The Packbats' Weblog

A dialogue on the nature of magic and digital computation

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 15:54:18 GMT

Simplicio: Computers are magic.

Sagredo: There's nothing magical about it; computers are simply sophisticated mathematical machines. Magic, by contrast, is supernatural - an independent force with its own logic that acts upon the world, and is merely channeled or controlled by those with magical power.

Simplicio: So, in your opinion, computers are not magic because they are not supernatural, not independent, not logical, and don't act upon the world. Shall we take these in reverse order?

Sagredo: Gladly. And yes, of course computers act on the world, and do so through logical calculation - that is the entire reason we created them. But they are not independent of it, they are part of it.

Simplicio: The logic of a computer is hardly the logic of a landslide or river or growing tree, however. All of these are straightforward and natural, whereas computers are constantly seized with their own caprices. You have a telephone, so surely you have seen it decide your text means something entirely different than your intentions.

Sagredo: You underestimate the sophistication of trees, but you are again merely describing the difference between nature and artifice. My telephone and your grandfather clock are alike unnatural, in your sense, and the errors of autocorrection in the one are much the same as the slipping minutes of the other: reflections of our limitations.

Simplicio: Do not try to distract me with the miracle of clockwork timekeeping - I can argue for the magic in that another day; your telephone is a much clearer example. Its errors of autocorrection happen within it, from its own memories and caprice, independent - independent! - of temperature or setting.

Sagredo: Only as independent as a book that remembers what is written on its pages. It acts because it was programmed to, because it stored this data and processed it in the way it was designed.

Simplicio: It acts because it was commanded to, by one with the power to channel its force in a direction - but even then, the magician wanted it to guess infallibly, did they not? Certainly an autocorrect without error would be quite a selling-point.

Sagredo: They did - but such a thing is impossible.

Simplicio: The computer acts on its own internal logic, independent of what its controller demands.

Sagredo: Independent of their intentions, but not their work - its actions spring from what it is told to do, nothing more.

Simplicio: Can you remind me what you had to say about DNS? I remember you spoke at some length the other day.

Sagredo: When many voices are speaking, the results can become confused, but it is still the result of how it was made and shaped, nothing more.

Simplicio: Can you remind me of what you had to say about free will?

Sagredo: I can - I said that we are also machines, defined by our history and origins, our nurture and nature, but able to shape ourselves, changing even our goals and desires. Are you about to claim that my telephone's autocorrection is as independent? Perhaps it should be granted citizenship.

Simplicio: As, no ... but independent, yes.

Sagredo: It is not supernatural.

Simplicio: Sagredo, you are a cunning arithmetician, but let me ask you: why should I care? We are surrounded by forces that we do not understand, that listen to sounds we can hear and sounds we cannot, that remember what they encounter, and that respond according to arcane and unpredicable intentions. They imbue us with tremendous power, if we can control them, but are terribly dangerous if we cannot. Lives are saved and lost because of what flows through these channels. You yourself wield this power, turning it to answer your astronomical queries and mine, to prove and to refute our theories. Do you not see what it does?

Sagredo: Your contention is that I am a wizard, unwitting.

Simplicio: It is.

Sagredo: I don't know how I can accept that.

Simplicio: Heavens help me. Sagredo, you know that you are capable, no matter how much you insist on downplaying it.

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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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MDA framework, except for, like, books

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 17:57:15 GMT

We've been pretty interested in game design's Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics framework for a while, but today for reasons we decided to take the idea of "the list of aesthetics isn't fixed, these are just the ones we, the authors of this paper, thought of" and extend that to making a list of aesthetics for traditional non-game fiction.

Edit: To sum up very quickly: one of the ideas of the MDA framework is that players engage with videogames to enjoy particular aesthetics, and serving their aesthetics successfully is a big part of making effective games. So, it's not that, say, challenges of execution are what makes games good, but if that's what you play a particular game for, then how well it does that is part of what might make that game good. Or bad.

What we (mostly Packdragon, I think) came up with, with a bit of help from someone on one of our group chats:

Setting:: The vividness and interest of the world in which the story takes place.
Allegory:: The political, moral, or similar implications of the fiction for the world outside the fiction.
Simulation:: The care with which plausible connections of cause and consequence are represented.
Identification:: The establishment of affection for characters within the story whose success is desired by the audience.
Character Development:: The representation of change within characters as they progress through the story.
Interplay:: The dynamics formed between characters who interact within the story.
Mystery:: The establishment and subsequent resolution of curiosity about elements within the world.
Spectacle (or Sensation, to borrow from the original list):: Moments and scenes which are delightful to behold.

