The Packbats' Weblog

The Humble Store sent us a receipt for our purchase of Lexaloffle's PICO-8 fantasy console at 9:13 a.m. EDT on Wednesday, September 25, 2019.

Today - Sunday, September 13, 2020 - we happened to select the "carts" folder and opened the "Properties" window to see how much we've done in that time.

For lack of knowing what to say, here are some subsets of that:

• 38 files, 2 folders, and 1.23 MB are made up of Lexaloffle's demos and various carts we downloaded off the Lexaloffle forums.
• 36 files and 1 folder are from making and modifying the Cave Diver cart from the Game Development with PICO-8 zine.
• 31 files and 2 folders are from the Mixed Feelings Jam we made Driftself for.
• 15 files and 2 folders are from the Games Made Quick Jam we made Truck Drive Test for.
• 232 files and 43 folders are from a single export of binaries for the Rain Gif cart.
• 78 files and 8 folders are from the rest of the Rain Gif files.
• 539 files, 11 folders, and 835 MB are made up of music compositions, exported .wav sound files of those compositions, and (mostly) .mp3 exports of those sound files made in Audacity.
  • Or rather, 522 files and 9 folders; the other 17 files and 2 folders are from a music cart work-in-progress adding visualizers to nine tracks.
  • We don't have a dedicated site or account for sharing this stuff, but some of it has been uploaded to our dragon.style Mastodon account under the #PicoBatMusic hashtag.
• 65 files and 1 folder are from various experiments with sound effects, mostly to support the composition stuff.
• 218 files and 2 folders are from other experimentation, including some bug testing.

...we've done a lot in a year. We have a lot more thoughts about the assumptions of PICO-8 and the limitations of PICO-8, for good and ill. We also have a lot more experience writing code, composing music, and drawing pixel art. We have several projects done and shared with the world, several projects that are incomplete and being worked on, and a lot more that we've left idle or abandoned.

It's hard to figure out what we should say about all this, but it's clear that dropping PICO-8 into our life has catalyzed a hell of a lot of reactions in us. It's been significant.

We seem to have become better at naming things in the past year. Possibly just better at naming musical tracks, but those are the things we most commonly need to name.

Outside the songs we name for the prompt or the structure, it's exactly the kind of process that we wouldn't expect to help anyone else, unfortunately. We listen to the song, try to understand how it makes us feel, and try to produce some kind of language that makes us feel likewise. "Proficience" is a piece that made Packfox think of someone competent working on a task of some kind; "Torque" made Packsnek think of motion, force, velocity; "Open" is very sparse, with lots of space between quick little staccato notes.

It's slow sometimes. We do a lot of sitting with a track, listening to it, trying to feel some sense of it.

Definitely losing momentum on journalling here.

We're working on another PICO-8 project that's a bit technical and hairy - we've gotten some cool results but not, unfortunately, results we consider usable. And the next thing we want to try with it is pretty messy with the mathematics.

...I don't know if it's messy. We need to figure out how we want to approach it.

I'm sure there's other stuff going on. There's the tabletop RPG Dreamwidth group we're organizing, we're doing a bunch of exercise (Wii Fitness Boxing and just, aerobics in the back yard) ... idk. We've been forgetting about this a lot.

I guess this is a post, y'all. Hopefully we'll have more to say another day.

We wrote a bunch of words today! A bunch of them specifically in a fediverse thread about obstacles people face to adding image descriptions riffing off the essay "Laziness Does Not Exist" by Devon Price.

...kind of fediverse inside baseball, all things considered, but now our wrists are sending "hey, you might wanna chill a little" signals, so we're not gonna write a lot more here. So you get the link instead. :P

...

Okay, also: if you're using the HTML editor to write your Dreamwidth posts, the key is <img src="[image URL]" alt="[text to display if image doesn't load]" title="[text to display when mouse hovers over image]">. If you use Dreamwidth's image hosting, the HTML it gives you to copy gets auto-filled with the "Title" in the mouseover and the "Short Description" in the alt text.

