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Harriet the laptop's touchpad started acting up this evening, so in the interest of being able to do stuff, we ... well, we first went and looked up Xfce keyboard shortcuts (the important ones are Alt+F1 for the Applications menu and Alt+F2 or Alt+F3 for an application ... searcher? something or other), but then we got a terminal open and opened Lynx, the old text-based browser.
To our near-complete lack of surprise, Dreamwidth actually works pretty dang well on a browser with no image support and no Javascript support and no CSS support. It's a bit busy in places - boilerplate taking up screenfuls of space instead of a single header bar - but the only real obstacle to using it as normal is that there's no word-wrapping on text entry. Which is theoretically fine, but asking us to remember what we typed at the beginning of the sentence to be able to make what we type next roughly grammatical is ... well, it's not a huge ask but it is an ask.
But it does work. It's probably like HTTP POST requests or something, classic form requests, no JS needed.
Anyway, lots has been going on and also not much has been going on - we've been having a hard time emotionally but we're surviving. We just got excited for a moment that a web browser from 1992 with SSL support but no JS is still usable on a part of the internet we care about.
(Not Scribble Hub, though. We'll have to rely on good ol' Firefox for our webfiction needs.)
Before...
...and after.
Gonna try and talk through what's happening here.
( Read more... )Customizing takes a lot longer than we expected. But also it turns out we had a lot more ability to decide what we wanted than we feared. And it turns out we do like customizing it a bit.
Over the past month and a half, as we've been coming up on the anniversary of our first installing Linux, we started poking at blog post ideas trying to sum up our thoughts and feelings - something honest, that captures some feelings.
We ended up writing two different posts with very different tones, and struggling to decide which to post. And then in a moment of shitpostiness, we said: cursed option: html table, one on the left, one on the right
.
...whereupon our friends were immediately like "yes".
So: here are our thoughts about our experiences of our linux year 1 (twice).
Just recently found out about the webcomic Runaway to the Stars. From its About page:
Runaway to the Stars is a hard science fiction slice-of-life story focused on communication, accommodation, and everyday life in co-species spaces. The main storyline follows Talita, a centaur aerospace engineer and cross-species foster kid. More information about the universe can be found on my website. Runaway to the Stars updates every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. It is recommended for readers 16+, as it contains swearing, references to sexual culture, and obtuse adult life drama.
We really like the art and characters. And worldbuilding, too. It's very fun. And there are transcripts for all the pages.
In which Maybe and Lizzie have a real conversation, and Phido gets lots of scritches.
Content warnings on this section: capitalism and labor abuses in the videogame industry (past, mentioned).
( Read more... )With our first two tarot card draws of spring, Maybe begins their village witch work.
Content warnings on this section: food (including meat), hoarding.
( Read more... )We're feeling like making a very different setting than the last time we played Village Witch, so I think we're going to go … cyberpunk post-dystopia post-apocalypse? The surveillance states fell apart, they fell apart hard, and in the wreckage it was local groups which took up the slack when it came to keeping people alive.
Is that solarpunk? We don't know what solarpunk is.
( Character introduction and first scene. )So, we just watched an old TED talk - "The transformative power of classical music" by Benjamin Zander, you can look it up if you're bored - arguing that everyone likes classical music, and I feel like there's ... four assumptions? it made that we can't vibe with.
Like, the first assumption is that we need to be convinced that everyone likes classical music, but we'll get back to that.
The second assumption is that everyone always prefers a lively and excited performance to one that is more understated and subtle, which, whatever, I don't care - if one-buttock playing is just how Benjamin Zander plays, so be it.
The third assumption is that people who don't listen to classical music are sitting it out because they don't care about classical music. Like, y'all know how much of the world got fucked over by western European nations to make a tiny portion of folks from western Europe rich, right? Their culture can't escape being the culture of colonizers and oligarchs, so folks are gonna react to that.
The fourth assumption is that music in the western European classical tradition is somehow distinctive in this regard.