It was a really delightful exercise, and looking back at the original list, I think it shows a substantial weakness in the idea of isolating "Narrative" as a separate aesthetic of play: we would analyze narrative as a dynamic which can serve many other aesthetics, not as an aesthetic in and of itself.

(...the fact that, to the authors of the paper, 'Narrative' felt like a self-contained aesthetic separate from the creation of a fictional world, the exploration of a creative work, and the overcoming of challenge by the player? Feels of a kind with the phenomenon of incoherent game design that inspired the coining of 'ludonarrative dissonance' as a term.)

(Those were sure some long sentences. Oh well.)

I think this was a really good exercise. It'd be interesting to do the same thing with other artistic media, like music or visual art.

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Communicative and Expressive Art

Tue, 10 Sep 2019 14:05:03 GMT

A while ago, I was going through old Philosophy Tube videos and came upon one about seeing YouTube as communicative more than expressive. Which isn't a distinction I thought about, but seems useful to me.

( A kitchen sink, language evoking experiences, and functions of creativity. )

Not really going anywhere with this. Just sharing a concept.

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A Tools Definiton of Art

Mon, 22 Apr 2019 16:51:03 GMT

I don't think I'm cut out for being a professional philosopher - a lot of the job of such philosophers is to study, understand, and respond to popular positions held by other philosophers, however asinine or incoherent, and because "asinine" and "incoherent" are philosophical judgments, you can't make any agreed-upon list of works to exclude on that basis. I can deal with the stuff sometimes, but my tolerance for it is too limited to do the job in any kind of consistent way.

I do like philosophy, though, and philosophizing. And I've been thinking about how to define art lately - "art" as in the all-of-it thing, not specifically visual art - and that turned into the following.

( Content warnings: homophobia, classism, sexism and racism mentions, hospital mention, and a brief rant about 1978 made-for-TV movie 'Rescue from Gilligan's Island' )

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The Body of Lucy Stoker, ch. 2 (Uprooting)

Mon, 23 Jul 2018 00:14:16 GMT

Rereading what I have so far, I think the next bit should be solid - the changes I may need to make are further along. Death mention, alcohol mention, and grief. (Link to beginnng.)

( They came in sight of Southmoor on the fourth day, with the sun still high in the sky... )

Back to Chapter 1.

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The Body of Lucy Stoker, ch. 1

Fri, 10 Nov 2017 01:56:46 GMT

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

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

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

( A beginning in questions )

On to Chapter 2.

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Two Drops of Water [NaNoWriMo]

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 16:32:30 GMT

Why did I sign up for NaNoWriMo again?

*rolls Will save vs. panic*

(p.s. not dead, just very, very distractable.)

Edit: Ping me if you want in on (or out of) my NaNo11 filter.

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Some much-needed profanity. tldr: I'm still writing, but not for Nano.

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 17:03:47 GMT

Okay, this Nanowrimo thing?

Fuck this. And I mean that with the greatest generosity towards the project and its goals.

I'm not going to write 38 455 words in ten days. It won't happen, mathematically. I could if I wanted to just type utter crap for four hours a day, but I'm not going to.

Do you hear that? I'm not doing exactly what Nanowrimo is about - screw that up the bunghole.

Why aren't I doing it?

Because I like my book.

I'll still be posting updates, and I'll still be writing - and I'll still be doing both on December ... maybe not 1, but still in the single digits. I'm not going to give up on the novel, I'm going to give up on the obsession with wordcount.

That is all.

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1741 words

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 23:03:35 GMT

Back from the write-in with my quota - barely.

A question I forgot to ask: does anyone want to read f-locked posts of the Novel So Far? I'm thinking I'll go with the classic make-a-filter option if anyone is interested. (For what it's worth, my brother - who wrote 5074 words - seemed to enjoy it.)

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1040 words

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 20:39:39 GMT

60% of one day's wordcount, and I've kicked things off with a literal bang. Unfortunately, I've a headache, $2.50 of iced coffee I don't want, 1/3 of a brownie I don't want, and a bit of a block.

I guess I just need to remind myself, as the Bard once said, to "lay on - and curst be he who first cries, 'Halt, enough!'"

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Entered NaNoWriMo.

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 04:40:56 GMT

Packbat's writer profile.

Still thinking about what to write.

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