The Packbats' Weblog

Posting from the Lynx browser!

2025-01-11T01:31:08Z

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.)

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self-link: linux, year 1 (twice)

2024-08-23T16:09:08Z

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).

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the Packbats' village witch playthrough 2024-07/08, part 3: keep vibing

2024-08-10T12:56:52Z

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... )

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no more turing tests

2024-01-03T15:18:49Z

the question "is this human" has expired - it has become a torment of con artists and cash grabbers

the one, perpetually remaking their machines to deceive us

the other, perpetually demanding that we become harder to fake so they can keep selling us to advertisers

the doppelgangers yell, "I am human!"
the marketers yell, "Prove you are human!"
we all tuck ourselves into corners trying to find respite from the noise

why? why are we being yelled at? why for humanity are we being yelled at?

Alan Turing started with "can machines think?" and went from there to "can machines make humans think they are humans?" but listen to his imaginary machines

his machines talk about poetry, arithmetic, chess, Mr. Pickwick and winter's days

his machines speak honestly to their interrogators, try to understand, try to help

our phone makes a noise after half an hour, because we asked it to in a way it understood

our friends speak honestly, because they want to us to know that they miss clubbing, they like umbreon, they think of a sunrise as a sun, rising

why should we put the people who traumatized us in the category with the friends who help us survive? why should we put the machines that exploit us in the category with the machines that help us survive? why is this the split we are asked to make?

why "are you human" instead of "are you good"?

why not "are you good"?

can you tell if something is good to you over a teletype connection? are you good to it?

(edit: followup)

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commercial aviation industry advice (Weirder Earth repost)

2023-11-28T18:03:00Z

Caveat: we are not pilots, we have never been pilots, we have other priorities. This whole thread was us being fans of the YouTube channel "Mentour Pilot".

I think if there's one thing to be learned from the commercial aviation industry, it is that "am I the asshole?" is a much less useful question than "how did the totality of habits, tools, knowledge, communication, and so forth - because it's never just one thing - result in something unfortunate happening, and what can I learn from this to avoid such things happening in the future?"

I think if there's two things to be learned from the commercial aviation industry, it's that if you've had less than 21 hours of sleep in the past 72 (numbers to be adjusted as necessary based on your own medical history, but that's the standard for pilots), you ought to bear in mind that you are at elevated risk of fatigue-driven mistakes.

( (the thread went on for a while) )

Anyway, now we're going to fix the "it's totally normal to have two to-do list alerts all the time" problem. The dentist one we can do on Thursday, so we'll hide it until Thursday, and the cmus one we can do now.

*opens the man page*

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Trusting our craft

2023-01-01T17:24:57Z

So a friend of ours was making a funny "games of the year 2022" post, one of those that people make who have no respect for the triple-A gaming industry and want to look at cool weird obscure stuff that fails that industry's metrics and succeeds at being something else. And we love that.

And our friend put our work on that very short list. Twice.

( Read more... )

Anyway, we've been putting out a free 200-word TTRPG every month on Patreon. And there's a style of phrase-long badass mech names we enjoy, names like Boiling Water Scalding Away Layers Of Bitterness, and a good way to make one is to look at the teapot on your desk, think about how the residue of old brews can be removed with hot water and scrubbing, and then remove context and make the wording go harder until it hits mech name status.

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Positive counter statements, a mental health tool

2022-05-06T19:47:25Z

A preface: nothing in this post is the fault of Edmund J. Bourne, PhD, author of The Anxiety & Phobia Workbook (fifth edition). That book introduced us to the concept, but we are not psychologists and our interpretations are our own.

That said, we hate most of the posts we can find on the World Wide Web on the technique, so we're writing our own. Hit us up in the comments if you have thoughts on our presentation of it. Content warning for discussion of self-loathing, albeit in a healing way.

( Sometimes your brain comes up with reasons for you to hate yourself. The goal of positive counter statements is to refute those reasons. )

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A metaphor for social expectations and transgressing them.

