The Packbats' Weblog

rambling about Classical Music™ and advocacy therefor

Wed, 26 Jun 2024 20:07:47 GMT

So, we just watched an old TED talk - "The transformative power of classical music" by Benjamin Zander, you can look it up if you're bored - arguing that everyone likes classical music, and I feel like there's ... four assumptions? it made that we can't vibe with.

Like, the first assumption is that we need to be convinced that everyone likes classical music, but we'll get back to that.

The second assumption is that everyone always prefers a lively and excited performance to one that is more understated and subtle, which, whatever, I don't care - if one-buttock playing is just how Benjamin Zander plays, so be it.

The third assumption is that people who don't listen to classical music are sitting it out because they don't care about classical music. Like, y'all know how much of the world got fucked over by western European nations to make a tiny portion of folks from western Europe rich, right? Their culture can't escape being the culture of colonizers and oligarchs, so folks are gonna react to that.

The fourth assumption is that music in the western European classical tradition is somehow distinctive in this regard.

Like, okay, yes, Frédéric Chopin's Prelude No. 4 in E Minor is a lovely, heartbreaking piece of music. Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" is a lovely, heartbreaking piece of music. Bea Miller's "feel something" is beautiful and desperate. MUNA's "Around U" is beautiful and lost. Andy G. Cohen's "Oxygen Mask" is overwhelming, powerful, perhaps despairing. Erik Satie's Gymnopédie No. 1 is agonizing, we actually have to turn it off because it hurts so much. We're talking about music here - if you're talking about music and people loving music, you can find music to love.

...because we're not even arguing with Benjamin Zander. We're arguing with the tradition that Benjamin Zander is participating in, of campaigning for classical music.

Like, does Zander know that classical music isn't music? He talks about a scourge of bland, technically accurate performances, then launches into playing a piece he loves with passion, intention, and understanding, and he thinks he's demonstrating that classical music is good. Music is good, my dude! People love the music you play because you're playing them music!

But classical music is a performance by the audience, of class. It is class-ical music. It's allowed to be boring garbage because, to paraphrase early (worse) xkcd, it's about getting some culture in you - and white culture is allowed to be terrible, to be bland and technically accurate, because white oligarchs can pay to have everyone taught that it's great anyway, that everyone should have it in them.

We found Zander's talk in the least charitable context possible. We found it via an Innuendo Studios video about "smart music" - about music you play to show that you have drunk deep the well of colonizer oligarch culture, and that therefore you are worth listening to. Because, in part thanks to Zander and Zander wanting people to love classical music, Chopin's Prelude No. 4 in E Minor makes the list.

I wish he'd been trying to teach people to love music instead. I really do. But the TED people wouldn't have paid him for that, because when the audience is paying six thousand dollars a year to be here, the speakers better be selling something exciting to rich people, and rich people don't want to be told that the problem with classical music is them.

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why we care about free/libre open source software

Thu, 06 Jun 2024 02:55:21 GMT

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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word processing is a programming language (Indiepocalypse Social thread rewrite)

Fri, 10 May 2024 16:06:37 GMT

A couple weeks ago, in a fit of frustration about not understanding object-oriented programming, we read several articles from the August 1981 issue of Byte Magazine explaining Smalltalk. One of those, "Is the Smalltalk-80 System for Children?" by Adele Goldberg and Joan Ross, contained this passage:

Contrary to the idea that a computer is exciting because the programmer can create something from seemingly nothing, our users were shown that a computer is exciting because it can be a vast storehouse of already existing ideas (models) that can be retrieved and modified for the user's personal needs. Programming could be viewed and enjoyed as an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary act. The frustration of long hours of writing linear streams of code and then hoping to see some aspect of that code execute was replaced by incremental development. Emphasis was placed on learning how to make effective use of existing system components (objects in the Smalltalk sense). Much of the teaching we did was to show users how to search for and read the descriptions of the many useful components we and others (and even new users) continued to add to the system.

Using resources within an already-powerful system is a highly effective and rewarding form of programming, and understanding that it is programming allows users to program more effectively within these systems.

We bring this up because, when you create a formatted document using a modern word processor, this is what you are doing: you are simultaneously creating data and creating instructions for how that data should be processed. (That's why it's called a word processor: it is doing work to convert the words into a format where they can be comfortably accessed.) When the Accessibility Awareness disabled.social account talks about using paragraph styles, it is because you, by using these library functions, allow other document interpreters – like screen readers and keyboard shortcut tools – to execute their own versions of these library functions and therefore process the data more usefully.

