The Packbats' Weblog

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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link: Runaway to the Stars

2024-08-21T03:30:45Z

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.

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naming yourself in toki pona (itch.io link)

2023-04-23T23:26:47Z

toki pona is a fun minimalist philosophical constructed language made by jan Sonja. As of early 2023, it has been exploding in popularity, and as more and more people who know us Packbats know, this means that there's a very real chance that a friend of yours will want to ask you, "how should I refer to you when I am speaking toki pona?"

There are three reasons why this isn't trivial for your hypothetical friend to answer themselves:

In toki pona, to talk about something, you have to say what it is - and different speakers use different concepts to encapsulate themselves, both for identity reasons and for fun.

In toki pona, one speaks using very few sounds, and those sounds are put together in very few ways. This makes it easy for anyone to speak toki pona, but means many names need to be modified to become toki pona names.

In every language, the correct thing to call someone is what they want to be called.

So: what do you want to be called?

A little belated of an announcement, but this is the introduction to our guide for non-tokiponists on how to make a name for yourself (literally) in toki pona.

We're really proud of it, honestly! It's about 3k words total, plus a wordlist for quick reference, and there's .html and .pdf downloads for offline use. We'd love to hear from anyone who tries it.

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Our 200-word TTRPG project has hit six months!

2022-10-27T15:36:39Z

So, I don't know how many people are still thinking about the 200 Word RPG Challenge in 2022, but earlier this year when we were looking at our completely unused Patreon, we decided, "what if we started writing 200-word tabletop roleplaying games and posting them every month?"

And then we did! It turns out that it's just a really good format for us, and it lets us finish things in a way that we struggle to with larger projects.

Anyway, here's what we've posted so far:

May: maryland tornado warning, a mini-larp: an imitation of the experience of sheltering in place to wait out tornado warnings.
June: conspiracy in reverse: a solo fiction-writing game where you use an oracle deck to tell a story of someone uncovering secrets about themself.
- The Packbats' playing card oracle system, which we invented before we had a tarot deck of our own.
July: as you would expect: a two-player game about one character visiting the dreams of another.
August: space to unfold: a freeform game about escaping a repressive culture and discovering yourself now that you're in a safe place.
September: talk about your lives: a letter-writing game: in which you tell each other about events in your lives, good and bad, and use those events to make up stories about events in your characters' lives as they also write letters back and forth.
October (today!): where things will happen: a worldbuilding game designed to set up the games that follow it with a setting that the players know and that has a few plot hooks to draw on.

We're hoping to finish out at least a full year, so, this is the official halfway point! Feeling optimistic about continuing - we have some bangers in the queue, I think.

...oh, and on the subject of mini TTRPGs: we also made a podcast pilot episode for a jam where us and our podner (podcasting partner) invented a roleplaying game to create the prologue to a YA creature horror story and then played it. It's an hour and fifteen minutes, and a copy of the post-recording edited version of the game is available on the page - feel free to check out either or both! (The jam was for The Podcast Mines, which is a delightful show about pitching podcasts but never actually starting any of them; our episode will likely be a part of their Episode 100 special that should drop tomorrow.)

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Link: Solar powered dawn poems: progress report

2022-03-21T23:02:46Z

An account from poet and programmer Allison Parrish about a project of low-energy computational poetry:

Last year, CultureHub accepted a project proposal of mine for their residency program. I proposed the creation of “a radically small language model, trained on a low-power microcontroller,” which operates “only when drawing sufficient energy from solar panels.” This language model would be trained on a corpus of “albas, a poetry genre in which lovers lament the oncoming dawn” and generate new examples of poems in this genre—again, using only solar power. Both Solar Protocol and Low Tech Magazine’s solar powered server inspired this work, and I also see it as a continuation of my research in standalone poetry-generating devices.

In this post, I show the progress I’ve made on this project, and relate what I’ve learned so far. [...]

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Link: Against Access

2022-03-09T22:22:38Z

"Against Access" by John Lee Clark, on interpreters, descriptions, and the difference between being burdened with objective data and getting help from an accomplice.

I just want to quote the whole thing, but here's a bit that stood out:

( Another thing ASL interpreters habitually do is describe the whole of things... )

(Hat tip to fluffy's Notes page on beesbuzz.biz, via the fediverse.)