2022-02-06T22:13:03Z

Being raised, we were handed a box to remain inside. Be polite. Don't be prideful. Stay cautious. Practice your piano pieces. Wear a suit. Get good grades. Sit in the first rows of the classroom. There were cracks in the box, to be sure but we were expected to keep ourselves contained. We knew, compliant though we were, that pieces of us stuck out, but we held ourselves in enough. Told ourselves that we held ourselves in enough.

We were lucky enough to be spared attack for our parts that stuck out.

...well, for a while. Did you know that being trans stuck out of the box? We didn't know being trans stuck out of the box. We thought that fit in just fine.

I don't know if that was a turning point. Connecting our dots, we can see holes in the box from before that. I do know it was impossible for us to accept being contained that far. Surely that was allowed. We knew we wouldn't stop being trans - not for anyone.

I don't know if that was a turning point, but it meant that we knew what it was like to have a wall pressed against us, and we knew how to break it.

We're nonbinary. We're not a woman. The world isn't a sphere, it's an oblate spheroid. We're nonbinary, and there was a wall pressed against us, a wall beyond which was neopronouns, beyond which was expressing gender through language more resonant with ourselves than "they" and "it", and it was a wall we knew how to break.

Nonhumanity ... took more force, to break a wall to reach. Plurality, not as much force but more time. Disability, mostly took us time to name and tentatively claim. By the time we knew the thickness of the wall blocking the way to asexuality, we were already well past it, and we easily explored aromanticism, polyamory, and relationship anarchy from there. The person who showed us our autism, years before the rest of these, was happy to do it and happy to see it, and so were we - the box wasn't even on our mind.

The box is on our mind sometimes. That fear that we are somehow inexcusable for being outside it, leading to dread as we look at how far our wings span and see that we will never fit back inside it.

But also fuck that box. It was a prison. We'll never go back.

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Twenty years ago today

2021-09-10T13:29:49Z

( This is a post about the US's 9/11, obviously. Content warning for police and military violence. )

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thinking about past and present Packbats through character design

2021-03-21T01:18:44Z

We were watching a video about character design that a friend of ours shared and, while very interesting, we actually spent a lot of it thinking about our physical form as a character and what was communicated by its costume design.

Then we started thinking about the "what if your current [selves] met your past self" hypothetical. It'd be pretty easy to make up plausible costumes to highlight the differences.

2005, a skinny college student with an afro, would be wearing a graphic tee (maybe the gray Dominic Deegan one we got once upon a time), a pair of khaki slacks, and a white pair of athletic socks in a mostly-white pair of sneakers. I'm not 100% on the timeline for these but let's also give them a gray flat cap, a mustard-colored windbreaker, and a big black laptop backpack. I'm guessing they have a little bar cell phone with Snake on it.

2021, a more chubby queer goblin with waist-length dreadlocks, would be wearing the same graphic tee under our white-and-green mini dress, leg warmers, and gray socks in hiking boots (which would probably make xem slightly taller than 2005). We'll also give xem our blue windbreaker with the pink highlights, our gray backpack, and our green purse. Xey have an old (which is to say, nine years in the future for 2005) iPhone in a purple case that xey're pretty attached to.

Also, 2021 is happier in xyr skin than 2005 is in theirs. Xey've had a lot more practice taking selfies, but I think xyr smiles are less stiff, and I think that's because xey know xey're trans and are acting on it. That's not something on 2005's radar.

(We had about half a setup for a story that was ... actually impossible, for both 2005!Packbat and 2021!Packbat, and also anachronistic for both them and us.)

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What's with us and luck-based games?

2021-01-18T02:52:42Z

We don't have an answer for this one, but it's kind of interesting to us: a lot of the games that we play a lot in a zoning-out or while-listening-to-something-else way are:

Short games
with a significant strategy element
but so much luck that we often just lose without recourse.

Solitaire games are like this. Minesweeper is like this. A lot of deckbuilding games are like this. "Forward" by Christophe Coyard is like this. "Castle Defense" by watabou is like this. These are games we can win if we play well enough and don't get screwed over by luck, but that we lose a lot because we do get screwed over by luck. (In Cards with Personalities, we're sitting at a 56% win rate after literally thousands of games.)

