The Packbats' Weblog

Breakfast Pizza (food photo blog)

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 16:57:29 GMT

Here be photos of food, including meat.

( Read more... )

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Posting from the Lynx browser!

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 01:31:08 GMT

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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Decorating our Linux in pinks and oranges and peaches

Sun, 25 Aug 2024 22:06:19 GMT

Before...

...and after.

Gonna try and talk through what's happening here.

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Customizing takes a lot longer than we expected. But also it turns out we had a lot more ability to decide what we wanted than we feared. And it turns out we do like customizing it a bit.

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self-link: linux, year 1 (twice)

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 16:09:08 GMT

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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learning a new keyboard layout is hard

Thu, 21 Mar 2024 01:09:48 GMT

So, we were walking home one day and there was a box by the side of the road with an ergonomic keyboard and a monitor marked "Free". We haven't tried the monitor (the stand is fractured) but the keyboard works and it has a bunch of extra hotkeys - and we were really missing the play-pause button from our laptop.

But also, in a fit of ... something, we decided that as long as we're learning a new physical layout, why not learn a new software layout?

Colemak-DH is (a) a variation on QWERTY for easier learning, (b) designed to be more efficient in finger motions, and (c) the first one suggested to us on fedi when we asked about keyboard layouts for split keyboards. It makes ... enough sense, we're trying it. And trying to maintain our ability to type with QWERTY, because new layouts are fun but we're going to have to deal with QWERTY keyboards a lot and typing on an unfamiliar keyboard layout is frustrating.

On which note, wow, this is frustrating. This is hard. But also we're making progress - not a lot of speed, not nearly the 75 words per minute we used to have in QWERTY, but we're beginning to know where our fingers should be going. And only messing up a lot more than before in QWERTY now that we have other muscle memory to cross wires with. We're making progress, and it's not terrible.

And the keyboard is nice. Having an emoji key is weird but it's not like we don't use it.

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listening to Spoon again

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 22:20:31 GMT

Anyone else remember Spoon?

( self-indulgent, content warnings not provided for linked and referenced material )

This post is nothing. Just, today we were looking for something to listen to and we remembered that Spoon exists.

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frustrated lately

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 01:48:25 GMT

been frustrated a lot lately

but also have been trying to try more, lately

to take chances on folks we don't know and folks we do, speak up even when we're not guaranteed to feel heard

to do new things that are hard and not just give up

so yeah

been frustrated more lately

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2023-W44: it turns out you don't accomplish a lot of goals while resting

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 16:22:43 GMT

So, lately we've been reading a lot of travel blog posts from Hundred Rabbits, and it makes us want to blog more. Not daily, but like ... ever, y'know? To create something that people can read.

As the subject line says, this week's been very unfocused because this has been specifically a rest week - and I mean "we told our fellow mods we'd be gone until Monday" rest, we have no unfun obligations at all. (Well, almost none - we posted on our TTRPG patreon and our TTRPG ko-fi, but shh.) Lately we've been in a state of staring at each obligation blankly and wondering if this is ( okay this got a little dark )

, so we really needed some time when we did not have to do that.

(...okay, the unfun obligations thing is almost twice - we did set ourselves a goal to get or make a cover image for an itch.io jam. It's not made, and that's okay - the jam is not gonna be until February.)

So, what did this rest week look like?

( ...I mean, I don't know, we weren't paying attention. But [...] )

So, like, a lot is happening? But most of it is what we want to do in that moment, and we can drop it whenever. And we do, regularly.

We'll see what happens tomorrow. For today, that's where we're at.

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Linux!

Thu, 24 Aug 2023 02:54:05 GMT

So, you might not know this about us, but until - *checks date* - two weeks ago Friday, we were using Windows 7 as our OS.

"But Packbats!", someone might exclaim. "Windows 7 hasn't been supported since 2015! Hell, as of January, you couldn't even bribe Microsoft to keep your system limping along!"

And you'd be correct! Which is why you might not have known this about us, because "oh yeah, our primary computer, our connection to a world where being a queer trans plural furry is normal and unremarked upon, is running an OS so insecure that even Mozilla has given up on supporting it" seems like an irresponsible thing to say on the public network.

That is, until the day just under two weeks ago when we weren't running Win7 any more, because our laptop had stopped functioning and we couldn't figure out how to fix it.

So yeah. We're posting this from NixOS.

( NixOS? Odd choice for a complete Linux beginner. )

( The revival of Evergreen, our new compy )

So far, we have:

Altered one config file so we could read ntfs drives.
Used nix-shell to grab a file partition tool so we could turn our temporary Windows 7 ntfs drive (the 2 TB one) into a proper Linuxy ext4 drive.
Used tune2fs to tell Linux that it doesn't need to save 5% of our now-storage 2 TB drive for root.
Decided to hold off on moving home to the 2 TB drive, because it would mean messing with hardware-configuration.nix and we're tired.