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packbat @ 2021-08-25T23:49:00

2021-08-26T03:58:59Z

Made a packbat favorite posts tag and went through our 2017-and-newer posts to select posts we want to highlight - ones we're particularly proud of. Think it might be nice to have those all in one place.

(The 2011-and-earlier posts are just going to have to wait until we have the spoons - as much as we appreciate the Packbat or Packbats of that period for what they valued and worked at, we feel a lot of embarrassment at the things they thought were cool and we think are not.)

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Thinking about sharing videogames with the universe

2021-07-11T02:59:01Z

Gaming and the Golden Record is a compilation of tiny video essays on the theme of the Voyager Golden Record, each answering the question: if you could package up videogames on a golden record to send out into the universe, as a communication to people who don't know anything about Earth about what we people on Earth are like, what would you send? We have issues with some of the responses - a little blatant fat-negativity, a little casual amatonormativity (assuming romance is for everyone here) - but it was interesting and the question was interesting: what do you send?

Our first thought was a game we loved and loved the plot of, pretty unsurprisingly - one that has things to say about who we are, what our social structures are like, what motivates us, what kind of injustices happen ... but we stopped, and we thought, and we decided that a story next to a game just wouldn't work, however well told. Every story is full of gaps, assumptions about what people will infer and therefore shouldn't be said, and if all you have is handfuls of words, there's so little to help you find what you're missing in them.

And on that note, shouldn't we try to help them understand us? There's going to be loads of stories on this, a lot of which will probably take for granted an understanding of our ordinary. Maybe we should include a game about that ordinary - give them "Gone Home" and let them pick up books and pens and cassette tapes and turn them over and around in their hands, or give them "The Long Dark" with bodily needs to be taken care of in a world physical enough that exertion keeps you warm and different species of wood burn differently, or give them one of The Sims games and let them watch the characters seek to fulfill their bodily and social needs both.

...we probably shouldn't give a group of people who, we presume, will tear apart the few records they have of an alien civilization for every atom of information it can give them ... a game with easy-to-find glitches that break things as a guide to what normal is. We don't want them to think the most efficient form of human locomotion is backwards long jumping. We probably also don't want to give them a game quite so cisheteronormative.

So ... screw it, "Stay?" by ejadelomax.

"Stay?" is a choice-based text adventure. You act by clicking links, not by pushing joysticks - the extent to which you can glitch out the story is probably near zero. ("Stay?" also deals with abuse, body horror, and violence, so be prepared for that kind of thing. Also food and alcohol, incidentally.) "Stay?" is a story about being a person interacting with people - about lying in bed the morning after failing at the task you were trying to achieve, about deciding who to spend time with in school, about asking your friends for help, about leaving everything behind and walking off into the mountains to go be somewhere else for a while, about mysteries and secrets and turning over every metaphorical stone in your hands until you understand enough about the situation to do something about it. "Stay?" stuck with us for hours after we played it, grieving our choices.

It's a whole lot of words - a whole lot of details, for everything it glosses over - even if it doesn't have images to help you interpret what the words are describing. But it has words, it has the specificity and perspective that words make explicit, assuming we send their readers enough dictionaries and encyclopedias to understand them. It has choices for you to make, and reactions for you to have to them. (I love abstract expressions of meaning, but ambiguity is not so helpful here.) It's not everything we want - there's a dating sim component to it, even if it lets you turn someone down and remain the closest of friends, and we're sure that there's not gonna be much aro representation in the collection - but ... but screw it. I want a story that doesn't apologize for queerness on the disc, and I want a story that talks about war and suffering and injustice, and I want a story you can spend hours pulling apart to try to understand, and a story that matters a lot to us and we want to share.

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Ian "Worthikids" Worthington: "Wire"

2021-03-06T15:24:00Z

We were reminded today of this music video and how much of an absolute trip it was the first time we saw it:

Animated music video of a fight between a group of clowns and a group of vampires.

( Content warning (spoiler) )

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Link: We Need to Talk About Digital Blackface in Reaction GIFs

2021-02-27T16:01:09Z

From Teen Vogue: We Need to Talk About Digital Blackface in Reaction GIFs: Why is it so common?" by Lauren Michele Jackson.

A good discussion of how racist stereotypes about black people play into and are reinforced by the use of GIFs of black people to represent strong emotions. Short quote under the cut:

( Read more... )

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Link: Can Historians Be Traumatized by History?

