The Packbats' Weblog

a partial list of xdle starting guesses

2024-01-21T22:50:25Z

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 )

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kyriarchy and subpersonhood

2024-01-10T16:23:46Z

There's a "no more turing tests" tag now.

This might be kinda obvious but we'll just stick it here anyway. Also, shoutout to acorn_squash, who made a perceptive comment about disability and neurodivergence in the last post.

( discussion of structural ableism and colonialism and racism )

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A half-thought-out thought about load times (Blaugust #5)

2023-08-06T23:20:48Z

(Apparently there's some kind of official organization of Blaugust with a Discord or something? Consider this illicit Blaugust content.)

We were talking to Manifold Mindmesh a.k.a Many (cw: 18+-only content) the other week about loading times, and since that conversation, we've started playing with the metaphor of load times as public transit.

If we want to play FTL, for example, we metaphorically hop on a bus, wait for a goodly number of seconds, and then the bus drops us off in the game, where there's basically no load times we've noticed. One bus trip, of some time.

If Many is launching a new world of Dwarf Fortress, fae has quite a formidable trip ahead of faer as the system simulates a whole history before the embarkation fae will be playing.

And if we click a Twitter link ... we have a fair few seconds of bus transit to get to the page at all, and then an additional stop on the bus line every time we scroll down or up on the page. Anything off screen was yanked away and needed to be recovered if we wanted to see it again, and we had to wait for all of that.

And yeah, a long bus trip can be frustrating, but you can at least sleep through it or listen to a podcast or whatever. An incessant series of bus transfers gives you no chance to do that.

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dark covid thoughts about public response in US states and the UK

2021-08-02T15:41:21Z

( Read more... )

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Radio thoughts, related to boombox thoughts

2021-02-26T15:07:01Z

Thinking more about that boombox we got out to look at its cassette deck and the feeling we were enjoying of having sound in our physical space from it instead of in our headphones, and we ended up having a couple more thoughts.

You know that Brian Eno quote? "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature"? I think one of those weird and uncomfortable things about radio is that you don't control what you listen to, when you listen to the radio - whatever the broadcaster decides you will hear, you either hear that or you don't listen to the station at all.

...and that can be fun? We have to be in the right mood for it, but it can be cool to make the soundtrack to our day be someone else's musical choices for a while. It ends up being surprising and novel, and encourages us to find what we appreciate in music we'd never've sought out.

(Admittedly we're currently listening to the web stream of WRUC 89.7 FM instead of a local station over the airwaves, but the principle applies.)

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a tree not cut (ttrpg blogging)

2020-07-01T02:36:37Z

We tried one half of don't cut the tree/be the tree today.

( Spoilers for 'don't cut the tree' )

It felt a little inadequately edited, and the metaphor was heavy enough in our minds that we couldn't really approach it as a prompt fairly? But it was still a meaningful story...

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The Body of Lucy Stoker, ch. 1

2017-11-10T01:56:46Z

Someone on a group chat I participate in posted a link to the site http://whothefuckismydndcharacter.com/ - a web toy which uses a Mad Libs-like system to generate oddball character ideas - and it gave me a "soulless Human Druid from the vast wastes who tries to be a friend to everyone" as a prompt.

I don't know if this is obvious, but I'm the sort of person who likes the idea that having no soul is not an impediment to being a lovely person. So I did some Googling, read through a discussion of what a soulless character in D&D might be like, brainstormed, and started writing.

No guarantees of completion. Might not make the most sense if you aren't a D&D geek. Content notes for injury (implied fatal), allusion to blood, and one very cheesy pun. There are a few words which are misspelled to indicate poor enunciation - the actual words are in mouseover text.

( A beginning in questions )

On to Chapter 2.

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When is Valentine's Day, anyway?

2010-02-12T14:35:12Z

(Don't answer that.)

Saw xkcd today - I think it's one of the good ones. Behold:

xkcd #701: Science Valentine

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