The Packbats' Weblog

why we care about free/libre open source software

2024-06-06T02:55:21Z

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.

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Princess with a Cursed Sword playthrough, 2024-05-12

2024-05-12T22:24:08Z

"Princess with a Cursed Sword" by Anna Anthropy is a single-page tabletop roleplaying game about a princess who was handed a cursed sword at her coming-of-age ceremony and cannot put it down. She (it is she, in our case) has just arrived at ancient ruins seeking the place where this sword belongs.

Content warnings on our playthrough for:

Class warfare.
Violence, injury, death, and blood.
Offscreen child murder and starvation.
Fantasy weirdness.

…yeah, idk. It's a game that encourages going hard.

( Read more... )

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The True Nature of Hobbes (Calvin & Hobbes Explained!)

2023-09-12T15:24:43Z

okay, but for real now

depending on genre, fantastical elements are approached in different ways

in much of the ~speculative fiction~ umbrella - sci fi, fantasy, superhero stories, blah blah blah - there's prolly an answer to how it works, and knowing the answer can help people deal with the challenges they face

for example, one of the characters in the 1999 Mystery Men movie, Invisible Boy, can make himself invisible when no-one (including him) is looking at him

like, obviously, that's funny - like, how do you even know

but also that's the rules, that's how it works, and that's how he saves the day later in the movie

in that story, knowing how things work is how you win

...but in other genres - something something magical realism? - how it works is simply not considered interesting

if Hobbes is a person, a walking tiger who can demolish Calvin at snowball fights, you can make humor and story out of it

if Hobbes is a toy, a plush animal that Calvin plays with, you can make humor and story out of it

if none of Calvin's magical nonsense is real, then he's a kid, using his imagination to create stories that feel real

but also for a lot of kids, especially neurodivergent kids, toys are a kid of real which matters

but also Calvin isn't real, none of this is real

Hobbes makes sense to us, reading a newspaper comic, because a kid and his tiger friend makes sense, and a kid and his tiger plushie makes sense, and living in a different world than the people around you makes sense

and if you want to tell a story with that? choose which one you want to tell

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Packdragon musician icon comm!

2022-09-12T14:49:46Z

Got a sketch commission from our friend Nuktibromos of Packdragon playing music on the keyboard our partner gave us!

Planning to use this as an icon for music stuff on Dreamwidth going forward.

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Post-scarcity thoughts

2022-09-06T03:46:53Z

This isn't super thought out - we're still trying to find our point while we write, here.

Also, we don't live in a post-scarcity society. There's scarcity up to our eyeballs. Fuck capitalism.

But there's some contexts where we're unconstrained.

( Read more... )

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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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review: "Non-Player Character" by Veo Corva

2022-01-18T23:44:50Z

"Non-Player Character" is a portal fantasy about an anxious neurodivergent person who is cajoled into joining their MMO friend's tabletop roleplaying group, and we kind of really love it? It is, like a lot of portal fantasies and adventure stories in general, very much about someone being pulled out of their familiar world, forced to deal with a new and terrifying situation, and discovering and developing new strengths in the course of rising to that challenge...

...and in this case, that actually starts before anyone is sucked into another dimension? Tar joining the Kin game is such a brave moment for them, and that ends up being enormously positive in their life before they and their group are handed a whole lot of magic and another entire world to try to navigate. It's a story about making friends, supporting each other, and saving people along the way.

It's also about disability and neurodivergence. It's about people having struggles because their brains and bodies can't do what needs doing on their own, and it's about people having friends who help them get through anyway. It's about having internalized negative stereotypes and being told how amazing they actually are. It's about finding ways to manage, no matter how weird.

It's about a group of marginalized queer people surviving and thriving. It's a kind of story we personally haven't read enough. We're glad we had a chance to read this one.

(p.s. In the course of writing "Non-Player Character", Corva accidentally wrote a sourcebook for Kin, the tabletop roleplaying game from the book, which we haven't yet played but could imagine ourselves running a game of. The flavor is very good, and we like how effectively it simplifies its mechanics by reusing systems.)

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D&D setting suggestion: The Ancient Sands

2021-02-03T18:38:02Z

So, we learned today that D&D's default setting has, instead of an entire meaningful afterlife for atheist^[1] characters the way worshippers of gods have, those characters' souls get used as bricks in moldy wall somewhere-or-other off in some Astral Plane sub-plane or something: The Wall of the Faithless.

That's boring. I think there's way better ways to acknowledge the presence of players with characters who don't want to worship any of the gods in the setting - ways which grant the faithless dead afterlives as thematic and as good a source of plot hooks as any of the others. Honestly, there's a lot of better ways. Here's one for y'all's amusement, though.