...it's probably, like, a random reinforcement thing. We know what to do but we don't know if we'll get rewarded, so the reward feels bigger when it happens.

We're not playing any games that try to get money out of the players, though.

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Setting idea: the No-Holiday Cafe

2020-12-30T23:55:30Z

It's ... impossible, frankly, to create a space where holidays do not exist. People will accidentally wear a pin or a T-shirt or a sweater or whatever, people will barge in unnoticing and carry those events in with them, conversations will accidentally drift in directions ... even without a global pandemic and our complete lack of funds, there's no way an actual, physical establishment could be made to guarantee holidays won't intrude.

We still like the idea, though. A fictional space, representing the idea that it's okay to set an impossible boundary and be able to spend a while not having to avoid or shut out a societal celebration you don't belong in.

Not sure if it'd be better realized as a story, an interactive fiction, a Bitsy game, or something else.

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packbat @ 2020-12-07T22:35:00

2020-12-08T03:49:56Z

Noticing more posts on here than in the past - I think we're maybe gonna make another push to incorporate Dreamwidth into our regular Internet habits.

Some updates since - *checks* - a month ago:

We started reading "Musicking the meanings of performing and listening" by Christopher Small after rewatching an Adam Neely video where he quotes from it. We're semi-liveblogging it in a Discord group chat we're in; we should probably make a full post about it. (2021-01-02: Followup post on Muskcing here.)
We finally broke out the MIDI controller keyboard we got for our birthday, installed LMMS, and started trying to make music with it. We haven't gotten super far but we did post one track to our dragon.style account.
We made a performance-presentation of-about La Monte Young's Compositions 1960 #7 in PICO-8 and put it online.
We stayed up later than we planned playing a fantasy text adventure story about ... I guess the page says second chances? called "Stay?" and spent a long while full of feels about it and our choices.
We also read a Bitsy essay about sourdough bread that was full of good tangents, called "Bread Minus".

...idk. It's hard to remember what happened, but those things happened.

We'll try to be around.

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How to Be a Jerk Ethically

2020-10-01T03:41:43Z

Step 1: Make a mistake that hurts someone.

This is something to avoid as much as you can, but it will happen no matter what you do - it's kind of inevitable. All of us grew up in a society that was pervasively problematic, and as much as we try to work against that, we're not immune to it and it still comes out sometimes. It still sucks, though, and trying to avoid it wasn't a wasted effort.

Step 2: Get called on it.

This is actually harder than you might think. With some notable exceptions, it mostly happens when you associate with people who are themselves trying to fight their bigotries and have a positive impact on the world, and it mostly happens when you demonstrate by your actions that you aren't prone to self-protective displays of anger, distress, contempt, or the like when people disagree with you, and when you demonstrate an interest in and willingness to learn.

Step 3: Don't do a self-protective display of whatever.

Finding out that you screwed up is really hard, and dealing with your emotions around it is hard as well. Some useful tactics include:

Giving yourself space to process
Talking to people outside the situation if you need to vent your upset
Talking to people outside the situation that you trust if you can't figure out on your own if you're in the wrong or if people are being unreasonable, and conveying the details as accurately and completely as you feel able to/you can ethically do

but ultimately, you need to figure out what works for you.

Step 4: Figure out what you did and avoid doing it again.

If you've done Step 2 well - which, as we mentioned, is harder than you might expect - this will be a lot easier: generally people will try to call out what needs changing, so you should be able to figure it out from what they said. If you need help, it's possible to ask for it or do research, but remember that people who were just hurt aren't obliged to help you.

Step 5: Apologize, if appropriate.

If someone tells you to go away, don't protract your presence in their company, but most of the time, an apology in the place where you screwed up is appropriate.

Remember to apologize for what you did. Apologizing because people are mad at you isn't helpful. Apologizing when you hurt someone for actions by people who are not you - for society, for your race, for whatever - isn't helpful. Apologize for what was done that you did.