2021-02-19T02:22:08Z

Content warnings for discussion of trauma, graphic descriptions of sexual assault, and suicide.

"Can Historians Be Traumatized by History?" from The New Republic.

This paragraph in particular jumped out:

It is bad advice to say that politics, sex, and religion ought to be kept out of polite conversation, but nobody wants you to bring up a genocide at a dinner party. “The extent to which my research is ‘dark’ and therefore not polite dinner conversation means I’m repeatedly isolated in piecing through the material,” Elena Gallina, a Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford and researcher of sexual violence in wartime, told me.

It makes me think of the equation from that old Tumblr thread about abuse, PTSD, and emotional neglect: "Overwhelming Experience + Isolation + Shame = PTSD".

If historians are expected not to be traumatized by traumatic history? This, we would expect, would make their trauma worse.

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Video Games in a Low Tech Future (link)

2021-02-01T14:40:31Z

Found this a while ago on itch.io but are still intrigued by it: "Video Games in a Low←Tech Future, a web of ideas contemplating what technologically-mediated entertainment might look like in a particular low-resources future Earth.

It's kind of a fascinating idea - turning a lot of fundamental assumptions (always-available electricity, always-available network connections, gigabytes of memory and gigahertz of processor power) that a lot of us on the Internet can assume without thinking, and using the contradiction of these assumptions to imagine how this art form that we love might persist recognizably into the future.

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Link: TJ and Amal

2020-07-28T01:47:11Z

Reminded of the existence of The Less Than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal" today.

(Content warnings include: homophobia (incl. family), alcohol use (incl. once to blackout), smoking (nicotine and marijuana), other drugs, food (specifically non-vegan), genitals and sex on-panel, someone getting punched, discussion of stressful subjects, casual ableist language of the kind that's typical basically everywhere, background 2008 Democratic primary election.)

...I feel like we must have read it circa 2012 - kind of in the middle of our heavy webcomics-reading period. As webcomics go, it's pretty gorgeous - lovely sketch-like art with occasional vistas, generally wonderful and elaborate detail - and the story is extremely solid. The emotional dynamics feel extremely real, the dialogue is fantastic, and the plot has a good arc and meaning.

Developing an appreciation of content warnings has been weird for us, because a lot of the stuff we find really comforting and nice and valuable needs very heavy ones? Bad stuff happened to these people but this story is about something better happening to them now. And about a long car trip. And about people clicking with each other really quickly. And about a lot of different kinds of music, and about conversations at restaurants, and about stopping and looking at really wonderful scenery.

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Comments on a few tools.

2020-07-21T22:16:54Z

Someone on the fediverse shared a link to everest pipkin's massive "Open source, experimental, and tiny tools roundup", and I decided to go down the list and talk about the ones we've touched.

Firstly, the ones we've actually tried to make something - or even succeeded at making something - with:

( Read more... )

Secondly, the ones we've looked at but never tried to create in:

( Read more... )

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Music YouTube link: "What can a guitar solo be?"

2020-07-03T01:46:13Z

What can a guitar solo be? by Ben Levin is pretty cool - kind of a weird poetic meditation and experimentation on the theme of guitar solos. Little bit inspiring, really.

And the music throughout is cool. Ben Levin is a good producer as well as guitarist.

(content notes: glitchy and goopy and space-warpy animations, food mention in lyrics, sustained eye contact)

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"The answer is clear."

2020-06-16T00:00:53Z

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling today on three cases related to LGBT+ rights - Gerald Lynn Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia; Altitude Express, Inc., et al. v. Zarda et al., as Co-Independent Executors of the Estate of Zarda; and R. G. & G. R. Harris Funeral Homes, Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission et al. - answering the question of whether Title VII the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination against gay and trans people when it prohibits discrimination by sex. In, unexpectedly, Justice Neil Gorsuch's words, the answer is "yes, it is illegal to discriminate against them" (us):

An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.

cosmolinguist has a nice roundup post bringing up a lot of good points about how much this means (tl;dr: a lot).

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Tumblr repost: [untitled pro-ace inclusion post]

2018-12-19T14:51:28Z

(Original post, 2016-04-19)

( Discussion of queerphobia and what-does-queer-even-mean )

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A Challenge to Theists and Theist-Friendly Persons

2010-09-28T18:52:40Z

Post edited ~5:20p EDT - thanks, zwol!