Like, okay, yes, Frédéric Chopin's Prelude No. 4 in E Minor is a lovely, heartbreaking piece of music. Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" is a lovely, heartbreaking piece of music. Bea Miller's "feel something" is beautiful and desperate. MUNA's "Around U" is beautiful and lost. Andy G. Cohen's "Oxygen Mask" is overwhelming, powerful, perhaps despairing. Erik Satie's Gymnopédie No. 1 is agonizing, we actually have to turn it off because it hurts so much. We're talking about music here - if you're talking about music and people loving music, you can find music to love.
...because we're not even arguing with Benjamin Zander. We're arguing with the tradition that Benjamin Zander is participating in, of campaigning for classical music.
Like, does Zander know that classical music isn't music? He talks about a scourge of bland, technically accurate performances, then launches into playing a piece he loves with passion, intention, and understanding, and he thinks he's demonstrating that classical music is good. Music is good, my dude! People love the music you play because you're playing them music!
But classical music is a performance by the audience, of class. It is class-ical music. It's allowed to be boring garbage because, to paraphrase early (worse) xkcd, it's about getting some culture in you - and white culture is allowed to be terrible, to be bland and technically accurate, because white oligarchs can pay to have everyone taught that it's great anyway, that everyone should have it in them.
We found Zander's talk in the least charitable context possible. We found it via an Innuendo Studios video about "smart music" - about music you play to show that you have drunk deep the well of colonizer oligarch culture, and that therefore you are worth listening to. Because, in part thanks to Zander and Zander wanting people to love classical music, Chopin's Prelude No. 4 in E Minor makes the list.
I wish he'd been trying to teach people to love music instead. I really do. But the TED people wouldn't have paid him for that, because when the audience is paying six thousand dollars a year to be here, the speakers better be selling something exciting to rich people, and rich people don't want to be told that the problem with classical music is them.
I - and us Packbats collectively - think it's a good thing when stuff that works is kept out of the trash. That's not a terribly controversial statement, I think.
Unless you're Microsoft. Our newest computer is ten years old and they think it belongs in a landfill - even Windows 10, the OS they don't sell any more and will stop supporting next year, doesn't support it. To Microsoft, our ability to have a computer at all is only permitted if we pay to give them permission to install their latest ad service and maybe also their latest AI spyware.
Or you're Apple, and you secretly push updates that shorten the battery life of old iPhones - an update which many believe was deliberate sabotage to force updates. After all, Apple has a deliberate policy of shredding old phones rather than allowing them to be repaired, which removes the option of buying used rather than new. This is also personal for us - our iPhone 6 was working perfectly fine, and then it started overheating and running dry faster and faster.
They can do this because their software is proprietary, and their hardware is proprietary, and their customers have no choice. It's put up with the abuse or run a zombie operating system for eight years as you watch more and more of the modern world cease to support your computer.
FLOSS software isn't like that.
And yeah, there's more to it than that. It's more complicated than that. There's an entire universe of philosophical, pragmatic, and political calculation going on, conversations about rights and safety and governance structures. But our 2010 laptop, a truly delightful and fast machine to live in running Windows 7, is ... still that, running Xfce in openSUSE. Because to Unix, an Intel Core i5-520M is just another amd64-compatible CPU, and 4 GB of RAM is more than enough to run a graphical desktop environment - y'know, the thing with windows and mouse and taskbar and so on, where you can double-click a PNG file to see it pop up in an image viewer. Why would it be inadequate? They aren't selling us dissatisfaction or new shinies - they're making things work, as best as they can, in a world that doesn't want your computer or ours to survive.
Everything that's annoying about FLOSS software is because FLOSS is a world where something made mostly by 11 developers with an annual budget of under US$8000 is basic infrastructure for literally millions of users. And that's not even strange here - like, there's standards designed for interoperability, and those get created and implemented by a crowd of different projects. Instead of Microsoft designing Word documents in secret to ensure no-one else's programs can open them, you have LibreOffice using the Open Document Format that anyone else, from megacorps like Google to some random single dev making a project solo, can implement. It's just how things happen here, and it means that one person can make a project for millions that mostly works.