Obviously, word processing programming languages are special-purpose, like the bespoke forks of Lua implemented in fantasy consoles and game engines, or the Personal Home Page tool that some folks use for managing websites. It is a vast storehouse of already-existing components, designed to support its specific purpose.

…and we are dwelling on this thought today because we know many users of word-processing tools who do not avail themselves of these existing functions. And because we think this is, in part, because using these functions comfortably requires a degree of philosophical understanding of computers – an ability to learn a computer's language and translate your intentions into it.

As sighted writers, we are well familiar with the idea of marking off sections by having some big text at the top … but the idea that you can directly communicate, below the level of visibility, that a specific block of text is a section heading? And that the bigness of the text should happen not because you chose it, but because you chose to invisibly designate a line of text as heading?

That's a programming mindset.

And you have to learn that.

(original thread.)

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every speaker is an artist (Toki Pona rambling)

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 18:25:06 GMT

If you spend any substantial amount of time listening to an English major or film major or literature major or whoever, you've probably come across the idea that all art is collaborative. Us, writing these words, can do nothing without your assistance, because they're just pixels on a screen until you come along and make meaning out of them. We say, as members of a society which has adopted the work-concept of creation, that Packcat wrote this and you 'just' read it, but there is no 'just'. None of this matters unless an audience comes along to do something with it.

But also language itself - the words we use to write - can do nothing without both of our assistance! We create and recreate language by using language. If a language is no longer spoken, it is dead ... but if a language is spoken, it changes, because we all change and we are who the language lives through.

This goes especially for a constructed language, a conlang, a language that was created by someone, and even more so for a philosophical conlang. And Toki Pona is a philosophical conlang - Sonja Lang set forth to seek a kind of simplicity, and that intent pervades the language.

And folks get gatekeepy about it - we've gotten gatekeepy about it (sorry!) - because they know that it will change when being spoken, and they want to keep it the way they like it, and the only way to stop change is to stop speakers from...

...well, having different artistic goals than they do. Or different pragmatic needs than they do. Or even just different taste.

No coherent conclusion, just thoughts.

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English proficiency: fluent (derogatory)

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 22:37:48 GMT

Okay, you might or might not know the constructed language Toki Pona, but we're certainly still learning, so I think we can construct a good metaphor.

( A hypothetical conversation about food. )

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ten thousand years

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 01:56:46 GMT

Reading the Sandia National Laboratories nuclear waste warning messages report - specifically the Team A apprendix, the one with the famous passage. We made a post about that passage a while ago but now we're thinking about the task they were set.

Like, any D&D player will tell you that a big warning sign with a clear map pointing to the exact place you're being warned about is enticing as all getout. But what are you even supposed to do?

Like, that's the thing, right? Imagine you, the reader of this post, were supposed to make it so some rando looking for treasure a thousand years from now - as far from now as "Hwæt! wē Gār-Dena in gēar-dagum/þēod-cyninga⁠ þrym gefrūnon" is from now - would see the notice-board you put up and go, "Oh, I shouldn't dig that up"? How do you make it seem like a bad idea to try and get at something which clearly was made hard to reach? Even knowing it was a trash heap wouldn't help - archaeologists love trash heaps, love seeing what people had and threw away! It says here in this warning message that there's machine tools in that pit! We could use some machine tools! So what do you do?

And what do you do if you have to get that message across for ten times a thousand years?

It's easy to crack jokes about "this place should be shunned and left uninhabited" but there's something very compelling about looking at a manifestly impossible task and asking, "okay, but if we had to, what do we do?" It's a kind of bravery, to consider a horrible situation honestly and forthrightly, and do your best to manage it.

We don't have a solution for nuclear waste. But maybe we can try something. And maybe we can learn something from trying, even if we fail.

And maybe there's something comforting about spending time in a world where we do try, where we don't throw up our hands and say "it would mean a smaller yacht for Jeff Bezos so there's nothing we can do". A kind of grounded science fiction, not about starships but about dirt, and rock, and salt, and public health.

A suggestion we saw in the report that never really got turned into a joke was the visitor's center. The place where people visiting this very expensive public works site could go look at some placards, talk to museum staff, learn about the society that made nuclear waste and the society that tried to protect its children from it. Maybe watch a looping video with a CGI representation of the site and its design. Buy a hat with a picture of the berms embroidered on it.