Well, I'm coming back into blogging with a fury, aren't I? First politics, and now religion!

Those of you who do not follow the atheist blogosphere may not be aware of the long, boring back-and-forths between the "New Atheists" and the "accommodationists". To summarize: the latter frequently accuse the former of being mean to theists (people who believe that one or more gods exist) and the former retort that the latter are being intellectually dishonest. What's annoying about it is that the argument ~~never actually connects to the essential disagreement,~~ edit: rarely gets back to actual questions of fact. The latest brouhaha, for example, relates to a question which "New Atheists" answer in the negative and many "accommodationists" answer in the positive: do any people have sufficient intellectual justification to believe that a god is real?

And for that reason, I want to congratulate Larry Moran, who is addressing this question.

This brings me to my challenge. I challenge all theists and all their accommodationist friends to post their very best 21st century, sophisticated (or not), arguments for the existence of God. They can put them in the comments section of this posting, or on any of the other atheist blogs, or on their own blogs and websites. Just send me the link.

(Link via pharyngula.)

If anyone in the audience believes that there are good reasons to believe that a god exists (or has a friend who so believes), please contact Prof. Moran (or have your friend do so) by Saturday, October 2.

As a footnote, though: I realize that there are a subset of people who would answer in the affirmative to the question above without answering Moran's challenge: some people believe that they possess evidence good enough to convince themselves, but that their evidence cannot be communicated to anyone else. Whether this is true is a philosophical question, and one which I would be glad to discuss ... but unrelated to the announcement.

Remember: if you believe that a God exists and you can prove it, or if you know someone who so believes, tell Larry Moran by Saturday, October 2.

Thanks!

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packbat @ 2010-09-26T12:32:00

2010-09-26T16:32:21Z

Happy Petrov Day!

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Link: Jackie at the crossroads

2010-09-19T14:38:45Z

Fred "slacktivist" Clark tells a story of an urban legend, a debunking, and two reactions. Short and (bitter)sweet.

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Drowning Doesn't Look Like Drowning

2010-07-06T00:49:54Z

Via kirabug, a proper description of the instinctive drowning response:

Except in rare circumstances, drowning people are physiologically unable to call out for help. The respiratory system was designed for breathing. Speech is the secondary or overlaid function. Breathing must be fulfilled, before speech occurs.
Drowning people’s mouths alternately sink below and reappear above the surface of the water. The mouths of drowning people are not above the surface of the water long enough for them to exhale, inhale, and call out for help. When the drowning people’s mouths are above the surface, they exhale and inhale quickly as their mouths start to sink below the surface of the water.
Drowning people cannot wave for help. Nature instinctively forces them to extend their arms laterally and press down on the water’s surface. Pressing down on the surface of the water, permits drowning people to leverage their bodies so they can lift their mouths out of the water to breathe.
Throughout the Instinctive Drowning Response, drowning people cannot voluntarily control their arm movements. Physiologically, drowning people who are struggling on the surface of the water cannot stop drowning and perform voluntary movements such as waving for help, moving toward a rescuer, or reaching out for a piece of rescue equipment.
From beginning to end of the Instinctive Drowning Response people’s bodies remain upright in the water, with no evidence of a supporting kick. Unless rescued by a trained lifeguard, these drowning people can only struggle on the surface of the water from 20 to 60 seconds before submersion occurs.

Read the rest, and read the prequel about cold water survival.

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Subnormality: Stairs

2010-06-02T18:21:13Z

A lovely story.

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Adam Savage Presents Problem Solving: How I Do It

2010-06-01T19:56:21Z

Via JamesAndrix on lesswrong.com, a talk from Adam Savage on his method of problem solving:

Second half is Q&A, which is awesome but mostly unrelated.

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Link: The Facts In The Case Of Dr. Andrew Wakefield

2010-05-20T20:21:23Z

Via elynne: the real story of the autism-vaccine saga, in easy to read and visually attractive comic form.

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Not to worry - ol' Dan will hold up the side for us!

2010-05-13T17:46:04Z

Via lesswrong.com, a brief foray into the realm of philosophy.

( SMBC May 12, 2010 )

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