Step 6: Figure out why you did it and learn how to do better.

This ... can take decades. Or minutes. Work at it as best as you can, be aware of it as something you had to work on. Research you did or do on what you did wrong is often helpful here.

That's probably the main stuff we'd like to suggest. Remember, the point isn't actually to be a jerk, however ethical - the point is to actively make things better - but also remember that being the jerk isn't something you have to double down on. You learn what you can and you do better.

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1,077,048,618 bytes of PICO-8

2020-09-13T19:38:05Z

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.

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No tea sleepy

2020-07-23T02:13:56Z

( content warning: slightly medical maybe? )

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Weird

2020-06-22T23:01:18Z

occasionally we are overwhelmed by the realization of how much weirder we are than we had any idea we were allowed to be.

- 🦊 (January 12)

Thinking about this b/c 👋🏽 🐰 - new system member fronting.

Like, god, the goalposts on our brain's bullshit just don't stop moving. We grew up taught to be proper and obedient, and we grew up knowing on a gut level that stepping outside the bounds of what's allowed could mean being punished and being told you deserve it ... so we have a really strong sense of when we're in a zone that we feel confident of social safety - of society's authorization - and when we don't.

And we can sense the gradations, because being a plural system with two members is already breaking from what society licenses, but being a plural system with a bunch of members, and adding more month after month, just ... we know we're not safe from What Everyone Knows out here.

...

Thank goodness for friends who are excited to meet new friends instead.

- 🐰

(Maybe with help from others - 🦗? 🐦? or maybe when I'm driving my fingers, their signatures feel close to hand. We don't know. We're still learning.)

we can't speak to anyone else's weird

weird, for us, was not lying to ourselves nor sabotaging ourselves in the name of compliance to the expectations placed on us

it has been scary because it has meant putting ourselves outside the bounds of what power structures defend as normal

but it has also made us real

made us self-aware, self-affirming, and self-actualizing

we get to exist and avoid pain and harm and seek out joy and accomplishment

this is the part in the script where we say it is worth it, but it honestly wasn't a decision for us - or if it was, it was the decision we made as a child, that we were not okay lying to ourselves

but we can say that not lying to ourselves seems to work out

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Some thoughts about being literal and sincere lately

2020-06-21T00:56:02Z

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.

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pandemic lockdown food

2020-05-29T03:54:45Z

( Content warning for eating problems. )

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A very personal reaction to replaying Dear Esther

2019-07-16T22:01:31Z

( Content warnings for depression & related heavy subjects, the band How To Destroy Angels, and Dear Esther spoilers )

[edited to add link to the second HTDA track 2019-08-17]

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Some people have the normalized experience

2019-06-01T20:31:40Z

(crossposted from my dragon.style fediverse account)

( Pride Month reminder, some second person (445 words) )

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Teavlogs 2 & 3: "Complimenting Myself" and "Does any1 care?"

2019-04-23T19:23:25Z

Forgot to post here, but I've made two more teavlogs over the past two weeks:

Complimenting Myself: one of the things that I struggle with is accepting that I'm a good person, so I talked a bit about that and also said some nice things about who I am.
Does any1 care?: I talk about how having an audience affects my motivation to create.

...they're fun. Making a vlog while doing something else adds visual interest, gives the vlog a natural stopping point (the tea is done and the kettle refilled), and it's just kind of fun to perform for the camera. And I pick topics I feel capable of speaking extemporaneously about - subjects I've thought through and have a pretty clear idea of what I want to communicate.

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thinking about comforting people

2019-01-13T22:41:44Z

(I hope talking about what I do doesn't make it uncomfortable for people I comfort, but I'm doing it anyway)

( a lot of this is gonna just be all-lowercase short paragraphs with no periods )

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Something akin to a love letter for my past self

2018-10-19T21:58:52Z

Things I need to say to myself, to my past self, to the person who made themself into me.

You love reality, love truth, want passionately to know what is and not fall for what isn't.