Or not. Who knows what a visitor center would look like after ten thousand years?

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kyriarchy and subpersonhood

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 16:23:46 GMT

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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humanity, personhood, personal baggage (Indiepocalypse.Social repost)

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 23:24:25 GMT

(We wrote "no more turing tests" after reading "The Unperson Of 2023" by James Boyle. We wrote the following after posting "no more turing tests".)

( Read more... )

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no more turing tests

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 15:18:49 GMT

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)

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 18:03:00 GMT

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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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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more than a week (Indiepocalypse Social repost)

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 17:02:13 GMT

rewatching Devine Lu Linvega's Strange Loop talk about computing and sustainability and thinking about the one deleted tweet they mentioned

I think Twitter, Mastodon, the microblogging Fediverse, they are utterly unsuited to be archives - they are all networks in the moment, conversational spaces with just enough persistence that you can catch up on what someone said yesterday, maybe last week if you're determined

and you can download your archive but it's just a huge mess - it's not sorted or connected, you can only find a thing if you already know what it is, and you might never find the context

that's part of why we are starting to repost things on our dreamwidth blog

sometimes we want the things we say to last more than a week

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

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 15:24:43 GMT

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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True Names and web privacy (Blaugust #6)

Tue, 08 Aug 2023 16:11:13 GMT

At a formative age, we read a 1981 science fiction novella by Vernor Vinge titled True Names, about a population of hyper-hackers doing operations around the world and maintaining the secrecy of their identity to protect them from being controlled by others through elementary ~~magic spells~~ computer exploits.

...come to think, it used "the Internet as a 3D immersive space" as a narrative device eleven years before the publication of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash made "the Metaverse" a meme. Kinda funny.

Anyway, in retrospect, that novella really encouraged us to think about security of identity in a substantial way. (At least, once we started caring at all.) This is a story in which an action which restricts your identity to three million possible candidates is considered high-risk. The concept of what could expose personal information becomes very broad, when you're thinking about that level.

And then you get into the stories about people identifying physical locations by nothing but the background scenery, or incidental environmental details. Like that time Tom Scott challenged people to identify where he and Matt Parker watched an eclipse from, and they got it within feet.

On that level of investigation - the, to be frank, "ten thousand people decided to stalk you" level - we are shit out of luck. If we wanted to be secret at that level, we would have to burn the name "Packbat" altogether and start over. But ... increasingly, we are very careful about landmarks in our photographs, we don't talk about trash pickup schedules or the weather, and we do not name streets. We will say we are in the mid-Atlantic region - we will even say where within on occasion - but we do not want to be specific enough to phone book.

Because it's 2023, there have been a lot of harassment campaigns that jump from Internet to city streets, and we don't want to make it easy.

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Breathing meaning back into words (Blaugust #4)

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 15:29:35 GMT

There's an interesting arc you can have with studying Toki Pona.

At first, you're learning words and phrases. That "toki" can mean "speech", "communication", "stories", and suchlike. That "pona" can mean "good", "acceptable", "approved of", and similar. That "jan" can mean "people", "characters", "humans", that kind of thing. That "jan pona" can mean "friend" - a person or people you approve of, that you like and endorse. That "insa" can mean "inside", "center", "stomach", and so forth. That "toki insa" can mean "inner monologue" or "thoughts". And learning all these things helps you understand what people are talking about.

And then you start unlearning them. Sort of.

Like, the thing about toki pona is that a lot of its strength is being not specific, is being contextual, is being personal. And you can translate the English word "think" with the toki pona phrase "toki insa", but there's a lot of things that a communication can be within - a house, a community, a back room, standard usage ... a lot of things. And "think" does a lot of work - I think that origami is delightful, but when I say that, I am saying that to me origami is delightful: musi pi lipu sitelen li pona tawa mi.

This isn't actually about Toki Pona - this is about Kyle Kallgren's analysis of the movie "Network", and the cover of "Land of Confusion" it ends with, and the idea of reading classic rock songs as saying something. Saying "things aren't okay, we're being lied to, and we need to stop the damage". Saying "justice for those American Indians who fight against poverty and police violence". Saying "the classist and racist status quo isn't actually a natural state, we can do something about it". Saying "The USA gave us a terrible life, sent us off to kill people who looked different than us, and left us with nothing when we got back, if we even made it back". All these words that got flattened into "angry" or "comforting" or "exciting" or whatever else, they were saying something.