Those who die without connection to any gods are sent instead to the Ancient Sands, a plane of trackless desert whose sun circles the horizon endlessly, offering no means of navigation. Those alive or dead that choose to wander the plane, however, find themselves coming upon first landmarks, then people, with those they encounter being connected to their own alignment. In this way, these souls find fates in keeping with their choices - the cruel surrounded by the cruel and the kind by the kind - with those who wish for stability seeking out a resting place and those who wish for novelty forever exploring the place and its people.

[1] In this case, worshipping no gods rather than thinking none exist.

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Shim's Circle 2: Hypothetically

2021-01-25T20:39:27Z

( Transformation fic, 667 words. )

Originally posted 2020-11-18

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Shim's Circle 1: Connected

2021-01-25T20:34:17Z

( Transformation fic, 743 words )

Originally posted 2020-10-10

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Some boombox thoughts (dragon.style repost)

2021-01-23T18:53:10Z

Y'know, I don't think it's even that we like having an easy way to listen to the radio or listen to CDs in our room - I think the biggest thing we like about it is having the option to listen to music not on headphones sometimes.

Also, listening to music we happen not to have listened to in a while.

- 🐲 💭 📻

...y'know what else?

Music playing from a device that's not right in front of us feels diegetic. If we're sitting at our computer with headphones on or lying on the couch or in bed holding our phone, the music is coming from here - this electronic universe that we are accessing.

Music playing on a boombox over to our left? It's in our physical room. There's music playing in our room. That's pretty cool.

- 🐲 🐍 💭 📻 ⚖️ 🎧

(redraft: jukebox -> boombox)

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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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Summarizing our impressions of eleven bases of arithmetic

2021-01-14T22:28:27Z

Here are the conditions of the experiment:

Starting with F₀ = 0 and F₁ = 1, calculate all Fibonacci numbers up to F_[ten] via addition.
Using long division, calcuate the ratio of F_[ten] and F_[nine] to estimate ϕ (the golden ratio).
Repeat for every positional system base that has a Wikipedia page: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 16, 20, and 60.

( And here are some thoughts. (425 words) )

I think as far as practical utility of bases of arithmetic, there is a lot we didn't test by doing this operation, but the stuff we did test was very informative.

Edit 2021-02-12: Here is a Twitch highlight of the stream where we did the experiment, for people who want to watch nearly two and a half hours of arithmetic by hand.

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We've never actually played "Watch Dogs: Legion" ourselves, we should note.

2020-12-18T21:14:45Z

In the past two weeks, two different gaming journalism YouTube channels have put out videos on Watch Dogs: Legion and its "Play as Anyone" system: "Playing as Anyone in Watch Dogs: Legion" (33:10, auto-generated English captions only) from Errant Signal and "How Watch Dogs: Legion Works | GMTK Most Innovative 2020" (13:29, manually captioned in English) from Game Maker's Toolkit. Both of these videos come to the same conclusion about the system: it's technically impressive, but it doesn't have a meaningful impact on the player.

9:26: And since it's kind of the defining trait of Watch Dogs: Legion, I think it's worth looking at the "Play as Anyone" system and what the game gets out of it. Because it's not clear to me - given the final product - what the "Play as Anybody" system is really trying to accomplish.

- Chris Franklin a.k.a. Campster, Errant Signal

8:08: But the thing is - and this bit is quite important: none of this actually matters. One of the most critical questions that Ubisoft had to answer with Watch Dogs: Legion was not "how do you make a game where you can play as anyone" - but instead, "why should anyone care?"

- Mark Brown, Game Maker's Toolkit

I'm leading with this, but neither video leads with this (the leading numbers in each blockquote are a timestamp), and the way they don't lead with this is interesting.

( 981 words )

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thinking about ambiguity

2020-08-08T20:26:38Z

( Raw essay, no focus as of starting )

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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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Miscellaneous day updates

2020-06-26T01:46:17Z

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

( content warning for mentions of food and COVID-19-adjacent matters )

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This is an essay about games.

2020-06-25T02:27:53Z

There are few tools as good as photography at documenting what is there. The camera almost inevitably captures an enormous wealth of detail in that span of time when it admits light into its lens - photography can record the visual element of history with incredible speed, accuracy, and fidelity. This is something to be celebrated.

...but the capturing of images with a camera does not cease to be photography when it is used to other ends.

( 550 words, including mention of food )

- 🐲

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dragon.style crosspost: Ableism Challenge + more on ableism stuff (cw: ableist language)

2020-06-24T01:19:19Z

June 23, 2020, 10:15 AM:

Ania Onion Bula's Ableism Challenge is a little over five years old. We first took it a little under five years ago - July 9th.

...these days, I think it doesn't go far enough. But whether it does or not, it was still an important step for us towards fighting our learned ableism. And we want to share it in case anyone else would get something out of trying it.

- 🎒

June 23, 2020, 10:33 AM:

( content warning: more on ableism stuff (cw: ableist language) re: Ableism Challenge )

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