Maybe what we should tape up to our wall is a note saying, "You're allowed to exist - be good <3", because this has been the ... many-th time that one of us has been like "but can I really be a new system member? the Packbats already have a bunch of those...".

But, as it turns out, yes, I can be a new system member.

Going with Packagia as a words-name - I like the 🦎 emoji as an emoji name, but Packlizard doesn't sound fun and I'm a flying lizard, and flying lizard wings are patagia. (Our partner came up with that pun.)

Anyway, what with now-ten documented system members, including a bug, a bird, a dragon, a snake, and a lizard, I guess we can say definitely that the Packbat system scales well.

(That one's on me.)

Don't really have anything to essay about, so instead just going to journal.

I don't know how literally they meant it, but in the time we've been active on the fediverse, we've seen a lot of people talking negatively about irony and trying to speak out in favor of being sincere, and ... well, we take things literally. It's literally a thing we do. And taking literally this push to be sincere, genuine, and unaffected has been...

...I think "transformative" makes it sound bigger than it is.

But it's not been as simple as flipping a switch, making a choice. It's been a learning process, or an unlearning process.

What we're noticing - what we're noticing now, anyway - is that we have more work to do. We wrote a reply just now that could have said, "It sounds like they're making some ... assumptions", and that would have been funny, but it also would have been a way to avoid having to explain why we thought those assumptions were troubling. It's not a huge change going from that to "It sounds like they're making some expansive assumptions", but it changed the remark from a vague expression of negativity at a group of people to specifically naming a problem we see in how that group of people have gone about their business.

It was less cruel, looking it over. Less cutting. Instead of saying they're bad, it says that they messed up and it says how and it points in the direction of them doing something about it. Wanting to be sincere led to us being kinder - not necessarily less negative (honestly, I think the scale of what that word implies makes it more so), but less brutal.

Wanting to be sincere has also forced us to recognize negative self-talk and respond to that instead of vaguely self-deprecating. I ... don't remember an example of that, though.

I don't know. It's a process. We think it's been worth going through.

...heh.

We tend to post in the evenings, as we've noted. And, as we haven't, we have a Friday-evening D&D game.

In the calendar view of the past three weeks, since we started trying to blog daily on May 27th, we've missed every single Friday.

We've been kinda aware for a while that we will sometimes encounter a thing and want to talk about it with a specific online friend group. Like, "huh - we'd want to CW this if we posted it on fedi, and it feels a little too blunt for the friend of ours on IRC, but it might be appreciated by the folx on this Discord server! Probably not that other Discord group DM we're in, though."

...but in this particular case, that particular Discord has a dedicated channel for politics talk and it obviously belongs in that channel - and we have that channel muted, because the conversations happening there drive our stress through the roof. And we don't really want to drive-by with it.

Anyway, have a comic about living in Seattle during the present police riots.

Not sure what I should be doing with my Dreamwidth, but ... eh, a public diary could be a thing. I'll see if it works for me.

Some up:

• Played some Minecraft on the server I reside on.

  • Built a Nether connection, marked it up so it would show on the server Overviewer map.
  • While I was in the Nether, I picked up some glowstone for lighting up a riverbed that can spawn Drowned after the server updates to 1.13.
  • Did some fishing to repair the Mending Silk Touch diamond pick I carved the tunnel through the netherrack with.

• Cooked some marinated chicken thigh I bought from the Korean mart yesterday.

• Watched a friend stream a videogame.

Some down:

• Still have a cough. Still haven't talked to a medical professional about it.

• Haven't scheduled my labs and my endocrinology appointment either.

• Not sure how well the marinated chicken sat with my digestion.

• Got stressed out about a couple interpersonal things.

Some ... *shrug emoji*:

• Sent an email about a thing for a group I quit, because I wanted to back up a friend of mine who's still in it and I'm still on their mailing list. Hope I wasn't out of line.

• Not a lot of Tuesday webcomics in my current (much-contracted) rotation. Been digging Goodbye to Halos, though.