Even when Microsoft and Apple would rather you pay for their thing. And be locked in their house. Where they can force you to give them more money.
There's more to FLOSS than that, but there doesn't have to be more to FLOSS than that for us to care. Our computer is alive. We can't not be passionate about that.
A couple weeks ago, in a fit of frustration about not understanding object-oriented programming, we read several articles from the August 1981 issue of Byte Magazine explaining Smalltalk. One of those, "Is the Smalltalk-80 System for Children?" by Adele Goldberg and Joan Ross, contained this passage:
Contrary to the idea that a computer is exciting because the programmer can create something from seemingly nothing, our users were shown that a computer is exciting because it can be a vast storehouse of already existing ideas (models) that can be retrieved and modified for the user's personal needs. Programming could be viewed and enjoyed as an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary act. The frustration of long hours of writing linear streams of code and then hoping to see some aspect of that code execute was replaced by incremental development. Emphasis was placed on learning how to make effective use of existing system components (objects in the Smalltalk sense). Much of the teaching we did was to show users how to search for and read the descriptions of the many useful components we and others (and even new users) continued to add to the system.
Using resources within an already-powerful system is a highly effective and rewarding form of programming, and understanding that it is programming allows users to program more effectively within these systems.
We bring this up because, when you create a formatted document using a modern word processor, this is what you are doing: you are simultaneously creating data and creating instructions for how that data should be processed. (That's why it's called a word processor: it is doing work to convert the words into a format where they can be comfortably accessed.) When the Accessibility Awareness disabled.social account talks about using paragraph styles, it is because you, by using these library functions, allow other document interpreters – like screen readers and keyboard shortcut tools – to execute their own versions of these library functions and therefore process the data more usefully.
Obviously, word processing programming languages are special-purpose, like the bespoke forks of Lua implemented in fantasy consoles and game engines, or the Personal Home Page tool that some folks use for managing websites. It is a vast storehouse of already-existing components, designed to support its specific purpose.
…and we are dwelling on this thought today because we know many users of word-processing tools who do not avail themselves of these existing functions. And because we think this is, in part, because using these functions comfortably requires a degree of philosophical understanding of computers – an ability to learn a computer's language and translate your intentions into it.
As sighted writers, we are well familiar with the idea of marking off sections by having some big text at the top … but the idea that you can directly communicate, below the level of visibility, that a specific block of text is a section heading? And that the bigness of the text should happen not because you chose it, but because you chose to invisibly designate a line of text as heading?
That's a programming mindset.
And you have to learn that.
We finally published the TTRPG supplement we made with a friend of ours!
Five Kinds of Deception is a US$2 booklet describing different ways people fool each other and how you as a player or GM can use that to help tell better stories in your games.
It's eight pages and three and a half thousand words, including quick-reference tables with mechanical notes and narrative prompts. We hope it is helpful!
So, we were walking home one day and there was a box by the side of the road with an ergonomic keyboard and a monitor marked "Free". We haven't tried the monitor (the stand is fractured) but the keyboard works and it has a bunch of extra hotkeys - and we were really missing the play-pause button from our laptop.
But also, in a fit of ... something, we decided that as long as we're learning a new physical layout, why not learn a new software layout?
Colemak-DH is (a) a variation on QWERTY for easier learning, (b) designed to be more efficient in finger motions, and (c) the first one suggested to us on fedi when we asked about keyboard layouts for split keyboards. It makes ... enough sense, we're trying it. And trying to maintain our ability to type with QWERTY, because new layouts are fun but we're going to have to deal with QWERTY keyboards a lot and typing on an unfamiliar keyboard layout is frustrating.
On which note, wow, this is frustrating. This is hard. But also we're making progress - not a lot of speed, not nearly the 75 words per minute we used to have in QWERTY, but we're beginning to know where our fingers should be going. And only messing up a lot more than before in QWERTY now that we have other muscle memory to cross wires with. We're making progress, and it's not terrible.