People learn to ignore what a communication means.

Probably because if any of these people were allowed to be understood, we might not be okay with letting the rich get richer as everyone else kills each other.

Howard Beale was saying something. He was saying that you have to get mad because the other option is depression and not caring, and if we have any hope of not taking it any more, not letting all the evil be wrought upon us, we have to care.

And on a personal level, to paraphrase jan Sonja about Toki Pona: if a friend is a "jan pona", a good person? A bad friend is a contradiction in terms.

Words mean things. And caring about what words convey can mean caring about a lot else, too.

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Should you read the comments?

Thu, 25 May 2023 22:06:00 GMT

Yes.

(Sorry, we're in a mood today, so we're just ... making a blog post. This is an essay in the most I-don't-know-where-it'll-go sense.)

On a very basic level, a comments section represents an aggregation of interpersonal connection. It represents an audience being heard not as hecklers, but as annotators, commentators, afterwordists. It connects Vienna Teng songs to AO3 fanfics, connects Paul Simon songs to those cherished dead who loved them, connects dodie songs to survivors seeking peace. It tips off machinists to better techniques, lets nonfiction writers know that their conclusions are heard, articulates shared reactions that they can be felt together. They are those rare moments when a movie is felt so strongly that strangers linger together in the lobby afterwards to process what just happened to them, made omnipresent.

They are communities. Sometimes ongoing communities - the second place we came out as trans was a comments section. Sometimes transient ones - we do not even know the name of the stranger for whom we wrote a review of a Negativland album in the comments of a music video.

No-one would tell you "don't read the comments" if you had no reason to read the comments.

...there are spaces where abuse runs rampant. There are rooms in which the loudest bigots in existence seek to crowd out all other voices. We are harmed by these comments because they betray us in the font of our connection with others.

Sometimes those represent people being under attack - a doctor who does not have the time or knowledge to manage a YouTube comments section, whose pro-trans comments went viral in just the wrong spaces.

...okay, all of them represent people being under attack.

But a lot of the time, those toxic comments sections represent a community whose leaders chose or accepted that toxicity.

Yes, read comments. But don't read them on hate sites.

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plaintext tech debt

Wed, 01 Mar 2023 15:51:35 GMT

We're thinking about making a new personal website for ourselves, and thinking about the way we avoid buying physical things most of the time, and suddenly we remembered a concept that computer software developers talk about: tech debt.

Like, the thing is, if you write code, then now you have to maintain it. If something changes in the computers that use the code, the code can break and you have to deal with that. If something changes in the problems the code must address, then the code may no longer fit and you have to deal with that. Writing code is work, but now that it exists it continuously produces more work, and that work doesn't happen on a schedule of you just feeling like writing code one day - it happens whether you like it or not. The upkeep costs come due no matter what.

And we're thinking about making a new personal website, and what to put on it ... and it's the same problem. Unlike a blog (where posts happen and then settle into the archive) or a microblog (where posts happen and then get buried in the churn of the past), anything we put on a website we have to upkeep. What ingredients we use in a recipe changes. We write new PICO-8 chiptunes. A webcomic's site hosting dies. These are changes and, to us, if we make a website, it's supposed to be correct, not just a historical artifact.

So ... yeah. We're thinking about making a new personal website. But it probably won't have a lot on it.

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Questioning of amatonormativity in Trying Out Marriage With My Female Friend

Sun, 29 Jan 2023 22:25:52 GMT

We've been following this scanlation by knight heron of Onna Tomodachi to Kekkon Shitemita (Trying Out Marriage With My Female Friend) by Usui Shio, and we've been really enjoying it - it's a cute and sweet story. And we want to talk about it, because we don't know where it will go, but we know one place it shouldn't. Because this isn't just a story about friends getting married, it's also a story about blowing past the "Romances Only" sign on Emotional Intimacy Highway in your friendship car and a little bit worrying that someone's going to pull you over.

Trying Out Marriage With My Female Friend takes place in a world which puts up those signs, and was made in a world which puts up those signs, and it has things to say about those signs. It's a story about beginning and developing life partnerships and a story about being and becoming good roommates, but it's also a story about caring more than you're 'allowed' to and that being a good thing.

