complaining.

[lesbianfakir]

Who would play who in a muppet adaptation of princess tutu? Tumblrinas I need our greatest minds on this