And the keyboard is nice. Having an emoji key is weird but it's not like we don't use it.
If you spend any substantial amount of time listening to an English major or film major or literature major or whoever, you've probably come across the idea that all art is collaborative. Us, writing these words, can do nothing without your assistance, because they're just pixels on a screen until you come along and make meaning out of them. We say, as members of a society which has adopted the work-concept of creation, that Packcat wrote this and you 'just' read it, but there is no 'just'. None of this matters unless an audience comes along to do something with it.
But also language itself - the words we use to write - can do nothing without both of our assistance! We create and recreate language by using language. If a language is no longer spoken, it is dead ... but if a language is spoken, it changes, because we all change and we are who the language lives through.
This goes especially for a constructed language, a conlang, a language that was created by someone, and even more so for a philosophical conlang. And Toki Pona is a philosophical conlang - Sonja Lang set forth to seek a kind of simplicity, and that intent pervades the language.
And folks get gatekeepy about it - we've gotten gatekeepy about it (sorry!) - because they know that it will change when being spoken, and they want to keep it the way they like it, and the only way to stop change is to stop speakers from...
...well, having different artistic goals than they do. Or different pragmatic needs than they do. Or even just different taste.
No coherent conclusion, just thoughts.
Okay, you might or might not know the constructed language Toki Pona, but we're certainly still learning, so I think we can construct a good metaphor.
( A hypothetical conversation about food. )- <!DOCTYPE html>: you have the modern HTML standard at https://html.spec.whatwg.org/ bookmarked now, you're not making terrible Microsoft Internet Explorer 5-only broken pages, the browser doesn't have to use ~*~quirks mode~*~. Stick this at the very top.
- <html lang="en">: If most of the page is in one language - this one is English - then you can tell the browser that so language-dependent stuff can use that. Use the ISO 639 abbreviations. I think. (Correction: BCP 47, not ISO 639. It's a subset, I think.) Anyway, if part of your page is in another language, you can put lang="whatever" on the element containing the other-language part. (Or, like, wrap it in <span lang="whatever"></span> if you don't have one.)
- <meta charset="UTF-8">: Did you make your HTML files using UTF-8? It should be an option in, like, the Save As dialog or something. Anyway, if you did, you can put this in the <head></head> part so the browser knows it's not Windows-1252 or something.
- Edit: If your server declares a character encoding in an HTTP header, this line will do nothing. It looks like Neocities doesn't do it for our site, though, so we still need it.
- <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">: Okay, so, you didn't use any tables for layout, right? And you still don't understand CSS or Javascript? Okay, then your website probably works fine on, like, a tiny screen. You can check this by zooming in like 500% or opening it in a small window or, idk, both. Anyway, the viewport thing tells mobile browsers that they can just display your site normally and it'll all be good.
Folks who learned HTML in the past fifteen years, feel free to chime in with more hot tips. Because we need them. Please.
(Link to Indiepocalypse HTML tips thread, because which a number of folks did, in fact, chime in.)
Anyone else remember Spoon?
( self-indulgent, content warnings not provided for linked and referenced material )This post is nothing. Just, today we were looking for something to listen to and we remembered that Spoon exists.
xdle is a game in the Wordle vein, but about guessing three-digit integers based on number theory facts like greatest common divisors.
Short post, but I guess might be spoilers, so it's under the cut. Also there's that one weed joke.
( some possible xdle starting guesses )For reasons, we wanted to play with color quantization and dithering, and we found out about command line tool ImageMagick's color quantization/dither tools. Then we came up with a very silly idea: what if we took a given starting image and, using our limited knowledge of dither algorithms and complete lack of knowledge of image size optimization, tried to make the coolest versions we could under 32 KiB? Setting the limit to be filesize and not raster resolution means that every algorithm is going to create some compromise between size and detail … so maybe Floyd-Steinberg produces a clearer result at the same resolution, but how much smaller does it have to be to fit in the size limit?
We finally finished this freaking project, and it's such a big one that it's too big for a Dreamwidth post - click through to check it out.