We're tired. But we have a working computer.

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mi toki lili e toki pona

Mon, 19 Dec 2022 02:34:07 GMT

It's probably not surprising, given that we've been watching jan Misali's YouTube channel for years, but we've been following along on the toki pona language course they're doing with jan Kesi and practicing with flashcards and, recently, starting in on lipu sona pona by jan Lentan so we have more material. And making more flashcards because sitelen pona, the logography jan Sonja kicked off for the language.

It's been an interesting process, even if we're flagging a bit right now - toki pona feels like it'll bring out the poets in us. If you don't know, it's a minimalist language - less than two hundred words - and to talk of most things you must combine ... but the combinations are deliberately not standardized. Instead, the word for a concept is built out of how the speaker describing it right now conceives of it. And that makes it really interesting to ask questions like "what is Dwarf Fortress? what is a roleplaying game? what is a story?", because we have to think about it to talk about it. jan toki li pali e toki. jan toki li pali e toki ale.

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[a circle made of arrows] devlog

Thu, 14 Apr 2022 15:19:44 GMT

We made a game for the Black and White Jam #8 game jam! Click through if you want to play it!

It's fun! Very abstract-strategy spatial-thinking planning-ahead-y - it goes well until it doesn't, in our experience. Content warning for blinking - it can be kinda disorienting.

Anyway, we're gonna talk about it a bit.

( Read more... )

It was a lot of work, our wrists hurt after, and there's a lot about it we're dissatisfied with ... but damn, we made a game! We made a jam game! And it's fun!

Like, really, this is something we'd already figured out: our best shot at making something is to make something we'd want to play, and that's what this is: a game where you can turn the music off (it's in the pause menu, hit Enter or Esc) and occupy your eyes and fingers while a podcast happens.

And we'll go back to it, eventually, and add a tutorial and a music volume control and suchlike. But for now we're proud.

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Bread progress, loaves #1 and #2

Thu, 25 Nov 2021 03:40:02 GMT

( Food discussion. )

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Weird dream

Fri, 25 Jun 2021 16:09:21 GMT

(Content warnings for death and firearms.)

( Read more... )

Kind of weird, but ... I mean, as dreams we remember go, not bad?

`

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Casual journalling update

Tue, 16 Mar 2021 01:53:39 GMT

Biggest thing going on right now is we're trying to start a new project with our PICO-8 creating, which is finishing carts. Like, within that project there are other projects - we're making a deck of pixel art cards for solitaire - but the goal is to finish things.

Current strategy is to achieve tangible progress every day. That is: the cart does something - even if it's as small as having a new sprite - that it didn't do before. We can do other stuff but we have to do that.

I don't think we mentioned No Video Jam 2. It's an audio game jam on itch.io - the challenge is to create a game that's completely playable without any visuals. It's a pretty different game space, but it feels feasible to do.

We kind of want to do it in PICO-8 because we're comfortable with that tool.

Speech synthesis is a problem. We can't really see a way around having language communication for menus and tutorial information and the like.

(The recent discovery of serial audio support in PICO-8 does change that, but not yet.)

(LÖVE does have audio - directional audio, even, which would be really useful. Relearning how to use that would probably be easier than writing a speech synthesizer or LPC encoder+decoder in/for PICO-8 in time for the jam.)

...dunno what else to talk about here. Been mostly doing the same stuff.

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thinking about our reactions to Negativland, particularly the track "This Is Not Normal"

Fri, 29 Jan 2021 18:16:01 GMT

Negativland's album True False on Seeland Records was released on 25 October 2019.

The music video for "This Is Not Normal", track 12 of 14, was produced in April 2020 and released on YouTube on May 4. It contains a lot of distorted and strange imagery and camerawork and contains some fast cuts, body horror, and death, and the lyrics feel ... at the very least, heavy-adjacent?

( thoughts (covid-19 and us politics mentions, 837 words) )

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Some boombox thoughts (dragon.style repost)

Sat, 23 Jan 2021 18:53:10 GMT

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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Some mild tech nostalgia

Sat, 02 Jan 2021 17:40:27 GMT

We ended up digging out our old boom box because we wanted art reference for audio cassettes - fortunately, it happened to have one in it - and we're having a little bit of fun playing with it again. We don't usually listen to music in the space around us rather than through headphones, and the last time we listened to a radio station, we were connecting to their Internet stream.

Also, thanks to the aforementioned cassette, we discovered that Los Lobos has a lot more variety of music than we were previously cognizant of. Also that roots rock is a thing.

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Not daily blogging, but awareness of time.