( Content warnings for spoilers, discussion of hospitalization, quoting of amatonormative remarks, and food mentions )

Trying Out Marriage With My Female Friend knows what it's about, is the thing. It knows about the hierarchies of relationships enforced by its society, and ours. It knows about amatonormativity - this isn't an accident. And as of Chapter 23, its thesis is pretty clear: amatonormativity is wrong, and this friendship marriage is good.

So no, we don't know where it will go, but we know one place it shouldn't. Because what it's saying so far needs saying.

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Thoughts about misandry and harassment dynamics, blog version

Thu, 12 Jan 2023 21:47:18 GMT

(This began as this fedi thread.)

Bigotry is specifically the exercise of power within and by a system like kyriarchy to fuck over marginalized groups in favor of privileged groups. We're not professionals, but that's our best understanding of the definition.

That said, kyriarchy isn't self-consistent. Kyriarchy can contain hatred of men just fine - hating men is a lot less threatening to it than hating injustice, so threats to the system can be diverted to individuals within it...

...and especially diverted to marginalized individuals within it.

So, yeah, misandry is real. You can tell it's real because autistic people, black people, trans people, disabled people, PoC, children, migrants ... we all get attacked. People take a power structure, turn it into a description of a villain, and use it to attack the vulnerable. It's not hard - all it takes is attacking people you hate with things you're told are hateful traits, and never ever ever listening to them when they try to teach you to be better.

This is half a tangent, but we still like Jay Smooth's video "How To Tell Someone They Sound Racist" and its distinction between the "what they are" conversation and the "what they did" conversation. Pretty near every time we try to talk about something we have a problem with, we try to talk about actions we have a problem with - about what they did - and, when necessary, let people draw conclusions from what they did about what they might do next.

(By the way, Jay Smooth's followup TEDx talk, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Discussing Race", is terrific. It's worth watching both.)

I'm gonna be honest with y'all as people who've been around on the Internet for a hot minute: we've seen some bullshit. But I'm also gonna be honest with you as a disabled genderqueer transfem Black plural system: "what they are" got fuck-all to do with whether you got bigotry in you. You got bigotry in you. You got that for free.

So when we're talking about misconduct, we leave "what they are" out of it. We even avoid "reply guy" and "mansplaining" and other suchlike phrases. Are they doing harm?

Are they doing harm?

Like, seriously, is anyone being hurt here? Is this just weird and uncomfortable and makes you feel bad? Because it's okay to feel bad, feeling bad isn't a sin.

And if people are getting hurt, what kind of hurt is it, where did it start, and why? If one person weren't fighting, what would the other person be doing? (That last question is inspired by "Lady Eboshi is Wrong" from Innuendo Studios.) (Lady Eboshi transcript.)

It doesn't matter which people in the conversation are being called what kinds of oppressor. Calling your critics your oppressors is the easiest damn thing. And the kyriarchy doesn't care why you attack its favorite targets. It just wants those targets taken down.

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Trusting our craft

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 17:24:57 GMT

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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Post-scarcity thoughts

Tue, 06 Sep 2022 03:46:53 GMT

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.

Sun, 06 Feb 2022 22:13:03 GMT

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

Fri, 10 Sep 2021 13:29:49 GMT

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

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Thinking about sharing videogames with the universe

Sun, 11 Jul 2021 02:59:01 GMT

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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What if narrative is not an aesthetic of play?

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 16:45:00 GMT

(Feel free to skip this first section if you're already familiar with the MDA framework - it's mostly just recapping the concept.)

( Let's start with Sensation as an example. )

The point here is: if you remember that you want the player's sensations to be delightful, it changes how you do the low-level work. Likewise, if you want the player's attempts to overcome a challenge to be rewarding, it changes how you do the low-level work; if you want the player's efforts to discover what's in the world to be satisfying, it changes how you do the low-level work; if you want the player's experience of the game's fantasy to be engrossing, it changes how you do the low-level work. And so on for the other four aesthetics on the list in the original MDA framework paper: Fellowship, Expression, Submission (i.e. zoning out), and...

( ...and actually, I'm not sure Narrative fits in here. )

It's not controversial to say that writing in games is better when it's not treated as separate from everything else, but I think that goes deeper than just saying that. It's not just that the game mechanics and the writing both tell stories, it is that the game mechanics and its story both create aesthetics of play. And that changes how you do the low-level work.

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