You try to understand things you love. You immerse yourself in these things, pull in everything you can from the experience of them, find features and elements that make them mean so much.

You have so much enthusiasm. Your fear and anxiety cannot stop you when your passion is sparked - words will just flow out of you.

You are entertaining - work hard to entertain, to think about what things you can do that work and don't, to think about what people might appreciate, to craft the things you make and words you say.

You're idealistic. You take all of these things about you, all the things you have because of where you came from, and you find with these things ways you can make the world better. You find out what making the world better means, you find out how the gears are turning and what they are producing, you find clues and share them like seeds - share everything you have as best as you can, hoping it will grow in people's gardens and make their lives and themselves and their abilities better.

You're a good person. I don't say that enough.

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My Atheism

2009-09-25T01:09:47Z

Greta Christina recently posted something rather brilliant about atheism and self-definition that ... well, it inspires me to define my atheism, just so people know where I'm coming from.

I'd love to see people's reactions to this, by the way. I might be too busy to react properly, but I'll try to answer questions, comments, complains, and arguments, whatever reaction you have to what I say.

*clears throat*

I'm an atheist. What that means is that I don't believe that anything like a god is real. I'm not totally certain - I don't think any atheist is totally certain, however hyperbolic their rhetoric might become in the heat of debate - but I've thought about this quite a lot for quite a while, I've read a lot of arguments, and all told I simply don't believe it. I'm pretty sure that the people who do believe there are any gods, be it one, a few, or many, are simply mistaken.

I'm an atheist. I'm a strong atheist - I believe that no such thing as a god is real. Now, this distinction commonly causes semantic confusion: "I don't believe gods are real" doesn't mean "I believe gods are imaginary", never mind that I could state both truthfully; it's perfectly common for atheists to not believe that gods exist, while simultaneously not believing that gods don't exist. Such persons don't believe they have the evidence to commit either way on the question. I do.

I'm an atheist. I'm a metaphysical naturalist - I think the universe operates according to fundamentally non-mental principles. Richard Carrier defined supernaturalism well in an essay a couple years ago: supernatural things cannot be broken down into non-mental pieces. That makes no sense to me. Everything I have ever learned - my education in philosophy, in physics, in psychology, in mathematics, in computer science, in literature - has given me a strong instinct that somewhere at the base of it all are simple mathematical laws. I draw the comparison to Conway's Game of Life: the rules are basic and unbreakable, but through their implications on higher and higher levels of complexity in the world shaped as it is we find everything with which we are familiar.

I'm an atheist. I don't believe there's any overlord of the universe to dictate moral laws for us, nor any afterlife wherein our acts can be judged. Our morals are our own - earned in the struggles and victories of our ancestral species, forged on the anvil of a world which does not tell us what we should do, but merely referees. Our senses of beauty, of honor, of justice, of fairness, of charity, of love, of pride, of disgust ... every subjective experience we have is ours, proven on the steppes from which we came and coming together to create that which is us. To declare that this makes goodness into something meaningless is, if you'll forgive the rhyme, senseless - we're not stupid, and if we value goodness, that is meaning enough.

I'm an atheist. I am an atheist because I have the freedom to be thus - the freedom to learn, to decide, and to proclaim. I would not live where I was required to be thus by ignorance, deception, or coercion: to be an atheist freely is to be aware of the need for freedom. As Alfred Tarski is quoted to have said, "The sentence 'snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white" - and to be forced to believe that snow is white is to be coerced to believe, be that belief true or false. The only way to be free to believe truth is to be free to believe what one must on the strength of one's own judgement.

I'm an atheist. I care about being an atheist - I care about what I believe, and about being true to what I believe. I want to be treated decently and with respect. I want the people who disagree with me to listen to me - to trust my sincerity and my rationality - and when they argue with me, I want them to be sincere and rational in doing so. I want the arguments against me to stem from a fair and charitable reading of my sometimes-clumsy explanations - you can fight me, but fight the true implications of my world-view with the true implications of yours.

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