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 01:42:45 GMT

I don't think attempting to blog daily is going to work for us Packbats - there's too many interruptions to break our flow for something like that.

I don't think attempting to blog weekly is going to work for us Packbats - it's too long between events for us to develop a flow for something like that.

What we're trying this time is pinning a tab in Firefox with our own journal page. Pin a tab which we can look at and see how long it's been since we wrote a blog post.

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It doesn't have to be D&D.

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 01:59:14 GMT

It's almost difficult to remember what it was like to just ... assume, on a bedrock level, that D&D as we experienced it was just What Tabletop Roleplaying Games Meant.

We actually didn't start with D&D - our first system was SLUG (Simple Laid-back Universal Game) - but it was very easy for us to go from playing SLUG as a kid to playing D&D and acculturate to the latter. The social structure of the table is the same in both cases: each person at the table owns a single character except one, who owns the entire rest of the universe and is usually called the DM or GM instead, and it is the job of the character players to use their characters to successfully traverse an obstacle-ridden story created by the universe player.

It functions. It facilitates a kind of storytelling focused on preparation by the universe player - massive sprawling networks of tunnels and rooms, full of secrets and setpieces, with challenges designed to strain the abilities of the protagonists - and that's wonderful. Our hours spent exploring such spaces were not wasted.

I suppose it was technically collaborative. It didn't feel that way. When we first read the rules of Fate Accelerated Edition, we found them completely alien - the players get to write the same kind of "this is what is true in the universe" cards as the GM? It was the world turned upside-down and we were not prepared for it. And when a DM tried to get the players to do some authorship in the form of adding worldbuilding details, we felt terrifyingly anxious and out of place - we did our best but we felt overwhelmingly that it was not our place. Our one GMless game was ... well, it was a farce, which would have worked if we'd gotten the joke, which we didn't.

Somewhere between 2013 and 2019 our feelings changed. I'm not sure by what.

Somewhere between 2013 and 2019, we tried games which were both themselves and not D&D, which helped. Somewhere between 2013 and 2019, we had conversations with people laying out all the myriad ways in which D&D is an incredibly specific tabletop roleplaying game system and not generic at all. Somewhere between 2013 and 2019, we internalized some ideas about game design and aesthetics of play. Somewhere between 2013 and 2019, we realized we were trans and transitioned, which helped us developed a better degree of connection with ourselves and, we suspect, more capacity to play characters we chose as opposed to just Packbat's Dude Cosplay. Somewhere between 2013 and 2019, we gained an appreciation for games that openly acknowledged their limitations, as contrasted with games that purported (and failed) to be unlimited in scope.

Somewhere between 2013 and 2019, we changed from the kind of people who had no way of understanding what Fate Accelerated Edition was trying to do, to the kind of people who could make decisions about what we would want to use Fate Accelerated Edition to do. We could recognize a system that approached the question of "how do you create the pieces needed to evoke a world and tell stories within it?" through freetext concepts instead of formal systematized mechanics, and which incorporated the Session-Zero "what kind of game do we want to play?" questions we previously didn't know needed asking into the act of player character design. And tried to encourage and also force players into staying in character very clumsily - the compel rule feels like one that would be useful to stop minmaxers from trying to maximize all the numbers but framed as a general game mechanic, and we'll probably houserule it away because compelling players to play their characters in a specific way is not something we want at our table. But we understand it.

We don't have a conclusion here. We just kinda started typing without knowing where to go.

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Tue, 08 Dec 2020 03:49:56 GMT

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

Sun, 13 Sep 2020 19:38:05 GMT

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

Thu, 23 Jul 2020 02:13:56 GMT

( content warning: slightly medical maybe? )

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Song titles

Fri, 17 Jul 2020 03:34:50 GMT

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.

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Life update

Thu, 16 Jul 2020 02:11:39 GMT

Been feeling fairly cruddy for the past few days - trying to just accept it and not let our usual "everything is fine" coping mechanisms kick in.

(Interestingly, that same coping mechanism managed to outright cloak whatever self-perception made us able to see our system members as existing - makes me wonder if a big component of us figuring out we were plural this year and not earlier is just better mental health.)

Still alternating Fitness Boxing and ... just, random aerobics in the back yard for exercise. Mosquitoes are becoming a thing here, which is frustrating.

...we've been avoiding going back to our Civil War and Reconstruction Era lectures we were listening to because Reconstruction is just ... far, far more a story of black liberation being crushed by white supremacy than we were wholly prepared for. We've mostly been just thinking about things - PICO-8 programming ideas, mostly.

Hope y'all are coping.

- 🦗

(p.s. music is from this YouTube video - I don't think the producer is well known.)

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Random updates

Mon, 13 Jul 2020 03:02:14 GMT

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.

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